Post #557271 by tikiyaki on Fri, Oct 1, 2010 11:47 AM

My new bar.

Me and Kirby started working on this every Wednesday afternoon about 3 months ago. We drew inspiration from this Witco piece from Tiki Modern page 260, from the Hawaiian Inn in Florida, and classic Witco Wall hangings.

The subject matters of the carvings are personal...Bongos, a guitar, fish and waves (I'm a pisces) , as well as some modern/abstract forms and of course, tikis and tapa designs.

I love mid century modern, especially it's take on primitive form, so there ya go. We put spears on each side to give it that jungle feel.
We STILL may paint some of the carvings, like in the above photo, but for now it is what it is.

Kirby did most of the hard stuff, and provided the shelf unit that served as the frame. I was the torch guy, burning everything....A Tiki arson, if you will.

For the bar top, we tried painting it red (not my idea !) and it didn't look right, so, I had to strip the paint, which of course took off some of the top layer of the plywood, and then opted for burning and then applying several coats of amber shellac, a la Bamboo Ben. Due the paint stripping, the top has an uneven surface, which gives it a nice aged, nautical kind of feel....so it actually worked out ok.

The Color scheme goes perfect with my chairs

This was alot of fun, and I have to thank Kirby for doing this project with me and lending me his talent, tools, materials and workspace.
Now if I could just get him down here to have a drink from it :)