Scaffolding wooden lounge benches

This is a lounge bench set of scrapwood (old scaffolding wood) that I made on the company I work for. This set will be completed with cushions for comfort. For more information on this piece of furniture: Droomhout.nl.

Roman Watch Tower

This is a roman watch tower that I’ve made with Stichgting bouwloods in De Meern. The tower is constructed of Oak wood, verry heavy duty, it weights about a ton all together. The roof is layed with cedar wood roof singles and the doors, shutters and floors are made of larch. The walls will be closed with clay plaster over a braid willow branches like in old european timber frame buildings. In De Meern and Leidsche Rijn there are several excavation sites where remains of these watch towers are found from roman times, hence this reconstruction.

Two tables from city wood

With a group of seven volunteers from Utrecht and surroundings we have participated in the producing of tables from wood out of the city. This was an initiative of foundation Tafelboom and supported by Stichting Bouwloods with furniture experts and a workplace. The life of these trees, an Ash and Elm, has been documented in a book and there has even a requiem been written for the trees. Once turned into tables (all done with hand tools) the wood will return to the neighbourhood where the trees originated from, to school buildings. These one and a halve make days where a great success thanks to the enthousiasm of the volunteers and the people from foundation Tafelboom.

Little Oak Box

This is a little box of Oak and Birch plywood that I made in a lost moment. Due to the overlapping lid it closes without hinges.

Key cabinet

This is a key box that I made. It consists of solid Oregon Pine sides and lists around the door and a Birch plywood door and back. I designed it is fitted with a lock, piano hinge and brass keyhooks.

Mill wheel wheat mill

I have made this Mill Wheel for the Wheat Mill “De Jonge Sophia” in Groot Ammers (The Netherlands). The production of a mill wheel is a painstaking task as the right distance between the stave’s is of great importance to a smooth turning of both this wheel and the contra wheel (it is necessary to work to the quarter milimeter accurate!). The wheel is made of Elm wood and consists of four “Schenkels” (quarter round pieces) connected with a pen and hole joint. Elm wood is a verry tough woodkind, though not verry durable in an outside climate. The toughness of Elm is required for mill parts. The stave’s of the wheel are made of Holm Oak (evergreen Oak), a woodkind that grows in the mediteranean an is verry hard and thus abrasion resistant. The dark spots on the photo are treated with insecticide.

Corner joint roman watchtower

These are the corner joints of a roman watchtower that we are building. At the four corners of the tower there are each three beams of 30×30 cm (11.8 x 11.8 inch) (Oak) comming together to form the “balcony” of the watchtower. The horizontal beams are each 7.57 meters (298 inch) long, the vertical post (the corner post) is 8.5 meters (334.6 inch) long. On the smaller model you can see how the three beams fit together like a japanese puzzle.

Doors for Roman watch tower

These are three doors and four shutters that I made for the roman watch tower that we are constructing with our company. The doors are made of Larch and to give them a rough look they have been planed with a wooden hand plane. The design is verry basic wich is probably what they where like originaly as well.

Two boxes with shared lid pattern

These are two boxes that I made from scrapwood. Both lids share a continuing wood pattern. The wood is Elm and Birch plywood.

Round Table

This is a round table of solid Oak wood with a birch plywood inner-top. The round parts are made of overlapping parts of oak wood, glued together brickwise (one half overlaying the other) and than made round with the stationary router table.

Swamp Kauri Ring

This is a ring that I turned from a cross grain glued piece of Swamp Kauri (3500 years old, NZ)

Shelter Shed’s children’s farm

We have made some shelter shed’s/huts for the Childrens farm in Utrecht. In these shed’s the animals of the farm can take shelter. The whole constructions (three in total, two large ones, one small one) are made of oak wood, they are woodskeleton constructions with pen and hole and half-wood joints. The largest length is the top ridge and the other two roof beams which are five meter fifty in length. Some of these are are from one piece of wood, others are welded together. The pen and hole joints are secured with oak wooden pens (toognagels) which pull the joints extra tight together. The roof wil be mounted with roof tiles and the styles come to stand on a concrete foundation. Inside the roof construction there’s a “windverband” (wooden wind reinforcement) to give the construction extra support.

Table for global warming day 10:10 2012

Today we made this piece of furniture, a coffee table of low bench, on a fair for sustainability on dutch sustainability day (10-10-12). Our organisation works wit sustainable goals but besides that the wood for this table is all local wood, so there was no long transport chain involved. It is FSC wood and table top as well as the legs are a rest material from another project we made.

