Picnic Table WIP

Somebody said aluminum was difficult to weld. but they were lying. it's EXTREMELY difficult. My welds range from very ugly to reasonably poor. but definitely improving. This is an aluminum & cedar table & benches that i'd designed ages ago with my skills being the stumbling block. The aluminum has been cut & sitting in the shop for over a year (throughout the shop reno) & and whenever I'd see it or have to move it (yet again) I would hang my head in shame & promise myself to do better. nice to finally have it on the bench.

Cubby shelf

Here's a couple pics of a small wall mounted shelf I made as a gift for a buddy. thought he might find a use for it at his fly tying bench. Catalpa (that dan may recognise) & black walnut.

Stool #2

Here's some pics of a slat stool that I managed to build amoungst the summer distractions.

Stool #1

Here's a link to photographs of the stool. First pictures taken with my ghetto knock-down photo studio.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/62883546@N05/sets/72157627117020409/

Stool WIP

Some in progress pics of the stool I've been working on. standing over a slot mortiser for hours can be a back killer, so I've found sitting down next to the arm gives good visibility, control & comfort. notice the dust collection rigged up; zero chips on the floor & the top pipe kept the mortise clean which resulted in nice crisp mortise walls.

parts on the bench; arbutus bookmatched seat & rift sawn walnut for the rest. Lots of hand cutting & fitting of the double bridal joints, especially the mitered ones, perfect exercise to get the hand tools swinging again.

Rifting & Re-sawing

Working on a simple stool design to get back into things & hopefully learn something about chair making. Here's some arbutus resawing & Walnut chunks getting rift sawn. Once again, nice figure in the arbutus. Rough cut the walnut with a small chainsaw, but once it was milled 4 square cleaned the ends up on the radial arm; 3" thick, single pass, didn't skip a beat, clean cut, incredible machine. Rifting the walnut gives beautiful straight grain on all 4 sides, but tragically does result in lots of waste.

Also some re-sawing of a piece of catalpa with a buddy, this first real test for the Crescent, came off the bandsaw so clean it left us shaking our heads.

Yes, machines are running well & settling in, hand tools are in need of some love.

The Studio

Here's a slideshow tour of the '2010 - year of the studio' upgrades: outdoor workspace; bench room; shop doors; insulation walls/cieling/doors; permanent heating, machine upgrades, central dust collection.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/62883546@N05/sets/72157626601376705/detail/