Staging table for Cotogna in white oak.

Tabletops and Countertop for Saru Sushi Bar.

Temporary countertop for Chef Tusk and Lindsay’s new endeavor, Verjus.

Had a great time in Joshua Tree National Park. Camped at Jumbo Rocks for a few nights which is an amazing spot.

Repairing and re-caning one of my favorite chairs ever.

This is the best short film about glass that I’ve ever seen.

This is a wonderful short film about Eric Hollenbeck and Blue Ox Millworks in Eureka, California.

Sputnik and Halfpipe, the walnut service pieces I made for Quince, make a short appearance in this video from Eater. Very nice.

Late one night I was reading the wikipedia page of Hans Wegner and realized that we both attended the same school in Copenhagen. I like that.

We exhibited ShapeCrete at the West Edge Design fair in November 2015 in Los Angeles. This helped spread the word and we reached a lot of people, press, and educators down there.

ShapeCrete was awarded “Best Design Material” at the 2015 Dwell on Design Fair in Los Angeles. We talked to hundreds of people and got them excited about this new malleable concrete mix.

I only played a small role in this project, but I’m proud to have been a part of it. I’ve worked with Fu-Tung Cheng, founder of CHENG Design and CHENG Products (ShapeCrete) for the past 4 years or so. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about concrete forming, casting, and finishing from a design and fabrication

Harry Bertoia would be 100 years old in 2015. Knoll has a really nice video of how the Bertoia chairs are manufactured at the first link below and embedded above, and the second link has some nice stories about him. I love seeing the jig that each individual wire is fitted into before it’s spot

Chef Tusk went to Japan and brought back a wooden plate. He wanted them for bread service at Quince, but in Walnut. I made two samples. One in Eastern Black Walnut (Juglans nigra), the other in Peruvian Walnut (Juglans spp.) to match the bread boxes. The first few plates took me about half an hour

Chef Tusk at Quince wanted to turn a vintage Italian rolling pin into a piece to serve Tortellini. I’m not sure how old the rolling pin is, but it has a beautiful old patina and I’d guess it’s somewhere around 50-75+ year old. It’s made of beech wood, which is normally much lighter in color,

These bread and butter boxes will play a large part in the new menu at Quince. They’re modular, stack-able, and produced in Peruvian Walnut.

Adam needed a stand for his turntables with some storage for records and other stuff like that. It needed to fit in this nook next to the fireplace in the living room of his apartment.

The restaurant Cotogna needed two serving carts that roll up to the tables. One for sweets and one for savory. I built a quick prototype to help them get a feel for the overall size of the cart.

Adam’s colleague had a quick little job to cut the hole for a sink in a walnut countertop. There are a few ways to do this, and having never actually done it before I wasn’t sure what would be best.

Last month I made serving boards for the restaurant Cotogna. The restaurant already had some wood serving boards, so the new boards needed to roughly match what they had, except they would be longer, and each will have a groove for a bowl, or two grooves for small jars. The existing boards were made from

parked behind a car on the street at my favorite grocery store in berkeley (mi tierra foods). couldn’t believe the colors at first being reflected on the back of this car, especially on the chrome. just a plain toyota yaris but so psychedelic because of the colorful mural on the side of their building. made

something about these wires criss crossing the sky made me smile when I looked up this morning on the way to work.

I was asked to make some canapé serving pieces for Quince.  Based on the feedback from Chef Tusk, I turned more prototypes on the wood lathe. There were probably 4 or 5 iterations before finding a final shape that worked. This is one of the earlier versions, and I’m going to skip over most of

Previous Post: Gold Concrete Bar Rubber Mold did some color tests to try and find a good color to make concrete look like gold. this is yellow base pigment in rapid set concrete mix. in the first test I used a 9% pigment load, which was too yellow. 1. 2 lbs. 1% load = 3.17

The sun was setting and sitting at the stoplight the angle was just right to make an unexpected rainbow out of a street sign.

