This is my first piece to be completed in the year 2012, and, for my poor family’s sake, let’s hope it’s not the last. It is a companion piece to a desk and wall cabinet that I had already made for the same client, a suite of furniture all out of similar materials. This little cabinet is solid wood throughout and made from local woods that came from trees growing in the area where I live.

The pecan came from a dead tree that fortunately was milled into lumber before the processes of decay had rendered it completely unusable, and the walnut from a tree that was growing too close to an urban dwelling and had to be removed. The pecan had been  sawn into 2 1/2″ thick planks which I was then able to resaw and get nice, book matched panels for each side of my little credenza.

The credenza is on casters so that it can be easily moved around, and because it sits out in the middle of a room most of the time, I wanted it to look good from the back as well.

At my client’s request the doors retract back into the cabinet when they are open. The interior drawers are mounted on full extension glides to provide easy access to the contents stored inside.

Like the rest of the material in this piece, the drawer bottoms are solid wood as well and came from an east Texas shagbark hickory tree.

In the design I am playing with tapers and arches. All of the vertical lines taper slightly from bottom to top, and most of the horizontal lines have an arch or curve. I even added little arches to the bottom ends of the corner posts.

Please look around on the blog to see more of my work and also visit my website.

Wow! This buffet was a lot of work and I was pretty spent physically and emotionally by the time it was finished. Often people ask me if it is hard to part with my furniture after I have put so much creative effort into a piece and the answer is almost always no. It’s kind of like being in solitary confinement for several weeks with your spouse or best friend. As much as you love them, after so much intense contact, it is good to get a little distance. I am also inevitably in need of a pay check by the time the finish has dried on a current project, and monetary compensation usually helps to ease the pain of saying any goodbyes.

Most of the great names in furniture history like Thomas Chippendale, Duncan Phyfe, Emile Galle, or E.J. Ruhlmann did not personally build the furniture to which their names are ascribed. Instead they employed workshops in which anywhere from dozens to hundreds of craftsmen worked to produce the pieces they designed. Those guys were a lot smarter than I am. I have never had more than three assistants at any one time and I currently work entirely by myself except for a long time friend who does my finishes for me. So, I personally designed and fabricated every little part that went into the making of this buffet. I cut every little dovetail and every little mortise and tenon joint that holds things together. I pressed veneer, sculpted pulls, turned the feet, and sanded, and sanded, and sanded… And look at those crazy angles and curvy parts. Don’t know why I did that to myself, but it’s over now. I only wish I could afford a vacation; I really need one, but I am already working on the coffee table that is to accompany this piece.

(Click on any image to enlarge.)

The design for this buffet (some people call it a sideboard) has its roots in a couple of earlier pieces. Sixteen years ago a client approached me about making a cabinet to house his audio equipment and his large collection of jazz and blues CD’s. He is a great lover of art deco design and wanted the shape of the cabinet to echo that of a deco juke box. We sat down together and eventually came up with a plan that materialized into a piece we fondly named the Blues Box. It was intended to be a musical, whimsical cabinet that would make you smile to look at. It was also a challenge to build and I learned some things in the making.

Blues Box

A couple of years later I was discussing a credenza with another client who wanted something unusual for her home office. When she saw photos of the Blues Box she requested something done in the same spirit. The resulting piece had file drawers, pull-out work surfaces, and a flip down drawer front that revealed a shelf that held a keyboard.

Deco Blues Credeneza

When my present clients saw pics of the credenza they loved it and wanted their buffet in a similar design; so this briefly summarizes how the design of the buffet came to be. As I said, I am presently building a coffee table for the same wonderful people, and since they live 1500 miles away, the buffet has been sitting in my living room until I can finish and deliver both pieces. Now that I have a little distance from the construction of it, it is delight to wake up to a daily view of this sideboard. The shimmering beauty of the figured bubinga and curly maple provide a visual feast for the eyes, and I have to admit, I got a great fit on the drawers and doors.

The striped sides are veneered but the top, drawer fronts, and doors are all solid wood. The drawer sides and backs are sipo mahogany and the drawer bottoms are lovely quarter sawn sycamore. My intention was to create a piece that lets you see beautiful materials and fine craftsmanship everywhere you look.

