Creative recycling; heavy-duty jarrah shelves
Posted in: News - Monday, March 01 2010
I’m passionate about wood. I’m off to electric plane some old salvaged timbers that I’ve collected for free over the years. Every time I saw a civic council kerbside rubbish collection I’d keep an eye out for good lengths of Jarrah. I’ve managed to transport peices of 4″x2″ up to 3m long in my tiny coupe. Opening the canvas roof all the way allows me to get 2m in the car. The rest sticks out of the roof at a 30 degree angle from horizontal. Hold it in place with seatbelts and voila!
Did you know that the older the Jarrah tree is, the darker and more reddish-brown the wood? Younger trees have a lighter color with a touch of pink in the grain. I was told this fact by a floorboard recycler when I had to source some matching boards for my home renovations. Ultimately the only boards in stock were from new-growth trees and I had to pick through a large pile of boards to get the ones that were darker.
Originally my plan was to get enough Jarrah beams for a pergola, but I’ve decided to stop hoarding and start using every peice of material in my stockpile. The design challenge is to use as much of the available materials as possible with minimal wastage, to create a useful item. This will also free up storage space. I sketched up a design for a massive 2.8m wide by 2.7m high x 0.7m deep, heavy duty storage shelves for my workshop. This six-legged design uses up every last 4″x2″ I have. In fact I was one leg short so I’m using a 4″x4″ in the center at rear. The rough-sawed Jarrah was giving me splinters so a good electric hand planing was in order. This is a very hard wood and it wasn’t an easy job but the deep reddish-brown colour that came through was absolutely beautiful and well worth it. I decided to leave the odd subtle saw mark as this added character and saved some time. Also, after the first of three frames was built the planer felt noticeably blunter so I may have to replace the blades before the job is done. Some of these timbers are 50 years old and were part of a fence originally on my property that had badly rotted posts. These were the horizontal beams that were well weathered, but otherwise in good condition as they were not touching the ground.
Well I’ll get back to it now and post some photos as I go. 2 more frames to go.
