Butcher Block

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Permalink Reply by sean on June 9, 2009 at 8:48pm

on first look i like the design and feel of the piece.

the book matched doors and screw caps give the somewhat generic maple a bit of texture and the double tops have an oriental inspired theme. very nice work on the design.
however the small casters give it a cheap feel and make the piece feel top heavy and look unsteady. if the casters could be hidden up in a notch cut into the back side of the posts than they would almost disappear and make the unit appear to float.
or you could install a larger set of 6" casters to give the base some visual heft and call attention to them as a design element.

whenever i trade out my woodworking for another skilled trade i figure the cost for labor by taking my actual work time only ( no mark ups, materials, etc.) and try to match that up fairly even with what im getting in exchange. just make sure you both agree on the amount work you're trading out before you get started. if i were building this unit i would figure 35 hours @ $40 per and $400 materials for $1800.

nice work Gary.

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Permalink Reply by Gary L. White on June 10, 2009 at 3:51pm

Sean, Thanks for the input. The customer requested the wheels and that they be lockable. These wheels are industrial (that will support several hundred pounds each) with locks and are 3/8 rod threaded into holes tapped into the legs. I couldn't hide them and make the locks accessible. They did not want large wheels, so I was stuck with the request. I would personally prefer that the butcher block have no wheels at all but sit directly on the floor. But you do what you have to.

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Permalink Reply by Brian Keller on June 10, 2009 at 9:02am

Gary,
Nice job! I especially like the look of the spalted maple doors and drawer front - it makes this very functional piece into something special. I wish the wheels were more substantial or less visible; they seem spindly compared to the heft of the legs.

Before giving my opinion on a price, I'd like to know more about it. What does the interior look like? What other features are on it? If it's just a box, basically, with a fake drawer and pretty doors then the work is fairly simple and the price would be smaller. If there is some tricky joinery that needs to be executed, then it's more. Am I explaining that clearly?

100 hours seems like a lot to me and I'm familiar with the notion of having to move everything around in order to work. Even after getting a separate building for my shop, I'm having to move things. That's why I'm asking the question.

Brian

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Permalink Reply by Gary L. White on June 10, 2009 at 4:25pm

Thanks, Brian. The time factor has a lot to do with working in my driveway. I am an adjunct college professor and work some mornings. The remaining mornings and afternoons are then available for such a project. I am in Florida and the rains and the hot sun have a lot to do with my schedule and then my endurance in working on projects like this. I have to move my table saw and/or my planer and/or my thickness sander and/or my router table and/or my chop saw (etc., etc., etc.) to the driveway, do the next group of tasks and then clean everything up and return it to my garage. With all my tools, I can't park my vehicles in my 2-car garage, and my wife wants space for pantry shelving, laundry and some storage, too. So I do what I must. And all the shifting and clean-up time builds up in my unique situation. I don't do enough commissions at this point to rent another facility. Maybe in the future. But if I had such a facility, the whole project would have taken half the time.

The lower cabinet is just a box. The customer wanted as much dust free storage space as I could come up with. The legs give the appearance of solid 4 by 4 posts, but are 1 bys attached to the box. The interior base of the legs are filled in with solid maple from the bottom of the cabinet to the wheels. The joinery below the butcher block tops is mostly dado, with some Kreg style attachments.

The two butcher block tops are 2x2s of rock maple with three 3/8 threaded rods in each (and glue) locking the pieces together. I have made 3 other butcher blocks in the past and have used biscuits for alignment of the pieces then. But with clamping cawls to keep the pieces even, I had no problems. Thickness sanding reduced the over all thickness of these tops by about 1/4 inch.

The pieces all have 3 coats of brushing lacquer, sanded between coats, and with a final application of wax and then buffed. The top butcher block has 3 coats of salad bowl finish done the same way. Since I have to do nearly everything outside, the finishing processes was mostly done in the mornings when my western facing house provided shade from the eastern rising sun. Occasionally I was able to so some parts inside the garage. What an annoyance this is, but it is what I have to deal with. Then, in Florida, if we had a lot of rain the previous day, the humidity was sometimes too great to responsibly apply lacquer. I don't have space to set up a spray booth although I do have HVLP.

Thanks for your input.

