Knot normally the way I do it…

A lady saw photos of a wine rack I posted for sale on craigslist and contacted me. I invited her to the shop to see what different pieces I have in my inventory. She had a corner in her dining room where she wanted to place it and we discussed dimensions.

She looked at completed racks and I explained how the modular nature effected the over all dimensions. She gravitated to a piece that was constructed from Black Walnut and Sapele, and said she really liked the redish color of the Sapele… also know as African Mahogany. She ask what color of stain I used.

I had to laugh and said that there was no stain, I use different hardwoods to show off their natural color. There is no reason to use a stain. I do however use stains on the pieces I make out of soft wood like Pine, Fir or Cedar. I showed her a couple of those different  pieces and some raw wood to illustrate how washed out the natural wood looks generally. She wanted, if not to match, at least compliment her dining room table.

She ask how much the Walnut/Sapele piece was and I said it was three times as expensive as the Fir/Pine ones. It was too small for her but she really liked it. I had to laugh again. I said, you have good taste, your like my wife. She sees a red car and says, wow that is a beautiful car, I want one of those. I say, baby you have good taste… that is a Ferarri. How about that red car over there? No, I don’t like that so much. Well Babe, that’s a Toyota.

I had three racks made from Alder that were recently glued up but I had not made tops for yet. They were the right dimension and bottle capacity for her. I showed her the two most common tops I make… Mitered edge band, with or without a contrasting feature strip, and the Breadboard style with through tenon joint.

She liked the Breadboard style, saying that the way I leave the tenon protruding matched her table’s styling. I told her that I never stain hardwoods, but that furniture manufacturers routinely apply stains to Alder. I pulled out my drawer full of sample stain cans and proceeded to wipe stain on some Alder scraps. The first one or two colors were spot on for her. So I made a Breadboard top, stained the piece and applied three coats of polyurethane.

She picked it up yesterday and said it looked great. As much as I would love to be purist, use highly figured exotic woods and tradition oil and wax finishes… I’m not a snob. In the real world, it’s only other woodworkers that really know the difference between a Ferrari and a Toyota… or care. While it’s Knot normally how I do things, it pays the bills. I did like the way it turned out and more importantly so did she. Thanks for the support… another one goes to a good home.

Knot a Wine Rack…

It has been about a year since I started this blog. 2010 was one of the worst years I have lived through. Almost nothing went right, I never caught a break and almost every single thing I tried to do, blew up in my face. I feel like a complete failure.

Having said that, I’m not alone. It was hard for almost everybody I talk with. I got a message from WordPress telling me enough people viewed my blog to fill two 747 air planes. Lot of good it did. I got very few comments and even less interest in my wine racks. It’s very disapointing and some what frustrating.

I’m going to try an keep the shop going, but I don’t see how. I don’t have any emotional attachment to it really. Carpentry and wood working is what I have been doing for a living for a long time and I don’t really know what else to do. I going to try and keep going until I can’t anymore. I enjoy the work but it’s not who I am or what I’m about as a person, just a way to try and make money.

This is a piece I built last month for a lady. It is to be used as a night stand. The shelves are for shoes and slippers. She gave me some rough idea of dimensions that would fit in the room and how high it should be for a reading lamp.

I looked through my piles of hardwood lumber and dried logs, but there wasn’t enough to make all the parts I needed in the sizes I wanted. Here is a shot of some Clear Verticle Grain Fir that I re sawed. It came out of a nasty looking old 6 x 12 beam, salvaged from a construction site. While it had some defects and a big knot, it is beautiful material.

It must have been a giant old growth tree by the close growth rings and how many there are. I’m always in awe when I think that every grain was a year… we must be looking at decades… generations to grow this tree.

Here is what’s left of a 2 x 12 somebody gave me fifteen years ago. It has some curly grain to it that is very delicate and most gorgeous. I used it for the legs and the laminated edge-band on the top.

I love the look and color of fir. It is very difficult to work with because it can be splintery and it’s not hard enough to resist dings and dents in furniture. I went with it anyway because it was free. Here are a bunch of parts and you can see that I cut the drawer fronts out of the face frame and glued it back together so that the grain would run through.

Here I am with the tenon cutting machine I built, making round tenons to join the legs with the shelves. I call it the pencil sharpener, because it’s like sharpening big pencils.

When working with fir, you need to have very sharp blades, bits and planer knives or else you get heart breaking tear out or splinters. Sometimes you may run a bunch of pieces through the router table very carefully and think you have it licked… then WHAM, a blow out that rips the piece apart so that the material is wasted.

