Spring in the Showroom

As spring has allowed for at least a moment or two of sunlight, I was able to finally capture some shots of the Lohr Woodworking Studio showroom. If you have perused our new website, you have seen that the showroom is open for visits upon request/reservation so we wanted to give the world a peak into what we have in stock upstairs.

On the second floor of the barn, in what was once Jeff's first woodshop on the property, there is a showroom of the finished pieces for sale. The pieces up for grabs include, but are not limited to: a cherry table sofa and morris chair, a ghost (spalted) maple and walnut coffee table, a set of dining room chairs, a walnut and oak cabinet, Jeff's original arts & crafts style floor and table-top lamps, and even a few live edge tables! All of these pieces are handmade by Jeff and/or Rob and are awaiting visitors. I can post photographs all over but nothing compares to coming in to sit on, feel, and see close up the details of this furniture. We encourage people to turn the pieces upside-down, open drawers and doors, and ask questions about the joinery. These pieces are meant to be used as much as they are meant to be admired!

Now that the harshness of winter seems to have subsided, the showroom is already getting visitors. After 15 years, last weekend Barbara decided it was time to swing by Lohr Woodworking and see what had developed since her last visit.

Barbara has a deep-rooted respect and admiration of arts and crafts style furniture as she is, and has been, actively involved with the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms. The museum "is the centerpiece of Gustav Stickley’s early 20th century country estate" and "is one of the most significant landmarks of the American Arts and Crafts movement."  She has been been president of Craftsman Farms Foundation (which runs the Stickley Museum) for three years, serves on multiple Committees, Chairs the Executive and Development Committees, and still has found time to volunteer her services as a docent. Needless to say, she knows a thing or two about the history, purpose, and design elements of the Arts & Crafts movement and thus style that Jeff incorporates into his own custom furniture.

Up in the showroom, only a few furniture pieces made from the English brown oak burl log that came from the Alnwick Castle (one of the filming sites for the Harry Potter films) remain unclaimed. These highly figured and unique burl slabs were cut from an entirely-burl oak log brought over from the UK and most of it's pieces have found their place in client homes around the nation. Two of the tables that we still have are in the form of live edge side tables and a third in the form of a live edge cocktail table. After Barbara's visit this weekend, only two of the tables remain in the showroom. We are happy, as always, to see a piece of furniture find a new home and sincerely hope that Barbara enjoys her first Lohr Woodworking table for years to come!

In JD Lohr School of Woodworking news, we have added a Lohr Woodworking Community forum to our school website. All alumni or registered students our course(s) are encouraged to join the group and start up the conversation! We aim to provide a resource for our beloved woodworking students to chat, share, ask, and brag before and after they visit us for class(es).

Live Edge Tables Begin their Journey Overseas!

As the snow fell down this morning in Schwenksville, Pennsylvania, we bid farewell to the three live edge tables as they start their journey overseas to their new home at the Vik Hotels in Chile and Uruguay.

The Handcrafted Delivery truck made it's way up the long driveway to the shop bright and early this morning. We were lucky to be sent Mike and Mike, the masters of packing and moving, to carefully prepare our tables for their trip. Handcrafted Delivery will take them on the first leg to Connecticut. In Connecticut, they will be loaded in a container to head over to the South American hotels.


We admired the work of Mike and Mike as they wrapped layer upon layer of protective covering around the tables. Plastic then cardboard was used as the first layer to protect the fragile and curvy nature of the live edges. Then blankets were wrapped around every inch of each table and held securely with large quantities of packing tape.



It's quite a relief to know that any concerns we may have had about safely shipping these one-of-a-kind pieces such a long distance is a concern we need not have. Watching these two guys at work made us nothing short of confident that the tables will travel and arrive safely at their next destination. A huge thank you to Handcrafted Delivery and the fine employees they have in Mike and Mike!

We wish the tables a safe adventure as they make their way overseas. And, we are hopeful and confident that upon their arrival, Vik Hotels and their visitors will admire and appreciate the pieces for years to come!

Keep your eye out for a blog post early next week sharing the photographs Eoin took of the finished tables last week. Be ready for some phenomenal images of the tables and their intricate details. I am eager to share them with you, readers!

Photographing the Chile-bound Live Edge Tables!

As the new year opens at Lohr Woodworking, we have finished, rubbed out, and are preparing to say goodbye to our three live edge tables as they near their Chile-bound shipment date. During our final days with the tables, we have been prepping for their official photo session.

One wall of the shop is an infinity wall (aka cyclorama) and is built with a curved edge joining the wall with the floor. The wall is designed for photographing our finished furniture without a distracting, harsh corner to catch shadow. Last week, we cleared the back of the shop, removed dust and dirt from all places we could get to, and repainted the wall/floor a clean white.

Today began the official live edge Chile tables photo shoot. Eoin came with all the photography equipment we could imagine to capture these pieces as beautifully as they appear in person. After a morning of setting up the diffused lights and playing with exposures, f-stops, and all those other fancy camera terms, he spent the day hard at work behind the lens.

He did an amazing job of capturing these pieces in their entirety down to their finest details. Each table is live edge piece made but of different hardwoods and varying drastically in size so it was impressive to watch him crawling, laying, standing, and climbing ladders to be sure he/we can share them with admirers without any question that they're presented beautifully and accurately.

The majority of the day was spent photographing the huge live edge Bigleaf Maple coffee table. We completed the maple base before Christmas and finished the entire piece just in time for it to be the star of this shoot.

Everything about this piece took thought, creativity, and precise hands to build. Eoin was a master at documenting the live edge slabs, the carefully constructed strong base, the strategically repaired natural voids and flaws, and the complex joinery. We are lucky to have such a skilled photographer-and-woodworker amongst us in this Irishman.