The interior is veneered in a softly figured curly maple and contains a removable shelf .

The buffet was made so that it could be set out in an open area of a room and look good from the back as well as the front. Back panels are veneered in figured bubinga and trimmed in wenge.

The drawer pulls are hand sculpted from wenge, a very tough and durable wood. I installed steel threaded inserts on the back sides of the pulls and they are secured to the drawer fronts with stainless steel machine screws.

To learn more about my furniture, please visit my website.

Now, it’s back to that coffee table.

(Click on any image to enlarge)

Compartments would need to be created for a variety of remotes, an iPhone, several harmonicas, guitar picks, notebooks. briefcase, drink holder, box of tissues, and flat panel display, with additional spaces for multi-line telephone and computer keyboard.

The photo above shows the recessed containers in one of the desk tops. A removable cover with a slot in it accommodates a box of tissues. The photo below shows the other desk top. Flip-up doors hide compartments for briefcase, musician’s notebook, and flat panel monitor.

Here are the desks installed in the clients home, set up and ready to use.

I also made a removable music stand that installs in one of the tops. The stand can hold two pieces of sheet music placed side by side. Doors in the sides of each desk provide for additional storage space. A motorized lift raises a flat panel display up from the inside of one of the desks.

Each desk also has four drawers and some hidden compartments. Below is a photo of one of the drawers while the pieces were still under construction in my shop.

The primary materials used were figured bubinga and wenge. No stains were applied to the woods, just a clear finish, so all colors one sees are the natural hues of the woods themselves. The tops were veneered with bubinga that I sawed on my bandsaw. Everything else is solid wood (with the exception on an interior shelf in each unit). Though these are visually simple pieces, they were a challenge to design and make.

I inlaid a rare earth magnet into the top of each flip-up door before veneering them. I then turned a small wand and installed another magnet in its tip. To open a flip-up door one simply touches the wand to a door and it opens due to magnetic attraction.

If you ever want to know what to get the person who has everything, here it is.

Unfortunately the photos don’t do justice to how nice these pieces really are. You can see more of my work in the Furniture Gallery section of this blog and also on my website.

Well, I didn’t actually make this for the wise and intrepid Jean Luc Picard. After all he exists in the future, but when my wife saw the completed piece, she thought it would look great on the Starship Enterprise. Yes, it kind of looks like it might want to fly off into the heavens; appropriate, I think, for an object intended to aid someone in talking to God.

Perhaps, the noble Picard will find it in an antique shop someday and claim it as his own.

The design brief I received from my client was that he wanted sides that were curvy and C-shaped, with a cross in the front that had open space around it- absolutely nothing boxy, paneled, or closed in looking. The design process can be pretty agonizing for me, often taking many hours to arrive at something I am truly happy with. So, I prayed about this one and forty five minutes later these drawings popped off the drafting table.

The construction process did not happen nearly as quickly. I thought I could build it in two weeks, but it took me three. Yes, yes. I wound up doing it for love, beauty, and soul satisfaction rather than the money. Unfortunately one cannot eat soul satisfaction. Well, there is a lot of curving and tapering going on in the parts of this piece and many of the joints intersect along curves and at angles other than 90 degrees. It all looks visually simple, but it took much head scratching and careful cutting to get things to come together cleanly and precisely, and I had to pay attention to the ergonomics so that it would be a kneeler that is actually comfortable to kneel at.

I put the side pieces together with miter joints to create a nice flow visually, but as every woodworker knows, miter joints have no gluing strength, so I reenforced them with double tenons.

The parts that make up the cross and those curving vertical slats in the front are all mortise and tenoned together also.

Finally, my client wanted a hidden storage compartment built into his prei dieu, so with a little more head scratching, I came up with this solution. Removing a brass pin allows the upholstered kneeling frame to be lifted off revealing a small box beneath it. I hope no one tells my client his secret compartment is now all over the internet, but I was kind of proud of the way it turned out and couldn’t resist showing it off.

When I finally got the prei dieu finished and delivered, my client and I were both very happy with the way it turned out. Praise the Lord!

