This is a collection of walnut pieces I’m making for a remodel project. It’s a very cool contemporary home built by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. They’ve added quite a bit of square footage in the addition and lots of custom one-off built-in stuff. One of a kind. I also made the aluminum hardware for the vanity out of aluminum 1” plate and some of the mounting hardware is made of steel I fabricated. I’ll try and post more pics when it’s all finished.

I work at a Salon in Central Phoenix. We just remodeled and I built the bar area for the clients to have refreshments at. It’s a ~9+ ft. long, 20” wide”, 2” thick maple countertop with a 3.5” quilted maple front. It’s sitting on a birch plywood shelf I bolted to the wall I framed. It also has L channel steel holding each side firmly to studs on each side. The thing is like a rock! I also framed/drywalled the slanted wall to the right where the plasma TV is going. I’m going to coat the bar(s) with glazecoat soon, but we needed it installed ASAP, so it’s just got a few coats of oil-based poly right now. I’ll be sanding it down and epoxy coating it soon. I’m also building another bar perpendicular to it for the bar refrigerator, microwave, and cappuccino machine. I just picked up the wood this last week. Can’t wait. I got some great deals on the maple. All together the project cost about $648 to build, including all of the framing, drywall, steel, maple, finish, glue, etc. Pretty cool.

When I laminated the top together it was just a little over 10’ long, 20” wide, and 3” thick. Luckily for me I have an incredible planer. The thing must have weighed over 200 lbs. I had to lift one end at a time and manhandle it back and forth since I was by my lonesome. The planer took it like was a playtoy. The planer weighs about 2500 lbs or more. It didn’t even budge. I’m so glad I bought big tools. I don’t think I could have done this without them. The sliding table saw came in handy for trimming. I had a friend help me install it and I cut it to fit on site. It was good experience. I want to do wood countertops in my house in the future. I also want to do a table similar to this. Now that I know how heavy it is though… I’m going to arrange for help.

This was a small project I took on for a friend. He purchased the wood and asked me to build it to his specifications. The woods are Cacao de Negro and Spalted Maple. It has through dovetails on all four corners and sliding dovetails for the shelves. I made quick work of it on the Leigh Jig.

I bought a Marlin Carving Machine for duplicating mandolin tops in the future. I had built a table for it from the plans that come with the user manual. I didn’t care for it. It’s an odd size so it makes for a lot of waste material and it’s not very sturdy. Also the chips build up when you start carving so there’s plenty to improve on. I wanted a sturdy, lower height table with down draft to remove some of the dust and some of the chips. There will be a huge 8” dust port that runs to the collection area underneath the torsion box. It will angle down from each side to the center where the 8” hole will be.

This is a down draft torsion box top and cabinet to work at a sitting height. It’s got hold down t-slots in three places to help with putting the fixtures down. The cabinet also houses my vacuum pump and tank for future vacuum hold down fixtures. I have yet to try the carver out since I installed it on the table. It’s too heavy for me to lift alone and I haven’t suckered anyone into helping me yet, but I’ll post pictures when it’s all done and hooked up to vacuum. I also need to finish rounding off the edges of the aluminum t-track and give those plugs a finish sand. Just wanted to get some before pictures up there to show what I’ve been busy working on.

Here’s a fun little sign I did for my in-laws. They just did a huge rebuild/remodel after being flooded. They were part of the big floods in Cedar Rapids, IA. I wanted to give them something that they could put on their new and improved home that should be finished sometime early this next year. It’s a quartersawn oak frame with a birch plywood panel dadoed in. I woodburned in the letters in with a cheap woodburning kit. I am definately going to upgrade in the near future. I gave the letters some extra texture by using a dot pattern of sorts. Took forever, but it looks cool. It’s stained with a Minwax golden oak finish to match their existing furnishings and then coated with Thompson’s Water Seal. Hopefully they don’t read this before Christmas. :-)

NOTE TO THOSE WHO WANT TO DO THIS…
Please don’t use regular grout like me. The wood shrinks slightly and is allowed to move because of the urethane adhesive remaining pliable. There’s tiny little cracks where the wood has separated on the outer tiles in the room. It’s not going to weather well, so I’m replacing the grout in the near future. Thank goodness endgrain floors are cheap material cost. :-) Everything else I did was fine, but the grout was an experiment that proved bad. I’ll leave this project here so you can see it, but be warned – I have now decided to try other grout mixes using flexible wood filler or epoxy/resin/sawdust mixes.

Here’s another one of my endgrain floors. This one is directly adhered to the floor with a urethane adhesive and grouted just like tile. This floor has more oil-based poly coats because I wanted to make sure it was waterproof. The floor just beads the water. It’s pretty cool. I still have to clean up some of the loose grout on the edges, but for the most part this room is done! On to another room. You can see my blog on endgrain floors to see how I do it with a subfloor.

