New Website Online

Over the past few weeks, I created a new website to help market my furniture. The site is:

www.steveneilwoodwork.com

Photos of Walnut Hall Table

I met with Ingeborg Suzanne a couple of weeks ago and spent a few hours shooting photos of my Walnut Hall Table. Here are some of the pictures that she produced.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Completed Walnut Hall Table

I finally finished the walnut hall table and presented it to the class on Friday evening. We all enjoyed a few drinks and celebrated the piece. It's nice to have it done, I was itching to get started on something new.

Here are some pictures that I took of the piece in the shop. I'll be getting some professional pictures taken soon, I'll post those once I have them. In the meantime, enjoy these...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Gluing Drawer Pulls

During the past few days I made the drawer pulls for the eight drawers in my walnut hall table. Yesterday I glued them in. It was neat to see all the drawers lined up on the bench. The pulls were milled from maple and matched the color of the curly maple drawer fronts. I mocked up different pulls. My original intention was to use shaker style pulls turned from walnut, but after seeing the mockup, I decided that there was too much contrast, and the turned pulls didn't really suit the style of the table. These pulls were made the same way as the ones I used on Donna's Cabinet (those were walnut).

 

 

 

Wood arrives in Roberts Creek

The shipment that I purchased for Robert from A&M Lumber  arrived at the school. Everyone was pretty excited to see it.

Here's one of the five planks of 8/4 curly sycamore. The planks are over 20" wide and 10' long and are curly over their full width and length.

Two planks of 8/4 sapele, 37" wide and 10' long:

 

Boxwood, padauk, curly maple and curly sycamore:

  

Another shot of the sapele:

  

Black walnut and an amazing plank of olive:

  

Here's a closeup shot of the curly sycamore. The curls are at about 90 degrees to the grain over much of the boards which is nice.

 

New Workshop

Well, this summer was pretty hectic. The closest I got to doing any woodworking was to build a new workshop up at our cottage. I converted the second floor above our garage into a shop. Previously we had been using it as a bunkie for the kids to hang out and sleep in, and it hadn't been used too much in the past few years, so we decided we'd get a lot more use out of it as a shop. It was a lot of work to convert it. First we had to more or less demolish the interior, ripping out all the interior walls and the plumbing. The floor had been covered in carpeting, and the subfloor underneath was only 5/8" plywood. That wasn't strong enough to support all the heavy woodworking equipment, so we put in a new floor on top of the plywood. I was able to get some hardwood flooring pretty cheap from a local supplier, so I put 3/4" thick maple hardwood down. It made the floor really rigid, plus it looks nice and is really easy to sweep up and keep clean. The lighting was also pretty awful, so I installed new fluorescent lights using T-8 bulbs and electronic ballasts. The advantage of those is that they're more energy efficient that the old T-12 bulbs, and the electronic ballasts are totally quiet, you don't get the annoying hum that the old style lights emit. It's super bright in the shop now. I just moved all my machines and tools into the shop a couple of weeks ago, and I've been busy since then unpacking and setting up things. Unfortunately I've run out of time, school starts next week so things here in the new shop will have to wait till I'm back at the cottage next summer.

This is what the second floor of the garage looked like before I demolished the interior and changed it into a shop:

During demolition, there was quite a mess up there: