Summer Changes

I decided a few weeks ago to upgrade the primary set of power tools in my workshop. By primary set I mean those that are used to do the initial heavy lifting, the table saw and jointer. You could include the planer in that set of machine tools also. I focused on upgrading the table saw and jointer though, by ordering new tools from Grizzly after doing a lot of research beforehand.

My organ building workshop was mostly populated with stationary power tools from Grizzly, and I like the fact that the new tools again came from Grizzly Industrial. The new table saw and jointer arrived this past Friday, and it was quite an interesting chore to move multiple shipping crates from the loading dock down to my workshop even with much appreciated help. I will be in the process the next few weeks of doing all the assembly and set up work to render them operational.

Thanks to John Doric and his girlfriend Laura for some much needed help with some of the heavy lifting last Friday night. I think we all admit that Laura - replaced in the photo here by a surrogate engine hoist - did most of the work.

How to Design Organ Case Pipes

This post is about my use of design technology that assisted me in building several mechanical action pipe organs as an independent pipe organ builder. I am going to use the original design objects that I used to build the organ described in my previous post here as examples. That organ was designed as a new instrument built around a core set of late nineteenth century artifacts. The challenge lay in creating a valid functional design built around those artifacts that were specifically three sets of discarded organ pipes still valuable for their great tonal beauty.

An interesting aspect of that pipe organ, and all subsequent that I built, was the use of technology to help successfully achieve the final results. It must be apparent from my previous posts that I have a strong background in computer aided design and manufacturing technologies.

I wrote several computer programs for pipe organ design shortly before I began building pipe organs as an independent builder. The programs automated and simplified tasks that were particularly challenging by creating useful geometry in a computer aided design and drafting program.

Pipe groupings that make up the front of an organ case are a traditional part of early organ building, and one of the tasks I simplified by using a purpose written computer program was to accurately model the front pipes that would form part of the organ case design. The front case pipe grouping for an organ I built is represented here in both its computer form, and in a photo of the actual instrument.

The image at the top of this post is a screen capture of an organ case pipe design program I wrote using a Java development tool called BlueJ. I used BlueJ to program in Java while briefly working at a small private liberal arts college that followed my stint as an organ builder, and I found myself in a position there to learn an object oriented computer programming language. The original organ case design program was written in a procedural programming language, and I used the opportunity to rewrite one of my organ design programs in a new programming language paradigm to significantly lessen the learning curve.

The organ case pipe design program like the other programs I wrote created a script file of drawing commands that produced accurate geometry when read into a computer aided design program. The result of the case pipe design program was a set of twenty-five accurately dimensioned pipes interpolated from three user input octave dimensions that determined the scale of the set. The interpolated values were accurately computed using geometric progressions.

The pipe geometry created in the computer aided design program could then be used and edited to create a set of pipe groupings visually appropriate to the intended organ case design. I hope the screen images included here adequately demonstrate this process without going into any further discussion that would be well outside the scope of this post.

Windchest design with nested pipes in plan or top view represented another major design challenge that I simplified by writing a set of rule-based winchest design and pipe nesting programs. A screen shot of the windchest design in plan view for the first organ I built is shown below. The rectangles represent the plan view outlines of the wood organ pipes, and the outer circles represent the plan view outlines of the metal organ pipes. The inner circles represent special devices called slider seals. An associated computer program would calculate the appropriately sized slider seal based on the wind requirement of its corresponding pipe, and represent it in the drawing as a uniquely colored circle.

Reuse and Repurpose

My workshop is located in a building peripherally considered to be part of the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association. Each spring the association hosts an open studio art tour know as Art-A-Whirl where the largest concentration of activity can usually be found at the Northrup King Building. It struck me when walking through the Northrup King Building not long ago how many artists reuse old material in their new work, and because of this I thought about the first organ I built as an independent pipe organ builder.

That organ came about when I was asked if I would be interested in the remains of an early twentieth-century pipe organ that were removed from a church in northern Illinois. What I found useful in that material were three sets of pipes that could be used to make a late-baroque cabinet organ if revoiced and added to by new pipe ranks that would provide the new organ with a complete and well-rounded set of tonal resources.

I therefore set about designing a one-manual mechanical action organ built around a specification that included the three older sets of pipes along with two new sets that completed a unified tonal plenum based on the late baroque style common to southern German organ building of that period. The new organ design included a new slider windchest, new wind supply, new casework of solid walnut, and a new mechanical action to directly connect each key to its corresponding pipe valve, all produced in my shop.

I contracted out the keyboard and metal pipes to respective firms who did work in reproducing early organ material to stay true to the historical nature of the instrument. Carvings were done by a local artisan whose normal business was furniture refinishing.

I would not have originally intended to build an organ using older material had it not been available for free, although organs have been built this way for centuries. Obviously though, there are many artisans who use older artifacts in their work, and base much of it on this principle of reuse and repurpose.

The Alice Table: An Example of Fluid Design

 There have been two simple projects described in earlier posts that experienced evolution as their production progressed. I can barely recall a single project where this has not occurred to some degree, and as a matter of fact, I feel that it is the nature of design itself as guided by the creative process that forces fluid change on a project as it evolves from design to actual outcome.

The Alice Table was no exception as the design of the top changed during the course of the project. The top was originally to have edges trimmed with mitered corners. After the base of the table was completed, it started becoming clear that a top with mitered trim would not look right against the four very linear frames that made up the base. I decided therefore to make the top as a sort of frame and panel construction to compliment the basic frame construction of the base. I even ran a cope and stick profile along the entire front and back edges of the central laminated panel to join the mating front and back rails.

