Giant Oval Molding w/ Built-in LED lighting
Home theater project
Last year I had the opportunity to do some specialty woodworking involving curved crown molding for an award winning in home theater by Admit One Cinema, and Twin Cities designer Annie Tropple.
Currently, we are working on a similar theater that is going to be equally awesome. This time I’m doing all the woodwork, including a giant oval ceiling molding that’s going to have built-in LED lighting.
The oval molding measures roughly 11′ X 17′. The LEDs will give off a soft blue glow to the interior of the oval ceiling, which is designed to look like stars.
The oval parts were drafted in AutoCAD Inventor by my pal Mike Prom, and were cut out of 1″ MDF using a CNC router. Mike also helped me out with a uber complicated hidden drawer mechanism that I built into a custom bookcase in 2010.
I’m really jazzed to be a part of this project, it’s going to be rad. I’m looking forward to filming the final product with my buddy Joshua VP when it’s totally completed.
Modern Kitchen Cabinets
Custom European-style cabinetry
This is a project I recently completed for Twin Cities desiger+builder Chris VanKlei. The European style cabinets will be painted high-gloss white with frosted glass panels in the horizontal upper cabinet doors. The walnut accents will be finished with an oil-based varnish.
Chris also designed the modern style kitchen in my home.
Arts & Crafts Vanity
Same style, smaller size.
Last spring I built an Arts & Crafts style vanity and linen cabinet for BJ Larson Remodeling. Those cabinets were for a master bathroom remodel; this vanity is going in the same house’s main floor bathroom. See the original cabinets.
Voted Best Cabinet Company
2012 Reader’s Choice Winner!
Each year MinnLocal.com and Minnesota Sun Newspapers conduct a reader’s choice poll giving consumers a voice to show which community businesses they felt performed the best during that year.
Readers submit nominations for this award, and a 3rd party totals the results. Everything ranging from restaurants to doctors is evaluated in this poll. Needless to say, when I found out my company was rated the best cabinetmaker, I was thrilled!
Fitted Furniture Design Sketch [Video]
This is a short clip my buddy Josh Van Patter and I filmed this afternoon. We had two cameras rolling, a Canon 7D and Canon T2i. Both cameras were shooting still frame images triggered by a remote timer every 30 seconds.
On a custom mount I made in the shop, I mounted the T2i directly above the drawing shooting straight down at the paper. The 7D was mounted to a new-and-improved time-lapse dolly prototype. As soon as I get the new design painted, I’ll do a post on it similar to the one I wrote for the original Time-lapse Dolly.
More images of the completed fitted furniture kitchen can be viewed in the Custom Kitchens Services page.
We’ll probably use this shot in the intro section of my upcoming demo reel. I’m really happy to be able to check this time-lapse off of my list of things-to-do in 2011!
Click on the images below to enlarge them.
Chevron Veneer Top [Video]
About the cabinet:
The veneering on the tabletop is a Chevron pattern. Some people refer to this design as a French Herringbone. This particular style looks awesome on hardwood floors.
For this project, I used Curly Figured American Walnut that I got from Certainly Wood. The quality of their veneers is excellent. I highly recommend them.
The finish I used is an oil-based varnish. The thing that I really like about varnish is that it tends to amber significantly in the first few months; which adds a lot of warmth to the strong character of the wood.
The hardware was hand-made out of brass and leather. The brass was finished to look antique. A great place to find hardware like this in the Twin Cities is Nob Hill.
About the video:
This is a 30 second HDR time-lapse that I filmed over the course of 23.5 hours. I mounted a Canon T2i on a custom-made ceiling mount directly above my workbench, and shot still images on a remote timer every minute for the entire process.
I bought a Tokina 10-17 f3.5-4.5 Fish Eye lens special for this particular shot, and I’m really glad I did. I love the way this lens bends the light and captures almost the whole shop.
I also used a Canon AC Adapter Kit for Rebel T2i. An advantage to having it plugged into a cord is that you are not moving the camera at all. Even a slight bump will show up in the final shot if you’re not careful.
This footage will be going into my upcoming demo reel when it’s complete. I can’t wait to finish this project; hopefully I’ll have all the shots I need by the end of the year!
