Just finished this desk hutch for my fiance, been in various stages of completion since december, I finally decided just to put in some hours and get it done. After the surfacing it’s all hand-tool work. More than 70 hand cut dovetails. Wedged tenons with walnut wedges hold the top to of the carcass to the sides, the step drawers are all dovetail joinery. No plywood or hardboard, everything in it from the back to the drawer bottoms is solid cherry. Found these cool card cabinet pulls, havent dropped in the labels yet.
I wanted to throw a little asian influence in here, hence the the step drawers and the overhang of the top of the center case. The center shelf has a dedicated space for a paper correspondence box I made earlier.

Now I just gotta get rid of that Ikea POS that it’s sitting on…

Thanks for looking!

This week I decided to make a couple of work tables for my shop. I wanted something that could move around the shop, but conceal one within the other to save space. I found a similar project here on LJs and thought it seemed like a good plan. I also wanted to use the torsion box method of worktable construction that has become so popular, but I made a slight modification in that I had fewer internal boxes and left one side open for extra space. Here’s what I came up with.

In March of last year I bought pretty much an entire walnut tree here in Bloomington. It was a tree that grew from a seed in Bloomington, fell down in a storm in Bloomington, was milled into lumber in Bloomington, and ultimately was turned into three pieces of furniture in Bloomington. I built Rachael’s coffee table, my bar, and our dining room table from that single walnut tree. Three matching pieces with similar design elements made from a single tree. Thus, when we move away from Bloomington, those pieces will forever link us to the time we spent here, and be intrinsically linked to each other as sibling pieces. To separate them is to separate a family, and they are thus pieces that I hope will stay within my family for many years after I have gone.

I think that there can be such deeper meaning in the things that surround us, if we have the ability to direct what goes into them. It is with that in mind that I’ve developed an interest in working in the idea of ‘place’ in furniture projects.

I think that furniture that is hand-built or custom commissioned can integrate what I refer to as a third function- that of place and memory. When you think about it, most furniture usually has up to two functions: it’s purely utilitarian (think the giant cable spool used as a table in a college apartment) or it is both utilitarian and beautiful. For the vast majority of furniture, it stops there. But if we make our own furniture we can add a third function, and that third function deepens our connection and embeds a degree of meaning within the piece that is otherwise impossible.

I finally completed my dining table. It’s based off fellow LJ Schroeder’s Stickley Done Darkly, which I thought was a gorgeous piece and fit with my overall vision for the table best out of all the other designs out there.

This piece is built from the same tree as the last two walnut pieces I’ve done, my bar and my girlfriend’s coffee table. All came from a single lumber purchase I made last March.
More pictures etc here: http://joshberer.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/stickley-dining-table-in-walnut/
Thanks for looking!
Josh

So this isn’t really a project project. Just a little shop thingy on the way to a project. I’m working on a dining room table and the top is made up of 8/4 walnut slabs. Gorgeous wood. But there’s quite a bit of edge jointing and they’re too cumbersome and long for the jointer, so I’m doing it the fun way. But my $99 HF bench is a little ill-equipped so I had to make a quick deadman to support the boards while I joint them. Just some 2×4s, some 1/2” ply, screwed together and clamped to the legs, then a shim holds the board tight.

One downside: it blocks the drawers from opening. I figured this out when I clamped them on, put a board in, shimmed it tight, and then went to get my plane. In the drawer.

This is the sideboard I’ve been working on for what feels like forever. It’s made of walnut and quarter sawn white oak. It was designed as a bar, so to that end I added a pull-out cutting board, a tile-inlay as a pouring area, and I put a fridge in the bottom. I made a full step by step build blog here, with loads more pictures: http://joshberer.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/a-sideboard-bar-cabinet-from-walnut-and-quarter-sawn-oak/

Perhaps the most challenging issue of this project was the finish. I didn’t like the intense contrast of the above, I wanted the oak and the walnut to be of similar tones, but the figure in the quarter sawn oak to pop. I went through several frustrating trials (to the tune of more than 20 scrap pieces tested with various finish combinations and layers) until I settled on Transfast’s Dark Mission brown dye as the main element of the finish. Now, here was the tricky part. I could only apply water-based dyes prior to glue up, because an oil or urethane based dye would reject the glue and essentially ruin the project. Since I knew I would be using such finishes, I needed to make it so the last layers of the oak’s finish were the first layers of the walnut’s, so I could glue it up and then finish the whole piece.

