Surgery

Sometimes things go right.

And sometimes they go horribly, unbelievably wrong. These couple of pics show the underside of the top (and therein lies some relief!) which looks, on the face of it, reasonably good.

Except that I didn't dare take a 'before' shot.....

Each of those four leaves were somehow sawn unevenly and so were not parallel, but went down in the AirPress bag as a series of small 'steps' and if looked at from the side would have resembled a saw blade profile. When they were pressed in the vacuum bag I stupidly placed it veneer side down onto the baseboard with the result that there wasn't an even pressure across the lay-up...the thinner bits of the veneers had next to no pressure (even though there was around 2.5 tons on it in total)














Result... huge bubbles under the veneer when it came out the bag. The only way to get round it was with a bit of fairly drastic surgery using a Stanley knife... and it's not easy to cut through veneer 2mm thick. By levering up each side of the cut with a very thin rule I was able to squidge some more glue underneath and then re-press it, this time veneer side up. The second pic shows in a bit more detail three dark post-surgical parallel scars across the board.

When it came out the bag, this was a real mess...so I reckoned the easiest way to clean this side up was to nuke it with the ROS, which took around 20 minutes to finish. Fortunately, because the veneer is so thick, there was no danger of going through it.

Sometimes, 60g paper is the way forward!