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Coffee Shed Stabilization Part 1

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In the Kona region of Hawaii Island (aka The Big Island), enterprising families a couple generations ago (most of whom were of Japanese ancestry) were often engaged in various home-based businesses, including growing and processing coffee. Part of the coffee processing for many farmers was the drying of coffee beans to yield "parchment" which was then sold.  Parchment The way coffee was most commonly dried was on the raised platform of a drying shed - locally known as a hoshidana - which is Japanese for drying shelf or platform . These sheds were almost as numerous as coffee farmers but over the years many of the hoshidanas have been torn down or fell down. This is a great loss, as the hoshidana is a showcase of thrift, ingenuity, and mechanical wizardry and a testament to the dedication of the coffee farming families that operated them.  So, what distinguishes a hoshidana from a typical farm shed? First, at the top plate level there is a drying platform that covers the entir
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Arched Garden Bridge

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I have a lava-lined ditch dividing my yard with a garden and compost bin on the far side of it. The old 4x6 plank was a bit sketchy for wobbly seniors to use so replacing it was rather important. For this project I used 2 4x12 x 10' as the main beams and covered those with 2x6 x 4' planks. Here is how it went.  Always looking for a deal, I picked up the 2  4x12's from the reject pile at the local lumber yard. These 2 were in that pile because they were curved - which suited my plans just fine. Fitting within the rectangular confines of 12" x 10' of the beam face, I pieced together a 22' pole that I used to scribe the inner and outer arcs. These are concentric and yielded about a 4x6 curved beam.  To cut the curves, I bought a very nasty Diablo carbide tipped sawzall blade and started cutting. Working slowly I was able to get OK curves that I smoothed out with planes. The concave edge required I make a radiused plane body but I just rounded the bottom of a conve
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Mix and Match Sewing Table

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The goal was to build a solid sewing table with an ample work surface - from a mix of kitchen cabinet construction leftovers, cutoffs, and other scrap I had in the shed. Of course, I had to put cabinets in the laundry room first, naturally. But after building kitchen cabinets and 2 vanities from scratch, I cheated and bought used cabinets for our laundry room to save time. That purchase for $500 yielded these sapele and birch ply cabinets (which I had to modify to fit and work for us):  Intervening cabinet project. The purchase also included another low sapele cabinet and a heavy 1 1/2" x 23" x 10' solid maple countertop - with a bar sink at one end. I cut off the gross the bar sink, dug out busted fasteners, sanded top and bottom, rounded over all corners and refinished this weighty countertop. It looked good, fit in our space, but I had nothing to support it.  Maple countertop - from above.  So I came up with these base units. Legs are 8/4 maple scrap, drawer rails are
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Take on a TV Tansu

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Mizuya tansu style, before final sprayed lacquer finish. This was a piece I built recently from provided plans and for someone else's client. The wood is sapele "ribbon mahogany", either quarter sawn solid or veneered plywood. T his piece is inspired by a  mizuya tansu , but it is not constructed like the originals. It is a more modern build that incorporates all kinds of metal fasteners and Blum drawer slides. Eventually the cabinet was to have an electric TV lift installed into it. However, you could easily build this thing to suit your purposes. Of course I injected some mortise and tenon joinery into it to strengthen a few key areas in the frame.  I had not worked sapele before so there was a learning curve for how to plane it with a hand plane and not have a lot of tear-out. As mentioned elsewhere, I do not have a jointer, so all solid wood parts were straightened and flattened on one side with a Veritas bevel-up jointer plane.  The nugget of insight in this process
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