Happy New Year Again! ... A repost from 2015

new year's day 2015! .. a time of reflection and optimism .. today's sunset above augurs well for 2015.  red sky at night; sailor's delight .... isn't that the saying?  2014 was an interesting and challenging year ... (as was 2021!) .. a little above average, actually.  some jobs just flowed; some jobs were like pulling teeth .. some had easy deadlines, and some, like the last three weeks of them, were rapid fire, one after another rush, rush, rush.  it's also possible that in reality, my management skills may be fading as i enter my 36th year of this grand production.  all's well that ends well though, and it's onward to 2015. 

since this blog post, i have organized all my slide shows in a page on my blog

here's a link to them ... thousands of pictures of pieces we have created over the last 42years.

Enjoy your tour!

2014
click an image there and arrow through it.. while you are there,
you can also access more albums from other years, like the ones below
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
live edge tables
furniture from reclaimed lumber
sam's metal work
a hundred or more dining tables
digitized sketchbooks
stuff you can do with a cnc router
happy new year to you all, and all the best for 2022!

christmas eve, again

it's that time again ... christmas eve ... it kind of snuck up on me

this year, so i am going with some regular, older photographs ...  

 

my best wishes and thank yous to my friends, readers, and clients who

make what i do seem enjoyable and semm to be worth doing .. 

all the best for 2022 ... 

stay safe. be well. have fun!

(another) custom walnut dining table

 well, it's saturday, it is snowing pretty hard, the music is good,

 and i am thinking of having a beer .. 

i'm on a roll with the blog posting, two so far, so here's another ...

i've got my beer now .. here we go ...

there is our inspoiration photo from the client, and our first mockup 

using the tooling for the apron we had on hand. the apron knife i used 

was one i had made previously for big cove moldings and pencil trays ..

not perfect!  we had to have a custom knife cut based on a section of an angled oval ...

once the knife arrived, we ran em ... no problemo

we used some nice walnut from irion lumber,

5/4, 6/4, and 16/4 for the legs ... a couple thousand $$ of it .. 

54 x 88 with one 18" leaf ... pretty big table!

next we used what we refer to as our 'holes and pins' jig ... 

it never fails to line everything up

drill bushings from mcmaster-carr

center aligned ... good up to 6' diameter tables

drill one half one way, the other, the other way .. 

one of my handiest jigs ever ...

where was i?  oh yeah, attaching the legs ...

we devised a sort of complicated pair of corner blocks, 

for each corner, pocket screwed to the 6/4 aprons ...

the top and bottom blockes were, in the end, connected with pieces

of 3/4 ply that were later screwed to the vertical square tenon on

the top of the leg. we also included a 2.5" #12 wood screw 

down through the center of the top block.  a very rugged connection

considering the deisgn ...

kristian ran the fluted details on the cnc using a 1/2" round nose bit,

many passes, on 1/16th" centers perpendicular to the center line of the legs

hard to describe til you see it happen .. 

it took about 6 minutes per flute, four flutes per leg

it took 3 tries to get the leg design approved .. i think if you blow this one up

you can see the tool paths on the poplar test piece

so there you have it, upside down, and ....

 right side up ... headed to tampa sometime in early 2022 ...

anothe challenge, for sure!

an english walnut slab coffee table

 

this was a fun little project

it started with an english walnut slab from our other friends at goodhope hardwoods

coincidentally, we had this nice walnut base left over that we acquired when 

a client bought a coffee table in on of our galleries, and

requested that we make a metal base instead of the wood one .. 

perfect!

 as you can see from the photos above, there were a few epoxy repairs required, 

but in the end, the grain of the walnut was quite spectacular!

 

 another view of the table in its new home, with better lighting

lookin good!

A mid century modern oval table

ok ... it's been a while here ... almost two months since my last blog post.  but it's not

cause we haven't been doing anything, but rather that we have been too busy ...

 

here's an inspiration photo we got from the client ... we were tasked to simplify

 it a bit, make seating for 8, and then figure out how to build it ... 

from the drawing that i will post later, on the cnc, we cut a mockup mdf

top and an insert for a steel pieces that would attach to

the legs and theoretically make the whole thing strong and stable.

we got that and then just made all the parts from some

 nice walnut from our friends at Irion Lumber

we got it all together, but before we did the finishing, we 

realized that the top was 'shaky' due to the fact that there were no real

'aprons' up by the top to firm the structure up.  sam rolled a simple 

1/4" x 1" piece of steel that firmed things up considerably

good to go ... off to boston ...

an interesting, (and a little challenging), project ...