****  CFDA meeting October 12 at Corosh - Members' slide show ****

Executive Board Meeting: 
At 3 Design, 1431 W. Chicago Ave. 6:30 pm on Wednesday, October 20. The principle matters on the agenda will be the selection of new officers and committee chairmen and policies for the upcoming Sustainable Furniture Show.

Meeting Programs:

October 12, Recent Designs: Members present recent work and works in progress for constructive review, comment and advice from other members. This is a great opportunity to get in touch and get inspired by other members' work and points of view.In additional we want to give some focus on ideas for sustainable furniture in order to ready members for the Cultural Center show next May.

November 9, Furniture Critic Glenn Adamson. Glenn is a decorative arts curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Many members will have heard him speak at the national Furniture Society Conferences. He will talk about the process of critically evaluating studio furniture.

Miscellaneous:

For the last six months I have been buying good quality, american made bandsaw blades from a firm in North Carolina called Wood Craft Bands. They have served their local furniture industry for years, but now they have expanded into website marketing. They offer a full line of wood cutting and metal cutting blades, though it takes some perseverance to understand the presentation on the website. The address is www.woodcraftbands.com. The prices are far lower than I the prices I had been getting from DoAll.

Announcements
Michael Obrecht has begun working on a set of chairs.

Antanas has begun making desks for the field museum. He is finding that working with commercial clients have distinct advantages over the residential arena, for monetary and personal resource reasons.

John Krieghauser found an excellent source for band saw blades 65% lower prices www.woodcraftbands.com

Items required for the members presentation in Oct.
John K. - Screen
John K. - Slide projector/ digital projector
Pete R. - Laptop

Glenn Adison, the Milwaukee Art Museum curator will be coming to a meeting we need to clarify what he will be doing.

Anyone interested in becoming a Public Relation Volunteer?

Judy Saslow Show

John Sirovatka met with Judy S. and staffers. There are three main things that Judy S. wants from this show.
1. To make sales
2. Wants us to pay for advertising
3. Wants to help the CFDA
John still has received little information from club members, please find anything, send John a sketch or picture (see below). John has done an excellent job keeping this opportunity alive we need to supply him with this information. Right now its looking like the show will open on Nov. 19th thru to the end of the year Dec. 31st.

What to send to John Sirovatka:

1. Pictures/sketches, dimensions, materials, descriptions
2. Short Bio
3. Include Pricing
4. Email: John@sirovatka.com

Sustainability Show

The show will be next May and six weeks long. The show will focus on the idea of sustainability (hence the title) each designer will create a piece of furniture with that idea in mind. Each designer will paint a story of why their piece of furniture is sustainable. The group discussed at length the question: what is sustainable furniture? You should be ready to tell a story about why your design is sustainable. What glue did you choose, why did you pick that wood, was it made with electric, what stain/finish, how long will your piece last, these are a few of the questions/ideas that were discussed about sustainability.

We need to plan a regular meeting to talk about this show.

Some ideas about the show:
1. Play a looping movie during the show
2. Advertise for other groups to enter show
3. Cultural Center / Large venue
4. Create deadline for designs
5. Include select groups and area designers (Green drinks etc…)
6. Advertise show in various magazines
7. Entry fee for show in addition to yearly fee
8. Gain interest from Dow (wheat board people) and other companies for donations of materials that are sustainable….

Tour of Bretford

The Bretford tour began in the office area, where the employees use and test all of the furniture it manufactures. The front hallway had a time line of Bretford beginning in the 1940's thru to present time. It was interesting to see the timeline of how the furniture evolved as technology changed - from the film projection cart to the modern computer desk.

We started the tour in the metal fabrication area where we saw hundreds of large weld setup fixtures. These fixtures play an integral role in the quality and speed at which parts are welded both for robotic welding and manual welding. The impressive CNC robotic welding arm quickly and accurately created the welds, while the operator on the opposite side concurrently loaded a separate welding fixture for the next cycle.

The tour went on to the testing area and assembly area. Pieces of furniture were tested according to the appropriate standards such as BIFMA and ANSI that address overall stability and quality. An example of Bretford's testing technique was to stack multiple 25 pound weight atop of a table and measure structural integrity.

Onto the wet electrostatic spray painting area: The electrostatic spray is a type of paint that uses an electric charge to help evenly cover a metal part with paint. This area had hundreds of metal parts hanging from a ceiling track holding the parts in single file. The parts passed through the spray booth where the wet charged spray was applied and then through a 380 degree oven to dry the paint. (This line never stops running.)

