Jet plane (actually, Delta)

Last weekend (actually a week ago) I thickness planed all the boards, which is a big, noisy, dusty job. Definitely not the fun part of woodworking. You can really see how pink cherry wood is when it's first planed. The curly maple looks great. The third picture shows the machine that does all the work. This process filled two of those giant paper leaf bags completely with saw dust.

The big problem now is the design: since I still haven't settled on the design I can't really take the next step. The general idea is to have a frame made of cherry and slats made of curly maple. We've been talking about making the sides solid wood, and perhaps having a design cut into them -- maybe a moon on one side and a sun on the other.