Friday, November 30, 2007

Chain Link

Chain Link Shadows, digital photo

This is a massaged photo of a chain link fence casting shadows on a concrete walk. I took it a couple of years ago when I was working on the New Mexico Rail Runner project. The black at the bottom adds ballast and allows a space to see the after image of the link pattern above.


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Sunday, November 25, 2007

Tall Chest of Drawers

Drawer Fronts and Drawer Sides

Today I finished up the drawer sides and cut the hand holes in the drawer fronts.  I’m ready to cut the dovetail joints.  I have given up trying to get my Sears dovetail jig to do what I want.  I’m throwing it away.  Tomorrow or Monday I’ll get a Porter Cable jig at Woodworkers Supply.

Tomorrow, Sunday, Cathy and I are going up to Santa Fe to see the Gee’s Bend Quilts at the Museum of International Folk Art.

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Saturday, November 24, 2007

Central Avenune Rail Road Underpass

Central Avenue Rail Road Underpass, digital photo

Central Avenue Rail Road Underpass, digital photo

I‘ve driven through this underpass many times, but I had an occassion to walk through it last Tuesday, when I took these photos.  Built in 1937, it has some modest Art Deco features.  It marks the exact center of Albuquerque, New Mexico.  The tracks overhead go north and south.  The tracks mark the line from which addresses east and west are numbered.  Central Avenue running east and west marks the line from which addresses are numbered north and south.
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Saturday, November 17, 2007

Kathleen Dunbar’s New CD

My sister, Kathleen Dunbar, will release her first CD around December 1, 2007.  She writes the lyrics, the music and sings the songs.  Check some tracks from her new CD.

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Saturday, November 10, 2007

Photograph

Autumn in Albuquerque, digital photo

Thank you M for inspiring me to take some photos. I enjoy your photos a great deal.  Often driving around town on errands, something sticks in my eye, and I say to myself, “I wish I had my camera with me.” I’ve started taking it with me more often. There is a downside though. I’m not a very attentive driver to start with (that is, attentive to the traffic), so I have to be careful.  The interstices or peripherals are what draw my eye, the view that is not a noun or subject, but more like an adverb modifying an adjective.
Posted by Chuck in 03:55:22 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Friday, November 2, 2007

Tall Chest of Drawers Update

Tall Chest of Drawers, 57″ x 26 5/8″ x 18 1/4″ (145cm x 68cm x 46cm), maple, poplar, pine plywood

I have glued up the case with two of the web stretchers in place and the back panel screwed in place. All the mortise and tenon joints are pegged with maple dowels. I am now working on the top, which will be a slab of five maple boards with hidden splines. The four panels, two on each side, are free to move. The relative humidity in my studio the past few weeks has hovered around 25%. If the piece were to find its way into an environment with normal humidity of about 70%, each 5″ (13cm) wide panel could be expected to expand by around 1/8″ (.3cm). The top, which is 18 1/4″ front to back, can be expected to expand about 7/16″ (1.1cm). This website discusses wood shrinkage and has a handy shrinkage calculator, among a lot of other useful information on woodworking.

Cathy and I paid a visit to the Simply Stickley showroom recently to look at drawers and how they slide. My initial idea was to use KV slides for the drawers. My preference for the slides is based on an antique three-drawer chest we bought nearly forty years ago. We dated the chest from about 1880 based on how the drawers were constructed. It was nothing spectacular, the kind of item one might have bought from a Sears catalog. It’s made of poplar. One hundred thirty years of pulling and pushing the drawers has produced considerable wear on the web frames and the drawer sides, so much that the drawers don’t fit easily in their spaces. There is no easy way to repair the wear, and the piece isn’t valuable enough to warrant the effort. The wear calculation is easy enough. One or two drawers of a chest of drawers will be opened and closed at least once a day. That’s 730 slides a year, 7,300 slides in ten years, 73,000 slides in a century. That’s a lot of wear. The modern Stickley reproductions use a traditional oak against oak slide. (I’ll show a detail when I get to the drawers.) Cathy prefers the more traditional approach used in better furniture. I’ll do the oak wood slides. Am I being optimistic about how long this piece and its mate (I don’t mean me and my wife.) will be around? I don’t think so. A soundly made and sensibly designed piece of furniture ought to last a century or more barring floods and fires. Think how much furniture was lost in Katrina-flooded New Orleans and fire-stormed-California.

By the way, at the Simply Stickley showroom a similarly dimensioned chest of drawers as the two I’m doing, were sale priced at $2600. Considering the quality of the materials and workmanship, I think that’s a good buy. That’s $26/year over a century.

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Thursday, November 1, 2007

Drawing from the Model

One Minute Sketch of Grace, 24″ x 18″ (61cm x 46cm), black pastel on paper

Twenty Second Sketch of Grace’s Dog Scratching, 24″ x 18″ (61cm x 46cm), black pastel on paper

Twenty Minute Study of Grace, 24″ x 18″ (61cm x 46cm), charcoal on paper

Study of Grace, 20″ x 15″ (61cm x 46cm), charcoal on paper

One Minute Sketch of Janet, 24″ x 18″ (61cm x 46cm), black pastel on paper

Twenty Minute Study of Janet, 24″ x 18″ (61cm x 46cm), charcoal on paper

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