Working the mind

I thought it was difficult coming up with new designs for my pyrography given that I have only so many pen nibs, I think the truth is I got stuck on the first ones and just needed to stretch the mind.

Now that I have this one I can see two more developing from this one I also have to plan more on the bowl shape to accommodate the pattern, this small angled rim is an ideal place to show some embellishment but I do wonder what else is possible.

This bowl is Pohutukawa, its size is 240mm diameter and about 60mm high.

 


 

A whole new world

 This is my new adventure, I have rather a lot of Tawa (this bowl is Tawa) it is lovely in my eyes but it would be bland to many people and certainly improves with a little embellishment work you could say it is a blank canvas just ripe for some action, pyrography is one way to add embellishment, the world of pyrography is huge and here are just a smiggin as my ability is very limited at the moment.

With this pattern I have used 2 different size tips and a steady hand.

This pattern also used 2 different tips and some more of the steady hand.

A Dirty Lump of Wood

It started as a dirty piece of unrecognisable wood.

 I had already cut it in half and made one bowl so I knew it was end grain, it had a slight taper from one end to the other, I mounted it on the lathe and cleaned up both faces and in doing so made it parallel, it seemed all wrong to cut a piece off just to make a round bowl so it became a bigger bowl with 2 live edges.

The wood is kauri and very gummy kauri the dark streaks are the gum

there are 2 knots one of them is very gummy the other has no gum around it at all.

The first 2 photos of the top are of bare wood while the under side has an oil on it, it is an oil I use to sand it with, the oil has two purposes one is to stop the sandpaper clogging up with all the gum the by product is that it keeps the dust down.

I will leave it a few days for the oil to dry out before I put some finish

coats on it.

For a dirty old piece of wood that could have easily gone on the fire it is stunning now.

I've Been Doing

I was given some demolition timber taken from an house built when

rimu was used as studs

I was wondering what to make from it, after talking with an owner of a furniture shop bar stools seeded a good idea, I enjoyed the idea I could use the wood lathe for part of the machining and tried some techniques I had not used before, I decided the first one was too high so the other 4 have become shorter by 20mm and the seat has become wider, the hollow in the seat was created on the lathe and the scallops for the legs on the table saw, I still have one stool to assemble.

I started to weigh some bowls I had rough turned and left in paper bags to dry they weighed more than they did in February so I set about

turning a

finished product, the larger white one (Tawa) had a lot of drying cracks on the outside that I managed to cut away there was still one small split so I created feet so I could eliminate the crack, I liked the feet so I did them again on the smaller one, I have a sorby texturing tool that rarely gets used so after a little experimentation I got a result I liked around the edge and wiped a little stain into it to highlight the lines, I gave the stain the night to dry and turned some small shoulders to make the pattern stand out, now I was enthused and picked up the red

pohutukawa I could not bring myself to cut off the corners and waste the wood so it is a round inside a square that shows off some nice grain on those corners, I have another texturing tool I like to use but have never used it on a flat surface as I have done here, I wiped in some black stain and once dry I gave a light sand to show off the high spots, I think its another success and am pleased with all three pieces.

They are for sale contact can be made through the blog.

On with the easy tables

With the big difficult table finished and some wood to spare the macrocarpa slab lent its self to an outdoor rustic type, this slab being 90mm thick was difficult to cut with my limited resources, I was a leg short so I had to add some of my own wood, this picture shows it in an unfinished state it has now had some coats of Sikkens light oak water proofing.

The final table is a coffee table made using the left over kauri the white wavy stripe and the X rails are Lancewood an interesting tree that changes its leaf shape as it matures, they take a long time to mature and this was a big tree that had come down in a wind and must be old given its size.
I now have enough kauri left to make a chopping board and 2 small turned bowls.

 

Finished Table

My covid 19 project is finished, roughly 200 hours spent over the 8 weeks of our stay at home period.
It has been very rewarding to have the chance to work with such wood as this, and being able to dream of a design then make it happen, the icing on the cake is to see the owners of the wood so happy with what I have done.

Don't attempt this

I say "don't attempt this" because its not easy, I thought when I started cutting up this wood and making the table top it was a challenge, I wanted to save as much of the good wood as I could which is why the top has all those curved joints, it turned out very well and I was pleased I had made such an effort.
The idea for the legs came to me without giving much thought to what was involved, I did know what was involved because I have done something similar before, however I have found it to be a challenge, it has been good it has soaked up every moment of the 7 week lock down we have been through so for me I did not suffer in anyway from the lock down, the best part is I have only used 1/4 of a tank of petrol in the car since before we went into level 4.

This joint is what has kept me most entertained, this joint 4 times as there is one on each leg, also where the leg joins onto the table top, and in the picture the table is up side down.
The table is made so it can be dismantled this makes it easy for me to deliver it and should the owners ever move house they can get it out of the house, the table being one meter wide could be a problem getting it out of the doors.

All of the parts are now made, and have been assembled while up side down, the top is too heavy to be moving it about, yesterday I spent coating the legs and rails with Osmo oil but the over night temperatures were low and it did not dry so today I had the parts sat in the sun for a while.