In addition to the floor, we did stone around the new jacuzzi tub. We added all new fixtures, toilet, and we turned an antique dresser into a great base for the vessel sink. I’ll try to pull up the old pictures of the bathroom so you can see how different it was before. Look for those pics a bit later…

I built this for a friend who needed to cover a big 4” hole in the wall where a bunch of wires for surround sound, television, etc. were coming out of the brick. He wanted to create something simple and that complimented the house. It’s a really neat contemporary home in Paradise Valley designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright that has a ton of strange organic lines and textures to it. I wanted to create something that mimicd the houses design and gave it the beauty of REAL wood. We also needed to make it functional by including a nice and neat way to display the electronics for the surround sound and get rid of all the wire mess. This is what I came up with.

The two wooden sides are held together by steel threaded rod that is running through anodized aluminum tube. The tubes are sunk into the walnut to tighten up the look. The glass shelves are kept off the tubes with 1/16” thick rubber gaskets. There are 5 black office desk inserts to help organize the cables through to the inside. There’s plenty of room and 2” holes through the supports on the inside to help organize the wires.

The side on the left of the picture is triangular and completely asymmetrical at the top. There was a need to slant it downward to match the ceiling and the 45° triangular vertical side makes it easy to see the kitchen once you walk through the front door. It really opens up the room. The other side I wanted to make a completely different height and shape just to add to the bizarreness of it all. I think it turned out cool. If you could see more of the house you’d be able to make a better judgement of how it fits, but maybe later I’ll add some more pics.

I love designing this kind of stuff from scratch. I think you learn more because you have to solve problems that aren’t standardized. It makes you more creative by necessity.

Okay so some times I bite off more than I can chew. This is one of those times. My friend Mike (in the first picture) said he wanted to get rid of an Olive tree at one of his rental properties. This immediately sparked my interest and I told him that when he wanted it to come down, I’d be happy to do it and take it away. I had never cut down an olive tree before and I’ve seen how beautiful it can be so I thought… worth a shot.

Holy Crap! This tree was hard. The main branches were a cakewalk but the main trunk of the tree was very difficult. It took me 7 chainsaw chains to get it in the truck and I used a backhoe profusely to get the thing moved. VERY HEAVY. I have a bunch of lumber now that I need to mill up and cover the endgrain with the waxy solution stuff, but I’m not sure I’m going to cut down a tree for a while.

Just as a happy note. The burls I got are gorgeous. This was a very big and odd shaped tree. There’s going to be some sweet turnings from this puppy.

I have a client who wanted a very small shelf to match his existing furniture. He wanted a 20”x5” pine shelf with as little hardware visible as possible, and he wanted it to be antiqued and mexicanized like his hutch and end table. It also needed to be mounted to a brick wall. Building mexican furniture is fun because they purposely beat the crap out of the wood to make it look cool. It’s also easy to finish. Here’s how I built it.

I cut the wood up and assembled up the mitered corners, gluing the pieces and clamping them down, leaving the front piece off. Then I drilled countersunk holes for the anchors. I drilled five of them so I could use more shallow anchors. This also allowed me to level the piece easier. I wanted the hardware to be hidden and then just attach the front piece after it was installed to hide everything. It worked great.

When I had everything together, I stained the piece with a honey oak minwax stain and then took it out to the garden and threw it around in the dirt and rocks. Then I beat it with a chain lightly and rubbed it up againts a rough brick. Then, I took steel wool and brushed the whole piece vigorously. I applied more stain as needed and then steel wooled again. It came out exactly the right color (must have been the dirt :-). I finished it with furniture was. That’s what most of the Mexican furniture places use. It’s cheap and easy. It was a lot of work to rough something up and make it look cheap. Not my thing, but I do what I’m told. It was fun nonetheless.

So I installed it drilling pilot holes in the masonry and using a level. Then I used a brad nailer to secure the front piece on and used colored wood putty to fill in the brad holes. Turned out nice. Hold their clock up great. On to the next project….

A client/friend of mine wanted to make two new bases for some sculptures he recently purchased. He wanted to make a mesquite base that had “cracks and natural flaws” but also had very smooth squared surfaces that would show off the grain. I took on the job not only because it tested the limits of my equipment, but because I happen to have some really large mesquite fire logs that would work perfect for the job. I love doing these weird projects. It tests your abilities as a woodworker when things stray from the average 4/4 lumber and require some creative problem solving. If you’ve never tried perfectly squaring a 8”x8” cube from a solid log of mesquite, try it sometime. It’s not as easy as it seems. I love these kind of projects.

A friend of mine is a fantastic chef and restaurant owner in Kansas City. He and I were talking about cutting boards and I told him I’d make him one. This cutting board is made of black walnut. It’s roughly 20”x25”x2.75”. I treated it with mineral oil only. No stains or finishes. I put Brusso brass feet on the bottom. It was fun to make. I’m thinking of doing a bunch of them at once because production wise this is an easy task. When it’s a one-off, this takes a great deal of time. I’m amazed at how many board feet it takes to do one of these. Costly, but worth it.

