Book 'em

Nothing quite compares to the feeling of completing a creative project.

Kim and I carried this completed book case out of the workshop and into the bedroom yesterday.  It's the first large piece of furniture I've finished in some time.  Sure, I've done plenty of other smaller projects, but this one has been simmering and slowly coming along for quite some time.  In fact, the drawings I made for it are dated 2008.  Kim reminds me that since then I've created a few other things outside of the workshop, but still.  Five years on a case piece is a long time!

I've written about this project before here on Commonplace.  There was a post about making dowel pegs from firewood.  I talked about preparing the lumber in this post, which also shows the inspiration for the project- an article written by Shaker furniture expert Christian Becksvoort.  His version can be seen on his site- boy howdy, I saved $4,500!  And yes, I adjusted the measurements from his example- my version is about 6" wider.  This post is mostly about Memorial Day, but there is a picture of the dovetails, freshly cut, that hold the case sides together.  And in this post, the shelves were but a drawing taped to the wall and a pile of lumber.

Here is the case with the doors closed, empty of books.  It is made from solid black cherry.  The wide lumber (the top and sides are 12" wide boards) comes from a memorable snowy day, probably 15 years ago, when I acquired it from a barn in western Geauga county- the personal stash of an octogenarian woodworker who could no longer make use of it.  I think of him and his kindness often when I'm working in the shop.  The small table in front is one of a pair that I built about 8 years ago.  The bed frame was built with the same lumber.

Dovetails are a mechanical joint, and here they connect the top of the case to the sides.  The shelves are also connected to the case sides with sliding dovetail joints.

I'm particularly proud of the perfectly matched door knobs I turned on the lathe.

 Here's the case, doors open, loaded with trout and fly fishing books.

The young apprentice says it measures up!

1869 Carpenters' Shop

Earlier this week Joel Moskowitz, proprietor at Tools for Working Wood, posted a photo to his blog of a wonderful engraving he found while at the public library on the day after Thanksgiving.

The engraving, from the June 26, 1869 London Illustrated News, shows the interior of a "carpenters' shop"- really a cabinetmaker's shop if you ask me.  The men are building furniture here, not houses.

The library where I work owns a fairly complete run of this periodical, so I located the image in question and scanned it at high resolution to get a better look at it.  Here it is.

The level of detail in the image is wonderful.  In the foreground, two men work at low benches: one at a saw bench ripping a plank of lumber, the other sitting astride the stile of a panel frame while mortising it with a mallet and chisel.  As it so happens, I was working in just the same fashion just a short time ago, chopping mortises in the stile of the frame for the back panel of a book case I'm building.


Other delights abound in the image.  The man on the foreground left is working on a large glued up panel, perhaps a table top.  There are completed tables with lovely cabriole legs on the right.


I did a very small amount of manipulation of the image in Photoshop to clean up the image.  I removed some wording from the bottom of the image: after the title, on the original it says "-see page 641", a reference to the article in which the image is mentioned.  The article tells that the shop is part of a facility built on Vauxhall Bridge Road by the Guards, where soldiers could socialize and- in this shop- "learn the trade of carpentry."

If you'd like a print of the engraving to hang on your shop or office wall,  I've uploaded the image to imagekind.com at full resolution (600dpi).  From Imagekind you can select from a large number of sizes, paper types, mounting, matting and framing options.  For $16 you can get a 16"x10.5" print on enhanced matte paper.

Here is the full size scan if you'd like to download and print it on your own.  It is 6175x4048 pixels and about 25MB in size.

I hope you enjoy this image as much as I do!

Surprises from the stacks

We've been working on an inventory project at work, identifying books that were not added to our catalog when we transitioned from cards-in-drawers to records-in-computers about 30 years ago.  We've come across some real gems, and here are just two that struck a chord with the woodworker in me.

Both are academic, but completely fascinating to anyone who has an interest in period work.  Here are two illustrations from the books- on the left are two photographs of bodgers (the term for chairmakers), one installing legs to a seat, the other bending what will become the back of a Windsor chair.  On the right is a reproduction of an image of an early gang saw mill.

