#bigcube

A friend of mine saw the previous cube, and said that he reckoned that I wouldn’t make one “a foot square”.

He was right, this is only 250mmx250mmx260mm.

I initially intended to make this out of 20mm acrylic and 20mm oak, to form a cube 300mm square. The acrylic for that would have cost a small fortune, so I settled for 250mm square, in 20mm, as that is the acrylic I could get as offcuts for a reasonable price.

It turns out that getting the acrylic at 250mm was a good plan, because in Nottingham it is hard to get any nice hardwood boards cut more than about 240mm wide, and if you want them to be planed all round even harder than that. There would have been no way that I could have got 300mm square boards planed all round without ordering, costing me more time and more money.

After a fruitless search at Brooks Brothers, where all they had in the size I needed was poplar, which is a particularly dull wood in terms of figure and colour, I lucked out at Gibbs and Dandy, with a chap there spending far too much of his day helping me to sort through several large piles of hardwood to find a slab  that met my needs.

There was no oak, walnut, cherry or other wood that I had worked with before available in a size that I needed, but we opened up a fresh stack of sapele to get to a board that was aout perfect to plane and cut to the right dimensions. They even managed to get it cut and planed for me by the next afternoon.