New Shop! New Sign! New Rate!

Tim McCready Fine Furniture & Architectural Woodworking has officially been subsumed by Bankston & Bailey LLC. All future business will be conducted under the latter name. We're moving into a new space in Richmond's Scott's Addition on May 1 (more details forthcoming), and our new shop rate is $50/hr. Check out Hunter Duke's drawing of our new sign:

Drawn But Not Yet Built

Here are a couple of sketches I made recently for a prospective job. My plan on this piece would be to use a milkpaint and linseed oil finish. The diamond grid in the doors would be a custom-fabricated brass grille with pleated linen hanging behind that. As drawn, the piece is a full six feet wide. I would probably use casement stays on the doors so they would be well supported in the open position.

Lock Lane Cases Complete!

I put the finishing touches on the built-ins on Lock Lane this afternoon, installing knobs and touching up a few paint spots. This was a very enjoyable project from the design phase straight through to hanging doors. Having a great client who really appreciates one's work is always a pleasure!

I hope to have a more professional photo of the complete project to post sometime in the next month or so.

In the meantime, if you happen to own one of the Lock Lane condos with this particular floor plan, I saved all my drawings and templates...

Installation Finis! Painting Starts Tomorrow.

Here is a roughly patched-together shot of the completed woodworking over on Lock Lane. Tomorrow I'll do last-minute finish prep, then prime everything. I'll mortise the door hinges and start making the shelves tomorrow as well. I expect I'll wrap up by Tuesday or Wednesday.

Installation Day 2

Today was my second full day installing the pair of bookcases I've been working on for one of the new Lock Lane condos. The great electrician Don Brewster met me first thing this morning to take care of rewiring the electrical and cable outlets in the cases. In the early evening I got started on the trim for the larger of the two pieces--I'll finish up installing moldings and hanging doors tomorrow and the next day.

Arches, Neck Moulding, and Keystones

Today I missed the U.S. Concepts arch moulder we had at the place I worked before going out on my own. With that machine I could have churned out the radius casings for the arches on this project in a matter of minutes. As it was, I built them up from three separate elements which are being glued together in the shot below. You can get a sense of the nice morning light in the shop from this photo.



I was curious to see how the mouldings would work together in the real world--I'd seen them in my drawings--so I used some double-sided tape to hold things in place in order to have a look. To my eye, the way the radius moulding wraps around and forms the neck moulding on the pilaster seems ever-so-slightly odd, but the research I've done confirms that this is the way to go. I don't remember it looking strange in person, and I kind of think I'm seeing it that way now because there is such low contrast in this photo between the pilaster's capital and the wood behind it.



I also made the keystones this afternoon. The photo below shows one taped together--sometimes I like to do that before committing myself with glue and clamps. I'd been through several designs of the keystone, and finally found some very helpful guidance in Asher Benjamin's 1830 volume The Architect, Or Practical House Carpenter. Benjamin suggests that blocks of this design be divided into 9 parts, with the center section representing 5 units to 2 units for each of the outer sections.



Dover Publications prints a nice paperback edition of Benjamin's book (ISBN:0486258025) which is available for around $10 at just about any online book seller.