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 !! heres 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), theres 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 hes ready, well be helping pete set it up for his current project. hes currently working on the soldier course that stands vertically around the 72" diameter .. heres a photo of that in the works.
in case you missed the first post, itll look like this when its 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 were 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 aint perfect, but there arent 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.
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Kamis, 10 November 2016
Walnut Chess Board w Drawers
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Now that I have some more time to catch up on projects since I retired 7/1, I finished this chess board I promised my daughter to give her husband as a gift for his birthday.
Overall size is 16" x 16" x 3 1/2".
The board is constructed of wenge and maple and is set in the frame with clearance for wood movement. There are 2 support rails for the board and I drilled slots in those and mounted the top with screws like a table top. This should allow for wood movement without damage.
in a recent post, i wrote about refinishing a table i built 21 years ago in a style i am still working in today, and in fact, started working on in 1986. ill give jasper johns some credit for that as i often use his quote in the title above when talking about a design language. my introduction to my style was by complete accident in 1986. a client/friend who had been living in germany for a few years described this desk she wanted me to build for her based on some furniture she had been living with during those years abroad. i kind got what she was describing and made her desk, as she described it to me. click the photos to enlarge them ...
there it is, in the upper right hand corner, mahogany and black paint with brass hardware. my wife and i both liked the style and since our house at the time was more or less devoid of nice furniture, i decided i would participate in a show at a local gallery and whatever didnt sell (hah !), we would bring home for the dining room. well, we know how that goes, and i have had this lovely furniture in my own home for 25 years now. this was before the internet and before my book collection had grown to include anything regarding the biedermeier style. the desk above we liked, but was too formal for us so we used native natural cherry with the black paint instead of the stained mahogany. presto ... studio style ....
thats our table and chairs in the upper left corner above and our sideboard in the top left corner of the top photo. so, what am i trying to say here?. this is a post i have been trying to write for a while about, really, how did i get here? we actually did two custom studio style dining rooms last year, this one, and this one so on we go with it ...
so, here we are ... take an object, or a design, or a combination of woods or colors and try to imagine how they could be different, or similar but different; change a little here; change a little there; change a lot, but keep some stuff; keep at it; keep reading and looking; keep an open mind and keep changing ... when you look back 30 some years later youll indeed wonder how did i get here? , but youll be pleased that your designs hang together from the same thread or threads that run through all of it ...
you can add some inlays ... here we have a studio style half round with abalone inlays, which led to some bed headboards with abalone inlays, and we know where that went, which was on to one of our most involved and challenging pieces. more on the wood and metal style in a future post.
wood and steel tables ... the bethlehem steel series.
