“Finally I stumbled upon the wreck of the Kunene and fell in love with her timbers. I carted the bits off to my workshop in Knysna without a specific plan and started cleaning the multiple rusted nails out of the timber.”
Well, so the timber lay in my workshop for a while till finally there was time to make the first item. "Table 1" it was called for the lack of a better description, but in no way
did it detract from the great character and warmth that this table owned. This was more or less how it all started and now we're busy setting the standard for great looking, innovative furniture made in an environmentally conscious manner. We use exclusively timber from our wrecks which in many ways limits us in conventional thinking and forces us to let the timber dictate the size, shape and finish of the final product. These boats were chopped up with chainsaws and little regard for future use. The parameters were the size of the dump-trucks that was used to transport it. For this reason it is not possible to make very long tables without joints etc. It is their beautiful streamlined hulls that make it possible for them to sail the oceans. For exactly this reason there are very few straight planks that come off these wrecks. All of the above challenges make it so much more rewarding to work with such great raw material. Our team at the moment is small, but consistently delivers a great product. A lot of time is spent extracting our wrecks from where we found them and turning the raw chunks into usable raw material. We have a big budget for saw and planer blades because of all the metal still prevalent in the timber. A full time team member is involved in cleaning and dismantling the wrecks. The metal bits incorporated in some of the designs are all leftovers from the wrecks.
