Tasmanian oak
- Colour
- Pale straw, turning honey in daylight.
- How it moves
- Little, when quartersawn; the rays show as a fine fleck.
- At the bench
- Planes clean and takes oil evenly.
Rauha
Contents
Furniture maker · Adelaide Hills
The grain runs all the way through.
Rauha: a Finnish word for calm. Say it ROW-ha.
Tables, benches and cabinets in solid Australian timber, drawn and made one at a time at a bench in the Adelaide Hills.
Make a table
Choose the size, the timber and the edge. The table is written out, then drawn.
A table in Tasmanian oak, 1,800 long and 900 wide, its edge rounded over.
About $4,540, illustrative
The area times the timber’s rate, plus the legs, skirt and edge. A real price follows a conversation about the room and the boards.
Drag, or use the arrow keys, to turn it. It settles back on its own.
The corner, close. The figure runs over the edge; at the end the rings stand almost upright, as they do in a quartersawn board.
Tell us the size, the timber and the edge in your letter, and we’ll draw it for you.
At the bench
We make furniture from whole boards, with no veneer and no board faced with a thinner one.
The boards come to us rough and wait in stick under the shed roof, then come indoors to settle before they are drawn on and cut.
Solid timber keeps moving a little with the seasons. We build it so it can, and tell you how to look after it.
Oiling a top at the bench, wiped back after twenty minutes.
What you see on the top is the tree, and it carries on down the edge and out at the end.
Four timbers
We keep to four Australian timbers we know well, each chosen board by board.
Tasmanian oak is a trade name: three mountain eucalypts, sold as one, and not an oak at all.
Blackwood
- Colour
- Gold to chocolate brown, sometimes a fiddleback ripple.
- How it moves
- Little, once it is dry.
- At the bench
- Kind to a hand plane; takes oil deep and even.
Spotted gum
- Colour
- Pale to mid brown, a wavy grain, faintly waxy.
- How it moves
- Steadily; it is hard and heavy.
- At the bench
- Planed slowly so the ripple doesn’t tear.
River red gum
- Colour
- Deep red-brown, interlocked, now and then a gum vein.
- How it moves
- The most of the four, so its tops use narrower boards.
- At the bench
- Dense and tough; it asks for sharp irons.
How a board is cut
Two ways through a log, drawn from the end. The boards outlined are the ones your top would use.
Your top: 5 quartersawn boards of Tasmanian oak.
| Top boards | 5 | 1,800 × 180 × 32 |
|---|---|---|
| Legs | 4 | 70 × 70 × 708 |
| Long skirts | 2 | 1,550 × 90 × 22 |
| Short skirts | 2 | 690 × 90 × 22 |
| Buttons | 14 | 60 × 40 × 20 |
Finished sizes in millimetres; skirts include their tenons.
We choose by where the board will go: quartersawn for tops that should stay flat, flatsawn where the arches will be seen.
The end of your top, close: two boards meet at a glue line, each with its own rings.
Four edges
Drawn close to full size. The top is 32 millimetres thick.
Square
Crisp, and it shows the full thickness.
Chamfer
A 45-degree face that catches the light.
Round-over
Kind to sleeves and forearms.
Soft bullnose
Makes a thick top look gentle.
Your table’s edge, rounded over, at full size.
Benches and cabinets
A bench in spotted gum. The seat is one board; the legs are through-tenoned and wedged.
A low cabinet in river red gum. Finger pulls cut into the door edges; no hardware on the face.
A bench is a table’s plainer cousin: a thick seat, slab legs, wedged tenons you can see.
Cabinet doors are frame and panel, so the panels can move with the seasons.
The boards wait
Boards come to us green or part-dry and go into a stack under the shed roof, out of the sun, with a thin stick between each layer so the air can move through.
We weigh a few offcuts as the seasons turn. When they stop getting lighter, the stack comes inside to settle before anything is cut.
Boards in stick under the shed roof, on a misty morning in the Hills.
The old rule is about a year for every 25 millimetres of thickness. River red gum asks for the most patience.
Living with it
- Marks
- Because it is solid all the way through, a mark or a ring can be sanded out and the top oiled again.
- How it moves
-
A top can grow and shrink across its width by a few millimetres between a wet winter and a dry February, and hardly at all along its length. So small timber buttons hold it to its frame, in slots, free to move.
Your top is 900 across: it will move across those 900, not along the 1,800.
- Spills
- Wipe them; the oil slows water but does not stop it.
- Heat
- A board or a folded cloth under the pot.
- Light
- All four timbers change colour in the first months, so move the fruit bowl now and then.
- Oil
- Once a year, a thin coat, wiped off after twenty minutes.
How a table comes to be
- 1
A conversation about the room and how it will be used.
- 2
A drawing, to scale.
- 3
Choosing the boards together, at the bench or from photographs.
- 4
Making.
- 5
Bringing it home and setting it level.
We talk about time once the drawing is agreed and the boards are chosen, not before.
Write to the bench
Tell us about the room and the people who’ll sit at it. Nothing on this page is sent anywhere.
What helps: the size of the room, how many sit, where the light comes from, and anything you already love or can’t stand.
We read every letter at the end of the day, with the shavings swept.
Rauha
Tables, benches and cabinets in solid timber · Adelaide Hills
Set in M PLUS 1 and Shippori Mincho.
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