General Woodworking

I’m a lumber-scavenger.  I pick up logs here and there, split them into manageable pieces, and resaw them on my bandsaw.  Usually I seal the ends with leftover latex paint, which is somewhat effective in preventing checks in the ends.  But when I really want to preserve a piece of wood intact, I turn to paraffin wax.

My wax-on setup is decidedly low-tech.  I melt the wax in an old peanut can on a camp stove.  I’m on the lookout for an old stock pot, which will allow me to dip wider boards.  Here I’m sealing the ends of some very tough mystery wood (persimmon, I think) that will eventually become mallets and chisel handles.

A few tips on coating wood with wax:

1. Melt the wax over low heat, and then turn the burner off before dipping your wood.  Liquid wax IS flammable!
2. Set the end of the wood in the liquid wax for a few seconds, which will let the it penetrate the wood’s pores just a little.  It will also ensure that any irregularities in the surface are adequately covered.
3. Dip at least 1″ of the end into the wax.  If you cover only the end, checks will still develop.
4. If a board is too wide to dip, brush the wax on with a bristle brush.  Double-check to see that you have covered the surface completely.

Paraffin wax is easy to find in the canning section of grocery stores.  You can also save the butt ends of candles.  However, if you go to just about any rummage sale, you can pick up a whole armload of candles for cheap.

My red wax above is the remains of a big cinnamon-scented candle I salvaged, so my lumber pile will smell like Christmas all year long.

Filed under: Wood and Woodwork

Here’s a chest I finally finished this week; white oak with maple and walnut inlay. Mostly millsawn, but the front framing stock is riven. It’s been around the shop for years. One mistake I made was to put the bottom in it, and before I made a lid, I started keeping stuff in it…

so never bothered to finish it! …til now.

This view shows you something more:

Now you can see, this is not a joined chest in the usual sense. The front is joined, but the sides and back are a board chest. This format appears from time to time in t he 17th century. In this case, I nailed the front frame onto the edges of the board sides. Two 17th-c examples from  Braintree, Massachusetts have square wooden pins securing  the front to the sides.

Here’s a view showing the side of the chest:

There’s a rabbet in the rear face of the front stile, and the end board slips up into that rabbet. Similarly, the rear board is rabbeted at each end to capture the edges of the end boards.

To further the simplicity of this chest, I chose to use a wooden hinge instead of the more common iron gimmals.

http://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/setting-gimmals-you-might-know-them-as-snipe-bills/

There’s an oak slat nailed near the outside top edge of the chest’s rear board. The slat extends beyond the sides of the chest, and is whittled there to a round pin. Then the lid’s cleats extend out beyond the back, and have a hole bored in them to slip over the pins.  A little beeswax keeps this hinge working for a while.  Here’s the rear view:

Here’s the pin/cleat detail:

so if you want to take a stab at a joined chest, but feel a little intimidated, make a board chest with a joined front. This one could be even easier by making a pine chest with an oak front. That’d make it lighter too.

 

Before gluing up the joint, it’s worth taking some trouble to make sure that the two parts fit perfectly. I put the neck in a vise and hold the headstock in place while checking for gaps with a 0.05mm feeler gauge. A bright light behind the joint also helps to reveal places where the fit is defective.

Here I’ve discovered that the sides of the V are a bit loose…

…while the shoulders are tight.

A couple of fine shavings taken off the shoulders of the headstock using a shooting board…

…improves the fit. As a final check, I rub chalk over the male part of the V joint, locate the female part in position and press the joint together hard.

Where the fit is perfect, chalk will be transferred evenly. High spots, on the other hand, show up as a blotch of chalk surrounded by unchalked wood. Here it looks as if there’s a high point on one side near the mouth of the V.

A small file takes off the bump…

…and a second chalk fitting shows that the joint fits pretty well all over, except for a small low spot on one side at the apex of the V. I decide that I can live with that.

The next step is to dust off the chalk, size all mating surfaces of the joint with hot dilute hide glue and leave them to dry.

This is the clamping arrangement that I use. It’s important that the compression force runs through the centre line of the headstock and bears directly on the shoulders of the joint. Chiselling off the front of the V where it projects through the headstock allows the bar of the clamp to sit close to the surface of the headstock.

Once I’m happy that I can get the clamp into exactly the right position, I un-clamp, brush medium strength hide glue onto all joint surfaces, re-clamp it and leave it undisturbed for a couple of hours.

