A number of years ago new legislation was introduced to require pasturization of all apple cider sold commercially in the US. To get that rich, fresh, true cider flavor that tastes like autumn chill and crispy white apples and warm cider donuts, I built my own press. It makes wonderful cider, but frankly it isn't very economical because of expensive California apples and the small batch size which makes it somewhat inefficient. About ten apples will yield a pint of cider. After testing a prototype that ended with a little over a cup of cider in my glass and at least another half cup on my kitchen floor, I bought some maple lumber from a wholesaler in East LA and drew up my plans. I designed the press to have minimum mass, so as not to clutter my apartment with a huge traditional load frame; the central threaded rod (which is coated in paraffin to prevent rusting) is pinned to a wood block that sits in a square socket in the wooden base. The handle drives a nut that rotates against a heavy duty thrust ball bearing. Ten pounds of force on each side of the handle generates around two thousand pounds on the round maple press plates, enough force to send rivulets of golden goodness trickling out from the layers of grated apples and down into a waiting jug. The handle and anti-rotation feet / carrying handles fold up for storage.

Cider is best used within a few days, and one of its best pairings is with fresh cider donuts. Commercial donuts usually all come from the same mass-produced donut mix, so just bringing home a cinnamon-sugar donut won't deliver the coarse crumbed, crusty morsel you need. It really is a simple 30-minute project: Combine 1/4 cup white granulated sugar, 1 tbsp. butter, 1 egg; cream together. Add 1 tsp. baking powder, 1/8 tsp. salt, 1/4 cup apple cider; mix well. Add 1 cup white flour and mix to a thick batter. Spoon sticky gobs the size of large grapes into hot vegetable oil an inch or so deep at about 250-275 degrees F and flip them over several times (chopsticks are great for this) as they puff up and brown. Cook until the centers are done - you'll figure it out. Drain on paper towels, then toss in granulated white sugar with cinnamon. Eat.

Rich dark walnut, creamy smooth maple, warm golden hickory streaked with bands of dark and light grain, and toasty oak all sound like things one might eat with a dish of vanilla ice cream. They look wonderful too, combined as they are in this new sturdy table that replaces - for the moment - my delicate maple walnut coffee table, which resides in a closet for a change of appearance in my apartment. The new table came about because one day Nghia wanted to pick up a load of cherry from Bonhoff Lumber, a wholesaler with massive inventory. We took my truck to East LA and loaded it up. I spotted these short thick walnut planks and soon had a stack in my stairwell begging to be laid edge to edge in a shimmering expanse of chocolate brown. I accented that with the four maple posts set in tight holes and built an airy understory to store books, support feet, and add some strength to the table without blocking light or hiding the carpet. Uneven ends and the wavy understory stir the smooth lines to keep the appearance casual and comfortable.

I built a cherry burl and ash box just like this one in 2003: it went off to a lady and after a time neither was ever seen again. I really liked that burl box. In 2007 I realized I had just enough ash and cherry wood left to make another one, and fortunately I still had the original pencil sketches. The dimensions are important: the lid is a golden rectangle, that beautiful shape first identified by the Greeks thousands of years ago, and the proportions and curves were carefully designed. I cut curves on the sides of the box and positioned the ash bands to convey a feeling of strength as if the box was bound with cords. The wood is black cherry and white ash from the low forested Berkshire hills in western Massachusetts. When I was quite young I noticed the burl where it grew beside a trail, and though the stump had rotted away by the time I thought of collecting the wood I found the burl just where I remembered it, fallen over and leaning against a sapling. I chopped the burl out of the trunk and hauled it a mile through the snow on a sled, then sawed it into slabs with a chainsaw and brought them inside to dry. The ash wood came from from my Dad's firewood pile in the late 1990s; it was of exceptionally fine and clear grain so I saved a piece for some future project. The fourteen inch wide logs could be split in half with a single tap of an axe. The ash accents are cut so the hard white wood layers face upward or inward and the bottom of the box is thin quarter-sawn ash set in a groove. The lid pilots on chamfers at the four corners so it fits perfectly. This one also goes to a special lady...

