New Bench Project

With the Marin Art Festival coming up fast, I wanted to create a new piece to show at the festival. Ive had a couple of matched walnut slabs from an orchard near San Juan Bautista for a few years, and have thought from time to time that they would make a great bench. So, this seemed like the time to get off the stick and make that happen. Im going to keep the slabs in as raw a form as possible, in other words, not hiding the worm holes and checks. To counterpoint that roughness, and give the piece a little sophistication, Im going to use wenge for the sculpted leg structures. Although I wouldnt be so bold as to suggest that my work is at their level, I think of this as a sort of a Kagan meets Nakashima design. Hopefully, I can get it done in time!

Heres a picture of the slabs and the leg blanks. You can see the final leg form from the plywood template. The slabs will be attached to the flat seat and back surfaces. Notice the great colors in the slabs that have been preserved by letting them air dry, rather than kiln drying. The only down side to air drying is that the moisture content of these pieces is only down to about 9%, which is a little high for furniture. So, Im going to have to design joinery that will allow for extra movement.

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Legacy Redwood Project The Good the Bad and the Ugly

After a flurry of activity in the shop at the end of the year, I finally got a chance to take the next step on the legacy redwood project. That entailed reloading all the big chunks I had cut back in November into the truck and taking them out to Dave Merchants milling operation at Out of the Woods in Bonny Doon. 

Daves got a great set-up, with several types of mills. 

The purpose of this trip was to remove the weathered outer surfaces of the chunks to try to assess how much sound, usable material the was in each one. My "smaller" chunks, the ones less than about 25" in width were sliced on a computer-controlled Woodmizer band mill - essentially a giant horizontal band saw.

The larger chunks that didnt fit on the Woodmizer were moved to his Lucas mill. This mill uses a large circular blade that can be rotated and used in both the horizontal and vertical positions. On these chunks, material was removed in roughly 6" wide pieces.

Now that each piece has a clean face, I can assess which ones still have significant rot, which will yield usable large-scale wood, and which might yield thinner panel material. Some of the pieces look pretty promising, with some really great burl figure, but others were a little disappointing in their extent of weather-related checking, and rot.

Stay tuned to see what develops ....

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New Project A Leggy Console Table

My newest commission is an entry console table that features swoopy, sculptured legs and two curvy drawers for small items like keys and such.

Complex legs like these start with a paper pattern printed full-scale from the computer model. The patterns are placed on the plywood template material such that the mating edges of the parts line up with the straight-and-square milled plywood edges.

Once theyre rough milled on the bandsaw, theyre smoothed and faired by hand with rasps and sandpaper.

The parts are then laid out on the rough lumber to take best advantage of grain.

Once theyre rough milled, again on the bandsaw, the mating edges are trimmed straight using a straight-edge saw guide.

After the mating faces are established, dadoes are cut across them to form bridle joints.

The next step is to trim them to exactly match the templates using the router table. In a design like this, with highly curved parts that meet at variable angles its important to leave flat ears to act as clamping aids.

The next step is to mill and attach the contrasting feet. To create a pleasing look, its important to maintain a continuous grain flow from leg to foot. With legs that are square in cross-section, structural integrity can be maintained by creating the foot by just veneering the bottom of the leg. But with curved legs that are rounded in cross-section its much easier to simply attach a solid foot to the leg that can be shaped and smoothed with impunity. Because the joint between feet and legs in this situation is, by necessity, an end-grain to end-grain joint, it has very little structural integrity. Therefore I always support this type of joint with a mechanical fastener, aka, a screw. Once the pre-drilled foot is glued in place, a pilot hole is drilled into the leg and the screw inserted.

Once the foot is attached, the leg can be tapered and rounded. Because the tapered legs change in thickness along their length, the radius of the edges has to change, as well. To make this easier, I use several round-over router bits of increasing radius as I move up the leg. This makes creating a consistently changing edge profile a snap.

Here are the four back leg pieces dry fit together. You can see the floating bridle tenon that connects all four pieces, as well as the positions of the clamping ears at critical points.

Then its just a matter of gluing it all up.

After the back leg sub-assembly has dried, the clamping ears are removed and the final fairing completed.

Et voilá, the assembled base.

Stay tuned for more as the piece progresses.

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