Here are a few of a group of side tables I built. They were all narrow and long, like a sofa table, and made of different combinations of wood species. Each had one for of wood for the top and a different contrasting type for the legs and rails. For example, I tried Padauk tops on walnut legs, maple tops on walnut, and more. The tops have a keyed block that fits into slots in the rails, so the top floats to allow wood movement, but still is secure with no screws or hardware.

I have made several beds, but this is the one that I still currently use and it was made around 1997. If I ever get a workshop going again, I have designs for a much more elaborate bed. This current bed is maple, and I made the base higher so the mattress is higher off the floor than normal. If I sit on the side of the bed, my feet don't touch the floor, and I really like that sense of height when sleeping. Originally, I made the base high enough so that it would be a normal height even with a thin futon. Later I swithced to an extra thick and soft mattress and now the bed is unusually high, so this was a fortunate accident that I will repeat in future beds.

The rails have tenons that fit into mortices in the headboard posts. More importantly, I use a bolt with a captured nut in the rails to lock them firmly in place. The bed is very solid when these bolts tighten down. All of the weight transfers from the matress to slats, to these rails to the posts. Notice that the larger side piece of the rails is actually non-weight bearing but does add to the rigidity of the rails. I think this is important; a lot of beds use metal brackets to attach the rails to the four vertical posts. But, this means all the weight of the bed rests on these four metal bracket assemblies. In my bed, all of the weight is on these two stiffened rails, and the rails extend to fit into mortices chopped into the posts.

I originally made some 1 to 2 inch slats out of maple to run cross-wide between the two rails, but found they would sag with the weight of a heavy mattress. I read an article on bedmaking in Fine Woodworking where the author said he used 2x4's for his slats. If it's good enough for Fine Woodworking, then it's good enough for me. I bought some redwood 2x4 that had few knots, then planed then down to clean up the surfaces, then rounded the edges with a router roundover bit. The result is a really strong base, which is basically as strong as floor joists. These slats sit on the rails, which are tenons into the headboard posts, so all weight is directly translated through the rails to the vertical posts and the result is quite strong.

Below is a nightstand that was part of several tables I built all at once as an experiment with making multiples. This piece only needed one drawer, so dovetailing it was not too big a job.

These two pieces were my Waterloo. I spent months drawing them over and over until I settled on the design, and then I decided to build two of them because I had just finished making a bunch of tables, and making multiples had worked well. It took me the better part of a year to finish these, and unfortunately there is a big design flaw. The case is a walnut frame with floating cherry panels; the cherry sides are floating, so all structural strength comes from the frame. That's great, but I made these walnut frame too narrow, so the pegs to support for shelves barely fit. Really, a shelf needs at least two inches or more of overhang to sit easily on a peg. This means the walnut frame need to be pretty large (I don't know, maybe six inches wide? More?) to accommodate a slot for the floating panels, space for holes to accommodate shelf pegs, overhang for the shelves, and recessed hinges for the door. Because I made the rails too narrow, the shelf barely has enough overhang on the peg. I designed these to work as a stereo rack, and I used one of them for that purpose when I lived in Sunnyvale, but the shelves just aren't secure enough. I may adapt these two to narrow armoires, which makes sense since my "stereo" these days is just iTunes on a laptop.

I still like the overall design, however, especially the idea of a walnut frame with floating panels of a contrasting wood. I also like the idea that the frame extends into the legs in a single piece of wood. If I ever do something like this again, I might try to make something like a silverware chest. I would also make the frame more interesting with tapered legs and possibly a convex side to the frame.

By the way, this picture shows my workshop in Berkeley California, which was also at an ActiveSpace building. This was where I spent my weekends while I was working at VMware.

This is a simple piece I made from some TV tubes, and it was actually a last minute design. I had previously collected a lot of TV tubes (mainly from old VT-100's that were being thrown out) for a different piece that I still have but didn't turn out as well. The piece shown below was made quickly to find a use for 3 CRT tubes I had left over from the other piece, and oddly I like it a lot more. The frame is made of oak, which is a wood I almost never use.

I built this around 1997 or so, and at that time, there was no iMac, and almost all of computers were plain beige boxes designed for a corporate office. The only exception that I was aware of were SGI's Indy and Indigo boxes, which were a solid purple. At this time, I was really into Keith Haring's work, and I was also thinking about technology as art. And, of course, I was also thinking about Warhol's use of repetition. Finally, I was hugely moved by Claes Oldenburg's Breakfast Table So, it wasn't a big stretch to do a Haring-esque take on Macintoshes. But of course, after I built this Apple later came out with colored iMacs, iPods, iPhones, and now the whole idea looks really cliche. It's also interesting that such an iconic design as the original Mac is fading from popular culture in so short a time. Soon, kids won't even recognize these boxes as anythng to do with computers.

This is a set of screens I built over 2013 and 2014. These are patterned after Shojis but have some basic differences that really prevents me from calling them a true shoji. First, I built these while living in an apartment during medical residency, so I did not have access to my workshop. As a result, they are built with lap joints rather than mortice and tenons. The wood is also pine (ugh) which has been lightly stained (double ugh) and the rales and stiles are the same width as the cross pieces.

Still, there are some nice ideas here, and when I get my shop set up again I will build a new set. Those will also be non-traditional, but in a more designed way. I want to use Cherry, finish it with a clear tung oil or similar finish and use mortice and tenons or possibly dowel the joints depending on clearances.

On the far left is another set of non-shojis I built, and the right screen in a very non-traditional design. To the right of this is a picture of Piet Mondrian's "Tableau 1" from 1921 that I used for a pattern.