Benches for Dutch fortress

These are the pictures of a series of four “Linie-benches”, made for “Fort bij Vechten”, a fortress in the Dutch inundation zone. (the inundation zone is a line of fortresses in the Netherlands, a heritage site). The benches are disassembleable as they where in the original line of fortress furniture. The original benches where made from pine wood but the ones we made are from native Oak, and thus verry durable. The benches are very carefully made and we hope they’ll last for a long time.

Wooden Sheepfold

At the moment we are building a wooden sheepfold with our foundation. The ground plan of the fold is 10×15 meter and there is a first floor in the building. The construction is an authentic wood-skeleton construction. The floor beam is 10 meters in length and all the wood of the frame is Douglas. We started with square side pillars and sawed and planed them round after cutting the joints for the support beams in the sides.

When all the joints fitted the three frame parts were loaded onto a truck and transported to the site, where they where mounted onto the foundation. It was a real buzz to see everything on such a large scale fit together tightly to form a strong structure.

Now the floor will be layed and the sides will be covered with timber. The window sils wil be made from Lark wich is verry rot-proof. The stairs to the first floor (or hay attic) are made from Oak.

Picknick tables

This is a series of eight picknick tables that me and my collegues made for landscape trust in the area of Utrecht (Netherlands). The wood (oak) comes from theire trust and we have sawn it with a mobile sawing machine to slabs for the tables. The legs of the tables are chesnut wich is verry durable in all weather conditions. The legs of the tables look verry long on the pictures but are ment to be dug in all the way to the rim of the charkoaled part. The burnt rings around the legs are treated with a gas burner to resist the rotting process that occurs near the soil surface where there’s lots of oxygen and moist. The tables are treated with raw lineseed oil and finished with hardwood oil.

Two wooden workbenches

I have made these two work benches or stands to use in the workplace. To accurately get the angles and mesurements I made a 1:1 scale european projection drawing on a piece of plywood. All joints are pen and hole joints except for the upper balk wich is fitted into notches and is (besides beeing glued) reinforced with a piece of screw-thread. A verry challenging design to make!

New and refurbished tables

A new and a refurbished table. The new table has a lower beam between the table legs and is made of oak and fir. The refurbished table has been taken apart totally, the paint has been sanded of and the table has been precisely joined together again.

Old Dutch benches

These are two of four “old Dutch benches” I made to go with a table. The design is full of angles in all degrees and the benches are assembled without glue. This is because of the oldfashion joints, mortise, half-timber, and pen and hole joints. The kind of wood is Douglas.

Oak Entrance Gate

These are pictures of a Oak gate I made. The gate is made for the driveway of a villa and consists of a small and large halve.

Boath parts are reinforced by diagonal “schoren” that benefit the strength of the construction.

Wooden fenders for Statenjacht “De Utrecht”

These are the wooden fenders for the Statenjacht “De utrecht” that I restored earlyer this year. Due to the cconstant contact with water and the elements the wood was rotten at some points. I chiseled and planed it away and made new douglas parts for those spots. The grain direction of the new parts had to be equal to the original pieces. With the restored fenders this 18th century admiralty yacht (reconstruction) can continue it’s course for a while.

Saw benches

This is a small sawbench that I made of Douglas. Douglas is a redwood, a coniferous tree with verry soft resin-rich wood. There are also two Shed stools that I made from other kinds of wood: Angelim (a tropical hardwood), one of differend kinds of wood mixed up and one from plywood.

Sapwood table

This is a table or peddestal that I made from sapwood. Sapwood is the outermoast layer of wood on a tree which is verry soft and usually concidered waste material amongst others for it’s borer sensitivity.

Rudder and Swords for Barge (Grundeltje)

These are the old and newly made Rudder and Swords of a Grundeltje (Dutch sailing vessel). All the parts are made of inch or two inch thick oak slabs, reinforced with iron pins. The ironwork is partly renewed and partly transferred from the old pieces.

Swamp Kauri Box

I made this box from a curly piece of Swamp Kauri which layed in the swamps of New Zealands north Island since the ice age 3500 years ago. That is the age of Sabre-tooth-Tigers and Mammoths. I have sawn little planks of it which I put together to a slath to make the sides of the box of. I have embedded a small lock and put two of the Canadian quarter hinges at the back. The lid and bottom plate are of scrapwood, a coniferous kind.