Here it is after taking the clamp off. The shadow below the right hand shoulder of the joint indicates that the headstock is slightly twisted relative to the neck. I suspected that this would happen while I was making the final adjustments but decided that the inaccuracy would be small enough to plane it out after the joint was glued up.

And I’m pleased to say that it was.

The back of the joint looks a bit weird until the extra block is shaved off.

But these two necks show that it comes out all right in the end. Even with a magnifying glass it’s scarcely possible to see that extra wood has been added and after the final shaping it will be quite invisible.

That’s the last of the series of posts on making a V joint. Thanks to anyone who has followed the story this far. Before finishing, I ought to add that there are many variations in the way this joint can be cut. Some makers, for example, prefer to use a template for marking out rather than a ruler and dividers. Please add a comment if you know how to do it quicker or better.

Click on the thumbnails below for larger pictures.

When it comes to finish, I want something that is easy to apply, offers a little protection and doesn't require spray equipment. And once I find a finish I like, I tend to be pretty loyal. I used Minwax's Antique Oil Finish almost exclusively before a friend turned me on to Waterlox Original Sealer/Finish about [...]

As a follow-up to a recent post about shop-made leather drawer pulls, I thought I'd share with you a photo of the completed sideboard. Just how did this piece evolve? There's a Sam Maloof cabinet that has the same proportions and drawer arrangement. I like very much the look of the all-walnut piece he built [...]

There are two types of people in the world; those who like to divide human behavior into one of two distinct groups, and those who don't. This can help us decide right from wrong, pleasant from distasteful, or fun from drudgery, but it usually turns into a way to separate "Us" from "Them". Naturally we [...]

Boy am I glad I’m a carver, not a painter. This takes forever.

 

 

but it’s getting closer. I decided to leave the ends of the chest plain. I mixed a thin yellow ochre paint for them; and have been adding more & more detail to the front & lid. I hoped it would be one more session – but I bet it’s two. Some more details in black coming up next, as well as some painted turnings between the drawer fronts.

But there’s been good ducks around Plymouth this week. It took a few tries, but my friend Marie & I found the ruddy ducks today, sleepy as all get-out…

I have only seen them in captivity before, at Buckingham Palace’s gardens…so these were my first wild ones. Well, to call them wild is an exaggeration. They barely moved their heads…at one point they sorta bumped into each other, then a two-second kerfuffle, and it was right back to tucking their heads in.

 

here is the male’s summer self, but as I said essentially in a zoo – so only here to show what this duck becomes in spring/summer. But not in the east…

Last week I wrote about epochs in the history of woodworking and several people suggested that I needed to add a revival category for all those folks making furniture now.

I didn't for two reasons. Even with the growing numbers of people making stuff the actual percentages of people making furniture for fun and friends is tiny compared to the population at large. And on the professional level the numbers are even smaller.

When I was a boy in the 1960's my parents needed some more closet space in their tiny apartment. A carpenter, a Mr. Goldstein came and did a fair amount of work on site. The closets were modern for their time, made of varnished plywood and sliding doors. We took the two cabinets with us when we moved and they live on at my parents house in Queens.

If doing something similar today my parents would have gone to Ikea, or Home Depot, or some other big chain. The idea of getting real custom work on a civil servant's salary would be pretty rare today.

On the other hand the custom cabinetmakers who are my tool customers are making really cool stuff for very rich clients.

You see custom made furniture whether made by you for yourself or made for someone rich is a form of cultural expression that we use to say something.

For the rich person it's a way of conspicuous consumption. A way of showing that they are cultured and refined. For people making stuff for themselves it's a way of showing individualism and personal values.

In my case the furniture I made is a fairly regular conversation point. When I was single it was one way I subtly showed the women who I managed to lure to my abode that I was a stable person, dextrous and rooted in tradition and traditional family values. As a family man, the solid pieces show us as traditional, non-trendy, and with a sense of history and permanence. I'm not going to be tossing the settles I made twenty years ago just because someone on the TV says furniture this year should be all blue.

There are lots of reasons for making stuff yourself and I just touched on a few reasons. All of this comes under the concept of "personal expression"

And that's what makes it art.