There are tricks to dealing with this like “Climb Cutting” where you run the work backwards agains the bit so it doesn’t grab the splintery grain…. or making multiple passes, taking a small amount at a time… or both. But, still you never know when the fir will bite you.

I was lucky this time, because I used every trick I know to machine all these parts right the first time. I barely had enough material to design this piece and no spare boards for mistakes and mishaps. In the end, there was barely enough scrap to kindle a fire!

I didn’t make the same mistake that I did on the last piece I built where I flipped the face frame in my haste to glue up the carcase. It’s subtle, but for those who know to look, they are rewarded with the grain running through the frame and drawer fronts.

I mortised my signature drawer pulls that matched the grain too. The last two from a batch of pulls I ran years ago. It takes six router set-ups to make them, so I do it in big batches of all kinds of woods so i don’t have to stop in the middle of a piece and make some.

The thing that took me the longest and was the most difficult, was to design the shelves. The boards I had were just too narrow to use. So I had to come up with a way to make them wider. I drew a dozen solutions but the one I liked the most couldn’t be built. I mean I could draw it, but there was no way to glue and assemble it… looked nice though.

The feature strip in the top is from my dwindling stash of old growth California Redwood. You can’t see in the photos, but there are small “Bird’s Eyes” in the Redwood.

There were two defects in the board I used for the field in the top. I could cut one out, but not both. So, the squiggle you see is a huge splintery check that ran through the whole beam. I glued it and clamped it. When it was planed off it came out smooth. Hey, it was made by hand! This ain’t IKEA.

I sprayed three coats of poly-urethane varnish on it, sanding between the first split-coat and second full wet coat. Then I rubbed out the top coat with double ought steel wool. It gets rid of any sheen and makes it velvety smooth to the touch. It’s virtually water and alcohol proof and pretty stain resistant too. Sometimes candle wax will stain it, but it is the toughest finish I know how to apply.

Over time, it will get used, dented, scratched and dinged. Like I’ve said before, some day after I’m long gone, somebody will pick this piece up, see my signature on the bottom and know that it took took time out of my life to make.

What Next?

Knot How It’s Supposed To Work…

It can start with a need. In this case, a friend has been remodeling his house and needed to put a key in a door at the end of a hall. All he told me was that he wanted a table to put a lamp on, so he could see the door knob, and that the space in the corner of the hall was 10″ by not more than 18″.

I like to have some kind of symmetry in my designs and the one dimension that seemed fixed was the 10″. Quickly I thought, how about 10″ deep by 15″ wide and 30″ tall… multiples of five.

I looked through my piles of wood and lumber for some walnut but didn’t really find anything that jumped out at me. I uncovered some gnarly pieces of Red Oak that my friend had given me last year and I’d completely forgotten about. I planed off the sides to see some nicely figured pieces.

They were just  29″ long, perfect legs for a 30″ table height. I squared them up on the jointer and thickness planed them. There were a few defects, checks, splits and splintery grain. I also thought because the piece was pretty small, I needed to cut them down so they would make sense within the scale of the piece. Hopefully I could cut out the defects too.

I fooled around with a bent piece of quarter round moulding that I use with a string to adjust the bow for marking curves. My idea was to make curved legs and cut out the defects. I cut a piece of plywood the size of the leg blanks for a template.

The hardest thing to do was figure out the sequence of cuts so I’d have a flat surface to run the against the fence and get a square part with which to join the carcase. Here is the first cut…

…then flip it 90 degrees for the second cut, and still have a flat surface to run against the table.

Legs.

That was the end of the day. I had a few random pieces of Red Oak in my stash but not enough to do much. I left the shop that night about eleven thirty in a driving rain. I got to the end of block where there is a new and used resteraunt supply business. They always have stacks of pallets and cardboard set out for the recyclers. There was an Oak counter with white melamine top and shelves sitting in the rain. I got out, kicked the particle board sides and top off it, and stuck these nice raised panels in the truck,

Nice stash of free material, except that when I cut them apart, the panels had been run through a sander or planer and were only 9/16″ thick. Couldn’t use them for a top like I hoped. Oh well, the styles and rails were still 13/16″, so I cut them up. I couldn’t use the panels, so I rummaged around and came up with this…

… a piece of Goncalo Alves that one of my shop neighbors gave me. It was an

off cut from a big board he used to make cabinet doors.Next I laminated pieces of

the Red Oak from the styles and rails on the salvaged counter and laminated

Black Walnut for the feature strips in my new top.

