Stairs by Tiernan Roe Fine Woodworking

It's been awhile since I updated but unlike before where I was too busy working to post anything, I'm now spending as much of my free time as possible out sailing. The weather has been especially good lately and when I can see the sea from my workshop it's very hard to resist the temptation to knock off early and go sailing.
Enough excuses and I'll give you a run down of the stairs illustrated below. The strings are made from 9" by 2" Ash and each step was cut out and the "waste" piece was glued and screwed to the step below to extend the string to an effective width of 12". The treads are 10" by 2" Honduras Pitch Pine to match the flooring.


The handrail is Ash again and came from a site clearance. The bark was stripped off with a drawknife and the hand rail was then mortised into the newel posts. I used 10mm stainless steel bar for the spindles to make the appearance as light as possible and still maintain strength. The spindles had to be individually plumbed up from the tread to the bottom of the hand rail so they wouldn't look crooked, which was a very time consuming operation. Next time I'll use a laser plumb bob.

Custom Kitchen by Tiernan Roe Fine Woodworking 22-06-06

Hi there it's been a while since the last post but I've been very busy lately trying to finish off building my own house. But here's a picture of the kitchen I recently finished. The counter tops are native Irish Elm and the doors and drawer fronts are painted red deal. The under counter spaces were filled with drawers as cupboards that are 600mm deep can make it very frustrating trying to find anything. I used full extension soft close drawer runners to maximise the amount of useful space in the drawers and reduce the slamming that could occur with such large drawers. The refuse bins are in a drawer under the sink; this had to be custom made to fit around the the plumbing that was there e.g. water filter.

The overhead cupboards were brought all the way to ceiling to try and maximise storage space and eliminate the inevitable clutter and dust that can gather on top of normal kitchen cupboards. A ladder chair will be used to access these high cupboards where infrequently used items such as christmas cake tins are stored. The table in the foreground is a work in progress the top is made from chestnut and Elm. Hopefully I will get round to finishing it soon.

Chairs from Tiernan Roe Fine Woodworking 23/05/2006

Here are a few photos of some chairs that I designed and made recently. The client wanted a chair that was comfortable, simple, light, robust and unique to them. Everything that a chair should be really. They came to me first looking for some shaker inspired chairs but after a lengthy design process I came up with these chairs. The strong vertical elements in the back were something that the clients liked. All of their current chairs had this element. We choose to make the chairs from cherry as they wanted a light coloured wood that had some figure but wasn't over powering. Also each chair has the name of one member of the family carved on it. I used an ancient irish script called "ogham" which consists of horizontal lines on a vertical line. Apparently this script was based on the names of trees e.g oak in irish is daoire and represents D.



In the photo to the right it shows that although the back is made from two flat pieces that are sawn to a curve when joined at an angle they create an almost perfect curve for a chair back. To enhance the comfort of the chair the seat slopes back at a 3º angle. The triangular shape of the seat gives ample support to the buttocks as the body is supported on only two points of the pelvis that are remarkably close together. In fact there is a traditional type of chair in Ireland known as a Sligo chair that has a triangular seat which provided some of the inspiration for these chairs.




You can see in this photo that the back legs of the chair are joined to the seat using relatively massive through mortise and tenon joints that are fastened with wedges. This jointing arrangement was used as this joint on the chair experiences quite amount of racking and as they were designed for a family with four young children it is inevitable that at some time some one will tip them back onto their two back legs. All the other joints are pegged with hand made Holly pegs. The finish is hand rubbed Danish oil.