After learning woodworking within the mid-Nineteen Nineties at Parnham Faculty, in Dorset, England, Brian Reid returned residence to Seattle with a present from his instructor, Robert Ingham: a stack of planks from a flitch-cut yew tree. Within the ensuing years Reid constructed furnishings in Washington, then Colorado, and now in Maine, but by no means touched the yew. “I carried that log by means of 10 strikes,” Reid says. “For a few years I assumed I wasn’t ok to make use of it.” When he discovered himself with a six-month residency at Buy Faculty in New York in 2017, nevertheless, the time got here. He constructed the primary of three tansu there (prime picture) utilizing stable yew for the carcase and shop-sawn yew veneer for the drawers and doorways. Riffing additional on a theme of Asian types and proportions, he constructed a second tansu in English sycamore accented with birch-bark panels and elk-horn pulls. And for a 3rd tansu he dipped into one other particular stash—of ink-black bathroom oak, additionally introduced from England—to create a parquetry sample of overlapping ripples as of two stones tossed right into a pond. Reid displays on constructing them: “It was joyful. Being alone at Buy I labored from 8 a.m. to eight p.m., seven days every week. I advised associates who wished to go to, ‘Nope, I’m busy.’” And the way did it really feel to make use of his valuable wooden? “I feel these are the perfect issues I ever made.”
—Jonathan Binzen
Join eletters right this moment and get the most recent methods and how-to from Fantastic Woodworking, plus particular provides.
