OK, first off … Gene wins!

However upon looking at the small number entries I thought I should see if I could add to the number a bit, just for fun and in the spirit of participation.

This is a study I did recently experimenting with dying and marquetry. I think it fits the spirit of the challenge if not the letter. It is all made from one leaf of veneer that’s about 10” x 14” x 1/32” thick. The leaf shown is not the one I used but another from the same flitch.

The marquetry was first cut on the chevalet, all from the same piece as mentioned. Then I dyed the blue and black parts and re-assembled the piece. Next I sanded the whole thing. This gives the appearance of light broken in the sea water and refracted into highlights on the whale. I coated with a sealing pass of spray poly to seal the alcohol based dye and then finished off with shellac in a french polish.

To finish the presentation, I used some more pieces of the same veneer leaf to frame the motif around a dyed black veneer edging. The black edging is not from the leaf. Had I planned to enter it would have been from the piece and dyed black when the whale was dyed. (The guilt is killing me).

Overall the piece is about 9” x 12” X 1/32” so I’m well inside the size limit. In fact I could have made several from 144 cubic inches. My math says close to fifty… is that right?

Final note : Thanks for putting on the challenge and let’s see more entries in the future, even if it’s something you already have.

Thanks for looking in.

Paul

This is my second attempt at the “fusion” technique. It stems from two sources. The first is that all marqueteurs, at least those working with thin modern veneer, eventually sand through their motif and ruin it. I’ve done that enough times and always thought it would be fun to see how it would work out if it was done on purpose. Then I discovered that Patrice Lejeune had already turned it into an art form. Soooo… I had to give it a try. The first attempt was in one of the seagulls that I posted previously….... didn’t like it much but it was a learning experience.

This one I like better.

The photos show:

1) The original photo from Google

2) The piece of movingui veneer that inspired the tiger in the first place. You can almost see the whole face right there in the figure and grain.

3) Work in progress. The holly has been applied and eroded away and the dyed black has been added.

4) Almost finished motif … I did change the pupil of the eye a bit.

The lead photo shows the finished piece mounted on a plywood substrate built up to 1 1/4” thick and veneered all sides and top with mahogany around a dyed black veneer accent frame.

It’s always a good day when you experiment with something new and it works out. This isn’t quite a destination yet but it’s a lot further down the road than the last one.

Thanks for looking in.

Paul

This was an experiment with some different techniques, never meant to be great marquetry. The photo is of a pushy little gull I met in New Zealand at Orewa Beach in 2004. The four takes are Plain marquetry, shaded (poorly) marquetry, hand dyed (watercolor style) and the last is a “sanded through” attempt.

If I get a whole lot better at the last, I may refer to it as “fusion” and give credit to Patrice Lejeune. At this moment I’m referring to it as “sanded through” and while intentional here, it’s not something I need anyone else to show me. I’ve done it many times unintentionally and have often thought I should try to duplicate the effect on purpose some time. I kind of like how the clouds and water area turned out but not so much the beach.

If I had to pick a favorite, it would be the dyed one, but really the biggest thing I learned here was to pay more attention. I don’t mind the piece because I learned a lot from doing it, but let’s just say it’s not my favorite.

I thought long and hard about posting this but decided that I would for just the reason above. Even when a piece doesn’t come out the way you wanted it to, there’s always something to learn and that’s never bad.

Thanks for looking

Paul

Last week Mat Nedeljko and I attended The American School of French Marquetry to take the level II course. This is the second of two studies that we completed in piece by piece (or classic) technique. Many of you have been following my marquetry adventure and have made kind comments on my progress and for those I thank you. Your comments and encouragement have helped me greatly but to actually reach the next level there’s nothing like being exposed to excellence and excellent instruction.

Before last week I had done several pieces in classic style and had felt my work was getting quite good. It was, but the piece shown here outstrips any I have done before in the almost complete elimination of gaps. It’s not that I didn’t know all about the theory of the style and it’s promise of gap free marquetry, I did. The difference was in the little nuances in technique that we were shown, and simply the exposure to fine pieces of work that set a bar for us to strive for.

This may just be a study on a piece of plywood but it represents my best work to date. For that I thank all of you for your encouragement and Patrick, Patrice and Kristen at the school for exposing me to what real marquetry is and what I can aspire to.

