the beautiful music all around us stephen wade stops by

we had a great event in manchester last wednesday evening.  the verrmont council of the humanities first wednesdays program featured stephen wade, a grammy winning banjo player and music historian.  he is a stunning performer and great story teller.  he spent an hour or so describing his travels through the south, meeting and playing with the old time musicians in the 60s and 70s interspersing the story with song on about 7 or 8 historic banjos from his collection.  naturally, at the end of the show, will needed to buy his book, the beautiful music all around us ... field recordings and the american experience.  more about that book at this link.  while doing that, he struck up a conversation with stephen and his friend sandy, a banjo collector.  next day, wouldnt you know, they showed up at the shop for a visit and to test out a few of wills banjos.  great music, great banjos, and a great time was had by all ...

sandy, with a new one, hot off the press

 

and will plays a tune for stephen ..

see more photos of wills banjos and their construction on his seeders instruments instagram feed.

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a mahogany slab conference table

this slab has been around the shop, looking for a home for a while now and it finally found one recently.  it will be going to a local financial firm, and will be a conference/meeting table 

in their about to be remodeled offices.

as you might imagine, any conference table in 2015 will require lots of wires and power outlets, in fact there will be four cat 5 cables, an hdmi cable, and 3 duplex outlets, all recessed into the bottom of the slab so that there are no holes poking up through it.  we will likely add some small simple wire retainers to support the cords where they loop up and over from below.

some early drawings and revisions of the plan above.

and we made a couple small scale models.  this one is 1" = 1.

lots of hand routing by trevor as the slab was too big and heavy to go upstairs to the cnc.

the electrical layout

while you cant see it here, there are holes in the bottoms of the hollow legs and the wires will exit through the top of the leg and into the channels to the boxes.  in the end, the table will be bolted to the floor as it is installed and the wires will come in from the cellar below.  we had it on its feet earlier in the week, but i somehow missed that photo opportunity .., well try that again later ...

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