Museum Show Chiffonier

Here's the next installment on the making of the chiffonier that I'll be showing at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History show the coming summer.

Two of the most distinctive elements of this piece's design are the sculpted bonnet and base. Both are made of wenge, a dark, dense, black/brown wood, that will give weight to and ground the piece. Both are stack laminated and then shaped. This series of photos shows the steps involved in making the bonnet:

First, pieces are face-laminated to achieve the required thickness for shaping. In this case, to accommodate the width of the part, it was made in three sections and then glued together after shaping (you can see the mortises for the floating tenons that will help with both alignment and glue joint strength) ....

Next, the built up blanks are rough cut to shape on the band saw....

Finally, the subparts are glued together and the entire piece is shaped ....

The base was created in much the same way, with the pieces in each layer being bandsawn roughly to size before glue-up, then the whole part being shaped afterward ....

Stay tuned for the next installment on the making of this piece, when I'll talk about the distinctive features of it's seven drawers.

The Desk Continues ....

Happy New Year, and welcome back after what hopefully was a good Holidays with a minimum of weather-related headaches.

Well, the desk is moving right along. The slabs are finished, and the structure of the cases is taking shape. Because the walnut slabs are so large, and in their "natural" state, some stabilization was the first order of business.

In the small slab, there were a couple of significant cracks that could continue to open over time with seasonal movement, so I bridged them with butterfly inlays. Butterflies are a very elegant way to stabilize natural slabs, first popularized by George Nakashima. It involves cutting bow tie-shaped pieces of hardwood and inlaying them across a crack. These are wenge, and are about 3/8" thick. In the picture you can see the simple band saw jig used to mill them, and the finished product.

The large desktop slab presented a different challenge. Surprisingly, there were no cracks to deal with, but at over 2" thick, and nearly 40" wide in some parts, cupping over time would be inevitable - in fact, it started to move around a we were surfacing it on the big CNC router! So braces were installed to keep it as flat as possible. Of course you can't just screw a brace to a piece of wood that size, or seasonal movement would eventually cause unwanted damage. Screwing the brace on with elongated holes to allow for movement is a popular technique, but the screw heads are unsightly. So, as with last summer's bench, the most elegant solution is sliding dovetails. To accomplish this, good stout braces of straight-grain ipe were milled with four 2" long integral dovetail pins. Matching sockets were then routed into the underside of the slab, and the brace dropped in and slid home. The dovetails allow the slab to expand and contract with environmental changes, and keep everything in plane.

With the finish on them the slabs look pretty great!



The next step is putting together the casework that these babies will sit on. The cases will be made using web frame construction, in which each part is made of a solid wood frame filled with a plywood panel. This method allows for the strength and edge/corner durability of solid wood, but avoids the problems associated with seasonal movement and cross-grain joinery. The only down side is that all those frames mean lots of frame members to cut joinery into (I'm using floating tenons) and to pre-finish before they can be assembled (the picture only shows about half the panels).

That's where we are, so stay tuned as the work progresses.

A Statement Desk

My newest commission is a large desk utilizing substantial slabs of walnut. The design is in the final phases of tweaking, but the slabs are already in hand. They came from Jim Baker in Gilroy, who specializes in large scale tree milling. They were then flattened and dressed on an impressive 5' x 22' CNC router by FrameCom, also in Gilroy.

The main desktop slab measures over 3' x 7'! This is the smaller of the two pieces. They should look great with a little sanding and some finish. Stay tuned for more as this piece develops.

New Project for Museum Show

During a lull between commissions this past few months, I took advantage of the time to build a new spec piece that will be shown during the Santa Cruz Woodworkers show at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH) this coming summer. In the run-up to the show over the next few months, I'll publish occasional posts detailing how the the piece was conceived and executed.

In this first post I'll give you a couple of detail shots as teasers of what's to come, just to whet your appetite. The piece is a chiffonier, which is a fancy word for (usually) a narrow, high chest of drawers - much like a lingerie chest. The design evolved originally from a desire to use a couple of long, narrow, live-edge, book matched pieces of walnut I've had for a while. As I tinkered with what to do with these pieces, I went from table top, to table base, to cabinet doors. Their use as tall, narrow cabinet doors was what led to the idea of the chiffonier. But once I got to the overall size and shape of the chiffonier, I ended up going in another direction where the walnut pieces didn't work, so they're still in the shop waiting for another spark of inspiration. The final design for the chiffonier features a trapezoidal mahogany case with a shaped cornice and base of wenge, book matched spalted maple doors and drawer fronts, and aluminum accents.

Stay tuned to find out how the various elements were made and how they came together.

I'm ready for my close-up Mr. DeMille

As I wrote few weeks back, the guys from Santa Cruz Community TV came by the shop to film a segment of their show Wood Works. Well, the final product is finished and has aired on SCCTV. Now, the episode can be viewed online, at http://woodworks.blip.tv/file/4034823/.

Get Ready for Open Studios!

Well, after a wonderful, but all too brief, vacation, its back to work and time to get ready for the annual OPEN STUDIOS ART TOUR in October.

I'll be participating again this year, but please note.....

I will only be open one weekend this year - October 9th and 10th. Please come by and visit!

For info on how to get your artist guide and maps: 831-475-9600 or www.ccscc.org.

Quiet on the Set!

I had some interesting guests at the shop today. John Hall and Keith Gudger of Santa Cruz Community TV were here filming an episode for their new show "Wood Works". The show profiles various master woodworkers in and around the Santa Cruz area, highlighting their backgrounds, inspirations, techniques, and of course their work. It was great having them here. Stay tuned for more info on when and where to see the episode....