These were prepared for my Dad's 80th birthday present. We're getting him a laptop. We've loaded it with these pictures and more of the family. A screen saver runs them at random for quite a heart warming show! Plus he can get on the Internet for the first time.
Caution - These are large image files designed for resolutions of 1280 or more. Since they are basically all art, we have gone with large, revealing images rather than small ones that don't do justice to the subject. Maximize your browser and hide all toolbars if you're on less than 1280 by 1024 resolution.
Art Furniture
For 8 years Jack was a sculptor, working in the North American hardwoods of walnut, maple and cherry. His work was characterized by clear finishes, hard and soft lines, exposed joinery, curved dovetails, contrasting laminations and exquisite organic form. He left the field in 93 due to a neck injury from too much sculpting. Good news, he recovered from that with physical rehab, no sugery.
Thanksgiving Chair - In walnut. Chairs are the toughest pieces of furniture to do well. One must get the comfort factor just right. The joinery is small, subject to high stress, and exposed. Functionality cannot suffer due to pleasing the eye. So one day on Thanksgiving I designed this chair, my first, and it becamse a big favorite. It's so comfortable....
Fancy Chair - In walnut with maple contrasting laminations. The back is a three step lamination with tricky carving to get it to come out just right.
Shellback Rocker - In curly maple with rocking footrest.
Furniture doesn't grow itself. :-) Here's a typical intricate glueup. Notice the extra "ears" for clamping. There's 6 clamps in this glueup, each adding compression in a different axis. This allows the entire assembly, made up of a total of 8 pieces plus dowels and laminations, to be glued up in one shot.
Design takes time, and sometimes it takes paper models. These all became actual pieces. The upper middle one had the top redesigned during construction when a better idea came out of the blue....
Table and Chairs - In walnut, taken on the ground floor of the Tower. You can see the beautiful Cherokee Marble the Tower walls are built of, and some of the arch detail.
Table and Chair Detail - The table is in birdseye maple with walnut laminations, chair in walnut. The dovetail tablelegs became a bit of the most liked elements of my style. Note the intricate coutouring on the table top.
Demilune Table - In walnut and maple. Demilune means "half moon". The tricky part about this piece was the pie shaped top sections and undercarriage joinery. The feet were turned first, glued onto the legs, the legs and feet shaped, then the dovetails done, then final shaping. A piece of great delicacy.
Flying Rocker - Front and Rear views - In walnut. This was my first rocker and became a gift to Martha. The rear view is especially nice - Can't you see yourself sitting in it and taking off! It's been on loan to a couple to rock their kids in for 8 years now, so it's time to get it back! :-)
Here we are shaping the bottom of a rocker runner, to get all the micro bumps out. Over the years, I spent thousands of hours with a dust mask on. Handsome, isn't it? :-)
Here's Jay Wiggins, my apprentice for two years, mimicing a new exciting rocker design under construction. Funny!
The Woodworker's Guild of Georgia had an annual picnic and "floatable race" where us woodworkers had tons of fun building wacky or ingenious rafts. That's Jack standing on his dragon raft. Martha designed the head, which is a royal dragon because each side has a different eye color! :-) This is where the dragon head at the Tower came from. Due to the 6 widely spaced inner tube feet, the dragon raft was very stable, even though tall. In the background is a hand made closed deck canoe, the most ambitious floatable that day by far! We had a fun time that day. Several wacky floatable wouldn't even stay above waterline once a person stepped in or capsized instantly. :-) After about a dozen floatables were launched, we had a "race". The canoe came in first of course, and guess what came in last? :-)
Dancing Side Table - In curly maple and walnut. Making this look like it's about to start dancing depended on those great legs! The interlocked streaky walnut at the bottom was a bit of fun too.
Grand Piano Coffee Table Detail - Cherry is so beautiful when young. As it ages it rapidly goes dark, due to exposure to sunlight. Here we see curly cherry, with details of a dovetailed drawer and tableleg. In back of the leg you can see a shelf.
All this was built in a tiny workshop in the Tower. Here's a shot showing the workbench, the fabulous Emmert vise holding two rocker sides, and the tools in back. That's our future kitchen counter!
The Emmert vise is legendary. They stopped making these vises over 50 years ago. They're pattern makers vises, used for building wooden patterns for iron and steel foundry molds. The design stabalized about 1880. It was so perfect they couldn't improve it a wink, and so the vise remained unchanged in design for over 60 years, a feat unheard of today. A fellow bought the factory, near Baltimore, and found enough reject pieces among all the junk to make, believe it or not, 150 vises. Mine is one of them. It's crooked here and there, but we don't care! :-)
Demilune Desk Fancy Joint - Ya gotta have fun. Here, instead of using a hidden sliding joint, we expose it and make it downright interesting. It's a "tusk and tenon" joint. The curly maple apron can slide 1/4 inch each way over the walnut. This allows the desktop to expand and contact as air humidity changes. Without this sliding joint the desktop would crack.
