Flourtown business turns damaged trees and discarded materials into high-end furniture

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  John Duffy started Stable Tables to fill a need for customized, local tables. He makes them from fallen trees, reclaimed lumber and wood from old houses and barns. (Photography by Milton Lindsay)

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  Trees with damage from insects or fungi are preferable for making uniquely beautiful tables. (Photography by Milton Lindsay)

By Claire Marie Porter

It’s the imperfect trees that make a beautiful piece of furniture for John Duffy of Stable Tables. 

“I don’t really consider myself an artist or anything like that,” Duffy explains. “I’m more of a business person.”

Stable Tables, he says, began after he bought a table from a carpenter in Maryland and had to wait out a 14-week backlog to get it. He saw a need for handcrafted tables that were customizable, and locally made. He adds that he was an executive telecom operator, and was looking for something else to do. 

“My [real estate business] partner is the one who really helped me get started,” says Duffy, referring to Chris English, a carpenter by trade. “He’s a general contractor and can make anything.”

Duffy, on the other hand, got his start making tables in 2003.

“The first table I made for Stable Tables was the first table I ever made,” he says. 

The company mainly sells tables and countertops, but Duffy says it occasionally also makes benches, tables for conference rooms and desks as well as side tables and coffee tables. 

The wood is mostly salvaged, and comes from trees felled by storms, age, or disease; old buildings or barns; and salvage companies — most of which would otherwise end up in a landfill. 

There are enough trees dying from
natural causes that there is no reason to buy trees from a mill that are being harvested, Duffy says. Most are fallen, some are dead, and occasionally a developer might be cutting down trees after someone bought land and is trying to clear it. 

The table bases are also made of salvaged material. One of his favorite materials, unique to Stable Tables, is made from the sifter of a mulch grinder, a heavy piece of metal that resembles a Connect Four game board. Repurposed scaffolding, old porch posts, and cast iron knitting table legs, are some of the other materials used. 

Customers want things that are unusual, says Duffy, with custom sizes and custom finishes. They may have already been to a restoration furniture store and found they can’t get exactly what they want. 

“Live edge” tables are a specialty that is in high demand, where the wood’s edge isn’t sanded straight, but left with its
natural curves. 

Book-matching is another method Stable Tables uses, which involves placing two pieces cut from the same tree, one after another, joining them side-by-side with the grain aligned so that they create a mirror image of each other. The result is eye-catching and highly desirable.

Over time, Stable Tables has evolved from building rustic to more contemporary-style furniture. 

 “I don’t really make things your grandmother would have,” says Duffy. Adding that customers often think they want something rustic, when what they really have in mind is actually quite modern. 

There is no cheating when it comes to the process of making a table. It’s a long process that requires properly curing wood. When a mill first gets a log, it has to sit in log form for one year per inch, in order to properly air dry. Then, it can go into a kiln.

The best tables are usually the most damaged trees, says Duffy. The company’s most supportive business partners are insects and fungi. 

“I look for wood that’s already got crazy stuff going on in it,” he says.

For example, maple is not a not a very exciting wood, says Duffy. It’s just a plain light brown, usually used for painting or staining. But a lot of maples tend to die from either mushrooms or a bug that bores into the plant tissue causing clusters of inky black spots.

“They do really cool things to the wood,” says Duffy.

The mushrooms cause “spalting,” a wood coloration that resembles tiger stripes. It can be found in dead trees or live trees with many mushrooms attached. 

“In the case of maple it enhances the way the wood looks,” says Duffy. 

But the mill has to know about the timing of spalting. The wood can’t sit too long. It’s like aging a grape.

“Because if it goes too far, the wood gets all punky and soft and it can’t be used,” says Duffy.

Currently, Stable Tables is comprised of two full-time employees and one part-time employee. And it will stay that way, according to Duffy. 

“I enjoy it because I don’t have a lot of people working for me,” he says. “I’ll never make the money I could make, because I want to build stuff; I don’t want to manage people.” 

Duffy is involved in the making of each and every table, whether this means picking up, cutting, or mining the wood; building or sanding the tables; or dropping off the resulting wood scraps, which they donate to wood shops at local schools. 

“I want to know what that table is going to look like at the end,” he says. “I’m very hands-on.” 

His greatest satisfaction comes from choosing a wood that’s so unique and beautiful, it just needs a good presentation, then “people look at it and think: ‘that’s art.’”

He’s in the sweet spot for a small business, he says. 

“I’m happy every day,” says Duffy. “I sleep well.”

