Using Fine Woodworking Tools

Making the fan

The fan we’re going to make will consist of eight elements to make up a half circle. We start by cutting more than eight pieces of maple, each about three inches long and about an inch and a half wide. In the next picture, you see that I cut two strips of veneer about an inch and a half wide.

You can barely see it in the picture but I’ve marked the strips with pencil to indicate the “up” side and the same direction. This is so that when I put the pieces together none of the pieces are turned over. This is important because veneer reflects light differently on different sides.

Then we cut the strips into pieces about three inches long.

We now need to prepare for the shading. The shading is actually the charring of the veneer to change the color of a part of the veneer. We’ll char the veneer with hot sand.

We start by putting some of the sand into the pan and putting the pan on the hot plate. The amount of sand is not critical but you don’t want too much – maybe a quarter of an inch deep. It takes a lot of heat to heat the sand and the top won’t get hot if you put too much.

You want to smooth the top of the sand so that when you put the veneer into it, the line of shading is smooth and not “lumpy”. You can use a spoon to smooth the sand out or just take a piece of scrap veneer and use that to smooth it out.

Use your piece of scrap veneer to test when the sand is hot. Just stick the veneer into the sand a bit – not all the way that it hits the bottom of the pan. When the veneer will shade in 15 to 20 seconds, the sand is hot enough. This is about what you’re looking for (next picture).

One safety note. Sometimes you drop a piece of veneer on the sand. You could just use your fingers to pick it up, but you risk burning yourself. A better approach is to have a set of long nose pliers or tweezers on hand and use that to pick up the piece of veneer.

 

Now, start shading your non-scrap pieces of veneer. You can do several at a time. The number you do depends upon how many you can handle without burning them too much.

Since we made more than eight pieces of veneer, we now have more than eight shaded pieces.

These were shaded fairly evenly across the pieces of veneer.  However, I want less shading at the bottom of the fan because the piece is quite narrow there.  If I don’t do anything, the bottom of the fan will be nothing but shading – you won’t be able to see any of the original maple color there.