The piece is 6 1/2” wide by 9 1/4” high.

Thanks for looking in

Paul

Off and on for about ten years now my wife has been getting valentines from me based on the “Bee Mine” pun.
They have been as simple as a hand drawn card and as complex as a 3D mine with matchbox machinery and fuzzy little bees from the craft store. This year marquetry seemed to be the way to go.

Yes, she loved it. It made her smile.

This is my second piece using the Chianti Classico logo that I cut in classic style recently. The first was the round serving tray here. This one represents my idea of an elegant way to picnic. Realizing that this is perhaps a bit fanciful to justify a purpose built box, it has a fall back use as a box for transporting sketching supplies and will double as a lap desk for sketching. This is a use it may actually see.

The box is all 1/2” BB plywood veneered on the outside with plain maple and on the inside with curly maple.
All corners are mitered to leave the outside clean and the vertical corners are splined.

The catches are a wooden version of spring style snaps and work very well. The catch part is only about a sixteenth of an inch but the osage orange it’s made from is hard enough and strong enough to get it done. I don’t envision them breaking.

The hinges are my usual wooden integral style as detailed in this blog. The handle is made of three layers of cherry laminated at opposing grain angles for strength and hinged on ordinary eye screws from the store.

The marquetry on the inside is a simplified sketch of the countryside in the Chianti area. The finish is French polish on the marquetry panels and the same procedure to a less fine degree on the other parts.

Hope this makes you smile

Paul

The topic of French polishing has come up on several threads lately. It made me think that some of you might be interested in this little tote that I made to keep my polishing bits and pieces together. I was introduced to the procedure last year at ASFM and got the general idea of the little squeeze bottles and a compact storage tote from Patrice who gave the instruction. The actual tote design is my own however.

The squeeze bottles on the front are for alcohol, pore-filling mix, pumice, shellac and mineral oil. There is an extra one that I will likely end up using as a second alcohol bottle as it seems to get used up the quickest.

The jars on the back are for pore-filling pads and bodying pads.

I don’t claim to be any kind of expert on the subject and even among those who are there as many methods as practitioners I think. At any rate here’s a little video of the way I do it. This was originally posted in my “Marie's Table” blog.

Thanks for looking.

Paul

This is the first of what will likely be a series if projects displaying this Black Rooster Marquetry motif based on the logo of the Consorzio Chianti Classico, the cooperative of growers who produce this wine. In Italy “Classico” denotes wine that is made from only grapes grown within a given region, in this case the Chianti region of Tuscany, and “Riserva” denotes it as premium quality based on tight production regulations. You can find this logo on a little pink paper seal on the top of every bottle of Chianti Classico wine.

My first attempt at chevalet cut marquetry was an attempt at this logo and it never did get finished. As a lover of the region, the wine, and the legend of the Black Rooster of Chianti, I was drawn to give it another try. This time I tried it complete with the lettering.

The photos show some of the tray details, the french polish shine, and a look at the cutting. The fifth one is why this is destined to become a series…... I have five more. Current plans are for a picnic box for wine and glasses and maybe a bistro table…. but let’s not get too far ahead.

There is a construction blog here for anyone who is interested.

Thanks for looking,

Paul

A simple wish for all my LJ friends.

May 2013 bring you health, happiness and success.

Paul

My wife asked me to make her a tray for her birthday ….. with a chickadee on a branch. This is in my mind at least a very overworked theme in marquetry but I agreed to give it a shot. I at least wanted it to look lifelike so I started a search of images on Google where I found this one.

I imported it to inkscape, did a nice tracing, retooling the branch for artistic effect, and added a few other branches and some faint terrain and sky to fill out the area. “How do you like this?” I asked, proudly showing her my drawing. ” I like the bird” she said, ” but lose the other branches and the landscape. All I want is a bird on a branch.” “As you wish my dear.” I said (or some fairly similar expression) .........and so just a bird on a branch it became. When all is said and done I have to admit (begrudgingly) that in this case at least, less may have actually been more. I quite like the little guys.

