Matching A Table Leaf

Surprisingly, we've got a lot going on right now ... We're about to start a large entertainment center that has required some intensive design work, we're finishing up a couple of other small projects, doing some repairs , switching from tennis to paddle tennis season, and chopping the last of the firewood for the winter. One of our smaller projects was to make a new leaf for a table we made about 5 years ago ... Our client has two houses and he decided to switch dining tables, moving the larger table to his main house. He bought the table below back when I had piecess in a local gallery and that table had only one leaf. In it's new spot, two leaves would be more useful so he had us duplicate the original leaf. Click the photos to enlarge them ...

The room before the switch

The original table in that room

With the 'new' table ..
When we did this 'house full of furniture' project in 2003, I was just discovering the work of Charles and Henry Greene. While never one to make slavish reproductions, I found their work interesting, challenging and inspiring on many levels. Still do .... So, this particular room has mostly G&G inspired detailing, but surprisingly, when I switched out the tables, the new table did not feel completely out of place ... The hanging lantern over the table is still one of our favorite pieces. The whole room though is in the middle of the house and is IMPOSSIBLE to photgraph effectively. Someday, I might have to call in the professionals ...

Testing the fit and pin locations of the new leaf, seen on the right with the first coat of finish ..

This picture shows the understructure of the table that allows te table to expand to 8' with only a single pedestal ... We've made other central pedestal tables like this using this Hafele hardware and we're always surprised what you can get a way with ... Biggest one so far with a single pedestal opens to almost 10' ...

We did the routing for the original inlay by hand, but Trevor did the new leaf on the cnc ... beautiful tool pathing ...

The burl inlay itself is a series of equal triangles, cut and fitted to lines drawn on the wood below .. Faster than using the cnc ...

He then lined it up with the old leaf, put masking tape on the old leaf to mark the pin centers and drilled for the pins with our old doweling jig ...

It lined up really well and at this point we took it for the prefit ... I've got some detail photos of other furniture in the room and I'll post them later ...

Looking up into the lantern

My Design Library

One of my readers emailed to ask what resources I use for my designs ... A while back, the local bookstore , one of the largest and best independent book stores in the country, was considering doing a feature on artist's libraries on their website and I sent them a few pictures. They never got around to doing it that I know of, but I still have the pictures. They're not the best or sharpest photos, but they'll give you some idea of the reference books we have accumulated over the years. It helped that we did a major renovation project there in the late 80's and I kind of stocked up then ... I have identified the ones I go back to over and over with 1, 2 or 3 dots with 3 being the 'best'. More titles have been added since the photos. I'm kind of a book junky ... Click the photos to read the titles ...

Best of the best here are the 'Foxfire' books for old time stuff, 'The Encylopedia of Furniture Making' and 'Cabinetmaking' by Fierer

If you blow this up you can read most of the dotted titles. Looks like I missed the pair of blue books in the lower right .. very important ... Wallace Nutting Furniture Treasury ... Out of print, I believe

Hmmm .. Nutting did get dotted in this photo .. Also lots of other good ones to the right ... Greene and Greene .. Nakashima, Carribean Style .. they're all good

'The Artist in His Studio ... The importance of a good workspace for creativity to flow .. josef Albers on color theory ... 'Perspective Made Easy' ... That's an $8. winner ...

The "art" books ... You can't have too many .. Watch for sales
I would be interested in hearing of your favorites ... Leave them in the comments below ... Thanks ...

"Categories' On my Blog

Will has set me up with a new Blogger 'Categories' feature over there to the left, under the 'Archives'. After I spend a little more time editing the 'labels' that you see at the bottom of the various posts, more of the stuff I've written will be grouped together for ease of access according to what you're interested in. I wish I had known about this from the start as it's an obvious way to organize stuff, but, well, I didn't ... Check it out from time to time ... It will take a couple of weeks for me to get it the way I want it ... Enjoy ... FYI .. Sam does the Metalwork, Will works with me in the woodshop, and Trevor is the CNC router maestro ...

There is also a post back in August with links to the 'New Stuff' section of my website where you can see photos of items on my website with corresponding blog posts. That one is a little more cumbersome as you have to go to the website to see the picture and the link in the text description, and then click the link in the secriptioin to go back to the blog for the post. The advantage of that one is you get a photographic image of what the post is about ... All for now ...