Thanks for looking!

So I got tired of squatting on the floor to work on stuff, so I built a bunch of simple stands to hold tools and whatnot. This project was posted by Lockwatcher here: http://lumberjocks.com/projects/45523
and that looked like a pretty easy formula. I added a middle shelf, and knocked these out in a weekend. It’s basically 2×4s framing MDF held up by 2 2×4s put together. I added total lock casters because most of the things that sit on these stands want to move around. Thanks to Lockwatcher for the post!

My garage is cinder-block construction, and I didn’t want to mess around with masonry screws, so I made a free-standing lumber rack to hold everything which was previously sitting in piles on the floor and in the basement. My parents were visiting for Memorial Day this weekend and so my dad and I knocked this thing together in about 3 hours all told, including moving the lumber onto it.

It’s a pretty simple construction: 2×4s cut to 18-inch lengths, at 5° angles on both ends to make parallelograms, sandwiched between 1×4s on each end, again cut to 5° parallelograms, but only on the very ends. One of the 1×4s is cut at the top so as to provide about 4 inches of contact at the top. The horizontal shelves are held in place by drywall screws to keep their place while its being assembled, but once it was up two machine screws locked them in and provided the kind of strength normal screws cant give. There’s space in the middle for sheet goods, and I used the protruding end of one of the support 2×4s to store some bar clamps.

The benefit of this design was that you don’t have to worry about making 4 of one direction, then 4 of the other- each piece is identical, so when you’re assembling it if you find you have two pieces that look the same, flipping one upside-down sorts it out and provides two opposing pieces.

It takes up more floor space than a normal wall mounted rack, but has twice the storage space. It is held together by 4 8-foot 2×4s. Definitely takes two people to put together, three would have been better. Once we had the 3 parallel 2×4s in place (2 on the bottom, one through the top) it was still pretty wobbly. Then we added the cross brace and it got locked down rock solid. I was literally trying to rock it as hard as I could and it wouldn’t budge an inch, it was like it was part of the floor.

I acquired a huge quantity of walnut from an ancient old woodworker in March. In May I made a coffee table for my girlfriend Rachael’s birthday from it. I love the Arts and Crafts style, the beauty in the simplicity, the honesty, the craftsmanship.

This was my first real project and I learned so much doing it. Everything was new, and every step required research. I fell in love with woodworking while doing this project. I finished it with 5 coats of 1/3 boiled linseed oil, 1/3 mineral spirits, 1/3 polyurethane.

I’m currently a graduate student, and finals fell smack in the middle of my project, so because of the two week break I took during finals I don’t have a good idea of how many hours it took me to do this. For my next project I’m going to keep better track of the hours, so I have some reference points as to how long projects take.

I put up a build blog with photos here: http://joshberer.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/rachs-walnut-coffee-table/

I recently moved to Bloomington, Indiana for grad school. Well, our house has a massive kitchen and a two car garage. Unfortunately, the kitchen doesn’t have so much prep space for cooking, and the garage has tons of space for projects, so I decided to make a counter for the kitchen. There’s a really nice and helpful lumber yard in town, so I went down and selected some nice pieces: a couple of 8-foot 4×4 cedar posts, some 8-foot 1×4 pine and two 2×4 birch plywood boards.

This took me longer than I thought it would, about 5 days total. This is pretty much my first project since high school, and it really re-introduced me to the joys of woodworking.

I did the majority of it with a single saw, a double-edged Japanese saw I got at Hardwick’s in Seattle, which is possibly the best hardware store I have ever been to. I also used a drill to screw everything together and a chisel to make the recessed mortises for the lower shelf’s support.

The table’s support is centered around the top of the posts, which use a double support system: first, they are supported by the pine 1×4 holding it all in, but they are also supported by the birch tabletop, which keeps it square.

I used some scrap wood from the pine and a jigsaw to attach a dowel to the long side of the table, to hold dish towels. I also attached a small garbage bin to one side, so we can just toss garbage as we’re chopping instead of stopping and going over to the garbage can.

More pictures here:
http://joshberer.wordpress.com/2010/06/06/prep-table/