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Hidden Door & Ice Cold Door Pull

The front of the door to my home office is concealed with 5 MDF panels, spaced with a narrow reveal. The MDF was screwed to the front of a typical door, although we used 4 hinges to handle the additional weight and spring hinges to keep it closed since it has no pull. Designed by Ruhl Walker Architects, it was installed a few months ago. I love it. No one knows it’s even a door, which for some reason, makes me really happy. Solving the facade of this wall was a tricky problem since the dimension above was immutable and the door is off center. This door will inspire other elements in our home.

Office Door Closed
Ruhl Walker Design
Office Door with Transparency
Photoshopped both images together
 

With no latch or door knob, the back of the door, had to pull. So I made this out of some scrap wenge and maple. It looks like an ice cream sandwich, and it’s not entirely a coincidence that the new Android OS is called Ice Cream Sandwich.

Simple design, glued it up, screw the back plate to the handle, and sanded it. It remains unfinished and I like it that way; the contrast between the wenge and maple is nice. It’s attached to the door with two screws covered by wenge plugs at the top and bottom.

Ice Cream Sandwich Door Pull
 

(I’m not sure why the full size image shows up rotated, but it is mounted vertically.)

This was a satisfying mini-project. It took less than 2 hours start-to-finish, and most importantly, I can now get out of my office. :)

Feb 23, 2012 | Categories: blog, Maple, slider, Wenge | Leave A Comment »

New Shop Layout

Rearranging a shop is quite time consuming. But dealing with a poor, inefficient layout ends up costing far more time and generates a lot of frustration. My shop was empty when I got here so I had to start from scratch. The first design wasn’t *completely* flawed, but there is huge opportunity for improvement. While it means I’m not working on my current dining room table project right now, it does mean that I expect the project to go faster and come out better once I complete this new layout.

Monster Workbench

Last year my shopmate, Peter, generously donated an enormous workbench (5′x10′!) to Furnetcha. This workbench was stuck in his old shop and it had to get out of there. Moving something this big is not a trivial job – big, awkward, heavy, and old. I guess helping him disassemble it and move it out of there was enough of a trade for him, but I think I got the better part of that deal!) But there are 3 issues with this workbench:

  1. The bench is too big for my shop. I’ve had to climb up on top of it when there’s a piece in the middle because it is just too wide to reach across. Plus when I leave my square or pencil on the other side of the shop (dozens of times daily), I end up doing laps around this big workbench. Big is generally a good thing because you have such a big work surface. This workbench also has the benefit of having storage for 4′x8′ sheets on a shelf underneath. My current layout, however, prevents me from utilizing this as sheet storage. It’s too close to all the walls. So now the space below is cluttered with rough, unorganized lumber. (I’m not blaming the workbench for my lack of organization; I know it’s me!)
  2. Built in 1970, the surface of this bench is a piece of art. It would be an archaeological treasure if someone found it. There are countless layers of paint, bondo, glue, etc. It’s really quite beautiful, albeit rather distracting when you’re trying to focus on a straight line. The real issue here is that it’s warped and bent in ways that are irreparable.
  3. The trim is neither wide enough nor strong enough to hold a clamp.

This is a pic I took tonight of a couple square foot section of the workbench. All 50 sq. ft. look just like this!

Small Section of Current Workbench
Tebow's 5'x10' bench; made in 1970; the black lines are 12" apart
 

This workbench dominates the floor space in my shop and therefore MUST serve multiple purposes: workbench, outfeed, AND assembly/finishing table. The result is that each function gets compromised in some way. Also, I now have over a year in my shop so I know a lot more about what I need and where it would be most convenient. It is time for a new plan.

New Layout

Replacing all of the functions of the current workbench involves several pieces, such as creating better lumber storage and mounting cabinets higher on the walls. The most important pieces are the table saw position & direction, the new rolling torsion box workbench, and a flip-up outfeed table. (I’ll only go into the floor plan for now, as it’s after midnight, I’m still at the shop, and I’m exhausted. I’ll update this post later.)

This image shows the new layout I plan to start implementing tomorrow. (Note: Google Layout doesn’t do a fantastic job of exporting pngs so this is a little blurry. If you’re interested in the details & dimensions, download the New Layout in PDF format.)

