After the completion of University in 2009 I took on a few ‘home’ projects for 2010 rather then looking for ‘outside’ works to get stuck into. The most notable piece being the sewing table that had been sitting outside for the last 30 odd years. Don’t worry there shall be a blog on that later.

From there I decided to do a little sight seeing of Australia by travelling to Perth which resulted in me buying a car and driving the 4000 kilometers home (2485.84 miles roughly) in about 3 days… Crazy I know but an unforgettable experience and if you like a good long drive I recommend it, save maybe take a bit longer then me haha.  From there it was a few bits and pieces but nothing note worthy there.

And like that you have 2011!

Having got a taste for restoration, not conservation, I decided to take on a bit of a challenge starting off with 2 chairs to strip, refinish and then upholster (this of course meant I had to learn how to do that) satisfied at the end product of the first chair I was given the next 4 chairs, the table and the side board to ‘play’ with.  Again I shall do a blog for those.

After they were complete the dining area was looking a little bear in one corner so with a scrap piece of paper I drew up a small shelf unit that would fit nicely, showed the design and got the go ahead to build that.

About mid year I made a trip to Sydney and emptied my bank account into the stretched out hands of a machine selling shop and return bearing very expensive ‘toys’ for the studio, these included a bandsaw, table saw, drop saw, 2 routers, thicknesser, jointer and a linisher (sander) so its made things in the studio a bit easier to manage.

And lastly at the end of 2011 I got a commission to build a chopping board which resulted in 7 more word of mouth commission from the original client.

And like the 2 years gone in the blink of an eye…

That’s a good thing and a bad thing, good because its a new design but bad because anything can work in your mind, you thought of it there and it worked there but it probably won’t in real life.

That’s what I’m facing right now, a great idea thought which I’d love to test out but I don’t have the necessary equipment to do the job. So its going to have to be a drawing board design until I can afford the things I need to do to test it.

With the spring, plant growth exploded into life at my house. . . all those dead trees didn’t look so dead because they now had leaves… and not just leaves but branches with leaves. Even the seeds I planted from the tree I can’t remember started growing, it was great… I had children from another species haha

Summer came, our lovely Australian summer came and all the plants should have drooped and showed life of some heat stroke, but no! Seems that my little child tree, the apricot tree wasn’t a child anymore. It had its growth spurt, it got pimples (hundreds of growth buds) and its leaves went from smooth to hairy (prickles) and the hunger set in… more water, more seaweed growth juice, a bigger stick to support its tiny spine (stem)

My pip squeak child of 9 inches (22.5 cm) had run away and been replaced with a monster and the monster kept growing and growing… I wouldn’t look at it for 2 days and it was different when I went back… is this what its like with humans?

To date my teenager stands tall… nearly as tall as me… with a grand height of 71 inches (177.5 cm) and counting,

Not to bad for a weed.

It ran smoothly,
No drunks for free booze,
Most people in the exhibition got awards (including me),
And I got described as a man with magic hands that everyone should be jealous of…

… Quite frankly I don’t see it but a compliment is a compliment and I take them when I get them.

(On a side note I fixed up the website a bit so everything runs a little bit more smoothly so make sure to have a look)

www.charleydesigns.com

There will be an Exhibition towards the end of January 2010 at the Bungendore Wood Workers Gallery, Australia. Entry forms have to be sent in by December 10th, I am considering entering in, but the decision is whether to create a new piece of work within the next month or simple put my cabinet I made at the start of the year in?

The decision is hard because I know I can make something new in that time, buts its a whole lot of work and it would be easier to enter my cabinet in, so I’ll have to come to a conclusion soon or it’ll be to late.

The chess board for my chess table is set into the top, but when i cut the recess in I lost my reference surface. I marked out the spot for the chess board and checked it, and checked it and check it. Basically I check it so many times that it couldn’t go wrong. Couldn’t.

But it did, I cut out the spot which took an age and went to put the board in and it didn’t fit. I had managed to cut the outline on one side 2mm to short and without my flat reference surface to work off I couldn’t just cut it out again. So I will have to do it by hand to get it to fit in place.

Just a quick one to say I’m still alive. The workshop took over and it became hard to try and get near a computer, I did manage to get my website working so make sure you get a chance to have a look: www.charleydesigns.com.

Here a quick picture of how the progress in the workshop is going;

That said… mine are not. I’ve decided to put my leg tenon’s on a 45 degree angle so that instead of having a sharp corner, you have flat surface (kiddie friendly) so this of course means that the mortise has to be on a 45, by that I mean cutting a hole at 45 degrees and lets just say its no walk in the park. I can’t use a mortise machine to cut the bulk out because the mortise bits are to big. So I had to resort to using drill bits to get the bulk out which meant I had to build a jig first to hold it.

As you can see it wasn’t an easy task from the picture above, lucky I only used an 8mm bit instead of the 10mm I was going to use because other wise I would have gone outside the knife lines. After the drilling came the joy of cleaning it all up and boy what fun it was… the drilling was hard but compared to this it was easy, pearing a mortise on the 45 and keeping out at 45 was nearly damn near impossible, especially when the chisel tracked all over the place because the wood didn’t want to give. But I kept at it and after 13 hours I have all 8 mortise’s done and now it comes to the next fun bit, the tenons.

So today I’ve been working on my table top. I usually tend to work with straight lines and 90 degree corners but for this project I decided to push myself away from straight and into the world of curves and hoping you get it right. So for my table top I’ve decided to go with a rectangle shape with the longer edges having a wide arc on them. Easy to say but how do you find a good arc across a 1.2 metre length? And more importantly how do you draw up this arc and get both sides the same?

So the first thing to decide was how much of an arc did I want. Did I want it to be very noticeable or did I want something that at first glance looked straight? For nearly 2 hours I sketched in my book trying to find a good arc but nothing was looking right, sketches were not precise enough for what I wanted and if I did small measured drawings they looked out of proportion. Eventually getting annoyed I got a rule and held it in an arc on the wood and penciled it on and stared at it. Usually theses out bursts towards design never work for me and I sit back down and continue drawing but looking at this I saw my arc.

The next process once I had this arc was to get a perfect arc but how do you draw an arc the size I had, I didn’t have a compass that could draw a 37.378999 metre radius. Someone in the workshop suggested I get a long bit of string… but thats not accurate enough. In the end one of the lecturers suggested that I get a template made and their 1.5 metre bit of metal, measure down from the side 5mm and hold the arc while he marks it out with a pencil. 

“The worst that will happen is you won’t get the arc right, but its an easy way to test the arc out.”

Wise words?

I did what he told me to, marked out where the metal had to carve to and got him to pencil it in on a piece of MDF. Sure enough he said it was fine and thats not what you want to hear. Before cutting the template out I had to aline it with both side of the table so that when it was cut out I didn’t have to try and aline a curve piece.

Afterwards I cut the template out, shaped it to the arc then place it on the table top sides again. Rough cutting most of the excess away on the bandsaw first before moving onto the router with a straight long blade bearing bit.

Having the template run against the bearing allowing me to have a smooth straight arc and by that I mean no bumps along the carve.

Left: Cut with template on. Right: Cut with template off.