andy rooney

i sometimes comment here on folks who have 'left the building' and was sad to hear of andy rooney's recent passing. i have always enjoyed his way of complaining ferociously without a hint of whining. a rare talent that i would enjoy, at times, having a little more of. i knew somehow that he was a woodworker and happened across this article he wrote about tools .... it's worth a read, regardless of how you feel about tools. it's more about andy ... check it out here. you might have to be a fine woodworking member. i'm not sure ...

hold on to my hat ....

well, ok, out of control here. not really, but looking at the pictures below, you might think we were ... there is just so much stuff going on, all at the same time, all different styles and directions, but all cool. above and below are two new belt buckles from sam in the metal shop. the top one was for one of our guides on our montana trip ('fish in montana'), and the one below was for a local bass tournament that ended recently ... the rest of the stuff below is just a short summary of last week and the rest of the month coming up... click the photos to enlarge them.
and in the woodshop ... we finished and delivered the dining room this past week; it all looks good and everyone's happy, including me ... it's always nice to wrap up a big one ...
it was hard to get it all in the picture, but the light in their room is fantastic in the late afternoon ...
arm chairs .... very sculptural process getting those arms on there ..and the clients threw an eastlake armchair restoration at us at the last minute ... we were all surprised how much we liked it when it was finished ... it had been in the client's basement since they moved in and it was pretty questionable looking when we picked it up.
and, a friend's mom died ... she was a client of mine too and so we made the box for her ashes, which i always consider an honor. we have made a bunch of these and i went back and read one of my blog posts about the process ... glad to do it ... the service was last saturday ...
and here we have a claro walnut slab desk that's happening now too ... here it is, as of friday afternoon, with the drawer framing just starting ...
here it is on its feet today. will was doing some banjo work this afternoon and we decided to put the first coat of finish on the top ... more on that piece as we progress ...
and we're watching our friend steve holman make progress on a challenging piece that trevor did some fancy cnc work on. essentially, trevor's job was to take the concept of the small handmade model above and convert it to full size. without trevor, it would have been a daunting task of freehand, large scale drawing. changes and adjustments would have been painful ...
trevor first converted the plan view that steve gave him at 1" = 1', to digital form, and then made the 1/4 scale model you see in mdf above. from there he made many small and subtle adjustments before making plan view templates of the shapes to test the full size fit ups. he then cut the curved plates and forms for steve to build the walls and laminate the applied curved and veneers walls on .
note the allowances for varying wall thicknesses, handicap, wheel chair access, etc.,etc ..
full size plates and shoes here
and friday, we saw some of the full size walls ... it's going to be a cool object ...
and then there are the troublesome bobbin leg tables for an interior designer in northern vermont ... looked easy on paper, yet will warned me it wouldn't be, and, he was very right ... we finally figured we had to make four forms to glue up the 3 piece mid rails or else we would have too many pieces to deal with at once ...
got it now ... we're going to reduce the space between the top two rails to get the joinery and proportions to be better and then all we have to do is make another one, just like it to match ... seems like they are taking forever ... win some/lose some ...
and then there's the bar cabinet that will is building ... it's loosely a simpler version of the art deco macassar ebony cabinet he built a few years ago. he's on the home stretch now ...
the doors, with their curly maple center inlays, went into the bag friday afternoon .. saw them this morning and they looked good.
and then there's that $5000. load of wood that arrived from irion lumber last week. 4 dining tables, a coffee table, a corner cupboard and 8 chairs, and some other odds and ends, coming right up ...

the table and corner cupboard cad drawings ... the client chose the slightly larger version on the left after we sent her a cardboard full size plan view ...
and there's the cherry trestle table from this post ... coming up soon
and this morning, in our driveway, was sam's new/old 700 pound clausing milling machine that he picked up yesterday from plaza machinery in bristol, vermont ... all we had to do was figure out how to get it out of the truck, into the shop and then off the dolly ... in the end, all it takes is the proper equipment
and a competent support/cheerleading staff, including uncle pete and his tractor, jennifer and kit.
getting it off the 6" high dolly and onto the floor was a trick involving about 8 layers of mdf blocks on each corner, removed one at a time ... it felt like we were building the pyramids, in reverse ... lever up, remove, lever down ... got it ...
and there was still time to help kit plant the garlic ... indian summer here this week ... beautiful.

