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What's new

Recent project - Table/desk with drawers

FWIW, wedge compensates for uneven barn floor. :)
Feet are adjustable, just in case.
However, it sits perfectly flat in clients home.

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smt
 
Carpathian Elm, Rosewood, Curly Maple?

Buck Rogers goes Federal?

Sort of - Big leaf maple burl, pau ferro, ebony, & birdseye maple in the top; Honduran rosewood and curly maple legs. Stainless pulls, dingleberry finials, and feet. Leg connector brackets are aluminum. Those made on a Thomson table (manual tracer on the mill) & I was worried 17-4 might be too much effort.

Definitely Buck Rogers. By way of Ruhlmann, just to be a little sacrilegious. :)

Burl blank was about 1-7/8" thick

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As with the first desk of this style, with the 4 point/8 facet legs, (this one is 6 point/12 facets); attaining the furniture commission allowed me to proof the tooling to carry forward for cues. IOW, furniture came first, and in many ways, i like that better than cues - there's a wider range of sculptural geometry available to apply it to.

Thanks for the nice comments!

smt
 
Very nice! I like the pool cue themed legs.

PS: Never even seen one of those Thomson tables in the flesh. Do they work well as a duplicator? it seems they haven't been produced for some years now.
 
Thanks for all the nice comments!

Dale- you moved a lot of this long 8/4 pine (& wide 8/4 mahogany boards) for me after the pattern shop auction!
Combined with plywood faces, some of that pine made the bending forms for the project table.

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Richard - you looked in the mirror sometime today, right? :)

Scott - 2 decades ago right after i bought the Thomson table, PM'r Frank Dorion sent me a pile of factory & other literature relating to the device, and how to use it; which helped fast track the learning curve. Today, a young person, or even a sensible older person, should learn cnc. Tracer/pattern duplicator systems are pretty cool. & there is a certain discipline and satisfaction to using them effectively. But you can change a cnc program with a few keystrokes or input in a simple drawing program. Tracing systems take patterns upon patterns, and changes in stylii, and changes in bit diameters to match. & then the stuff needs catalogued and stored, perhaps a dedicated drawer, or several. Not a thumb drive.

Yes, they work fairly well in 2D & even layered stacks of 2D. Possibly the only thing they could be "competitive" timewise today might be drilling complex hole patterns from an already made part. So long as the owner already had a good catalogue of stylii. & perhaps best run on a turret drill.

You probably know there's a 3D Gorton here, too. That still gets occasional use. Sigh.

smt
 
SMT,
I like that photo, why build a workbench when you can just use a pile of wood as a bench! Very nice work BTW and I especially like the little drop pulls.

Two out of three ain't bad on the wood guesses, it looked like the burl was a bit dark so I suspected elm over W maple as the figure can be very similar.

On the subject of Thompson tables I have three and have never used one as a tracer so no experience there but they are fantastic as a template drilling setup and for just regular drilling with a vice mounted. I have one mounted on each of two drill presses and the third is a backup unit and I purchased all of them from different PM members. I now have a CNC mill so no need to try out the tracing potential as I am a sensible older person and continue to learn new things.

MM
 
You probably know there's a 3D Gorton here, too. That still gets occasional use. Sigh.
A 2-30 Tracemaster ? If I wuz a hundred years younger I'd be beating you up to buy that thing. I could have a decent little biz off in the woods duplicating old castings, with no goddamned worthless unreliable expensive stinking crapola "I'm sorry, that's too old" electronics ! John Parsons should be strung up by the gonads !

I can imagine the Thompson tables are good for wood. For metal, not so great, especially if you tried to climb cut. We tried using one and even on aluminum it was less than wonderful.
 
Great to see and hear about your latest work, Stephen. Beautifully done. I'm going with Deco on the design - glad to see someone is turning back the clock.
 
Stephen,
Would you please share how you made the leg connections? Not how you made the metal prts but how they connect to the wood.

That is an incredible piece of work.
 
Just beautiful. The combination of the woodwork styling with the "jet-age" leg connectors makes me think of something you would have seen in the movie "Dune" (the original one). I like it a lot.
 
My apologies -
Over the past couple days I've been trying to upload more pictures in response to some of the comments and Q's.
For whatever reason, the uploader is back to "waiting for FB" then disappearing whatever has been put in it. You can see from what has been posted that this is not user error. Photo sizes are well within limits. being pulled from files accessed for other posts above. Multiple efforts, multiple times of day, various poses with crossed fingers, eyes, and holding my tongue "just so". No joy.

All the nice comments are appreciated!
Not ignoring this, will continue trying.

Thanks!
smt
 
Richard - you looked in the mirror sometime today, right? :)
smt

I think you're the only one that got this Stephen. Need to use emoticons I guess...

I'm curious also about the attachment of the metal brackets to the leg, hope you'll share. This is the advantage of bringing extensive machinist skills to woodworking, wild stuff can be fabricated. But usually at great labor cost, the other side of the coin.
 
These relate to the comments about the Thomson table.
Then finishing parts on a rotary table. If parts are handed, or if both sides need duplicate operations, even set up components, location fixtures, & patterns need to be precisely reversible or invertible. The holes were in the brackets were also drilled and bored, back on the Thomson table. It can still be relatively fast and convenient for stepping/spacing operations like that.

Originally, Thomson tables were provided with a pair of 90 lb weights & a quick clamp system that hung one on each end under the table. I've never seen any. The idea was to provide inertia when milling. I stack up junk and more or less clamp it down. It makes a very big difference in control, and avoiding broken EM's.

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The original table leg bracket was sized much larger and with a strong under section. As the initial parts were compared directly with the wooden components, the pattern and parts were whittled down to a more compact/less visually incongruous shape. This is the starting point. Note that one of the set up "complications" is that the tracing process rotates the machined form, from the traced pattern

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Simple rounding profile (gothic arch profile) requires another, invertible fixture with locating dowel to do both sides symmetrically.

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More later if the picture loader cooperates. :)

smt
 
Let's see if the uploader is going to cooperate today....

Yes!

Per hardware Q:


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Using machined fixtures with interchangeable bushings, location in legs and case is by snug fitting stainless dowels. Screws hold it together. I devised this dowel system about a decade ago and use it for some of my KD cases. The dowels are all hex broached for easy insertion in threaded connectors/brackets, etc. In some apps (not here) the dowels are threaded internally as well.

smt
 
BTW -

I like that photo, why build a workbench when you can just use a pile of wood as a bench!

That's actually my all-purpose clamp carrier, veneer press, and long bed lathe. And sometimes workbench. :)
The lumber is merely piled under it, until being moved up to the loft. I had just cleaned out a pattern shop for pine and mahogany, (at an auction Dale made me aware of & then helped move) & had only got that far with storing it at the time.

These photos might give a better perspective on the clamp hangars:

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smt
 








 
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