Shaker style table

 This table was built for Amy and Chris.  The wood is hard maple from Cedar Lake with door panels from spalted maple.  The design is an adaptation of measured drawings of Thomas Moser, the noted Shaker furniture maker from Maine.  I think it will be a piece that fits well in their living room and serves them for many years.

The table has a moveable shelf and a back with splined vertical boards.  The stain is white oak and it is finished with polyurethane.  It seemed to take forever to make as I started it before going North for the summer and then worked around the hunting season.  As usual, I started from the air-dried rough planks and boards stored in the barn.  The maple is really hard; tools have to be very sharp.

More Projects

 This cabinet was built for Susan and Sam in Georgia and presented to them when they were here for Christmas.  It was modeled loosely on a cabinet in their home.  The wood is cherry air dried in my barn and harvested from trees that were removed for electric line clearance at Cedar Lake.  The door panels and back are cherry plywood.  I had never had an opportunity to make a cabinet with feet and aside from putting the first one on upside down it went well.

 My granddaughter Megan's birthday was approaching and she just had her ears pierced so naturally what should grandfather make for a gift?  That's right, a jewelry box for her new earrings.  This is a cantilevered design from a magazine article.  I made mine with  walnut and hard maple.  This is the box before I made the drawer.

 Here is the drawer.  It can slide out the front or the back.  I purchased a new toy which was helpful in sanding the curved front and rear of the drawer and the curved parts of the box-an 8 inch disk/belt sander.

Megan was home because of medicine she was taking for an infected thumb and wound up out in the shop on occasion.  The first time, she used the scroll saw to cut out a heart and the drill press to make a door knob hanger from the board used to cut out the heart.  We started another project that intrigued her-a magic coin box.  A coin is placed in the drawer and disappears when the drawer is closed.  The box is cherry with maple drawer and runners.

First Shop Product

 The first project made in the new but unfinished shop was this mallet.  The handle is hickory with a black walnut head.  It had been years since I last used my lathe and there was a bit of relearning to be done. 

Using the mallet has indicated the unwise use of black walnut as the facing of the head as it is relatively softer.  The hickory would probably be less prone to denting.

Home in the Winter Workshop

 Progress continued on the workshop slowly since 2010 as we spent time building additions and refinements on the camp in the summer and fall and went south for the winter.  2011 saw more activity on the shop with walls roughed in and insulated.

 This shot shows the doorways for the office space and the finishing room.

 The entry from the rest of the barn is large enough to get large pieces of equipment and materials through by removing the sliding glass door panels.  The door was originally in our house and has been stored for many years in the horse barn.

Here is the current pegboard storage.  I have a whole bunch of pegboard that was available at no cost or effort on my part.  Some is wood grained as this piece and all have quarter inch holes.

Renaissance

Remember how you first got interested in making something with wood?  My memory goes back to the building of a tree house using scrap lumber and hand-straightened rusty nails.  This summer my grandson and his father joined me for several days as I built an addition to our camp in the Adirondack woods.  He really enjoyed "helping" with the construction and showed good eye-hand coordination in this non-video game activity.  I know he will remember the experience.

The addition project got me back to hard physical labor after many years and I felt every exertion in the sore, overstretched muscles and ligaments of my body each night.  But it also brought me back to the joy of making something of value with wood, the satisfaction of using mind and body to create, and the pleasure of work.  So it became time to get back to it.

Next was the roof job at home-38 square and a tearoff, too.  The job was overestimated by four square which happened to be exactly what the horse barn roof required.  The trash rolloff container was still here.  I went for it. 

 

 

The job went well, although I had to dodge some rain.  I rebuilt the cupulo base and repainted and reinstalled it on the new shingles.

But this was all leading me to what I had put off for

a couple of years-building that woodshop in the end of the polebarn, the one that was imagined when I had the barn built, but which had waited for time and priority to coincide.  Its time had indeed come.