What's Up?

North Carolina's Bob Trotman  is June's featured artist. Post questions for him in the comments of this post.

I have done a lot of repair and some festival-going in the last week and a half. A few beautiful mashup things were sold quickly and I don't have pictures. One was an 80's shaped hardwood desk base that I matched up with a vintage sheet of bird's eye maple veneer plywood for the top. The bottom layer of the bird's eye looked like weathered leather but it may have been a severely distressed finish applied very thick? About 40x22, 7-layer finish ply with a drawer pull (type of thing) cut out along one edge - the most unique piece of scrap I've run into in a long time!

On this Formica table, I painted the legs burgundy.

Then I built Icehouse II bookcase on commission:

 Starting with the door (backing), I cut of the bottom to make it even and to clean off a thin layer of woodrot in the endgrain. The worn, graffitied door was beaten apart from the sides of the tool cabinet it once enclosed, so splintered edges were split off with a chisel. I then wire brushed away the loose paint chips and triple-coated it with water-based polyurethane front and back.(4 layers on exposed endgrain) The hinges were busted off to remove this one, but the bent latch is intact and rotates freely. (Icehouse I Bookcase also had hinges)

The side panels are cut from the plywood back of a very strange old stereo cabinet. I may cannibalize the rest and will try to remember to take pictures of it first. I gave bits of the componentry to Susan for the future making of a Bot.

The shelves are the very last of the shelf-stock donated by our neighbor Sam from a library tear-out in the early 90s. (Previously, I guessed they had come from a prior incarnation at 201 Haywood Rd.) I lost the shop countersink for about a week, so I used a flat auger bit in its absence. With a wide pilot, the flat recess created by the auger seems to create a lock-tight effect when the wood screws bite in at the end. So, lesson learned: losing tools leads to innovation. Lose your tools often as long as you are certain to find them again later.

___
] j [