He was sure to capture the live edge oak library table as well as the live edge oak crotch slab table before we called it a day. Each table is so unique in it's shape, grain, color, function, and overall appearance so it was so stunning to see each one have their moment perched in the spotlight. They each sat with the infinity wall behind and the careful lighting shining from above them caused them to look as if they were floating in thin air.

And, don't you worry, there were plenty of the four of us, Lohr Woodworking team, perched upon this piece. First intended to show the strength, functionality, and practicality of the table, it quickly turned into a family photo shoot with fun poses and jokes between snapshots.

What an exciting day! Thanks to Eoin for his skills, equipment, and company. And, thanks to Jeff for constantly designing such exquisite furniture for us to work on. I am one lucky apprentice!

Progress on Chile-bound Live Edge Tables

Greetings and a belated Happy Thanksgiving from us at Lohr Woodworking!

We are hard at work on the three live edge tables we have been commissioned to make for a Vik Hotel tucked in the hills of Chile. In my last update, we had joined two Bigleaf Maple slabs creating a coffee table with a curved joint held together with floating splines, dovetail bones, and West System Epoxy. Then we removed the bark and sanded her down. Since then, the 12' slab has been treated with boiled linseed oil to bring the unique, detailed burl grain patterns to life. The oil was left to absorb into the wood for a week before we started the finishing process. Jeff is using General Finishes Arm-R-Seal semi-gloss applied with a foam brush to the surfaces of the slab. The top of the slab will have 4-5 coats when all is said and done to ensure that it will protect against the plentiful wine glasses that are sure to grace it's surface. In between each coat, we carefully sand with 400 through 1500 grit to smooth and even the surface before applying the next coat.

Aside from the coffee table, we have been in the midst of creating a small table for the library at the hotel. Another burl slab provides such interesting and lively grain patterns. We tended to the natural splits with a series of small walnut bones.

You can see in the photo to the left, the slab has such a beautiful shape and live edge. In the vein of George Nakashima, we have chosen to leave the natural voids and crevasses as they are. The alternative would have been to fill the voids with epoxy and crushed bark but it was decided that the textured spaces marry too well with the splits to fill them.

This slab, like most of our furniture, was treated with boiled linseed oil. You can see in the 'before' and 'after' photos to the left what a world of difference the oil makes. The slab was then finished with gym seal finish and is currently awaiting the final rub out (using 0000 steel wool and mineral oil to smooth and reduce the shiny/glossy appearance) and the construction of it's base!

The third and final table in the works for this project is a Pennsylvania Brown Oak crotch slab. As the slab was dried, it developed a large split down the center of the crotch but the shape and size were right so, we got the chance to be creative with more bones! Jeff printed some inspirational, skeletal images so we could cut bones in shapes as true to life as possible. As they are structural additions to the 'flesh' of the wood, it is important that they are beautiful and strategically placed. He carefully selected pieces of figured walnut to cut the bones from and designed their shapes and placement.

Next, it was my job to take to the router! After the bones has been cut and shaped, I double-face taped them in place and traced carefully around their edges with a marking knife. When the outline was clear, I removed the bones and loaded the plunge router with a 3/8" plunge bit with the depth set to roughly 3/4 the thickness of the bone itself. I set up desk lamps so ensure that I had a most-than-necessary amount of light shining on my work area since the router cuts need to be incredibly precise. I then carefully routered out the space within my outlines, getting to within a 16th of the knife line.


My final passes cut out the material right up to the outline, watching carefully as the fibers split away from the knife lines but doing all I could to avoid going beyond them. From there, I would test the fit of each bone keeping in mind that the goal was to have them fit as close to perfectly as possible. The bones needed to be snug in their holes (enough that they should need to be tapped in with a brass mallet), but not so tight that they would split from the pressure of being glued in.

You can see to the right that when I was finished, the bone slots were shaped for each individual bone and didn't cut all the way through the slab. These bones will serve as a strong structural element to hold the split from getting wider with time and wood expansion/contraction. The board I am holding in my left hand was what we used to apply even pressure to the bone as we lowered it into the slot for the final glue-up.


And then came the glue! We used a two-part epoxy to hold the bones in place. After trying the 5-minute epoxy on the first bone, we realized that it was too thick and the open time wasn't quite enough for us to feel confident that each bone would be bottomed out and placed perfectly before it started to tack. Onto the West System epoxy we went! Although the dry time for the West System is longer, the consistency was much easier to work with and it allowed us ample time to set the bones just as we wanted them.

In the photo to the right, you can see our brass mallet and hammering block on standby to tap the bones into their slots. The two boards underneath and on top of the slab were pulled together (like a sandwich) with c-clamps and helped us to lower the bones toward the edge into place evenly and slowly. It was important that each bone bottomed out into its routered slot so that they fulfill their role as structural and strong additions to the piece. We want to make sure that 100 years from now, the split in this slab remains harnessed, un-extended, and beautifully treated.

Finally, after the epoxy had a day to dry completely, we belt sanded the bones down to be level with slab's surface. The entire slab was then sanded with 80, 120, 180, and 220 grit sandpaper via a random orbit sander. The blunt ends were rounded with files and sanders as well to create the soft, round ends you see to the left. The live edge was de-barked and otherwise left in it's natural state.

And, for the third table in a few weeks, we treated the table top with boiled linseed oil. The brown oak slab now lays drying for the week before we jump into applying finishes to its surfaces.


Now that the table tops are nearly complete, we are onto the design and beginnings of their bases! Look out for an update soon about our current Practical Woodworking course as well as the base construction for these beautiful tables as they make their way to completion!