If you happen to visit the Seattle area this summer, be sure and check out the 4X4: Art by Design show in Port Townsend, Washington. Port Townsend (PT in local speak) is a ferry ride plus an hours drive from Seattle. This historic town with a long history of boat building and woodworking is a wonderful place to visit.

The show runs through August 7, 2022. There’s an artist talk and walk through Saturday, July 9th. The show featuring the works of four artists, including yours truly, who started out as graphic designers. The four of us have been friends for more than 35 years and now focus on fine art using different mediums. My focus, of course, is on wood sculpture. Most of the work I’ve prepared for the show is created using digital woodworking tools like CNCs.

I created a lot of new work for the show including several pieces designed to look at the world differently. My series called B Flat challenges the expected perspectives of the viewer. One of the goals of the work is was to create 3D wall sculpture that plays well with modern framed wall art.

Another series called 3D Sketching is the result of a personal challenge to create three dimensional wood sculpture based on quick sketches.

A third series in the 4X4 show is a series of abstract sculpture based on Northwest coastal indigenous tribe design elements.

I’m happy to say that the show turned out very well. All the art in the show looks great together. Some examples are shown below. Come see for yourself!

4X4: Art by Design

Northwind Art Jeanette Best Gallery
701 Water Street, Port Townsend
Gallery hours: Thurs. – Mon. noon-5 pm. 
Artist Talk Saturday, July 9th, 2022 at 1 pm

4×4: Art by Design is an exhibit featuring four Northwest artists.
“All of these artists share a common career path,” says Kathleen Garrett, Exhibits Director at Northwind Art. “They all started out as graphic designers and continue to use those skills as they have migrated to the world of fine art.”

The exhibit features works by Tim Celeski (Indianola, WA), David Owen Hastings (Sequim, WA), Leslie Newman (Indianola, WA), and Brian O’Neill (Bellingham, WA) and focuses on abstract art in mediums including prints, quilts, ceramic vessels, digital painting, and abstract wood sculpture.

4×4: Art by Design  presents complementary forms, shapes, colors, depths, and intensities that radiate throughout each artist’s work. The exhibit demonstrates the shared history, experience, visual skills, and unique perspectives that each of these artists brings to their work.

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The BARN Workbench is named for a community group of woodworkers and other artisans. BARN is the Bainbridge Artisan Resource Network located on Bainbridge Island. The island is directly across and a 35 minute ferry ride away from Seattle. Started by a group of enthusiastic woodworkers, the group has grown to include artisans with a number of interests, including fabric artists, metal workers, jewelers, writers, printers and more. After years of organizing and fundraising, they’re opening an incredible facility so that all the groups can share knowledge, tools and a great space to work in.

A great maker workspace

The woodworkers at BARN have built an incredible workshop with a little help from local professionals including Bob Spangler, Hugh Montgomery and myself to guide them through various tasks. Being the workbench junkie that I am, I took on the project of designing a workbench for the woodworkers’ bench room. The result is the BARN Workbench.

Every workbench project comes with a number of requirements or limitations. The BARN bench is no different. The bench is designed for hand tool woodworkers who might occasionally need to use a power tool like a Domino. It also had to be made at a moderate cost, assembled quickly with help from woodworkers with various levels of experience. And, there’s nine of them to make.

As the benches are being built, I’ll get into more details, but for now here are the basics of the design.

To benefit working with hand tools, I put an emphasis on quality hardware that serious woodworkers can appreciate. Each bench is equipped with a Benchcrafted Classic Leg Vise with a Criss Cross mechanism. The tail vise is a simple, well made 7” metal quick release model from Yost.

Rather than gluing up nine bench tops, the BARN bench uses a pre-made 25” x 72” x 1-7/8” thick maple top from Perfect Plank. The base is squared and milled 4×4 fir from your neighborhood home center with the legs doubled in width. Chris Schwarz took this approach with his excellent 2-day workbench plan. If you’re spoiled by building out of hardwood, you’ll find that working with flash kiln dried material is tricky, but doable if you take your time. Lots of expansion and cracking if you’re not careful. The results are plenty strong and inexpensive.

At this point, a question on a number of regular readers’ minds is where’s the digital woodworking in this bench? Was a CNC used? The answer to both questions, of course, is yes. Mounting a Benchcrafted vise requires a fair amount of work to create a large hole and a deep mortised pocket in the front left leg and vise chop. Certainly, this can be done by hand or with other power tools but with nine benches to build, a CNC makes the process simple, accurate and fast. Same for cutting and chamfering the very accurately placed dog holes in the top. In this case, for some of the special features of the top that I’ll get into later, accurate dog hole placement is particularly critical. Definitely, you can do this with other tools, but for this project, the CNC saves time and delivers accuracy.

As Steve Jobs used to say, “…there’s one more thing”. The vise chops. Being a designer, I thought it would be fun to make each bench unique and so using Rhino3D, I created a special 3D design for each vise chop. Then I milled them using 3D milling techniques I programmed in RhinoCAM on my CNCs. I used hard maple, local western maple, and eastern walnut. Why not make the vise chops fun to see and touch? Here’s a sneak peek of the six of the ten vise chops (9 + 1 spare) waiting for completion.

