A triad of Deep Deck longboards in American elm, ready for trucks and wheels

I’ve been making small batches of my Deep Deck longboard in the background of other projects in the shop, laying up a new deck each day, trimming, sanding and finishing the previous day’s cured laminations. Making decks at this scale has been a pleasant, fairly effortless task, a good way to wind down from carving the crane before I sweep up and call it a day.

I burn my ‘deep’ logo onto the undersides of the decks, and stamp the species and date.

In the coming year, I plan to scale up my Deep Deck production, and hope my limited production prototypes will help to generate interest. I’ll continue to make the decks by hand, but in larger batches, which should be easy once I invest in a few key tools to speed production. The decks will be offered in dated, limited editions, sequenced from locally sourced logs that I mill and dry myself; the scale of each tree will determine the scale of each production.

My next batch of decks will come from a 100 year old white oak.

I recently purchased the log that will yield my first large production run of decks, a giant white oak that was felled for safety reasons on the property of a historic, one room schoolhouse in Healdsburg, CA. It’s likely the tree was planted adjacent to the Felta schoolhouse when it was constructed in 1906. I look forward to researching the site and posting more about its history as the wood dries after I mill it in early 2012.

The Felta schoolhouse, built in 1906 in Healdsburg, California

Tagged: deep craft, deep deck, innovation, longboard, scott Constable, skate deck, skateboard, woodworking

Two identical bases of green pecan, ready to receive the top, a giant slab of sycamore.

Whenever I design and make a new piece of furniture, I’m always keenly aware of how it will age, and how the piece might transform over time to encourage and support future, as yet unforeseeable patterns of use. I’ve been collecting choice local woods over the years, all neatly stickered in the barn, so my design process usually begins with rummaging through my piles for inspiration, making measurements and drawing directly onto the wood with white chalk. My primary criteria at this early stage is whether the piece of furniture I have in mind is the appropriate final destination for the wood- will it do the tree justice? I’ve always thought of my furniture as a way of extending the life of a tree, as a way of simultaneously storing and appreciating wood by putting it to good use; living daily life as an extension of making.

As I continue to collect and store local woods, and especially as I begin to mill trees myself, I’m becoming more attuned to the value of locally sourced, well-sawn, air-dried wood as a commodity. An increasingly scarce resource, fine wood is a good investment and increases dramatically in value, especially if it has the added cache of ecological responsibility, streaming from the urban forest, or as ‘horticultural salvage’. Because handmade furniture ultimately needs to compete in the marketplace with an increasingly sophisticated range of mass-market comparables, it can be challenging to offer a price point in proportion to the value of the material itself, which is a dilemma, even if the quality of the finished product is markedly higher. This is especially the case when ’studio furniture’ needs first and foremost to meet rigorous functional, as well as aesthetic requirements.

I milled grooves into the stickers for better air flow and to allow for movement.

While my way of thinking about wood-as-commodity has lived quietly in the background of most of my furniture design to date, I’ve been wanting do make a new body of work where the concept is front and center, both in the process of making and in the process of using the furniture. To this end, I’m grateful to my friend Cindy Daniel, who commissioned a ‘Community Table’ for Shed, her Healdsburg-based café/retail/community hub offering local foods, goods and quality wares. Shed is Cindy’s contemporary spin on the traditional country mercantile store, and I’ve enjoyed working with her over the past two years designing interior scenarios for the new building currently under construction, a large, open air metal structure designed by Mark Jensen.

My original thumbnail sketch for the Stickered Table

As much as my Community Table for Shed will serve as a gathering place in the café, it doubles as a process piece for the duration of the enterprise, establishing a kind of invented tradition. The table’s base consists of two nearly identical stacks of green pecan wood I recently milled from a dying tree, neatly stickered to allow the wood to naturally air-dry. The table’s top, a massive slab of sycamore, rests on top of the two piles, acting as a gravity clamp to keep the material from cupping. I milled V-grooves into the stickers to allow for better air flow and to decrease friction as the boards inevitably shrink. After one year, when the stock is adequately dry, the top will be lifted and the material removed and converted into functional wares for Shed, either to be used in the café or sold as product to customers. This first batch will likely make small table tops for the Shed café, slated to open in October 2012.. The two bases will then be re-constructed, stacked from freshly milled wood each year, that will in turn be made into a small production run of whatever item surfaces in the course of its drying.

I typically shellac and wax the ends of boards to prevent undo checking.

