Sayonara Workshop

I found this beauty while cleaning out my workshop at the Globe Studios. It's funny what makes me excited these days...but anyways, I've got all my stuff out and it's a bit of a sad day. It was a nice thing to have a place to go where you could just bang on something or take a couple passes with a plane...a good creative space.

Now it's back to school in January and a bit more of a focus on research. I'm joining the KW Craft center, so my woodworking days certainly aren't behind me, but I'll be doing things at a much more relaxed pace.

Hammer Time

Mallets are something I like to make. Here's a little kanna tapper...now I just need to get a real kanna!

Mitred

The Globe fall sale wrapped up this afternoon and was a great success. Thanks to everyone who came by and checked out my work, and an extra thanks to those who picked up one of my pieces!

Before the show I finished up one of the few remaining planes that was missing from my arsenal...a mitre plane!

A mitre plane is usually used with a shooting board and makes the job of squaring up your boards a whole lot easier! The body lacks the sexy curves of a smoother, but the blockiness lets it be used on its side. This one is made from ipe and quartersawn maple, and I think that ipe is a wood I'll use again in my planes.

I've rounded over the edges to make it a good fit in my right hand and so far it has worked extremely well. I also used a new wedge design that is a trade secret right now. I applied some of that knowledge I gained from my engineering days and I think I've come up with a simple, but great approach. Somebody probably already beat me to it, but I'll claim it as my own for now.

Right now it's sharing a Hock blade with my high-angle smoother and like my other Hock blades it works great. High carbon O1 blades from Hock have lived up to their reputation and I'd recommend them to anybody.

End of the line...and the Globe Fall Sale - November 20-22

So I've come to the decision to close down my workshop at the Globe Studios. It's a great place and I'm sad to have to let it go, but I'm low on funds and time, so life will have to rumble on. My PhD has me spending time in labs doing things like motion tracking (seen below) and computer modeling, and this means I've been stretching myself thin.

I'll be working out of Globe until the end of December, so I hope to put on one more show sometime in January with the work I complete between now and then. I think it will mostly consist of lighting, and hopefully some fashion from a friend of mine (that is still TBD). There's also the Globe fall sale coming up on November 20, 21, and 22. I'll have a couple coffee tables and some lamps for sale, including this curvaceous beauty:

High Angle Smoother and a Little Bit of Music

I've been holding onto a Hock blade that I bought a couple weeks ago and I finally got it into a plane. This is a high angle smoother, bedded at about 58º, and is used for cleaning up those really nasty grains you find around knots and places with a lot of figure.

The sole of the plane is jatoba, with a quartered maple centre, and ziricote sides. I had never worked with ziricote before and to say it's a strange wood would be an understatement. It's got the most amazing grain that seems to weave in and out and it just turns into a cloud of dust when you cut it with a saw.

This plane didn't come out quite right the first few times...but after sticking to it I'm quite happy with the final results.

I also just finished up a music stand. It features some great birsdeye and curly maple that you have to see to believe.

The angle adjustment gave me a little problem, but in the end I figured out that I needed to add some felt in there to make it work right. Building things you've never built before is a neat challenge...a good way to stretch your brain and make some mistakes.

The height adjustment was also a bit of a head scratcher, but in the end it came out great, both visually and functionally.

Show Pictures

Sam...

George...

...and James...

So the show went real well last night. My friend Peter did the three great drawings of Sam Maloof, George Nakashima, and James Krenov that you can see above and I had some new pieces as well. The table below came from my friend Mohrgan's tree and is a fabulous bookmatched set from a crotch of his Maple tree.

I'm getting my head around the butterfly joint and I'm getting confident in making them nice and tight. I used some Jatoba for the butterflies and I really like the colour match with the maple. Speaking of colour, the Padauk desk seen below came out really well.

Padauk is a wood most people don't know about and it's funny how many people asked me how I stained the top to get it that colour. Stain is not really something I use very often (or ever really) and it's funny to see the perplexed look on peoples' faces when I tell them that that's what the real colour is. So all in all a good night, and a special thanks to all of you who made it out!

Show On Friday

Come on down Friday for a great show featuring my friend Peter and me.

Maple

I'm always amazed by maple. For one tree to grow with such variation just sort of blows my mind. Here is some curly and birdseye maple that I'm using in a music stand, it should turn out great (as long as I sharpen my planes)...

