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**This workshop will be live streamed via Zoom.**
Share your woodworking successes and challenges and learn what others in the BARN woodworker community are doing in a new series of online meetings.
Scheduled on the second and fourth Tuesday evenings of the month, these sessions will usually begin with a small bit of prepared content, such as pictures of projects that members want to show, or interviews with local pro woodworkers, or tours of home shops — whatever content members of the group suggest. After the prepared content, we’ll have a chance to touch base on areas of interest with each other. You can ask technical questions, share lessons you've learned, suggest classes you'd like to take.
If you have pictures to share or a topic to suggest, please email woodclasses@bainbridgebarn.org.
Details:
Join us for a free laser cutter presentation from the San Diego Fine Woodworkers Association.
Get hands-on experience with Cold-Bend Hardwood — wood that's so flexible you can tie it in knots, without the need for steam or laminating thin layers. Yet when the wood dries, the shape will be fixed and you can wow your friends by asking: "How in the heck did I do that?"
A Gig Harbor company, Pure Timber LLC, sells the wood for use in everything from curved-roof buildings to wooden bicycles. The wood is also used to great effect by artists, including the instructor for this online class, who made the jigsaw creature with the curved tail and snout shown in the picture. The wood is subjected to intense heat and pressure in a way that compresses the fibers longitudinally but leaves moisture in the cell cavities. Until that moisture evaporates, the wood remains flexible.
Pure Timber sells sample packs on its website, but they start at $120. For this class, you will get a smaller sample pack with sizes that the instructor recommends as a good place to start. Your kit will include at least a dozen pieces 48 inches long in a variety of thicknesses and widths, from 1/8 inch to 1/2 inch, plus at least one piece about 1/8 inch thick and 3 inches wide. The pieces will arrive in plastic wrap, which should keep them flexible.
At the first session, the instructor, Art Liestman, will show how he has used this wood, often as a component of pieces that also involved woodturning. He will share tips and discuss limitations of the wood. Liestman will suggest ideas for experimenting with the material, but there is no set project. You will then have a week to experiment.
At the second session, students will show their projects and the instructor and students will discuss what went well and what didn't. Both sessions will be interactive, so you can ask questions and get answers.
You will need to supply tools and other materials:
Instructor bio:
Art Liestman, who lives in Vancouver, B.C., is well-known as a wood turner and woodturning instructor. He has presented to woodturners' clubs throughout the United States and Canada, including several repeat trips to the Olympic Peninsula Woodturners. He has been teaching online since the pandemic closures last spring.
He specializes in what he calls the lost wood process, in which he turns turning spindle blanks made of three layers. He then cuts the pieces, separates the layers and glues the outside layers back together to create turned objects that aren't round in cross-section. It was a short journey from that sleight-of-hand to incorporating cold-bending wood in his pieces.
Liestman's work can be seen on his website, artliestman.com
Learn to make bentwood rings using thin layers of wood called veneer. In this two-evening online class, you will complete one ring and wind up with the know-how and materials to make five to 10 more rings on your own.
You will pick up the process the next session, once the wood has fully dried in place. During this second session, you will glue, sand, and then finish the ring with fast-curing cyanoacrylate (CA) glue, giving you a finished piece that is both lightweight and durable.
The materials fee covers veneers, glue, sanding materials and other disposables, and the shipping cost to mail these to you. If you are a member, you can opt to pick up the materials at BARN and save the shipping cost.
You will need to provide the following:
Kevin Kelly is always making things: building nonprofit databases in his day job, turning bowls on the lathe in the evenings, or building new things for around the yard on the weekend. He has been making bentwood rings since 2014, when he finally gave up on his poorly-fitting wedding ring in favor of a homemade one from walnut.
The first step in designing and making any object is translating the idea into a two-dimensional plan, and that starts with a drawing.
This class is for beginners and people who want to revisit their drawing skills. This class will be useful to you whatever your discipline.
Instructor: Michael Gunderson moved to Bainbridge after a thirty-plus year career in California Public education. His degree is in the arts and has taught classes in art, jewelry, ceramics and the trades, as well as serving as an activities and athletic director. He has always found a great pleasure in communicating with young people.
He thinks of himself as a person who solves visual problems. He proposes a situation and looks to openly create a visual answer, whether it be paint, wood or combinations of media. He is not political in his work - not even angry. He's looking for the fun and the whacky.
Please note that this class will only be held at BARN if Kitsap County has been approved for Phase 3.
*This class has prerequisites. See below.
Gain confidence in using a wide array of power tools safely in this three-week component of BARN's Intro to Woodworking series.
You will build a sturdy, two-step stepstool of solid wood and plywood. The project was specifically designed to give you experience with the most common stationary and portable tools in the woodshop:
Have you ever built a project and then been disappointed by the design result? By making quick, easy scaled models first, you can play around with different design solutions and settle on one that incorporates your favorite elements — before you embark on building the full-size project in wood, metal or other materials. Scaled models are also useful for artists working on projects such as books with popup or fold-out elements.
Designing anything in three dimensions really benefits from using three-dimensional models. In this two-session class, you will learn how to build scaled physical models that are classic 3-D design aids. You'll be working mostly with paper, card stock and basswood, and you will be encouraged to modify your models as you experiment with design and technique.
This two session class covers:
At the first session, you will learn about the tools and materials and make a simple model of a project suggested by the instructor. At the second session, you will make models and experiment with design options for a project of your own choosing. The overriding principle is to have fun both in making models as well as discovering how to further refine your design.
Instructor: Alec Vassiliadis studied models from a very young age. He built lots of scale models of planes, cars and boats, and painted, altered and sometimes destroyed them. "So, naturally, I gravitated to architectural school, where I excelled at building models," he said. After working as an architect for about a year, he gave up on paper as a medium of design and fell back into building models. It did not take long before he was turning his life passion into a profession. He has been building models for architects and industrial designers for the past 40 years.