The marquetry is quite simple as the pieces are larger than what I’ve been doing lately so I decided to cut them in classic style and get a few extras, after all you don’t have much more cutting to do … and it is a bit more challenging. The marquetry itself was done quite quickly. What took me way too much time was the silly idea of having round inside corners. I guess it looks nice but it presented a new problem (opportunity) at every stage.

The veneers in the backgrounds are mostly maple in one figure or another plus a piece of what I’m guessing is a burl-ish redwood. The marquetry veneers are ipe, holly, fir, oak and the redwood for one branch. Two of them have legs like my music motif tray and the other two sit right down on their bases.

All cutting was done on my Green Valley chevalet, the first one I built (and maybe still my favorite).

Thanks for looking in.

Questions, comments and critiques are always welcome…................. Merry Christmas!!

Paul

I made an oval tray a while back and lots of people liked it, myself included. I am now planning to make several more and needed to come up with a better way to deal with the installation of a floating bottom in an oval frame.

This simple jig, based on one of those HF trim routers I like so much, works perfectly and only took a couple of hours to design / build. You can still adjust the depth of cut and the height above base is somewhat adjustable. For my purposes I wanted 3/4” deep tray walls so it is set for that. My tray bases will be 1/4” material, veneered on both sides so it will take one cut as-is and one cut with a 1/16” shim. It has a web on the bottom to clamp in any vice.

The curved piece on the face of the router is attached with double sided tape but I may buy another trim router to dedicate to this (~$18 this week) and epoxy it on if I really like the jig.

Nothing special or new here I suspect, maybe just a cheap solution to a tricky problem.

Thanks for looking

Paul

EDIT: UPGRADE

When I first made this jig I was envisioning sharp corners inside the tray. Each side would be done separately so I didn’t have to get into the corners. However I design as I go and came up with a way to use radius corners which led to this modification.

The router base assembly is too wide for this application so it is removed and the guide becomes merely a “pin”. Without the thick curved piece on the base, this one doesn’t need to be extended as far as it is but rather than rebuild the jig, I used it as-is and it was fine. If I did it again I would make the clamp closer and the extended part of the bit shorter. Beyond that the photos speak for themselves.

You’ll have to wait to see the bottoms that are going in these trays. What you do see is a 1/8” template that will be used to cut the bottom panels.

Thanks for looking again

Paul

It’s all well and good to make beautiful arty tables and boxes that take tens or hundreds of hours to build but selling that sort of thing requires either hard work or a very low hourly rate if you are an unknown. .............. .......... Sounds like a challenge to me. ..................Time to see if I can urn some money with marquetry.

I did some checking around and found a funeral director that thought marquetry might fly on urns and after looking at what he had in stock and their retail prices I thought I’d take a run at making some. Assuming his markup is about double, give or take, it made for an interesting bit of sport.

This is exactly what classic (or “piece by piece”) style marquetry is all about so I chose simple a motif that I particularly like and cut it in three colors plus background, eight at a time on the chevalet. Then I made a quick prototype urn more to get his input than to evaluate time as this is a very easy box to mass produce.

This post shows the finished prototype. It’s not as spiffy as the rest will be in a number of ways but I am confident I can turn eight out in about 24 hours….... and that should work.

First photo shows about 12 hrs of work, eight pieces of marquetry cut, assembled and sand shaded. The roses appear brown because I laminated a walnut veneer behind the bloodwood to get the same thickness as my other colors of veneer. You are looking at the back, hence you are seeing the walnut.

Next two show the quick strong little mitered box. No clamping required with hot hide glue.

Last two show the finished (with a few flaws) urn with a fast French polish finish. I may or may not stay with the FP finish, but I’m leaning toward it.

Off to Az. next week (for six months) with a box full of veneers to make lots more marquetry skins for this size urn. They will keep me out of the bars and be easy to transport back with me.

Thanks for looking in

Questions, comments and critiques (like ” Hi Paul, There are some little chips at the top of the face panel) are always welcome.

Paul

Back in ‘04 when we remodeled / built the house we now live in I did a lot of the architectural woodwork and furnishings. I had always wanted to build a front door but was worried about the effects of cold wet air on the outside and warm dry air on the inside. It seemed like a good time to give it a try. This is what I came up with and I can say it has held up extremely well for eight years now with six months of cold rain and then hot (ish) summers.