I like the idea of adding an element of ‘crowd-sourcing’ to the design development of an annual product, taking advantage of a constant flow of people gathered around the table while the material slowly cures beneath. I also look forward to maintaining an ongoing relationship with Shed as a kind of artisan-in-residence, collaborating with Cindy to design products that exemplify the Shed ethos.

Please click here to see the table with the top installed.

Tagged: appropriate technology, craft philosophy, deep craft, furniture design, green design, green woodworking, innovation, Jensen Architects, scott Constable, sculpture, Shed, slow design, sustainability, vernacular, woodworking

My friend Sean Gavin mills logs on site with his portable Wood-Mizer

I spent an action-packed weekend milling my first tree, a mature pecan (Carya Illinoensis) that grew in the sandy soil of a nearby horse pasture. The tree was beginning to die and had been dropping large branches, threatening the safety of the horses. The property owner decided to take the tree down and I worked with my friend Kevin Paul, a local arborist, to devise a cutting strategy to optimize the wood for on-site milling. I then hired Sean Gavin’s portable mill and worked closely with Sean and a few friends milling sections of the trunk and large diameter branches to my specifications.

Kevin felled the pecan tree into a neighboring pasture for ease of access

Belonging to the hickory family, pecan is notoriously hard, even when green, and the cutting was tough on Sean’s blades. To make matters worse, we hit pockets of nails embedded in the main trunk on several occasions, probably the remains of a treehouse early in the life of the sixty year old tree. Despite the challenges we managed to mill well over one thousand board feet of wood in two short days, and I have a goodly stockpile of pecan wood ready to sticker up in the barn to dry.

We brought in the heavy guns to load the main trunk, weighing about 6000 pounds

I plan to use the smaller branch stock for a project I’m developing for Shed in Healdsburg, and will save the large slabs for future experiments in furniture-making. Measuring up to 16′ long and 2.5″ thick, the large slabs will take over two years to air-dry, which will give me ample time to develop a new line of tables and other furnishings that take advantage of the material’s inherent attributes. Like most hickories, pecan has a pale, creamy sapwood with streaks of honey and light brown, and a dark brown heartwood. Known for its extreme hardness, strength and durability, pecan is prized for making utilitarian items like tool handles, baseball bats, crates and pallets.

the upper trunk, boule cut to 2.5″ slabs

dark brown heartwood contrasts with the tree’s pale sapwood

The process of milling and curing my own material brings me one step closer to realizing my dream of managing a true, artisan scale, craft production, optimizing the capabilities of our rural studio compound. The next step will be to develop a marketing strategy to sell my wares in sync with the Deep Craft ethos. What’s most exciting to me is the challenge of reverse-engineering ‘design’ around the constraints of scale, site and local relationships, and enjoying every step of the process.

leaf and fruit of the pecan tree (Carya Illinoensis)

Tagged: aesthetics, california flora, craft philosophy, deep craft, furniture design, green woodworking, scott Constable, sonoma coast, watershed, wood-mizer, woodworking

The first in a series of coffee tables, a lozenge-shaped slab, 30″ x 72″ x 16.5″ high

I’ve begun making a series of coffee tables, encouraged by a recent commission from my brother in law to make one for my sister’s 50th birthday later this month. It’s always easier to make things in small multiples, with variation in material, proportion and construction style. I had honestly never given much thought to the idea of a coffee table, but am discovering that it’s the perfect form to experiment with some new ideas. I also like that the coffee table is inherently casual, functioning as a site for dining, reading, writing, as a footrest and even as seating. Plus, I have a stockpile of wood I’ve been saving that is ideally suited to the task.

The first table to come off the bench is for our own use, a lozenge-shaped monster I cut from a solid slab of locally-milled Monterey cypress, three inches thick. The table has bent wire legs I salvaged from a 1950’s era production table that I plan to tool up to replicate in my shop. To me, the table bridges a Southern Californian ethos of casual modernism with a North Californian ethos of forest stewardship and artisanry.

