Walnut Snare Drum Shell

My wife is a drummer, and her snare had a thin, brass shell. While she liked the attack, it was “ring-y”, and she wanted a more solid sound. I thought I would try my hand at a stave snare, and founds lots of info online on how to build and calculate the pieces. You woodworkers will notice a sort of “mistake” in the build photos. I approached this like a piece of furniture, so of course, I used a nice board, and wanted to cut the staves so that the grain was continuous around the shell. So the “mistake” (after I’d already cut the parts) was that the glue joints were all end grain to end grain. The “correct”…

Prairie Sofa & Love Seat, Part 1

I’ve always loved the iconic L. & J. G. Stickley No. 220 Prairie Sofa. As the pair of sofa and love seat in our own living room have aged, and as my skills as a furniture maker has increased, I knew this day would come. This is going to be large build, as it is two pieces of large furniture that I’ll be building at the same time. Space in the shop is going to get tight. Although these are once again reproductions, I’ll make changes where it suits me. The first obvious change is that Stickley never originally produced a love seat version of the sofa. The love seat is a more modern type of furniture. The modern Stickley company …

Prairie Sofa and Love Seat, Part 3

The end of my last post said “Part 3 coming soon”, but that was back in April, and the sofa and love seat were completed back in May/June. Since then, I’ve been waiting to get some nice photography of the pieces before finishing the series. Because they were so large, and I’d already put them into my house, it was hard for me to do the photography well. Luckily, a friend of mine is a great photographer, and he came over with fancy lights, cameras, and other equipment, and he went at it for an an afternoon taking some excellent shots. Once he had the shots, it then took a while for him to edit and color correct them, etc. …