New Furnetcha Shop Floor Plan
For February 2012
 

More soon…

Feb 21, 2012 | Categories: blog, Sketchup, slider | 1 Comment »

Cherry for Dining Room Table

My current project is a very large dining room table (102″ L x 44″ W at the widest). Most of it is cherry and the trim will be Peruvian Walnut. I’ve searched high and low for the “right” cherry and found it today at Anderson McQuaid in Cambridge, MA. This table top will be long, thick, gorgeous, and really heavy!

There’s a lot more to this story (like why I bought pre-milled lumber!), and I’ll also make the design public soon. But here’s a couple of quick photos to show what I got. The 10-footer isn’t checked as bad as it seems. Both that and the 11-footer are absolutely gorgeous.

Do Not Tailgate!
Lengths Marked in Feet
Total Width at Shop
 

And oh yeah, 11-footers that are 1 1/4″ thick and 10″ wide? Really, really heavy. I strained my neck loading my truck and it is seriously spasming. Ended my work day. Job hazard! Ouch.

Jan 05, 2012 | Categories: blog, slider | Leave A Comment »

Project: Foyer Bench

This project was done in the Spring of 2011 for a client and friend in New York. He owns a 1910 rowhouse in a historical neighborhood in downtown Albany. Tall & narrow, each of the 3 main floor has 2-4 rooms; there is also a basement finished basement and backyard. The exterior is mostly red brick; the walls between homes are brick as well. The interior is long & narrow with very high ceilings. The design is genuine to the period with very ornate, dark reddish trim dominating the woodwork. The hardwood floors are mostly original and dark as well. The staircase is a prominent element on all floors, especially in the dining area.

Goals of the project:

  • create a functional bench for the foyer that can be used as a place to sit, take off jacket/shoes, and store a couple pairs of shoes/boots underneath
  • create a completely original & unique piece, but also fit it into the aesthetic of house, especially have the bench work with the ornate trim
  • learn new techniques of woodworking; namely vacuum bending and veneering

I created this project while taking the “Art of Furniture Making” class at MassArt. The class was taught by two veterans: Judith Hanson & Peter Thibeault (my shopmate). Both are extraordinary teachers and have very different perspectives. This class was an opportunity to create something special, get immediate peer review and assistance, learn a lot of tools and techniques, and get to use MassArt’s awesome wood shop!

Note: This story is incomplete and will be updated soon!

Components

The bench is comprised of these features:

  • Major components are made from cherry, most of it 6/4; the legs 8/4 (this is a heavy, sturdy, beefy bench!); all cherry is from Downes & Reader
  • Mirrored top and bottom pieces made from two glued-up pieces of cherry with biscuits; shape of routed edge is an enormous ogee bit I got from Rockler
  • Curved doors made of 2 pieces of bending plywood sandwiching a piece of wacky wood, & edge trimmed in cherry; bending ply & wacky wood from Boulter Plywood
  • The door surfaces are veneered; front = cherry, bubinga, & maple strips; back = cherry
  • Door hinges are knife hinges from Brusso
  • The fronts of the legs are veneered too in order to prevent big section of sapwood from distracting from the facade of the bench
  • The feet are cherry, routed with a cove bit
  • Back panels are cherry-veneered plywood to provide racking strength; rabbets & glue hold these in place; plywood from Boulter Plywood
  • Finish over entire bench is Minwax cherry stain + sealer, and protected by a layer of Minwax wax

Trim

This trim was used as my inspiration for the doors. I wanted to mimick the shell pattern on the front of the doors.

JG FoyerBench 01
JG FoyerBench 02
JG FoyerBench 03
JG FoyerBench 04
 

Doors

The doors are curved. This curve was drawn in Sketchup and dictates the shape of the entire bench. I lost a lot of time trying to overlap sequencing. For example, I couldn’t cut the top and bottom pieces to finished size until the doors were formed & cut to final size! This mistake was compounded and cause significant delays in the project, and many headaches for me.

The doors are attached with Brusso offset knife hinges. Using a grinder, I removed the 90° corner and made it match the curve of the doors (approximately). Then I mortised in the hinges to the door and to the top and bottom of the bench. Aligning these doors was a huge headache. I really had no idea how to accomplish this since they were to be on an angle and the doors were curved. Having nothing measurable, nothing straight, and no legitimate reference points made this really difficult. Lesson learned: Figure out how to measure and align the hinges in the design!

JG FoyerBench 09b
JG FoyerBench 11
JG FoyerBench 12
JG FoyerBench 13
JG FoyerBench 14
 

Assembly

Gluing up the bench wasn’t too difficult.

JG FoyerBench 16
JG FoyerBench 17
JG FoyerBench 19
JG FoyerBench 20
 

Finish

Putting Minwax cherry stain on the entire bench normalized the different cherry colors a bit. As you can see in the pictures, there was quite a bit of sapwood in some of the pieces. As I learned, cherry gets redder and darker over time except for the sapwood which stays light. So the contrast becomes greater over time. Thus the stain helped darken the sapwood just a tiny bit. The stain looked nice even on the veneer and didn’t dirty up the maple too much (I was nervous about this).

My favorite picture is the one in the middle with the doors open. If the last picture looks a bit off, then no, it’s not in your head. I Photoshopped the floor because there was something in the picture that I wanted to remove. I didn’t pay too much attention to the parquet pattern on the floor. My bad!

JG FoyerBench 19
JG FoyerBench 20
JG FoyerBench 21
JG FoyerBench 22
JG FoyerBench 23
JG FoyerBench 24
JG FoyerBench 43
 

Seat Cushion

I have so many pictures of this phase because my wonderful wife helped me create the cushion. She’s great with materials and did all of the work after I cut the cushion and base plate of plywood. The cushion is brown leather stretched and stapled to the plywood. It fits into the routed-out depression on the top of the bench.

JG FoyerBench 25
JG FoyerBench 26
JG FoyerBench 27
JG FoyerBench 28
JG FoyerBench 29
JG FoyerBench 30
JG FoyerBench 31
JG FoyerBench 32
JG FoyerBench 33
JG FoyerBench 34
 

Oct 27, 2011 | Categories: blog, slider | 3 Comments »

Beech Handrails

The stairs originally built in my condo were odd, ugly, unsafe, and poorly made. The staircase starts at the 5th floor, comes up to the 6th, and ends on the 7th. The 7th floor is the top floor and only has one room called a “headhouse.” (If anyone can explain why it is called a headhouse, please post a comment!) With the front door on the 6th floor accessible by both an elevator and a common staircase, the purpose of these interior stairs down to the 5th floor is as a fire exit only. This section is useless but code states that you must have two safe exits from this kind of building. Anyway, the original stairs were winders, which are no longer accepted by code. Not only are the stairs different shapes, but the inside depth and the outside depth differ which can make them quite dangerous. Winders also create a problem for handrails because the code states the handrail must be continuous the entire length. Combined with the other code that dictates how high the railing must be from the tread, this makes for some funky handrail designs. Most include a vertical piece at the inside corner, and I think this looks rather ugly. A few architects and I tried to design a better looking continuous rail that was square but didn’t have a vertical piece. We were unsuccessful.

My solution was to add a platform and remove the winders all together (actually only on the top set). This meant that the railing didn’t have to be continuous which allowed it to be placed on the outside wall. John from Wood Works Etc. made the treads and risers from hard maple. He stained them with Minwax ebony and spray finished them with a matte poly. They look great. I took on making the handrails.

Design

Designing the rails was straight forward. Contemporary styling dominates the remodel, with the upstairs room being a little more industrial. The guardrail cap on top of the glass fits this aesthetic perfectly, and it is this glass & steel that should get your attention, not the functional handrails on the wall. For these handrails, TerminatorI wanted something simple that matched the treads & risers but otherwise didn’t stand out. The stairs are almost black, so the type of wood was not a primary concern. Downes & Reader, the lumberyard I go to most of the time, didn’t have a great selection of hard maple but did have an awesome selection of beech. The beech was a bit cheaper and the pieces I found were straight with nice grain. Even though the grain wouldn’t show through very much, it’s always nice to have consistent grain on rough lumber as it helps during milling the faces and edges. I bought two 8′ long 8/4 boards, each roughly 6″ or 7″ wide. One served as the long section of rail, the other for the terminators. The terminators are 90° pieces that curve from the rail to the wall. (I’m guessing there’s a more proper name for these pieces but I don’t know it. This leaves me with plenty of beech left over for another project.

The cross section of the rail is 2 1/8″ high by 1 11/32″ wide. A taller rail looks a little cleaner to me than a wider rail does. However, these dimensions pose a challenge for the terminators as these pieces need to be 2 1/8″ high but also >3″ wide. The center of the rail is 2 3/4″ off the wall, which means the terminator has to be 2 3/4″ + (1/2 * 1 11/32) = 3 19/32″ wide. Since 2 3/4″ > 8/4, the terminators would have to be glued up. In other words, since the height of the rail is greater than the thickness of the wood, the height actually comes from the width of the board. (It’s hard to grasp even when you’re looking at the wood; trying to describe it here makes my head hurt.)

Sketchup Note: To become more proficient at Sketchup, I try to use it for everything; even for easy stuff. A current frustration/disappointment is annotation with text and dimensions. I use the dimensions tool in Sketchup all the time; but they don’t scale well. Layout has come a long way in just the past year, and adding simple text boxes looks great. Specifically the two problems I have right now are: 1) Sometimes the dimensions come thru different after exporting to Layout. Setting high precision and/or matching the precisions sometimes helps but not always. And 2) adding text in Sketchup sucks. To reword that: the way I add text in Sketchup produces sucky results. Perhaps there’s a better way using Scenes? Extruded 3D text just never looks good. The image above was is just barely tenable; I cropped specifically for this blog.

Milling & Finishing

Milling the beech was easy. One board produced two 90″ long rails that didn’t move too much after the jointer and planer. One had a slight bow which was corrected by installation. After ripping to final width on the table saw, I routed all four corners with a 3/8″ roundover bit.

The terminators were a little trickier. After they were glued up, the band saw did it’s job. Final shape on the inside corners was done with the oscillating spindle sander, and the outside corners on the disc sander. Routing these were trickier too so I set up a router table platform (I don’t have a router table yet) and clamped some pieces together to make them safely maneuverable over the bit. The inside corner got a little too close for comfort since I designed a 3/8″ radius. Next time I’d give myself a little bit more room, but I do like how tight the corners are.

I forgot to seal the beech before staining. Doh! That means they soaked up a couple of coats like sponges. The third coat was put on at a late hour and with a fair amount of frustration which meant it went on way too thick. Of course they weren’t dry the next day, so I had to wipe them down quite a bit. [Note: There's "Assembly" in the paragraph below this one. Yep, I did assembly in between coats of stain. This was only partially intentional; luckily it didn't cause me too much grief.] Sanded with 220 grit before the last coat and that went on great. I decided to go with a wax rather than a poly because 1) I’m more comfortable with the application, and 2) I like the matte finish of wax. Just one coat of wax for now and they feel pretty good.

Assembly & Installation

Dowel Screw

1/4" Dowel Screw

Originally I planned on using dowel screws to connect the terminators to the straight pieces of rail. But since the roundover routing was done prior to assembly, the alignment of the pieces would require a level of precision I could not achieve. So I used wood dowels and drilled the holes slightly bigger than they should be which allowed me to tweak the alignment during glue-up. To increase the strength of this joint, it was time to crack open the Kreg Jig Master System and add some pocket screws! This was the first time I had used the Kreg jig and… WOW! It’s awesome! The jig is well made, easy to use, very precise, and even came with wood blanks that fit right into the pocket screw holes. A nice bonus was the kit has a vac attachment. At first I thought, “Could sawdust really be a problem for drilling a few holes?” But then I hooked up the vac and realized that it’s not only cleaner, but it’s better for the bit and wood. The Kreg jig was a gift from my Mother- & Father-in-Law. What an awesome gift! Thank you! I highly recommend this jig, even if you are buying it for yourself.

Kreg Jig Master System

Kreg Jig Master System (stock photos)

Handrails must be secured to blocking behind the GWB. [I picked up the habit of saying GWB, for Gypsum Wall Board, from reading architecture drawings. But I've never heard anyone say this; just drywall & sheetrock.] You simply cannot plan on hitting studs. Even if the studs were magically in the right locations, you can’t trust them. In my case, they’re steel studs which is even worse. Hitting a steel stud in the center with a drywall screw is fine but for handrails you need beefier screws. Chances are you’d tear right through the stud or bend it out of the way. Unfortunately the change in stair design happened after framing; which meant there wasn’t any blocking installed on the outside walls. So we had to rip the walls open (after the final coat of paint!), but the guys were able to patch them up quick.

Since the brackets aren’t done yet, I hung the handrails using the cheapo $5 brackets temporarily. They don’t look too bad but the custom brackets will be really great. The rails are 90″ long, the brackets are located 12″ in from each end, and I pre-drilled pocket screw holes on the bottom of the terminators. So the 4 screws into the blocking make the handrail solid as a rock!

In conclusion, I didn’t mention all the mistakes I made because this post would be twice as long! Still I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. And just like every new project I’m taking on, I’m learning a ton and becoming more efficient. As always, I’d love to hear any and all good, bad, and ugly feedback! Thank you in advance for your comments.

Here are a few pictures for now and I’ll update this post again once I rehang them with the new brackets.

Oct 16, 2011 | Categories: Beech, blog, Remodel, Sketchup, slider | Leave A Comment »

Computer Closet Design (and why this is relevant to Furnetcha)

Fueling Furnetcha is my dream to combine technology and woodworking. My passions for design and making things are universal and medium agnostic. In other words, I love designing and making both tangible (e.g., furniture, homes, gadgets) and intangible things (e.g., software).

For the past 3 years one BIG project has dominated my life: the remodel of our condo. Since I only started Furnetcha last year, completing the remodel has taken priority. Frankly it has taken away from my ability to invest as much time as I wanted in Furnetcha.

So not only is my workshop an intentional combination of all my interests, but my home has been too. Day or night I’m living a blur but none of it feels like work to me. There’s no doubt that it is difficult work but the blur has sometimes helped! Certainly my personal schedule has been more flexible. The flip side is that my Furnetcha clients have unfortunately suffered long delays.

Thus I have decided to share my designs, lessons, successes, & failures of my remodel through this Furnetcha site.

In fact, Furnetcha would not exist if it were not for this remodel project. I’ll post the full story behind Furnetcha later on. (One critical element I can’t help but share now: My dining room will have one wall that will look like curtains; it will actually be made from CNC milled panels. But how does one make CNC milled panels? My answer: Build a CNC machine!)

Totally Geeked Out

This story is really about one part of the remodel project where I let the computer geek in me run totally wild. In the floor plans I included a computer closet where almost all wiring for the entire house would begin & end. This closet is where almost all of the electronics live too. The closet was already framed and not part of the actual remodel, but every other wall around it was to be demolished and rebuilt. This made wiring easier. But having all of this wiring and equipment together pretty much makes it a mini data center! And just like a real data center, the hardest problems aren’t managing the computers or networks; the hardest problems are providing consistent power and cooling.

Once the electrician started snaking all the wires, the wire bundles started piling up and I freaked out. Without a design in hand, how would all of the wires get organized? Where would all of the components go? Determined not to do a half-ass job, I knew the design had to be fast-tracked. Otherwise components would get stacked on top of each other, rats nests of power strips would create a fire hazard, and I’d spend hours debugging cabling – only to have to do it all over again once I had the design.

There is a ton of thinking that went into the plan but for now I’ll just share the physical design for the closet and some pictures of how it came out. I went a little overboard.

Sketchup

My initial 2D design done in Sketchup:

As soon as I got a first draft of this picture, I jumped in and started building it. Truth be told, the original design did not include a rolling rack; it was meant to be a swivel rack. But when you calculate the diagonal dimension of a rack-mounted computer, for example, you realize that swiveling really isn’t an efficient use of space. But accessing the front and back of every component is critical, especially for someone crazy like me who is constantly adding and removing components, and of course, rewiring. I’ve often said, “I spend 25% of my life doing some sort of wiring” and I’m pretty sure that is not an exaggeration. This project involved A LOT of wiring.