four years of blogging

well, what to make of four years of sporadic writing? i'm not famous, i'm not richer, except in the experience of writing, at which i have gotten vastly more comfortable as a process, and i still don't really understand exactly why i do it. part of it is for my boys, sam and will, who if they want to continue this business will have a visual and verbal record of our processes: the processes of design, visualization, method discovery and a written record of how we built stuff to go with it. i also enjoy the comments and interactions with my readers, and the surprising amount of new work that we get that is a direct result of our blog and website. for the first time this year, slightly more than half of our new work came from the internet rather than from our existing client base. i think it's the stories and the visual depiction of the pieces, from drawing to completion, that validate what we do. click the stuff below to see the statistics ...
and, people read the thing ... people i don't know ... (395,000 page views? hard to imagine)
from places i'll never visit ... ( 168 countries? who knew? ) spreading the word ... make something .... wood, metal, pottery, art, jewelry ... the process is the same and the rewards are the same. a psychological bonus we don't often get from paying bills, shuffling papers or raking the yard. it's been great ! thanks for reading; feel free to comment or question ... 500+ posts down (wow, if i do say so myself) more to come ... enjoy ... for other anniversary posts, visit this one from last year with links to the others ... check it out ..

a custom 'studio style' dining room

update 10/31 ... we're on the home stretch on this project now. we'll be delivering the sideboard and table today and the 8 chairs later in the week. coincidentally, we have another dining room coming up next. an oval table (52 x 86), 8 chairs and a corner cupboard ... click the photos to enlarge them ...
the 8 chairs before the arms and the finishing ..
here we have our 'arm adding process'. essentially, we use the mdf too keep the arm blanks parallel to the seat rails until we can do the joinery and the final shaping
the completed armchairs ...

10/16 ... on our website you can see a type of furniture we refer to as our 'studio style', which could also be thought of as a 'signature' or 'default' style ... the kind of stuff we have made for 25 years for many clients and for our own home. it design nidea originated with a client who spent some time in germany and commissioned us to build a custom desk for her like the furniture she saw when she lived there. i later came to understand that what she was describing to me was actually furniture in the biedermeier style. that was in 1986, before one of the definitive books on the style was published about 1992 and, believe it or not, before the internet and google even. so we kind of made it up on our own. these pieces are direct descendants of that german and austrian idea from the mid 1800's. must have been in my german blood. click the photos to enlarge them.
the construction process for these designs requires first building the piece and then completely disassembling it for the painting and varnishing. the pieces above are for the sideboard that is part of this commission. it is identical to one in my own home except that the center detail will be part of an oval instead of the angled geometric one in the photo below.
loyal readers have probably seen this one before ...
here's how it goes ... in the early stages, all the details are left flat so they can be registered with each other and then the shadows and bevels are cut when the individual pieces are disassembled for painting and finishing ...
at this point, nothing is glued, though the web frames are screwed to the insides of the face pieces, and the piece is completely rigid.
we leave the lower rail element uncut at this time too ... and then the drawer faces and the central element are fitted tightly in the holes. the final fitting happens after the case is finished and glued up ...
dovetail time ...
pulls and more finish tomorrow ...

the palette for this project is natural cherry and curly hard maple, with ebony and black milk paint details
here will is reassembling the table base that he made a few weeks ago.
the top and leaves of the table have a curly maple and ebony inlay that we routed out and filled back in. ... here lorne has finished installing the ebony borders before fitting up the 1/8th" central curly maple veneers.
once the bottom of the top is finished, the base is assembled and installed, the table is flipped, and the top is final scraped, sanded, and finished on its base ... runners again from our friends at moin hardware.
tah daahhhhh ... with the leaves in, before the fnish. 10' x 42" wide
a quick finish sample/palette study for the clients
we will be wrapping up the chairs and the sideboard this week ... delivery time soon ... more on all of it as we finish up ....
lots of pieces to keep track of ....