Wednesday, September 14, 2011

André Jacob Roubo

I was surprised to find that the Wiki Article on André Jacob Roubo was so scant, given that he published, in his day, one of the masterworks of the state of woodworking in late 18th century France.

 To quote:
He wrote a highly influential complete treatise on woodworking that covers practically all the associated trades. This multi-volume work, L'Art du Menuisier (The Art of the Joiner), published between 1769 and 1774 by the Académie des Sciences, contains sections and illustrations on: building carpentry, furniture making, and precious woodworking (ébénisterie), carriage making, and garden woodworking.

I watched an online episode of the The Woodwright's Workshop recently, and am inspired to build Roy Underhill's ||Roubo inspired Workbench from the original engraving.





Having spent some time reading 18th century  treatises on lute music of the period, the examples show more and more details after some time seriously considering the proportions, ratio and methods.

I'll need to acquire a top for this stout workbench, and being inspired by a grandmother's "waste not, want not" Depression-era upbringing, I hope to demonstrate that buy builing a workbench such as this, might allow someone interted in the idea that the old techniques and practices, of understanding one of the basic "building blocks" are FAR more sustainable than our current practice of using  our available resources for fast and quick.






Sunday, August 7, 2011

An invaluable resource on Japanese Architecture and Art

A great resource for explaining Japenese art and architecture.
Here ...

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

A couple of useful tools ...

On the left is a 16 inch Makita beam saw and on the right is a regular 7 1/4 inch blade sidewinder, circular saw. Although the pic saw is around 30 lbs or so, it is relatively easy to handle although a healthy fear and respect for it is always in order.

 


This is a Makita Chain mortiser which is basically a little plunging chainsaw used to create mortises in beams. 

The word of the day ...

Axometric Projection:
There is a good Wikipedia article explaining how a 2d planar model can be rotated along an axes to create a 3d representation. It was interesting to me that this is not how photography or our eyes work and it is one of the methods that MC Escher expoited in his drawings.




 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axonometric_projection

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Some of the people I've worked with

Here are a  few of the people and companies I've had the pleasure of working with over the last few years

Woodenshoe Timberframes
Davidson Log and Timber Frame Homes
Arman Design
Spearhead Timberworks
College of the Rockies