I was finally horrified by one of norm's finishes

[brianlanning]

I know, I know, hard to believe isn't it? In the past, many people have complained about norm's abuse of stain and poly. I've been mostly ambivalent about the subject up until now.

The latest NYW in the tivo was this really cool corner table where half of the table was a drop-leaf. But what was really striking was the wood choice. The first part of the show talked about how this white oak was pulled out of a civil war era dam on a river in virgina iirc. After resawing, the *white oak* looked like a charcoal color, almost silvery, on the television. He complained about being able to get enough of the wood for the two projects. And the color wasn't exactly uniform across the table top. But still, the color was awesome.

Can anyone guess what he did? He stained it with dark walnut stain to "even out the color". This thing was screaming for just a clear finish. Now, I agree that the top had been glued up with boards that were unfortunately a different color. But couldn't he have done something else? Couldn't he have selected a different board? Put the light wood in the back or something? He glued up five of the boards to be able to make the table legs, and there was a aweful lot of waste. Couldn't he have done the first project in some other wood, saving the good wood for the second one he does for the camera? Anything?

brian

[Leon]

I saw the preview of that episode but not the show yet. The table looked like he spray painted it black from an aerosol can.

[GeeDubb]

I brought up a similar question reguarding the shop clock. Somebody commented that in HD the clock he stained dark was made out of sub-par walnut.....Of course after I brought it up I noticed that the clock he kept in the shop was unfinished.

While I hate to defend the intentional staining of wood, in Norm's case he's usually making a replica of an antique which had a dark finish.

Gary

[brianlanning]

Yeah that's about right. As he brushed on the stain, the mixture of the dark wood and walnut stain just turned it jet black. It really seemed like he was annoyed with the wood and the supplier. He also said that he had to add a couple dutchmans to cover some nail holes. To me, I'd show that off as a character piece, either leaving the nail hole or showing the dutchman. With the stain, I'm sure the patches disappeared.

brian

[brianlanning]

I can certainly appreciate doing a reproduction piece. But in this case, if he were doing a reproduction, why not use walnut, cherry, or qswo? I think a unique wood deserves a unique piece with a finish to show off the unusual grain or color.

brian

[Swingman]

Some folks just shouldn't be allowed to apply finishes ... I know because, being color blind, I feel that way about my own finishing attempts.

I am thinking that Norm mostly needs to stick to paint on curly poplar and quarter sawn mdf. If I was that rich and famous, damn if I wouldn't hire someone to do it right.

[Javier]

NYW is shot in HD? Which stations show it in HD? The local PBS affiliate (in Raleigh, NC) shows it in SD.

-jav

[cselby]

On 28 Feb 2006 08:33:52 -0800, "brianlanning" I watched an episode where 'Nahm' got very expensive slow growth sinker log wood with the most beautifull grain. Before making the project, he was quite proud to comment on the value and work required to retrieve these logs and have them sawn and dried. Then he made the project piece and painted it with what looked like green fence paint.

Has anyone else noticed that when he uses a 'little' glue, there seems to be an awfull lot of sqeeze out. I think he gets glue by the drum.

[GeeDubb]

It was this post I was referring to.

[Pete C.]

He does bill himself as a "master carpenter", not a "master cabinetmaker", perhaps your expectations are a bit too high.

Pete C.

[Leon]

Me too but Poplar is often substituted for Walnut and much cheaper especially if you are going to douse it with paint.

[David]

Why did it take this long to be horrified, Brian? :) :)

dave

[cselby]

I have learned not to have expectations.

I'm not knocking his work, in fact it's actually quite good - up to the finishing part, sometimes. I would lay paint on MDF/plywood/particle board and maybe on a fence board, but not on expensive woods particularly the ones that are hard to come by.

Pete

[Leuf]

When I saw that episode I immediately checked the wreck for the thread complaining about it. I'm not shocked at what he did, but I am shocked it took this long for one to show up :) "dark walnut stain" is too kind, that may as well have been black paint. Maybe they cut out the part where he goes "Oh crap, I should have tested on a piece of scrap."

"It seems to be evening out the color" Uhhh... yep, it's even Norm.