Rack Features

  • All four corners of the rack are 30U steel server rack L brackets I bought on eBay. (Server rack equipment is NOT cheap!)
  • The rack rolls side-to-side on 4 bearings which ride on an aluminum track. The aluminum was attached to a poplar rail which I rabbeted to hold the aluminum. The poplar was supported by cleats I secured to the steel studs. (Bearings and threaded rods came from McMaster-Carr.)
  • The poplar rails are supported by steel L brackets. I’d guess this setup can support roughly 150-250lbs.
  • The face of the closet is trimmed with walnut (only main piece shown in pictures).
  • All cables have both strain relief and fixed attachment points to allow for the rack to roll without concern of snapping off a connector.
  • A mirror provides quick view to the back of the components.
  • Cable modem, router, & Vonage device (soon to be removed) are mounted to the wall because they are thin and rarely need to be accessed. The rack slides right by them.
  • D-Link ANT24-0230 external antenna is connected to one of my D-Link DIR-655 routers. The antenna is mounted on the other side of the wall, tucked neatly up in the corner of a soffet in the living room. I expected dramatically improved range but am not incredibly impressed. It is much better than having the router in the closet, but the signal still degrades quickly even 40 feet away on line of sight.
  • There are two dedicated 15A circuits running into the closet. A leftover Monster Cable power strip is used basically as a surge protector for the APC UPS. All of the networking components, security DVR, and computers run off the UPS. The UPS has a USB port that tells my NAS to shut down nicely when the power goes out. Sweet feature!
  • With this much equipment, the closet gets hot! It easily climbs to greater than 90° if I leave the doors closed. So there’s a thermostat that will kick on an inline fan mounted near the master bath. When it kicks on, the hot air exhausts through the same duct as the bathroom. Down the road I may consider adding a cold/fresh air supply line from the outside for increased efficiency.
  • Monoprice got a ton of business from me on cables, velcro straps, zip ties, HDMI port savers, an HDMI splitter, RJ45 connectors, and a lot more. I love that site! 1000′ of CAT6 for $99!
  • I make all of my own CAT6 and coax cables. These tools pay for themselves: RJ45 crimper, coax crimper, and this TRENDnet wire testing tool.
  • Belkin Conserve Insight outlet estimates energy usage. The closet is running between $250-$350 per year. I need solar!
  • Missing from this rack is the amplifier to power six 8″ and two 6″ in-ceiling speakers spread throughout the master bedroom suite. I did have a huge Denon receiver in there but it was really overkill and I need to sell it to pay for the other random stuff I bought for this rack!
  • Green is my favorite color.

Please let me know if you’re interested in hearing any details about the components or the install!

Oct 14, 2011 | Categories: blog, Sketchup, slider | Leave A Comment »

Handrail Bracket Design

Shopping for handrail brackets was frustrating. I found two vastly different price points: $5 for unexciting circular brackets from Home Depot OR $50 brackets from companies like Linnea. The latter are nice, but $50 is quite expensive for a stock component. And I need 4 of them. This research motivated me to design them myself. Chalk a victory up to “build” in the “build versus buy” war. Of course to build them, I had to design them.

Brackets are not very complicated but they can be tricky because of the angles involved. This is especially true if you want to make a universally usable bracket. Every set of stairs has slightly different rise and run dimensions. So if you want a square, rectangle, or somehow plumb bracket, you need to know these dimensions ahead of time. Perhaps this is why there are no middle-of-the-road mass-produced brackets.

But besides the angle dictated by the rise/run ratio, there is really only one other critical dimension: the distance off the wall. Massachusetts building code states:

Handrails adjacent to a wall shall have a space of not less than 1 1/2 inch (38mm) between the wall and the handrails.

A inch and a half is not very much space. I’ve found that almost all manufacturers standardize on 2 3/4″ as the distance from the wall to the middle of the handrail. This is what I used. The other dimensions can be chosen by aesthetic. I chose these dimensions to match the steel handrail I designed along with James Gonzalez.

