Tenth Week of Furniture Making School - August 12 - 18 I was in the shop before 7 Monday morning for about an hour and a half of work before Jan, Collin and I headed into Rockland to join the class for a visit to Aaron Fedarko’s group workshop. Austin and his father own an old warehouse near the harbor in Rockland that was Austin’s workshop before he back to moved to Miami, Florida where he was raised. Aaron leases the shop, owns much of the equipment and leases space to other furniture makers and woodworkers. His lessees are full-time as well as part-time. Evidently Brian will soon become one of his tenants. It was a quick reunion with a fellow who had become dear to us and a chance to see and discuss the ins and outs of running and/or working in such a shop. I have a sense that several of my classmates will be looking for such a set-up once they get back to their homes and try to get back to working with wood. Most do not have equipment; certainly not a shop. I am indeed fortunate to have what I have, in spite of its limitations. I subscribe to the notion that a man can never have too many tools or a large enough shop! It also should be noted that I lack the bank account to fund such a notion. Again, Aarons’ place is in an old warehouse. High ceilings, good natural and artificial light, wood floors and adequate space for lots of equipment, assembly space and bench space for about five or so individuals, plus an area in a separate room for lumber storage. The most striking feature in the shop was a very old huge jointer - perhaps 20” or so - that he had completely refurbished as well as installing a helical cutting head. He probably spent $2000 or so just putting that cutting head on it. The machine was magnificent! One fellow remarked it was beautiful enough to put into a living room, though probably not in Linda Ellison’s living room. Once we got back at the center, demonstrations continued at a rather full pace, though there was more time to work than the previous week. Whereas in the six weeks we spent on the casework piece the class as a whole was focused on one thing - building a casework or carcass project, now we were headed in many different directions. Whereas before the eleven of us had one project each, now most people had multiple ideas in various stages of preparation. Most often, there was little in common among a student’s various projects. It was invigorating; lots of people were talking with each other about their projects out of curiosity and a genuine desire to learn what they knew they were not going to be doing themselves. We were tapping into each other’s experience and learnings quite a bit; the dynamics were fascinating. When I glued up the trusses and the braces, each glue-up produced a piece that had to be run through the bandsaw in order to make it become two matching pieces. First, I ran the source piece over the jointer to the point that one edge became flat and clean, then next I ran it through the bandsaw. I tried bringing the rough edges to smooth and a common width at the surface planer, but I never developed much comfort with that approach, so I set them aside until some other things were accomplished on the drum sander. There seemed to be a bias or disdain at the staff level for the drum sander, and the truth is that it was not nearly as good a machine as mine, but gradually I noticed people coming from other classes to use it with increasing frequency. One, they had unique needs that a surface planner was ill designed to accomplish. Second, it was the only drum sander on campus. Third, some of the fellows also began to have a need for the drum sander. Basically, I slide in amongst them, got checked out and then I ran with it. I had used it the previous week to prepare all my laminations to create the trusses and braces. This week I would use it mostly for creating veneer. I’ve built veneer previously, but I’ve learned a lot more a short time, adding greatly to my understanding and comfort. Making this veneer was going to fun. My goal in creating this veneer was to create an illusion. This project is a prototype for a breakfast nook table I will build for our kitchen in San Angelo. The idea is that the top will be circular and solid, yet have a sense of being an informal, slated piece of outdoor furniture. In my much smaller prototype, in which I get to experiment and learn some challenging features, I will use cherry as the dominate wood and use walnut to imitate the shadow lines between the imaginary cherry slats. The top will appear as if the slats are coming in from any quadrant at 90 degrees to the adjacent quadrant and the slats will appear as if they are woven at the middle. It’s all an illusion, but I think this veneer can pull it off. To create the veneer, first I had to mill cherry into boards that were 5/8” thick and walnut into boards that were only 1/8” thick. I would stack and glue up the various boards, alternating cherry, walnut, cherry, walnut, etc., then place them into a vacuum bag overnight. The effect of the vacuum bag is to exert enormous pressure on the glue-up, to the tune of about 1500 lbs or so per square foot. When the stack was removed the following morning, the block of wood was cleaned up and trued on three faces with a scraper and a jointer. The block was then taken to the bandsaw where a thin strip was sawn off, the block was trued on a jointer and the process was repeated until the block finally became too thin to produce any more pieces of veneer. Each strip of veneer, about 4 1/2” wide and 16” long, was run through the drum sander to produce about 15-20 strips that were uniformly about 1/16” thick. I now had a lot of material with which to work. I also had substantial odds and ends which would be very important elsewhere in the project. One of these odds and ends eventually produced some 3/4” square tiles of cherry and walnut, the walnut being an 1/8” strip along one side. I produced a lot of those, many more than I needed. As I got into the process of cutting the veneers and the veneer tiles, I realized I had sufficient material to build a number of experimental table tops, each a different application of the veneer. The layout is a challenge, rather exacting for sure. Basically I built a section at a time, upside down, connecting the pieces to one another with green painter’s tape. When the tape is applied, it is stretched a bit and that stretching serves as a clamp to pull the pieces of the veneer tight to one another. Eventually, when the patterns are completed - all pieced together - they are then glued to a piece of Baltic plywood and stuck into a vacuum bag for several hours or overnight if possible. I created several shooting board set-ups so that I could lay a plane on its side and shoot (trim) the edge of the veneer to be glued to another. Sometimes that was to tweak the size, sometimes to change an angle and doing that, even though it was a bit tedious, was actually very pleasurable. I learned so much and developed a significant degree of comfort attacking several issues. By the end of the week I had four table tops, each substantially different from any of the others, glued-up. There was enough enough scrap left over for another experimental table top, but that would be set aside until a later time. Also during the week we saw several demonstrations of steam bending, in ours and a neighboring class. The process is rather fascinating and fraught with imprecision and risks of failure. Eventually that week I steam bent ten legs, hoping to end up with four legs for the mail project, three legs for a secondary project and perhaps only two failures. That was exactly how it worked out. One splintered at the bend, one didn’t bend far enough (because we were too long putting it in the mold) and the rest looked like they worked out right. My bends were very simple, but I became the third person in helping Esin and Adrian bend material for her much more challenging bends. It was an amazing process and quite fun to be a part of “her bends,” so much so that that as they began one bend I hear Adrian shout out “Roger” in his Canadian accent and I came running to help. When the legs came off the form, they were placed in a form which held the ends in their place and then was placed in an crude oven, heated to about 100 degrees. I would leave them there for the rest of the week and over the weekend so that by Monday sometime they would be dry. The work this week was marked by a lot of people helping other people at critical times - bending, glue-up around molds or forms and glue-ups going into the bag (vacuum bag). These are times when timing is of the essence, everything has to be done right and margins for error are somewhat critical. It’s a real learning process and a true bonding experience. As a class, we can feel time racing, if not slipping by. Surely it is running out.
Posted on: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 01:33:27 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015