Next, I miter the edge band and…

… and glue the top together. Next I made the carcase sides, cut out the drawer front.

I make the pieces a little wider than I want, so I can rip the drawer front out and glue the frame back together. The you see the grain pattern run through the piece. At least that’s the idea. Next I machine the tenons for joining to the legs.

Next I machine the mortices in the legs on my router table equipped with an IPM fence. Same deal, it was harder to figure out the sequence of cuts, so I had a flat surface to run against the table and fence, than it was to machine the parts.

The IPM machine allows me to make extremely tight fitting joints. I have to make them at least sloppy enough, so that when they get wet with glue, they slide together and won’t wipe the glue off the joint or have to force it together. Every click of the detent wheel moves the fence a thousandth of an inch.

I sand all my parts then glue up. Unfortunately, in my haste to get everything square and true, I flipped the front backwards and by the time I realized it, I couldn’t pull it apart again, the glue dries that fast.

I know and you know, but nobody else will every know. I make runners that fully house the drawer, so I can have tight fitting drawers that slide smoothly and positively. I should have dovetailed the drawer sides, but once I have made a mistake that I can’t or don’t want to spend the time recovering from, I just want to finish and see if the overall design works for me. Still, I make traditional box joints to hide the dado for the drawer bottom.

The drawer bottom was a scrap of Jatoba. I looked through a big box of my signature drawer pulls. It took me years to come up with pulls that felt good in your fingers when you open the drawers. I make them by the dozens because it takes six router setups to create them. I don’t want to stop and make one in the

middle of a piece.

 

Unfortunately, I used all The Red Oak pulls on a previous table,

but at the bottom of the box was one I made from Spalted Apple. Here I route a

mortice in the drawer front to accept a tenon on the back of the pull. A perfect

color match!

Finally I put it all together, did some finish sanding and applied three coats of a

water based lacquer.

When I showed it to my friend, he told me his father had worked at a millwork company in Tigard, Oregon for thirty years and that the pieces he had given me, were  rejected turning blanks he brought home to burn forty years ago. My only cash outlay was for the Lacquer.

I was disappointed that I didn’t get the grain to run through the front of the carcase, but I like the way the legs came out.  I’ll put them in my repertoire and do better next time… maybe in Black Walnut.

My friend really like the piece and thought it was better that he envisioned.

Wine Enthusiasts Christmas Gifts…

What to get the wine connoisseur or alcoholic wino for Christmas? How about a counter top wine rack?

KTW #1810a

Gen-u-wine Knot Traditional Woodworks wine racks. Produced from local FAS Kiln Dried Alder lumber. (The Forest Stewardship Council is creating sustainable forests worldwide, producing and certifying sustainable lumber for a growing industry of green builders.) The through tenons in the  bread board style tops are made from Oregon Black Walnut logs I have dried and milled.

15" x 15" x 14" tall

Further more,  I machine parts and hand assemble these wine racks from rips and off cuts, gleaned from the custom upholstered furniture business next door.  If I didn’t take it, they would burn it or put in in the dumpster.

I apply three coats of bar top poly-urethane that is stain resistant and virtually water proof. I use a flat sheen so that you can see the natural color of the wood and the grain, not a glossy wet looking finish.

Because my design is modular, I can make four bottle, six bottle and eight bottle racks, that will fit on a counter top or sideboard. I can build them with my miterd tops too… like this four bottle by two shelf  model.

KTW #1710

Again, Alder hardwood with Oregon Black Walnut for the feature strip in the top.

23" x 15 1/2" x 14" tall

So many combinations and ways to construct these wine racks. I have some really interesting harwood logs that are drying but not ready to make parts out of yet. I would like to make these from Black Walnut or White Oak eventually too.

If you have some floor space, maybe a unique 36″ tall (counter top height), 20 bottle rack to display your collected wine treasures.

KTW #1610a

The checker board top for this piece was made from some kind of fruit wood, probably apple, for the light squares and Black Walnut.

These legs were milled from a very heavy, hard, dense, tropical wood that a friend of a friend got for me. He works for a lumber importer that was doing inventory and found these big planks buried under dust and debris for years. When they couldn’t identify the planks, didn’t know where they came from, I fortunately ended up with them.

The bread board ends are Sapele, the through tenons are Australian Lacewood and the shelf racks are Alder.

I cut out three of these racks, but only had enough material for two tops, so someday I will come across some nice lumber and make a different top on legs and shelves like these.