As furniture makers we are anomalies in our culture. Our work, even though it is most of the time in traditional forms and in many cases unoriginal forms, in the finished context of being used in a room in our house it is a personal statement just like a work of art is. We didn't have to make that table, we could have bought a table - but we didn't. This is the same idea but a different, just as valid form of expression, as painting a picture.

For a wealthy customer deciding to have someone design and make the perfect vanity for the bedroom is just as much a statement as finding the perfect picture to hang over the mantle.


For those of you who say that it's not art because the design isn't original and it's just a copy I say go to a museum and count the sculptures of "Madonna and Child" or go look at some landmarked building and count the stock details made by anonymous craftsman. Now it's art, then it was just craft. The personal expression of wanting something you made is the message of your art and it's just as valid as someone who paints a picture and has it hanging in a museum (except they have a better agent).

Note: The picture above is of the top half of the cabinets custom made by Mr. Goldstein for my parents' Manhattan apartment c. 1966. It now sits in their basement and is used for storage. The bottom half is in the garage.

One of the most recent joined chests I made had fairly wide muntins in relation to the panels. Maybe 6” wide muntins & 9” wide panels. This was based on some period pieces I’ve seen by Thomas Dennis, the joiner in Ipswich, Massachusetts, c. 1660s-1706.

 

I have another one underway now; not a copy of any particular example, but drawn from the body of work Dennis is credited with, along with examples from Devon, England that are the source for his work.

This one is made from random bits of stock; I don’t even have all the panels cut yet; but I had two already planed up at about 9 ½” wide. That means the opening in the frame will be 8 ½” wide – particularly narrow for a panel in a 3-panel format. Earlier, I had posted this photo of the rails, stiles & one panel.

So I dug out some wide muntin stock, 6 1/2”, and started carving one of those today. In this case, I designed the pattern myself, filling the space with motifs from various notes & photographs I have collected over the years. Here is the outline struck with gouges & chisels, based on some centerlines and compass work.

This pattern has very little background to remove. That makes it both easier & harder. Tight spaces to fit in; but not a lot of wood to remove.

A detail often found in these patterns is a circle left proud of the background, then gouge-cuts made into it to form a pinwheel-like shape.

Cutting the chips out of these little circular elements is always fraught with peril…more than once the whole little disc has scooted across the room. Seen on the oldies too, though. I don’t use a mallet for these, just hand pressure.

Here is the entire pattern now formed; the rest just repeats below the center.

 

As an example of where I copped the design – here is a panel from one of the Ipswich chests, showing a diamond with flower shapes inside it; I greatly condensed this pattern & worked it into the muntin strapwork above…of course in the full-width panel more detail is possible; but it’s still the same design.

I have to split open a new log soon to get the rest of the stock out for this chest and another…so you will see more of this in the weeks to come.

When I first started seriously working wood, I bought my first smoothing plane, an Anant 4 1/2.  The ad copy insisted that they were just as good as the Record hand planes that the Anant replaced, and online reviews were passable.  The plane worked okay once I flattened the sole and sharpened the iron.  Yet I found it finicky to adjust, and performance was inconsistent.

Eventually I replaced it with a vintage Stanley 4 1/2 (type 17), and after using my new/old plane for a few weeks, a light went on.  This plane was demonstratively easier to adjust, and results on wood were consistent.

So what distinguishes a good hand plane from a mediocre one?   The difference is in the details.

Let’s begin with the soles.  Both have been lapped flat, though the Anant took significantly longer.  I don’t really care for the corrugated sole on the Stanley because it makes it difficult to use the plane to break sharp edges.  However, it does make the sole quicker to flatten, should that be necessary.  (It shouldn’t.)

Notice that throats are different sizes. That’s not a problem on a smoother if you can move the frog forward to close it up, but it suggests that Anant is allowing more room for error.  A wide-open mouth would be desirable in a jack plane, and acceptable in a jointer plane.  Other things being equal, a smoother should have a tighter mouth.

Taking off the iron assembly, I find that the bedding area for the iron is nearly identical on each plane. However, I notice the first real problem with the Anant: the lever cap screw wiggles slightly in its hole.  It won’t prevent the plane from working, but it might allow the lever cap to come lose after a while.

Putting the irons back on reveals a more significant difference between the two planes.  The post on the Stanley’s depth adjustment yoke fits snugly into the slot on the chipbreaker.  The post is tapered, so even though there appears to be a gap above and below it in the slot, the bottom of the post engages the slot with little play.  The Anant’s post, however, shows a noticeable gap, and the post is not significantly tapered, so the gap you see is the gap you get.