The Osmo oil has brought the colours out of the wood and the contrast is more obvious, the Osmo coating only needs 2 coats so the end of building this table is very close then all the difficulties will be just a memories if I care to think back.

Good things take time

Its only been 2 weeks since I finished the top and started work on the legs and rails, the legs I had made before the kauri arrived and here I show what I hope to do on the legs eventual.
I now have some rails made that will span between the legs and some of the skins that will cover both the legs and the rails, the 2 rails will be covered with macrocarpa, this picture shows me laminating 10 pieces of 3.5mm thick together, I thought that if I used PVA glue it would take too long to get the glue on the 9 pieces and in the jig and it would have started to cure so my only option was to use epoxy glue that has a much longer open life, the epoxy shows a line more than PVA would have done but I thought it would enhance the look of the laminated curve, this piece is 40mm thick and will be cut into 4 of 7mm thick then glued onto the top and bottom of the rails.
Its a long slow process but now I look at the dates its only been 2 weeks, during that time I have put feet on the legs so the ply is unseen also I made some tops for the legs that will have a dowel sit in them to locate the top, I have cut some mortice holes that I got wrong and am now in the process of remaking, the tenons are made that will take the wedges, the wedges shown here are a temporary wedge and the final one will be much different.
The last photo shows me trimming off the excess wood after I had glued on the 2 sides of the legs, I have a toy shaper that is ideal for this kind of work.

   

What a Picture

Today we decided the top would be Osmo oil coated so that is one coat, in there I can see a sea scape.
I did another mock up of the legs and this time placed 2 chairs at the side of the table we decided there was plenty of room for 2 adults to eat dinner.
Now its time to get on with making the legs.
The 2nd picture is of the top and the mock up of the legs put away for the night.

Top ends

My table top now has 2 ends and while the photo shows only one of them having its finished curve both of them are actually finished, now there is a lot of sanding to do.
Half of the table in this photo has water on it, but 10 minuets later it was dry and it all looked the same, its been warm during the day here.
In these pictures the legs were mocked up temporally so I could see what the end result would be, how much room there would be for chairs, the 2 curved pieces that hold the legs together will be much bigger they will have tenons on the ends that push through a mortise in the legs with a wedge to hold it all together.
The legs will have some contrasting wood in a pattern running down front and back of the leg, I am hoping to move the legs further apart on the long side making it easier to get 2 chairs side by side.

The colours of bog kauri

I now have all those shapes glued together and the 2 long boarders, it has been a slow process, once I had worked out the method or maybe that is I worked out how to do this with the tools I have, a band saw could have been useful but then again the wood is heavy and it would have been difficult to manage these long pieced through a band saw on my own, my main tools have been a router and a jig saw for cutting those wavy lines, I do have a table saw a buzzer and a thicknesser all good machines for cutting straight lines.
The 2 outer straight pieces are a different colour so I would guess that they have not sat in a bog for years they are a very rich colour darker than a lot of kauri I have seen, the colours have been accentuated because I gave the whole top a wipe with water after I wiped off the excess glue 5 minuets later the top had dried and the colour was very different.
Now I only have the 2 ends to make and glue on this is going to take a little longer as it is going to involve some curves.

What a Treat in our Turmoil

How fortunate could I be, I have been asked to make something, anything from this wood, I paid a visit to the owners house and I suggested I could do a dining table.
I managed to get the wood into my man cave 4 days before the whole country shut down due to Covid19 and all our travel was restricted, Its a mammoth task working out how to rescue the good wood from the rot so I have a lot to do during our isolation.
I had made a sample leg, an idea that I thought was appealing
and it was approved, at the time I had thought I would put a similar stripe down the center of the table but the owners asked that I keep the table top simple, I didn't know at the time what the top had install for me, I made up a former and pressed up 4 legs out of ply wood before the wood arrived.
The wood on the floor is 2 pieces of kauri that must have been in a bog for years it is all very stained from what was in the earth some of it is very green, its grain is very close some of it shows less than 1mm of growth a year so I am playing with very old wood.
As can be seen it is a challenge to get enough wood for a top 1.6m X 1m, at one end there is some very circular grain that is good wood then with having to cut around the rot I decided there were to be more wavy joints than straight joints in keeping with the legs.
I had to get the wood flat to begin with, my buzzer is only 150mm


so too small for this my thicknesser is 330mm wide so I decided each board had to be no more than 330 wide then I had to attach skids to the underside in order to get a flat top when I put it through the machine, I made 2 pieces of old packing case straight and attached them using "builders bog" this dries fast and hard so by the time I have had a cup of tea I can carry on and feed it through the thicknesser, it was a slow process and the uncertainty of not knowing just how it would all go together or if I even had enough wood or if I would have to include some with defects.
I am now into my second week, I think I now have a plan to put these planks together for a top of the right size but it will be the rest of the week before it comes together.
I discovered early on that the big thick piece on the saw stools is not kauri but macrocarpa so there is half a plan to make 2 benches to go with the table.
The other long piece of 140mm X 50mm is kauri and will form the boarder around the top of the table.