On the next BARN Workbench Post, I’ll take you on a video tour of the prototype bench and the BARN Bench features.

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The BARN workbench was designed for the Bainbridge Island Artisan Resource Network. It’s a Seattle area community group that built a wonderful community facility for artisans to share resources, education, and workspace. Being neighbors, I wanted to help and so, I designed a new workbench. Having to build a total of nine benches on a budget presents some interesting challenges. One of the things I’ve done to speed up the process is to use a CNC to for some of the precision work and to 3D carve the vise chops.

The workbench construction is straight forward. The frame is 4″ x 4″ material purchased at local home stores. The legs are double thickness. The bench is put together with Domino joinery to speed up the process for a large group build. The top is a pre-made 1 7/8″ top made out of Western Maple. The front vise hardware is a Benchcrafted Classic Vice and the tail vise is a Yost quick release vice. As you can imagine, the chops are a project in themselves. I’ll have several follow up articles and videos on the process of making them.

Since workbenches have a lot of details and can be complicated, the simplest way to introduce the project is via the video above. Much more to come as we build them.

Lots of chops. Rather than a traditional vise chop, I’ve chosen to 3D carve ten vise chops for the BARN workbenches

On the next BARN Workbench Post, I’ll take you on a video tour of how the 3D carved vises are made.

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I have a confession. I love workbenches. My first project as a hobbyist was a workbench and ever since, I’ve been in love with all the things a good bench can do to help you be a better woodworker.

Workbench 1.0

My first bench was Tom Caspar’s Build a Workbench in a Weekend that appeared in the October 1996 issue of the excellent, but long past Woodwork magazine. Tom later revised the bench a bit for in article in American Woodworker. Excellent bench and for me, it was a platform that inspired a passion for woodworking that turned into a career.

Workbench 2.0

I learned from that bench and after a few years, I designed and built a new bench. Workbench 2.0, I call it. Classic Norther European style with a modern twist and a few Frank Klausz details. I’ve been using it daily ever since. By the way, Bench 1.0 is still alive and in daily use in a friends shop.

My passion for this essential tool never abated and I built a website in 1999 dedicated to helping woodworkers build their own benches, workbenchdesign.net. Though the website is in need of a make over, it’s pretty popular. The site has had over 3.3 million visitors to date.

Since that time, I’ve used the bench daily. Along the way, I’ve collected dozens of new ideas for a new workbench design with the idea of building a new one some day. Though Workbench 2.0 has been a trusty tool, there’s things that I’d change and just too many benefits to Roubo and Holtzapfel style benches and modern bench hardware. We can all thank Chris Schwarz for bringing these classics to our attention.

With a new bench in mind, 8 years ago I bought a massive Copper Beech tree from a local sawyer, aged it, slabbed it, and kiln dried it with the goal of using all that hardwood for new benches. That lovely stack of wood just stares at me in my shop but I still haven’t built that bench.

A career as a furniture maker grew and consumed available time leaving little left to work on projects for myself. Certainly, being a furniture makers is a good thing, it’s fun but it’s really time consuming. When you’re too busy building work for other people, it seems that personal projects fall by the way side. More furniture for my own house is one thing, but that new workbench is the project I think about most often. That stack of beech needs attention.

The BARN Bench

A recent project reignited my passion for benches, once again. It started innocently enough. I volunteered to design and build a new workbench for a local community organization. The Bainbridge Island Artisan Resource Network (BARN) is Seattle area group who’s focus is to sharing tools, facilities and knowledge amongst local woodworkers, jewelers, metal crafters, fiber artists and more. They’re completing an amazing new community workshop and the enthusiastic woodworkers needed workbenches. So, armed with a notebook full of ideas that I’ve been dying to try out, I created a new bench. The BARN bench.

Like all interesting design projects this one came loaded with a number interesting goals and limitations. The biggest challenges are budget, limited time and simplicity of design for group construction. As to the bench’s practical goals, I just wanted to make a great hand tool workbench that also excels as a platform for modern power tool woodworking. Some new ideas for making benches work better ergonomically have been included. As a final detail, my goal is to make each of the 9 BARN benches unique.

I completed the prototype a few months ago and have continue to add some additional improvements. It’s time to build these benches so I thought that Popular Woodworking readers would be interested in seeing the project in real time. Over several upcoming Popular blog posts, I’ll introduce you to the new design and take you though the process of building the BARN benches.

The post BARN Workbench Part One appeared first on woodworking.digital.

A workbench designed for hand tool woodworkers but made (partially) with a CNC. Each bench features a unique 3D carved leg vise. Here’s a video introduction into how they were made.

The BARN workbench was designed for the Bainbridge Island Artisan Resource Network. BARN is a Seattle area community group that built a wonderful community facility for artisans to share resources, education, and workspace. To give them a hand, I designed a new workbench. Having to build a total of nine benches on a budget presents some interesting challenges. One I added for myself was to make each workbench unique. So, in Rhino3D I designed and then used a CNC to 3D carve a vise chop for each bench. In this video introduction, I’ll show you how I did it.

In future posts, I’ll get into more details of the different vise designs.

Much more to come as we build the benches.

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