New Table Project

Table update 11/6/09 Ok ... I'm back ... Box and funeral last week, meetings and catch up this week, and I actually had a paid writing assignment that I had to work on ... More on that when it hits the stands ... Anyway, the construction on the cherry and burl table is complete. We're still fussing with the finish samples though... looking for the right shine ... It should all be resolved this coming week ... all for now ...

Close up of the corner and leg inlays ... They are shellaced with a seal coat and we wil 9mostly0 stain around them when we color the cherry to maintain their clarity and contrast ...

the whole table with the two leaves inserted ... Table slides we use are by Moin hardware They're great and they are the same ones we used on this project ...

While we're still a little ahead of the carpenters on the other project we have going, we're slipping in an order for a table from our website. We made the original in 2006, custom designed for a client in New York City. This one is very similar in size and design so we actually know exactly what we are doing for a change.

Always start with a great log of cherry from Irion Lumber

Make some legs and put in the inlays

layout the top and glue up the halves and the leaves

cut it to size and rout the channels for the inlays

Make sure everything's the right size before you glue up the base

Make some finish samples using a different varnish than we usually use at the client's request

Glue in the walnut strips and corner inlays ... not shown in the photo here is the fact that the walnut strips actually are cross cuts of 3 or 4" wide thin boards which are put in individually, the grain of the wood of the strips runs in the same direction as the grain of the wood of the table, allowing everything to expand an contract seasonally together ... The longs ones go in in one piece.

fit up the corners and the inlay strips ... trhe burl strips will be cut into shorter sections before gluing ..

Glue and clamp them in... Tomorrow Trevor will flush them up, scrape and sand the whole top, and we should be ready to start the finishing process Monday if we get an approval on the color and varnish sample ... All for now .. Back to the Yankees game ... Doesn't look so good for them right now ....

Thoughts on Mortality

We lost two friends this week. Both were elderly and lived long and happy lives, but still, it gives one pause .... The first, Peggy, was the mother of friends we have known since the early 70's, (both of them, the friends and the mom), and the second, a client for both Kit and I and a woman totally involved in our local community who we encountered, going about town, many days a week. Both will be missed. I was asked by Peggy's family to make the box for her ashes, an act I consider a high honor. I have made a few 'funerary items' as I believe they are properly called, and each has been a thought provoking and meditative process, a time to reflect on who that person was, how they affected ours lives if I knew them well, and how I might live my life to reflect the values and knowledge gained from knowing them ... Just after I put the final coat of finish on Peggy's box, I looked out and saw a mink in the pond with a chipmunk in its mouth and reflected on the natural course of life ... We're here, we live and make an impact on others we come in contact with, we're gone, leaving behind little traces of ourselves with whoever we meet ...

Peggy's box ... simple and elegant, just like her ....

On our way to the service .... It was a beautiful day ...
Below are some other 'boxes' I have made for friends and family members over the last couple of years. We seem to be getting to 'that age' ....

This was my first casket, for my father, in 2006. I was sort of carried away by the thought of it and maybe went a bit overboard on the details ... Fortunately, I had a lot of help on this project ...Click the pictures to enlarge them ...

I was a bit more subdued when we all made my mother's casket last summer ...

This box was for Kit's mother's ashes ...

Painted pine and a fir top

Above, for another friend's mother ...

Writing this post made me think of a photo I took a few years back of some advice on how to live your life. It's from 1692 and it about sums things up for me. I took the photo at a client's house, shortly before his wife died, and I think of it often ... Worth a read .... click it
The closing's great ... 'Be careful,Strive to be happy' ...

I have written something about designing and making the dovetailed box above in the post below this one ...

Make a Box

While this post is about a box I made for a friend's ashes, above, it can really be about making a box; pretty much any box, or drawer, or cabinet case ... whatever. This is how we do it ... It's not the only way, it's not the 'right' way, it's just the way we do it. I don't think I've seen this dovetail method in print recently (or ever), but we've been using it for so long that I don't know exactly how we came to it ... Anyway, for a hand cut looking dovetail, it makes for a pretty quick process and the more of them you do, the faster you get at them. No jigs to fuss with either. For the tansu stairway project and the tansu cabinet project, Will did so many of them, I think he could do them now while playing his banjo. I did this box, start to finish, and I know I'm not as fast as I used to be ... It was a reflective process though and I enjoyed it totally.
Click the pictures to enlarge them ....

