Working with Wood

Dixie Lumber had a wide range of hardwoods and had fine mahogany from its own plantations in Honduras. I bought lots of wood there and had to build lumber storage racks in my wood shop. By the time we were ready to move from New Orleans, I had several hundred board feet of mahogany, African Mahogany, Rhodesian Teak, Santa Maria, Walnut, and other woods. Some of it traveled with us for the next 45 years through many moves and made plenty of furniture and other projects.

Here's a picture of a library ladder build for a friend from Rhodesian Teak. I also built them a table for their new sailboat out of the same wood.

During the first year in New Orleans we bought a sailboat, an Ensign 22 foot boat. It had beautiful African Mahogany benches in the cockpit, rift-sawed with a prominent ribbon pattern, and I fell in love with that wood species. And stocked up from Dixie Lumber.

After we moved from New Orleans to New Hampshire, most of my wood working was basic carpentry, maintaining the old house, barn, and outbuildings. I did do some furniture building there, but it was later, once most of the construction and reconstruction was nearly complete. My stock of hardwood lumber spent some 20 years there, safe in the barn, stickered and drying.

I built a Shaker style wardrobe with drawers from local New Hampshire white pine for one son. There was a large lumber company nearby with several saw mills and I would check frequently there for newly milled pine. They let me pick through the boards, and I would find clear white pine in 12 inch widths in the bins there and take it home to dry in my wood shop for a year before using it. I also made a toy chest of African Mahogany for another son. Here's the toy chest.

Interlude

I didn't do much furniture making when we lived in Oklahoma, Virginia, or California. Most of the wood working was shelf-making or milling lumber to use in my ship model building. The ship modeling was taking most of my spare time by then, as I had begun scratch-building models and made up most of the "lumber" for the models myself, using mostly hard Maple and Red Oak that had been harvested at the farm and added to my stash of hardwood.

Woodworking in Arkansas

When we moved to Arkansas, I set up an excellent wood shop in one side of the two car garage in the house there. The other side was converted to a ship model shop.

The wood shop was used a lot as I remodeled the house. We converted one bedroom to a library and I build floor to ceiling bookshelves. I set the wood shop up so I could bring in four by eight sheets of oak or maple plywood and quickly cut them down without assistance into shelf stock. All the workbenches and machines were set to the same height, 36 inches, so it was simple to move large material around. Two of the workbenches were also movable, so I could use them for additional support when cutting plywood with the table saws. It also had a large dust collecting system. Here's a photo of the wood shop in Arkansas. There is a large lumber storage rack on the left for my stash of hardwood. I worked over the several years there on multiple projects to get the stash down to reasonable size.

Following are a few of the projects I made there.

One Christmas I made some combination end table-file cabinets for the sons. They were living in small apartments and this seemed a useful thing to have and combined the two functions nicely. I covered the top with tile and grouted it so it was waterproof, as a fine wooden surface is really impractical for most people.

There were lots of other small tables where I experimented with different joinery, veneers, and combinations of different wood. One combined cherry and bird's eye Maple. The top was Bird's Eye Maple veneer and the sides, back and front, solid Bird's Eye Maple. Legs of cherry and the cherry edge banding used the mitered dovetail tenon joints again.

And for the last of the end table series, one made combining some of the last of my Rhodesian teak and Walnut.

I also made a large coffee table of walnut from Dixie Lumber. In the last year we were in New Orleans that time, the owner of the company was killed in a plane crash while visiting Honduras. The company was then closed and the lumber sold off at fire sale prices. I purchased two matched pieces of Walnut, 22 inches wide and seven feet long. They were adjacent cuts from a log of American Black Walnut and were highly figured with some burl areas. One piece I used to make a living room coffee table using walnut I purchased in Arkansas. The second piece I later used as the top for a storage chest I made in Santa Fe. It had split during the nearly 50 years I had carried it about, but I could use bow-ties to stablilize the cracking. The two pieces were adjacent cuts and would have made a magnificent large dining table, but we did not need one and would not be able to use it today. Although there are days I fantasize about combining the two pieces of walnut in that way.

I got some beautiful ribbon stripe rift-sawn Houduras Mahogany at the same time. One piece 16 inches wide and twelve feet long, which I later cut into two six foot pieces and used to make a small dining room table in Santa Fe, the very last furniture and the last table I have made.

Here's the mahogany dining table in our Santa Fe house.

Other fun Projects

One of our sons particularly likes puzzles and mysteries and the occult. So an "end table" with multiple secret compartments seemed a great gift. Here's a series of instructions and photos showing how this "table' works.

First, some pictures of the finished piece.

Instructions for opening the compartments.

Use a coin to turn two screw heads which hold the top down. Turning them 90 degrees frees the top, which slides back out of a false tenon joint and then moves up to reveal the first compartment.