KTW #1610b

The top for this piece I made from Alder for the light squares and highly figured Balck Walnut for the dark squares.

23" x 15 1/2" x 36" tall

As much as I try make these in a production fashion, it’s still mostly one offs or two offs like these examples.

I tried to cut boards so that the dark figured grain pattern looks like it runs through lighter squares. My photographs don’t really do it justice.

About the time I get pieces ready to apply a sprayed on finish, I’m already thinking about ways to put the next ones together. There is still time to make some special presents. What is next?

Making Something Out of Nothing. What’s Next?

A friend of mine used to say that if there was and easy way, or a hard way, to do something… I will always choose the hard way.

Last fall I decided to try being a vendor at the Portland Saturday Market. Partly just to see if I could actually sell my products, but partly to get feedback about the whole wine rack idea, examples of my design ideas and craftsmanship. I told myself I would give it a year to see how the Market could work for me. If I didn’t try, I wouldn’t really know how it worked.

Above: A piece of fire wood I pulled from a stack. It’s some kind of fruit wood, maybe Apple, but could be from a Plum or Pear tree. Below: I cut some highly figured pieces of Black Walnut, this Apple log and contrasting pieces of Alder. then I cut a tongue and groove with my IPM Machine on a router table with up-cut solid carbide spiral bit.

The red and blue crayon marks are to tell me to route either a tongue or groove.

I tried to organize the pieces so that the grain pattern continues in order through contrasting light/dark pattern.

This experiment in joinery has one more row than the first top I made two months ago. People seeing this first wine rack top said, “Look Honey, we could play chess and drink wine!” I hadn’t even thought of that in terms of  it’s graphic representation. I was just trying to make a big top out of small scraps of wood. This time around I added another row to make it look more like a real chess/checker board. I would need two additional rows to actually play a game on it, but this time it looks more like a game board. Because the tops are rectangular, the “squares” wouldn’t turn out square.

It is very time-consuming and tedious to machine parts and glue this up. Adding two more rows so it was a real game board would just add more work.

I still might try it some day but I need to drop back and punt as they say. For me the game is to design things around “FREE” material. It would be too easy to design beautiful, complicated woodworking ideas and just go to the lumber yard and buy expensive, highly figured exotic materials. In the end, I still need to sell them. That is the trick.

One of my neighbors at the shop gave me a two huge planks of some kind of tropical hardwood. He got it from a friend that works at a big wholesale lumber importer. In an inventory they found three big planks covered in dust at the back of the warehouse. Not knowing where the lumber came from or what it was, the friend gave it to my neighbor, who after a while had no use for it. So, it came to me. It is very hard, heavy and dense beautiful material. I used it for legs and rather than cut up big pieces of material, I used off-cuts and rips of Alder wood from my furniture building neighbors to make the racks.

KTW #1610a

It was a beautiful warm summer Saturday and the Market was pretty packed. Just as I hoped, hundreds of people were sucked into my little experiment! I can’t say it enough… If I had a nickel for every person that rubbed the tops, I wouldn’t have to sell them!!! Literally hundreds of people stopped to look at these two pieces and tell me that my craftsmanship was like art work. Great, just what I don’t need to hear anymore.

KTW #1610b

Above: You can see my first “checker board” top in the back. In close to three months, I still haven’t been able to sell it. Despite being told repeatedly that my prices were “very reasonable” or “too cheap”. I chopped fifty bucks off the price of it this day and still didn’t sell it! I tagged the two new pieces at $175 and reduced the prices of everything else at least $25. Very few folks looked at my other pieces or the checker topped piece in back for $125. I handed out a huge stack of business cards, flyers and talked to more people than I can remember about building them custom racks. Not only did I not sell one thing all day, but I never got a single call or e-mail for custom work.

KTW 1610b detail of top

Above: Traditionally styled bread board ends made from Sapele, and the through tenons are Australian Lacewood.

So, I’m coming up on one year of doing the Portland Saturday Market. What have I learned? Expensive lessons:

#1  The only people who are making money at the PSM is the PSM.

#2  Most of the PSM vendors are barely scraping by and many of vendors I talk to are going to quit.

#3  The public comes to the Portland Saturday Market just for cheap entertainment and the social hang out, not to actually buy anything. The economy in Portland is destroyed. If anybody has a job or any money… they ain’t spending it!!

