Back in July I made a foot stool for my office from the branch of a maple tree I had cut down the year before. Kind of a “chainsaw art” type project, but I took it further with a lot of hand work to make it very smooth. Details on that project can be seen in this video.
Even though it had nearly a year to dry, the wood was still very wet and I knew it may crack as it dried out. I did a couple of things to try to minimize this, starting with making the middle thinner by cutting more wood out while carving it. The idea was to make it easier to compress the wood near the middle while the outer parts dried and shrunk. Another was to put on several layers of danish oil to slow down the escape of moisture, especially from the end grain.
While the combination of these two measures weren’t enough to stop it from cracking completely, I think they did help to reduce the number of cracks that could have happened.

A single large crack. The way I want to fix it is to make a series of cuts along the crack to remove wood and eventually close it up:

In the video at the bottom of this page I talk about the other options I considered to repair this crack. But the one I settled on gave me the best chance of fixing the stool and making it look the way it did originally, the way I intended it to look. While I’ve not done this type of repair before specifically, I did do something similar when making my rack of ribs cutting board. To get the “bones” and the “meat” to fit snugly together, I cut through both at the same time with the band saw.

After just two cuts the crack is already starting to close:

And after four it’s very close. I was actually surprised that it happened this quickly:

Even though this looks pretty good and I could probably get away with leaving it as it is, I glued it together to make the final cut:

The next day I took the clamps off and made the last cut. This last cut went from one side to the other following the glue line, so it removed one even jigsaw blade thickness of wood all the way across.

Again, I used polyurethane construction adhesive and left it to cure overnight. I used that glue because it will set at the low temperature it is in my shop (5 degrees Celsius) and I have abswolute faith in the strength. The joint after the clamps were removed:

Next I did some shaping with the block plane where the edges weren’t in line, and also did some sanding to even it out:

Very difficult to see the crack after sanding it flush:

The insane spalting this wood has certainly didn’t hurt to conceal the repair.

After a fresh coat of oil:

The before and after:

Hard not to feel a real sense of satisfaction after this one. To see the repair work out so perfectly makes me appreciate the project all the more, for some weird reason.

I made a video showing how I did the repair: