These are some neat visuals.

watershedplus:

18 temporary pontoon bridges were built for the 2013 Maha Kumbh Mela, one of the largest religious gathering on earth (with an estimated 100 million piligrims in 2013), held that year on the banks of the Sangam in Allahabad at the confluence of the rivers Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati.

Photographs by Wolfgang Weinhardt.

Via The Guardian, and more details here

OK - one more project from school for now. This is going back a few years now, but I made this desk for my dear wife. I was sort of wild for Shaker furniture and I added some Federal-style details. Purists won’t be pleased, but I still like it. It’s traveled with us to three different homes now and is made most of cherry, with the exception of the drawer box which is birds eye maple (with hand cut dovetails!).

Another throw back to my school times. This right here was made for my friend Josh. One of the earlier turning projects I ventured into, it was my second three-legged stool and one of the first projects I undertook entirely on my own. This, again, is another project from my days at Vermont Woodworking School. It was made from cherry and ash.

A brief review of my past. Right before I left the good people at the Vermont Woodworking School, I turned this Shaker-esque candle stand. With slightly more generous proportions, this piece is made from flame birch - out of a board that was wide enough to get a book-matched top from. Probably one of my favorite pieces from school.

A modern hand-cut dovetail walnut console.

This piece was made as a commission for Hill Country Woodworks earlier this spring. While simple in form, this console featured challenging joinery. The thickness of the wood meant all the existing Hill Country jigs were too small. From there on, I was on my own, cutting all of the tails using a table saw and my chisels and a router with a home-made jig for the pins. The lower shelf was joined to the walls with sliding dovetails.

The console was the third of three pieces I made for these Hill Country customers. Below the console you’ll see a dining room table, also in walnut, that I made for them last fall. The console and the dining table are both in their dining room, while the second of the three (a six drawer dresser) lives in an upstairs bedroom. That dresser was featured on this blog back in February.

Hill Country Woodworks

Not too long ago, I spent almost everyday of the week in a building on the side of a country highway in the hilly Piedmont of North Carolina. Mark Todd and Will Bucher hired me on shortly after I moved south from Brooklyn to join my then-girlfriend-now-wife for her graduate school experience.

These two guys taught me a great deal about building long lasting and beautiful furniture in as efficient a way as possible. I am sure that I’ll carry with me for a long time the lessons I learned in their shop.

Here is a scanned page of the latest issue of Chapel Hill Magazine. My former boss, Mark Todd, was featured among a few other craftspeople as one of the area’s finer designers. It’s some well-deserved attention for two fine craftsmen who maintain a well-established shop in Chapel Hill.

A series of small turned useful things!

Over the past year or so, I’ve taken on a few projects that have had me make three dozen or so small turned (or featuring turned parts) objects. Here are a couple of bread boards turned from hard maple, a small cherry foot stool, a set of four ‘cans’ turned from birch for an art exchange, and three pairs of candle sticks.

I very much enjoy producing small turned objects that can see a lot of heavy daily use. The making of them allows for a wide amount of variation and experimentation.

Just before leaving good old Hill Country Woodworks, I made a set of four bar stools.

Turned entirely from ash and walnut - some of the ash was harvested in neighboring Wake County - I used wedged tenons through out.

Another fine piece of Hill Country furniture. This is the Kennebec chair. Like so many other HCW pieces, it is named for a geographic feature. A curious coincidental holdover from my previous geographic work.

At any rate, it’s the first arm chair I’ve made.

I got these handsome live edge boards from a very small lumber operation in Wake Forest. He mills wood that’s been cut from within fifty miles of his operation, so it’s about as local as you can get wood.

I’m thinking of making some small live edge benches or coffee tables. Anyone interested?