A few weeks ago I had to have a yellow cedar tree removed for many reasons, it was wrapped up in power feeds to two houses and a streetlight, it was starting to split in half and lean towards a neighbors house, it was too close to my garage, and it was just becoming a major pain. I decided to have it taken down before it became an insurance claim or a lawsuit. Needless to say I kept a large amount of the usable wood for firewood and other projects. This project is one of the later.

I used my chainsaw to take off a 2 1/2″ wafer from one of the 12″ diameter logs. I had a couple of ideas what I wanted to do with it, but first I wanted to let it set in my utility room and dry out a bit since it was too wet to start working on it.

After a week or so of drying, I ran it through my planer and smoothed off both sides and brought it down to a level 2″ then I sanded it a bit to bring the grain out.

After that I laid out the pattern, and bored some 1 1/2″ inch holes to the same depth and finished it up. You have to love forstner bits a drill press to do this kind of work.

Then it was a lot of sanding, and time to start applying the finish. I decided to start with a few really thick coats of polyurethane to get a solid base, and then I actually used a sander with 400 grit paper to level it back out.

The final outcome was a very smooth mellow finish, while still keeping the blemishes and irregularities of the wood.