Sping Fever

The Garden ... of course

Yo! I see I haven't been writing much lately ... must be Spring Fever in Vermont (finally). I think I've played my last paddle tennis for the season and I made it to the tennis court and the golf course in the last week. Too much going on outside to sit in front of a computer any more than I have to, which, (fortunately), has been quite a bit lately. We've had a flurry of requests for new quotes and designs which is quite a change from the last couple of months when I thought someone had stolen my phone or taken down my website. We've got quite a few projects on the board and in the pipeline which is nice. Some of the things we've been working on ... click to enlarge ...

A challenging desk repair .. delivered it today ... more on that later

Finished the doors .. more info here

Put the stove in last fall ... Need a wood shed now ... concrete Friday

Me and my original woodshed with beams I hewed from pines on my property in Arlington, VT .. circa 1975.

A cherry, burl and walnut coffee table to go with a credenza we made four years ago .. roughed out the lumber and stickered it today ..

A cherry bed like we made for my neighbor Sheila (and a few other clients)

Will roughed out the turnings today and Trevor started on the rails and the bolts.

We're copying a knife display case we made about 10 years ago for a new store J K Adams is opening in Stowe ... If the felt for the back of the top case comes tomorrow, we'll finish it up..

In process

This is the next tbig thing ... a room full of paneling, a desk and a bar/stereo cabinet ... concept below ...

Designs for a 'dragonfly ' coffee table for a potential new client

the bar cabinet for the project above ...

All for now though that's not all that's going on ... They say Spring is a time of renewal ... I guess ...

Pete's Pizza Ovens

Curved arch forms cut on the cnc .. click to enlarge

Our brother in law, Peter Moore, of Peter Moore Masonry, ( check out his fantastic work) builds genuine brick ovens, fireplaces and masonry stoves for clients all over the world. He had a brainstorm lately that we could cut the forms for the arched roofs of his ovens on the cnc, giving him fair curves and saving him boatloads of aggravating time truing up curved forms. This is the second set we've cut for him and he's got it worked out so that he can disassemble them from inside the arch after the arch is set up, and reuse the forms if he has an oven with the same radius and dimensions. It took Trevor about an hour or so, start to finish, from turn on the machine to finished forms out the door. A win/win for everybody and really nice forms for Pete to work from. Pete says he'll take some pictures of the process once he's got the form set up on the job and I'll post them here when I get them. It sounds like a cool process. Also, this week we cut a set of curved parts for a form, 3" thick, with a 24" radius and two straight sections for gluing up table aprons for a 72 x 48 racetrack dining table for another local furnituremaker and that also worked out slick. I didn't even get a picture of that one it went out the door so fast. Custom CNC work available anytime ....

the dome ... part 2

phew ! .. the dome left today at around 5:00 ... a challenging project if ever there was one, and we plan to help set it up for the new oven on site tomorrow or friday.  watta project !!  here's a link to the previous post on the early stages of construction ... ignorance breeds confidence ...we had no idea what we were getting into.

in this photo, you can see pete, the mason brother in law, of vermont brick ovens, on the left, and trevor, admiring the collapsing mechanism.  if you enlarge the photo, (click it),  there's a handwheel on the vertical stem, and when you turn it, the 'hub' drops and the ribs can be removed one at a time through the oven door, or more likely from the collapsed pile of parts.

when he's ready, we'll be helping pete set it up for his current project.  he's currently working on the soldier course that stands vertically around the 72" diameter .. here's a photo of that in the works.

in case you missed the first post, it'll look like this when it's done.

well, it was quite a trip getting this project together .. lots of head scratching, lots of glue, (over a gallon) and some sanding and bondoing ... here are some more photos of the process ...

 early on, with the 'glue up form' still in use .. see this link for other early photos

 here we're getting the shim blocks (later knocked out to collapse the form) figured out ... 

in the end, we made two different versions ..

 sanding and fitting the rough glued pieces .. it ain't perfect, but there aren't any 

cracks that a half a brick can fall through ...

tah dah .. on to bondo and paint

the holes were from the ten thousand screws we used to make the five layers of bending plywood do what they had absolutely no interest in doing, which is form part of a sphere.

 a previous vermont brick oven project  in manchester, for which we made a different form 

that was a lot more complex and time consuming to set up than this one ..

we realized as we were packing it up .. damn! we missed our chance.  we shoulda painted 

the north pole, hudson bay, and sweden to alaska on it ...

 i will NOT be going into the wood globe business ..... all for now. 

