Flagstaff Desk -- Style 3

 The Flagstaff Desk was my name for a series of study carrel type desks that sold well way back at crafts shows held in December at the Coconino Center for the Arts.   I kept one for myself and still enjoy such features as integral valence lighting, a bulletin board, handy pigeon holes in some versions, Flagstaff Desk -- Style 1, the huge "pencil" drawer and matching companion chair.  In all cases the carcase is solid wood as are all the drawer sides.  A flat screen monitor now often finds itself against the bulletin board, a keyboard on the desk top.  Even so the sense of entering a nook or private enclosure remains.

Hall Table

His and Hers Bureaus

Note that the grain runs across the two bureaus

Detail showing dovetails

This pair of bureaus was designed to promote spacial equity between the sexes.  Each drawer rests on its own web frame joined at the corners with an open mortise, the bottommost with a dust panel.  The boards of the carcase sides are elongated trapezoids, not cut on a table saw but edged with a jointer plane in order to minimize waste.  All corners of the drawers are dovetailed, and each drawer individually planed to fit its designated space (numbering included!).  The drawers slowly graduate in height and the pulls are custom made.

Detail showing web frames

Hiking Stick Compass

It's a rare day outdoors that a compass is required to find one's way, but it's any day that one can enjoy one of our planet's little miracles.  All that was required here was a 1" Forstner bit and a dab of epoxy to set this Suunto compass, which is available from Summit Hut, in the walnut knob of my trusty hiking stick.  The clip on the compass was removed, but the rotation of the bezel is preserved.

Backpackers and campers find our wooden teaspoons a more rustic and lighter alternative to plastic or metal.  Our mini cutting board is great for camping! 

Nonmiraculous Spiral Staircase

As an architectural element the spiral staircase always holds intrigue.  Where might it lead?   An alchemist’s lair, an artist’s garret, a lighthouse lens, the captain’s quarters?

My dorm room window during my sophomore year at Columbia College provided me a slantwise view of the front facade of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a place built for an epic congregation, frequented then by only a few, myself included, and now the resting place of James Gandolfini.  Once in my wanderings I encountered a deacon who asked me “Do you want to see something?”  Not what you think. What followed was an enthralling, rambling tour through the hollow walls of the building honeycombed with passageways, tunnels, bridges, spiral staircases, windows both outwards and inwards, a world of its own that few if any parishioners would even guess at.

So when presented with the problem of connecting the lobby of the Northland Aviation FBO at the Flagstaff airport to the briefing room aka classroom above without taking up valuable space, the spiral staircase solution naturally came to mind.  What ensued was a massive amount of geometry and trigonometry to align all the factors of rise, run, rotation, radii, step overlap, etc., all those numbers eventually converted to huge chiseled mortises deep into an APS (Arizona Public Service) power pole.  The treads were laminated hemlock 2x4's each embedded so tightly that the balusters might not have been necessary, though I would not venture even an approach to the Loretto Chapel’s miraculous staircase.   The 2x2 balusters rose into the room above and supported a circular railing laminated to them piece by piece of 1/8" baltic birch, eventually some 25 layers.

I taught my first ground school classes in that room above.  We could have been in the 40's, discussing aviation on the second floor of our Quonset hut hangar. The circular railing sat right in front of the instructor’s table with the student desks behind.  Latecomers, every teacher’s nemesis, would then be unable to sneak into the back of the classroom, but instead their heads would rise inch by inch through this cylinder for all to see, the instructor’s scimitar mentally poised to swing across the tube, the transgressor’s head sent evenly bouncing down the steps with their perfectly parallel and equal rises.

This spiral staircase paid for much of my commercial pilot’s license, and later one of my ground school students ordered a similar spiral staircase, the ascent to a loft in her own home and a rare instance in my custom woodworking career in which I utilized the knowledge gained from #1 to do a second of something.  The Quonset hangar itself, alas, was a victim to progress, the staircase salvaged.

