Challenges
These are a variety of projects or situations that caused me a particularly interesting challenge.
Dragon Table
This table provided three particular challenges:
- It was to be heavy, so we made it from fruit woods (cherry for the base and pear for the top and drawer) and made everything out of solid pieces of timber; there are no air spaces except for the drawer.
- The double opening drawer was to fit into the round top and therefore needed dovetail joints cutting into the round front panels.
- The dragon himself who we eventually made from glass beads set into coloured resins and sanded flat (with extreme care).
Pear Tables
The difficulty here was that the pear tree in question that had blown down and had no substantial lengths of straight timber. This meant that, although we cut straight planks on the saw mill, they twisted as they dried and only allowed very short lengths of straight timber to be cut from them. To overcome this I started the design process again from scratch and designed a pair of matching tables that could be built exclusively from short lengths of timber – without looking like they were made exclusively from short lengths of timber.
Dr. Who Umbrella Handle
My commission was to make a 'master' from which my customer would make a mould to then make plastic umbrella handles to be sold at a Dr. Who Fan Club rally. This was interesting because although it had a circular cross-section throughout, only the 'full stop' could be made on a lathe. I made this in the correct shape but with a square cross-section which I then rounded off and drilled and glued on a ball that had been made on a lathe.
Shortening The Table Rails
This challenge was that the customers asked me to shorten the long rail under the table (i.e. bring the legs closer together) AFTER I had completed the rails but before gluing the frame together. The pictures show cutting a shallow diagonal slice out of the centre section of the rail and re-gluing with biscuit joints. The final two pictures show the customers looking for the join!
Bowls in Spalted Beech
The challenge here was not the material (spalting refers to timber that has started to gain some colour variations as the first stage of the rotting process) but the shape that the customer specified, specifically a very deep, rounded-square bowl that did not lend itself to either turning or hand carving.
In the end we shaped the bowls using a series of jigs on a router table and to get the depth required we used an extending collett.