Dragon Carving - In walnut. This was my only large carving, for a friend who saved up all his mony and traveled around the world for a year, and wanted a special chest to store his photos and things from the trip in. It was a sea captain's chest, with all sides carved, including hinges, lock and a secret key. The top is what an ole sea captain's chest might have looked like on a long journey, with sea maps rolled out after his pet dragon got out....
I learned it all from my Dad and life on the farm. It was a wonderful childhood. Thanks, dad!!!
The Tower
In January 1975 Jack started building "The Tower". It's been a design-as-you-go, pay-as-you-go, have fun type of art piece, not a house. The guiding motto has been "Make it perpetually inspiring to live in". It contains 95 tons of Cherokee marble, has older sections in White Oak and Yellow Pine, has a Tree Room with the ceiling held up with tree trunks, and recently on the second story has a timberframe using 12,000 board feet of Eastern White Pine.
The earliest known photo of the tower, in 1979, shows when we finished the "stone circle" after two years, took a break, and then switched to wood. We built straight up in White Oak in a hexagonal shape, with plans to simple peak in the center. However after the walls were up, the design changed. A floor was added to the top of the hex walls, as you can see in the photo. Next the "crow's nest" was added.
First arches - Way back in the early 80's we added on the "Tower", which you can see in back of the stone wall. The add on was to bring the house up to the minimum square foot amount needed to legally occupy it. But later my woodworking took off, and all that space got filled up with equiipment, wood and furniture. Se a few years after this we added on again. :-)
Outside Corner - We got one corner looking good to make the neighbors happy. Soon afterwards we put in the moongate window and took down that blue plastic. The large ring is a bent lamination frame for the moongate window in the Marthalette Garden Shed.
In Winter '93 we built the "Marthalette Garden Shed" for Martha. (Jokingly named after the Juliette Balcony) To keep the mortar from freezing before it cured, we put up a plastic tent. It took Jack and Jay Wiggins (his woodworking apprentice) 4 months to buid the shed, which is only about 10 feet square. It has a Gothic arch and a Japances moongate. The outside is textured by jutting stones out. All in all, it was a labor of love for Martha.
Cutting stone - With hammer and chisel usually, sometimes with a saw.
Inside the tent - It was crowded, especially with all that scaffolding.
Laying up an arch - Stones for the top of the moongate ready for final run.
Getting close to the top - It really was that blue in the tent, due to the plastic!
Done at last - And we've started stick framing for the second story.
A view of our cozy little nook - Can't you just imagine Martha sitting there? :-)
Once the shed and twisted column were done, we could really get going with stick framing. Here's a laminated beam spanning 19 feet. Keefer Erickson, only 17 years old, did it himself, figuring out where to put the scaffolding, how to hoist it safely, and everything. Seems when he as young he used to visit his grandfather every summer at his grandfather's boatyard, who told him, "Give me tools and I can move anything", as he moved huge stuff in his boatyard. Impressive.
In 93 we started cutting the timber frame. First we had to unload 12,000 board feet of White Pine, so we made a day of it and had a bunch of friends over. Two years later most of them came back and helped with the barn raising. Wow!
Gunter Sprang did most of the actual timberframe cutting. He's from West Germany, with superlative training as a woodworker there. He didn't see eye to eye with the Communists, so they made things so hard for him and his family he fled to the US long ago. Gunter now lives in Alpharetta. He's a super guy and does great custom art furniture, which is how he and Jack met.
Unloading the truck - This took a full day by itself. It was about 15,000 lbs.
Carrying a beam uphill - Wet wood is heavy, beams are bulky, we were tired.
Sawing wood for tent - The tent had to last 2 years. We cut the frame under it.
Bandsawing arch - Gunter and Jack make a monster arch cut. These were tough.
Hand planning arches - A curved bottom plane was used for smoothing up.
Stack of arches ready - These were the side arches. Note the tenons on the ends.
Cutting the first bent - The first bent apex joint took some doing to get right.
In 95 we had 20 friends over for a weekend barn raising, to raise the timber frame that took 2 years to cut, and after the raising took 6 months to complete the joinery and decorative ceiling.
Before the raising - The deck is clear and ready. It's a beautiful day!
First bent Is Raised - We did final assembly on each bent as we raised them.
More bents to go - Note the split rings, grooves, bolts, washers, nuts...
Bents everywhere - Some are still down. some are up. We were busy!!!
Barn raising with Jack at top - Boy, was this an exciting time!!!
All bents up at last - We propped some up while we worked on others.
A view through the bents - Chester took this shot when the raising was over.
Jack flossing - A gag photo for my dentist, who has lots of such shots. :-)
Main Frame Done - Here's the entire frame assembled. It was beautiful!
Ceiling construction - A plastic tent over the frame allowed detail work.
Ceiling detail - A little later. The clearstory windows give great natural light.
A look upward - Another perspective. All that design and work was worth it!
The happy barn raisers - A few months later, on the day Martha retired!
The saw that won the West - The 16" diameter monster saw for cutting timbers. This was taken in the Tree Room, where the ceiling is held up with tree trunks.
Work in progress - The inside of the Great Hall of Tranquility as it looks today, November 99. The widows are next, and we have lots of them!
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