Letter Opener

Wooden Teaspoons

Opening of Etsy Shop

The landscape of memory always contains several prominent peaks, images or instances that especially stand out and can typically be counted on your fingers.  One of mine is watching a Hopi Kachina carver at work on his porch, working outside under broken sunlight and shade with a set of simple tools at a small workbench.  The image is particularly appealing because it combines both leisure and work.  Pure leisure so rapidly become cloying.  I can’t take too much of it.  Yet all work, of course, becomes exhausting.  This carver to me had found exactly the right synthesis of both.

Anyhow, the point of this: after just short of forty years of woodworking larger commissions I have slowed down and am thinking smaller, moving into the field of wooden crafts, which to this point I have pretty much abjured, nose in the air.  Thus the opening of an Etsy shop: FlyingCircusStudios

In time more items will follow.  Thank you to the individuals in both Flagstaff and Tucson who have already purchased some of my pocas cosas.

Car Camping Chuck Box

Seemingly simple and wonderfully convenient for car camping, this chuck box required the labor equivalent of several kitchen cabinets and meticulous fitting.  The idea of producing these commercially was eventually rejected due to the resultant high price.  Still it seems to me that the niche for such a chuck box remains unexploited.  All one sees in campgrounds is folks rummaging through giant Tupperware unable to find anything.

Singular wooden ware + hand carved teaspoons at:   FlyingCircusStudios.etsy.com

Backpackers and campers find our wooden teaspoons a more rustic and lighter alternative to plastic or metal.  Our mini cutting boards are ideal for picnicking and for camping.


See also other hiking and camping tips:

Hiking Stick Compass

Viking Express (Tent Trailer) Bed Extension

Viking Express Camper/Cargo Trailer Conversion
 

Hungarian Sideboard with Razor-Thin Lightbox

 

 

 



The "lightbox" consists of 72 ultra-thin LED lights set in strips and placed in a rabbet just beneath the rabbet for the obscure plate glass, thus making the whole assembly only 3/4" thick.  The bottom is not closed since the lights cast nicely both up and down.  The 6 watts of LED lighting are sufficient to illuminate a room.  As far as the mounting goes, I thought why not use the Hungarian Shelves system just for a single shelf, aka sideboard.  The beautiful wine glasses are by George Averbeck, Fire on the Mountain.

 

 



 

Meyers Collaboration I

The needlepoint sampler by Sara Meyers was facilitated by materials and studies at the West in Tucson.  The piece is stretched over 1/4" masonite.  The frame is made with cutoffs from the upcoming "Hungarian Sideboard with Razor-Thin Light Box."  The matting was expertly crafted by Mia Schneider at Photographic Works in Tucson.  The glass does not touch the thread and was salvaged from discarded storm windows, though remarkably scratch-free.  Mia managed somehow to fit the entire assembly into the 3/4" thickness of the cherry.

Cheese Paddles

In Flagstaff our woodstove had an endless appetite for table saw cutoffs, but in Tucson these are reduced to 28" lengths, becoming cheese paddles.  They have not, however, been tested for actual paddle ball.

Floating Headboard

Custom Door

2-Drawer File Cabinet Revisited

Hungarian Shelves Slot Height Revisited

Two recent sets of Hungarian Shelves ran thick and thin, i.e. in one case I made the slot height taller than my recommendation Slot Height for Hungarian Shelves and in the second case (the set above) shorter.  At first I thought the tighter the fit of the shelf in its slot, the better, but I have changed that thinking for several reasons.  First, wedges that taper to a knife edge are more likely to break upon insertion or removal.  Second, they offer too little wood for compression when driven into the slot.  Third, the thinner wedges lack rigidity and tend to fall away from the bottom of the shelf.  My revision is to make the slot height always a little more than 1/16" rather than less.  I found that even a 1/8" space works but that tends to be a little too much.

The uprights are African mahogany stained to match the accelerated darkened cherry, accomplished by some careful time in the sun.  As always the natural face of cherry is so lovely.  She requires no makeup.

Commercial furniture makers still think that cherry should look black.