Arts and Crafts Vanity
Arts and Crafts style vanity and linen cabinet
This is a small project I worked on for a bathroom remodel with BJ Larson Remodeling. I’ve never been a huge fan of this style of woodwork, but I really dig the way it turned out. The vanity and linen cabinet are made out of quarter sawn red oak. I’m not doing the finish work on this job, but if I did, I would use a gel stain top coated with amber shellac. I’ve used that finish before on this style of woodwork and it looks really sharp.
I filmed a time-lapse of myself installing the drawer boxes and drawer fronts and included it in my Spring 2011 “test footage” demo reel. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that I accidentally bumped the tracks when I was filming the time-lapse. I did a lot of work in post production trying to smooth it out but was unable to do so. My solution was to edit the “bump” to be on beat with the song. If you are a fan of the TV show Dexter, you might notice in the intro to the show they do the same thing with one of there macro shots. I wonder it it was intentional or an accident. Either way, I think Dexter’s intro is brilliant.
"Fitted Furniture" style Kitchen
I’ve been working on this project since the beginning of summer. I just completed the install and now I’m gearing up to enamel all the cabinets and trim by hand. I will be filming a “How-To” video on the painting process and writing an article to accompany the video. It should be fun and an educational experience!
Features that make this kitchen especially unique
- Furniture quality cabinetry
- AAA Quilted Maple veneered interiors in the furniture “uppers”
- Curved raised panel cabinet doors on the sink base cabinet
- Soft closing doors and drawers
- Solid brass full-mortise barrel hinges on the furniture upper doors
- Brian Grabski, author of the briangrabski.com, and president of Minneapolis-based designed & MADE Custom Woodworking. Specializing in custom cabinetry, furniture, and fine finishes, available at www.designedandmade.com. Brian can be reached at 612.702.9972 or e-mail to brian@designedandmade.com
Hidden Drawer Mechanism
How the Locking Mechanism was designed
The hidden drawer mechanism was designed by both myself and my friend Mike Prom. We came up with the original concept one evening when we had two too many cocktails out in the front porch.
I had heard about the desk in “National Treasure 2″ from a customer a couple months earlier, but I hadn’t seen it. After we started talking about it we watched it instantly on Netflix. We skipped to the scene in that movie and paused it several times to see if we could get anything useful out of it, we didn’t. I am pretty sure that Hollywood’s design doesn’t actually work in real life.
Mike sells high-end AutoCAD software to companies like Case and Caterpillar. He also does consulting for these companies, teaching them how to use the programs he sells. So in other words, he is very proficient. The mechanism was first conceptualized on paper, and then designed, using a program called Inventor.
Mike was able to provide me with 3d drawings with dimensions of every piece of the mechanism. Two of the linkages failed during the preliminary stages of construction, so we had to redesign them for a second time, and then again for the third and final time. About 40hrs later, I had it working. I shot a short “bootleg video” and put it on YouTube, and then posted it to FaceBook so Mike could see it in working condition. One week later it had 8,000 views.
“Bootleg Video” posted to facebook:
How the Hidden Mechanical Locking Mechanism works
The hand-crafted custom bookcase requires you pull open each of the visible drawers, before a hidden control springs out and allows you to trigger the secret compartment built into what looks like a normal molding.
To make things more complex, each of the drawers must be pulled out to a certain point before the latches they control slide out of the way, similar to how the pins in a regular lock work. That finally allows a length of wooden dowel to slide out – hidden, normally, as a knot in the wood itself – and when you twist it and then push it back in, a cable tracked around the back of the cabinet allows the hidden drawer to spring out.
Hidden Mechanism [video]
The Final Edited Video
With the help of Josh Van Patter, Chris VanKlei, and Justin Bullis, we brought the bookcase into the basement of the Northrup King building in NE Minneapolis. The building was at one time used as a nuclear fall out shelter.
Chris and I took care of getting the bookcase delivered and set up, Josh did all the filming and video editing, and Justin took care of the lighting and photography. Mike Prom did all of the 3D animations for the video.
Bookcase w/ Hidden Drawer [video]
View the Bookcase Featured Project