Since the mid 90’s Batterman’s Custom Woodworking has made several fine wood products for my home, my sailboat and my imaging laboratory at RIT. They have all been of incredible quality, with many refined touches, often exploiting very clever optio...ns and covering an extremely wide variety of materials and uses.
Because custom work of any sort is as much about the ability of the craftsman to work closely with the customer, grasping their sometimes difficult to express ideas, as it is about their skill, I will describe Dean Batterman - the person - before describing some of the products he built for us. I have known Dean as a neighbor, fellow parent, a fellow engineering manager in a large nationally known manufacturing company, and as a friend. Dean is a very intelligent, creative, practical-minded, problem-solving person with a particularly good talent at listening and asking good questions to discover what is being sought by a customer. Widely known among friends and peers at work for his extreme patience he has the ability to work with many challenging situations and different types of people and personalities. He is meticulous and precise in all he does, often making detailed plans or mechanical drawings on complex projects. But above all he has a very high level of integrity, great work ethics, and a good sense of fairness and schedules in business dealings which means he stands behind his work and his commitments and is very customer oriented. All of the products he made for me are still in heavy use, many for over 10 years.
For our home he has designed and built:
o A roughly 10 foot long floor to ceiling (perfect fit!) wall unit that serves as handsome entertainment center with swiveling (large and very heavy)TV, a display case (several adjustable glass shelves w lighting) a book case and stereo shelves complete with lighted storage cabinets. Visitors rave about it!
o A robust, functional storage cupboard that fit in with the décor, cleverly using angled side pieces.
o Candle holders, trivets, valences, furniture quality shelf supports and more
o He also refinished an antique: fixing parts, adding new parts, creating a beautiful new antique looking finish
For my sail boat he has made superb interior teak panel swinging doors with rounded, precisely-fitting tops and various smaller components that all still function perfectly.
For my college imaging laboratory he designed and built 6 sets of sophisticated interchangeable wood attachments upgrading 6 older electro optical instruments at huge savings over designing costly metal parts
The bottom line: Dean is a superb craftsman who listens well to a variety of customers and can design and build or rework just about anything made of wood and do it at an affordable price .
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