Thread: outdoor serving bench from oooold meranti

Due to a few reasons I have not done a lot of working with wood over the last 4 years... this is an easy way to ease back into it.

Make a servery to fit the kitchen windows of a mate, allowing her to pass through things from the kitchen to the back deck.

I got some old 300mm wide meranti boards, the ink stamp dates them to the pre-independance period for Malaya/Malaysia... so call them 60+ years old, covered in 60 years of grime, dried out and dirty, but stable.

Plane/scrape off the grime and a little of the top surface, leaving in the old sawmill marks of the circular saw blade for 'reference'., edge them to mate with the edge/face boards I'll use, leave the underside with the ink stamp alone so the stamp remains.

Varnished with Feast Watson exterior varnish, rubbed back after the second coat with 000 steel wool to get rid of any gloss.
Underside took 200mL of 50% linseed oil/turps mix and was touch dry after 5 mins. Wow! Dry old meranti really slurps up the oil and turps.

I ripped/ploughed off the facing strips of hardwood, but will attach them and size it all when I go to her place on Thursday. She'll be finiky, so I'll take a box of tools so I get it to what she wants.

Her hubby is a fitter turner, so he'll be told to make the brackets to hold it to the wall, and I'll have to explain wood movement.

Paybacks ~ her hubby is a fitter and turner, so we'll think of something over a bbq and glass of wine.

Of course, doing this at a distance (100km's) means phone conversations to find out what she wants... I may have got it all wrong and have to bring it all back to make it again out of something else.