As a by-line, you could also call it Honeymoon 2.0. After 42 years in this married life, our wooden cutlery started to show their age.

Our first romantic dinners, and the many gluttonous excesses that they all had to undergo, the thousands of times they ended up in the dishwasher … in the long run it all became too much for the pine wood cutlery, and they ended up in a dead-end street. But it had been fine quality, and condemning them remorselessly to the scrap heap was a Bridge Too Far for this woodworker. I would fix that sometime.

It already started with the choice of wood. To repeat the adventure with Scandinavian pine, seemed to me like challenging the Gods, especially since it is not at all easy to find a good dense quality of such wood. Oak was also out of the question, it would turn black too quickly. Beech or pear could have been an option, but not ideal with their pink color. Finally, boxwood, which is also used for rifle butts, should already work. A first trial run with a few pieces that were part of our household for several months seemed to point in the right direction.

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You can judge for yourself, it was high time to give the oldies a facelift …

Time for a large-scale phase III study this time. But when we took out the calculator and started counting how many pieces the 12 knives, 12 forks, 12 spoons and their ditto little brothers and sisters did represent, we soon came to 144 pieces … quite a lot for handicrafts.

A great opportunity to try out some new techniques. In our wood workshop in Gaillac we still have a vintage CNC machine, nice stuff, dating back to 1998, it is operated by an equally old PC that still runs under … Windows XP [for the little ones: this is it operating system for PCs used in the age of the dinosaurs, so you know how to catalog me right away]. And in the picture you also have Guillaume (and Aster), who helped me with some tricky situations.

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I had (of course) never done it, so that was a great challenge. The software I used is called Galaad, and despite its age you could do quite a lot with it. Also, it includes the funniest and most ironic user manual I had read in a long time. Many winter evenings were well filled with this, and after a while I was able to do the first tests.

The advantage of such a design program is that you define your model once (or adjust it later), and that you could make ten virtual copies of it in a jiffy. But before I got to that we had to measure first. Measuring is knowing.

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Oh yes, before I forget. CNC is short for computer numerical control, the automated control of machining tools (such as drills, lathes, mills) and 3D printers by means of a computer. This allows you to move a router with exchangeable milling heads in three dimensions (X, Y and Z), and if you’re lucky, in the direction and at the location you intended. See below what I mean. And be careful when you turn on the sound, this is not intended for sensitive ears.

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We could keep you busy for quite a while, with the lessons learned, lessons forgotten, the frustrating mistakes, the terrible failures … Anyway, let’s cover that with the mantle of love. Ultimately, the result was there.

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I already see a smart ass remarking ‘Why all those little pieces of boxwood? Isn’t it easier to immediately take a large piece? ‘ It’s not that easy. Buxus is a very slow-growing tree species, to get a trunk of a foot diameter you have to be patient for 150 years. So you have to work with smaller branches and pick up the most regular pieces from them. I made a whole series of identical pieces, all of exactly the same thickness, and finally glued them to molds with hot glue, always in the same place.

Ready, you would think. Wrong. This time, we’d be protecting our family jewels for eternity, or at least for the dishwasher to start with. Easy to say, but how? Digital quests eventually led to a stabilizing resin with which you could impregnate the wood completely and make it dishwasher safe. The solution! There were just a few minor details:

• the wooden pieces had to be super dry, it was best to let them out in an oven at 100ºC for 24 hours. When I tried that with my old oven in my workshop, my dear wife suddenly saw black smoke billowing from the windows, I will spare you the rest, but I have not ventured it again. Six months above the central heating boiler ( for the wood I mean) were ultimately a worthy alternative
• the resin had to be pressed into the wood under vacuum. It became quite a lab construction, worthy of Prof. Dumbledore. Some times, this worked better than others
• once properly impregnated, the resin had to cure under high temperature, in principle for 30 minutes at 90 degrees, which is called thermal polymerization. Coincidentally, this just happened around the time that my dear spouse was on a long-term absence, so all the tempers had ample time to cool down.

Please be patient, we’re almost there. The stuff had to be held together with brass rivets. Just start finding that, it’s like searching for a rivet in a haystack. Eventually I found what I was looking for at Dictum in Germany, nice stuff.

Last but not least, the holes had to be drilled out a bit, and then I discovered that stainless steel is about the hardest steel you can imagine, and that it eats ordinary metal drill bits for breakfast. So we had to dig up stainless steel drills, even with those it got a bit difficult, but in the end it worked.

And now, two years later, in Dutch we would say that I finally know how the fork fits the handle ( “weten hoe de vork aan de steel zit”), how things work …