There are actually two. The front door is 42” wide by 80” high and the back is 36” by 80”. They are both 2 1/4” thick. The composition is a sandwich of solid walnut, plywood and foam. The sketchup and the photos will give you the details. The main frame around which the rest is formed is made from “boards” that I laminated up from 1” wide strips of 3/4” plywood. My reasoning being that there was no way they could warp. Then after insulating inside the frame I added 1/4” plywood skins to form sort of a torsion box. The rest is cosmetic.

Coolest part…. they are very heavy and swing closed with a very solid “Thud!”

Photos # 1,2 and 4 are the front door.
Photo #3 is the back door.
Photo #5 is the internal layup.

For the 3/8 walnut skins I re-sawed 1” boards and put the halves opposite each other on the inside and outside of the doors to carry on the illusion of a solid door.

Thanks for looking

Paul

This is my third chevalet de marqueterie. I should be getting it down pat soon.

There is a difference this time however, this one is a commission for a friend, a fellow Lumberjock in fact. He is a fine marqueteur already and I can’t wait to see what he does with a chevalet in his hands.

The material is spaulted Garry Oak with accents in Paduk, Wenge, Arbutus and Bubinga. The finish is Minwax Jacobean stain and antique oil.

I won’t go into much detail as the details are covered in my other two chevalet posts (here and here) but one notable improvement is the blade clamp system. By switching from steel to aluminium I was able to do a much better machining job without metalworking tools. They don’t work any better but look much more professional.

The last photo shows what Patrick Edwards would call the “pre-industrial” corner of my shop with two chevalets, my screw press and my new bench.

I did a small video to show the accuracy test used to assure complete squareness between the blade and the packet clamps (therefore the packet). You cut a keyhole shape from a piece of material as thick as your packet will be. If the cut out piece slides easily out of the hole either way without binding you are square in both vertical and horizontal planes. If the ball binds, you are off on the vertical plane and if the tail binds, you are off on the horizontal plane. There are built in adjusters to fix any problems. The good news here is that with all adjusters at zero the cut was perfect on the first try.

Thanks for looking.

Questions, comments and critiques are always welcome.

Paul

This is the new bench I’ve been building for the last couple of weeks. I have to say that I’ve never had one of these and quite frankly, never understood what their attraction was. Then one day it dawned on me that I had spent my career building big things with power tools and that these were for building smaller things with hand tools. Then it all made sense and I decided I would build one.

My thought process for this sort of thing is a little different than some. I don’t ask myself ” How are these things made?” and go looking at examples or scouting for plans. My process starts with “What does it have to do?” and then plans the most interesting way to accomplish those goals. That and I love reinventing the wheel.

To make a long story a little shorter, I ended up with a rather different bench.

This may be a bench for you if:

1) You want a solid bench that’s easy to build with simple tools

2) You want a heavy rigid bench but don’t want to break the bank buying hardwood and hardware.

3) You enjoy having something a little different.

This is not the bench for you if you see building your bench as an opportunity to learn / practice fine joinery and at the end of the journey have a beautiful hardwood masterpiece as the centerpiece of your shop. I have nothing but admiration for those who view it this way…. but this isn’t the bench for you.

In my mind a good bench of this type was to hold work in vertical and horizontal positions that would allow work to be done on both the faces and the edges. It had to be heavy and it had to be rigid. If possible it should look nice in the bargain. Above all it had to have a very powerful grip. If I failed in that , I would truly fail…. I don’t think I did.

This is getting long and as I sense a construction blog coming on I will cut to the photos and save the long explanations for the said treatise.

The photos show:

1) Planing a surface with the board held in one of the “8 Degree Vertical” wedge wagon vises.

2) Planing an edge with the portable Deadman and the “8 Degree Vertical” wedge leg vise.

3) Planing a surface held in the two wagon vises.

4) Pretty shot of the wagons.

5) The plywood “guts” of the half-tops.

6) The plywood “guts”of the legs.

By now you will have seen that this bench is really plywood and only the trim is hardwood. That wood incidentally is arbutus (madrone) and it is used for the front, back and end boards and vises as well as the cosmetic top. The legs have been shamelessly veneered to look like solid walnut.