Three Easy Pieces

One of my shopmates asked if I had reverted to high school shop, and that may well be true here.  Nonetheless, the beauty of a three-legged table, like its companion the three-legged stool, is that no matter how uneven the surface the table is stable.  This, of course, is canceled somewhat by its tendency to tip over when pressed between legs.  I thought the rock would enhance its stability, which would be the case if it were ten times heavier.

More Copper Collage Sculpture Slabs

"Theo Helii"

"Theo Helii'' - Detail

 

"Delphinus"

"Delphinus" - Detail

Copper Collage Sculpture Slabs

"Casement Vision"

The “Copper Collage Sculpture Slab” series of works represented one of my few forays into the world of art furniture.  Mostly tables and trivets they were shown at galleries in Sedona and Flagstaff as well as my favorite venue the Coconino Center for the Arts.  Thin 1/4" slabs of float copper, often containing large flecks of native copper, were arranged on a bed of actual mining tailings in collages, sometimes suggestive of particular forms.  Durable bisphenol epoxy resin was then poured over the entire system to lock it in place.  The slabs were provided to me by prospector extraordinaire, the late John Sikorsky, who also provided the inspiration for this line of work.

The epoxy pours were nightmarish affairs, first requiring a day’s cleaning to render a woodworking shop dust-free, no mean feat.  Then the mixing ratio needed to be near perfect, a quart or more of epoxy having to be stirred in very short order.  The thousands of bubbles thus induced had to be popped before the epoxy hardened, using the rather dangerous technique of blowtorch heat which could ignite the whole affair.  Special covers had to be designed that did not attract dust like a capacitor while the casting hardened over the course of many hours. 

One of the pieces entitled “Ore, Timber and Rail” actually won first prize for sculpture at “Vision Southwest,” a show for artists residing in the states of the Four Corners.  This particular coffee table contained elements suggestive of an ore car riding on tracks.  Remarkably it not only provided a cash prize to the maker but also sold from the show.  That was an exception as most of the pieces were eventually purchased by existing customers.

2-Drawer File Cabinet

Kitchen "Spacer" Wine Rack

When this kitchen installation required a 3" spacer it seemed a waste of space to place it at the face frame. Always looking for a new tunnel for the wine cellar, it occurred to me that the width was perfect for a bottle of wine though insufficient for a wine rack with sides and shelves.

The idea of supporting wine bottles with just a bored hole was provided by my cooperative shop partner Tony Furhrman (Summit Woodworking).  Thus the spacer was moved back, thickened, set slightly away from the back wall, screwed to the side of the adjacent cabinet and now provides storage for 8 bottles of wine.  The lip of each bottle locks it in place so it can't slip out.  Tony points out that though the bottles slant down from the neck, corks are still fully submerged.  A similar "spacer wine rack" provides storage for 8 more bottles at the base cabinet level.  A little clever rotation of the bottles  allows the labels to be read without removal.  I like the fact the bottles share the same cantilever support mechanics as Hungarian shelves, less the wedges.  Though very secure they are easily inserted or removed.

Yet More Hungarian Shelves

Finally realized upon installing this set of shelves that knocking in the wedges with an oversized block that extends beyond the front edge of the shelf not only allows placement of the wedge perfectly square to the shelf but also prevents marring of the bottom of the shelf with the hammer.

King Bed Platform

King Bed Platform Side View

Full Extension Drawer Detail

The Ship's Carpenter

Flying Circus Studios was in business for more than 35 years in Flagstaff, and with this move to Tucson I am sure that there are those who feel disappointed, perhaps even betrayed, that I have jumped ship.  And I am afraid that that is true, for though I did do fine woodworking in Flagstaff I was perhaps not so much a fine woodworker as I was a ship's carpenter, and, at that, for dozens of vessels over those years.

