Every project we do starts with a vision. This one didn't. We grabbed species — Black Walnut, White Ash, Black Cherry, Padauk — and tried to force a pattern out of the color and grain, the way we always do. It wasn't working. Not "needs a tweak" not working. Fundamentally, structurally, this-isn't-going-anywhere not working.

So we did something we don't usually do. We stopped trying to fix it, and leaned all the way into the wrong.

Mixed species with no pattern to find. Strips laid out of sequence in the next glue-up, on purpose, just to make it worse. If you've ever tried to build something and felt it fighting you back, that's the feeling we chased — deliberately — through every step of this build.

Staged and strapped. Already off the rails.

This build didn't happen in an afternoon. It took a couple of weeks, spread across three separate glue-ups — and the humidity those weeks wasn't doing us any favors. We work with hide glue, which needs time and the right conditions to cure enough to safely unclamp. Sticky air meant longer waits between every stage. Chaos on a schedule it refused to keep.

Clamped and curing. The diagonal weave taking shape, whether we liked it yet or not.

After the second glue-up, we'd had enough. This one was headed for scrap — we were literally carrying it toward the burn box.

Someone in the family stopped us. "Why?" they asked. Then: "Someone might want to buy it. It's actually kind of cute."

Around the same time, we were thinking about footage we needed for a RESURGO video — something with texture, something that would hold attention on camera. And it clicked: why not just embrace the unfortunate appearance and put it to work instead of putting it in the fire?

Almost out of self-preservation, we threw in the diagonal strips. Not to fix the chaos — just to put one hand on it before it fully got away from us. A little structure holding back a lot of noise. Like we were trying to funnel the randomness and filter it into a single direction instead of letting it run every way at once.

Even the species pattern running through those diagonals is doing something subliminal in there, whether you consciously clock it or not.

Broken down to individual strips — walnut, ash, cherry, and that one clean stripe of padauk cutting straight through it.

Cutting the blank down into strips for the final diagonal re-glue. No more steering it now — just execution.

We don't have an exact board-foot count on this one — between the extra glue-ups and the strips that got cut apart and reassembled, the real number is buried somewhere in the shop floor sawdust. Working backward from the finished dimensions and padding for the waste this kind of build generates, it's somewhere around 3 board feet of hardwood that went into fighting us the whole way.

We finished it in polymerized linseed oil, thinned with D'Limonene — a citrus solvent instead of the usual petroleum-based thinners. It's worth mentioning that this is exactly the kind of cured oil finish RESURGO itself calls for as a base before its first buff. The board and the can it ships with were always meant to end up together.

The first reaction, honestly, was repulsion. That's just how it goes with some art — the first look doesn't invite you in.

But the longer we studied it, the more it started to look like something. The diagonal strips holding back that checkerboard noise reminded us of old European timber-frame houses — the kind you see in Germany and Switzerland, where heavy timbers hold together walls of stone and mortar, structure imposed on material that would otherwise just be rubble. It also reminded us of bins of loose gravel, held in place by their dividers — walls controlling the randomness of the lot, not eliminating it.

It's ugly. We know it's ugly. We're not going to pretend otherwise. But it might be the most honest board we've ever made, and there's only one of it. As a certain immortal Scotsman once put it — there can be only one.

Admit it if you're the one. Someone out there loves this duckling and knows it'll be a swan in their kitchen.