A relaxed project turned into a race to finish this in time for visiting my nephew in Dubai to gift him it. Early 1900’s style and design was the rough idea. Pretty happy with how it turned out. All mahogany body, neck and bridge. Rosewood fingerboard with mother of pearl inlays. Ebony nut and saddle. All hide glue construction. Thin French polish and wax finish.
I volunteered to help construct some small stackable dining tables for the Platform community cafe (opposite Loughborough Farm in Loughborough Junction) with a similar kind of finish on the tops, we didn’t use gas burners just a small amount of paper and some scaffolding boards held together in a vertical prism with wire. The boards were kept apart with some wooden wedges - (important to allow the burn to reach the very edges of the boards). With the scaffold boards we had a lot of scope for wire brushing the charred parts without having to worry about going through the thin veneered layer. You can see the finished tables “live” if you pop in to the cafe, it’s just down the road / 1 stop on the train! Wire brushing the boards back was a really filthy job, definitely wear a mask for that and the sanding too. Once finished we used a natural Osmo oil to seal the boards, you’ll probably need 2-3 thinly applied coats of this.
I built a standing desk a couple of years ago to take advantage of a small space in my previously deskless room. The top was scrappy plywood - functional, but I always hoped to replace it. These are recycled - they came out of a skip, were thicknessed, and cut in half on the tablesaw. They’re laminated, meaning that cutting them open is pot luck: you mught get trash, you might find a really nice figure. After a slightly botched joining process and a good deal of sanding, I filled the holes with an epoxy resin and sanded flush. I did the final sanding at the weekend and finally took it home for a test fit and oiling. Next step is going to be polishing. As with every project, I learned an awful lot and have a mental list of stuff to do better next time…
I'd been working through photos id taken in the past. seeing what would work for the laser cutter in terms of etching. I found a pic id taken of st Pauls did my best to optimise the photo and then at 4-5 am turned up to etch my photo from a a piece in a piece of wood I had spare from the dresser I built. I was pretty impressed by the results and had the idea of leaving it in the spot where the photo was taken, with a note to the new owner telling them who I was and that they should feel free to take the piece home. a few days later I received an Instagram tag showing that someone had found the piece both beautiful and valued it enough to carry it home. ’
I’ve been showing Quantum Garden (the big spring + led project I made at the space earlier this year) in a few different exciting places now. First off was MARS conference, a fancy space & robotics conference in Palm Springs, where I met a real-life astronaut (Story Musgrave):