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A few weeks ago I stopped by The Hardwood Connection in Sycamore, Illinois. It’s a combined retail hardwood lumber dealer/woodworking store/cabinet shop/gallery. And it’s one of the best run shops I know about. Okay, I’m a little biased since I worked there for a short time in the early 1980’s when I was teaching high school woodworking in a neighboring town, but it is a cool place.

It’s always fun to stop by and see what owners Ken and Barb Burtch and their employee, Dave Smith, a former student of mine, are up to. This time Ken brought out a piece of wood and asked me to identify it. It had the coloring of walnut, but not the grain pattern or open grain. (In the photo at left, the “natural” wood is on the left and I sprayed some clear lacquer on the right side. That’s a little strip of end grain I cut off laying on top.) It looked a bit like well-aged cherry but had the grain pattern of curly maple. And it wasn’t stained or dyed as I could see the color went all the way through it. It had a slight bit of a “burnt” wood smell to it.

I was stumped and figured it must be some foreign wood I had never heard of. Then he told me that it was “Roasted Hardwood.” It’s being distributed by a Canadian Company called Goodfellow.

Roasted hardwood starts out as very dry soft maple, yellow birch, or poplar and is then heated (roasted or “carmelized”) at extremely high temperatures (440 degrees Fahrenheit) in a vacuum. It’s then rehumidified so that it’s once again dimensionally stable — and it helps create a uniform color. It was originally designed as a wood for outdoor projects since it’s very resistant to insects and rot, but it seems to me you could use it on indoor projects as well.

Apparently Australian aborigines started heat treating wood 10,000 years ago. As the story goes(?), in the 1990’s a kiln owner left some wood in the kiln and it was accidentally overheated. They were going to throw it out but someone decided to experiment with it and found it had some interesting characteristics. A French company got a patent to the process and started licensing it to North American companies in the late 1990’s. For more about the process go here.

Though roasted hardwood has the color of walnut, it’s much more consistent and predictable in color. Without any sapwood it makes grain matching easier when building up panels. And the cost is considerably less per board foot than walnut.

I got my hands on a piece of roasted soft maple (see photo) and first cut a small piece off the end to make sure the color went all the way through (it does). I’d heard that the wood is “brittle” but I didn’t notice any problems. I tried jointing and planing the piece and discovered it works just about like I would expect from soft maple. It sanded okay, but the dust was very fine and I would strongly suggest wearing some kind of dust mask or respirator. I also quickly sprayed a coat of lacquer on part of my sample board and it brought out the color, again like walnut, but perhaps a little darker. (For a larger view, double click on the photo at left.) It will be interesting to see if it will lighten over time (like walnut) or darken (like cherry). My guess is it will stay the same.

I hope to make a complete project out of roasted hardwood some day.

Ken told me that he now is selling roasted hardwood and if you would like more information and pricing, e-mail him at KBHardwood@aol.com or call him at 815-895-8733.

After visiting Dunedin, Florida (see “Woodworking on Vacation? Part 1” below) we headed north a couple hours to the town of Cedar Key. Cedar Key is definitely “old Florida.” I’ve heard it referred to as the “anti-Mouse.” It’s stuck out on an island in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. (Yes, you can drive to it). From when we first entered the town I felt like we had jumped back 50 years. There are some modern accommodations (though we stayed in a cottage built in 1914), but you won’t find any McDonald’s or Holiday Inn’s here. It’s clearly a “laid-back” fishing community (especially known for its clams).

While driving around town we came onto an old building that was the home of “Wells Wood, Outdoor Furniture.” We found out later that it used to be a Baptist church and I read in the local newspaper that there is some effort to get it onto the National Historic Registry. The large barn-style doors were completely open so we stuck our heads in to see what was going on.

There didn’t seem to be anybody in the shop so we just sort of looked around. We saw this sign on one of the benches (click on photo at right to enlarge). We heard later that the “Wood God” was an older man with an incredible amount of energy. His main product seemed to be cypress outdoor furniture such as Adirondack chairs. They were very comfortable.

Most of his equipment was old Sears Craftsman. I wondered about why he had mounted his table saw to a single pedestal (click on photo at right)?

Here at Woodsmith, ShopNotes, andWorkbench magazines we’re always showing off the latest and greatest ideas in router tables. But check out these two I saw at Wells Wood (photo at left). They’re just a router mounted to the bottom of a piece of fir plywood with legs added. For the “Wood God’s” needs, they probably work just as well as our fancy, schmanzy router tables!