The cope and stick technique produced an interesting design element in that it produced a visually appealing exposed joinery detail at the front and back of the side edges of the table top. I had a decision to make at this point, and decided to go ahead and route a quarter round profile around the table top edge. This was done as a period detail to highlight the exposed cope and stick frame joinery, and then mirrored on the inner cross frame shelf to maintain the table within a table design concept.

The table had not taken on any specific design statement until this point, but now it appeared that my former work in producing historically inspired design helped to move the table in that direction. Going back to a time when I practiced woodworking as a profession through musical instrument building, the inclusion of a certain period element produced a design with historical inspiration. My dad used to say that water always flowed to seek its own level. I guess that proved true with the final outcome here.

The design elements as they evolved of basic frame, frame and panel, and profile detail combined to produce a visually integrated whole. I was fortunate in this project to have a client that understood and appreciated the creative process and its application. A better table resulted.

Update: The client posted this to her Facebook page.

THANK YOU EVERYONE WHO HELPED ME CELEBRATE A SIGNIFICANT BIRTHDAY LAST WEEK. THE CARDS, CALLS, EMAILS AND EVENTS JUST CAME COMING. THE HIGHLIGHT WAS THE DELIVERY OF "THE ALICE TABLE" THANK YOU, STEVE. I ENJOY IT MORE AND MORE EVERYDAY. BLESSINGS TO ALL OF YOU.
LOVE, ALICE

There's no better feeling than a good endorsement from a client after completing a project.

The Problem with Sales in a Difficult Economy

I opened a workshop here in Minnesota to produce work that would sell on consignment in local galleries, and doing it this way would allow me to design and build whatever I wanted. This was a model that worked in the past. The recession hit though, and gallery sales slowed way down and still have not recovered. One of the consignment galleries in fact closed this year.

So rather than stay with a model of design-build-sell that currently does not work, I have focused more time during the past few years on workshop and methods development rather than actual output, and some of that work is detailed here. For example, both the light fixture and candle holder projects taught me technique that I applied to the Alice Table commission just about to be completed.

The idea to build the candle holders came from a short pile of imported scrap wood that I had no use for, but felt that such beautiful wood should not end up thrown away. I built ten, and brought five to a retail gallery, but again there they sit proving that not even product mix is the answer.

I was recently asked though to donate something to a benefit auction held on the University campus. Normally this would not have been realistic, but wouldn't you know that I had five small objects sitting in a cabinet back at the workshop that were readily available to use in a perfect sort of marketing experiment. Therefore from the five candle holders remaining at the shop, I decided to donate one small and one large candle holder, being really interested in what value they bring at auction relative to their value appraised by staff at the gallery where the other five reside.

The auction is coming up next week, and its result may give me some useful information back. If not no harm, no foul. If I learn something useful though, I'll provide it in an update.

The Alice Table: Managing Visual Complexity

I completed the woodworking portion of the Alice Table two days ago, and posted a photo of the yet to be finished project. Someone pointed out to me that the table is really a table within a table. That person is correct. The two cross frames support an inner shelf, and that inner structure can be seen as a small table by itself.

The base of the table is made up of two side frames joined together by the two inner cross frames. The two inner frames fill space that would otherwise be empty in many other table designs, and often it is good to have empty or sufficient white space in a design. The inside cross frames though create a certain amount of visual complexity in addition to their practical function as simple structures that physically join the side frame assemblies together as well as support an inner shelf.

Yet the table appears unified because of repetition. Side and cross frames share the same fundamental architecture. The only difference besides being sized differently is in linear movement. The side frames extend from front to back while the cross frames extend from side to side. I designed each of the surfaces they support to convey that same linear movement through grain direction. The grain direction of the inner shelf runs its length from side to side to emphasize the same visual direction taken by the supporting cross frames. The grain direction of the teak panels and joining walnut rails of the table top runs from front to back to accomplish the same visual effect for the supporting side frames.

You might think that there could be tension created by using wood grain in this way. Similarly the two cross frames that fill the inner space could have contributed to a feeling of clutter. Not at all though. The design appears unified and well-proportioned, and does so because of effective use of repetition and linear movement. The table appears simple and foundational despite its relatively complex architecture.

Developing Ideas in the Internet Age

A blog entry appeared in a major woodworking journal recently with regard to a change that has come about concerning the development of ideas, especially with new forms of social interaction brought about by Internet-based social networking. I actually wrote a comment.

The entry can be found here.

http://blog.woodshopnews.com/tbaw/?p=744

The writer's viewpoint is generally in favor of what is now normally referred to as crowdsourcing, where ideas are solicited from a group of people. This is obviously now much easier within Internet groups using Twitter, Facebook, or an online forum for example, and is a concept that has grown in popularity. Read any history about major inventions though, and one gets the idea that sharing ideas so freely wasn't always popular. Most famous inventors were at one time or another involved in a patent lawsuit against a competitor. In fact, patents are specifically awarded to protect someone who intends to materially profit from his or her own unique idea.

So now if someone crowdsources an idea though, then because ownership of that idea no longer belongs to any one individual, I suppose that any profit from that idea would have to come from the implementation of that idea through manufacture. Most practicing artisans I know are both proud and protective of the ideas that give their work its own identity. Ideas are intellectual property, so to me the idea of crowdsourcing may not apply to all people in all situations.