Tripod table finished!

Ok, this table has been finished for a while.  Actually I have almost finished 2 more projects.  I am really behind on my blogging.  I will get the other projects updated soon, I promise.  Here are the pictures of the finished table.  It is for sale...

New Project: Dressing Stand

So, it has been a long time since I have updated.  the project that I have been working on is a dressing stand.  It is a small box with one drawer and a mirror on top.  The idea is that someone could put it on a chest of drawers or a desk and use it to do their make-up, brush their hair, etc.  It took lots of drafts to come to a final design.  I was designing according to the piece of wood and piece of veneer that I already had, which did not entirely go as plan, but the results have still been nice.

Front view.

Front view of the standard (the arm that holds the mirror.)  This is the part which took the longest to design.  I probably did at least 20 drafts to come to something with the right curves that would actually physically work.  It will be made from one solid piece, but be carved to look like one is in front and the other behind.

Side view.  You can see that the mirror tips back and the standards taper.  You can also see that the front bows out.

Plan view (view from above).  In this view you get the best look at the serpentine shape of the front.

Construction begins! And immediately is set back.  The case is mitered (jointed together at a 45 degree angle) so there is no visible joint on the outside.  Originally I was going to use hidden splines cut from the inside before the case is glued together.  Unfortunately, when I was cutting them the router bit slipped out and blew through the outside of the case. 

Instead of hidden miters, I glued the case together first, then cut through miters.  In this picture you can see the knot in the middle that I was designing around.  After designing the whole case around where that knot was, I milled the wood and the knot moved because it did not go straight through the piece of wood, so I had to make the whole case less wide. In the end, it didn't matter because once I decided to do through splines, I decided to veneer the entire outside of the case to hide the splines.

Here are all the splines in place.  They just need to be trimmed flush.  Part of the design was that the curve of the front matches the curve of the grain lines around the knot (which will now be hidden by veneer).

I didn't take pictures for a while because I got frustrated with some setbacks and was trying to get a lot done before Christmas.  Here I have the drawer constructed and I am veneering the front of it.  The 5/8 in thick drawer front was cut from 2 in thick stock to account for the serpentine shape.

This is what the veneer on the drawer front looks like (although the drawer is upside down in this picture.)  I learned a lot about veneering.  It is a time consuming process during which you need to be very careful to not crack the fragile veneers.  It is worth the work, though, for the beautiful results.

This is the mirror frame after I shaped it.  It is made from 6 trapezoidal pieces that are connected by the small white splines you can see in the picture. The shaping of this also uses a lot of wood for a thin result, but that is  what needs to be done to get curved shapes.  The splines provide a better glue surface making the joint much more durable. 

To apply the edge veneer I cut the pieces, glued them in place and then taped them down securely with a combination of masking and electrical tape.  This project uses a lot of tape to apply veneer.

This it the result of the edge veneer.

In the foreground I am flattening some pieces of veneer by applying a lot of pressure between two pieces of MDF with an excess of hand screws.  In the background I am applying the veneer to the side of the case with hand screws.

Once the sides and top of the case were veneered I was able to cut the shape of the front on the bandsaw to match the drawer front.  I did it in this order because once the drawer was veneered, I couldn't change its shape, but I could still shape the case to match it.

Here is a decent shot of the veneer on the top of the case.  It is the crotch of a walnut tree.  This is the area where a branch meets the trunk of a tree.  The growth rings in the trunk overlap with those in the branch, causing interesting grain patterns

Once the front was shaped it was time to apply veneer to the edge around the drawer.  More tape!  I used the piece I cut away when I veneered the drawer front, so there are continuous grain lines across the front of the whole piece.

This is the last bit of veneering. The mirror frame face was the most obnoxious part to veneer.  I had to cut small trapezoidal pieces and fit them together around the face so that all of the grain lines were pointing towards the middle.  The result was really nice though. 

While the veneer dried I began shaping the standards.  This tenon goes through to the bottom of the case where it will be held in place by a yolk.  This is not entirely necessary, but allows me to remove them once the project is done.  I chose to do this so that the mirror and standards can be removed for easy packing if it ever needs to be moved.  The tenon took a long time to cut because it is surrounded by angled shoulders on all sides.  It required a lot of set up on the table saw for a relatively small amount of cutting.

Veneering is done!  The stand is starting to come together.

Here I applied cherry stringing about the edges to protect the veneer, started to shape the standards and started to build the foot/ apron section.