To see more of my work please go to My Furniture Gallery. To see even more of my work, please visit my website.

Click to enlarge images.

The design process went through many false starts and revised drawings, but no one saw these except my wife. At the same time I was visiting several local lumber sources in search of just the right woods. I knew my friend liked mesquite, but I was having a difficult time finding enough defect free material to be worthy of this bed. I finally acquired enough wood to cut around most of the cracks, knots, and bug holes common to this local timber. In my searching I also came across a few gnarly boards of Texas walnut that had some beautiful flame figure in them. These came from  an old tree that had been blown over by hurricane Ike.

Figured walnut panels in the headboard

Walnut panels in footboard

Detail

In the end everything worked out well. My friend and his new wife were both very pleased with their new bed.

To understand how the posters on this bed were made see Tapered Octagonal Bedposts.

If you would like to see more of my work please visit My Furniture Gallery. Also, visit my Website.

I recently made an updated version of this table in Macassar ebony and bubinga, so I thought I would show how I went about making the legs for this new piece and incorporating them into the overall design of the table. As seen in the photo above, there is an upper stretcher that is mortise and tenoned into the legs at the top and a lower stretcher that passes through an open mortise cut in the bottom end of  each leg creating what I call a bridle joint.

One nice thing about split turnings is that they are a two for one deal; one turning gets you two legs. To make two of the legs for this table, I begin with two pieces of lumber 3 1/2″ wide by 1 3/4″ thick by 28″ long. These two pieces glued together will give me turning stock that is 3 1/2″ square in section, but before I glue them together, while my stock is still rectangular in shape, I will first cut the mortises that will later accept the upper and lower stretchers. To cut the open mortises in the bottom end of the legs I make multiple passes through a table saw blade with the help of a tenoning jig. Because the stock is pushed vertically through a saw blade set at 2 3/4″ high, great care must be taken for wood and jig to completely clear the back side of the moving saw blade once each pass is made. The back side of a moving table saw blade is one of the most dangerous places  in the workshop; STAY CLEAR and NEVER attempt this operation without the aid of some kind of tenoning jig.

Next I cut mortises in the upper end of my leg stock using a plunge router and straight-edge guide. These mortises must be centered exactly in the face of the stock and cut 7/8″ deep. I square the rounded ends of the mortises with a chisel.

With mortising completed, the two pieces are ready to be glued together, and here is the trick to being able to split them apart after turning. After applying a thin layer of glue to both pieces, a sheet of newspaper is placed between them, and then they are clamped together. Edges and ends must be clamped perfected flush with one another. Hand screws keep things aligned as clamps are tightened down.After the glue has dried a snug fitting block of wood is cut to fill in the open mortise in the bottom end of the turning stock and a couple of drops of super glue are applied to this block before tapping it into place. A little bit of super glue will hold it in place during the turning but allow the block to be knocked out after the work on the lathe is finished. Now centers can be located in each end of the turning stock and it can be mounted and turned. The turning is very simple for this design, just a straight taper with the finished piece being 3 1/4″  in diameter at the bottom end and 2 1/2″ at the top.

Once the turning and sanding on the lathe are finished the piece can be removed, and the block in the bottom end can be tapped out with a smaller block of wood and a mallet. Now the stock is ready to be split in two. Line up a 1″ wide chisel on the glue line at the top end of the piece and give the chisel a firm tap. The piece will separate pretty easily at the top. Then push the chisel on in, and, using it as a wedge, split the glued up pieces completely apart. A couple of light passes on the jointer and a little sanding will completely remove the newspaper and glue from the flat side of our split turnings and the two pieces are now ready to become table legs with mortises already cut. The photo below shows the split turned legs being dry fitted to upper and lower stretchers.

Here is the base of the table completely assembled.

Here is the finished table. The split turned legs compliment the over all design very nicely.

Click to enlarge these images.

To see more of my work please visit My Furniture Gallery.

After completing the headboard posts I will cap all of them with an ebony finial.

The walnut panels come from lumber I was able to acquire at a local mill. Apparently the walnut tree was blown over during Hurricane Ike. I think these woods are going to be pretty gorgeous once the finish is applied.

Here is a recap of how I made the mesquite octagonal bedposts.

