Erickson Woodworking https://ericksonwoodworking.com Enduring, functional objects that are beautiful to behold and that fit like well-made clothes Wed, 05 Jan 2022 22:35:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 A Live-Edge Table With a Sculptural Base https://ericksonwoodworking.com/wapiti-table/ Wed, 05 Jan 2022 18:58:51 +0000 https://ericksonwoodworking.com/?p=2959 The new Wapiti Table in black walnut harvested from Grinnell College campus Designing wooden furniture requires that you think like the tree. Trees constantly absorb and release water, expanding and contracting while they do so, and harvested wood will do the same. And the trunk of a tree is strong as it grows up and towards the sun because the tree needed to grow tall, but if you slice across the grain you lose all that strength. This means that when you design with wood there are limits that you have to keep your eyes on at all times. Forget […]

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The new Wapiti Table in black walnut harvested from Grinnell College campus

Designing wooden furniture requires that you think like the tree. Trees constantly absorb and release water, expanding and contracting while they do so, and harvested wood will do the same. And the trunk of a tree is strong as it grows up and towards the sun because the tree needed to grow tall, but if you slice across the grain you lose all that strength.

This means that when you design with wood there are limits that you have to keep your eyes on at all times. Forget to account for seasonal movement of the wood and your beautiful tabletop can split in two. Or create a curve that cuts across the wood grain and you lose all of the natural strength of the tree.

A crotch-figured bookmatch from black walnut is the focal point of the table

The inspiration for the Wapiti Chair and our new table, the Wapiti Table, comes from the shed antlers of elk and deer, some of which we find in the woods around our shop. These antlers branch, and where they branch the antler narrows down into a reinforcing web to create a light but incredibly strong shape.

The large, naturally occurring cracks in the top of the table are stabilized with rosewood wedges as George Nakashima taught us

But when you try and replicate these sorts of shapes in wood you run into all the problems I described above. A deep curve can lead to a point of structural weakness. In order to resolve this problem we created a new system of joinery that involved creating precise templates using a CNC machine, joining together long pieces of wood using hidden tenons, and then creating hard lines that run through the finished piece, in part masking the division between the separate pieces of wood.

The complex joinery for the Wapiti Table is accomplished through a combination of precision CNC-cut templates and hidden floating tenons

 

The result is something that is both sculptural and incredibly durable, and these techniques have opened up entirely new design possibilities for us with the Wapiti Table being an example of this.

Crafted from a 150 year old black walnut from Grinnell College campus in Grinnell, Iowa, the Wapiti Table combines a dramatic live-edge top with a sculptural base, rosewood inlay, and heavily relieved edge to create a top that almost seems to float.

 

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Sandhill Writing Desk https://ericksonwoodworking.com/sandhill-desk-2-2/ Mon, 13 May 2019 17:00:14 +0000 http://ericksonwoodworking.com/?p=2025 The Sandhill Writing Desk in steel and California walnut A writing desk should be compact, elegant, and austerely beautiful. And then when you sit down it should get out of the way and let you write. In our new collaboration with Mike Route at Red Iron Studio we try to accomplish all of that. The trestles of the Sandhill Desk are hand-forged from steel The Sandhill Writing Desk is based on an old table design called a trestle table. These tables consist of two or three trestles (the legs of the piece), a top, and a horizontal brace. For the […]

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The Sandhill Writing Desk in steel and California walnut

A writing desk should be compact, elegant, and austerely beautiful. And then when you sit down it should get out of the way and let you write. In our new collaboration with Mike Route at Red Iron Studio we try to accomplish all of that.

The trestles of the Sandhill Desk are hand-forged from steel

The Sandhill Writing Desk is based on an old table design called a trestle table. These tables consist of two or three trestles (the legs of the piece), a top, and a horizontal brace. For the Sandhill Writing Desk we built the top and brace from California walnut, while Red Iron Studio in Wisconsin forged the trestles from steel.

A Fine Woodworking article from 2016 on creating the connection between wood and steel

The joining of two disparate materials like wood and steel is always tricky. For this desk, Red Iron Studio first forged the steel and then we shaped the wood to match it. The resulting design is extremely functional, and, we hope, beautiful to look at.