This father-and-son cooperage is math, and may stay that way

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  Ryan Ebner chars a whiskey barrel. (Photo by Milton Lindsay)

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  He and his father Jeff stand with a finished product. (Photo by Milton Lindsay)

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  The Ebners fit staves together with hoops made of mild or stainless steel. (Photo by Milton Lindsay)

By Claire Marie Porter

Ryan Ebner is a construction consultant by day and a cooper by night. In a rented workspace in West Philadelphia, shared with Ice Sculpture Philly, he and his father, Jeff, moonlight amongst smells of smoke and wood.

The father-son duo started Anthony Barrel Company in 2015 as a side hustle. Jeff  is a retired Volvo logistics engineer who commutes from Reading. His son Ryan lives in South Philadelphia. With two decades between them, they experiment with old and new methods for barrel-making. Their handiwork is intended for craft whiskey distillers.

For Ryan, whiskey-barrel making is a passion, and the wood brings him to life, as he shapes, chars and toasts. 

“When I started working a desk job, there was no real access to hands-on problem solving,” he says, “so this fills that void.”

Ryan read a lot of books and watched a lot of YouTube videos to get started. 

There is machinery that can make a whiskey barrel. But there’s nothing like engaging in the centuries-old tradition of woodworking. The 3- to 15-gallon barrels are made in small batches, using various tools and methods. 

The intricacies were something Ryan wanted to figure out on his own, he says.

That includes the complex math used to fit a barrel together.

“It’s mostly just the arc of a curve—understanding how staves fit together,” he says.

The wood, mostly white oak, primarily comes from a mill in rural Pennsylvania. 

The wood is air-dried for at least a year before it’s transported to the workshop. Then it becomes either staves, the body of the barrel, or heads, the pieces that fit on either end. 

Once the staves and heads are cut and prepared, the Ebners fit them together with hoops made of mild or stainless steel. This is an assemblage called the “rose,” for its blooming look pre-bending. The barrel rose is then steamed and evenly winched. Then comes the dramatic part, Ryan’s favorite—the part with the fire. 

Toasting is the process of helping the wood to caramelize by gently heating the barrel at temperatures of 300 to 450 Fahrenheit. Caramelization occurs around 320 degrees. 

“From there you get more complex flavors,” says Ryan. 

The Ebners’ toasting process takes about 45 minutes in total and occurs in a big, insulated barrel that functions like a wood pellet grill. 

“Caramel, vanilla, the sweetness of it, comes from the barrel,” explains Ryan. 

In fact, 50 to 80 percent of a whiskey’s flavor comes from the barrel alone, he says. 

When charring, a process used more often for darker whiskey and smoother, richer flavors, the barrel is lit on fire using a propane torch. 

“Charring is the most satisfying thing—you smell what it’s going to taste like,” he says. 

They bag up the leftover white oak chips and take them to Urban Cowboys, the horse collective across the street, where they are used for bedding.

“The horses love it,” says Ryan. “It’s both convenient and sustainable.”

The coopers are toying with the idea of going larger, but the industrial sized 50-
gallon barrels require bigger machinery and more hands.

“I don’t know if I really want to go there,” Ryan says. “I don’t want to do big
cookie-cutter barrels.”

For him, as with most artisans, the satisfaction is in the craft itself.  

With the help of termites, Scott Keeley carves out one of the world’s most ancient instruments

Photo: Margo Reed

by Claire Marie Porter

(full story can be found here)

Scott Keeley began playing didgeridoos to treat his sleep apnea. 

“Didgeridoo players don’t snore,” he was told by his doctor. 

The didgeridoo is one of the world’s oldest instruments. It’s in the wooden brass family and was invented by indigenous Australians. An experienced “didge” player can make a myriad of sounds, from animal imitations to explosive pops, along with the omnipresent droning hum that sounds like an alien abduction. 

The name of the instrument is considered to be an onomatopoeic Western attempt to describe its sound: “didjerry, didjerry.” 

Traditionally, it’s made from termite-eaten eucalyptus or agave tree trunks, says Keeley. One myth suggests the instrument is best made by burying a log underground and allowing termites to hollow it out. 

Termites are still an important part of the process, though they don’t do the work alone. The best trees are those that are dead and termite-eaten, but still standing, says Keeley. Subterranean termites, or white termites, prefer darker, more humid areas, so they do most of their munching towards the center of the tree. 

There’s little margin for error. If the tree has been dead too long, it will fall apart—if it’s too green, the instrument will split within a year. The rest is a mystery, says Keeley.

“Only one in 100 is an excellent didge, and we don’t know what makes it that way,” he says.

Keeley has gotten very good at finding the perfect dead standing tree.

You want the bark flaky, he explains, not completely sloughed off. Traditionally, the root of the tree would form the bell of the instrument, creating a natural flare. 

