In an effort to expand my experience with building larger woodworking projects, I am starting this new year making some furniture pieces. I do not want to go totally crazy, so I am starting on two Shaker end tables featured in the September 2004 Issue of Woodworking Magazine. This article goes into great detail on building this popular and timeless design. The Shaker style has an appeal to woodworkers, as it is functional, very stylish and pretty strait forward to build. I decided to build two end tables so that I could maximize my wood use and match the pair using the same wood for the whole project.
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at the class schedule of Roy’s Woodwright’s School and noticed Chris Schwarz from Lost Art Press was going to be teaching his Dutch Tool Chest. It was then I decided I would build my own Dutch Tool Chest. Yes it would have been great to take the class and experience Chris’s cheeky teaching style and benefit from his vast experience, but I have a business to run so I can’t really get away for the three day class right now. Besides, I knew I had the skills to make this simple project and decided the time was right. My old chest is great and I still use it but, It is not big enough for the tools I use everyday.
Some of you may remember the Saw Box I started in this post -> Have Saw Will Travel . In preparation for finishing my chair I made in the “Continuous Arm Windsor Chair Class” at Elia Bizzarri’s, I wanted to get some more practice with the finishing techniques that I will use in the chair so I decided to finish my Saw Box.
The process goes like this:
The completed machine - what a beauty!
You may recall from my previous post, that my half-finished spring pole lathe had become a temporary “bookshelf” due to an injury. Now, oh happy day, it has been repurposed into a functioning lathe! This project, by far, was one of the most difficult I have undertaken. I don’t mean technically difficult, but physically difficult. But let me say up front that it did not have to be this way. Sometimes, we work against ourselves and are our own worst enemy.
