Friends,
It is hard to find “new designs” for furniture. I have been looking for new interesting designs to try for a long time with no luck. I am not interested in making a “$10,000 rocker” that folks will say I copied from a well known furniture maker. There are too many people doing that already. We need new venues. I can’t find anything “new”. It’s all “derivative”.
Well, I found something today on the web. It is really not NEW. Rustic furniture has been around as long as trees have (well, shortly thereafter). What I found was a take on rustic furniture that is new to me, but it may already be known to you. Anyone can design a chair with wings and a propellor and say that it is a new design, but that has never interested me.
To me, furniture MUST be comfortable, useful, and interesting. Today I ran across the following website:
http://www.indonesiateakfurniture.com/teak-root-furniture/teak-root-furniture.html
If you surf the site, you will see that not all of the artisans are using Marcou planes and Wenzloff saws. They seem to be using knives, rocks, etc, but at least they are wearing dust protection! I have attached two photos. IMHO, these two chairs are quite beautiful, perhaps because they were designed by God herself, but they also look like they would be fairly comfortable and useful as well as decorative.
Unfortunately, getting teak roots from Indonesia to the U.S. to make these things would be very difficult. I checked Woodcraft and they aren’t selling any. I may have to move to Indonesia to try making a few. I’ll check with SWMBO to see if she is interested. Let me know if you come up with any new designs for me to steal — oh, sorry, I mean “adapt and modify for personal use only, and I’ll only make one of them.”
Enjoy.
Mel
Measure your output in smiles per board foot.
Replies
It might actually be possible to get teak roots from plantation growers in Central America. Some of the plantation operators are from the U.S., so you'd at least avoid the Lost in Translation problems. Of course, you'd probably have to ship them by the container load in order to make it worthwhile.
-Steve
Very common sight in tea shops; pretty much any Chinese tea shops has a variation on the theme.
The table surface usually feature a carving of the Buddha. Never thought anybody would be interested in that.
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Chris Scholz
Galoot-Tools
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