Mike Route of Red Iron Studio at work on the trip hammer

 

Red Iron Studio Bullwhip Bench

A bench in wood and steel by Red Iron Studio

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Wapiti Chair https://ericksonwoodworking.com/wapiti-chair/ Thu, 14 Mar 2019 17:40:53 +0000 http://ericksonwoodworking.com/?p=1920 Walking in the woods near our shop in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada we sometimes find discarded antlers, shed by our local black-tailed deer. We keep these antlers around as beautiful decorations and their shape eventually led to the inspiration for a chair design. Chairs have three fundamental engineering concepts that drive their design: they must be strong, they must be light-weight, and they must be comfortable. The forking curves of antlers suggested solutions for all three. Each individual member of the Wapiti Chair is relatively light and delicate, but tied together as they are by a series of […]

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Walking in the woods near our shop in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada we sometimes find discarded antlers, shed by our local black-tailed deer. We keep these antlers around as beautiful decorations and their shape eventually led to the inspiration for a chair design.

Chairs have three fundamental engineering concepts that drive their design: they must be strong, they must be light-weight, and they must be comfortable. The forking curves of antlers suggested solutions for all three.

Each individual member of the Wapiti Chair is relatively light and delicate, but tied together as they are by a series of webbed branches, the result is extremely strong, like a truss, or a honeycomb.

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Holland Writing Desk https://ericksonwoodworking.com/holland-desk-2/ Tue, 22 Jan 2019 23:12:24 +0000 http://ericksonwoodworking.com/?p=1608 A writing desk is a work space for one person. It should be compact, light, and not too deep. There should be a drawer for pencils and paper. The top should be smooth, and left clear of distracting clutter. Beyond that? We have a lot of freedom to play. The wood for this desk was harvested along the Sacramento River levee north of the farm town of Grimes. The tree was a hybrid of the native California walnut, claro, with the English walnut. The hybrid is known as paradox in the walnut grower community and Bastogne in the gunstock/woodworking network. […]

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A writing desk is a work space for one person. It should be compact, light, and not too deep. There should be a drawer for pencils and paper. The top should be smooth, and left clear of distracting clutter. Beyond that? We have a lot of freedom to play.

The wood for this desk was harvested along the Sacramento River levee north of the farm town of Grimes. The tree was a hybrid of the native California walnut, claro, with the English walnut. The hybrid is known as paradox in the walnut grower community and Bastogne in the gunstock/woodworking network.

We found the complexity of grain and color of some of the boards too mottled to integrate in the frame of the desk so we decided to re-saw one of the boards into thick veneer and laminate the pieces onto solid wood, making the wraparound apron homogeneously spectacular.

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Crocker Art Museum Holiday Artisan Festival November 23-25, 2018 https://ericksonwoodworking.com/crocker-art-museum-holiday-artisan-festival-november-23-25-2018/ Sat, 21 Apr 2018 14:59:17 +0000 http://ericksonwoodworking.com/?p=1260 The Sumi Settee https://ericksonwoodworking.com/the-sumi-settee/ Thu, 24 May 2018 17:30:20 +0000 http://ericksonwoodworking.com/?p=1459     What is the correct distance to sit from someone while you converse? Should you face your fellow conversationalist directly or turn slightly away? How upright should your posture be to facilitate the most interesting conversation possible? The Sumi Settee is our attempt to answer those questions.     The Sumi Settee is the third design in our Sumi furniture line. We built the seat from a slab of wood we purchased from Dr. Gary Goby – founder of Goby Walnut – over fifteen years ago. The slab was thick, almost three inches, and so covered in dirt and […]

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What is the correct distance to sit from someone while you converse? Should you face your fellow conversationalist directly or turn slightly away? How upright should your posture be to facilitate the most interesting conversation possible? The Sumi Settee is our attempt to answer those questions.

 

 

The Sumi Settee is the third design in our Sumi furniture line.

We built the seat from a slab of wood we purchased from Dr. Gary Goby – founder of Goby Walnut – over fifteen years ago. The slab was thick, almost three inches, and so covered in dirt and dust it was impossible to tell what the figure would look like before we milled it.

 

 

Sealed with our new vegetable oil finish, Osmo, a product from Germany and introduced to us by Peter Korn of the Center for Furniture Excellence in Maine we feel like we have a new successful piece for our “Sumi” suite of seating.