This project was quite an undertaking. I had no idea what I was getting in to when I started it, but it turned out great and I’m glad I got to do it. It taught me a lot about a number of techniques. As you’ll see from the pictures, these shelves were made to hold up a pair of 90 lb. vases. The problem was that the client didn’t want any supports and no visible hardware. He also wanted the shelves to be elliptical so that nobody would catch on the edges passing by. So… this meant that I had to weld up a steel subframe and mount it with lagbolts to the studs. The subframe would be drilled to allow the screws to hold the piece from below. I also had to do a bent lamination and build a form to clamp everything together properly. Since I knew the glue wouldn’t hold on the end grain I used small triangle pieces on the inside to act as “kerfing” to secure the front to the top. Oh yeah… and the toughest part… matching stains. He wanted the project to match as closely as possible to the chairs at the table. Eeeek. All in all… I need more projects like this. It taught me a lot. I love a challenge. If I could change anything I would cover up the bottom or paint it darker so that it was less noticeable from below, but he didn’t want to do it because from just about every normal angle he went to in the room you couldn’t see the bottom. Only if you got on the floor and looked up…. so oh well. It turned out nice, and we’re both happy with it.

This was a project for my sister and her husband. He wanted to build this table for her for Christmas. I have a few thousand board feet of rough-cut oak sitting out back all sticker stacked and so we went to milling and cutting. You’ll notice the apron is dovetailed more than normal. I wanted to show the dovetails instead of doing sliding dovetails or tenons. This meant using lots and lots and lots or very carefully laid out dovetails. Fun, though. It’s final dimension is 10’6×3’7

This project was designed to match the other contemporary pieces I built for their home. I built the wastebasket as a gift. They are both constructed out of natural 4/4 cherry. Satin finish. Mitered up… clean lines… no visible hardware on the sink. I used aluminum to accent the rim of the wastebasket and made a knob from aluminum rod. One of the unseen features is the birch interior support and the steel, triangulated frame I welded for the interior of the base that keeps the piece from warping because it’s only three sided. You could pretty much drive a car over this sink base.

I made a sign for my wife’s new workshop. It’s scrap masonite letters painted black over a Cypress board. The cypress should turn grey over time and look really neat. I cut the letters using a bandsaw and a rotary tool for the insides of the letters.

I had a client who wanted to build a relatively simple cabinet that would fit in between her two mirrors in the bathroom. It had to be somewhat exacting as to the size, and it had to wrap over the backsplash. The mirrors were some sort of mahogany, so I matched them as best I could for color using African Mohogany, 6 different types of dye, and then a cherry stain. It was very close. Stain matching is very difficult. This was my first attempt at it. The cabinet door at the bottom opens up to reveal the hair dryer and other styling appliances. There is a cutaway in the back for the outlet. It was a fun project. She had already designed it and measured her space. I just had to interpret the drawings and build it to suit. We’re both pretty happy with it.

This is a poplar children’s picnic table that I made for my son’s 1st birthday. I had seen a picture of a picnic table out of an old magazine that I liked and so I just started cutting. No rough drawings… no Sketchup… just a cut here. Cut there. Took about a day from milling to finish. Had to make the thing out of rough poplar that I had in the pile. Turned out good I think. The kids love it. It’s funny to watch adults sit at it too.

These are 12×12x12 Boxes made of 4/4 monterillo. They are completely mitered to give it a very contemporary look. I continued the grain across three sides for appearance. The sides all consist of 3 pieces that are laminated together. They weigh a ton bun they look good and are very sturdy. I love the grain in this wood and the way it cuts, sands, and finished makes it one of my favorite (though more expensive) woods to work with. The finish is just a clear satin polyurethane. It’s amazing, though how something this simple looking can prove to be so challenging in the shop. Getting the miters to match up and glue up perfectly and squarely is sometimes very difficult. This took all of the bar clamps I own to complete.

A friend of mine asked me to resize some bar stools. At first I thought it was going to be really simple but after seeing how the legs had bowed a little from age and realizing that if I just went to cutting the legs off as I had imagined when I took the job, I would end up with weeble-wooble worthless bar stools. So… I made a jig for my sliding table. It’s really complicated (not really). I just used a brad nailer to place stops on a piece of MDF so that I could use the bar stools’ rungs (or whatever you call them) to line the legs up correctly and cut them near 6”, but all the same. It worked great. The stools were solid as a rock. This is not a jig I plan on keeping, so mind you it looks like crap, but it sure did the trick. I used the table’s stop to line up the rungs and the jig just acted like a sled keeping it aligned.

I found a great site that has some high resolution wood textures that I’ve been using in sketchup. If you go download my thoreson sketchup plan I made for you guys in my projects and just copy and paste it a few times like I did in this picture, you can mix and match woods up how you like and see how they look in 3d first. Here’s the site:

http://www.defcon-x.de/wordpress/textures/

Just download whatever texture you want and in Sketchup make a new “list” in your materials panel called “User” or whatever. Then, select color and choose “new texture”. Import the file that you downloaded and it should automatically size it just fine. Hit okay and you should be good to go. You can apply it to any surface. Just a hint…. you can use this same process by taking a picture of wood with your digital camera and then importing it the same way.