| Blog series by Dave Rutan | updated 09-20-2016 02:58 PM | 6 parts | 10428 reads | 35 comments total |
Part 1: Dressers
[Legebla ankaŭ en Esperanto]Where do you find wood that isn’t plain pine boards and studs from the local lumberyard? If you don’t live near a furniture supply house or don’t want to pay for wood for small projects, do like I do. I live in a mid-sized town in the rural corner of New Jersey. When I’m out driving here and there I keep an eye out along the streets, mainly in my own town, for broken furniture. A lot of folks throw out broken chairs, but I don’t ha...
Part 2: Oak Plant Stand
Coming home from Church on Sunday I passed this plant stand, out for the trash, not far from my house. Needless to say I walked out and took a look. It is made of solid, 1 inch by 1 1/2 inch oak. It came apart into 2 frame pieces by removing 4 screws on the bottom. Some flexing broke the doweled joints. This is what I got. The long bits have a useful 22 inches of solid oak between the dowel holes.
Part 3: This Wood Won't Smell
My church had two pews in the narthex that were starting to fall apart. I had repaired them a few times, but there’s only so much you can do without just taking them apart and restoring them. I was starting to make plans on replacing them with plywood benches, but this week the church got a hold of some reception are chairs for free. So now the pews are spare and I’ve offered to take them away. They are each 12 feet long and made (I think) of maple. I’ll have to c...
Part 4: The Pew Report
As mentioned previously in this series, I got possession of two old church pews that my church no longer needed. Today I disassembled them and cut the long pieces in half crosswise to fit them in my car. Because of the splits in the wood, I ended up with many 1×4’s and a few 1×6’s. One seat stayed intact, but it has a split. I’ll have to break it anyway to fit through my thickness planer. I cleaned the wood up, taking off any molding so that it would fit ...
Part 5: Old Dresser Drawers
A while ago I saw a chest of drawers on the curb, out for the trash. I didn’t have room for the carcass, but I grabbed the drawers. The drawer fronts were plywood covered with veneer. Unfortunately I didn’t know this until I started planing them down. Pretty much ruined as plywood, I used them to make a bunch of John Heisz style push sticks. One small bonus from these was a few pieces of hardware. I got two mending plates and two corner brackets. All hail ...
Part 6: Curb Score
I vowed to myself that if a certain dresser were still on the curb on the morning of trash collection that I’d grab the drawers for myself. If I had a pickup truck, I might have grabbed the carcass as well. The tops are often of use. As I began breaking the drawers down, I noticed on one drawer front that someone had put the holes for the drawer pulls in the wrong spot and had filled them in. Oops. The drawer fronts have a veneer, but the core looks to be solid popla...