Let’s turn the Stanley around. (Heavens, I didn’t know my plane was so dusty!)  I have removed the depth adjustment wheel for visibility.  The yoke rotates on a rod in the frog.  It wiggles a little on the rod, but overall there’s not a lot of play in the mechanism.

The Anant, however, has a lot of play in the mechanism.  (Note, too, that the yoke on the Anant is stamped, not cast, and so is less precisely made.)  You can see the gap where the yoke rotates on the rod.

By themselves, each of the gaps in the Anant’s depth adjustment mechanism would be insignificant, but when compounded they result in a sloppy depth adjustment.  There is about 450 degrees (a turn and a quarter) of play in the wheel.  That’s a lot of backlash.  Worse, it’s difficult to feel when the yoke has finally engaged the chipbreaker and is moving the iron forward or back.  I suspect that the stamped yoke bends a little when pressure is put on it, making depth adjustment imprecise.

Now let’s look at each lateral adjustment mechanism.  The Stanley’s adjuster on the left fits neatly into the slot on the iron.  So when I move the lever, the blade moves immediately.  The Anant on the right has a small but significant gap between the adjuster and the slot.  That makes for slop in the adjuster, resulting in imprecise lateral adjustment.

Finally, we come to the bedding of the frog.  If the frog does not seat well on the plane body, the iron will vibrate in use, making the plane harder to push and leaving a rough surface.  The Anant’s frog on the right actually has a little more surface area on the front-bottom of the frog than does the Stanley.  That’s to be expected since the mouth allows for (requires?) more frog adjustment.  The machining on both frogs is comparable.

The mating surfaces, however, are rather different.  The arrows show the four mating surfaces.  Again, the Anant has a lot more surface area on which the frog can rest.  That might be a good thing, but look at the machined surfaces on the bottom right.  Uneven milling marks are clearly visible.  Worse yet, the frog rocks slightly when set onto the body.  When the frog screws are tightened, only three of the four surfaces are actually mating.  It’s possible to either shim the frog or file down high spots, but is it worth it?

To be fair, I decided to give each plane a test.  I sharpened each iron and took the planes to a piece of very knotty cherry.  First the Anant:

Then the Stanley:

Both planes could take a fluffy shaving and leave the surface very smooth.  The biggest difference was that it took longer to get the Anant set to take a very fine shaving.

My conclusion?  You can make an Anant plane perform reasonably well if you are willing to fettle it and put up with mushy adjustment mechanisms.  Me, I’m going to put my Anant smoother up on a shelf and stick with my WWII-era Stanley.

Filed under: Wood and Woodwork

Moving on from my previous post about marking out a V joint, it’s time to cut and trim it to shape.

First, I saw out the V in the headstock, keeping close to the lines but being careful not to saw past them. I try to be brave in sawing up to the line at the narrow end of the V because that’s the hardest part to clean up later.

Next, I stop to put a fresh edge on the chisel that I’m going to use. When it will slice through tissue paper, I reckon that it’s sharp enough.

I clean up the V, paring from both sides towards the middle. Final cuts are carried out with the chisel resting in the knife line that marked out the joint. A small square is useful to check that the sides of the V are flat. The most difficult part of the joint is the apex of the V but a slicing cut with the corner of the chisel will remove the last bit of waste.

Here’s the female part of the V joint in the headstock finished. It shouldn’t be necessary to touch it again.

Now I cut the male part of the joint on the neck, starting with the angled shoulders. I chisel out a ramp for the saw in the usual way…

… and then saw down to the V, keeping clear of the lines.

I mark the starting point of the cuts for the sides of the V on the endgrain…

… place the neck in a vise, tilting it so that the cut will be vertical, and …

saw off the sides of the V with a tenon saw.

I mark and keep the pieces that I’ve just sawn off. They’ll be useful later.

Now I clean up the V and its shoulders with a chisel, paring in from both sides as I did for the headstock.

Here it is almost finished.

The neck and headstock are now tested for fit. Below is the view from the fingerboard side of the neck.

And here’s the view from the back of the neck.

As you can see, there’s a problem at the apex of the V, where a shadow shows that the neck isn’t quite deep enough to fill up the whole of the female part of the joint in the headstock. (My stock of mahogany for necks is planed up at a thickness of 25mm which means that I always run into this difficulty.)

