Atelier Lalonde
Paul Lalonde's Weblog

I finally started back in the workshop over the holidays after a long hiatus. I’m still having some eye troubles, but now that all the machines are fitted out with guards and that I’ve adapted some, I’m getting productive. And that means that the disaster area that the space has been turning into over the last year is getting cleaned up.
The first thing was to sort out the dust collection. I had built a cyclone a couple of years ago, but had choked it’s throughput by recycling my bag filters for the last stage of collection. I just replaced it with two cartridge filters as recommended by Bill Pentz in his excellent how-to pages. You can get them (and many other filters) from Wynn Environmental or any decent HVAC supplier. Wow. What a difference - there’s real air flow through all my pipes. The next step is to drop my table-saw run under the floor.

This shot is looking from our new living room out to the front sunroom and dining room. The house dates from 1908, and although the original shingles have been stuccoed over, the interior has been left mercifully untouched. The original shellac is crackled all over the fir trim. It’s a good fit for the furniture I like to build.

Four (of seven) marking gauges I made as Christmas gifts for friends. Cocobolo and brass.

I built this chair about a year ago, and had it upholstered in leather with a sprung seat. It has surprized me a little, in that I made it about 2 inches too short front-to-back to support the heavy back-cushion. I’ll make the next one a little larger.

This vase stand is inspired from one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s vase stands crossed with Stickley’s spindle furniture. Designed to hold a vase above, it can display a single rose below in the fretwork.

This is one of the few photos I have of my old house on Victoria drive in Vancouver. We bought it as a near-derelict, and three years later sold it to move to Victoria. On the way there the original woodwork got exposed, the floors redone, the kitchen renovated, the front and back steps rebuilt, a new roof put on, and so forth. This shot of the living room was taken as we cleared the clutter from the living room in preparation for selling. You can make out my cube chair, a footstool, and the vase stand just past the fireplace. All the trim in this room was buried under a thick coat of paint. The saving grace was that all the woodwork had originally been finished in shellac, which meant the later paint scraped off to that layer (relatively) easily.