I like the ordinariness of the grain pattern; you can feel the girth of the tree

I like any piece of furniture to have a stance, an attitude

Tagged: aesthetics, coffee table, deep craft, furniture design, scott Constable, sonoma coast, woodworking, wowhaus

Each fall I sweep the dry duff off of our funky barn roof before the Dampness ensues

One of my September rituals has been clearing the corrugated roof of our funky back barn. The rambling, open-air structure is an explosion of three dissimilar building concepts, fused together with the oddball valleys and warped pitches of an under-planned roofline, one that collects piles of fallen duff of the redwood trees overhead each year. Though it’s a bit of an eyesore to most sensibilities, the building is structurally sound, and I’ve enjoyed studying it over the years whenever I clear the roof during the dry season, thinking about how best to put the barn to good use before the Dampness ensues until the next spring. I’ve learned to appreciate the improvised mess of its design with the same happy reluctance I reserve for the work of Frank Gehry.

The barn’s deceptively vast interior spaces are multi-functional and well-suited to our needs: a portion of the building is where I store paints and hardware, metal-working tools and surplus gear; a portion houses one of our wells; a portion we use as an annex to our sculpture studio; a portion is to store large equipment, a boat and other materials. Over the summer I’ve been trying to clear space inside to better support the increasing scope of our wowhaus projects. We recently sold our broken down McCormick-Deering tractor, which got me thinking about using the barn as a drying shed for the wood I’m about to have milled from our land. In conjunction with my new woodshop and a related body of work I have in development, I plan to source and mill more of my own logs, and have just enough room in the barn to air-dry a few thousand board feet. This spring I plan to build a solar kiln for a final kiss of dry heat.

Taking a break from the work, I lie on my back on the roof and stare up into the redwoods

Tagged: california flora, coast redwood, deep craft, vernacular architecture, woodworking, wowhaus

Front and back of my last box of Blue Band Velevet #5572

As a daily comfort I prefer quality, vintage pencils, which I use in the course of drawing, writing and working with wood. I’m in a bit of a panic, down to my last box of Blue Band Velvets, manufactured by the American Lead Pencil Company in the 1920’s, that I inherited from my grandfathers (not sure which one), along with some drafting tools and hand planes of the same vintage. Luckily, I’ve discovered Bob Truvy’s website dedicated to the historic archive of pencils from around the world. Unfortunately, his collection is not for sale, so I plan to continue my search, knowing that contemporary pencil manufacture is not up to snuff. I’m even considering making my own as we prepare to fell a pair of incense cedar trunks on our property, the best wood for making high quality pencils.

our twin trunk incense cedar, limmed and ready to be felled

Tagged: aesthetics, bob truby, deep craft, furniture design, green woodworking, pencils, woodworking

Freshly harvested kelp drying on the garden fence

For a while after the recent tsunami in Japan, Californians were aflutter about iodine, the primary antidote to radiation exposure. In researching sources of the element I discovered that the Japanese consume about five times more than most of the rest of the world, largely because seaweed and fresh fish figure so prominently in their daily diet. Interestingly, there is a strong correlation between the Japanese consumption of iodine with both their decreased rates of cancer and increased lifespan. I also learned that the production of the chemical element, iodine, was a cottage industry in Ireland and other coastal regions in the nineteenth century, where kelp was prevalent and abundant throughout the year.

Because our local beaches yield heaps of kelp, I’ve experimented over the past few years with using it as a material for making things, with varying degrees of success. I’m now more interested in kelp as a food source, and have been foraging the flat strands and drying them in the sun for cooking. Eventually, I’d like to make a batch of pure iodine as an experiment, perhaps as a way of staining/preserving wood. Historically, iodine has be extracted from kelp by reducing it to ash, boiling and filtering the ashes, and extracting the pure element by mixing it with hydrogen peroxide.

Tagged: appropriate technology, deep craft, iodine, kelp, tsunami

It’s been a bumper year for wild plums, and our few trees, bent to capacity with ripe fruit, have been feeding the birds, raccoons and a solitary bobcat, who harvests from our rooftop at night. We’re eating our share as well, and Ene has already prepared a few gallons of ‘plum brandy’ that should be ready for Christmas.

On or way to the beach we pass the Pozzi Ranch, some of Straus Creamery’s grazing meadows, and several smaller family farms, all of who have been cutting hay over the past few weeks. Just as the grasses turn gold, they’re cut into rows where they sit for a week or so before being baled. I love the haphazard architecture of the bales as they cure before being collected and loaded into barns. The ride to the beach smells of sweet cut grass drying in the sun.

Salmon Creek and the Russian River are still feeding the Pacific at high tides, so the surrounding beaches are loaded with driftwood. This year I’ve discovered some surprisingly sophisticated structures built of driftwood. I’m not sure if it’s due to an abundance of good material after later than usual rains, or to an increase in leisure and anxiety given the current joblessness crisis.

