I was recently commissioned to build a few custom display stands for a few trees that my good friend and bonsai teacher Matt O. was entering in the Midwest Bonsai show that ran August 14th thru the 16th. The trees pictured below are not my trees, I only built the stands shown. The first picture is of the largest stand I have built so far. It measures 29” wide by 26” deep & stands 9” tall and was built for a truly amazing Kaede (Trident Maple). The construction of this table was fairly simple, the top frame is tongue and groove with biscuited triple miter corners that join the frame pieces with the legs. The top panel was made from 4 pieces of walnut that were book-matched and glued together with biscuits. The stretchers are joined by hand cut mortise & tenon joints directly into the legs. The doweling was the hardest & most time consuming part of the build. Since the dowels do not pass completely thru the stretchers, to keep the lines of the table clean, the pattern needed to be laid out exactly on each stretcher to match the pattern in the bottom of the frame. This ensured that all the dowels would be evenly spaced and true. The table was made from walnut and finished with 4 coats of poly. I would have preferred to see the finish a little darker but my client wanted a natural tone that showed the grain of the walnut.
Next is a smaller stand for his shohin Zelkova (Elm). This is one of my favorite trees in his collection and I was really excited to build this stand. This was made from the same walnut as the larger stand above and finished the same way. The construction of this stand was fairly easy as well but needed a lot more shaping in the legs and stretchers. These pieces were cut on a band saw and shaped with an orbital sanding bit in my drill press. The stretchers were again joined to the legs with mortise & tenon joints. These joints were much smaller and needed to be aligned perfectly. With something this small being off by even 1/32” really stands out.
The last picture is of a table I called my prototype, I was experimenting with the design when my client saw it. He really liked the way it complimented the lines of his chuhin Kaede (Trident Maple) but felt the original height was too tall. We decided to shorten the legs of this table to 3” from the original 7” and we were both very happy with the outcome. The top frame is a tongue & groove frame and panel design with small splines added to the corner joints. The mitered corners are joined with biscuits so these splines don’t add to the structure of the table but were added more for aesthetics. The lower frame features triple miter joinery with hand shaped legs to give it a more feminine/delicate feel that matched the feel of his tree. The top is joined to the lower frame with 1/8” dowels stained to match. This table is finished with 3 coats of walnut stain and finished with wipe on poly.
That’s it for the my first post but stay tuned, there are many more projects in the works that will be added soon!~ Jay
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