Pass the Sketchup

Yesterday I put together the legs for that little table I've been working on and I think it's turning out pretty well. A couple more coats of oil and then I'll paper the kumiko frame and put a piece of glass to act as a table top.

On a completely different note I wanted to describe a setting in Google Sketchup that I Iike. I use sketchup for my CAD because 1) I'm a Mac user and there is approximately zero good Mac CAD software, and 2) It's free! So when you draw things they normally end up looking like this:

Which is nice, but kind of static and too computery, too perfect perhaps. So there's this setting under the styles menu that let's you render the image with a marker, hand-drawn style that looks really, well, hand-drawn.

I don't know what it is exactly, but the marker style just seems a little nicer to me. More fluid, not some rigid computer generated thing. The way you present information is really important, something I keep learning over and over.

Table Planes

This little kimiko frame is going to turn into a table when all is said and done. Making the asanoha hemp leaf pattern for a second time was a lot more successful. I'm planning to paper the underside and then put a piece of glass on the top. We'll see how it turns out. The contrast between walnut and poplar is something I like a lot.

So I made a new plane as well. It's sort of a franken-plane, made up of a myriad of leftover pieces of wood (there's at least three different pieces of oak and a little padauk). It's longer than my 5 1/2 and is intended to work as a jointer. So far it seems to be working quite well, even though it's super ugly. I think it deserves a rebuild, but conceptually it works!

Another Hammer

I'm going hammer crazy it seems. Here's another oak mallet that I put together last week. This time I turned the head on my lathe and made a simple handle. The wood is reclaimed oak from the London Winery that I've had kicking around for a couple years now, and is pretty much quarter sawn.

Better Bench Pictures

Slab Bench

I'm just about finished this little hallway bench. It features a nice slab of maple and has a drawer that pulls out in the front. I've learned quite a bit about drawers while reading up to build this one. They're quite the complicated thing to build for something that seems so simple. A couple coats of oil and this bench will be out the door. A nice quick project.

If I had a hammer...

Some days you just feel like hitting things with a really big hammer. My sander and jointer both just bit the dust this week and that meant I wasn't too happy shelling out for parts and wasting my day fixing things. Because of this I built a big Japanese-esque mallet today. The head is quartered oak, with an oak and padauk handle. I got to use my spoke shave to shape the handle, which was really a nice thing to do.

Sometimes I wonder how my personal interpretation of Japanese woodworking relates to the real thing. I'm not too worried about it, I mean I just like building things and they don't have to fit into any tradition or style.

Lamp-o-mania

Now that I'm back from Italy I'm getting to work in my workshop with some new ideas. I'm currently working on some new lamps, because I really like lamps. The one below is inspired by the construction of a kayak and will use shoji paper for the screen. It's big! I think it's going to be pretty nice though.

I also just finished up this free standing, columnar lamp. It's made of walnut, curly maple, and mylar. I'm thinking that I might try to put together a little show with some more lamps and maybe get a friend of mine to put up some of his paintings.

I really like the heartwood/sapwood contrast of walnut, it's really a nice wood to work with.