...and a better picture of a walnut bench I've been working on. This piece was the centre slab from the tree and was basically cracked all the way down the slab. I put the crack back together and got to include some butterfly joints to boot.

Show Details

So here's the official poster for the show I'm putting together with my friend Peter...

If you're free and can make it out it should be a good time. Like I say, at the very least there will be cake! That's a good thing!

Now for a completely different topic...On a recommendation I recently picked up a router plane and I'd have to say I'm liking it a lot so far. Sort of a weird tool that keeps those noisy power tools on the shelf. I used it for the first time to clean out the bottom of the mortises for some butterfly joints and it worked beautifully.

I'm also working on a bench to go with the walnut table I just finished. I'm half done the dovetails, just one more end to go, but I like the way things are turning out.

Plane old Padauk

There's been a bit of an African invasion in my workshop this week. First of all is the African Blackwood that found its way into a nice little hand plane. I made this plane to take with me places like the lumber yard and the weight of the ABW has really turned it into something special. A real nice little plane that has me thinking about how I can incorporate the ABW into some more hand planes.

The other part of the invasion is this big hunk of Padauk. I'm planning on turning it into a deskand hopefully it should be ready for the show I'm planning for the end of October.

A Show! With Cake!!!

I've been talking about doing a little show for a while now and I finally got around to booking a space and setting a date. It's going to be on Friday October 23rd, in the evening sometime. Details still need to be sorted out, but I'll be sharing the space with a friend of mine, Peter, who's a painter. It should be an interesting show and at the very least there will be some cake!

Walnut Table Done (mostly)

...and finally, a fully built, legs on, right-side up table:

Now I just need to put on a couple more coats of oil, take the legs off, move it, and put the legs back on! Simple.

Walnut Side Table

I finished this walnut side table a couple months ago, but never got a chance to take a good picture. I just sanded it and wiped on some oil so I thought I'd better pull out my camera. Amazing curl and colours in this piece...just wonderful wood.

Levitating Table

Okay Matt, enough with all the pictures of your Spiers smoother...

...and a new shot of the table with the legs magically attached:

Like a well oiled...

...walnut table! Well, it's not quite well oiled yet, there's only one coat on, but you really get a great sense of the walnut contrast to the sapwood and the curly maple butterflies. Here's half oil, half no oil:

...and the full monty:

..and a close up of one of the butterflies:

Even More Walnut Table

I worked on putting in some butterfly joints today and they came out really well. I got to use my "punisher" mallet which was a lot of fun too!

I still need to track down a router plane to help smooth the bottom of my mortises and rabbets, overall I was quite happy with the way the curly maple butterflies turned out.

And here's the wide shot:

Walnut Table Top

More walnut table top pictures...first the top of the table which I used my smoother to finish.

...and the bottom of the table which I used my sander to finish...

Walnut Table Update

I've been working on jointing a walnut table and got some good use out of my 5 1/2 Bailey. Sharpening has always been a weak point in my plane skills, but today everything seemed to be working just right.

After all that planing I got a shot that nicely summarized all that hard work. I had already made a new handle for this plane, but I just added the new "knob" after I got a blister the other day. A bit of a different design, but I'm really liking it so far. The plane's now definitely right handed, but it's a lot more comfortable and it fits my hands a lot better. Taking the time to make things fit is definitely worth it.

And here's the table top ready to be glued up with some biscuit joints.

Wonderful Walnut

I got some great looking walnut slabs in today that will be turned into a dining room table and some benches. These pieces are right from the center of the tree and are just amazingly clear. Wonderful pieces of wood, but they pretty much take up my whole shop ;)

I still need to figure out what pieces go into what things, but I couldn't resist planing down one end of a slab to see how things would turn out.

After a couple minutes with my 5 1/2 and my Spiers (and a rub of tung oil) I wound up with something like this:

Plane Improvisation

I had picked up this Spiers smoother a couple of months ago and I had only got to use it a little bit. It needed a new blade and I haven't scraped enough money together to get one yet, so today I decided to figure something out with what was in the shop. I had a 3/16" thick, 2 1/4" blade that didn't fit with the Spiers chipbreaker, but since I had success with faking it with a wooden chipbreaker in the jointer plane I just made I thought I'd give it a try. It worked out great and has me thinking about some new plane designs to try in the future.

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.