#4  The people who run the Market have a hard task in trying to deal with a City hall and other public agencies that don’t really care to help the Market out. The Vendors who should care about the future of the Market and Market policy, don’t care at all. Having attended the last two membership members meetings with maybe twenty of the same long time vendors in attendance, and the three or four hundred vendors that show up each week conspicuously absent… apathetic would be a good description.

#5  If participation in the market, got my name/brand out there and worked as an advertising tool, it might be worth paying the monthly membership fee, daily booth fees. But to work all week, then get up early Saturday, set up the booth stand there all day, then pack up and go home for a twelve-hour day after not selling one thing to cover the cost of gas and lunch… I must be insane!

#6  I can’t afford to do the Market any more. The half-assed good Market days I had were off set by three bad days. It doesn’t look like this is the right venue for my endeavour. The PSM organizers don’t really care about me or most of the vendors for that matter. They know that there is no shortage of broke, laid off, out of unemployment insurance fools, that will give the direct marketing thing a shot.

The decision whether I should try to continue doing the Market is made for me. It’s not working for me anyway I slice it. I’m sure that there are other things I can try or do… but what ever it is, it needs to be easier.

Onward…

The Art of Being an Artist…

KTW #0305

I sold this console table at the Portland Saturday Market two weeks ago. I always ask folks who purchase my work, to send me pictures when my wine racks are in their new home stocked full of bottles. I got this photo in an e-mail. Pretty cool, my creation has found a good home. This piece was one of the first few prototype wine racks I built back in 2005. I had it in my house for a year or so, just to live with it, look at it and see how the glue joints and spray finish held up. Then it was in storage for a while and finally I need space in the shop, so I’m selling off my prototype/models.

I got to thinking about how I am  keeping track of the products I make here in scenic Portland . I use a pretty simple system, The first two numbers are the sequence through year and the last two are the  year. So this piece was the third one made in 2005, the year I built this shop and started branding the work.

Sutter Street circa 1989

In all the years I have built furniture, cabinets and woodworking projects in my shops, I never thought to sign the work. I ran across these photos recently and remembered how I began to sign and number my work.

In ’89 I was working off of scaffolding four stories off the ground, restoring the facade of an ornate old Victorian set of flats on Sutter Street in San Francisco. Somebody way in the past shot a gun into the air. Falling to earth, the bullet made a hole in the metal roofing that covered this conical roof. Throughout many years, water leaked into the attic through this dime sized hole. It drained into the front outside wall, down four stories all the way to the ground. With the exterior siding and trims constructed out of Redwood, they did not decay, but much of the wall and roof framing beneath it rotted away and the nails were crumbs of rust.

Above: a shot of the old rusted metal roof and the new galvanized sheet metal flashing I made to adhere the new “Torch Down” roofing membrane. Below: the finished roof.

My job was to gut the interior of the three flats and completely remodel the building. There was money in the budget to repair the facade of the building but not enough to address the horrible conditions that were hidden by 80 years of paint. My guys and I took most of the front apart to repair and replace the deteriorated framing and put it back together to appear as it did originally. We had a small carpentry shop set up in the basement, but much of the work of reconstructing the attic dormers and refurbishing the windows and trims, was done by hauling a table saw, chop saw, router table, etc, up on the scaffolding and cutting parts next to the work.

All of these big crown moldings I milled to match the existing shape down in the basement and then cut the joints up on a small platform. Meanwhile a painter spent three months stripping, sanding, prepping and priming the whole facade.

Above: Detail of galvanized metal flashing I fabbed in place. This shot is between the twin circle head dormers that light the attic, which I turned into a huge Master Bedroom and Bath with Jacuzzi. Everything on the exterior was caulked with a high-tech, flexible, paint-able adhesive caulking as it was assembled. I wish I could have used copper for the flashing, but there just wasn’t any money in the budget for any of this to begin with. It will still last another eighty years. Below: Owens Corning roofing material.

I can’t really relate how difficult and tedious it was to repair the siding and trims. It might have been easier and better to strip the whole front of the building and make it new, but there just wasn’t the money. Plus, we ran into costly problems restoring the curved windows and plumbing and mechanical issues too. When these places were built, they had gas light fixtures, no electricity, no hot water or heat.

Above: Column bases surrounding the attic windows. These dormers were the most time-consuming to repair, because the water leaked there first and the original construction was built to look good, not last for a hundred years of weather. Below: The circle head dormer roofs with new roof flashing.

I wish I had pictures of the interiors but these are the only photos I thought to take. The reason I tell this story is that I spent nearly a year of my life working on this building and had a few extremely close calls where I could have died in an instant.