I bought a hickory plank one day because it had a nice contrasting grain cut through the sapwood and heartwood. It stayed in my stairwell for months until I finally settled on a new way to showcase the grain without building another coffee table: I would build a barrel. Immediately I set to work, sawing and planing the lumber into thin strips and building a jig to bend them into their final curvature so I could bevel the edges on the jointer. This, however, required that I use the top surface of the jointer fence as a guide - and that surface wasn't machined square or smooth. Becuase of that and my imperfect, late-night jig building the joints of the barrel aren't very tight and I have new respect for people who built waterproof barrels centuries ago without machine tools. I used hose clamps to assemble the slats and then built up walnut veneer layer-by-layer at each end, orienting the grain differently in successive layers to build up a tough composite ring that I then trimmed to size and pinned in place through the holes first used for clamping the slats to the bevel jig. The finished barrel is 32 inches tall and the bottom is wider than the top. It was a fun project, but I'm not really sure what to do with the barrel. Right now it sits in a corner with some curly branches arranged inside.

This one has been years in the making. The walnut top was one of the first pieces of wood that I bought after arriving in California in 2003. I didn't have much of a plan when I started designing the table top, and I had to buy tools along the way to get the job done - dovetail saws and good chisels and hand planes and rasps and a router and slot cutting bit. Other projects came and went but still this one sat in a corner of my living room. Finally in January 2006 I took the risky leap of drilling holes through the legs for the dowels. To make the hole pattern at exactly sixty degrees I built a special drilling fixture in my garage using a one-meter precision ball slide from work, my power drill, and a brad point bit. It was a big relief to see it all fit together! This isn't kid-proof or party-proof - it's plenty strong but you can't sit on it, and even with the top covered by a sheet of 0.090" thick clear acrylic there are too many joints for spills to get into. The entire table has glue in only a few places, on the last maple slats to go on the ends and in the joints that make the curved legs. Everything else is held by joinery and dowels. I like the curves and angles of this piece. It was partly inspired by sealskins I saw stretched on frames in the Canadian Arctic - that and the thought that in the Arctic, whalebones would make curves like those in the table. Like many of my pieces, this one can be taken apart and packed into a flat box for transport.

These are my favorites of many small carvings I've created from butternut logs pilfered from my dad's firewood stack. The trees have a layer of pale colored wood under the bark that is separated from the light brown inner wood by a thin gray boundary, an ideal structure for making the body of a fish with its gradient of color from bottom to top. I've seen exquisite agate carvings created from natural stone that ranges in color across the spectrum such that the purple frog sits on a green leaf or the field mouse has a gray back, brown ears, and a white belly, but sadly to me those end up looking like dyed glass knockoffs. The same is true for wood: a quality piece of art needs to be rough enough to show its origin and plain enough to communicate its meaning. I carved each of these fish with a detail knife I ground thin from the broken blade of a pair of scissors and set in a handle carved to fit my hand. Commercial knives are too thick to cut well. Each fish is swimming in a particular direction, twisting or gliding or leaping, and the fins are set appropriately for each motion. The fins are white ash split radially to show a ribbed texture. The carcing without fins has so many fish that I decided fins would clutter the flowing form. I assembled the schools on pins, each in a fluid formation. One swims over a bit of lodgepole pine weathered by wildfire and alpine winters and colored by the sun ten thousand feet high in the eastern Sierras and the other follow a bit of pine branch from the western Sierras.

Fitting this maple burl slab into a piece of furniture has been a challenge for me ever since I bought it on an impulse with little thought several years ago. Irregular but chunky, rather small, and studded with sharp thorny bumps about its perimeter, it didn't lend itself to the headboard I first had in mind. I put stubby legs on it, but then it looked squat and boring. Now I've searched deeply in my imagination and created this odd piece, keeping with my maple walnut theme. The curves of the understructure are meant to reflect the shape of the top while lending an airy feeling to the otherwise heavy slab.