 

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The Sumi Chair https://ericksonwoodworking.com/the-sumi-chair/ Wed, 18 Oct 2017 20:54:31 +0000 http://ericksonwoodworking.com/?p=1024 Some designs start from the ground up. Others provide a variation on a theme. The Sumi Chair is one of the latter, taking our award-winning floating back design and reimagining it with a solid back and an updated arm. Available now as a dining and occasional chair, in both armed and side chair variations.

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Some designs start from the ground up. Others provide a variation on a theme. The Sumi Chair is one of the latter, taking our award-winning floating back design and reimagining it with a solid back and an updated arm.

Available now as a dining and occasional chair, in both armed and side chair variations.



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A Recent Acquisition: Pacific Madrone https://ericksonwoodworking.com/a-recent-acquisition-pacific-madrone/ Wed, 08 Mar 2017 09:43:18 +0000 http://ericksonwoodworking.com/?p=538 Madrone is a native West Coast tree. It has a scaling bark that is red, green and shades of beige. Its leaves are bright forest green. Its berries are enjoyed by band-tailed pigeons. Last year we had some madrone trees begin to die on our land and we asked Homestead Milling and Logging to log and mill the large diameter trunks. At the sawmill we evaluated each log and discussed how to cut it to provide the best boards for furniture. It is a wood that is not considered to be a commercial species and hence is “rare”. This wood […]

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Madrone is a native West Coast tree. It has a scaling bark that is red, green and
shades of beige. Its leaves are bright forest green. Its berries are enjoyed by band-tailed pigeons.

Last year we had some madrone trees begin to die on our land and we asked Homestead Milling and Logging to log and mill the large diameter trunks. At the sawmill we evaluated each log and discussed how to cut it to provide the best boards for furniture. It is a wood that is not considered to be a commercial species and hence is “rare”.
This wood occasionally produces variable color which we call “red streak”. It is most commonly associated with the heartwood that has been distressed in some way. A knot or scar from another tree falling against it.

Madrone Bench with red streak caused by the 1911 forest fire in our neighborhood. (Sold).
After cutting the boards in a thickness to allow for the natural warping (common and predictable) in this wood we stacked the boards into a deck with strips of wood between each layer to allow for even drying. We also sprayed each board with BoraCare, a borax salt that discourages several beetles that enjoy this wood as food.

Next we wrapped the whole pile of neatly stacked boards with black plastic and let it sit for 2 months in the spring. In early summer we opened the wrap and allowed the warm summer heat to evaporate the water encased in each board. This winter we finished the drying of the wood in our wood-fired sauna and I built one of our classic Yuba Rockers. I was excited to see this local tree turned into this chair and to have solved several problems associated in drying this difficult to cure species.

South Yuba Rocking Chair

Yuba Rocker with red streak
This chair is currently available. The price is $7100.

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A Collaboration in Wood https://ericksonwoodworking.com/a-collaboration-in-wood/ Wed, 08 Feb 2017 09:38:46 +0000 http://ericksonwoodworking.com/?p=526 One of the joys of creative work, of any kind, is the chance to collaborate. A good collaboration leads to startling results as you are forced to modify and improve your own ideas through the creative filters and work processes of someone else. And on a personal level, a good collaboration is an opportunity to deepen and strengthen a relationship. Last November I was lucky enough to accomplish both of these things when we completed a table with our neighbor, land-partner, friend, award winning wood sculptor, and my godmother, Holly Tornheim. Holly and her husband Bruce Boyd were two members […]

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One of the joys of creative work, of any kind, is the chance to collaborate.

A good collaboration leads to startling results as you are forced to modify and improve your own ideas through the creative filters and work processes of someone else. And on a personal level, a good collaboration is an opportunity to deepen and strengthen a relationship. Last November I was lucky enough to accomplish both of these things when we completed a table with our neighbor, land-partner, friend, award winning wood sculptor, and my godmother, Holly Tornheim.

