I purchased the blueprints for this Grandmother wall clock. It has an all brass Mason and Sullivan clock mechanism in it. The clock measures 40 inches high by 13 inches wide. The front and sides have glass panels so you can see the clock mechanism. Looking at the brass plaque behind the pendulum, I see I built this clock in 1987. It still keeps good time.

I have always like the shape of school clocks. They just look like 100 years ago. This one I built about 40 years ago. The octagon face measures 15 inches across the flats and it is a total of 22 inches tall. It keeps good time but the chime is too loud.

Before I got into Arts and Crafts Furniture, I was interested in colonial furniture. I saw this pipe wall box in a museum back east. They were common in colonial times to hold clay pipes, so I had to make one complete with clay pipes.

My grandparents migrated from Sweden. We found this manifest in some of their old papers. It was a passage contract for my grandmother and her family to come to Canada in 1903. The price for the four of them was 670 British pounds. They came across from England to New York on the White Star Line ship the Celtic nine years before the Titanic disaster. At the top of the paper you can see the word “Ismay”. Bruce Ismay was the president of the White Star Line. He was the one who put on a woman’s coat on the Titanic to get into a lifeboat.

When visiting Arizona, my brother and his wife took us to the largest gourd farm in the United States so, of course, I had to try my hand at gourd carving. I used a lot of northwest indian art and incorporated some cord stringing around the top. The colors are applied by using colored felt pens and buffing them with steelwool to fade the colors.

I saw this collection box in an old stone church in Stratford-on-Avon, England. The original had a long handle attached to the bottom that the usher would hold as he passed it down the aisle to take collection. When I finished it, I found it was just the right size to hold magazines and the TV remotes.

If you lived in the 15- or 1600s, these would have been state of the art scientific instruments. I had the steel components laser cut to my cad drawings and turned or cut most of the brass components. The instruments themselves I purchased where I could find them. I think they make an interesting collection

This is a group of kitchen tools that I got the metal components from the Penn State Industries catalog. You can buy these items from them on line as well as a number of other things including pen blanks. You can then use your stash of small pieces of exotic wood that were too good to throw away to create the handles.

My grandsons like anything steam punk so I made all three of them lamps for Christmas one year. They are made of pipe fittings, water meters, old gauges, and whatever else you can put together. This one even has an old barbell weight as the base.

This is a model of an 1890s marine steam engine. It is mostly wood with some copper components.

This is a strange device. I started with three old liquor bottles and drilled a hole in the bottom of each. I put a water-tight fitting in each hole then built the wood frame and installed three hose bibs. The bottles were connected to the hose bibs with Tygon tubing. Each bottle holds a different whiskey. The corks are vented so the whiskey will run freely. I gave this to my son-in-law who is a contractor. He put a stickers on each bottle with a dollar value. When they win a contract, they all drink to it from the dollar value that fits.

The top board is for Chinese Checkers made of scrap wood. The chess/checker board is made from all pine knots. The light squares are from knots cut with the grain and the dark squares are from cross grain cuts. I made the surface heights for each square vary in height to add character. The problem with working with knots is that your band- or table-saw blades build up with the pitch until they won’t cut.

One of my grandsons enjoys fly fishing and he likes to tie flys so I made him a fly-tying kit this past Christmas.

I collected the photos of relatives I could find when they were about 10 years old or younger. There are five generations in this piece. I scaled them all to the same size on a copy machine on photo paper then glued the photos to a sheet of 1/8 inch modeling plywood. They were then cut out on a scroll saw and glued to the base. It was interesting how their poses made them look like they were interacting. I now have to add the next generation - 8 great grandchildren - to the assembly.