MY FAVORITE OAK PIECE

Loved the many reactions to the 9 foot painting easel hubby made and decided to tell you how it's made. He wants to stay anonymous, so I wiped his face out of the pics.

In Holland one cannot find work as a carpenter unless one finished trade school.This carpenter comes from a carpenter's family. His father was a carpenter, and also hubby's younger brother.

This means that he is not only very skilled with wood,
but also thinks in terms of solutions, and is interested how parts are put together (like a mechanic).

We were in an art warehouse once and looked at the different mechanisms in easels.
*I needed one that could hold big paintings, and
*an easel that could be transported easily, since I regularly paint somewhere else at painting events.

The main parts are :
the oblong base on rollers, because I wouldn't want to lift this baby, LOL
An oblong frame in the front
that holds the two 9 foot tall sliding posts
Two supporting posts in the back that hold the front of the easel in place
the sliding contraption.



Then comes the question: what comes where? All these pieces just look planks of wood to me!
Since I'm not a carpenter, I gave him a little interview.

What was the most time consuming and intricate part in building this easel?
To make it slide up and down well.

How did you do that?
The tong and groove on the side of the 2 tallest vertical supports makes it slide for different sizes of canvas

The shelf to hold paintings supplies can also be adjusted, right?
The shelf can be winched because of the tong and groove inside of the two outside vertical posts.

And the angle of the biggest posts can be adjusted as well (that's important for me because larger canvases need to stand more straight, so I can reach it with my arms)


Here he has a look of how well the wood is stained. In my layman's observations that seems to be very important for carpenters. Now can your hubby or friend build you an easel like this?
Hope I didn't go too technical on you:) My explanation was longer, but when I read it to hubby, he said it sounded confusing.


Voila, the end result. This oak easel will last longer than my generation!
My kids joked, "if dad makes it, it will hold up for 300 years", when some of his colleaques complained that when the owners changed their mind about their kitchen, it took the workers a long time to take apart what hubby had built before.