October 17th, I called it a day for the first time in three months and sent my guys home ten minutes early. A few seconds later I was on the Central Freeway thinking, where is everybody? It’s rush hour and this place is deserted! I got out to the Candlestick Grade, saw the ball park and I remembered why we called it early… to go home and watch the World Series! That’s where everybody was. Seconds later, down by the SF Airport the magnitude 7.1 Loma Preita earthquake struck as I was driving.

Long story short, that part of the Central Freeway was eventually demolished from seismic failure. The building I was working on survived with minor drywall cracks. The seismic upgrades we did worked as designed. I had to go back and finish the job because the scaffolding rental cost a $1000 a week. The Saturday after the main quake, I was working on the pair of  circle head dormers that lit the attic room. A 5.3 aftershock went off followed by a 5.2 about twenty minutes later. The scaffolding “walked”  twenty-two inches down the street and didn’t topple over because I tethered it to the building. It got my attention for sure. We were so close to getting our carpentry work done, we just kept on going. People were streaming out of all the buildings surrounding us. The looked up at us and yelled, you guys are nuts!

My painting contractor was working on stripping 80 years of paint from the face of the dormers. He called me over to show me where the original carpenter had signed his work in a beautiful big flowing cursive scrip. I have built some pretty cool stuff for people with guts, vision and big checking accounts, but I never thought to sign my work. It was good enough to sign their checks.

Since I built my little shop here in the “UnderWorld”, I have been signing and dating the pieces I build. Not because I think it’s great work or that I am an artist, but  simply to track my production and have inventory control.

I think my furniture pieces will probably outlast me. Who knows, someday in the 100th year of Antiques Road Show, the expert will see the serial #0305 and say this was an early piece, probably a prototype for what was to come. I wonder if that carpenter had any idea that his work would survive into the next century. In in ’04 I did a remodel/addition on a small commercial building here in Multnomah Village. The latest tenants have already torn off part of the front of the building and changed it again, so nothing lasts.

If the earthquakes hadn’t happened, I might have thought to add my name under his signature, or put a time capsule in one of the walls for some future restorer to discover.

I would like to think that my little pieces, just as objects, have a shot at surviving long after I am gone. I hope I can hang on here long enough to keep on designing and working. I have years worth of ideas and sketch books. As long as I can keep finding nice material, I think I can make pieces that people see and connect with. I hope I can continue to experiment and grow as a woodworker.

I feel like it has taken me five years be able to manufacture these wine racks pretty quickly on a small scale. Finding great material that will make the exercise worth my time and effort is going to be my biggest challenge.

When I look at objects, cars, buildings, art, etc, I always wonder about the minds that had the idea, drew the plan and made the things. I wonder how much time was spent, how much energy, how much frustration, what the feelings were at different points in the process. Was there a single person or a collaboration, different designers and builders? Were they pleased, disappointed or just glad to have work?

Someday a person that has done a little woodworking or is a person that has been involved in projects of any kind, might have the same thoughts looking at one of my pieces. They will turn it over and see my KTW brand and signature. They will know that they are looking at time from someone’s life.

The next trick is to figure out a way sell this stuff. The art of being an artist is getting paid for it.

The Parade @ Portland Saturday Market

Finally the summer weather is here. Saturday and Sunday were busy days at the Portland Saturday Market.

The infamous space #599... next to the porta-potties. Not that bad, you know... eventually everybody makes their way over here.

Usually I pick spaces over on the west side of Naito Parkway near the Skidmore Fountain. I have never been on the east side they call the pavilion, near the river. It was definately different. Many vendors came by and ask if I was new because they had never seen me before. I took a quick spin through the pavilion and realized that I had never seen most of the vendors either because I’m always sitting on my booth across the street. A vendor that had never seen my stuff stopped by to talk. She remarked that my prices were very reasonable… then looked at the tag on the checker board piece and said, “This one is way too cheap!”

I was talking to a couple that were interested in maybe giving the PSM a try to sell woodworking products. I tried to relate my experience so far. I said I can tell you what happens but many times I have no clue why. Take this checker board topped wine rack for instance. People see it from 40 feet away and make a bee line for it. Sometimes I don’t think that they even know what it is, just that I looks interesting. Every minute someone will walk up, feel the finish, oh… ahh, nice work!

$ .05

I quipped the line I use: “If I had a nickel for every time someone rubs their hand on the surface… I wouldn’t have to sell them!” In two months I still haven’t sold the piece.

$ .10

Right at that point two young women were in the process of an extra vigorous hand rub.