Tagged: aesthetics, california coast, deep craft, phenology, pozzi ranch, slow food, sonoma coast, straus creamery, wowhaus

I typically paint or wax the ends of green logs/slabs to ensure a slow and even curing.

I’ve begun to harvest some of the holly trees on our property in anticipation of making small bowls, spoons, candlesticks and other tableware for our inaugural Secret Dinner scheduled for this fall. The trees were probably planted about 30 years ago as an ornamental and they’ve grown to an unmanageable height, blocking light and clogging our gutters with their spiny fallen leaves. We’ll continue to make winter wreaths from branches of the remaining variegated shrubs, but I’m eager to try my hand at turning, break in an excellent set of Sheffield chisels and learn a valuable new skill.

In Celtic folklore, the holly tree symbolizes protection, and it’s an ancient tradition to plant them close to dwellings to ward off evil spirits while providing food and shelter for seasonal bird migrations. A healing tea can be brewed from the leaves of certain holly trees, and it was believed that throwing a stick of holly towards bears, wolves and wildcats will ward them away. The tree has also been thought to protect people from threat of lightning and severe weather. I will consider these themes as I turn the wood over the summer for an autumnal feast featuring foraged foods from the sea.

Tagged: california flora, deep craft, green woodworking, scott Constable, slow food, sonoma coast, sustainability, traditional craft, woodworking

Model of Tsuru, commissioned for the new Ralph M Carr Judicial Center in Denver

We’re celebrating at the wowhaus studio after winning the public art commission for the courtyard of the new Ralph M Carr Colorado Judicial Center in Denver. We worked especially hard for this one, and the concept and presentation evolved collaboratively through a process Ene and I have honed over years of trial and error. We’re especially excited about the prospect of making another monumental sculpture to be cast in bronze and integrated into the landscape, where it will be accessible to the public and contribute to the daily lives of the people who work in the building.

Tsuru features a slightly larger than life bronze inspired by the Whooping Crane

Here is the text Ene wrote to accompany our presentation:

TSURU

“Conscience is the chamber of justice” – Origen

This artwork takes its inspiration from the crane, an ancient symbol of justice, peace, independence, and wisdom in many cultures. Among some Native Americans, this majestic bird was revered as an emblem of justice and intelligence.  For the Japanese, the crane (“tsuru”)  became a symbol of world peace in World War II as a Japanese girl tried to stave off leukemia caused by the bombing of Hiroshima by making 1,000 paper cranes. Sandhill cranes play a role in the local ecosystem, migrating annually through the Denver environs; many eagerly anticipate their seasonal arrival.

The crane embodies the independence and moral courage Ralph Carr brought to bear in resisting the internment of the Japanese during World War II.  The sculpture depicts a crane in flight, wings outstretched in a delicate state of balance, the stance echoing our quest for balance and equilibrium in the pursuit of justice.  Finally, the sculpture has additional symbolism: the Whooping Crane, the only other crane in North America, is an endangered species, protected by the laws of the land. In this way, the artwork embodies the vital role that the legal system plays in protecting not only our citizens but the fragile ecosystems of our earth as well.

The focal point of the courtyard will be a bronze sculpture of a Whooping Crane rising in flight. This graceful form, feathered wings outstretched to a span of 8’, will be sited on a rise of native Bluestem grasses toward the rear of the lawn, with a total height of 8’.

The sculpture will be framed by a circle of granite stone elements radiating in a 4’ wide ring around the piece.  Each of the cardinal points of the compass will be etched into the stone, orienting the viewer to their place in the landscape, just as the law orients and guides those seeking justice.  The granite used to create this feature was reclaimed from the Justice Center Building that was demolished to make way for the new building.  The artful repurposing of this material embodies an ethos of environmental responsibility; it also links the artwork aesthetically to the pavements surrounding the space, which is created from the same granite. Etched in the stone will be the phrase  “Conscience is the chamber of justice.”,  a quotation from the ancient Greek Origen.

Flanking the sculpture will be a series of four elegant sculptural granite benches, also cut from the repurposed granite, laminated to form a solid mass of stone.  Measuring  30”l x 18” h x 16” deep, these curved seating elements, which provide a place for respite and reflection,  echo the abstract form of a crane with wings outstretched.

Tagged: contemporary art, public art, Ralph M Carr Colorado Judicial Center, scott Constable, sculpture, wowhaus