This was a quick production of serving pieces for a nice restaurant called Quince in san francisco. I was asked to make 28 of these pieces on a thursday night. I finished up the canapé pieces to deliver on friday and then got started on these after work. My neighbor didn’t like hearing the table

First the master is secured to a baseboard with silicone, surrounded by foam walls, sprayed with mold release, and then it’s ready to cast a polyurethane rubber mold (polytek 75-60). Pouring the rubber: The rubber is ready to remove after about 12 hours. Some air bubbles were formed from air escaping from wood because the

Everywhere you look, even when you’re in a bad mood and wet from polishing concrete samples, there is something beautiful to see and absorb. If you just pause for a moment to take it all in, you’re bound to see something that will make you smile. These are the thin layers of happiness.

After a day or two the form can be stripped and finishing begins. This piece was stuck pretty securely to the base board, so the whole thing was flipped over in one piece and laid on some scraps of foam. After the silicone seal was broken, the base board was easy to lift off, but

“Husk at elske mens du tør det Husk at leve mens du gør det” “Remember to love while you dare to Remember to live while you do” – Piet Hein (1905 – 1996) After finishing the outdoor tabletop and using it for a few weeks, I started thinking about what kind of top to make

Levelers screw into the legs of a table base, which can be adjusted so the table doesn’t wobble. I have two of the herman miller contract bases, but one was without levelers. I thought the levelers from the one would swap over to the other, but the thread size and pitch is different between the

The final step in securing the concrete tabletop to the contract base is to glue the shock mounts in place. Here I’m using smooth-on metalset A4 epoxy, and tinting it black with dry pigment. First the base is centered on the tabletop by measuring from each leg to the outside edge. The base isn’t perfect,

I waited an extra day to demold the tabletop because it’s so thin and I wanted to minimize the chance of it breaking. It was covered in plastic to keep the moisture inside and demolding was pretty simple actually. First the form walls and base board are unscrewed, and then the walls and liners can

This tabletop is made for an Eames contract table base and will be outdoors on the patio. The tabletop that came with this base is 36″ in diameter and is made out of MDF or something with a laminate surface that is an ugly marbled white / yellow (and weighs 24 lbs.). This top isn’t

At work we have a lot of different concrete color samples. Some of them are to show customers what colors are available, but the majority of them were buried in cardboard boxes. Most of the samples have a code which corresponds to a spreadsheet so you’re able to figure out what mix it is, what

I picked up this reproduction rocker base for pretty cheap because the woman’s dog had chewed on the runners. I sanded off the varnish and then sanded down the bite marks without removing too much wood. The runners are maple, but they are really poor quality – one spot is filled with glue where a

A few months ago I saw a rocking chair for sale on craigslist that I liked, but it was 325 bucks. After searching around, it was usually attributed to a finnish designer, Ilmari Tapiovaara. I had to pass on that one because that’s a lot of money for an old chair. Then a few weeks

The plaster mold had some imperfections, so I painted it with filler primer and wet sanded until it was very smooth. I packed the concrete into the form, same as before, but I made sure it was thicker all around. I decided not to put the rubber drain plug on the form this time, mainly

I put casters on the base and took this chair to work where I would use it more often. The cracks slowly grew bigger, and one day I leaned back and it sounded like crunching into a giant potato chip, and the chair broke in half. At the seat it was only about 1/4″ thick,

After waiting 2 weeks for reproduction shock mounts to arrive, it became clear that the company didn’t have any in stock, and there would be more waiting, so I made my own. The best resource is the eames patent from 1953, “FURNITURE SHOCK MOUNT CONSTRUCTION” (2,649,136). The patent goes into detail about shock mounts for

The first thing to address is how the hell to release a solid piece of concrete from a solid piece of plaster. A rubber grommet is glued to the form, and it will do two things. It will create a drain hole for a brass fitting to drop into, and it will give me a

Got lucky and saw my neighbor putting two chairs out to the street. One was this grey chair. In really good shape, with some wear around the edges and the white paint splatter that comes from being kept in the garage. Having never really taken a close look at one of these fiberglass chairs, I

Here is a concrete clock made from tupperware, a funnel, and a piece of foam. The form is pretty easy to make and uses a standard clock mechanism that you’ll find in most any craft store in the usa. This project was completed at work and the point was to find cheap forming materials that

These concrete jars are simple and cheap to cast, using plastic tupperware forms from the dollar store and a pigmented concrete mix. The wood lids here were cut on a CNC machine, but they’re just as easy to turn on the wood lathe, and really – round shapes are better suited for the lathe, it

