Challenging interesting enjoyable

[DarwinStrings]

A customer recently came to me with a story of her new extensions to her home. She had built a small addition which was a single room with a mezzanine floor. To build a staircase to access the mezzanine legally or to code would have dwarfed the room, that is a width, riser, tread and handrails to the Australian standards would have taken up a lot of space in the small addition, so she asked me to build her a set of shelves instead. While designing it I looked at using a stringer but even a stringer seemed to take up too much space in the small room (in my head that is) so I triangulated as best I could in such a open design (the more open the less invasive) by housing the horizontals tightly into the vertical members as well as chucking in a bit of epoxy and screws. She wanted the wood look (or wouldn't have come to me in the first place) but when I laid the wood for the shelves in place it just looked too woody to me so I "ebonized" the shelves (black aniline dye in metho).

Now the bit for Stu, even a job like this Stu I used a chisel for about 30 minutes and a hand plane for about 15 minutes, I could have done the whole thing by hand including ripping the Tassie Oak down to boards with my old 4 point rip saw and dressing them with a number 7 plane but doing it that way would see my hourly rate fall well below that of a just legal age Macas worker which would not be so bad cause I do enjoy the work but try buying a decent tool kit on a income like that. So my advice in answer to your question in your thread in the guitar section would be to teach yourself then set yourself up and supply direct to customers, that way you can choose the way you work and you don't need any sort of certificate just skills you can teach yourself on the weekend while working a job that slots in with today's ways of doing things. I reckon you have probably worked that out for yourself but it did give me a chance to show off my design work.

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Jim

Life is good when you are amongst the wood.

[Kim]

Clever bugger Jimbo..

[Nick]

So when the council come around, she has to stack books on the stairs? Nice bit of lateral thinking Jim & the 'ebonised' wood came up a treat, you'd almost never know.

[DarwinStrings]

Cheers, I dyed the wood then sanded it to bring a bit of grain back Nick, the photos are not great but the dye does break up the wood look while still being the "solid wood" that people seem to like.

What is interesting about the rules is that you can not put a set of stairs in that does not conform to the Australian standards as far as riser, tread, width and rails go on your plans but you can build a mezzanine floor 1500mm above your ground level and have absolutely no access to it or seemingly one single 1500mm step which is way above the standard riser , a toast to loop holes

Jim

It is funny how advertising works, I just used that Guinness emoticon and now I am gunna head to the bottloe for one or two of those draught Guinness cans with the widget....mmmmm am already drooling.