Back to Basics

Sometimes its good to get back to bare basics, if only to appreciate the conveniences we tend to take for granted.

I've just gotten back from my fourth two-week trip to Tanzania with a friend's medical team. Not being a medical type, my duties usually fall into the carpentry/infrastructure, photo-documentation, and general go-fer categories. I learned the hard way in earlier trips that taking power tools was problematic, at best. For one thing, their power is 220V (more or less), and both "dirty" and intermittent. So this time, I gave up and just took a basic set of hand tools.

As it turned out, they worked out just fine. My woodworking project turned out to be to build whatever I could in a couple of days for the microbiology lab we were helping to outfit at a small village just on the outskirts of Arusha. The wish list consisted of some storage shelves for supplies and a work table.

First duty, find some materials. This wasn't too hard a task, since there are roadside lumber dealers all over Arusha.

Luckily I had one of our driver/translators with me to help with the shopping and buying (my swahili is really, really limited). After checking out a few places we settled on a good yard that had 1x8s already rough milled, and was willing to surface them for me.

Surfacing was pretty quick, as they had a mill shop of sorts on-site. It was a little scary - not a guard in sight, and guys were cross-cutting parts on the table saw freehand. Clearly they've never heard the acronym OSHA.

Actually, I was kind of jealous. They had a couple of old industrial planer/jointer combination machines that were great. The planer and jointer shared a cutterhead, but there was no change-over that had to happen. The jointer passed stock over the top of the cutterhead in one direction and the planer passed it under the cutterhead in the other direction. Wish I could find something like that here in the US!

Anyway, materials in hand, I set out seeing how far I could get in the limited time I had. I started with the shelves first. Since the stock was now surfaced, and thus relatively clean, I tried to design a piece with as little cutting as possible (especially ripping), since my work area was really just a patch of dirty under a tree (and yes, that's the septic tank lid).

Luckily that didn't last long. This really kind of sums up the whole trip - as I was starting to get to work with the help of Jackson, one of our drivers, I was joking that I was getting too old to work on the ground. Jackson then disappeared, and about 5 minutes later returned and asked if I wanted a bench. And to my surprise a couple of guys rounded the building with a workbench lent by a local guy in the village. My "workshop" was now up and running.

And I found yet more evidence that some things are universal - this bench, while appearing to be pretty crude at first, had pretty much all the features a woodworker, from any continent, would need, such as an edge planing cradle, and various stops and hooks for bracing work. It may look crude, but it was plenty sophisticated for any woodworker's basic needs.

I tried to keep the extent of milling that I had to do to a minimum, pretty much just crosscutting parts to length. I only had to rip a few batons to keep things together. Rather than trying to get fancy with the joinery, I went with simple butt joints and screws for the most part. There's nothing like pre-drilling and driving screws by hand with a brace and bit to make you appreciate that cordless drill sitting in the shop at home. Fortunately, Jackson was more than happy to help keep things steady while I worked.

Things went pretty smoothly. Although the sight of an mzungu (swahili for foreigner, roughly) working away in back of the clinic did tend to draw some attention.

And sometimes the commuter traffic got pretty interesting....

Eventually, in about 10 hours of actual working time, I was able to complete the requested storage shelves for the lab room, and a quick-and-dirty trestle table, as well.

All in all it was yet another great experience. My thanks to Michael Eastwood and Sally Eastman for supplying the photos to document this project. And a big thank-you to the gentleman who lent me the bench, he was a life-saver.

Stylish Bench from Walnut Slabs

One of the great things about making wood furniture is that sometimes you get the chance to let nature do most of the work - then all you have to do is add a little bit here and there, and you get a great looking piece. This bench is just such a case. The walnut slabs, sourced from an orchard in the San Juan Bautista area, are the real star. All I had to do was add a little styling in the form of legs, and voila. It got a great response at the Marin Art Festival, and now is available for purchase. It measures roughly 70" long x 35" high, x 28" deep.

This is a look at the back and leg structure.


As you can see, the material speaks for itself.

Designing for Movement

Even though its been dried and milled, solid wood lumber still experiences expansion and contraction with changing environmental conditions. This movement must be taken into account when building furniture because if seasonal movement is restricted, the internal forces brought to bear can cause cracking and splitting. The challenge with this piece was to come up with a joinery system that would allow the spare design, just two slabs and two leg assemblies, to be strong and rigid, while still allowing movement of the slabs. Because the grain orientation of the seat and back supports are perpendicular to the grain of the slabs, simply doweling, tenoning, or screwing the pieces together would not allow the slabs to move, and result in failure. The answer that best suited this project was to attach one edge of each slab with a mechanical fastener (aka, a screw), and the other edge with a form of sliding dovetail, known as a blind keyhole dovetail. In this type of joint a dovetail-shaped tenon fits into an elongated sloped-sided mortise - the dovetail shape keeps the slab firmly snugged to the leg structure, but allows the slab to expand and contract by sliding along the tenon.

This is a picture of one of the mortises. You can see that half the mortise is square in profile, to allow the tenon to be inserted, while the other half is dovetail-shaped.

This photo shows one of the back supports. You can see the attachment screw near the top of the support that is the fixed attachment point, and below it the hard maple dovetail tenon that will slide into the blind mortise. To the left you can see the other leg assembly already attached to the back slab.

This next photo shows the similar arrangement for seat slab attachment. You can see that the front of the seat slab will be fixed, with the rear of the slab allowed to move in and out.

Here is the fully assembled bench (upside down) showing the slab-to-leg assembly attachments.

Stay tuned for more images of the final, finished piece. Thanks!

New Bench Project

With the Marin Art Festival coming up fast, I wanted to create a new piece to show at the festival. I've 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. I'm 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, I'm going to use wenge for the sculpted leg structures. Although I wouldn't 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!

Here's 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, I'm going to have to design joinery that will allow for extra movement.

The Finished Bench

Well, after a few coats of oil/varnish mixture and some good furniture wax, the bench looks pretty good. Now it goes to the client to help them welcome guests as they enter their home. I hope they like it.

The bench is progressing ...

.... quite nicely. Here's the base assembled and waiting for finishing.

Happily, after a lot more searching around than I expected to have to do, I found a great board set for the seat at Northwest Timber in Oregon. After refining the shape of the MDF seat template, it was used to shape the seat blank.

A Welcoming Bench for an Entryway

Last week I was able to get started on an entry bench for a couple I met at the Marin Arts Festival last summer.

Here's the design .... it has tapered, curved mahogany legs, an organically shaped wenge stretcher, and a slightly curved figured maple seat.

The shape of the legs is achieved by a technique called coopering. In coopering, the edges of the billets (i.e., sticks) that make up the leg are beveled an both sides before they are edge glued, which results in a curved surface. In this case, to get the fan effect, the billets are both beveled and tapered. To make milling easier I made a dedicated table saw jig that cuts both the taper and the bevel at the same time.

The coopering involved two steps - after the billets were beveled and tapered, a dadoe was plowed along the length of each edge so that when edge-joined a space for splines was created. The splines help maintain alignment and add glue surface for strength.

The curved stretcher was laminated from 1/8" thick solid wenge over a plywood bending form.

Here are the three parts of the base before fairing and final shaping.