Treasure Box III - Post #5: Chêne de Tronçais - Tronçais' Oa

I have been working more on the Treasure Boxes than on the blog…

I could cut down the blog and fast forward to now, closer to the end, but I understand some of you like the step by step appoach.

One of the reason I have not been updating our progress as much as usual, and I am usually not great at it anyway, is that the first box was ordered 11 months ago, on drawing alone. It was bought by the wife of one of our best client for a big birthday, one with a brand new zero in it. The down side was that we had only 9 months to bring one of the 4 boxes to a presentation stage for the big date.

It is a small series so we worked on the 4 of them as much as possible and focused on the first one in the last couple months to bring it to presentation. We usually take 2 years to complete a series of 4 boxes, with all the other work and the fact that this box is the most comlplicated one we made so far, iit has been quite a challenging and very busy year.

One way we saved on time was with the carcass. On the previous 2 boxes we used european beech, one of the best wood we have access to, here, in San Diego, but we wanted to upgrade for something special and as Patrick was really busy working on a 14 foot dining room table, we contacted our friend Florian Bourgine in France.

He proposed to use Tronçais oak for the carcasse, a great white oak to work with.

Tronçais is a forest in Allier, France, that has had areas protected since the 17th century. A lot of the French oak forest where created by Colbert in 1670 when he bacame minister to Louis the XIVth. He ordered 2,5 million acres to be planted in order to become the first naval country and avoid the prediction of shortage of old growth tall oak for boat building by the year 2000. Talk about long term politics.
Today, in Tronçais, there is still a protected area of about 9000 acres with some trees closing to 500 years old.

Florian Bourgine had easy access to that great wood and I knew his quality as a woodworker, so we asked him to help us, in our need of hurry and quality in equal measure, by cutting and preparing as much as possible of the wood before hand.

Dimensions and type of joinery wanted.

(photos by Florian Bourgine)

Ready to ship.

While in the meantime I was working on the marquetry panels.

-- Patrice lejeune