Frame and Panel Cherry Table

Here are the images for a table I've been commissioned for. I'm excited as it's my first full fledged commission, and I've gotten to buy a few new tools to help build it.

Not all the details are in there, because some of them weren't finalized yet. Also some details have changed, such as the stile arrangement. Which is now like it is below.
 

Inspiration and Skill

My girlfriend just sent me this link, I'm in love. I want to commission some hardware, I want to visit.




The name of the company is P.E. Guerin, they specialize in decorative hardware and fixtures and were founded in New York City in 1857. It's the oldest dec. hardware firm in the US and operates the only foundry in NYC. I simply must visit.

Making the Best Butter

I haven't talked about this side of my life much on this blog as it's about woodworking, but food is one of the all important aspects of [my] life. I've got particular convictions about eating, one of which is cooking from scratch. I leave out all the other parts for now...

This is a photo of a mostly empty cream container, and butter. Now you may be more familiar with the piece of butter on the left, it's paler and rectangular. The butter on the right? Well that's something you can't just buy in the store, it's home made butter. It takes very simple tools (or fancy traditional ones if you're a woodworker) and only about 10 minutes.

Basic instructions are theses: Take a pint of heavy cream (mine is organic from a local creamery), let it sit out at room temperature for 6-12 hours, pour into quart sized mason jar, shake (steadily not violently) for three or so minutes, it should clump and start to look like well butter, drain off liquid (you can save this, it's buttermilk, great for omelets, biscuits etc.), wash with cold water, dump into bowl and work with the back of a spoon to remove the extra water/buttermilk, then salt to taste.

The butter in the picture is about a third of the butter made, my guess is $6 of cream got me 3/4c of buttermilk and a half pound of butter. You may notice that the butter is very yellow, this is from carotene in the cows diet, usually butter is yellower in the spring with better food and paler in the fall/winter. I know this cream comes from well fed cows, and is free range... making the best butter I've ever had.

I don't think I'll be buying butter from the store anymore, making it is just too easy and infinitely tastier, plus now I have an excuse to make all kinds of specialty butter making tools. Let the fun begin!

Working with other Materials

In the first semester of my senior year in college we partnered with the Philadelphia based C.H Briggs office to work with a material called Corian. You may know it as a solid surface counter top material made by DuPont.

Anyways the material is really cool (for not being wood), in all seriousness I thought I would hate due to its lack of cellulose, that wasn't the case. It was amazing stuff. It can be heat formed, printed on (in a process called dye sublimation), glued with special glue, cut with a CNC etc. Signmakers use rather extensively I've noticed. Our task was to work with it and find new uses for the counter top material. Because of its properties I knew I wanted to do something with food. I also knew that heat forming it was a process I was going to love.

I had about a zillion ideas, but didn't hit my stride until I chose a food culture to work with. I chose sushi, it had a lot of positive things going for it, sushi is about plating, it has tradition, it tastes awesome. Here is what I came up with after about 4 months in the design process...

Okay that is just the rough mock-up out of foam-core, with foam stand-ins for actual sushi. I'm liking it so I went ahead and built molds in CAD then cut them out on a CNC routing machine. Then I threw some Corian blanks into the oven and got the hydraulic press ready and SQUISH, here's the final thing...complete with freshly dead fish.

 
I have mileage left to go on my ideas for this process, and I'll be posting about those products as I get them ready for production.  Also check out this great write-up about our installation on the Surface&Panel blog.