David Tilson, Woodworker
Furniture and Accessories

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After my early years of working in a shop the size of a parking stall, I got a job working at a shop that worked a little like a health club, but with power tools instead of exercise equipment. The access to a large shop full of “everything Norm has” was nearly as valuable as the knowledge I gained from watching the people there as they made everything from kitchen cabinets and workbenches to salad bowls and reproductions of 18th Century desks. I soon started working on a wide variety of projects such as mechanical models, commissioned furniture, and furniture restoration, while continuing to make boxes more elaborate than ever.

When I design a piece of furniture, I often incorporate design elements I discovered while making boxes and mechanical models, such as the joinery used to assemble a trestle table without any tools being required. I also find those years of practicing cutting joints with hand tools very helpful when building gallery furniture, where joints are often not at the usual 90° angles found on most furniture and casework.

Another thing I really enjoy about making furniture is the fact that no two pieces are ever really the same. Even from one end of any given board to the other, the character of the wood changes, which makes selecting and cutting wood parts for a project an artistic challenge in maintaining symmetry and balance while building with a material that is naturally asymmetrical. And although it is no longer truly alive, the wood still retains many properties of the living organism from which it came, and reacts to changes in its environment as well as the changes I make to its shape in sometimes hard to predict ways. This all means that, even though I might build two "identical" end tables, the nature of the material makes the process of building each table quite unique, thus there are no "ho-hum days at the office" in the woodshop.