I have done a fair bit of pretty-ing up here but the main structure of this bench can almost be said to be buildable with a skilsaw and a hammer.

The structural joints are all interlaid layers of plywood that, when all assembled, resemble and have the strength of perfectly fitted finger joints but in any one layer they are all just butt joined.

That’s enough. I have far to much to tell about this bench and it’s vises to bore you with here. Those who are interested can follow the blog and get bored to sleep for several nights at their own risk.
Suffice to say that I think this concept will be of value to some of you and I hope that this won’t be the last ”V8” I see here.

I have a sketchup of this but as our resident SU savant (Rance) is reworking it for me I think I’ll wait. You would only be frustrated by my poor job on it.

EDIT: Rance’s excellent Sketchup is posted in the last blog entry here.

A full construction blog on this bench starts here.

Thanks for looking in and please ask questions, comment or criticize.

Paul

A couple of days ago I posted the wagon vises that I have installed in the “outside the box” workbench I’m building myself. Today it is the leg vise. It is a very simple mechanism. In fact you could call it plane if you were so inclined. (sorry).

The jaws of the vise are fairly traditional except for the ability of the outer one to travel vertically. It is very different when it comes to power source however. As I said in the other post we boat builder types do very much like our wedges so this vise is powered by an 8 degree vertical wedge that offers about 1/2” of travel. In concert with two shims and a series of holes 1” apart that is enough to cover the vise’s travel of about ten inches face to face. The bottom spacer strut is conventional.

I think the photos will explain better than I can:

1) The vise as it fits on the bench in level clamping mode. There are no shims in place and the outer jaw is exactly level with the bench surface.

2) The same setup from the business side showing the stop pins and adjusting holes. These are very easy and quick to set up.

3) Shows the outer jaw in elevated mode. There is a 1/4” shim slid under the wheel at its base so that the jaw is now 1/4” above the top of the bench and can work against a dog. Also a really easy setup.

4) Same setup, other view showing a 3/4” shim in use. You knew I’d slip a little marquetry in somewhere didn’t you.

5) The lower strut, marked off in inches to facilitate setup.

6) One of the best things about this vise is that when not in use you can, by simply pulling the pin on the wedge rail, remove the whole thing…. leg bruiser and all and put it aside while you do other work on the bench.

That about sums it up. It is, like it’s designer, a simple soul but a good worker.

I haven’t played with it much yet but I can say that I can lift the end of the bench by a board clamped in this vise. The bench weighs 300 to 350 lbs ,is 90% plywood and you can just about build it with a skilsaw and a hammer. The dovetails you may see in some of the photos are strictly cosmetic.

The bench is a couple more days off. Stay tuned.

Hope this intrigues some of you and more important raises a few smiles.

Questions, comments and critiques are always welcome. Thanks for looking in

Paul

I designed these vises for my new bench. They are now installed and work perfectly and yes, they cost less than $10 each at a $4 per fbm price for the clear arbutus of which they are made.

When I was building boats we often used wedges when screw clamps were not powerful enough so it wasn’t much of a leap for me to choose the wedge as the go-to devise for my “outside the box” workbench. The concept is simple. The vises are made as “inserts” and as such could be dropped into any existing bench. In the case of mine they are two of a set of inserts that were all built in as the top was assembled.

The wedge itself is an 8 degree inclined plane that will advance the wagon a little over 1/2”. There are 1/2” and 1” shims that drop easily into place to bring the travel up to just over two inches. The wagon has three dog holes that are 2” apart so by choosing the appropriate dog hole on the wagon, I have over 6” of travel. The dog holes up my bench are at 6” intervals so I have all the travel I need and don’t be worrying about the power, it is massive.

The main point of interest that makes this all work is the modified deck beam joint, an old boat builders standard for load bearing. The back end could be glued in place but by employing this wedge style joint the base half of the wedge system can easily be removed. Once it is out, the wagon will slide back and come out for cleaning etc. The video will make this a little clearer.

With two of these wagon vises and two rows of dog holes I will be able to stabilize a large flat piece quickly and efficiently.

