Barkitecture

Earlier this fall I designed and built a teacup-inspired dog bed for a charity auction to benefit Animal Friends, a non-profit companion animal resource center serving the needs of pets and people.

The auction is next Thursday, October 24th, at Perlora Southside from 5:30 to 8:00. Tickets can be purchased by clicking here.

Here are some images of my piece, made of cherry and maple.


A Finely Constructed Case

The chest of drawers is starting to take shape as I begin to take the individual parts and assemble them to create the case.  Up until now each part represented a lot of work – milling, sizing to dimension, joinery, more joinery, smoothing, fitting – but hadn’t yet been assembled into something recognizable.

I always design and build case pieces with wood-to-wood joinery, and this piece is no exception.  The sides join to the bottom with hand cut, half-blind dovetails. The off-center vertical divider joins to the bottom with a tapered sliding dovetail.  Horizontal dividers join to the case sides with sliding dovetails and to the vertical divider with half-laps. The benefit of all of this tight-fitting joinery is a case that will be more than adequate to resist the loads it will see over the span of its life – no bowed sides or sagging dividers. And that’s extremely important because a case that is not rigid will lead to drawers that don’t slide in and out sweetly. And what’s the point in a chest of drawers you can’t use?


Curvy Drawers

I’m working on the chest of drawers and have been sawing laminations and building forms for the curved drawer fronts.  In a nutshell, the fronts are made by sawing maple into thin slices, called laminations, which are then glued together over a curved form.  The adhesive, in this case a 2 part urea resin, prevents the laminations from slipping past each other and returning back to their original (flat) shape.  Here are some pictures showing the process. Click on any image at right to open up a full screen slideshow.