Having expanded my workshop with a dedicated metal welding and forming station, I can now build metal legs for furniture (or other basic welding needs) in house. If you have a project in mind, please reach out!

There is a world of difference between designing a one-off product for a commissioned job, and designing something to be manufactured by the dozen (or by the thousand) - those hard-to-reach corners or peculiar material choices might not be a big problem for one creation, but they can add real production costs and potential support problems when done in volume. In this post I touch on a few of the many considerations a product designer needs to consider when manufacturing something in wood.

Gluing veneer to a curved surface is a bit more challenging than a flat panel as the clamping pressure needs to be distributed evenly over the curve, and often, that clamping pressure also might act to deform the shape. In this post, I share a few tips and tricks - and include photos and examples of my own work - on how to overcome these challenges.

Just scratching the surface of the “feeds and speeds” topic that any good machinist knows, I learned quite a bit about how to make my CNC work go faster, and what tooling to use to better match a machine’s capabilities with the material being cut. Read on to get an overview of spindle speed, travel speed, tool size, and horsepower - and why it matters.

If you are making a tambour door - think roll-top desk - there are some critical relationships between the size of the slats, the size of the tenon, and the minimum radius that can be supported as the door slides around corners and contours. The rules-of-thumb and anecdotal experiences I found online did not tell the complete story which led to a brief panic in my project. With some pen & paper, I was able to translate an understanding of the geometry to a quick adjustment, and to a concrete equation which provides some guidelines for anyone building their own tambour door.

Though typically labor and shop time is a bigger factor in driving the cost of hardwood products, its still helpful to understand the relative cost of different materials so you can make an informed tradeoff on appearance and cost. This blog provides some data points for the retail cost of about twenty-five different domestic and foreign hardwoods, as well as identifying a few other considerations of how a different material selection can significantly change the cost of a project.

Fabricating custom treads for a circular staircase is largely a story of jigs, made and remade until they’re just right. I outline the steps - and missteps - I took along the way of bringing this nearly year-long vision to fruition.

So many engraving bits to choose from; which is the right one to use? Did you ever expect to apply that high school trigonometry for engraving? In this post, we go through the considerations in selecting the size and angle of engraving bit based on the width of the characters and the thickness of the stock.

Applying those multiple coats of finish can quickly get to be tedious. But beyond bringing out the beauty of the natural wood grain, it also provides an essential moisture barrier. Just how effective is that moisture barrier? And is that third coat really necessary? This post illuminates a great resource for understanding the moisture retardance properties of different finishes, and based on how many coats you’ve applied.

Want to make sure you get the most out of your sheet goods for a complicated project? Have a large multi-material project that you need to estimate the weight of prior to construction or transportation? This post outlines a few tools and resources you might find handy early in the planning stage.