Thread: redgum furniture

Hi Daniel,
My own thoughts are that 10mm for things like tables and book shelves and entertainment centres is too thin. For one thing, you're more likely to get movement in the timber. Not pretty in book shelves. Also, though red Gum is strong, it will still sag under weight. You'd be putting shelf supports everywhere to keep the shelves straight.
There's also the issue of scale. A 1.5 or 2 metre Entertainment unit in 10 mm is going to look really strange. sorta like it was made from scraps. I use 16 mm on boxes and they look right, not sure I'd use even 16mm on a table or book shelf.

Regards,

Rob

To me table tops and shelves for bookcases need to be at least 22mm to 25mm. Floating panels can be around 10mm and 19mm for other constructions.

That leaves you a big problem. If you are going to resaw your boards then you will lose around 10mm during the milling process. So you are unlikely to get 2 useful boards out 1 single board. My suggestion is to mill the 35mm boards down to 25mm for your table top or bookshelves and resaw the 40mm boards into either 2 X 15mm or 20mm + 10mm.

I recently had to resaw some 50mm Jarrah boards into some drawer fronts, and I was very lucky get 20mm.