Finally, it’s a good thing I didn’t have a truck with me. Wells Wood was selling beautiful, clear long boards of cypress for only $1.25 a board foot! That would have been tough to pass up.

If you ever get to northwest Florida, stop by Cedar Key. And check out Don Duden, woodturner, as well. His shop is The Natural Experience Wood and Clay Gallery at 334 2nd St. Unfortunately, he was closed when we were in town but I’ve heard some great things about his skills. I understand that he turns daily in his glass-enclosed workshop.

One of the things my wife, Cathy, and I enjoy doing when on a vacation is checking out local woodworkers, woodworking supply stores, and galleries. Once we’re comfortable in our hotel room I’ll open the Yellow Pages to “Woodworking” or “Woodworking Equip & Supplies,” or simply “Lumber.” We recently took a trip to the Gulf Coast of Florida and had the opportunity to visit a couple of interesting woodworkers. (I’ll cover the first one here, and the second one in Part II.)

The first was “The Dunedin Woodwright” (shown at left) in Dunedin, Florida. Dunedin is a small town just north of Clearwater. It’s one of those places filled with galleries, artists, and quirky little stores and restaurants.

Patrick (at right) and Grant Painter eagerly invited us into their shop and spent a good deal of time telling us all about their business. They grew up around woodworking and building construction since their father, Roger, was an architect who designed and built high-end custom homes.

In 1994 the family bought an old boat-building facility with high-ceilings and a wide-open area. It was perfect for their shop and they’ve filled it mostly with Powermatic equipment. They have a couple employees, Jim and Ian, who do a lot of the actual production work. Most of their business is custom cabinetry and they have delivered complete kitchens to as far away as Asheville, North Carolina. They draw everything the old-fashioned way — with pencil and paper instead of a CAD program.

The day we were at “The Dunedin Woodwright” they had two projects going on. One was a “typical” kitchen filled with cabinets made largely of birch. These were to be painted. A more impressive project was set up temporarily in their showroom. Made out of tiger-grained mahogany and ebony, this kitchen will be as unique as it is beautiful. All of the horizontal drawer fronts (seen along top of the cabinet shown at right) came out of the same boards so the grain ran continuously from one to the next. That takes some planning.
But the most impressive part was probably the kitchen’s center island (shown at left). It was built to look like a ship’s hull with mahogany and ebony strips bent around a curved base. You almost felt like you could climb up on the glass countertop (not shown in photos) and sail off into the sunset. I asked Patrick about the problems of expansion and contraction of the wood. He said that’s one reason why they used the narrow strips. The mahogany was about 4” wide and the ebony about 3/16” wide. If they should slightly shrink and a gap open, it wouldn’t be very obvious alongside the dark ebony. Interestingly, a lot of the assembly of the base was done with pocket hole joinery. Patrick said they love using Kreg jigs on most of their projects.

There was one other thing in their shop that I noticed. That was the long stairway up to their loft office. It was built from ash and the “spindles” used through mortise and tenon joints that were then pegged and wedged to hold the whole thing together. There wasn’t any hardware used. I’d never seen a through mortise and tenon used like it.

Next time you are on vacation, see what unique woodworkers you can locate. And if you ever get to the Clearwater area, stop by “The Dunedin Woodwright” and see what they’re working on.

Yesterday, Joel posted his Top 10 Woodworking Tips to WoodworkingSeminars.com. His first tip had to do with fire hazards, so I told him a story from the “good old days” of Woodsmith magazine, and he thought it would be good to share it on WoodworkingOnline. (Okay, as you will see, they weren’t always that “good!”) Anyway, this story took place in the late 1980s. The magazine wasn’t printed in color yet, each issue only had about 32 pages, and there were just a few of us working on it. We did everything from designing and building the projects, working on the drawings, researching and writing the articles, laying all of the artwork and text blocks on a page manually (long before the beginning of computerized page layout programs), and even occasionally boxing up and mailing back issues.

Since everyone did everything, a lot of us worked in the shop and we probably weren’t as careful as we might have been. One morning, Archie, our maintenance and mail guy, was the first person to arrive at work, about 6:30AM. He smelled something in the building that didn’t seem right. His nose followed the smell into the bottom floor, back end of the building: the shop. He was surprised to find that our full-sized plastic garbage can was now a melted puddle on the floor! Read the rest of this article »

I had an interesting day last week visiting on-site during construction and filming of the ABC-TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. This is the first home they have built in Iowa, so my wife, Cathy, and I decided to drive the hour and a half north of Des Moines on a sunny, autumn day and check out the action.

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