A ship’s carpenter should be able to, and did, make any piece of furniture or furnishing for stateroom or cabin, sometimes even the cabin itself.  His work largely derives from needs and is directed by query.  Besides the furnishings, a ship’s carpenter might be called upon to connect decks with stairs, be they spiral or straight, or construct the deck itself, or replace a porthole.  He might even be found wielding a paint bucket in hold or on hull.  A ship’s carpenter might find himself more often renovating the galley than displaying his artistry on the gallery.  There is also nothing he might not be called upon to fix, from the finest captain’s chair to a problem head. 

Truth be told the captain came to depend on the carpenter, and they built up a relationship over the years, and then again became good and fast friends.  This aspect does not end when the high desert separates.   I think of you and your vessels more often than you know. 

It is said that Shackleton’s carpenter could look at a space, go back to the shop, cut the piece, and it would fit perfectly.  This ship carpenter, however, could use a tape measure and still find the piece exactly one inch too short.  Nonetheless the analogy is growing on me, feeling almost comfortable; yes, a career of relationships rather than objects.  I have, I think, misunderstood the true nature of my portfolio.

Happy Thanksgiving

The morning paseo begins here

Forgive the fall hiatus in tips and portfolio photos for much remains to be done in moving Flying Circus Studios from Flagstaff to Tucson.  Relocation is chiefly the work of Sisyphus, redoing an endless string of the details of daily living, but advantages accrue too in reassessment, reflection, and, of course, sifting with a finer sieve.  Throughout this process I remain thankful for my family, friends and the new acquaintances of our Tucson life.

15 Tool Tips

1800's Level

Tool Tip#15 -- Hose through a Door -- a decorative and permanent way to route hoses or wires through closed doors

Tool Tip #14 -- New Grit for Sanding Sponges -- reviving the grit on a sanding sponge after its own grit is worn away

Tool Tip #13 -- Miter Gauge Tightening -- using transparent tape to quickly tighten a miter gauge sloppy in its track

Tool Tip #12 -- Grabbing for Arrows -- improving a pencil's handle to unsheath it more easily, not to mention removing more errors

Tool Tip #11 -- Sharpening a Hammer -- using a disc sander to prevent rubber mallets from marring work or skidding

Tool Tip #10 -- The Hulk's Bench Scraper -- plate glass to smooth and flatten bench tops as well as standard glass for use as a wood scraper

Tool Tip #9 -- Securing an Old Favorite -- draw tight latches improve the traditional door slab over sawhorse workbench

Tool Tip #8 -- Easy Fill for Portable Tank -- a double male coupling allows fast filling of a portable air tank through its outlet

Tool Tip #7 -- Sleeves to Shoulders -- using a shelf pin sleeve to reinforce frequently used 1/4" holes in pegboard

Tool Tip #6 -- Replacement Power Cord  -- the appropriate gauge extension cord makes an inexpensive and easily available replacement power cord

Tool Tip #5 -- Magnets in Molded Plastic Cases -- glue in magnets to keep bits, blades, wrenches or whatever handy in your plastic tool cases

Tool Tip #4 -- Extension Cord Hair Band  -- a giant inner tube rubber band nicely cinches an extension cord roll

Tool Tip #3 -- Power from Above -- just because you're working in front of a garage door doesn't mean you can't have a place to plug in a tool

Tool Tip #2 -- Nuts over Tangs -- protecting your hands from the sharp end of a file or rasp with a common electrical item

Tool Tip #1 -- Block Tenderizing -- if it's hard to bend that sanding block to receive sandpaper it may be time for block tenderizing

More Hungarian Shelves

Hungarian Shelf Wedge Detail

Small Hassock

Zen Bench

"Before"  (black walnut courtesy of Shawn Skabelund)

"After"

Lean Thinking Tip# 9: The Jig Is Up

Jigs are wonderful aids in the fabrication process.  Not only do they increase efficiency but they also improve precision.  Furthermore, more craftsman joy often derives from creating a clever jig than making the product itself.  Nonetheless most jigs are one time affairs.  I sometimes revisit these and wonder how in the world do you use it?  I have not left myself "operating instructions."  As these jigs accumulate they only add to shop clutter, and often the best place for them is as shown on the left.  "The jig is up."