Where Has Summer Gone ????

Oh My ! Labor Day Weekend .... Summer is so over .... But what a summer it was weatherwise. My neighbor Bill LaBerge said he had a 5 week stretch where he ate lunch outside every workday and it didn't rain on him once ... It has been beautiful. As a result, I've been a little slow on the writing front. Lots going on though ... The weekend is here and I probably won't be writing much more so this'll be a long one. What's been going on the last couple of weeks? Here goes ... Click the photos to enlarge them ...
The balcony Sam has been working on is now ready to paint and install ... Since it overlooks a beautiful trout pond, the owners requested some fish cutouts on the floor. These are cut on the bandsaw from 14 gauge and detailed ... they have studs on the back and will be bolted on once everything is painted ...
Jim finished cleaning and restoring a small menagerie of stuffed stuff for our fire client. It's hard to believe, but they were pretty black before he started. The wood duck's tail was off and the pheasant had a hole in his cheek just behind his eye that Jim very cleverly repaired with a piece of a sanding pad that was almost the perfect color and texture. He patched in behind the red with a few feathers from the wood duck ... Gold star for him from that client .... See the bottom of the photo below ...
Trevor, Jim and I made six sets of mahogany arch topped screens on the shapers and the cnc. They go with the porch I wrote about last month ... The frames will be painted to match the rest of the porch which allowed us to mix in some pvc board for the curves stops which eliminated potential problems with the short grain on the curved cuts.
Will has been working on several projects at the same time ... Three cherry and abalone mirrors for the same client. After exploring a couple of options with 1/16th " abalone that we usually buy from Stewart MacDonald's, Will found a new west coast source for 1/8th" Puau abalone from New Zealand at Luthier Supply ... That definitely did the trick and has the best color of all the abalones.....
The full length mirrorThe abalone strips are sold by the ounce and have to be squared up. Then they are inlaid into a slot cut in the walnut which is then sanded and blackened using juice made from a mix of cider vinegar and steel wool left to soak for a couple of days ... After sanding that with 1000 grit, Will then rubbed on/rubbed off some black latex paint to fill the pores and then paper toweled that and glossed it when it was done ... The finished looking mirrors are shown with only the first coat of gloss on them and will be satined next week ... They are going to look great.
Click this one .. the abalone is amazing
The two smaller mirrors

Will and Sam also whipped up a small console in the 'Bethlehem Steel' style to go with the big walnut oval dining table we finished a couple weeks ago. That will be off to the side to display a Dale Chihuly piece the client owns ... they both leave for CT Monday morning
On the side, Will also plays banjo and fixes instruments. One of his clients had a 50's hollow body Epiphone that needed a new pickguard and they collaborated on the design ... The client picked it up today ... Loved it !
Cutting the gold abalone on the cnc with a 1/32nd" bit
The finished replacement...

And I have started the next big table project ... I spent some time last week rough planing the claro walnut slab for a big table that will end up in Montana .... The top should be ready to finish next week and last I checked, the steel for the base will be finished Wednesday .... It's a new base design, but it will be bolted together and installed in a similar fashion to others that we have made ... This top is the thickest one yet (3") and weighs about 400 lbs we're guessing ... The moving company says 'no problem' ... I'm glad for that ...
Prototype mdf base design
Rough smoothing the slab at my garage with my trusty Makita power plane from the 80's. It's astonishing to me how durable this tool has been ... No room in the shop for this piece when it arrived from Good Hope ...
As you can see by the winding sticks, this thing was incredibly flat even though it is 4 feet + wide.
It did have a little issue on the bottom though where apparently there was a bandsaw blade issue.
My 1994 ford pickup has finally died and the slab was too wide for my van so ... what to do? No problem, get Sam to tow it to the shop with his trusty Saab ...
We routed out and patched the divot in the bottom ... Coincidentally, the divot was exactly where we have to attach the base ... Jim thought we should put it on the top and would make a good fruit bowl...
The top will be ready to finish next weeks after the base parts arrive from Melanson's, my waterjet folks ...all for now ... having trouble with Blogger loading stuff

