The Oak for RST#1 came from a wine barrel headboard ~50mm thick, ~300mm wide, over 100 years old, sourced from Murray Bridge, South Australia. The photos are of its brothers and sisters. Note the headboards are curved across their width; I’m not sure if they start out life with this curve or end up like that over time in contract with moisture.

Flat/square wood was extracted from the original was quite flexible/unstable across its width, unusable in that state due to the inter-grain tension created when the headboards and wine parted ways resulting in the unique expanded grain structure. Black-tinted epoxy was poured into the voids to stabilise the wood.