Unique Box

These are the final pictures of the box of my previous order that was under the required mesures and therefor failed. Actually I find it the moast special piece of the serie cause of the wild wood pattern in the bottom and lid which results from the use of the rest (packaging) material of another order of plywood. You can see here what wonderfull things you can make with rest material. The sides of the box/case are far from rest material and are made from oregon pine. The front of the box got damaged in the manufacturing process and I restored it with some small wooden strips; American Nut and Fir.

Four little cases

Last days I started on four little cases to use for make-up for a little make-up business. The first case failed my quality controll but after that I payed more attention and got better results. The cases are square in shape and the make-up containers are going to be stuck on both lid and bottom part of the cases, with magnets mounted on two iron plates. The sides of the cases are made of Oregon pine and Larch and the lid and bottom are from russian Birch. Oregon pine (from the state Oregon in the US) marks itself by the fine line pattern and orangy color. The Larch is a tree found in Europe as well and is the only pine tree to lose its needels in winter. The wood  of the Larch is one of the moast durable ones of the coniferous trees in Europe, due to the oil inside.

Laminated stairwell

For my working experience course I worked in 2010 on this stairwell. The sides are made of laminated oak, the steps are also made of oak and the whole stairwell is organically designed and made by Sytze de Groot, with my help. The stairs splits half way to lead to two different front doors. The stairs stands at an ecological building site in Driebergen called ‘Drieklinken’.

Conference tables

Earlier this week I started making 18 conference tables for in the office of our foundation. I do this with my fellow carpenters, of course! It is a pretty simple design of 14 rectangular tables and 4 tables of a curved shape (to eg the corners of a square table sharing). The tabletops are made from 15mm thick birch plywood which gets a 40×40 millimeter frame of solid oak. The rectangular table tops are 150×64 cm in area and are resting on round metal legs. We started with double-inch air-dry oak wood cuttings from outside and made them into bars of 40x40mm (approx.) and in lengths of 155.68 and 210cm (the last are the corner lengths for the round tables).

Because the wood hardly shrinks in the longitudinal direction, in the interior climate where the tables are to stand, the lists can be mounted to the dryed birch plywood is the idea.

The tables get a finish of Auro natural hardwax oil.

Roman Barge

These are photos of a scale model (size 1:10) of a roman punt (vessel) found in an excavation in de meern (Utrecht), The Netherlands, in 2008. The barge or ‘Punter’(Dutch) was used as a trading vessel by the roman settlers in or around the third century ad. It’s called ‘meern 6′ by it’s excavators, the name indicates the richness of the archaeological site which lies in the old watercourse of the Viking Rhine which was at that date the northernmoast boundry of the roman empire.

The replication of the nearly ten metre long vessel is done by Stichting Bouwloods in de meern (Utrecht), The Netherlands.

In late summer of 2011 I started working with Stichting Bouwloods on the project of the Punter. The vessel is made of high quality european Oak and roman style forgings. This is a somewhat different scale,  and thus drill, than the woodworking I have done so far but it’s great  fun to work with wood on such a large scale. Stichting Bouwloods makes all sorts of large wooden projects, but there’s also (moast of the time) a small scale modle of the project beeing made. I started on the scale model of the punter. Scale 1:10 makes it nearly a meter long and the bottom 10 cm wide.

Just as the large punter the scale model is made of Oak and the skin of the vessel is bend in shape of solid wood. For the scale model this was done with steam while on the large boat we did the largest curves with gas burners and cooling/steaming water in a template of steel scaffolding.

Moast of the time I keep my hearing-protection on cause while I’m gently working with my finger tips my colleagues keep hammering them ol roman nails in the trusses and working on ‘leg thick’ shelves.

View Project

Lowboard

These are the first pictures of my final exam piece. It is a Low-board, designed by me. It’s not finished yet, but these pictures are for a first impression. It is made from European oak, quarter sawn, Pen and hole joints, dovetail joints, notches, dominoes joints, dowel joints, mitered Lamello and swish-joints.

Fire Column and table

I made this Fire Column and table on my intern ship job with a lounge furniture company (tenso.nl). They are for in or outside use and made of Guariuba (tropical hardwood). The fire burns on gas or bio-ethanol.

Table 1

This table I have made as a test for my exam piece. I wanted to try a couple of new things before my finals that I hadn’t tried before. The slath was an experiment which I hadn’t done before. The wood is European Oak and the design is by myself.