The next area was the sheet steel processing center: This area had several pieces of equipment: cnc turret press, press brake, laser cnc, and flywheel press. The cnc turret press punched different features into sheet steel such as holes, chamfers, radiuses. The press brake made angled bends into sheet steel. The cnc laser with its large vacuum arm lifted the 4'x8' (max 1/4") sheets of steel into the cnc laser loading tray; and once loaded, the laser perfectly cut a variety of patterns that are first drawn in AUTOCAD or SOLDWORKS and then converted to machine code (G-code). The flywheel press was designed for high output production using very costly die. After the investment of a die, the cost per a part becomes very efficient as these presses make 200 to 1000 parts per a minute, which is much faster than a cnc laser.

The final area was the wood processing center. The wood inventory is based on the "supply and demand" principle. All materials have a bar code that relate to a specific project, thus minimizing material cost and avoiding misused or lost product. Some common materials are MDF, Wheat Board and Particle Board. There were several large cnc routers, some three spindle router tables that were used to cut/size two to three tops simultaneously. Some cnc routers where set up similar to the continuous running cnc robotic welders where one part was being made while another part was being set up. For finish sanding there was a large 62" wide cnc belt sander that had a 3 belt progression.

Towards the back of Bretford we saw the massive wood grinder that takes in all wood waste and creates wood pulp/ scrap that is ejected into large truck trailers lined up in the back of the facility. It is interesting to note that while the scrap is typically used for horse bedding, walnut can not be added because of its deadly toxicity to horses. Also in the back of Bretford there where two large dust collectors about 3 stories in height.
Other notable pieces of equipment were the cnc edge-bander that would automatically move the plywood and make it easy for one user to operate the machine, a large plywood laminating machine, an automated molding machine and panel saw.

The final piece of equipment was the UV clear finishing center. The panel is first is sprayed and brushed with the UV curable clear. The panel is then passed through the UV curing light chamber and then sanded. The part is then flipped over and the process is repeated again for the other side completing a total 40-minute execution. The UV curing process is very environmentally friendly because the clear coat is fully cured after it passes through the UV chamber and has no out gassing.

This was a wonderful tour of Bretford! The CFDA would like to thank Bretford and Chris Brandel for making this possible.

How can civilization continue without exhausting the resource base that sustains it? There are many answers to this question but no single point of view predominates. Sustainability is the attempt to build a society that can exist in harmonious balance with the environment. While sustainability is the buzz word of the moment, it is more than a fad. It is the spawn of the environmental movement, which has been growing for a century, and sustainability is likely to be a central theme in design for decades to come. Here are seven ways you might relate your furniture designs to this growing movement. Use your imagination.

1. Renewable Resources: Make your piece from sustainable materials. Maybe you could build with certified or plantation grown lumber. Weyerhaeuser advertises a plantation grown eucalyptus hybrid called Lyptus. They might even give you some if you built with it, and surely they would provide information on its ecological credentials. Similarly the wheat straw panel people and other manufacturers of low environmental impact products will likely cooperate with you just to have their products showcased in the Cultural Center.

2. Do more with less: Could you make a piece that fulfilled its function while using less material, consuming less energy and producing less pollution?

3. Whole Picture: Consider the entire life cycle of the design. The environmental impact of a piece of furniture extends well beyond its initial manufacture. It must be marketed, transported, maintained and ultimately replaced. Anything you can do to reduce the environmental cost at any stage of the piece's existence counts. Chris Brandel spoke of the competition to build a collapsing stool that could be shipped in a standard Fed Ex package.

4. Eco-Tech: Design a piece using new, low impact technologies. Many newly developed materials claim reduced environmental impact: There are the low VOC non-toxic finishes and that have become increasing viable. Some products involve novel recycling ideas. Was it Pete Radecki who brought the shredded money incased in resin to one of our meetings? And that is just one example. Many people believe that new technology will reduce pollution and ease the burden on mines, forests and energy sources. Working with new materials in new ways is always challenging, but the rewards are potentially there.

5. Timeless Rather Than Timely: Instead of designing a piece expressing the fashion of the moment, design one that embodies a more timeless appeal. The quiet dignity of James Krenov's pieces convey this approach.

6. Spiritual Rather Than Material: Some designers make furniture a vehicle for spiritual values and deeper connection with life and nature. George Nakashima's work perfectly expresses this approach. Think of the solitary bowl on the table in the sparsely furnished room; then think "What does that table look like?"

7. Tell people how to live: Frank Lloyd Wright once said that an architect's job is to tell his clients how to live. Indeed, every piece we make advocates and expresses a certain kind of lifestyle for our clients. We have all seen movies that present an apocalyptic vision of the future. But we are looking for an alternative to that. What we are looking for is a vision of the furniture that people will have in some future, sustainable, utopian civilization.