As I’ve stopped using social media now (moral reasons - its really not doing our world any good at all IMHO) I’m going to endeavour to update this Journal more regularly from now on, assuming I’ve actually done anything… This first entry covers the whole of January where there has been plenty going on but not too much actually made.
The majority of work this year (and plenty at the end of last year) is to decorate the interior of a large building, to keep some consistency I’ll refer to this in the Journal as No. 3. This project will have a lot of carvings and interesting classic details. Many of the doors I made panels for last year are for this and have started being installed as you can see in the first two images below. As you can see it’s still mostly a building site but I’m excited to see some of it being put into place. One thing I have cut this year for this room is to cut decorative holes into the skirting that will dress the bottom of the units. These were mostly different sizes so needed a lot files to machine them all. Once I’d prepped the computer data from the drawings, I made a jig to hold the parts in place so the shapes could be cut out. You can see the jig and a part being carved in the third image below and then the stack of skirting that I had to cut for the whole room. The jig made this job pretty straightforward, as is often the case good preparation and planning made the actual cutting go as efficiently as possible.
Another project for this room was some large Cherub carvings that will sit inside some panels for the passages between rooms. I’d carved some of these at the end of last year but we decided they would look better if they were also carved on the back to make them look hand carved. To do this I made a jig to hold the front of the carving in position, you can see this in the first picture below. Using this I was able to carve a model from the software to cut the edges of the back which you can see in the second photo. As well as the machine work I did a lot of hand carving too to cut in the overlapping pieces and sharpen up some of the details. This was time consuming but very effective. The third image shows the four finished parts. Notice there are two with left wing overlapping and two with right overlapping - as per the customers request. Small customisation like this and the hand carving really made these look good.
The final image below was a very beautiful Peacock butterfly that turned up in the workshop and nestled on the outside of our office wall. I don’t think it was very happy with the cold but brightened my day.
In other news, the Cabinet Maker I share a work-space with has decided to buy a much bigger CNC than I use, mainly for sheet work. So we’ve spent a fair bit of time this month pulling apart and putting together the workshop to fit the new piece of kit in. This meant moving most of the tools we already have along with building a new staircase and flooring so that has eaten up a fair chunk of time.
Finally for No. 3 we discussed with the client at the end of last week a design for two chimney pieces for each end of the room shown above. He was enthused about these so I’ve started the formal design work, they’ll be based on a design from a furniture catalogue from 1742 and will look amazing. More on those in future updates.