From The Early Sawmills of New Jersey:

Sawmills, unlike gristmills, were not places of romantic interest.  Although the early sawmills were run by wooden machinery, the water wheel vibrated the building, there was no odor of ground meal, no millstones to rumble, no dusty miller drawing in fat bags of grist, and no miller's daughter to enhance the surroundings.  Instead of gently descending mealy showers, the air was full of sawdust, bad language of the men struggling with logs, and the noise and screeching of the saw.  Sawmills were places for work and not for idle gossip or the exchange of neighborhood happenings.

Big pieces smaller

The wag refers to woodworking as the process of making big pieces of wood smaller, and as I was spending a small amount of time in the shop messing about on a project over the weekend, the aphorism seemed particularly apt.

The procedure in question is making dowel pegs.  In cabinetry, these are traditionally used to pin mortise and tenon joints.  The joint is actually drawn together and held by the dowel pin.  The pins are best made when the wood is still green.  Straight grained wood is a must, and usually wood like oak is used.  In this case, the pins are for a piece I'm building using cherry.

Flash back two weeks, when I took down a small decorative cherry tree for a neighbor.  The tree had died so I offered to remove it.  I sawed the six-inch diameter trunk pieces into firewood lengths and tossed them on my pile.  The other day I stood at our kitchen window, just above the firewood stack, admiring the yard.  I looked down and noticed that one of the pieces of cherry I'd cut was straight as a rod and didn't have any knots in it.  Dowel stock!

The process is to split (rather than saw) the still-green wood to allow the length of the piece to carry the strength inherent in the grain of the wood.  So, I work from the back of the above picture to the front.  It begins with the froe and maul.  The froe is that L-shaped tool in the top right.  This cleaves the wood in half, in successively smaller pieces.  Next is the drawknife- the blade with two handles right in the middle of the picture, which I use to get the stock roughly round and roughly 1/2" in diameter.  The finishing tool in the process is the dowel plate in the lower right of the picture.  This is a piece of tool steel in which I've drilled successively smaller diameter holes.  The stick of green wood is beveled at the end to get it started in the hole, then pounded down through, peeling it like a banana to that diameter.  Those three next to the dowel plate are just about finished.  Once done, they'll be allowed to dry completely before being used to pin the 14 or so mortise and tenon joints on my bookcase project.

On adding vocabulary

Organology.

That's my new word for today, and it came to me through an internet-typical series of clickety-clicks. Here's how.

One of the blogs that I follow originates from the Colonial Williamsburg's Hay Shop, the period cabinetmakers shop in that wonderful town. Despite being set firmly in the eighteenth century, the workers there recently began a blog, where they write about the work that they do. And they are without doubt men after my own heart. One of the cabinetmakers there specializes in building spinet harpsichords , a trade that was necessary at the time and for that shop. He is working on a piece, but due to nagging tendinitis, is unable to work with tools, so has been reading up on the history of spinets.

In his post, he mentions having read a recent dissertation from the University of Edinburgh, a two volume brute, by Peter Geoffrey Mole which discusses (among other things, no doubt) construction methods of period instruments. Following that link, I kept myself to reading just the abstract of the work, but marveled at the index terms, among them Organology.

Further curiosity and tippity-tapping lead me from the Oxford English Dictionary through the Grove Dictionary of Music (both of these behind Ivory Tower pay walls, sadly) and of course Wikipedia to explain that this is the field of study of the history of musical instruments, and reminds me quite a bit of how the field of bibliography studies the history and "construction" of books, if you will.

Aren't connections super?

Iowa Trip

We took a fantastic quick trip to Iowa over Memorial Day weekend to visit with Jane and her family. It's a lot of driving- about 1500 miles (fortunately at nearly 50 mpg in the hybrid)- but well worth it. Cedar Rapids was great! Shall we tell them about it, Sam? Yes we should.

On Saturday we took a day trip to Jefferson, Iowa. Kim's friend Brooke lives in Omaha, and she and Kim decided that it would be fun to meet somewhere halfway between Omaha and Cedar Rapids. I brainstormed and came up with Jefferson. This charming small town is home to RVP~1875, a "living history" woodworking shop where the owner Robby Pedersen builds furniture in the style of and using the methods Iowa furniture makers would have used in 1875, and a place I've long thought would be fun to visit. It made a great place to spend some time while Kim and Brooke caught up with each other's lives.

First stop was the Uptown Cafe, where we met Brooke and had a tasty lunch.

