Category: Updates

November was a crazy month and we have just about recovered from it. The month started with equipment fails and repairs, followed by crazy product building, and ended with us having a booth at the Portland Christmas Bazar (the largest of it kind in the US) and getting product into a local store in a hipster neighborhood (Forage Collective on Mississippi Ave). It was a great month, but hectic.

The Christmas bazaar was grueling. We signed up a couple of weeks before it started at the suggestion of a friend of ours. We hadn’t researched the event in depth. It seemed like a good idea. We took the shot. It was after the registration deadline anyway. What was the likelihood of getting in?

Both of us had been at conventions in our corporate careers. No big deal. NOT. We missed the whole team of people whose job it was to set up, decorate, and tear down the booth, provide security, and made sure everything ran smoothly. When our application was accepted, … we had to scramble. We had to figure out the booth details, signage, layout, order processing, staffing, food, water,  … and that minor technical detail, products and quantities.

Since this was a Christmas bazaar, with about 30,000 potential customers and no ideas as to how much of what would sell, we had to scramble build stuff to stock our booth. There were a couple of long weeks.   Needless to say, we were totally winging it when showed up at our booth on Black Friday with most of our inventory — cutting boards and some home decorations.  Fortunately, we had very nice neighbors who’d been at the show many times before who helped us get organized.  They also turned into an awesome cheering squad.

The short version is we learned a lot from our experience. Net: we will not be doing THAT again. The response to our products was interesting.  Generally, there were two sets of people. The first thought what we had was pretty. They were looking for “deals”. They were curious about how we created the colors in the wood. They probably voted for Trump.

The second set of people were buyers, generally 35+ who knew what they were looking for. Unfortunately for us, there weren’t many of them at the bazar.  The question in their minds was typically which item or what size.  If they picked up a cutting board or box, they generally made a purchase.  They like the construction details, they loved the display/drying stand for the cutting boards, and the way things felt in their hands.

What we learned from the bazaar was we should follow our instinct and make well designed, attractive, durable products, at  a  good value. We don’t want or need to compete on price. We also learned getting product into people’s hands (literally) is key.  Besides our Etsy store,  our products are now carried at a little boutique in the hip Mississippi neighborhood.

We have a bunch of new stuff we will be posting on Etsy as soon as we can take some decent pictures. Following are pictures from our  November whirlwind.

A few weeks ago, we bought enough wood to make about 25 18″ x 12 ” x 2″ end grain beech cutting boards. While that doesn’t seem like much, in raw forms that’s about 1.25 cu yards  of wood. We’ve got sick of tripping over the stuff it’s time to batch process them into cutting boards.

There are several steps to making end grain cutting boards:

1. Joint plane and rip the component boards to the correct dimensions
2. Glue  the prepped boards together into a panel
3. Rip the panels into strips of an even width
4. Glue the strips together into a new board with exposed end grain
5.  Level the board — we use a drum sander for this
6. Trim the board to size
7. Sand and seal the board with a protective coating

Thus far, we’d been individually gluing the prototype boards we’ve made. It was time time to build a clamping frame so that we can batch process the glue-ups a couple of boards at a time. The camping frame is pretty simple. It’s essentially a bunch of pipe clamps that are embedded in 2x6s. It’s a simple tool, but it helps keep the clamps aligned and offers a flat surface the evenly distributes calming pressure.

Here are some pictures of getting our first batch of 6 end grain cutting boards. We haven’t completed steps 6 and 7. We still need to sand the boards so they are smooth, and give them a protective coating of mineral oil. Actually, it’s a mineral oil soak. This will happen tomorrow and the day after. Stay tuned.

The past few days have been a little bit of fun and a lotta bit of drudgery. After our recent experiments with cutting wider panels for the end grain cutting boards we’ll be making, we decided that we needed to have an out feed table to support longer work pieces as they are pushed through the saw. Without this support, longer workplaces would tilt, possibly catching the blade and damaging the workpiece — or worse, one of us.

Initially, we’d thought we would make a simple little table to support work pieces as they were pushed through the saw blade. Then we thought we’d upgrade to a face frame cabinet like you’d find in most kitchens. What we ended up with, however, was a set of stacked, modified  torsion boxes.

Torsion boxes are essential a box frame with a series of cross beams sandwiched between two layers of a relatively thin skin. The purpose of the design is provide a rigid light weight plane that resists twisting and racking. For our purposes, this design is more rigid and resilient that face frame cabinet construction. It is also easy to disassemble if we ever need to move it out of the basement.

One of the tricky bits of this build is that the grooves in the outfield table need to match up exactly with those on the saw. They also need to be exactly aligned along all three axes, and be at the same depth as well. If the grooves or the slots are misaligned in any way, the table ceases to be useful as it doesn’t allow larger sleds that we use for cross cutting to run freely. Suffice to say, we are quite proud of ourselves for getting all of this right and for being able to rely on the set up of our saw to help us.

We are very happy with the final product. It even has handy storage so we don’t keep tripping over things. We hope you enjoy being brought into some of the details of getting our shop production ready.