I thought maybe once he brought it out in the sun like he always does at the end it wouldn't look as dark, but darned if I could see any grain even then.

But he did use some hand tools making it, that counts for something. But he also used the "industrial pocket hole machine" so that negates that.

-Leuf

[Dave Jackson]

Yea, he had the right wood, just picked the wrong project for it. Natural finish would have been really cool. --dave

[Greg G]

Uhh... I guess that would have been me.

Atlanta PBA - Terrestrial ATSC broadcast channel: 21.1

515000 khz - Video PID: 49 - Audio PID: 52 - Transport Stream ID: 747

Before the recent republican cuts to the PBS budget, they were broadcasting considerable content at 1920x1080 res, but since, it's been mostly SD, small HD, and non-16:9 content.

Now don't get too excited and run out and buy one of those bug infested HDTV receivers just yet. The video looks as though it has been touched by analog equipment, but it is broadcast in HD, but NOT

16:9. It is HD but not wide aspect ratio. ( SD is 740x480 or less)

Here is a frame - if you care to see the lumpy parts. Native broadcast resolution, about 1400x1080:

would link you to a video clip, but a 15 second raw transport stream clip of the finishing sequence is about 13.616 Mb. Re-encoded into a DVD resolution MPEG-2/AC3 stream, it is still 6 Mb. A full 25 minute NYW episode is around 4 Gigs of TS data.

FWIW,

Greg G.

[Fly-by-Night CC]

After how many years of making furniture does one qualify to call himself a furniture maker (not a master, just a good ol' furniture maker)?

Norm's been at it for, what, coming up on 18 years now? Likely his NYW furniture building gig is sitting pert near 1/2 of his adult wage earning life. Me thinks he's had enough time and experience at furniture making to drop that tired old overplayed excuse.

[LRod]

That's because the episode just aired last Saturday (25 Feb; just five days ago) on the national PBS feed and some local PBS outlets. Likely there are very few wreckers that have even seen it yet.

I'm a week behind the national feed in my market (Orlando area) and I haven't seen it yet, either. By the end of whine season (probably two of them) I'll be four to five weeks behind.

[Larry Bud]

LOL!

Yeah, the Superbowl in HD was AWFUL (rolling eyes!).

The broadcast may be HD, but if the video isn't 16:9, it's certainly not shot in HD.

[Greg G]

I wouldn't know - who wants, or has time, to sit in front of the tube for 3 hours? What I do know is that more money is spent on eye-candy and tweaking the HDTV broadcasts of football games in the US than any other material, because that's what sells TVs, gas-grills, 6 bladed razors and $200B in Chinese imports. Inexplicably, sports broadcasts are the premiere example of the medium.

But there are issues with HDTV at this point in time. glaring A/V Sync problems, gross artifacts from mangled bit streams and MPEG2 encoding, lockups in confused digital equipment, etc. Consumer response has been tepid at best, and most early adopters of this technology, like most others, pay a premium for the privilege of working the bugs out.

This isn't only _my_ opinion, see: Implementation Subcommittee Finding, IS/191, ATSC Implementation Subcommittee Finding: Relative Timing of Sound and Vision for Broadcast Operations, which is available on the ATSC Web site.

a nutshell, ITU R BT.1359-1 was carefully considered and found inadequate for purposes of audio and video synchronization for DTV broadcasting.

and

've been in the video business for a third of a century, and IMHO, HDTV is not quite ready for prime time, and is being forced down the public's throat. I also feel that in the best interests of National Security, standard NTSC broadcasting and VHF band allocations should be left as is, not only to service an alternate lower tier market, but to provide a simple, durable, proven fallback method of communications. But idiots and their cell-phones are clamoring to claim the frequencies for their superior coverage/penetrating abilities.

IMHO, there are other factors to consider as well. When an EMF burst destroys all these cell-phones, satellites, DTV's and their supporting infrastructure, good old ham radio and NTSC will be the only forms of communications for quite some time.

Unlikely, perhaps, but terrorists & solar activity warn 'be prepared'.

Never claimed that it was shot in HD, and in fact, implied otherwise. The chroma-crawl implies old analog and bad transcoding to DTV.

FWIW,

Greg G.