Knot Traditional Woodworks-Portland

About the time I get a piece or project sanded and start to apply the finish, I’m already thinking about the next variation or permutation of my design ideas. The Portland Saturday Market is in one respect, a brutal evaluation of the finished work. I’m too close to the work to have any objectivity and by the time it is done, I have mentally moved beyond. I’m already thinking two or three projects down the road. I’m wondering how I can come across more interesting material so I can try new ideas.

I keep hearing people tell me that I’m an artist. I wish. I’m just a craftsman… on a good day. A long time ago, somebody told me that the art of being an artist is getting paid for it. If that is the criteria, then for sure I ain’t there yet!

Last month, I used my shop time to build a machine that would help me with a woodworking operation, producing joinery at the heart of my wine racks. I have tried many different ways to make this joint and they all had different pluses or minuses.

Most of the stuff I used here was salvaged out of dumpsters. The motor is a nice old GE capacitor start, 1/6 HP unit, that came from a forced air furnace. The black metal frame came from a debris box at the back of a contract office furniture business a couple blocks away. The only things I had to buy were the bit on the right… a plug cutter that could also be used to cut round tenons… and, a 3″ pulley and three 1/2″ ID, ball bearing races, that mate with the shank of the cutter.

I had some scraps of Delrin in my stash of junk that I call my “Magic Bucket”. It is thirty year collection of weird pieces and parts you could never buy in a hardware store or supplier. I made two pillow blocks to house the bearings and mounted them on the board.

I saved these two pieces of junk years ago hoping that some day I might be able to build a thickness sander. The thing on the left is from an old Kodak photo enlarger and on the right is a crank from a cheap Delta bench top table saw I burned out.

I had no real plan other than in the end, I knew what I wanted it to do. I was making it up as I went along. I cut down the bracket holding the saw crank and re drilled holes so it was more compact.

I mounted a small table with a fence to hold parts. The crank in front moves the fence back and forth. The big knob moves the table up and down. Now I can cut accurate round tenons for my rack parts very quickly. The rack parts may be different dimensions, but it is easy to change the set-up for different sizes.

I’m always trying to build the parts for my wine racks with big pieces of material. It is easy to take small pieces of inferior lumber and glue them up into bigger pieces. But in the purest sense of wood working, big pieces simply look like what they are. Of course, many times big pieces of solid wood are hard to come by or more expensive. For production furniture factories, lamination or veneering give the appearance of big piece of wood. It is a cheap way to say that the pieces are still made from solid wood. One way around this for me, is to use joinery to make small pieces into big ones. Then there is no need to make excuses for the lamination, as it is on purpose and part of the design, not just a device to build products cheaply and efficiently as possible.

I had some chunks of Apple wood that I got from a dried stack of fire wood. I also had some odd nice pieces of Black Walnut. Look at the bottom right corner and there are some sample blocks I ran through the router table to make a tongue and groove joint.

It’s hard to see, but I cut a groove in the “bread board” ends of Black Walnut and the ends of the “field”. Then I glued a floating tenon of a contrasting colored wood into each to join them. I left the end of the floating tenon a little long so it stands proud of the table top. I’m trying to say, “look at the joints”, not ,”I don’t have any big pieces of lumber to use”.

On another note, with my new “Pencil Sharpener” machine, I can produce rack parts of different dimensions so much faster, that I changed the size of the cleats in the rack. In talking to wine makers, I found that bottle manufacturers are selling Champagne bottles cheaply. Many producers of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are using these bottles. The glass is thicker even thought the inside volume is the same, it makes the outside dimension larger. My rack dimensions have worked for 90% of all the bottles I have come across, but these big bottles touch and it bothers me. So by making the cleats an 1/8″ of an inch wider, they fit easily without touching. It makes the racks look a little more substantial too. I like a substantial look. I’m still in the middle of my substantial look period, ha, ha, ha.

The frame and racks for this piece were made of Alder scraps gleaned from my neighbors who build really high quality upholstered furniture.  Market goers see this checker board top from thirty feet away and gravitate right toward it.

I sit at the Market all day and every minute, I hear people walking by comment on how nice my stuff looks. Like I’ve said before, If I had a nickel for every person that rubbed the finished top of this piece and said, “Beautiful work man, you are an artist”, I wouldn’t have to sell this stuff.

I dropped my prices by a third to one half, just to see what would happen. Out of every three people who say, what a unique product, or what beautiful wood, great workmanship… one person will say, “…And your prices are very reasonable or even too cheap”. Many PSM vendors have told me to double my prices and then they would sell like hot cakes.

So, I sold a couple of pieces. It covered my vendor fees. I don’t think that prices have any thing to do with selling them or not. The market segment is a small one and only wine aficionados are the buyers. Thanks to those people, enjoy them.