Our family has been seeing Dr. Asarkof since we moved to Concord nearly twenty years ago. He is a great dentist who also shares my interest in woodworking. One of the things he does in his spare time to relax is slicing logs into thick slabs. When he learned that we were hoping to make our foyer bench out of a live edge slab he invited us to his home to have a look at his collection. We picked out a lovely piece of cherry and one of hard maple which he gifted to us. When we returned to the River House, Jeanine and I worked together on applying finish to a bunch of cabinet parts which took us until dinner time. I then started to work on the slab. It had a significant twist so I made a sled so I could run it through my planer. I used every last bit of the 16″ capacity and it made all the work of moving the behemoth into my shop worth it. Then next challenge that I tackled this morning, was figuring out how to install it. The cavity where it resides has a longer back than front dimension. That means if you size the board to slide in from the front then you will have a big gap in the sides at the back. Because the slab is so thick, rotating into place won’t work either because the front face diagonal is longer the the width of the opening. To solve this problem I did a back bevel on all but the first 1/4″ of the right side. This provided the clearance to rotate while leaving enough material on the face to have a flush fit. I am very pleased with the result and from hereforth, this will be called Keith’s bench in honor of our dentist.