News from the Metal Shop

I haven't written much about Sam's work lately though he has been fishing and hard at work too ... After he finished the metal work on the big tables, there were a couple catch up projects and then he headed into a project for clients he met during Open Studio weekend. It was a fairly straightforward piece, a kitchen island with a Danby marble from our friends at Johnson Marble. At the moment he is working on a kind of complicated balcony project for clients in Dorset Hollow ... The design process for that project has been in the works for a while and it's nice to see it taking shape ... Random images below ... click the photos to enlarge them ...
We are currently having a visitation from a sculpture that Sam gave to his friend Jennifer a few years ago ... She is waiting to move into a new house and is storing it here for the moment .. Kit and I want one ... It has a real nice David Smith like presence. We have an 'official' (read valuable) nude woman sculpture at the top of the garden that we are 'guarding' for a neighbor who is currently living in Boulder, but imho, Sam's can easily holds its own with that one.
Back view ... it's about 4' tall ..
Side
In the garden ... if you enlarge this one, you can see the neighbor's sculpture center right ...
The island
Process ...
Parts ...
The balcony mentioned above, in a test install on the front of the shop ... gotta love that rough sawn siding ... you'll never know it was there when it's gone
Future home ...
Starting out, Sam explored a couple of options for the support brackets ...
the finished brackets bolted to the upside down platform ...
hanging it all on the front of the shop ...
getting started
Starting the detailing ...
He should be finished construction this coming week and then it will be off to the paint shop ..

New Blog Widget

i recently added the Google 'share' widget to the bottom of my blog posts ... you can now easily email, twitter, facebook and blog about my posts if you want. it seems fairly inobtrusive. use it or ignore it ... thanks.. dan

Two Oval Tables

We finished up two oval dining tables this week. The first, in English elm from Berkshire Products, has been in the shop for a while, after a finish change from natural to a light stain ... It looked great when it left and the client was very happy when it arrived. Click the photos to enlarge them ....

The legs are the same as on the big claro walnut table we made earlier this year, and we will be doing a variation on this base on anther big claro table that we will start this week ... More on that later as we progress ...

Shows the underside .... The metal structure, once the bolts are tightened and it is attached to the top, is surprisingly rigid ... no, make that completely rigid ...
The table below I wrote about in the post 'new table design', earlier this month. In person, its 60" wide x 86" long presence is very powerful. The top is only four boards from the same walnut log (only without the hardware) that we made the 'Bethlehem Steel' dining table from earlier this year ... It's beautiful lumber ...
The long crosspieces and bolted engineering also made this base extremely rigid
Close up ...
Glue up ... more photos in the earlier post ... the base design and glue up was a very interesting process of discovery ...
While we we working on the dining table, the client added the 'Bethlehem Steel' style console above which she will use to display a Dale Chihuly piece she owns ... It's shown above unfinished, but will be reassembled probably Tuesday ...

 good to go !

Pictures of the Big Tables

I got these photos from Steve a while ago but haven't taken the time to post them until now. It's summer. The weather has been pretty near perfect. I have been playing golf and tennis .... I have requests for new work that I have to address and new projects starting up. We had friends in from Taos ... Anyway .. Here they are now ... Click the photos to enlarge them ... I didn't take them and I know they were not easy tables to photograph, but here they are .. There is a list of all the relevant blog post links at the bottom ... See the whole story; start to finish by following the links in order ...
The 26' x 9' table
From the endThe 'small' table ... 20' x 8'
From the beginning ....
post #1
post #2
post #3
post #4
post #5

new table design

A client sent me some links recently to tables that she had seen online that she kind of liked but not exactly ... The size she was looking for (60 x 86) was not a standard one for most manufacturers so, I made a drawing for her. Working with ovals to define the curves, I played around with the proportions until I arrived at something that had some promise .. I got her ok for the concept and gave the drawing to Trevor, who cnc'd up a quick 1/6th scale model to look at. After a little more back and forth, we came to an agreement and we were off. Click the photos to enlarge them ...

The 1/6th model is on top of the bottom of the English elm table we finally finished this week ...
Without the top showing the interior 'flower' kind of concept ...
We started with 4 really nice wide boards of walnut from Irion Lumber ...
and after the top was glued up started in on the 16/4 pieces for the base. From the model drawing, Trevor made full sized patterns to help layout the cuts
After mitering them on the tablesaw, we added 3/4 inch hardwood dowels that passed through the center of each section to allow us to later run timberlock bolts up through the x cross base and into the four sections.
Before gluing up we also added some long grain walnut to reinforce the short grain out near the ends of the arcs. We tried a bunch of different approaches to clamping ...
and then hit on the idea of a cut out piece of plywood 'collar', clamps on the bottom, and cross clamps on the top, which allowed us to view the place where the four miters came together ... It all seemed good until we added the actual glue which for a minute turned the whole process into a small wrestling/clamp juggling match which we eventually won ...
Before adding the crossed base elements, Trevor routed and glued and screwed in a half inch baltic birch play reinforcing spider that gave us all confidence in the integrity of the glue up ...
A little more sanding and it will be off to the finish room next week ...
We're liking it and have already discussed a couple of variations on the theme ...