The solution is to add a little extra depth at the apex of the V. This is where the offcuts that I saved come in handy. I prepare a small piece from one of these…

and glue it on, taking care that the direction of the grain in the extra piece is orientated in the same way as the grain of the neck.

When the glue is fully hard…

… it’s sawn roughly to shape…

… and trimmed with a chisel. This addition will be invisible in the completed joint.

The last step is to make sure that everything fits to perfection before glueing up. I’ll discuss how to do that in the next post.

Click on any of the thumbnails below for larger pictures.

Readers in the New York area shouldn't miss the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibit "Duncan Phyfe: Master Cabinetmaker in New York," which is slated to run through May 6, 2012. Whether you make it to the exhibit or not, take a look at the museum's video of Maine woodworker Allan Breed turning and carving water [...]

Router bits that are guided by ball bearings make it possible to add a profile to a curved edge. If the entire piece is curved, it makes sense to do this shaping on the router table. The tricky part is getting the cut started. When you push the uncut edge into the spinning cutter, it [...]

One of the stools I made while photographing the book…still without its paint. Maybe now I have time to work on it…

Chris told his side of the story tonight; and from what he says, you might want to get over & order your book soon if you haven’t yet…

Thanks to all who have chimed in…can’t wait to see your joinery projects.

http://lostartpress.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/make-a-joint-stool-from-a-tree-now-available-for-order/

 

 

A couple months back I stumbled onto a bundle of harness leather scraps at a flea market and snapped it up. I was working on a new six-drawer sideboard and it gave me a chance to try out an idea that I had years ago for a shop-made drawer pull. I figured making the pulls [...]

I don't drink a lot, I don't use any illegal substances, heck most of the time I even drive in the vicinity of the speed limit. I really only have two vices, (the naughty kind, not the attached to my bench kind) that occasionally get in the way of being an attentive husband, father, and employee. One of those is woodworking, the other is studying medieval history.

I gathered from the article that while one sector is functional, a pair of them can be very versatile. One about twice the size of the other. I chose a width for the larger sector and proceeded to rip the width from the narrow stock after marking it out with a marking gauge.


As I worked along I made myself pretty happy, a couple years ago when I started changing my game plan to hand tools there's no way I would have been able to pull off ripping a half inch off a board with a D-7. Now it really didn't seem like a big deal. After sawing I planed the edges first with my #6 for flatness followed by my #3 for smoothness.


Now I had a good ol' pair of sticks to make the longer sector.


The shorter sector could be thinner dimensions so I ripped the two sides from one shorter section of stock.


Toplin's sector puts the hinges on the endgrain. I know he's probably smarter than me and there's gotta be a reason for it, but I had to go with what felt right to me and that was sinking the screws into side grain. This meant creating a little recess so the hinge will lay flush once installed


Then there comes the knife work breaking the sides into 13 equal sections. I cheated a little and used inch measurements for both sectors, The smaller sector has 13 divisions spaced at an inch and the larger has them at two inches. I measured them out and knifed the lines both on the top, then on the inside of the legs.


A very fine Sharpie pen was put to work darkening all the knife lines.


While I was working away I got to thinking about the layout squares I started building about this time last year and the decorative molding cut outs on the Roubo Square and English Layout Square and how they help make the tool attractive and increase the pleasure I get working with them. I decided to repeat the experience here with these sectors. I cut these ovolo silhouettes on the distal ends of the legs on both pair.


Towards the hinge end of the smaller I rasped out these simple covetto silhouettes.


And the hinge end of the larger sector received this bead detail.


Then came the time to number them one to thirteen. One the smaller I used standard Arabic numerals.


On the larger I decided to change it up and use Roman numerals. No particular reason, a little romance that's all.

We're looking for a handful of amusing and/or thought-provoking articles for our End Grain feature (the last editorial page in every issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine). So, we're running a contest. The writer of the best submission (in the editors' collective opinion) will not only get paid for the article ($250, plus $75 for an [...]

I was looking through some old correspondence between Alexander and me; from 1991. In it, we mention that such-and-such would be good for “the book.” Slowly we were assembling what we thought we knew about joinery techniques, all with the plan to publish it as “Make a Stool from a Tree” – drawing on the title of Alexander’s 1978 chair book.

Things happened. 1994 I got a job, both a blessing & a curse. then later I got married. A blessing. Then later still, twins. double blessing.

