This coming Saturday there is an Open House at Brian Boggs impressive new 10,000 square feet premises. It includes workshop tours, demonstrations, a wood slab sale, free access to the furniture gallery as well as food and drinks. And if that wasn't enough there's a raffle to win a Sunniva swing bench! I wish I wasn't going back to the UK tomorrow.
We did a big detour to take in a visit and Brian's very knowledgeable wife Melanie very kindly showed us around. The lobby had a number of maquettes on show, it's amazing how cute these miniatures look.
Here's an outdoor rocker which looked particularly nice in oak.
Below is one of his classic rockers with hickory bark woven seat and very comfortable it is too.
Upstairs is a wonderful walnut dining table and chairs, what a lovely rich colour.
The rocker again, this time without me obstructing the view.
The rear of the wonderful chair I saw at the WIA show, a real head turner.
Melanie told me that all Brian's chair were numbered and this is number one, the first chair he ever made over 30 years ago. Apparently he lacked proper tools at this time so the mortice and tenon joints for the back slats were cut with a sharpened screwdriver!
This ingenuity was stretched to the limit with amazing home made machine for processing hickory bark into perfectly prepared and dimensioned strips for weaving the seats of his chairs.
Apparently it has numerous cutters inside and can produce strips the length of the tree, amazing.
There were very good stocks of Honduran Mahogany which is used for the outdoor seating. This was sourced from local small producers in Honduras and Brain has made more than one trip down there to set this up. The different coloured ends denote different farms.
The 'follower' setup below was for the seats for his musicians chair. Now this I can understand this much better than the bark machine! They investigated having these seats CNC machined but they could not get within acceptable tolerances, just goes to show any machine is only as good as the person operating it.
The result is an even set of cove cutter marks defining the exact symmetrical shape of each seat. They offer this very tactile surface as an option to the normal smooth one and if I were buying one of these it would be the one I would choose. A lovely textured balance to the smoothness of the rest of the chair.
Here's the monster band saw which makes David Finck's look like a toy! (read the other posts).
It's used to cut the laminations and with a carbide tipped blade produces results that are ready for gluing straight from the saw.
All the while we were being shown around Brian was buzzing around in the back ground. It looked as if any disturbance would be unwelcome so I kept my distance. I'm sure Saturday afternoon will be completely different so if you're anywhere near Asheville NC this is one open day not to be missed!
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