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Permalink Reply by Gary L. White on June 12, 2009 at 7:16pm

Thanks for the support and the comments Sean, Brian, John, and Steve. It's great to meet you guys. Best of luck on your own work, too.
Gary

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Permalink Reply by John Hufford on June 12, 2009 at 4:44pm

Gary,
I'm new to Sawdust Soup (just signed-up) and just took a look at your butcher block. I really like what you did with the design, especially making the top height adjustable for your taller customer. Looks like you did a great job and I'm sure your customer was happy. I understand about the customers request for locking casters and sometimes we have to do what the customer wants instead of what we would prefer. Having to move your equipment from the garage to the driveway to use is very time consuming and that time is difficult to get paid for, but one way to look at it is, it is a lot cheaper then having the overhead of the rent for a commercial space, seperate electricity, phone, insurance, etc. Your overhead is low, so your hourly rate can be cheaper than someone with all the other overhead. Enjoy what you do and you will have to make a decision down the road just how far you want to go with your woodworking as a business. If you are trading your services for other services, do what feels right for you, but remember, don't give your work away. If they could build that same piece, than they wouldn't be having you build it and if you where an auto mechanic, you wouldn't need their service. Keep up the good work.
John Hufford
thehuffordfurnituregroup.com

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Permalink Reply by Gary L. White on June 12, 2009 at 7:16pm

Thanks for the support and the comments Sean, Brian, John, and Steve. It's great to meet you guys. Best of luck on your own work, too.
Gary

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Permalink Reply by Gary L. White on June 12, 2009 at 7:32pm

John,
I also went to "your" SawDustSoup page. Wow! That looks like a giant bandsaw box you made. What's its history?
Gary

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Permalink Reply by John Hufford on June 14, 2009 at 7:39pm

Hey Gary,
Thanks for visiting my page. I love doing band saw boxes. While making one I got this crazy idea that it would be fun to do a full size chest that looked like a band saw box. The hardest part of the project was trying to figure out how to create the same look, but making it 4ft. wide and 42' high. Building a jig and using bendable plywood, I laid up the main shell. The front and back was laid up with solid 1" wormy Maple and the shell was veneered with wormy Maple. I cut the drawer fronts from the solid front so the grain would follow through the entire faceframe. Actually there are 5 dovetailed drawer behind the two drawer fronts. 3 different sized drawers are attached to the top drawer front and two different sized drawers are attached to the lower drawer front. It was a real challenge, but a lot of fun. If you would like to see some of my work please visit my web-site @ www.thehuffordfurnituregroup.com. Good luck with your woodworking and if you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line.
Thanks,
John

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Permalink Reply by Gary L. White on June 14, 2009 at 8:16pm

John,
That is really cool. I have quite a few woodworking friends that will enjoy looking at that picture. I'll tell them the specs.
Have a great day.
Gary

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Permalink Reply by Joshua Lynn on August 7, 2009 at 3:04pm

I love the piece, very good work. I'm with most every one else on the castors though, yet when you're doing custom work some times the client will throw something really random. On my last job I had the guy and he wanted stainless steel speaker covers about 1/16 thick, odd but it looked pretty decent at the end of it. One thing that I learned from my last job is that if the customer starts to change a lot of things as the work is being completed... you need to make sure you charge them for that. I tend to do my quotes off of a base design then to keep it easy I'll multiply the expected cost of materials by two at least ( I reserve this for very simple work ) usually by three though ( it gives me a bit of wriggle room for better joinery). With that said Seans number is bang on. If our customers could go to say Ikea and get it for $100 most of them would, but then again if you price off of what you know (strong joints, general look and feel of the piece, origional and signed work, whatever you want to push) then you're adding a lot more value to that piece.

One bit of refrence material I use is a book "The Woodworker's Guide to Pricing Your Work Revised" by Dan Ramsey. I've got one of the older publications and a new one wouldn't hurt. Any way he goes thru how to find all those nitty finincal details as well as some basic pricing. One of the really big htings that I love about it is all the free forms at the end of the book, it helps in tracking where money is going and how much time you're acutually spending on the piece. I'm sure that you can find a lot of books on this subject but I can only speak for the one I have and use.

I hope this helps and again great work!

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