Entry Table

Beautiful inlay and veneer work. Also, that is a great idea to show people the possibilities and skill you offer.

Hi Gregg, The top is incredible! Excellent Craftsmanship! I was wondering if you have noticed that marquetry & carving don't get the attention from other woodworkers, that a simple bench or a cabinet get? I wonder if it is because most craftsman don't attempt or even understand exactly what it is!

I do both Carving & marquetry, and I think that marquetry is much more complicated. Put I enjoy both of them equally. Well, good luck to you in your art! You are a big inspiration in my woodworking journey. Thank you.

Hi Dennis. Thanks.

I would agree that carving and marquetry don't get the attention from woodworkers. But really, who cares? They aren't the customer. Similarly, customers (retail) don't care about joinery. They like what they can see, not what they can't. When I submit for woodworker competitions, I show dovetails and curves. Hobbyist sure do love their dovetails and Greene and Greene.

Keep up your good work. You are one of the few professional people I know that have a deep passion for the decorative side of woodworking. In fact, I know of no one who does both skills by hand.

As for marquetry being complicated, for me it is pretty simple. Design it on a computer and laser cut it. No real skill needed. Heck I use high school kids sometimes to everthing since they know their way around a computer and safety isn't an issue since there are no moving blades. If I had a CNC like I think you have, I would be going crazy with 3d modeling and using carving just for back cutting. For me carving would be far more difficult. Heck, I have only 2 marquetry projects without a laser. You have done many more than me by far.

Hi Gregg,

Thank you for the complements. I feel like a real old timer, I don't have any CNC I do both carving and marquetry by hand on the weekends and in the evenings. During the day I draw on AutoCAD engineering furniture. And running the company.

Right now I got a job with a lot of hand carving, I make time during the day to carve. I love everything about hand carving, it's like a workout. lol It keeps me in shape.

If you don't mined me asking what type of laser do you use? I still think that most of the work of marquetry is done before and after cutting. I cut mine out on a old scroll saw & use 3/0 blades which is very time consuming.

I have a Universal Laser x660 with an 18 x 32 bed and 60 watt laser. You only need about 20 watts to cut veneer. I have to slow the speed down considerably since I use a lot of curves. You could buy a small table top laser used for under 5k I imagine.

The table pictured took me 40 hours of computer time. I had half of the designs already, and created 6 more border designs. Radius work takes longer in the design because everything has to be tailored to fit a specific curve. So in this project 40 hours of design, 8 hours to cut (67 sheet loads 7 mins per sheet), shading 45mins (150 shades per hour), assembly 11 hours (672 pieces, 100 pieces/hr), bag in 4 hours (we did a prepress with no glue first), bag out 1 hr. 8 hours for carcass. So 32 total to build. The base is from Adams Wood Products and we haven't sprayed it it. I usually do photography first, then spray. If we had the basic table with no medallion and 1 border design, we would be done in 1 day. So the ratio of computer to build is at least 2:1 computer:build. We are metric crazy around here. We defined a process called the Divine Method tailored to decorative design. We shoot for 75% to std on our metrics. Every year we try to nudge closer to our gold standards. We have all our metric posted everywhere. Every project is like a game trying to beat the high score.

Its funny. One day I counted the number of pieces to make a typical kitchen, and most of my projects have more pieces. And it take me the same time to cut pieces out of a 6"x18" sheet of veneer as it takes a CNC cabinet shop to cut parts out of a 4x8 sheet of ply. I use that metric when I am selling. The table above has 667 pieces.