 

under the dome ...

well, we're working with peter moore, of vermont brick ovens again.  we made the forms for the one above and a couple of others, and now we're attempting to simplify the on site set up process. 

basically, we have to create a structure that supports the bricks until the mortar sets.  once that happens, the forms all have to come out the oven door so they can be reused on the next oven ... 

in the past, we made about 24 half domes, which then had to be connected with thin strips of wood to support the bricks .. more or less, not much fun.  this time we plan to make 8 ribs and 24 pieces that lay on top of them, like parts of a turtle shell.  click the photos to enlarge them.

we started with this drawing, and decided we could make the 'shell' pieces an eighth of the dome at a time. we had to add more ribs for the two lower sections

the plywood doesn't really want to conform to the dome shape, and each layer is made from 4 pieces of 1/8th inch bending poplar and one layer of 3/8ths wacky wood.  some kerfs were cut in some of the pieces to facilitate the bends and as you can see in the photo below, the dome shape is not bad.

we plan to sand the whole thing once al 24 sections are laid up, cut to size and fitted.

to get the wood to conform, we had to use many screws, which can all be removed once the glue sets.  we may or may not have to fair the curves with bondo, though i think we will get better with the laminates as we do more of them ...

in the end, the finished oven will look something like this one ...40 years of wood working, and i've never made a dome before .. kind of exciting and challenging for sure ... more pics coming as we progress.

some carved scrolls for a mantle

we recently carved some butternut scrolls for a mantle that one of our clients was making.  we had sort of an internet fuzzy photo to use as an inspiration, but we did some google image research and came up with the drawing below.  click the photos to enlarge them ...

 

we were pretty happy with it, as was our client, but i did put  it up on the door for an hour or two to make just a few refinements before it went into our cad program.

draw over it ... copy what you need

the reason we decided to do that was that, as you can see from the first photo, the element had to be 13" thick (!!) to complete the design.  after a little thought, we realized we'd need a whole bunch of pieces (about 20, not counting a couple of miscuts and practice pieces) and that led us instantly to the cnc.

after we finished the first one, we checked it on site before we did the second one ... good to go.

 this is an onsite photo after the finish was applied

 

i have the actual cad drawing somewhere and i'll post that later ... all for now ...
on site 12/14

some fancy cnc work

a while back, we worked with our neighbor, steve holman, on two large conference tables, one 9' x 26' and one 8' x 20'. we had to set them up in my garage as neither of our shops was large enough to hold them ... this fall he got a commissions to build two more 'smaller' tables, a 16 footer and a 14 footer. those both fit in his shop and were simpler in design, but we still helped by cutting the table and base pieces on our cnc.

one of the other parts of this project was a fantastic reception desk, designed by steve and paul molinelli, that was full of curves and different levels and was pretty complex as you can see from the photo above. click the pictures to enlarge them ...
so, how did we get from there to here ... it was easy for us. all we had to do was the full size templates, curved plates, and bending forms ... steve and his crew did the rest. i'm sure it could have been done without the cnc, but you would have needed some pretty big french curves to lay out the full size pieces. and then, the small adjustments ... it would have taken some time and some really intense bandsaw work ...
we started by scanning the scale drawing actual size and then drawing over it in our cad programfrom there, trevor imported that into the cnc router program and he added the elevation sections shown above ... next step was the 1/4 scale model you saw in the photo at the top. trevor constructed it by stacking layers of mdf of the proper thickness to correspond with the section drawings at each slice.from there it was a simple matter for him 'scale it up' to full size ... (increase; proportional) and then cut the full size patterns, counters to be veneered and their curved solid wood edges, and the plates from which steve and his crew created the curved walls and curved laminating forms.here are the walls, 'unskinned' ...
in some cases they were covered in wacky wood and veneer panels made with the curved forms, and in some cases, vertical 'siding' of 5/8th" thick solid lumber
next paul carved the 'car element' (this project went to an automotive company) and added the hood element from, i think, a 1937 ford or chevy ... cool ...
and then there was the other part to the project; the two conference tables. one 14' long, and one 16' long ...
this one is makore veneer and cherry. after i did the cad drawings, trevor programmed and cut the vertical elements of the base and the 'outriggers', the horizontal elements that receive the cross bars that support the top. he also cut the top sections to shape and the matching solid wood borders, as well as the holes for the power/data fixtures.
this is a section of the walnut and walnut burl table. ditto for this one except for a little adjustment to the thickness of the inlay panels. for whatever reason, the pockets trevor cut in the top sections were a little too shallow (there were two sets of burl panels made as the first one was 'too dark and burly', so, i suspect that was part of the problem. anyway, it was a quick, though somewhat nerve racking fix. after milling pockets in the spoil board he took a few thousandths off the backs of the panels so that the 1/40th inch veneer panels were just a shade below the surface of the 16th" veneered main table panels ... i'm glad i wasn't the one to level them up ...
but level them up they did ... and below, the solid wood edges are added to the top panels ...
the tables are probably finished by now, and maybe we'll see them before they go, or maybe we won't. anyway, we always enjoy working with steve and his crew. their projects are inevitably a rewarding challenge.