On the city square, the Lincoln Highway is marked with this stone marker. The square is also home to the Mahanay Bell Tower, a 168 foot tall carillon tower. We enjoyed taking an elevator to the top of the tower for the views of the town and surrounding countryside.

Sam enjoyed the lawn, and visiting the Ben Franklin (in the background). Jane and I visited RVP~1875 where Robby gave us a nice hour long tour while Sam, Kim and Brooke strolled. We rounded out the day trip with a stop for ice cream before returning to Cedar Rapids.

Sunday we visited a small farm zoo in Cedar Rapids in between rain showers. Sammy loved seeing the ducks, lambs, piglets and ducks.

He also got a third chance at a birthday party, opening a few gifts from Aunt Jane, Uncle Bruce and his cousins.

Thanks for hosting us, Nesmiths! We had a great time!

Weekend update

It has been a busy weekend of fun and chores. Photographic evidence:

We've got other plans for Memorial Day weekend, so geranium planting came early. I wrote about why we plant geraniums last year.

Here we are weeding. It was a very wet spring here (to say the least) so the daffodils did very well. Usually they are dried out by now.

Sam wasn't sure how to respond to the grass on his feet. He'd hold them up to keep them from being tickled. He didn't mind crawling in it though.

At Alger, the lad got his first taste of dirt. It may look like chocolate, but it is definitely not chocolate.

It was hot work, so we soothed our bellies and memories with a trip to Malley's.

This is not dirt, it is chocolate.

Sunday morning, video chat to France wasn't working, but Sam was happy to see the sun after morning rain showers.

Rainy morning meant time for me in the shop. This is my current project, a glass-door bookcase in cherry. The top-to-sides dovetails are done!

From the Shop

Colder weather makes for more time for indoor projects, and as such, I'm back at work in the shop. I've not done much in the way of furniture building for more than a year, and am itching to get back at it. Construction and household projects are satisfying, but cabinetmaking is more so for me.

I've got three sets of plans up on the wall. First are two smaller projects: a pair of saw benches, and a long-overdue triple frame for three watercolors by my brother-in-law. Finally, a bigger project, a glass door book case.

This fall I've been building Shaker boxes. These are fun to make and can be done with small chunks of time. Their form and utility are wonderful. My friend Daniel was interested in learning how to make them, so we worked together. I've made two sets of sizes #0 through #5, which are all done but for finish.

A nested set, sizes #0 through #4, sans tops and bottoms.

Stacked #0 through #4, on top of a pair of bigger #5s.

Stack of pine (saw benches) and cherry (picture frame and bookcase) awaiting their fate.

"Don't make something unless it is both necessary and useful;

but if it is both necessary and useful,

don't hesitate to make it beautiful."

Making Wood Smaller

With rain in the forecast for the afternoon, I knocked off a little bit of painting before breakfast, and then after my second cup of coffee, headed outside to make big pieces of wood smaller. I've got two projects in my sights- a quick build of a pair of saw benches, and then a piece of furniture that should give me plenty to work on through the winter. It's a small bookcase with glass doors, out of cherry.

Making big wood smaller. The wood I am using started out looking like this:

Prunus Serotina (Black cherry)
(c) 2002 Steven J. Baskauf

I bought it milled from a man who lives just a mile or two from Louis Bromfield's Malabar Farm in central Ohio. This guy owns a small mill and saws lumber from trees on his own farm and those nearby.

I rough cut the pieces I will need and then fired up one of my few nods to modernity, a Dewalt surface planer. Most of the wood I use is either straight from the sawmill or sometimes rough planed, oversize. I spent about two hours planing up the pieces of wood to nearly-finish dimension. All finish work will be done by hand.

Here is the prodigious pile of shavings created by the Dewalt. This tool is used outside only!

And here is the resulting stack of lumber. It is now in my shop, where the moisture content will adjust from being outside in the garage to that of the house. I likely won't do much work between now and the holidays, but it's nice to know this beautiful cherry lumber is waiting for me in the shop.



This bookcase will be built along the lines of one built by Christian Becksvoort, which he detailed in an issue of Fine Woodworking magazine many years ago and which was reprinted in his book In the Shaker Style: Building Furniture Inspired by the Shaker Tradition (below).