Bar-height table set

I like clear fir.

Whenever possible I try to incorporate fir into any design that requires beautiful wood.  Unfortunately, clear fir is becoming outrageously expensive, and harder and harder to come by each year.

I’m also inspired by the many beautiful pieces I’ve seen made from laminated Baltic Birch plywood. In fact, take a look at “wood bench” to see one of my first steel & wood creations.  A wood box / bench for my living room.  The main problem I personally have with Baltic Birch plywood design is that in my region I can only find it in half inch thicknesses.  This means that if I want a 24 or 36 inch wide table top, I have to cut and individually glue up 48 or 72 individual pieces.  That’s a lot of glue, a lot of time, and a lot of clamps.

Lucky for me I stumbled across a particular type of engineered lumber called LVL (Laminated Veneer Lumber).  This stuff is 2′ thick and is designed to be used as structural beams and headers in wood constructed buildings.  What caught my eye was the 2″ thickness meaning 1/4 of the pieces and gluing.  I started off simple with a 3″ thick by 14″ wide bar-stool seat.  It took just 7 pieces of wood instead of the 28 pieces of birch plywood I would have needed.

Best of all, it resembles clear fir to me, (others think it looks more like bamboo).  Either way, it’s a faster and more cost effective way for me to produce this series of bar-stools and tables.

Availability…

These stools are available to purchase in either a raw steel (indoor) or powder-coated finish. Raw are $300 while powder-coating adds an additional $75.

Usual disclaimer – my stuff is built to withstand all sorts of natural disasters (meaning it’s super heavy and generally over-engineered) so shipping is not cheap.