| Blog series by Jeff | updated 05-03-2008 05:46 AM | 4 parts | 32852 reads | 38 comments total |
Part 1: Beginning of the Course
In November of 2007 the Minnesota Woodworker’s Guild held the annual Fall Seminar at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD). It was an excellent two and a half day event hosting Marc Adams of the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. I highly recommend Marc as a speaker at a guild or club event if your group plays host to speakers. Part of what made the event such a good time were the facilities available at MCAD. They not only have a commerical class wood shop, metal fabricati...
Part 2: Inspiration
As I mentioned in the last entry, I found a project that jumped off the page and gave me the inspiration I needed to start the design for my project. I picked up the book Tradition in Contemporary Furniture and started thumbing through the pages… Here is a shot of the cover for anyone interested. This is the work that gave my creative juices a jump-start:Copyright 2001 by The Furniture Society. Artist: Gord Peteran, Toronto, Ontario, 1999. Photo by Elaine Brodie. It reminded me...
Part 3: Design Presentation and Final Modifications
The next week of class was consumed by each student presenting and speaking to their design what their main tenets would be for the project. Part of the previous week’s assignment had been to pick your tenet or tenets and be prepared to stick with them. My main tenet was to see the design through and devise a way to pull off the cantilever. I knew it was going to be tough just by all the drawing work I had put into SketchUp. Seriously, there are only 6 90-deg corners (aside from all the...
Part 4: Building a Scale Model
As mentioned in the previous entry, at the suggestion of my instructor, I modified the design such that the whole top would be a torsion grid. This approach did present its own problem though. Since the design called for the ‘leg’ to act as a massive tenon seated in the underside of the top, I would need a lot of bulk around the leg. I considered laminating solid wood pieces to build it up. I decided against that; I can’t recall why. Instead, I opted to take what I call t...
