Custom Benches (Doriss Design Workshoppe)

Monday, July 17th, 2017 @ 11:01 am

bench, design, doriss, furniture, mahogany, nick, portfolio, workshoppe

I spent about a year and a half working nearly full-time at Doriss Design Workshoppe, a cabinetry/furniture/millwork shop in South Boston.  It was a great low-key work environment, with all kinds of different an interesting projects coming in and out, and I learned a bunch about cabinetmaking, furniture fabrication, and some welding and spray finishing techniques.  These mahogany benches I made a few times while I was there were a nice, simple, but really elegant product.

Ready for spraying.

By simply milling all of the material at once, and being careful with the glue up, making sure to let each longer section overhang by just a bit over the thickness of the piece it would be butted up next to, we could have a pretty accurate glue-up pretty quickly into the process, and plenty of glue surface in what are essentially finger joints of box joints along each edge of the bench.  We’d usually add a stretcher in underneath, glued to the underside of the seat and dominoed into the legs.  In later versions we added dominoes everywhere we could for added insurance.  But I expect these will last a while with just the stretcher for stability.

Done!

Spray finished with clear lacquer, the whole process probably took about 3-4 days from start to finish.  Milling stuff together and doing a glue-up within one day was a pretty unique and exciting change from some of our longer projects!  Nice to have some small stuff some in and go out quickly between larger jobs.