| Blog series by Blake | updated 84 days ago | 6 parts | 3475 reads | 98 comments total |
Part 1: Sketchup Design
A friend of mine has been telling me for a while that he had shown his parents my website and that they love my work and wanted me to make them something. Well they eventually contacted me and commissioned me to make a table for them. They bought a lamp from an artist named Brian Giambastiani, which looks like a Jellyfish. The head, which illuminates, is made of blown glass, and the tentacles are copper wire. It is about 40” tall. So my challenge was to build a table that ...
Part 2: Getting Started... I found my Lumber!
I went to a place called “Global Wood Source” in San Jose, which is the most amazing place I’ve ever been for lumber. The owner travels around the world in search of only the best and most amazingly figured woods. He’s got stuff you can’t find anywhere else. Check out their website and if you are anywhere near San Jose you have to stop by. Anyway, I found the perfect lumber for my table top. Three slabs of figured maple over 2” thick. I also bought the m...
Part 3: Legs and Base
LAMINATING THE LEGS When I left off I had cut most of the strips. That was a very tedious job and I broke it up over several days (over 80 total). I finally got to the point where I could start bending my laminations. Here is the “dry” trial run: Here are the strips laid out to apply the glue. I had to mix the special glue made for laminations: And here is the first glued up leg in the form: After about three days I had all eight legs. Some of them are s...
Part 4: Making The Oval
THE OVAL The apron for this table is going to be a bent-laminated oval: I found a great tutorial on how to draw a simple oval on a website called In the Woodshop with Howard Ruttan. Here are some of the simple drawings on his page: And here is mine: MAKING THE FORM So I cut it out with the jigsaw: Then I used the first oval as a router template to cut its clone: (I broke my favorite spiral router bit in the process) The two MDF form ha...
Part 5: Dying the top BLUE and spraying the lacquer
A friend of mine has a cabinet shop with a spray booth and was nice enough to let me play in it. These photos were all taken in his shop. Here is one of the samples we tried on a test piece. This is aniline die dissolved in alcohol. WOW, I really like the color! We used his Festool sander for the final sanding. I had to stir the dye for over an hour. On goes the die: Sanding in between coats of sanding sealer and lacquer: Er...
Part 6: Assembly
So I got the table top back from the spray booth (after it cured for a day) and it looked amazing! Here are the three pieces back in my shop ready for assembly: As with all my furniture I made little wood “buttons” to hold the components together to allow for seasonal wood movement as well as the ability to take it apart. Here it is with the buttons in place: And I finally get to see it completed!!! Total Project Time: 50 hours You...
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