Thursday, February 18, 2010

Update

So, I've been in and out for the past couple of weeks. I decided to rearrange a little bit of my work area, to make it make more sense to me. I spun up a side project, which I'll talk a little more about at some point. I've come up with new chair patters, and I'm pissed off.

The work space I laid out is nice, but one of the things I've noticed as I go along is that it inevitably ends up looking trashed. Most of the stuff I don't need, things I'm not using, and so forth, end up littering the surrounding areas. And I'm able to ignore most of it because it's behind me. As are most of my tools... so I have to turn around when I'm at the bench to get my hands on anything.

Well, I solved some of that for now. First, there's a big table that I own that I've used as an auxiliary bench, but I've always used it as a crap-catcher of sorts. Now it's an auxiliary work table, underneath the window. A place to do assemblies, to leave wood stickered when I'm not playing with it, that wort of thing. What I'd been doing with it before is leaving it tucked under a shelf, and using it to hold things like drills and hardware organizers. Not a great use of space, and not a great habit to get into.  I did tuck a few things underneath it... like my antique tool chest, my Emmert vise, and a Festool Vacuum. The Emmert needs to be mounted to something soon, I'm tired of having and not using something that is so well suited to chair making.

Parallel to that, is my bench. It's now 90 degrees to the wall, which means the big storage cabinet is to my left, and I don't have to turn completely around to get to it. And parallel to that is the shaving horse.

Side project is a crate that someone was throwing away. For a packing crate, it's surprisingly well put together, and as I've been trying to work out a few ideas on movable furniture, I thought that a very nicely made dresser built into a packing crate is a sort of metaphor for the kind of furniture I've had a use for for several years now. So, I'm going to build a nice dresser into the packing crate.

Lastly, I'm pissed off. I mad a lumber trip a week and some ago, and didn't get enough of what I thought I needed. I made a second trip up last week, didn't make it before they closed, and on the way home, my truck got rear-ended by a small bus. So, I'm still chasing the insurance company to get that sorted out. Hopefully soon it'll all be behind me in more than a literal sense.

2 comments:

Seth Kaufman said...

You are so process-oriented; your description of how you've optimized your work area reads like a Kaizen exercise from Toyota. At the same time, your creative side is manifest in the chairs and bookcases and other furniture you make. I hope you appreciate how infrequently those qualities exist in the same person!

JW said...

Aw, shucks....

Yeah, I think I do have a pretty good appreciation of how far I've come. But there are days when it really feels like it's been a long road, and I'm just not done yet. It's nice to think that I'll get there. I just want to know when.