Cherry went on sale at the lumber store so I bought a carload and lay out plans for a dresser. Working to arbitrary dimensions I started with the lid and then designed the rest of the dresser as I got to it. Using more Berkshire cherry burl and black walnut pruned from the neighbor's tree back home, as well as birch and cherry planks, I shaped the molding and cut a round into it mainly with a belt sander. I chose clear pale birch for the corner posts and used the same design on the side panels as I'd put on the lid of the burl box. Dark walnut pieces define the top and bottom and accentuate edges. The back is made from thin poplar planks and the drawer faces are carefully selected cherry planks with decorative bands of birch. The drawer bodies are partly aromatic cedar, partly cherry, and some are poplar. The drawer slides are shaped cherry fixed to the frame with dowels. To make the drawer pulls, I procured copper grounding wire from an old utility pole my dad got from the town to cut and split for fenceposts, and two-inch copper nails from a barrel in the barn where they had resided since the early 1900s when copper nails were used to put in slate roofs. At the shop I forged the nails into eyes on the anvil, melting and shaping the metal with a hammer and oxy-acetylene flame. After hammering and forming the wire bails I drilled the eyes and slipped them onto the bails, melted a ball of metal on each end of the bail to retain the eyes, polished the handles, and pressed them in place secured with glue. The piece is very solid and quite attractive. It weighs a ton!

I bought a small piece of jade from an old man on the curbside in China's remote western autonomous region of Xinjiang, where the huge desolate expanse of the Taklamikan Desert meets the towering Karakoram mountains. The nearby Jade River occasionally reveals bits of precious clear green and white jade and the local people scour the gravel banks for lucky finds while camels nibble on dead grasses beside spindly poplar trees. Back in California I sectioned the stone into thin wafers with a small hacksaw, a process that took hours, then sanded them smooth with a progression of fine sandpapers and polishes. I drilled holes and soldered stirling silver loops through the stones and a silver chain that seemed to fit the design well. I haven't done much work with precious metals or stones but nonetheless this was a fun project.

This was an afternoon project one Saturday assembled from scrap lumber. Joy's got a new apartment, a studio, and knowing that space would be a little tight I decided to get right to work on the first space-saving furnishing I could carry onto an airplane. Actually, it's an inch taller than is allowed... I built it thinking I would transport it in pieces - if the eight screws are removed it disassembles into a heap of wood slats - but once it was together I decided it might make more of an impression fully assembled than in a heap of slats. We ended up taking two shelves out to accommodate taller spice jars.

Joy's studio apartment didn't have much kitchen counter space, and my stairwell was full of three inch wide slats of oak that I'd salvaged from discarded shipping pallets. The logical result was this oak chopping block, 42 inches wide with birch legs and trimmed with scrap walnut from the coffee table project - already cut to the right shape when I made the table legs! I installed a lattice shelf below for pots, leaving leg room in case the piece ever gets used with bar stools as a breakfast bar. Two half-inch threaded rods with twin nuts on each end hold the pieces together in compression as well as deck screws throughout to secure the smaller slats.

This piece came from my Dad's barn. It sat there in a corner covered in dust, hayseed, and grease, painted black and filled with an assortment of old pieces of junk. My great grandfather made it probably around 1915 or thereabouts and kept his woodworking tools in it. Now I'm going to do the same, having stripped off layers of blackish paint and sanded off the greasy dust and applied several layers of tung oil. It's not quite a living room piece - the lid is a little too battered - but it sure will look nice in my workshop.

Karen commissioned this piece - or something like it - to store an odd-sized Christmas decoration. Neither of us really thought about how big it was going to be if I didn't give special attention to making it small, so here it is: 50 inches long, 25 inches wide, and 17 inches tall weighing about seventy pounds! I put a curvature of 3/4 inch top to bottom in the sides to keep it from looking too boxy and mitered the corners (a difficult task) for a lighter-looking structure. The internal brackets are cold wrought strip steel blacked on the stove with oil (better than paint!) but I didn't do the handles myself this time. Also the inlay strip around the edge of the lid is a commercial piece.