I did the turned elements first before creating the tapered octagon. This way I had more meat on the bedposts during the turning process which made for a little less flexing and vibration on the lathe.

Next I use a pattern to lay out curved tapers on one face of each bedpost.

I carefully bandsaw to the two lines I have drawn. Then I masking tape the waste pieces back to the post, turn it 90 degrees to the face I just cut, lay out my pattern again and bandsaw to these new lines.

I now have bedposts tapered on four faces. Here is how a post looks after I clean up the bandsaw marks with a spokeshave and scrapers.

Placing a post in V blocks, I clamp it to my work bench and create four more tapered facets using hand planes, spoke shave, and a scraper. I go back and forth between two adjacent edges until I get facets that look equal in size to the eye.

Here is a completed octagonal tapered post awaiting an ebony finial that will be attached to its top.

Here is the bed, finished and ready to deliver!

For more about this bed see A Four Poster Bed In Mesquite & Texas Walnut.

To see more of my hand made furniture, please visit My Furniture Gallery. You can also go to my Website to see even more.

(Also see Furniture Legs From Split Turnings)

I don’t usually take the time to photograph all the stages of a work in progress, but the client I made this table for lived 1500 miles away and insisted I email him regular updates on this piece’s construction. Since I had the pics I thought I would show how I made the octagonal tapered legs for this table. These legs are made of wenge, a hard, brittle, splintery African wood that I like for its dark color. What you see in the photo is the natural color of the wood with a clear finish; no staining is involved.

Click to enlarge any of these images.

These legs have a nice neoclassical elegance to them, but one must pay careful attention during the shaping and turning to get pleasing proportions. I begin with a scale drawing and then make a full-size template in 1/4″ material that shows the exact shape of my slightly curved taper.

I start with a leg blank that is 2 3/4″ square in section and 25″ long. Later on I will add a decorative foot made of bubinga with wenge accents. I locate and mark the exact center of each end of the leg and drill a shallow hole on my marks with a bit 1/8″ in diameter or smaller. I will later use these holes to mount the leg on to the lathe. I will also use the hole in the lower end of the leg as a visual guide to keep me on track as I hand plane the tapering facets on the octagonal part of the leg.

I come down 3 3/4″ from the top of the leg and on the table saw cut an 1/8″ deep kerf  all the way around on each face of the leg to mark where my turning will begin. Another 4″ below those cuts I make another series of kerfs to define where the turned portion of the leg will stop. These cuts can be seen in the photo below.

I lay my full-size tapering template on one of the faces of the leg, and, making sure it is exactly centered, I draw the taper on my blank, then bandsaw very carefully just leaving leaving the lines I have drawn. I then masking tape the waste pieces that I just cut off the legs back on to where they were, turn the leg 90 degrees, and, using my template, again draw the taper on this new face and then bandsaw to these lines. I now have a leg that has a slightly curving taper on all four faces.

Using hand planes, scrapers, and sand paper I clean up the bandsaw marks and make sure everything looks smooth and symmetrical. Then I make a couple of V-blocks in 2″ material that will support my leg as I spoke shave and hand plane the four sharp edges of my leg into the other four facets that will create the octagonal shape. I think this photo will explain what I am trying to describe.

Anyone who would like to try making a set of these legs should not be intimidated by the fact that these facets are achieved with hand tools and by eye. With practice and attention to what you are doing, you can make facets that look very close to equal. Properly done, the human eye cannot pick out very slight variations in each bevel. After the octagonal facets are completed and sanded, the leg is mounted on the lathe and the turning is done.

The decorative foot on the leg is made by taking two pieces of bubinga 3/4″ thick, 4″ wide, and 20″ long and gluing them  together face to face with a 1/16″ thick piece of wenge sandwiched between them. After this lamination dries, it is ripped in half down its length, making two pieces of equal width. Between these two is inserted another 1/16″ piece of wenge  running 90 degrees to the first piece and all of this is glued together. I clean this final lamination up into a square turning blank and cross-cut it into two pieces. I mount each new blank onto the lathe and turn the feet two at a time.