I designed the bracket in Google Sketchup and created this spec in Layout. Below is an image although I think the attached PDF shows it more clearly. (Once I figure out how to clean up .skp files, I’ll post that file too.)

Handrail Bracket Design

Resources:

Oct 04, 2011 | Categories: blog, Sketchup, slider | Leave A Comment »

Glass Railing Design & Fabrication

When I decided to use glass as a guardrail in my condo, many questions arose regarding how to support and stiffen it. If you have access to 6″ or so below the floor, you can attach the glass there and theoretically that should be enough, even with only 1/2″ thick glass. But in my case, accessing below floor level was problematic. Regardless, I wanted something at the top of the glass to secure the pieces. Even if the glass is strong enough, having peace of mind about its strength was a critical factor in my design. Getting thicker glass wasn’t possible since 3/4″ glass is about 2x the cost of 1/2″! On top of this, the code was recently changed in Massachusetts, now dictating the height be 42″ instead of 36″. So I needed a cap to sit on top of the glass. I use “railing” & “cap” interchangeably here although I believe technically this design isn’t a railing.

The other criteria for the guardrail cap:

  • Industrial aesthetic – The image in my head was raw steel with the welds & grind swirls shown. Maybe even some discoloration.
  • Not aluminum. Not only is extruded aluminum expensive, especially for this purpose, but it is really bland. Don’t get me wrong, I love the utility of aluminum and use it on my CNC all over the place. But on top of big pieces of glass? Yuck.
  • Small. The contemporary design of the unit requires clean lines, not bulky.
  • Strong. Besides satisfying code requirements and providing peace of mind, this rail must be functional and protect both the glass and the people near the glass.
  • No posts. Too much material and it would interrupt the view. Everyone working on the project defaulted to posts because it made them feel better. Understandable but I was belligerent we could do it without them.
  • Minimize cuts to the glass. Many railings for glass come with brackets that go through a circle hole cut in the glass. This creates several problems, most of important are that every cut costs money and the brackets are insanely expensive ($100 each!).
  • Whatever we attach to the glass, it can’t be wide enough to put a drink on it. This may seem minor but it’ll probably save a few glasses and maybe prevent a concussion or two.

Pre-made solutions weren’t meeting my criteria. As I discovered, anything tied to stairs or railings carries a premium. It’s the equivalent of the markup on items in a wedding. One bouquet of flowers = $25. But ten of the same bouquets for a wedding = $25 x 10 x 10 = $2,500.

Railing Cap SampleIf not pre-made, then custom. The first  quotes for a custom rail came from some big metal shops, and were in the low 5-figures. So I decided I needed another approach. The Furnetcha shop is located in Humphreys Street Studios, along with ~30 other artists, craftsman, woodworkers, AND… a blacksmith! James Gonzalez has been at HSS for 10+ years and I approached him with my requirements. We clicked immediately and 15 minutes after our first conversation, he produced a sample that is exactly what I had in my head. I was thrilled.

The ~18″ long sample piece was welded, wire brushed, and sprayed with a quick coat lacquer. It’s smooth but has texture. The piece consists of 3 pieces of stock steel. The top is 1 1/2″ x 1/2″. The side pieces are 1/4″ x 3/4″. Steel is substantial and there is no doubt it provides structural benefit. This 18″ long sample weighs about 5 1/2 lbs! Perfect. Besides having nailed the design and getting along great with James, the price was a lot more affordable than anything else I’d seen. Trifecta.

There are two separate sections of rail, one around the foyer opening and one down the stairs. This is not meant to be a handrail that you grab. Those will be hung on the wall and I am milling those out of beech. They will be stained ebony to match the stair treads and risers. I’m talking to James now about fabricating custom brackets.

James & I designed it but he did all of the fabrication and installation. He did an amazing job! Below is a picture of the rail during installation. Finish pictures to come soon.

Railing Cap Installation

 

Oct 04, 2011 | Categories: blog, Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Website Redesign In Progress

While I have quite a few blog entries logged, I haven’t yet ported them into this format. The redesign took precedence over getting all the content posted since the previous design was getting quite tiresome!

Oct 01, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »