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After finally getting a digital camera, late last year, the extreme heat of Summer 2006 reduced my time in the workshop to almost nil, giving me no finished projects to photograph. But here is one project from this fall, presented in photo essay form.
The job involved building an L-shaped countertop for a friend's sewing business. She was on a tight budget, which meant that only the most inexpensive of materials could be used: ordinary framing lumber, OSB, hardboard, drywall screws.
Which further meant that I wouldn't be doing fine woodworking, per se, but something more like glorified rough carpentry. Even so, I decided to approach the project's construction in much the same way I would build a piece of furniture. That my friend's budget limited us to humble materials didn't mean I shouldn't try to give her a finished product that was as well-built and as attractive as I could possibly make it under the circumstances.
I began as I always do, by making a number of crude sketches to explore how the counter might be built, and just generally letting my brain cells work on the design, almost subconciously. The main dilemma I fought from the beginning was that building with 2x4s usually results in assemblies that are crude and bulky, with inelegant joinery. After much deliberation, I decided to invest the time required to mill the rough 2x4s four-square, and to employ mortise and tenon joinery for most of the connections.
The following series of pictures documents the workshop phase of prefabricating the Industrial Sewing Counter, step by step, from start to finish. I'll show you the on-site final assembly phase of the project in another thread.
The job involved building an L-shaped countertop for a friend's sewing business. She was on a tight budget, which meant that only the most inexpensive of materials could be used: ordinary framing lumber, OSB, hardboard, drywall screws.
Which further meant that I wouldn't be doing fine woodworking, per se, but something more like glorified rough carpentry. Even so, I decided to approach the project's construction in much the same way I would build a piece of furniture. That my friend's budget limited us to humble materials didn't mean I shouldn't try to give her a finished product that was as well-built and as attractive as I could possibly make it under the circumstances.
I began as I always do, by making a number of crude sketches to explore how the counter might be built, and just generally letting my brain cells work on the design, almost subconciously. The main dilemma I fought from the beginning was that building with 2x4s usually results in assemblies that are crude and bulky, with inelegant joinery. After much deliberation, I decided to invest the time required to mill the rough 2x4s four-square, and to employ mortise and tenon joinery for most of the connections.
The following series of pictures documents the workshop phase of prefabricating the Industrial Sewing Counter, step by step, from start to finish. I'll show you the on-site final assembly phase of the project in another thread.
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