A 1″ long round tenon is turned on the end of each foot. The feet are cut apart, and then a hole is drilled in the end of each leg the diameter of the round tenon. The decorative feet are then glued and clamped onto the octagonal legs.

And that is how I made the legs for this table. Hope it all makes sense. This is the first “how-to” I have attempted on my blog. Let me know if anyone would like to see more of this kind of thing. For an update on this post please see Tapered Octagonal Bedposts. Also see Furniture Legs From Split Turnings.

To view more of my furniture, visit My Furniture Gallery.

James Krenov (1920-2009)

Photo: Senya Jacobs-Burkin

I recently learned that the incomparable James Krenov died last week. Along with Sam Maloof this year marks the passing of two truly great, hugely influential craftsmen in wood. Others, who really knew these men, will be able to write about them more intimately than I ever could. I knew them only from a distance, primarily through their books, which I poured over with utter devotion when I was younger.

I was just beginning to teach myself some of the basic techniques of woodworking when I stumbled across Krenov’s The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking and The Impractical Cabinetmaker in a public library in the late ‘70’s. Being quite impractical myself, I was totally seduced by the exalted standard of craftsmanship so poetically expressed in these works. Wow! If I could only be disciplined enough and devoted enough, with just a few machines and some well tuned hand planes, I might also make lovely, sensitively wrought objects in wood and find people to give me money for them. Yes, this was how I wanted to make a living!

Like the call of the siren, Krenov’s vision was too irresistible for me. I had no idea what I was doing, and even though I had a young wife with no work experience and a pre-school age daughter, I quit my day job and set off on a holy quest in search of the truth and beauty to be found only in the grain and figure of wood. We were poor, and even though I got work, we got poorer because I was never able to charge enough for what I made because I really wasn’t good enough to charge more.

In the beginning I didn’t even own a jointer or a planer. I made a five-drawer chest for a client out of rough sawn white oak and walnut hand planing all the surfaces front and back with a smoothing plane and jointing all the edges with a jointer plane. Even though I lost my exhausted ass on that and many other projects, I would always return to Krenov’s writings for hope and inspiration. My wife, however, was not at all impressed. With financial help from her father, she entered nursing school hoping to save us from third world poverty, but became pregnant with our second child before she graduated.

She must have been an enabler because she gave me a copy of Sam Maloof Woodworker as a Christmas gift. As I began to read this book and absorb Sam’s take on the craft, however, I could see his approach was very different from Krenov’s. Sam saw no shame in using belt sanders, routers, or steel screws in making his furniture. If he didn’t know how to do something, he came up with his own methods, his own joinery even. He looked sturdy and full of tireless energy. In some of the photos he almost appears to be wrestling his pieces into existence. Being a pretty physical person myself and being self-taught this approach really connected with me.

Sam Maloof (1916-2009)

Photo: Courtesy Sam Maloof

A couple of years later I became a member of The Austin Woodworker’s Guild and our organization brought Sam to Austin for a lecture and slideshow at the University of Texas and then a weekend workshop where he demonstrated how he made his famous rocking chairs. Along with a dozen other people I had dinner with him at a friends home. I sat beside him on a couch before the meal and got to speak with him for about an hour. He was just an incredibly gracious, loving, and precious human being. The man was even greater than his works. He clearly understood that relationships are the most important thing. I will always treasure that evening.

In most areas of endeavor our mentors intend for us to go beyond them, and I know that is what James and Sam would both want from all those they have taught, but I don’t know of anyone in my generation who is having the kind of impact on the future of fine furniture making that these two men have had. Instead, their approach and skills have been multiplied to many. Krenov’s last publication, With Wakened Hands, celebrates the work of some of his students, who are all crafting wonderful objects, and I find this book to be just as inspirational as his earlier writings. Surely we have seen the passing of two giants.

This side table I made a couple of years ago owes a great deal to Krenov both in terms of the care I took in making it and also in the design.

Krenov influenced detail

Though very different in style from a Maloof dining chair, I certainly had Sam in my mind when I was hand sculpting this one. The crest rail at the top of the chair is butt joined, glued, and  screwed just like a Maloof chair. Thank you, Sam.

To see more of my furniture visit My Furniture Gallery.