Indoor Furniture
Through our workshops with Geoff Barnes, I started to produce small items of furniture for indoors. These are usually in the form of short stools. It started when collecting or buying firewood, I would come across pieces that were too good to burn. It happens all the time. Below are a few items.
Indoor/Outdoor Furniture
The 3-part redgum feature shown down the bottom of the gallery below is intended not as a stool, but as a heavy duty food platter holder (or maybe a sculpture or flower display base). It could be used indoor or outdoors, or both. This creation is definitely not recommended for sitting on or using as a seesaw.
Outdoor Furniture
Again, through workshops with Geooff Barnes, some outdoor furniture pieces inevitably unfolded. One such piece (above) came from my efforts to get some timber off the ground away from the moisture and attack by insects. We had two massive gateposts, that had fallen over. One was attacked more than the other and that ended up being the backrest to a park bench. The one that was attacked less, made it to be the seat of the park bench. There is no way I would have produced this result without Geoff Barnes. His influence gave the bench an even more industrial look than I had planned, even with custom made steel bolts taking up some of the seating space. Geoff is also good at making furniture comfortable, taking into account the angle of seating. Even though it looks heavy duty and hard, it is a very comfortable place to sit back and take in the view.
The table you see below is made of chainsaw bars and a heavy chain (probably from a large ride on mower). The chairs each have a seat that is made from saw blades. I am grateful to Paul at Stihl Payneham for letting me go through their scrap metal bin to achieve this result. I am also very grateful to have Geoff Barnes help with the more tricky blacksmithing aspects of this job (the bits you can't see, supporting the saw blades). The irregularity of this work is a real departure from some of the other work you will find with blacksmith-made furniture. You may notice that the two chairs don't even have the same number of legs.
The third last picture is a work in progress. A table top made from a cut through a mallee tree root. I will show the base later, but it has a steel threaded swivel height adjustable base and this table is already in use (for barbecues) and placed near my forge. I intend to fill some of the holes with resin so you can still look into them. In this picture the holes appear to be light in colour. That is just light dust after sanding. When clean, the holes will appear much darker, but I might end up putting some LED lighting into them?
