'This Week' At Dorset Custom Furniture

A friend and famous local tool collector came by after work on Wednesday to talk to us about how we would like to have our set of 'dream chisels' made ... That was interesting and it was nice that the boys hung around to talk with him about it ... Click the photos to enlarge them ...

One of my readers asked in a comment on the previous blog post 'how many projects do you have going on at one time in the shop?' .... I thought this week was a productive and interesting one so the thought occurred to me that the question might make a good blog post ... It'll be sort of a long one because when we're all here, there are five of us. We all pretty much know what we think we're doing most of the time, so it takes a lot of projects to keep us all occupied ... For the last 7 or 8 years we've had almost more work than we could do ... Right now, not so much. We're still busy but the projects seem smaller and more numerous, but still challenging. I guess this was a typical week but when I go through the list it doesn't seem possible that I could keep it all moving week after week like this for 30 years. But, I guess I have. We're still here. Once when I complained about feeling like I had ADD , my friend Pat confessed he had it too but preferred to think of it as being 'multifocused'.... I guess ... So, if you can believe it, this is what happened this past week .... Some of it has been in the works for a while so it might look somewhat familiar ...

The new table leaf in the raw ... See the previous post ...

Trevor finished his table leaf and we took it to the house for a test fit above ... while we were there, we noticed that some chairs and tables we made for the client's porch looked kind of shabby so we brought them all back to the shop for a quick spruce up. This client has bought sooooo much stuff from us over the last six years that it will be a 'no charge' spruce up....

Tuned up and ready to go back to the house next week..

Will finished a recycling bin cabinet for the 'This Old House' project ...It's stuck in the shop under the table because we're ahead of the carpenters at the house.

The dining table with the inlay is waiting for approval of the finish samples and
Trevor made two new final final prototypes of the ladder back chairs ... He had a small math error on the first one that could turn into an innovative chair concept ....

One of the other prototypes with the right back splats ... He also made a set of narrower ones, all about an in and an 1/8th wide that I'd like to study before we make the real ones ... These graduated ones, now that we've shortened the back legs, seem a little heavy to me ... There is NO overestimating what it takes to get a new chair design exactly right ... With a little thin leather seat, this one will sit nice, but I still think it could be a bit more dramatic ....

A friend came by with two table tops that needed to be run through the wide belt sander and cut for inlays, one set of wood ones and one set of metal ones. The metal ones were cool and something we hadn't done before ... Sam is making some tapered metal legs for that table too. I didn't get a picture of the other recycled spruce top with oak butterflies but that was cool too .. We finished designs for a large tv cabinet and made the layout sticks that you see in the photo above. We organized the materials for that including cut lists, ply, solid wood and hardware and did some preliminary part rough outs.

The cad drawing for the tv cabinet .. more on that later as we progress ...
A client came by with an unusual sculpture below that we designed a base for and will make next week.

The sculpture from the back mounted on a scrap of ply


The proposed base photoshopped in ...

Sam made good progress on big railing project he is working on .... welding the section supports onto the posts and he and Trevor made a welding jig for the sections on which Sam will weld the parts together next week ...

He welded the caps on his 2" square tubing posts ... This is an interesting and challenging railing and I'll write more on it later

He cut and ground his section parts and they're ready to weld

And he welded on the supports for each section. They are welded half inch square and round stock with tubing sleeves that will be welded onto the individual rail sections to support them ...

Sam also worked on a sculpture base for a local glass blower, Andrew Weill of Manchester Hot Glass

and made a walking turkey belt buckle for an order from his Facebook page

Will and Trevor made a table that goes with a pool table we made in the house with the table leaf.

We had the jigs from the last one we made like this

Trevor doing the center inlay

The table is not actually finished, but I stacked it up today to take a photo for this post ...

A recycled chestnut table we made last January with the troublesome light fixture above it

I worked on a strange and complex decorative piece to cover the wires of a light fixture that hangs over the chestnut table we made last January at a house at Stratton Mountain. I spent a couple of hours there Friday doing some fussy routing and next week I'll finish it up .. we also explored a 'burned' finish on the fir to match the existing chandelier ...

Jim took an unexpected day off on Wednesday. He has been helping another glass blower, Lucy Bergamini of Vitriesse Glass on weekends for a month or so now and in his words 'just needed a day off to do some laundry, clean his house and cure cancer'. I got a chuckle out of that excuse .... He also made a site visit to the burned house project to clean a brass screen frame that was built into the fireplace ..

We received a bunch of recylced oak for an upcoming table project ...And I had a late afternoon meeting with an interior designer regarding modifying an existing tv cabinet to make the tv seem not so deep in the 'hole' ... we'll work on that soon ...

The existing cabinet

The new sketch

Last stop Friday afternoon was a friend's house ... Carol had gotten prices from a local kitchen shop for a built in in her laundry room ... She felt the price was maybe a bit high and the owner actually told her she might get a better price from a carpenter... I redrew it this morning and I'll figure up an estimate next week sometime ...

The boys cleaned up while I was gone ... we all went home ...

View from the table leaf house

View of the guest house,pond and main house of the tv cabinet project. These are both local projects so the mountains you see here are the same ones you see in some of my 'nature' photos ...