Paul Discoe the founder of
Joinery Structures and Live Edge lectured at CCA last night.
The way I found out about Joinery Structures was I saw a very long, very thin piece of wood being carried down an alley in the middle of West Oakland by the wind. The alley was behind a cement factory and I had never really noticed it.
At the time I was working for a cabinet shop and was delivering a job to the finisher to get sprayed, I saw the ribbon of wood and turned down the alley. It was a dirt road full of pot holes and I worried as the load of perfectly sanded doors and parts piled in the back of the van shifted around, but it was to late. I pulled up to it and got out and picked it up. It was so neat, it must have been 2oft long, and it was so thin it was translucent, it smelled of cedar.
From then on I always kept an ear out for info about Joinery Structures. I accumulated some intriguing stories and bits of information. I heard things like Oh yeah the guy who runs that place never wears shoes, That's Paul Discoe's operation he's so Zen you can barely hold a conversation with him. One of his clients was Larry Ellison the CEO of Oracle.
So I was excited to attend his lecture, I even had butterflies, nervous that he was going to be "too zen" to be a good speaker! But the lecture was great! (he wears flip-flops)
The next day my buddy Leon, who is a friend of Paul's took me over for a tour of the whole facility! Paul came along to show us the mill and the prefab sample house and the furniture show room.
Here's the wood shop where huge logs are milled into boards. Those really tall boards leaning up are 35 feet long! It is hard to get lumber that's 12'!
I love these two chairs in the courtyard.
This cut is to keep the post from spitting over time.
Paul published a book that combines teachings from his five years of training that he did in Japan to learn temple building with his personal stories and his projects. In the book he talks about different woods belong in specific places. Woods that have lots of knots are good for ceiling boards.
After the wood sits in the yard for about 5 years the moisture content reduces and it can be milled and then kiln dried. The moisture content needs to be at about 7%. These are boards that came out of the kiln.
I was impressed by his abundance of wood. Some how he arranged to get any tree that falls in any of the Bay Area parks. He acquired a lot of Elm when the Dutch Elm Disease broke out. He has Cypress trees from Golden Gate Park that he made into benches for the California Academy of Sciences!
He knows so much about his wood, he'll say things like, "We used fourth generation red wood", or "If they ask for vertical grain redwood without any knots you need to tell them the only place to find that is in the last virgin redwood forest up in Canada."
He is prolific as woodworker and designer, but he has hobbies too he makes olive oil and apple brandy. One of the first things he old us about when he started showing us around was how he just started learning to farm fish. He had just got the fish in the mail and now he is raising them, later he showed them to us and they were tiny little guys.
This is just the tip of the iceberg with this guy too.