Holly and her husband Bruce Boyd were two members of the original team that helped to build poet Gary Snyder’s house, Kitkitdizze, in 1970. That team included my father, and when they completed that project they, along with six other members of the work crew, went on to purchase an adjoining piece of land. They called their new piece of property Wepa (which means “coyote” in the language of the Nisenan, the indigenous Native American tribe), in a nod to the popular idea that Native Americans were exemplars of land stewardship and community-based living. Wepa was to be a communal living experiment, an active rejection of pure capitalism and an embracing of the ideal of intentional community. Wepa is where I grew up, where my dad and Holly both built their woodshops, and where we all continue to work to this day. Perhaps because Wepa was able to strike a balance between the private and public, and between socialism and capitalism, it continues to be one of the most successful approaches to communal living that I’m aware of.

The idea to collaborate with Holly came four years ago in the process of putting together a gallery show. My dad and I had two book-matched pieces of figured California walnut and were contemplating building them into a coffee table. Everything about the pieces called for a sculptural approach—from the heart-shaped grain pattern, to a curved live edge—a sculptural approach that went beyond the functional curves that my dad has incorporated into his designs for the past 45 years. The more I thought about it, the more the pieces of wood reminded me of something that Holly would use in one of her carved pieces of wood art.

My concept was simple: make the top of the table feel light and organic, like a curling leaf, and then continue that motif uninterrupted down into a main leg. Functionally there would need to be other legs but they would be of lesser visual impact, keeping the design as simple as possible. The idea for the curling edges of the top came from a detail that Holly uses extensively in her work. A thin lip, or ridge, like the top of a cresting wave, undulates through many of her pieces, and it imparts an incredible sense of delicacy and craft.

I thought we could take this aesthetic detail and make it into a functional detail on a full-sized coffee table: it would serve as a rim to keep items from slipping off the top, and to contain any spills that might occur. I also hoped that we could put it to use to solve a tricky joinery problem we were running into. Though I had originally envisioned walnut as the material to use for the table, the piece was going into a room that called for a lighter wood, and the client chose instead of walnut the dramatic and beautiful Pacific quilted maple. The only problem was that we didn’t have any pieces of maple wide enough to make the top out of a single slab.

In spite of living next door to each other, and both working in wood, my dad and Holly took very different paths to their craft. My dad built furniture, a process that requires lots of precise joinery of many different pieces of wood. Holly went a different direction (“I gave all that up a long time ago,” she told me, referring to any kind of joining of different pieces of wood together), and focused on carving chunks of solid wood into sculptural bowls and spoons, and then later in her career, moving onto more purely art pieces. Occasionally my dad would enlist Holly to carve a part for one of his pieces, like the curved handles she did for a massive credenza we built in 1990, or the control knobs we put on our office chairs, but they largely pursued their own paths and designs independent of each other.

But looking at the two pieces of figured walnut in 2013, I realized there was the possibility for something much more. I envisioned a table put together using our joinery techniques and functional knowledge , but fully carved by Holly. Ultimately, the gallery show we were preparing for didn’t come together, but the idea persisted, and so when we were approached by a return client in 2016 to design and build a coffee table I included as an option a sketch for a table fully carved by Holly. He responded enthusiastically and the decision was made to move forward.

Normally, this isn’t a problem. Virtually all dining tables are glued together from multiple pieces of wood, and this is an effect that can be used to dramatic effect, as when we lay up a book-match. But Holly’s style is built around carving from a single piece, and even though it wasn’t going to be possible to do that in this case, I wanted to at least create the convincing illusion of it appearing that way.

In modern furniture design, derived from Danish cabinetmakers of the early- and mid-20th century, joinery is typically celebrated as a point of detail. But there are cases where you want to hide the joint, and this was one of them. It was problematic however, because in the broad expanse of wood that makes up a tabletop, there’s no place to hide. The answer? Hide it in plain sight. We cut the two pieces of maple we were using for the top into two curved pieces, and then glued them up so that the glue line created an organic, fair curve that split the top in two. Then, when Holly carved the piece, she used this line as a guide to create one of her signature spines, and the resulting detail was enough to distract the eye away from the shift in wood grain, and create the illusion that the top is made from a single piece.

Creating this table with Holly took a lot of back and forth: a lot of sketching, carving, and talking. This took place at my workbench and frequently on the shop floor as we drew out ideas full-size and then stood up to contemplate them as though we were looking down on an actual coffee table. Additionally, we frequently needed to check back in with the client, who was extremely supportive of this process, as we made changes and updates to the design. In spite of having known Holly my entire life, this interaction led us to relate in ways we never had before. An artistic process calls for honest criticism and evaluation, and a good collaboration requires you to simultaneously listen closely to someone and push hard for your own ideas when you think you’re right. The result was something we both feel proud of.

