Amazing how things work out sometime…..
In March ’17 an Upstate SC Anglican church emailed me with a photo of an antique Gothic Pulpit.
“Can you build this?”, was the question.
“Maybe”, I responded, “Let’s talk.”
After a meeting with the church Rector and a little pre-design ciphering we agreed to proceed and, 4 months later, the pulpit was completed.
Without a doubt this is the most complicated piece I’ve ever done or will probably ever do. There are, seemingly, no plans or even dimensions for this type of pulpit on the internet, in books, or anywhere else I could find so it all had to be ‘created’.
It is made of Cherry because the original intention was a pulpit of ‘medium color’. However, after the pieces started coming together the Rector decided to go dark, so I finished it with a Red Mahogany stain and several top coats of General Finishes Oil/Urethane blend (hand applied). This thing would have been amazing in Mahogany or Sapele, but, what can you do….
Many, many lessons learned on this build….for example, how to dial in a perfect 22.5 degree cut; heavily pigmented stain application techniques; angled bandsaw cuts, just to name a few.
It now sits in the church, my shop looks barren and undergoing a major cleanup/re-org, and I’m beginning to look to the next build. Probably something simple.
What next?