In a case like this, we start with a full size mdf mockup so we all know how big it's going to be, and what kind of 'presence' it will have... This one was on hand for the service and seemed about right. The main box part is 4.75" high x 13"long x 8.5" deep as I recall. Base and lid add about another inch and a quarter in height and length ....

We cut the tails on the table saw, in this case using a 10 degree angle. The butternut (wood from Meg's kitchen) is soft so we used an intermediate angle. Those cuts can be anywhere from 8 to 12 degrees depending on the look you like. In the photo above, we're using a stop and a cut off to test our layout. after cutting the initial, defining 10 degree cuts, we make another set at like 5 degrees and then at 90 degrees, leaving very little waste to chisel to the line. (lower the blade a bit as you get to vertical).

We keep the pins small (1/8" or so at the small point) for what I think is a referred to as a 'British' look but you can make them equal if you like that look too. This is what the side looks like as it comes off the table saw, before we pare to the scribe line...

Then we trace the tails onto the front and back pieces and make our cuts with a 'gent's' saw. We use a sharp pencil to mark with and leave the line ... You can see the saw we use in the first photo above ... Then, from the small side of the pin cuts, we waste between the cuts with our multirouter. This can also be done I suppose, same as the tails, on a table saw with a carefully set dado head.

However you do it, you're left with some small trapezoids to final cut. We use a modified flush cut saw. The nose has been ground down for working in a small pin space on small drawers ...

You should be able to hammer them home right off the saw ... (after a little practice)

Front and back view ..

Glue up with cauls and clamps and center block to keep the sides from flexing... we use good old Elmer's white glue ... decent open time, short clamp time ...

The bottom is rabbeted and screwed on , or if you're making a drawer, slid into a dado from the back ,,,, For a cremation urn, we make an intermediate top, supported on corner posts, with a little leather tab to open it. You can see that top on the right above ... All the hardware is installed and then removed for the finishing process. we use a 1.25" brusso box hinge with a stop for the lid with a rare earth magnet epoxied in to hold it shut ...

The finished box ... Finished with a two step aniline dye mix, (Lockwood light golden brown walnut and LW Antique walnut water stains), a coat of gloss poly, a sanding and a gel stain coat next and a coat of satin poly ... buffed with a paper towel when dry ....

The thank you note which arrived in my inbox as I was writing this ... good karma ...

A New Client's Interesting Idea

Often my new designs are a result of interactions with thoughtful, 'know what we want', clients. I met some folks at the Woodstock Furniture Show. It was totally the last minute and, I mean, totally the last minute. Other furnituremakers were packing up their booths as we were talking ... Anyway, it turns out they had purchased a house in Manchester ( ! ) where I had sometimes gone to parties in the early 70's ( ! ) when I was a bartender. They are remodeling it and when I went by to check it out, it brought back some interesting, hazy memories ... The origianl owner's pool table was even still there ... I took the photo below throught the sliding glass door as there was no one there and roughly photoshopped in their idea for a mirror, a 4" wide frame covered in galvanized, hung on the stone ... I wasn't precisely sure how to go about it so we had the local metalshop bend up some test pieces, stuck them on the wood with 3M Spray 90 adhesive and cut them to length on the table saw with a thin carbide blade and face shield. So far, so good ... We need to discuss finish colors, if any, and get approval for the copper boat nails we placed in the edge of the mirror. Without the nails it is going to be hard to hold the outside metal edges tight to the wood with just the contact adhesive ... Great concept ! Click the photos to enlarge them ...

The fireplace

With the mirror photoshopped in ... Actually, in the picture, it's too big. The stonework is 7' wide, which I didn't know when I did the picture .. I think 4' will be perfect ...

The cutoffs of the steel parts with the spray 90 on them. The folds on the outside edges wrap around where the mirror sits

We are using 1" plywood for the frame to eliminate complicatons from seasonal wood movement ..

With the copper boat nails on the edge ... I plan to try a little patina solution on the galvanized and the nails just to see what it does, after talking with the clients ....