Update

I thought a brief update was in order before getting on with the next post in the CNC essay series. I have been chipping away every day at the remaining work on the second half of The Art of Japanese Carpentry Drawing Volume III. I appreciate the patience shown by all of you who have bought the volume on the faith that I would issue the second half in a timely manner. The table project chewed into that time, but now I'm between projects, more or less, so I can move the writing and drawing forward. I greatly regret the delay. When it's ready, the second half of the volume will be sent to all those who purchased the first half. I've also made some tweaks to Volume I and II and plan to send out that revision (#2) in the near future. Again, for original purchasers, the revisions are completely free.

I haven't heard a peep from the architect who wanted me to collaborate on a Mansard roof project down in Pittsburgh. For no apparent reason, he has vanished completely and hasn't responded to any messages I've sent him in the past three weeks. We were supposed to take a trip to France together in another week, so it's really puzzling.

I have received a design deposit to commence work on a new piece of furniture. This will be a coffee table with a glass top and some interesting curvilinear elements. It's probably a 2~3 month project. If the client is open to it, I'll do a build thread on that soon.

In the meantime, I decided to take my Oliver 166 jointer fence apart, which involved drifting out some fixed pins and general careful bashing with a mallet. I have the parts down at a local machine shop where they will do, I hope, any necessary re-machining and align-honing of the parts so I can get the fence operating smoothly like it should. While I don't tilt the fence all that often on the jointer, I prefer not to have to arm wrestle with it when the need arises to change the angle from 90˚ to the table. I will also be getting the fence re-ground or re-planed back to flat, possibly at the same machine shop.

My wife reminded me that we could use a few bookcases, so I am taking some leftover bits of wood and putting together a 'quickie' bookcase. By 'quickie' I jest a little, since it will be all joined and will take me "at least a couple of weeks". Given that it is casework, it will be hard to avoid using some glue for the connections, and I'm okay with that -really.

Here's the material I will be working with - a bit of Canary wood, a bit of bubinga, and some curly Black Cherry:

Another view:


Too bad the Canary wood smells gross and doesn't hold its colour. I'm glad to make some use of the board I have left from the Mazerolle sawhorse project from last year, but I doubt I'll be getting any more of the stuff as I don't like working with it much.

The book case will be about 72" (183 cm) tall, and be about 27" wide (68.5 cm), with 5 shelves. Not sure if it's worth doing a detailed build thread or not, but I'll bring the camera to the shop and see what I feel like shooting.

The client who funded and supported the previous project, the Ming-inspired dining table, has indicated interest in dining chairs to go with it, but it is not an immediate priority for him so those chairs might be something happening in the fall.

The client for the coffee table seems interested in several pieces of furniture, and possibly a small outbuilding on her property, so we'll see what happens there. In the next few days I will be concentrating on getting the drawing work moved along.

A bit of this and a bit of that, seems to be the order of the day. I'm looking forward to some of the technical challenges in this next piece of furniture.

One interesting bit of news - I was emailing with a Westerner who is an expert in Chinese furniture, who happens to be in China at the moment, and he said he was unable to access my blog from over there. I guess the Chinese government is blocking access to blogspot and likely other blogging servers.

Thanks for coming by the Carpentry Way today.