Perfection is supremely uninteresting. This piece is special to me for a variety of reasons. It has technically been under construction since 2012 when I purchased the walnut log in the mountains of North Carolina. The log was chosen with this design in mind and features many lovely bullets and iron nails (tongue in cheek). It is a nod to George #nakashima, whom I highly respect. It is also a piece that I made for my family, I made it the way I wanted, which is not the way I would construct a table for most customers. For starters I constructed the piece almost entirely using hand tools. This is not to say hand tools are better than machines, rather I simply enjoy the process of using hand tools. Perhaps it is my fine arts background holding a mark making or sculpting tool in hand. Indeed my fingerprints are all over this. It has not been sanded. All surfaces were hand planed giving a surface quality unlike a sanded one. Secondly the finish is very impractical for a table yet I prefer its simple, historical, natural, and ease of servicing values. Shellac and beeswax, polished with a cut off broom. The design can be disassembled with knockdown joinery. Legs are highly sculpted using a technique called coopering which I adopted early on at Haywood community college. I try to make the base more organic instead of architectural to be in harmony with the live edge tops. Finally this massive 8 foot long table features two sculpted benches to boot. We all come to tables and I look forward to the stories made at this one.
NFA