I said, “Now these ladies are into me for about a quarter because that is more than a rub… they are fondling it!

More that a rub...

When I explained, they reached into their purses…

Fondling fees... $.25 each!

That’s what I’m talking about! We all laughed so hard. It’s great to laugh. For the rest of the day I tried to ambush photos, but they are mostly sneaky and too fast for me. I wouldn’t cut it as paparazzi.

Is two hands a dime?

This delightful lady was in town looking for a place to live and would like to have one of my pieces for her new place.

She copped a quick feel for the road...

So it went all weekend:

Finally this lady when confronted with her unabashed fondling said,

"Thanks for letting me fondle your wood!"

My thanks to all who bought wine racks from me this weekend! I appreciate the support.

Custom Wine Rack

A few weeks after the Turkey-Rama Experience, I received an E-mail from a couple that had talked to me about needing a wine rack. They joined a wine club and were accumulating bottles just a little faster than they could enjoy them. They liked the idea that I was trying to use recycled, reclaimed or salvaged materials. I explained how my design was modular in nature and could expand in height and width in increments of bottles and racks. After some consideration they sent me dimensions that would fit in a space appropriate for their need to store about fifty bottles. This is not the tallest rack I have produced, but the largest capacity and widest at nine bottles by seven racks for sixty-three bottles.

They also mentioned that it was more for storage and not for formal display. In other words, “It didn’t really have to look as nice as the rest of my stuff”. I began by looking at what kinds of material I had on hand and decided to use Pine for the racks and top, fir for the legs.  As I began to mill the parts for the racks I realized that the stretchers were so long they were warping slightly making it hard for me to machine and assemble the racks.

I have neighbors in a nice big shop that make beautiful, high quality upholstered couches and chairs. John from MAD Furniture caters to the professional interior design trade and goes through stacks of kiln dried Alder hardwood for the frames. He gives me long rips and short off cuts from his milling operations. It is perfect for my needs. So I shelved the parts and started over with Alder for the rack parts.

Once I changed the plan, I used material from some logs I salvaged and dried two years ago. I call them the Bertha Blvd. Logs… because that is where I saw them laying on a sidewalk for a three weeks, after a tree service trimmed trees away from power lines. I’m not sure what kind of trees but my guess was Western Maple. The legs were milled out of some Poplar pallet skids I found years ago and have used on many projects. These were the last pieces of that material.

Some of the Bertha Blvd. logs were pretty clear, but this one had some worm holes and small loose knots, so I decided to distress the top rather than to fill the defects. We weren’t going to apply any finish to the rack when it was just pine and fir, but the Alder racks and Poplar legs planed out so nicely that I left them smooth and only used my distressing tools to gently beat the top, then apply boiled linseed oil.

While some folks don’t like the distressed look others do. I began to experiment with distressing techniques after I worked so hard milling salvaged pine and fir lumber to glean clean clear material for furniture pieces, tediously sanding them smooth… only to have my heart broken when they were dinged, scratched or dented from the slightest knock. I found this hand-made meat tenderizer in a dumpster and I broke out my MIG welder to weld nuts, bolts and washers on a broken ratchet wrench. By gently spinning them over a surface I have instant antiques. I might be sleazy from a fine furniture standpoint… but the customer specified not too nice! I’m no woodworking legend like Sam Maloof or James Krenov, but the pieces are made with power tools to avoid the drudgery and assembled by hand using traditional joinery techniques. Here are breadboard ends with Black Walnut through tenons.

Still, it’s hard for me to not do the best job I can. My roots are in rough carpentry and framers have a saying when a guy is taking to long or doing too nice a job… “Hey, this ain’t no Piano”. No, it’s a 40″ X 40″ X 15″, sixty-three bottle wine rack.

Thanks so much to the Pitkins for supporting my efforts. I glad it went to a good home.

Turkey-Rama Experience

July 9th and 10th, I did a street fair in McMinnville, Oregon at the heart of the wine country. They called it Turkey-Rama, because there used to be many turkey farms in the area years ago and they had this get together. The name changed throughout time, but it was changed back and this was the 50th anniversary.  I have traveled through that area for years, stopped for a meal once or twice, but never really spent any time there. It is a slice of classic Americana. A small farm town that is growing in fits and starts, trying to come to grips with a changing, state, nation and world.

Friday there were so many people out cruzin’ up and down enjoying the beautiful 95 degree day. But I only talked to two people who even stopped to look. I took a lap up and down the street to see who the other vendors were and noticed that there were more wine bars, tasting rooms and  other business that had wine related gifts and gourmet cooking shops, than I have ever seen.