The best didge-making trees are those that have had a hard life, he says. The best instrument he’s made to date was from an 80-foot-tall, dead black birch. 

When he began to cut at the roots, he noticed that they had fought to get their nutrition, growing around a rock. This made it so the base of the tree already had a natural bend, and when Keeley knocked it over, an enormous puddle of termites poured out. 

“I really ruined their day,” he says. But it made the perfect didge. 

The process is straightforward: Keeley preps the outside, then sands the trunk with a belt sander, tapering the wood to the top. He uses tools and materials from
NextFab South Philadelphia, where he works as a patent agent.

After treating the outside of the trunk and cleaning up its roots, Keeley slices the whole thing lengthwise and carves it like a dugout canoe. He shapes the mouthpiece and glues the two halves back together, then sands, polishes and plays. 

The whole process takes about four days. 

There’s a final mystery in the making—a maker can’t know what key the didge will be in until it’s complete. It depends on the growth of the tree and the hollowing work of the termites. The majority of Keeley’s end up being in the keys of E or F major. 

Keeley’s didgeridoo is about as tall as he is, around 5 feet and 8 inches. 

He plays it on a still, sunlit day in the
NextFab courtyard space, placing one foot on top of the other—eyes focused, lips pursed—as he creates a low drone that mingles with the sounds of construction next door.

It took him about six months to learn circular breathing. 

“My technique was to just make some kind of hooty-tooty noise while breathing,” Keeley says. 

“I’ve only found three other didge-makers on the East Coast. So, I guess that makes me the third-best didgeridoo maker here,” he says, laughing. 

Piano technician Tom Rudnitsky doesn’t just fix old pianos, he reclaims their souls

Photo: Margo Reed

by Claire Marie Porter

(full story can be found here)

While Tom Rudnitsky doesn’t make instruments from scratch, he restores them—or as he might describe it, he saves their souls. 

“New pianos can be very green behind the ears,” he says. “Older pianos, they’ve been through a lot. You get this sense of history in the object.” 

Rudnitsky is a composer and pianist who became a mostly self-taught piano technician after a music-career proved to be financially unsustainable. 

“Piano restoration has been both an incredibly fun journey in its own right, and a means of creating financial stability as an artist,” he says, though pursuing music is still a long-term goal.

He was always drawn to the inner workings of the piano. 

“In music school, you’d sometimes see the piano technician on staff, pulling the action [the mechanical assembly of parts inside the body of the piano] out of the piano,” he says. “It looked so cool.”

Rudnitsky was always a tinkerer, he says, always taking things apart. So, when a customer would ask him to fix a loose key on a tuning job, he would figure out how to do it. He gathered tools and knowledge until, finally, customers were asking him if he could restore their pianos for them.

Rudnitsky started working on piano actions out of his apartment.

“I think everyone who starts has a cardboard box they keep all their tools in,” he says.

The process gets very messy very quickly. Sometimes, Rudnitsky would have to give up his living room for a week, sacrificing it to house piano parts. 

The process of restoring piano keys alone can take up to 35 hours. 

“This involves precisely milling the keys, trimming the new plastic keytops to size, and then leveling and aligning all of the keys back in the piano,” he says. 

If he’s rebuilding an entire piano the whole process could take up to 300 hours.

The goal is to make as consistent-sounding an instrument as possible. 

“When you play the piano, every key should feel the same,” he says. 

He rolls out several different tool bags, a spread that looks something like if Bob Ross and a surgeon combined their wares.

“It takes about ten times as many tools to make something as you’d think,” he says.

The woodworking culture is dominated by white males in the suburbs working alone in the basement, says Rudnitsky. So, a collaborative space like NextFab allows people from all walks of life to jump into that world without having to have a garage or surplus cash. 

“I get excited when people other than the typical woodworker wearing the flannel shirt is working,” he says. “Everyone should be able to do this.” 

Rudnitsky works on sandblasting keys from a 1920s upright piano in NextFab. The ivory natural keys and black sharps are in bundles of seven or eight notes. When removed from the piano, they look a bit like hermit crabs out of their shells. 

He takes the bundle of keys to the sandblaster, a machine that uses an abrasive mixture of sand and air to literally “blast” rust and dirt off a surface. In about five seconds, the wood on the piano lever arms changes from a dull brown to a bright, fresh-looking wood.

“It’s deeply satisfying,” he says.

Pianos don’t always have significant financial value, says Rudnitsky, but the personal value can be high, and a bond with an instrument is difficult for a musician to find.

“You can get a brand new piano,” he says. “It just doesn’t have the soul you’re looking for.” 

Tom can be reached at his website or @tomrudnitsky