Chairs and more

I recently finished up an article for Popular Woodworking on my Arch Table, a piece I’ve been making for at least 20 years. It’s a something of a signature piece for me; perhaps because it’s part of my logo (thanks to my graphic designer), but more importantly, because it was one of the first pieces I did using flowing and branching curves, and a lot of my work since then has grown out of this piece.

The Arch Table in cherry

Megan at Popular Woodworking asked me to do the article about two weeks after I had shipped one out to a customer in Florida, so I had to make a new one. And now I’ve got a beautiful table sitting around looking for a buyer. It’s not exactly the same as the one on my web site (but is the same as the one shown here) but it’s available for $2795 (plus tax and/or shipping). That’s $200 off the standard price for this version, and $500 less than the version on the web site. Let me know if you’re interested.

There’s no place like home! I’ve been traveling an awful lot over the last six weeks: first a family vacation, then a trip with my son to his freshman orientation at college, then out to the AWFS Conference in Las Vegas to present two seminars, and finally off to Lie-Nielsen Toolworks to give a weekend workshop on mortise and tenon joints. A great time at each of these events, but all that moving around does take its toll. So it’s finally time to dig back in to the work at hand; furniture to make, lots of articles to write, and lots of photographs to shoot for those articles. Oh yes, and a new book project, which is scheduled to be published next fall by Popular Woodworking! More on that another time….

There wasn’t a whole lot of woodworking relevance on our family trip, but one thing stood out: the dining table at the rather bizarre place we stayed was actually a classic old Roubo-style workbench.

A Roubo Dining Table?

You can see where the threaded hole for the leg vise was plugged, and there’s some evidence of a crochet as well. Made a great dining table (other than the stretchers, which did get in the way). That will certainly go on the list of options for a new table design. This one only had through-tenons, but I like the idea of the through-tenon and dovetail joint even better.

AWFS in Las Vegas was great fun, and the seminars were well attended and enthusiastically received. The show itself was a wild experience. Attendance was not the greatest, which wasn’t really a surprise given the state of the economy, and I’m clearly not exactly the target market for a show like that. But cabinetmakers were in heaven amongst the endless sea of CNC (!). I loved watching an Onsrud 5-axis CNC router machine a sphere inside a cube (loose, but still captured).

http://www.cronsrud.com/video/5axis/pages/sphere_inside_cube.php

This was extremely impressive work, but it would be hard for me to justify something like that in my one-man shop. I also liked some of the Grex air tools, Lamello’s INVIS fasteners (that are indeed invisible once assembled, and tighten up with a rotating magnetic tool! – they’re not new, but they’re still pretty amazing), and a variety of other small tools.

Mostly, I enjoyed meeting people.

At least they're easy to see

One of the better time-saving choices I’ve made in my shop was to purchase a pair of fluorescent green Peltor hearing protectors. I admit that they’re pretty goofy looking, especially in combination with the bright pink P-100 filters on the 3M dust mask I often wear, but I’ve cut down drastically on the time I used to waste looking for my black ear muffs; the green is pretty easy to spot anywhere in a shop full of more natural colors. But yesterday, my system broke down just a bit. I had brought in a Granny Smith apple, and left it on my bench in the morning. For much of the day, I found myself heading over to the bright green apple when I was about to turn on a machine, instead of to my hearing protectors, which were usually hiding somewhere at the other end of the shop. I finally had to eat the apple just to stop wasting time. Or rather, to stop wasting time in that particular way.

Not exactly the same color, but close enough...

The other day, after I found myself reaching for my roll of blue masking tape for the fourth or fifth time, I realized just how useful and versatile the stuff is.

One of a couple of rolls of blue masking tape I have in the shop

The realization came as I was putting a little piece of tape on my mortise chisel to ‘set’ the depth of cut – I continue chopping until the tape is at the surface, do a final clean out, and I’m done. A had used the tape as a drill bit depth ‘stop’ as well. Earlier I had used the tape as a shim (this tape is about .005”, the clear plastic packing tape I also use on occasion is about .001”) for micro-adjusting the position of a stop on a jig. This is by far the most common use I have for these tapes. A variation on that uses it to rout a groove that’s a little bit out of parallel with an edge. I’ll build up a tapered reference edge, by putting a series of incremental lengths of tape along a straight edge (for example, a 1” strip, a 3” strip, a 5”, 7” etc.) all starting at the same point, The result is a carefully defined tapered edge to run along the router or tablesaw fence or to hold a router fence against. Sure, I tape things together too. I commonly glue down splintered edges with the tape. I didn’t use the blue tape for initial taping up of veneer segments today, but only because I’m not doing any veneer work. I’ve even used pretty much for its intended purpose: to mask off joints when pre-finishing parts.