To learn more about Holly’s work, visit her website here.

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Red Elm: A Perfect Wood https://ericksonwoodworking.com/red-elm-a-perfect-wood/ Mon, 07 Nov 2016 09:29:00 +0000 http://ericksonwoodworking.com/?p=521 Words by Robert Erickson. After 45 years of experimentation we have settled on a few select woods for our unique back support design, which we affectionately call “The Floating Back.” The flexibility and durability needs of this design have required us to delve deeply into the inherent qualities of various woods, and one thing is certain: all woods are not created equal. Some have gorgeous figure, some gorgeous color, some gorgeous grain. These aesthetic qualities are what we look for when choosing the wood for our chair seats, arms and headboards. Other woods have less figure, but have knot free, […]

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Words by Robert Erickson.

After 45 years of experimentation we have settled on a few select woods for our unique back support design, which we affectionately call “The Floating Back.”

The flexibility and durability needs of this design have required us to delve deeply into the inherent qualities of various woods, and one thing is certain: all woods are not created equal.

Some have gorgeous figure, some gorgeous color, some gorgeous grain. These aesthetic qualities are what we look for when choosing the wood for our chair seats, arms and headboards. Other woods have less figure, but have knot free, stronger grain. These are what we choose for the back posts and legs of our chairs.

To function as required, the woods we choose for the flexible slats in our floating back design must satisfy a distinct set of demands. Most importantly, these woods need to be resilient: that is, able to be bent over and over again, always returning to their original shape. They must be durable over decades of use. They must be flexible, and never brittle.

Twenty years after I started making Floating Back chairs, a few slats began to fail. A couple of times a year I would get a call from someone with an older chair who had a slat that needed to be replaced. Slats of one species of wood, however, have never been returned in the more than 40 years that we have been making our Floating Back chairs: red elm.

Ulmus rubra, or red elm (sometimes called slippery elm), is a little known tree that grows in the Eastern U.S. and the Midwest. Unlike its cousin, American elm, red elm is almost exclusively a forest tree. Both species have been impacted by Dutch elm disease but slippery elm has been more reduced by the elm bark beetle, Xanthogaleruc luteola. Ulmus rubra is closely related to European elm but the Old Country cousin does not have the intrinsic qualities that we are looking for in slat wood.

Apprentice Bobby Corns demonstrates how to remove a red elm backslat from Erickson Woodworking on Vimeo.

I first heard of red elm in the 1970s when I read a book about Rushton canoes of upstate New York. First made by Henry Rushton in the 1880s, the canoes incorporated ½” by ½” strips of Ulmus rubra for the ribs of these hardy yet extremely light craft. Rushton had found that the wood worked well for steam-bending, that it was very strong, and quite light. This caught my eye way back then, because I was just beginning to develop our chairs’ back support system. But it was not until a year or two later in 1976—when I was working in a small riverboat town along the Missouri River— that I used some local red elm for chair parts. It was as strong as oak but much lighter in weight.

In the early 1980s my Uncle Dewaine took me for a drive heading south from his town in central Nebraska toward the Republican River. We passed the site where my great-grandfather, Anders Eriksson, homesteaded in 1878, and we kept going until we came to a large, dead red elm tree that Dewaine had noticed a month or two earlier.

I evaluated the tree and realized that it would make excellent lumber. My uncle agreed to take it to the local sawmill and have it cut into boards for me. A year later, I made him a rocking chair out of this wood: the first chair made entirely of red elm (plus upholstery) that I’d ever made.

Since then, we’ve been encouraging clients to choose red elm for the back slats of their chairs whenever they order a chair in walnut or other woods that look good with the rich brown color of Ulmus rubra.

This wood is hard to find in the quality we need for our specialized purpose, but we hoard a small supply and save it to furnish the comfort and durability that we expect each of our chairs to provide.

Hans Wegner declared “a high quality wooden chair should give 50 years of daily use.” We subscribe to this famous Danish chair designer’s manifesto, and red elm helps us on our way.

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