Woodworking: A Bench For Jeff
My brother-in-law bought a home in Frisco and wanted a bench for his garage/mud room. I had a maple table top and legs that I salvaged from the trash at Yale. The top was 1.5 inches thick! It made for a great looking utilitarian bench and shoe rack!
Woodworking:
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Woodworking: A Desk For AlexMy son Alex wanted a desk for his room that would fit in the corner and not have any legs that you would bump into while seated. He helped design this craftsman style desk that is made from red oak I salvaged from a tree that fell in the front of our North Haven CT home during a storm. The top is oak veneered plywood wrapped in solid red oak and ebony.
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WoodWorking: A Table for The DeckMy wife wanted a table for our deck that would match some chairs she had found. My sons helped me design this octagonal table using balsa wood models. The table is constructed of red oak that I salvaged in North Haven CT and topped with floating slats of ipe. The table is quite large and heavy. The center is a Lazy Suzan that rotates on rubber scooter wheels mounted on the frame. The center piece is made from plywood topped with veneer I made by resawing quarter sawn pieces of the same red oak. The trim on the Lazy Susan is made of wenge. All joints on the table are floating mortise and tenons.
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Woodworking: Main Dinning TaBleSitting at a large table surrounded by friends and family enjoying good food is hard to beat. Although we do not get to fill this table all that often it is always fun when we do. This table is 10' x 3.5' and was built following plans from Norm Abram in his New Yankee Workshop series, but is a bit classier being built from mahogany that I purchased from Maurice L. Condon lumber in White Planes New York instead of pine. The table top is made from to 3/4" x 10' sheets of plywood and topped with mahogany veneer with a center piece made from sapele, ebony, and koa. The table is wrapped in solid mahogany and inlaid using banding made by Buffard Fréres of Paris and purchased from Lee Valley tools. The table is used daily and as shown here has been refinished in recent times. This was my first foray into using veneer and was done with diluted yellow glue which was painted on and dried. The veneer was then applied taking advantage of the thermoplastic characteristic of yellow glue and using a normal cloths iron. Don't look too close as I have become much better at applying veneer (see tables above) using plastic resin glue and a vacuum bag.
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WoodWorking: LongboardsI am not into longboards but have three sons who are so thought it would be fun to have them design their own. These were made by sandwiching three sheets of 1/8" plywood between hardwood veneers using a vacuum press, plastic resin glue and I jig that I built to give the boards a slight curve at the front, back and down the middle. The boards were finished by spraying on several coats of a water based polyurethane using a sprinkle of play sand on the top surface. They came out so awesome that my former colleague at CSU Bob Williams came over and we made a few more for his sons.
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Woodworking: Step StoolsWhenever I feel the need to practice my hand-cut dovetails I make a few step stools. These are about 16" wide by 14" tall. They see frequent use and most have been given away as gifts. My favorite wood to work is cherry but I have made these from oak, mahogany, maple, walnut and canary wood (below right).
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Woodworking: Shaker basketsI am drawn to the simplicity and superb function of Shaker Designs. Their oval baskets and boxes are fun to make and thanks to the efforts of John Wilson, a talented Michigander artisan, the materials and methods on how to make them are accessible. The basket shown here is not a traditional Shaker size. I made forms for this one myself and it is designed to fit a wine bottle (in this case a baby blanket), which makes for a nice gift. As you can see in the background, I typically make a dozen or more at a time.
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Woodworking: InlayI was fortunate to take a couple of classes from David Marks, the talented host of the HGTV series WoodWorks. The topics were inlay using the scroll saw and bent wood lamination. The recipe box shown here is a wedding present I made from makore and is veneered on the top with canary wood surrounded by ebony and inlaid with bubinga hearts. The makore veneered cabinet (bottom left) is inlaid with birds-eye maple and ebony and the supports of the small ebony banded shelf (bottom right) are an example of bent-wood lamination. Thanks David!
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Woodworking: The Off-CutsThere are always plenty of scraps when a project is finished. These do not go to waste but are often used for smaller projects like making pens, picture frames and as shown to the right small purple heart bats made for my sons little league coaches. Over the years I have been the beneficiary of numerous works of art given to me by Nobel Prize winning chemist Satoshi Omura, a world class collector and supporter of the arts and also a superb calligrapher. The pieces shown here are just a few of the gifts from Professor Omura that I have framed.
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Woodworking: REstoring, Refinishing, and RepurposingBeing a young son in an old family has resulted in numerous pieces of antique furniture finding their way to my house. This furniture is not only well made but often stunningly beautiful, especially after a bit of restoration. The top 10 frames show an early 19th century bed and dresser combination that I restored. The next four frames show the repair of wobbly table legs. The joints were separated, dowels removed, holes squared using a chisel mortiser and plugged. New mortises were then cut using the Festool Domino Joiner (awesome tool!) and the joints reassembled. The next 10 frames show the conversion of the an early 20th century sleigh bed from a full size to a queen size. After stripping the finish down to bare wood the mahogany veneered head board was cut in half and an insert was made to fill the needed gap. The insert was veneered in the vacuum press with figured mahogany. The sideboards were extended and a new wider footboard was made that matched the original, which had already been modifed many years earlier by lopping off the top part of the tall end of the sleigh. The refurbished bed frame was then stained and top coated with a wipe on polyurethane finish (General Stains and Finishes are awesome products). The bottom frames show the restoration of two late 19th century chairs to a point where new needle point can be applied...still working on that.
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cooking: Brewing, Baking, and SmokingI think chemists have a natural affinity toward cooking and, as illustrated in the top three frames, that includes cooking with crushed grains and yeast! At one point, no longer I am sad to say, I had an awesome gravity fed system for making home brew. Once children entered the picture that hobby was quashed and the equipment sold. However, baking artisan loafs of bread was allowed to continue and has been helped substantially by Ken Forkish's "Flour Water Salt Yeast" cookbook and videos. I have always preferred pie over cake and thus pie making had already become second nature. Every Christmas we generally make it a family effort to spend time dusting off candy and cooky recipes and distributing the goods. The perfect pretzel requires NaOH and I recently spent some time trying to do brick oven pizza on a gas grill. A few bricks from home depot to support a pizza steel on top and a couple pizza stones on the bottom make for an easy to assemble pizza oven on your gas grill. Even before moving to Texas, while still living in Connecticut, we discovered the awesomeness of the SmokinTex electric smoker. The turkey breasts and pulled pork (before and after) shown in the bottom frames are staples.
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Polymer Chemistry: Screen Printing and Etching Glass The chemistry that enables screen printing and the preparation of the masks that can be used when etching glass with a sandblaster is fundamentally organic and very cool. My son was getting into screen printing and wanted to build a homemade system capable of printing four colors. We did that and I was hooked on another hobby. We now routinely print up our own group shirts and, when the occasions arise, celebrate victories in the lab with custom shirts. Ever since learning how to etch class while making a series of mantel clocks (above) we have celebrated completed syntheses by putting images of the chemdraw figures onto glasses for the students.
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St. Alban's Episcopal Church, WAco
Although not a hobby, it is equally rewarding to finding a good way to give back to one's community. The congregation at St. Alban's Waco is awesome as are the Clergy and both do great work in the Waco Community. During two three year terms on the Vestry I had the privilege to spend three years as Junior Warden and give back by lending my time in numerous ways, a few of which included: updating several outreach rooms, building new screens for the bell/carillon tower, updating the the card holders in the pew racks, and traveling to Houston for two weekends to help muck out houses after hurricane Harvey.
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