Rietveld Steltman Chair

After the saw bench I decided to make a Rietveld chair, the Steltman chair to be precise. This chair is originally designed by Rietveld for the jewelery Steltman in The Hague. I really like the design which is still quite modern I think. The wood is European Oak and originally it’s painted white, but I won’t do that.

Sawbench

This is a saw-bench that I’ve made in my second year. It was actually a workpiece that I wanted to make to get the feeling for it again after summer Holiday. This year I only have to do my final exams so I can make whatever I want until than. The wood of this saw-bench is Padoek, an African hardwood that’s known for it’s red color. It’s a very wear-proof bench of a luxurious kind of wood.The wood turns eventually brown by the influence of light so I treated it with a UV-oil. That enhanced the red color.

The Stool

This stool was part of the second test for the machinery. It’s almost entirely made in the machinery. I’ve used Maple. Only the assembly was done by hand.

The Cupboard

This is a cupboard for next to my bed. The task was to make something that could be disassembled. I have followed the standard drawing but added a drawer with halve covered dovetails. The handle of the drawer is made of eight layers veneer, bend in a press and the buds of the doors I have made on the lathe. It was pretty hard to make two identical buds. The kins of wood that I’ve used are Maple and American Nut veneer.

Swamp Kauri Box

This is a box of 3500 years old wood! It is Swamp Kauri from New Zealand that has been lying in the swamp for all those years. The Kauri-tree is protected. It is a box for pencils. This piece of Swamp Kauri is from the root area of the tree and has a beautiful pattern because of that. On one of the corners there’s still a piece of bark which has grown into the wood itself. The hinge and snapper are made in Canada. The hinge stops at a 95 degree angle. Again I have finished this workpiece with hard-wax oil which makes it ware and water proof.

The Table

This is the table that I’ve made. It is made of American Cherry which was originally 4 cm thick. Thereof  remained a slat of 3 cm. The design is made by me. I wanted a square ‘cube-legged’  table, and one that could be disassembled. If you disassemble the side-rules and the slat you end up with 5 pieces that make up this table. The measurements are also adjusted to me and my home. It is 77 cm high and 160 cm in lenght by 90 cm width. I have finished it if with two layers of hard-wax oil to harness it against stains and moist.

The briefcase

The next theme was a briefcase. The new thing in this task was the making of dovetails. There has to be an inlay in the lid veneer as well. I have made the body of the briefcase of American Nut and the lid and bottom of steamed Beach veneer on plywood. I have made the handle of twenty layers of veneer on a model under the vacuum-press. The making of the dovetails was not as hard as I thought it would be. It is precise work but if you’re careful it’s not hard. My inlay of veneer in the lid is a little cube. I have finished the briefcase off with hard-wax oil. 

The Box

For this box I’ve used two kinds of wood: American Cherry for the body and American Nut veneer for the lid, the bottom and the laths that hold the lid in place. The embedding of the hinges appeared to be the hardest part of making this box. It’s something that has to be done very precisely, otherwise the lid will go slanting. The lock was not as hard as the hinges.

The sawplank

This saw-plank we again had to make largely by hand (without machines). The plank exists of two parts and the touches are glued into the plank. It can be used by both left and right-handed people because it has two different touches. The wood is Sycamore/Maple, a very white kind of wood. The white color comes from the kind of wood that this tree is: Maple is a sap-wood tree, with soft white wood.

The Hammer

After the slats we got an instruction lesson in the machinery. There we could prepare the wood for our hammer. The head of the hammer is made of Hornbeam, a kind of wood that splinters little. The handle is Ash wood that is springy. The head of the hammer is made out of three slabs of wood glued together, with dowels through the head for extra strength. I have covered the dowels with Wengé wood that has a nice contrasting color with the white Beech hammerhead. The hammerhead sits loose on the handle so you can easily take it apart and put it away.

De Doeklatten

The next task was to make a set of similar slats which (covered with fabric) can be used to support your workpiece. The most difficult part was to make to identical slats while the wood could be quite quirky. The wood for these slats was European Oak. When they where finished I have covered them with a thick fabric on one side to guard my workpieces.

The round bar

The first task was to make a round bar out of a balk of steamed Beach-wood. The balk first had to be made exactly square before you could start with plaining it round. Making it round was done by taking the corners of until it was almost round. Than finally you went from left to right (cross-wards) over the bar to finalize the round shape.