interior design ... dining rooms

one of our favorite projects is creating a custom dining room ... we have a project coming up where we'll be doing an expanding dining table with a hard curly maple inlay, 8 chairs, and a cherry and curly maple sideboard. we get to make the pieces relate, in essence, determine the style of the room ... the designs for this new project are loosely based on the furniture in my own dining room above, with of course, the clients' unique input which is based on their own experience with a table i made for the client's brother in 1990 or so ... round and round it goes. click the photos to enlarge them ...
this is part of the proposal for that project ..
meanwhile, for a potential client who is coming to visit this week to discuss furniture for her dining room, i rounded up photos of different projects of different styles, most of which consisted of at least a table, some chairs and a sideboard ...
while in the natural cherry photo above this one, we were going for a more contemporary look, here we're shooting for the traditional, with the dark, carved mahogany legs and stained mahogany and walnut chairs with burl backsplats ...
here, we've clearly taken a contemporary slant on the traditional, dark, arts and crafts style, taking our cues from the designs of greene and greene and stickley, but by using natural cherry we have (hopefully) brought it up into the present.
hanging fir and burl table lantern ... inlays in the top and 0n the aprons of the table
here we have the 'one board' bubinga dining room ... plain and simple design, the table top and face of the sideboard was made from one 46" wide, 19' board of bubinga ...
here, the view from the other end ...
another take on what we refer to on our website as our 'studio style', a mix of natural or stained woods with painted details and accents. (love the milton avery boxers over the mantle) we used to make quite a few windsors, but, not so many any more ... i'm encouraging the padded seats ...
the sideboard for that table ..
and another ... for more, check out the 'dining table', 'seating', and 'sideboard' sections of our website for other styles and designs ...

more piccolo banjos

short concert here

will put up a website back in may and boom, boom, boom .. three piccolo banjo orders. he's working on all of them sort of at the same time and finishing up the first one, which has to be in california for a festival next week. i haven't been paying 100% attention and i only caught the highlights, but watching him figure out efficiencies to produce multiple editions of similar designs has been really interesting. click the photos to enlarge them ... 

6/22/2014 .. for photos of 20 more banjos visit will's website at seedersinstruments.com

first, he cut all the pot ring parts at the same time. it was quite a stack ...
then, based on some stuff he found on the internet, he designed and built a machine tool type setup for the wood lathe to rapidly and accurately turned the pots.
eventually, he'll have a steel plate made to more firmly hold the reversible tool post, but the wood plate worked surprisingly well.
three necks ... cut on his refined swing jig ...
he then added the inlaid and slotted fretboards
and refined the final shapes
he finished the wood parts with tru oil, a hard oil product made primarily for gunstocks, but it works great for banjos and other small things too.

a new challenge was installing the natural skin head, which the first client requested for a traditional sound. this one's goat skin which has an interesting, natural look.
you soak it in warm water, and then lay it over the rim and install the brass flesh hoop, which Will and Sam rolled from brass and brazed in the metal shop.
then you place the tension hoop over that
and pull the excess up through a little at a time.
last step is to install the tightening hardware, snug it up and trim the excess. after drying for 24 hours, the skin will shrink and tighten itself ... pretty slick ... i was fascinated watching the stretching process. i had my camera nearby and took the really short video here as will was finishing up ... about all you can see there is how quickly you need to work, but it's still a pretty cool process shot.
other banjo related posts

a couple of restaurant tables

well, here's a fun project ... two large english elm slab tables with metal rebar bases for a restaurant in bethesda, maryland. we've been working with amy krol, a competent and responsive designer at aria group architects in oak park, illinois. her concept sketches are above and we have gone back and forth with her over the last two months, refining the construction and material selection details. we're on the home stretch now and aside from a column location question (the column hasn't been built yet) we're ready to wrap them up and ship them out. click the photos to enlarge them ...
we started at berkshire products in sheffield, massachusetts, a great source of amazing and unusual wood for woodworkers the world over. we picked these three slabs from their photos on the internet. the one above for the single long table ...
and this matchinig pair, which will be butted end to end and notched around the column as shown in the drawings below.
next came the model stage. i drew them in my cad program, but in the end, the random, 'this looks good' placement was the way to go ... some things you can overplan.
there was some concern that the skinny rebar (actually, it's 5/8ths and not that skinny) would flex, as in theory, rebar gets its strength from the concrete surrounding it ...
sam said it would be 'no problem' but just for fun, we loaded the unglued model and applied a little side pressure ... solid as a rock, even with 1.8th inch rubberwood dowels and no glue ...
we trimmed, smoothed and stiffened the single slab ...
cool top ... and started construction on the real bases in the metal shop.
sam came up with the great concept of temporary pipe and threaded rod through the corner holes where the table bases will be bolted to the floor and to the wood tops, which held the two 1/2 x 12 steel plates parallel, and, when the bolts were tightened, completely square. he tacked the rebars randomly and checked them out, then welded them securely ... very cool, but when we figured it out, the long base weighs +/- 450 pounds !! fortunately, we were prepared and actually constructed all the steel bases on dollies.
base #1, 'resting' in the driveway ... this dolly was a touch under built...
the double table is wider at +/- 42" and we built those bases upside down, using 1/4 x 20" steel plates for the base tops to give the wider wood tops more support.
we bolted them to some timberstrand on the floor of the garage ...
and built a two piece mock column the appropriate size for the full effect.
view down the 17 footer
the column 'top' is shown here moved off center to its approximate location. the final column location will be determined with cardboard templates by the job foreman on site and we will cut them to the templates before shipping ...
the single slab table ... 9'8" x +/- 30"

loyal readers will note our upgraded garage 'extended workplace' we thought we were done up here after the 'big tables' last year, but noooo ... so, now we have a painted floor, full insulation and sheetrock, heat if we need it, and today, a commercial dehumidifier arrived for summer work ... we're officially ready for 'the big ones' ...

what to do ... what to do

well, friday afternoons ... you just never know what might happen ... as we were cleaning up, somone put this claro slab cutoff out on the porch just as i happened to go out the door to the finish room. this piece has been hanging around the end of the sander for oh, a year or so? who knows. anyway, i suddently had this urge to clone it by resawing it with a chainsaw. kind of like the rubber stamp tool in photoshop. so i did. jim was johnny on the spot with the photos .... now comes the hard part ... what's the 'best' thing to do with them ??? comments? we're open to suggestions ... click the photos to enlarge them ...
1st obvious arrangement with the curving negative space ...
not so obvious, but maybe cool on the wall ... or, as a table with a glass top?
free standing 'swans'
have a good weekend ....
other chainsaw adventures