The photos:
1) The two wagon vise inserts ready to install.
2) An exploded view of one vise.
3) Preliminary assembly of the main components.
4) A close up look at the modified deck beam joint.
5) Comparison between assembled and exploded. In the foreground are the pieces for my wedge powered leg vise. Stay tuned.
6) The assembly into the back end piece of the bench showing how the end of the vise is trapped.

The following video was made before I had installed the vises and before I was actually sure that my preliminary guess of 8 degrees would do the job. It does do the job.

My apologies for the audio…. so I mumble, OK. It gets better if you listen twice.

Here they are in the finished bench, going through their paces.

EDIT: Here’s a sketchup I did. I’m no pro but I think it works OK.

Thanks for looking
I hope that this gets some of you thinking about alternatives to the expensive bench jewelry down at the toy store.

Questions, comments and critiques are always welcome.

Paul

Music is a little French style table of my own design that has taken me about half as long to build as my sailboat did. In Marie Antoinette’s day it would have been called a writing table and I would like to think she may have been amused by it.

The design started as an idea for a leg that I sketched up last winter, gathered speed when I did a chevalet demo at the local fine arts show in the spring and sort of grew from there.

The central motif is an etude from ASFM and the other designs are modifications via inkscape of various motifs found in Pierre Ramond’s Masterpieces of Marquetry series of books.

The substrate is western maple and the top is baltic birch plywood. Joinery is mortise and tenon. The solid edges of the top and the balls on the legs are queen ebony. The marquetry is done in macassar ebony, birdseye maple, purpleheart, green poplar, holly, mahogany, bubinga, and in the central motif only, dyed yellow, black and green. I may have missed a few.

As near as I can count there are about 1500 individual pieces and the cutting was done on the chevalet in a combination of Boulle, piece by piece (classic), and painting in wood styles depending upon the requirements of the element. All assembly is with 192 gram hot hide glue, there is no metal. The finish is french polish.

My greatest regret is my ignorance of period furniture, something I need to work on. Because of this the piece is almost certainly a “misfit” in the world of fine furniture. It’s one of those “If I’d known it was going to turn out this well I would have paid more attention” kind of situations. Next time I will.

There is a construction blog here.

I hope you will enjoy this piece as I certainly enjoyed creating it.

Any comments, questions and please, critiques are welcome.

Thanks for looking,

Paul

This is my first marquetry tray. You can only build so many boxes so I am branching out looking for new marquetry venues. A serving tray seemed to be a nice place to start. The design is my own and grew and changed quite a lot during construction. The motif itself is from the workbook that came with Patrick Edwards’ course.

The “music” motif is one, if you are following my projects, that I suggest you get used to for a bit. I originally cut it in “painting in wood “style for an elaborate table I’m working on but decided I didn’t like it with the birdseye maple background. .... Soooo … I cut it again in classic style giving me four identical motifs with different backgrounds. Then of course I changed my mind again and used the original one on the table. This tray represents the first iteration of the four “classic” cuts. I will try to vary the presentations to reduce the yawn factor but they will be showing up.

The basic tray is sawn (not bent) curly cherry and besides the marquetry it is trimmed out with Sapele pomele (background and handles), and holly (stringing) veneers and a strip of amaranth (purpleheart) to tie the rim back to the central medallion.

The finish is french polish.

Thanks for looking

Comments, questions and critiques are always welcome.

Paul

In Boulle style marquetry you cut a design once in a stack of different veneers. When you separate all the parts, you “mix and match” them to provide a number of similar motifs. I cut these designs originally just as an exercise, to tune my cutting skills but when you do that, after all the work you’ve put in you have to find a place to put them. I decided that three simple mitered boxes would do the job and had the idea to continue the “mix and match” format of the marquetry.

So these boxes, each a little higher than the last, represent I guess three little steps in my quest to become a marqueteur.

The materials are Holly, Lacewood and black dyed veneer (although I ran out and used grey inside the lids) and again Holly, Lacewood and aniline dyed Western Maple solids.

The hinges are my easy integral style although Andy (gadfm) has made far more of them than I have now. (maybe they should be “Andy Hinges”. That has a nice ring.)

The finish is rubbed shellac and the glue, of course, hot hide.

Thanks for looking. Comments, questions, critiques, always welcome.