Woodworker: John P. McCormack

McCormack designed this piece around a granite drilling core from the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge in Boston. McCormack used 60 sheets of 80-grit sandpaper to polish the granite, spending over two and a half days at the lathe. He incorporated a variety of wood into the table design (bloodwood, Macassar ebony, Swiss pear, madrone burl, and pernambuco) and topped the table with glass.

The piece took several hundred hours to complete. McCormack named it after Oliver R. Smoot Jr., an MIT undergrad whose body-length was used by in a fraternity escapade to measure the bridge (it measures about 364.4 Smoots and one ear long.)

Photo: Mitch Rice

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