Fixing a family heirloom

another save on the antique repairs and restoration front

this one is a family piece in rosewood and satinwood and i am guessing

18th or early 19th century, french or italian ..
hand sawn veneers, minimal interior gallery work, 

butoverall, definitely a piece worthy of a longer life ..
it'll be good for a while now for sure

@mrwhiskers chris bowlen did most of the work on this one, and he

did a beautiful job piecing back the flaking veneer

it looked not too bad at first glance, but on second glance, 

the veneer just flaked right off

fortunately, the owners were diligent about picking up the pieces,

and we only had to make 2 or three new ones ..

ittook a lot of tape to make it right

a little soap and water, a little wax and out the door ..

as usual, it felt good to make a worthy piece whole again ...

10 years of blogging

 

well, here we are .. hard to believe that 10 years and 852 blog posts have gone by, 

but, they have ... will got me started back in 2007, and i have been at it more or less

steadily since .. my peak writing years seem to have passed, but i do still keep at, a post here, 

a flurry of posts there, one or two that month, but still at it.  

it helps me think about what it is i do most days ...

for a quick overview of what i typically say in november, i refer you to this post

entitled '3 years of writing'  ... a history there with photos from the very early 70's.

hard to believe i been building stuff for 45 years ... pull up a chair; enjoy your tour .. 

or drift off and do something else .. i'll never know .. whatever ...

 

here we are today, or as it were, last week.  not woodworking,

but more along the lines of other stuff i do when i'm not working.

if i wrote only about woodworking, i'd lose my mind, so there are quite a 

few 'nature' posts, some 'what i'm reading' posts, categories of 'sam's work', 

and 'will's banjos', and probably the heart of it all

'the slide shows' ...
you may have to be logged in to google to view them ..

seriously, there are THOUSANDS of photos of our work there, and

when working with clients, i refer to that section time after time.

click any image to start the show, and click through the rest of them as 

fast as you can hit the arrow key.

so here's the blog tour/history .. click the photos to enlarge them ...

you've got your slide shows, your popular posts, your archive, and your video tour 

and your visitor history below ...

644,000 + total sessions,  2,345,000+ page views and 378,000 users

kinda humbling when you add it all up ... 

852 published posts, (140 some unfinished or drafts)

and a couple recent ones in the works ..

my most popular post on steel table bases has been view over 30,000 times

and at least some posts have been viewed by people in 216 countries

 us, canada, uk, france, etc. you might expect ..

but yemen? afganistan? sudan?

power of the internet ...

as my ex neighbor, the late tom brennan, used to say:

"just keep everlastingly at it."

will do tom.  thanks to my clients and to readers, and thanks for the platform google ..
it ain't shakespeare, but i bet it's at least as long as war and peace.
happy thanksgiving ...

dan's painting's ... a woodworker does color

ok ... i've been fooling around with this stuff

now for a couple years and i am ready to let it out of the bag ...

i like color!  

woodworking, there's not so much.  you've got

your different woods, your lights and your darks, your curlies

and your burls and other oddities, but the tones are earthy, and after a while,

they sort of blend and you find yourself fussing with subtle variations of brown

over and over and over.  red brown, green brown, light brown, dark brown ...

where are the cadmium reds and oranges, the cerulean blues?

you can't find them in the wood pile ...

so, off to the right there is a new page with a link to a slideshow

of my paintings, only some of which are shown here.  you can see all of them

at this link  i've got a million of em ...

trust me, this is just the beginning.  i am inspired not only

by my friend horst , a multidisciplined creator if ever there was one, but also by reading recently

on the mid century americans, motherwell, johns, diebenkorn, krasner, frankenthaler, o'keefe ...

you get the idea ... 

i plan to add to this post, which will also be accessible from the 'dan's paintings' page 

once it leaves 'home'

enjoy, comment, criticize ... i am open to your thoughts ..

ps .. it looks like you may have to sign into your google account to view the slideshow
ever since they ditched picasa, i have been having trouble sharing new slide shows
my sincere apologies ... 

some brass feet ... contractor services

being that we have accumulated many skills over the years, and like to keep busy, 

we often find ourselves doing work for other makers ..

builders, upholsterers, antique dealers, contractors ... we're open to your ideas

this client is a millwork, cabinet, and furniture shop in massachusetts,

and both our shop and theirs do work for the same boston and cape cod designers.

this project involved fabricating four 1" thick solid brass feet to cap 

the ends of the x shaped legs on a desk they were building

the legs were (conveniently) on a 45 degree angle so we
made some fir mockups, cut the brass, drilled and flushed it up,
polished it a bit and box em up

we got these photos of the finished piece last week ..

all in, all good ...

one of our most popular designs

we finished and delivered another version of one of our popular

mid century modern expanding round tables .. we've made at least 6 or 8

or even more of this design in various sizes and color shades of walnut.

 

this one was a 60" round with three 20 inch leaves

making for a 5' x 10' table when fully extended ..

as usual, we started with a log of walnut from irion lumber in PA,

though this is not a picture of it ... it looked  kind of like this thougg the

boards were all the same length and there were several bookmatches to chose from

my man trevor had at it, vuutting the top, the beveled aprons, and
the base pieces on the cnc ..

generic cad drawing for this design ... just add leaves

steel table runners from moin hardware

same finish as this table

maple table, steel base

we finished a sweet maple table last week .. very minimal, clean design

steel base by sam, wood by irion lumber

two choices that boiled down to 'a little wider on the A end'

1.25" thick top, 1.25" square tubing

interesting mineral streaks in the bookmatched hard maple

going to try to shoot a better picture before it leaves ..

a kas style tv cabinet ... from the archives

one from the archives here ... 

i had a request yesterday for info on this cabinet that is on the internet

with my name on it somewhere ... that led me to look for the original

photos from, as it turns out, 2004.  i got my new olympus e-3 around then

and loved taking fine digital photos with it .. these have all been reduced to 

about a third of their original pixels, but they still look good ... 

it was a big effort of nearly 400 man hours ...

back when a big tv was a big tv

an interior shot as things took shape ... a little fuzzy ...

ready for the finish .. this design was inspired by a photo
on the cover of a sotheby's auction catalog from the late 90s ...

the never ending cornice project

how we sometimes signed the big ones

tah dahhhh ... and, over and out  ..
and that's a brunswick style pool table we made in 2003

show at the feick arts center poultney, vt

i am participating in another guild of vermont furniture makers show,
this one at the feick gallery at green mountain college in poltney vermont.
we had a good crowd for the opening last friday/

i think there are about a dozen of us participating, maybe more. 
the show was curated and arranged by the director christine schultz,
and her husband/assistant marc deloach .. they did a beautiful job,
and the lighting and space there is terrific.

we made that wall piece a few years ago, but i've never seen it lit like that ...

we've got a new claro walnut table for sale there  ...

i think it is about 36 x 44

the president of the college, yukking it up with govf ray finan ..

i've got a few paintings hung there

and our convex, wide view mirror that usually hangs over
trevor's computer that runs the cnc

also available and for sale ... +/- 24" diameter

 

the sunset on the way up was beautiful and there was a full moon

for the ride home down through the pawlet valley.

check out the show if you are passing through poultney ...