The point of this project was to capture a brass ring in the center of a concrete candle holder. The form is pretty easy to construct, you need two funnels, a base board, a knockout for the tea light or candle, and a few pieces of wood to support the form during casting. First the

This table takes advantage of a unique property of glass fiber-reinforced concrete (GFRC). The material can be bent roughly 20 minutes after casting, when it has entered a false-set. I made this mould, and the one for the blue table, to demonstrate this technique for the 3-day advanced fiber-reinforced concrete training at work. This had

One day at work I had some leftover epoxy tooling compound after casting a master for the stepping stones. Not wanting to waste it, I poured it into the plastic moulds that were used to cast the concrete salt cellars. Those moulds were made to create half-spheres, but I was using them backwards to make

After the glass is blown, it’s placed in an annealing oven where it slowly comes down in temperature to prevent it from cracking. The annealer usually cools down the next day, unless you’re making really thick stuff like giant telescope lenses, which are so thick they have to stay in there for a few years.

This is an easy way to construct moulds for blowing glasses or vases or stuff like that. It gets more complicated if the shape has undercuts because it won’t pull straight out, so the mould has to split apart. It’s best to use solid wood if you can. Next best is plywood. The worst is

Salt Cellars produced for the salt show at Fouladi Projects on Market in San Francisco. The concrete is cast in a plastic form and the wood lids are turned on the lathe. There are three sizes of concrete, the medium and larger cellars have lids. Scoops carved from Eucalyptus bark.

Heath Ceramics is a really nice company in Sausalito, just over the golden gate bridge from san francisco. I bought this jar a year or two ago but haven’t put anything in it because it didn’t have a lid. Yesterday I finally made a lid for it from a piece of claro walnut that was

Seeing pictures of ancient dice inspired me to make them out of concrete.  Throughout history dice were probably carved from stone, maybe wood, but for sure bone. Here is a nice link showing how to make these old dice out of antler. Last week I had a reason to make a small rubber test mould

I started blowing glass again at a studio in berkeley. The guy who runs the place makes sconces for lamps, and he was throwing away a white cylinder that didn’t make the cut. It was about 12″ long, with some marks in the middle from the tools. I cut it down on the saw to

Demold Rubber: After about 12+ hours, the rubber mould has cured. First remove the form walls and then gently pry up on the rubber with a plastic putty knife. The rubber should pull off easily with almost no damage to the original plasticine piece. The rubber picks up EVERY detail from the original piece, which

Yesterday I spent some time turning wood lids for the concrete salt cellars I’ve been working on. Woodworkers call this wood Claro Walnut (Juglans Hindsii), but it’s also known as Northern California Walnut because it grows around these parts. Unfortunately it’s seriously endangered, so either don’t use it, or use it while you still can,

Here’s what I’ve been doing at work recently. In the past we created a series of stepping stone moulds for casting concrete, one of which can be seen here. Last time I made a computer file and the shape was cut out on a CNC router, which is great, but the shapes were very controlled,

I made these concrete egg holders for the 21pop shop at the FOG art and design fair 2014 in san francisco. In order to produce a lot of the same thing in a short amount of time, I made a few rubber molds and used a concrete mix that sets up very quickly (rapidset). This

For a full step-by-step, check out the Instructable. This is a no.24 keen kutter plane, it’s about 100 years old, and was all intact before I took it apart. The sole is in good shape, the mouth is tight, and no cracks in the body. The knob is fine too, and the frame has most

The old draw knives that I come across are usually pitted with rust, have broken handles, or are so worn out there’s not much metal left behind the cutting edge. Occasionally they’re bent. Mostly good reasons to pass them by. This one is stamped Lakeside Quality, and may or may not have been sold through

One of the nice things I’ve noticed while sharpening is the relief patterns that form when you pull two stones apart. David Wade’s book Li – Dynamic Form in Nature calls this phenomenon Viscous Maculæ.    

These are 5 preliminary prototypes, all turned on a wood lathe. The wood is Redwood, which was cheap to use for prototyping. They are finished with mineral oil. We had talked about the final versions being made from Walnut, which is shown in the last image. In all of these pieces, the lid and base