These are unique pens – they are made from the timber with which I made the Bushfire table.
The reddish pen is from some jarrah I had left over from making the table aprons and the lighter pen is from the ribbon gum – the tree that burnt in our front yard during the 2003 Canberra Bushfires – that I used to make the table top and legs.
The fountain pen was a bit trickier – but is also made from the ribbon gum tree from the bushfire – this one I made for Sharon.
Cheers
Jerry
Keeping the frame light and unobtrusive, yet strong enough for a long wide dining table meant I had to use knockdown bolts to keep the structure tight. But that left some unsightly holes where the nut/dowels were inserted to intersect with the bolts. So, a decorative trim was in order.
I took some Australian red maple left over from the bookcases and used the roundel cutter in the drill. Then sanded off the outside risers and glued them each side of the table legs on the apron – it adds a nice feature to the table 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
Okay it’s been a while – lots of sanding and two coats of Rustins Plastic Coating then a final sand at 1500 grit and then an organoil wax/oil finish with lots of buffing. But here is the finished table
And it’s a table with a story. Back on 18 January 2003, the Canberra Bushfire – the Great Fire of Canberra came through our suburb without warning. Within hours Canberra lost 563 houses – including five houses out of eighteen in my street, and four lives were lost. Next door neighbour’s house was badly burnt and we lost the garden and fences – and our front door mat – we were lucky.
Our ribbon gum tree out the front was not so lucky, it caught fire about the time the wind changed and put us back in the business of saving the house. The gum tree dominated the yard, but was too far gone to save. So about a fortnight later we had the tree felled – but in the process I located a bloke at Hall with a portable Lucas saw mill. So I got the tree fellers to leave the trunk next to the road and in the afternoon a truck arrived and took the trunk away to to be milled. I spent that Friday at the saw mill learning how to mill my tree into boards.
When I saw the number of boards I thought then that I would make a new dining table from the timber. I stacked and stickered the timber in my shed to dry slowly up until a month ago when I figured that I had some holidays, I had the technology, and the time had come to make a fine dining table.
Hopefully I’ve done justice to the the tree and to what it represents – hope out of a devastating natural disaster.
The Legs are ribbon-gum (Eucalyptus viminaris), as is the main part of the top, and the aprons and breadboard ends are from jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) which provides a nice contrast.
It’s been a lot of work but well worth it to see the finished table 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
Some time ago I built a flying model of Leonardo’s helicopter – so many people said it would never fly, but I had read that the original was based on a flying toy, and proceeded on that basis to make a toy using technology available in teh Renaissance period to make a flying model of Leonardo’s helicopter. And it worked (ok not very well, but it did work). You can see the results here…
I have put full instructions on how to make it on my web site (just follow the link).
You can buy commercial models, such as from Gakken in Japan, but I think it’s more interesting and fun to build your own at a fraction of the price 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
The table top is now biscuited, glued and clamped and the glue should be cured by morning 🙂
Having set up the router on the Triton Mark 3 saw bench, and set up the biscuit jointer attachment I set about cutting slots for the 28 biscuits that make up the top – four biscuits per join, across seven joins (eight boards).
Relaxing over lunch I thought I’d check out what other users have said about the biscuit jointer attachment, and was surprised to find several advising against the Triton version on the basis that they couldn’t joint long boards to make, for example, bench or table tops. So I thought I’d set the record straight – you can cut biscuit slots in large boards. In fact the sliding extension table makes it very easy to handle large boards, such as when jointing pairs of boards to make up a table top.
And here’s the proof!
To make the table top I biscuit jointed the boards in pairs, and glued and assembled them and clamped them for about 2 hours, then I took the board pairs and biscuited them, finally setting them onto the Torquata panel clamps for the final full width glue-up. I set the lower clamp legs across the table frame, then laid out the boards in sequence and ran a glue line along each length, inserted the biscuits and closed the seam. Then onto the next and so on until the whole table top was assembled. Then I added the clamp upper and the hardware and clamped the whole thing tight.
Tomorrow I’ll make the breadboard ends – hopefully out of Australian mahogany-like jarrah to match the table aprons.
Cheers
Jerry
