It was Christmas Eve, 2019. I received a voicemail from a man looking for someone that could bend wood. My name is Geoff and I’m a wood problem solver. Before I was a furniture maker, I built boats. Yep, I bent a lot of wood building boats. When people visited my boat building shop, I would show them all kinds of cool stuff that would be part of building a wooden boat. Dozens of steam bent ribs, hand cut rabbets that would twist and turn, hand shaped bevels 20 feet long and hundreds of hand set rivets. They would marvel and wonder and be bedazzled. Then they would come upon an oar leaning against a vise. After all they had seen there would be the ultimate expression of amazement, “you make the oars too,” they would remark?
So what happened with the person who was inquiring on steam bending? The photo above is of the finished project from that call. Is it furniture? Not exactly, it’s a tool used for making wool rugs. Not something I had ever heard of and not something I, nor the individual that commissioned it had ever used. It was exactly the kind of problem solving I do use when I make a piece of furniture and required techniques that I would use making a piece of furniture. So certainly it fit the definition of custom. It was also an interesting challenge to come up with it for some great customers
