Creative and Custom Wood Work, Carlton OR
Here’s the follow-up to yesterday’s post on a couple of the cutting boards we were making. They turned out pretty well.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to see the beautiful patterns that the end grain makes on the beech cutting board.
Today was a long and tiring day. Both of us spent the morning completing some necessary tool maintenance. And then we got to have fun! We spent this afternoon building a couple of prototypes we plan to place in our Etsy Store — very soon! The first – an end grain “butcher block” cutting board and second, a serving board/platter.
Butcher Block cutting boards are “de rigeur” (i.e. necessary) if you are serious about cooking. They expose the end grain rather than long grain unlike most of the non-plastic cutting boards one finds. It’s sort of like a dart board. The fibers part to absorb the cutting edge allowing it to stay sharp longer. If you ever go by a traditional butcher shop, you’ll will probably see them cutting on either an end grain cutting board or the cross section of a tree stump — depending on how traditional they are and how long they have been in business. End grain butcher block cutting boards are the modern equivalent of the original tree stump. They can be quite beautiful. And now, we are making some.
A table saw is the heart of most small woodshops. This weekend we decided it was time for the heart transplant. We replaced our trusty Delta Contractor-style saw with a more powerful Cabinet saw.
“Why? ” you ask, would we do this when we had just managed to restore our shop back on an even keel after replacing our dust collection system the previous week. The simple answer is we needed a more powerful saw.
A large part of building a small business appears to be about branding. Perhaps we’ve misunderstood the memo. We recently purchased and received a branding iron with which to brand our products.
Here are pictures of our first attempts at branding. We love our brand and hope you do too.
Hello World! In case you followed the “Harley, Lisa, and Ajit” story on sailingpearl.com, and have been wondering what we’ve been up to, here’s the latest.
The three of us have spent the past several months in Portland, OR. Initially, we were exploring the possibility of building little robots to automate routine manufacturing tasks for small producers. In doing so, however, we encountered a minor problem: we had no experience manufacturing anything. So, we decided to launch a little manufacturing company out of our basement that produces solid wood furniture and accessories. This seemed like a better first step than trying to solve problems that we didn’t quite understand.