And the book got shelved a number of times. It was always on-going, but might sit for a year or two sometimes.

And I am glad it did. things happen for a reason, and last spring, I was in Saratoga Springs, NY where Chris Schwarz & I were roped into judging of a bunch of woodworking entries in the big show there…it went on for hours, & they didn’t feed us.

Turned out to be  a good thing. Off we went to some great pizza joint, where Chris was to meet Matt Bickford to pitch Lost Art Press to him for a book…while we waited, Chris pitched to me too.  So all those years, turns out we were waiting for the right publisher to come along.

The book is ready for ordering now, follow this link to Lost Art Press. Free shipping on orders between now & Feb. 27 http://www.lostartpress.com/Make_a_Joint_Stool_from_a_Tree_p/bk-majsfat.htm

I’ll have more to say about it, & so will Chris on the LAP blog.

There have been 5 major upheavals in the development of woodworking tools. Each upheaval changed the way woodworking was done, changed furniture styles, and changed the skill level needed to produce professional work. The dates are approximate.

1 - Hand tools mature and become standardized c. 1750-1850.

Aside for the water or wind powered sawmills, which were not ubiquitous, all work was done by hand. With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution quality steel became more available and at much lower prices. Greater availability of tools along with a population explosion greatly increased both the demand for wooden buildings and the demand for furniture. Tool manufacture became the province of highly specialized industrial firms, working out of several major cities; Sheffield and Birmingham topping the list. Centralized manufacture took advantage of new national transportation networks of canals and railroads which drastically reduced the cost of transport and by extension, further reduced the cost of the end product. Regional makers could not compete. Tool designs standardized. The lowered costs of tools made it possible for more people to answer the demand for wooden products successfully and the standard of finished work became higher and fancier. However all furniture and house construction involved skilled labor working fast.

2 - Water and steam powered machinery - the Age of Belt Transmission c. 1840-1920
As the Industrial revolution matured precision machines allowed for the construction of the first woodworking machinery. The machines were large, belt driven, and required a lot of capital to obtain, and specialists to maintain. The latter limitations made machinery impractical for smaller shops but in the United States, especially for furniture making, the factory system became the norm and furniture became a factory made item that the middle class could afford instead of purely a bespoke industry for the rich. As the nineteenth century wore on the middle class no longer bought simple joiner's furniture. Instead they bought fancy factory made versions of the latest styles made for the rich.
In house construction the biggest change comes in the 1840's with the introduction of inexpensive, pre-sawn lumber in standard sizes, which completely changes American architecture away from traditional timber framing. While previously standard sized timbers were used for most construction the introduction of framing with 2" x 4" standards greatly lowered the skill level needed for house construction. Fairly early on moldings and other worked details are made by machine. Later in this period pre-made door and windows further standardize construction and lower the needed skill to build a house. The United States was a leader in developing highly specialized machinery for production work in the furniture industry. In England some industrialization took place but there was far more reluctance to industrialize as the piecework system made it impractical for investors. Capital was also much harder to get. Even as late at the 1930's mid-price furniture in London was made by small workshops working with hand tools only. However these shops would take their wood to the local lumberyard for planing.
The picture at the start of this blog entry is of a early planing machine from the early 1850's. While I don't know if this machine was ever built, at this time machinery like this would be found only in saw mills, very large lumberyards, and in the US, large factories.

3 - Stationary electric motors c. 1920-1960
With stationary electric motors it became possible for small shops to have "machine rooms" and compete with the giant factories. No longer did you need an expert to run a system of pulleys from a central location. Each machine needed could be installed independently, anywhere there was electric power.

4 - Portable Power Tools - c. 1940-1990
The boom in housing after WW2 put a huge strain on the national capacity for building housing. Motors became small enough to make hand held tools and for the first time a portable circular saw, drill, and jig saw could replace hand tools on a job site. Most important of course was that far less skill was needed to use power tools than maintain hand tools in productive condition, so lesser skilled craftsman could be employed. In addition, plywood and other materials that would easily dull hand tools could now be readily used on their own and plywood and other sheet goods replace solid timber wherever possible. Cordless tools, popular since the 1980's have increased the versatility and productivity of on-site building equipment.

