This is a reproduction of the Nicholas Brown tea table made by John Goddard of Newport, scaled from pictures in an auction catalog and with a lot of mentoring from a friend who made one also. It is made of mahogany with chestnut glueblocks, as was the original. I finished it with potassium dichromate dye, garnet shellac, and lacquer.
27H x 34 1/8L x 21 1/8D
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iGaging Wheel Marking Gauge
Unlike the other inexpensive disk gauges, this one has an O-ring inside the fence. The disk would benefit from some honing, but works as is.
The Powermatic smoothed boards excellently. It has a plastic insert that sits shallow of the fence, where thin boards tended to catch when flattening faces. The Powermatic was the only model that uses a knob to adjust the angle of the fence—a nice feature—except that locking it caused the fence to move slightly, which made it tricky to square the fence. But when locked, the fence did not move. The 90° stop was easy to set but wasn’t reliable. The guard was finicky to install and would often not snap back fully after a board passed by.
The Origin has a touch screen that controls a small trim type router motor with a 1⁄4-in. collet. The machine’s handles are comfortable, with an orange button on the left handle for retracting the cutter and a green button on the right that starts the cut and is the “Enter” button for various commands. It’s intuitive, doesn’t require dedicated space, and can provide lots of shortcuts to complete projects quicker and with less stress.
The top is 1 piece (1" thick), and the carving is not applied. The edge is first bandsawed to shape. Next, I used a compass to layout the width of the carved edge (1 1/4") and routed the rest of the top surface 9/16" deep. The bead and ogee are then just carved and cleaned up with scrapers. I don't consider myself a good carver as it took me about a week to carve and clean up the top. I think I had about 400 hrs. total in the piece. Good thing I'm not doing it for a living!
With its graceful curves, cabriole legs, and ornamental back splat, a Queen Anne side chair is a bucket list build for many woodworkers. Dan Faia had a very specific Queen…
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Comments
Excellent work.
Remarkable piece of work.....would you outline the procedures/techniques you used to fabricate the top? Thanks.
The top is 1 piece (1" thick), and the carving is not applied. The edge is first bandsawed to shape. Next, I used a compass to layout the width of the carved edge (1 1/4") and routed the rest of the top surface 9/16" deep. The bead and ogee are then just carved and cleaned up with scrapers. I don't consider myself a good carver as it took me about a week to carve and clean up the top. I think I had about 400 hrs. total in the piece. Good thing I'm not doing it for a living!
Very nice work..
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