Close up of the stringing and veneer.

The standards are fully cut out and ready to be carved.  The feet and apron are cut out and shaped.  The end is in sight, but there is still plenty to do.

Footstool update- ball and claw foot

Here's the fourth and most challenging foot- the ball and claw.  As with the rest of what we do it looks very complicated, but there is a process.  The roughing out, fairing and layout are similar to the other legs.

The knee is flatter for the carvings and the ankle is more square in order to lead into the toes.

This is the layout.  The outer circle is the max diameter of the ball.   That happens around the bottom knuckle.  The inner circle is the bottom circumference of the ball.  The toes all point to the corners.

We sawed in to define the toes.

We then carve straight up from the outer circle to get the maximum circumference of the ball, which we mark with a pencil line.

 We then chop down from the ridges we created when we bandsawed out the rough blank to find where the ball goes under the claw.  Once we have that point we can start to shape the ball.  This is done with a chisel whose sweep is the same as the circumference of the ball, which helps guarantee consistency in the shape.

The ball is starting to take shape.  We also form the bottom of the ball at this point.

Next we remove the web between the fingers to facilitate the carving of the fingers.

With that done just the shaping of the claws and fingers is left.   This is the part with the least process and most "doing it by feel" and "making it look good."

I am happy with the way it came out.

Tripod table update: construction complete

The construction on the tripod table is finally finished.  I was able to make the cupped top work by pulling it down with screws and adjusting its underside as well as the top fo the rails.  One of my favorite features of this table the overhang looks radically different depending on what angle from which you look at it.

Front View- normal overhang

Side View- drastic overhang

Now it is finishing time.

New Project: Footstool

One of the really cool projects that we do at school is a footstool with 4 different legs.  We are doing it in a workshop, so about half the people in the program are all working on it at the same time.  The idea is to learn how to do 4 different style legs in one project instead of 4 separate projects.  Plus, at the end you have a really cool and unique footstool.

My dad got me this awesome set of carving chisels as an early Christmas present so I could use them on the footstool.

The first one we worked on was the pad foot.  The foot and back of the ankle are turned on the lathe.

We then trace the patter on 2 sides of the leg.  We take it to the bandsaw where we cut along the pattern lines on one side.  Then we tape it back together and cut along the pattern lines on the other side.  This gives us the rough shape in this picture.

After faring the surface (smoothing off the saw marks) it is time to start shaping.  This leg is circular all the way from the bottom up to the knee.  We make it round using the 5:7 method that I described in my chamfer and quarter rounds post from last year.  The inner line on each side is the shape to line.  The outer 2 lines are the cut to lines.  I used my 1" bench chisel and my rasp to remove the material between the 2 lines closest to each corner creating an octagon.

After you have an octagon, you just have to knock off the corners, which creates a 16 sided shape, then a 32 sided one and eventually the facets become so small you can file/ card scrape/ sand them away and your leg is round.

The same principle applies on the foot, but is a little harder to do because the diameter changes much more quickly.

Here is the rounded leg.  It just needs a little cleaning up and it will be done.

This is the beginning of the slipper foot, roughed out on the band saw. 

The faring had to be be done really well, because this is the only leg that is not rounded.  I had to take the same amount off of each side to keep the line formed at the corner straight.

After the faring was done, we traced the pattern of the footprint on the bottom of the foot.  There was an inner outline and an outer outline.  We chopped off the material from the outer outline straight up to form the basic shape of the foot.  We then beveled from the edge we just created on the top of the the foot back down to the bottom of the foot to get the final shape.

This is the footstool with the pad and slipper foot done and the other two legs roughed out.  At this point I glued the rails into the two finished feet, but not the other two.

With the rails glued in, I was able to fit and then roughly shape the transition pieces on the bandsaw.  Then I glued then in place.

With all the transition pieces in I could glue the support blocks on the inside and start removing the extra waste pieces from the outside of the post.

The shaping on the trifid foot was similar to the other two.  We used the same basic method to round the leg, but took away more material at the knee in order to leave it broader, because we are going to carve a shell on it.  Like the slipper, we traced the inner and outer footprint on the bottom of the the foot.  We removed the material straight up from the outer outline to form the general shape of the foot. 

We then beveled back down from the top edge we just created to the inner outline to give the foot depth.  This was a little trickier because the bevel did not stay at a consistant angle the whole time.  The rest of the the shaping of the foot happens after we carve a "sock" up the ankle.