5 - Prefabrication and outsourcing. 1980 - The real change in production since the 1980s has been increased use of prefabricated parts. Even framing elements are routinely assembled in a factory and trucked in. That idea, but overseas outsourcing has moved a lot of the core furniture making and building elements overseas. Architectural woodworking for most Americans is no longer the work of a skilled cabinetmaker making a kitchen or library. The actual woodworking is now done at a factory and except on the high end, prefabricated, machine made parts are just assembled at the job site. Furniture is less and less a work of a cabinetmaker or a woodworking factory and more an advanced, automatic production of composite materials and high tech. Furniture, which used to be an expensive capital investment for any family is increasingly a commodity item that you buy, use, and discard like an item of clothing. Most Americans have very little connection to new furniture built in a traditional manner.

I’m glad to see the interest in the painted decoration I am using on my tool chest. While the construction of that chest is not based on any 17th-century piece; the painted work is pretty close to period work. If you’ve just arrived, here’s what we’re talking about: http://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/a-solution-to-too-much-blank-space/ and http://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/another-day-of-painting/

for studying painted work of the 17th century, the trick is there are few surviving examples. Paint was often used as interior decoration. One good source for inspiration in James Ayers, Domestic Interiors: the British Tradition 1500-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Ayers’ book goes well past the time period I am interested in, but he has a whole chapter on paint, and painted stuff shows up in other sections too; like doors, windows, walls, etc.

 

A sample from Ayers’ book shows a painted plaster wall, done in black & white. Imagine a room like this – you’d be hard-pressed to see any carved furniture sitting in it.

 

For sources of patterns like this, there’s great stuff done in the early 1600s by Thomas Trevelyon. He made 2 books of patterns, adaptable for gardeners, painters, joiners, embroiderers, etc. But, his were not printed books, but just 2 manuscript copies. So his work didn’t circulate enough to be an original source for much. But it’s based in things he’d presumably seen in various forms; drawings, patterns in gardens, needlework, ceramics, architecture, paintings on cloth, plaster, and more.

 

Here’s one more of his drawings/paintings:

For more of his work, see http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=2283

There are only snippets of painted architectural work surviving in New England, but here & there in old England there are numerous examples. Nothing like there once was… Here’s a room painted to look as if it’s paneled , late 17th-century,  from Oakwell Hall inYorkshire.

 

 

For comparison, here’s an actual paneled wall, from the same trip my wife & I made in 2005. So the painting is not to fool you into thinking it’s a paneled wall, but just to give the impression. I think this is from Haddon Hall in Derbyshire. I can’t swear to it, but I’m close…

How about pinstripes? This is from the Merchant’s House in Marlborough, Wiltshire. Note that the door doesn’t interrupt the scheme.

 

Painted furniture from the period is not unusual; it’s again hard to find surviving examples, but they are out there. Here’s a simple one. English again. What we don’t know for certain is the finish for the non-painted parts.

Remember, these folks were not afraid of patterns and colors. Here is a very high-style chair of the 2nd half of the 17th century, now displayed against a pale, plain wall in a museum – but in a period house? Could be totally lost against some of these walls.

and a detail

On my toolbox, I am not following any particular scheme; just sort of making it up as I go. To make matters more confounding, I have also looked at several examples of late 18th/early 19th-century Pennsylvania chests, seen in Wendy Cooper’s & Lisa Minardi’s book Paint, Pattern and People: Furniture of Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1725–1850 , I never did make it to see the exhibition, I had seen bits of it when it was being researched. But Kari Hultman went for us::http://villagecarpenter.blogspot.com/2011/03/paint-pattern-people-book-review.html

http://villagecarpenter.blogspot.com/2011/04/paint-pattern-people-exhibit.html

Those chests and boxes really stuck me, and if I had room here at the house, I’d make some copies. In my spare time…

A favorite random piece of English  decoration is this embellishment I found in the Carpenters’ Company Records in London – 1573.

 

As far as how I prepare the paint, several people wrote & asked. Yes, it’d dry pigments mixed in linseed oil. And I doubt I’ll put a finish over that. When it’s painted, it’s done. The stool book has a section about making & using this sort of paint. Any day now…

There’s stuff in a few books on paint in New England work. Abbott Lowell Cummings’ Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay has some architectural interiors with paint. And Jonathan Fairbanks has a whole essay about portrait painting, but it has great details about materials, etc. “Portrait Painting in Seventeenth-Century Boston: Its History, Methods and Materials” in Fairbanks & Trent, New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982)