There was DJ set up in the intersection a few hundred feet away who played a pretty nice mix of music. Being a long time musician and music fan, I talked to him. I was going to stay in town overnight and ask if there were any bars or clubs in town that had live music. He said I should have stayed in Portland because that is where the music is happening… there are only three bars in town and only one might have live music. I said isn’t there even a sleazy biker bar with a blues band on the outskirts of town somewhere? He said no, McMinnville is full of yuppie wine sippers. All right, my demographic!

What is funny is, that I closed up the booth early when the light began to fade and wandered down the street in search of the place that might have music… and a cold beer! Lo and behold there is a hot blues band set up on a stage in an intersection two blocks down. I had just seen these guys a week before at the giant Poertland Waterfront Blues Festival over 4th of July and they just tore it up in front of fifteen thousand people. Ty Curtis Band is a young up and coming group from the Salem area that is the future of blues music. I caught the last half hour of a smoking set. I have been following these young cats for a few years and they are the real deal. Hank Shreve is a great blues harp player and the perfect partner in crime for Ty.

After getting my soul vaccination I was off in search of that cold beer. I went into the place that I will not name, because it is part of a famous oregon chain of businesses that I have much respect for. I ordered my favorite micro brewed ale and it was served in not only a warm glass but a hot one right out of the dishwasher. I only drink on occasion, and had been looking forward to this all day. What a disappointment!

Saturday was cooler and the crowd was much bigger. I talked to a lot of people and got my usual compliments. Just as I was thinking that I might not even sell anything and paid for a booth fee only to stand in the heat all day to do it… I sold a piece. A little later a couple bought my two nicest Black Walnut wine racks.

Finally I talked to a couple that loved my stuff but had specific space requirements and went home to measure. I never heard back from them but that is usually the way it goes much of the time. However, that is not the end of the story. To be continued…

The Experiment in Direct Marketing Continues

When I am a vendor at the Portland Saturday Market, wine festivals or street fairs, I hand out lots of cards and flyers to people who say they are interested in buying one of my wine racks or having a custom rack made for them. Very few of those people ever contact me. For a while there I didn’t know what to think. Maybe this is not the way to go about selling my products.

Possibly wine racks were something too large for purchase from a craft vendor, except that I have sold some of the largest wine racks I have ever produced to people who walked up, said, “Wow these are cool, I have been looking and have never seen anything like this!” Then bang, they whip out a couple hundred bucks cash and take them away.

I believed going into this,  setting up a vendors booth at markets was partly to get my products out in front of people and get some feedback about them. Secondly, I might take orders for custom work, or have folks look on-line here at other inventory that I couldn’t bring out to show.

Finally a couple that talked to me at the PSM, e-mailed me and set up an appointment to come to the shop to see what kinds of wine racks I had. They ended up buying one of the larger pieces that got great comments every time I showed it.

There was another piece of furniture in the shop that they liked too. It was the first in a series of tables that I made a few years ago as a design exercise. They bought this one also.

I called them “eighth note” tables because I wanted the legs to look like musical notation. Back in my previous life as a contractor, I worked on a new house doing finish carpentry. The flooring contractors installed pre-finished Brazilian Cherry flooring throughout that house and two others next door. They made a huge pile of off cuts and mistake cuts to haul to the dump. I ask if I could have it. They said it’s all trash and they gave me some opened boxes of material that they couldn’t return also.

I wrapped the entryway columns with specially milled Mahogany

One of the most difficult jobs I ever tackled

You can see a stairway inside the front door. It was metal framed and I fabricated, installed 2″ thick Brazilian Cherry stair treads.

You can see the flooring material, and I salvaged left over material that was used to edge around the stair wells.

I planed the finish off the flooring and laminated pieces together for the legs and stretchers, then I took short off cuts left from the thick stair treads to glue up a laminated butcher block top with the thick edging material as the border.

The shelf was carved with a router jig out of a big piece I had in my lumber stash for many years. I think I got it at an auction.

This table was pretty tall at about 38″.

The second variation was a little shorter at 30″. When all was said and done I think I had something like 90 hours into this one table. Some exercise!

And this was a coffee table, more or less square at about 26″ in height. Once I did one the others were faster… but that is not saying much.

Thank you to Kristy and Deb for supporting my efforts. I’m glad they went to a good home!

Clear vertical Grained Fir and California Redwood with a marble tile top.