So yeah, remember that beautiful maple burl that I bought online, and was so happy about, but so reluctant to work on?
Well, that's the picture you look at when you view the product you want to buy online. However, what isn't explained (and i'm assuming this is true for any website that sells burl or figured woods) is that there is a "show" side," which is the side you see online, and there is a "raw side" which is the side they don't show you:
Basically, that's the side that they sliced with the saw, and the other side was sent through a planer I'm assuming... and somehow they planed it without tearout... Anyway, I don't trust a planer with my expensive awesome looking burl, so I went at it with a hand plane for a bit, and threw the plane aside because it seemed pointless if I wasn't going to get a true flat surface, but a bunch of different flat surfaces in the end. So I marked it up and threw it on the leveling tile.
As a reference, this is how much it warped over the course of a year:
Its not bad, but its certainly curved enough to where if I level it, I won't be able to do as dramatic of a top carve as I want.
After a few hours of leveling, I discovered that burls warp differently than normal quartersawn lumber, over the course of a year:
You can see in the pic that the lower left is flat, as is most of the center, and part of the upper right. The rest is marked and not level. Also, let it be known that maple is a bitch to sand to shape. Hopefully I'll be done leveling this by the end of the week, and my wife won't be too pissed at the amount of time I'm spending hunched over a tile scraping a loud piece of wood back and forth during commercials.