Untwisting the final apron piece

Today I worked on flattening, untwisting and squaring up the final piece for the second apron.

Turns out that this piece was really badly twisted. It’s a little hard to tell just looking at the piece:

But the winding sticks make it perfectly obvious just how bad the twist is.

A twist that severe translates into about 4 - 5 mm of material to be removed from each of the high corners on both sides.

So, after a lot of sweating, this is where I ended up:

I then switched over to squaring up the edges, but ran into a bit of a problem with a knot in the wood. After planing down the edge I found that there was a major hump where the knot was located, and trying to plane the knot down didn’t seem to be working. My plane blade just wasn’t biting into the knot material, although it was putting a nice sheen on it.

I called it there for the evening, when I come back I might try cutting into the knot with a block plane, see if that helps.

Lessons learned

• Be more selective when buying timber.