Keep Your Eyes Open

September 13, 2016

I'm not an architect, but as I've grown as a furniture maker, the connections between furniture and architecture is strong and undeniable. Gustav Stickley, a furniture maker, designed homes, and published other's plans for craftsman homes, in his The Craftsman magazine. Frank Lloyd Wright not only designed homes, but often the furniture that went in them (the control freak that he was). So its not surprising to find inspiration in period buildings.

Recently, I went on a walking tour / architecture tour of some turn-of-the-last-century homes and buildings in my neighborhood. As a period furniture maker, a fan of craftsman / arts & crafts furniture, and the history of my city & neighborhood, this was a slam dunk for me. The tour was a mixed bag of highs and lows. There were some places that had been "modernized" by clueless people who had more money than taste, not "getting it", and ruining once classic interiors with horrid sterile choices (me, "they painted the oak wainscoting and built-in hutch GREY!?!?!"). Those places ranged from sad to unbearable (me "what did they do with the the original cabinets, the one's they replaced with those plastic things?"). But thankfully there were several places that, oh boy, they GOT IT. Really got it. Either well preserved, or in one case, lovingly restored - a gut rehab (for damage and structural issues) that looked like it had been that way for 100 years.

The star of the show (for me anyway, most people were oohing and awwwwing over a 1920s garage that had been converted into what must have been an aging rock star's modern man cave. Once color - concrete. sigh) was "the Rose Building", at 2934 W Logan Blvd, Chicago. It was so nicknamed by it's heavy Art Nouveau and Craftsman styled woodwork, art glass, and masonry using repeating rose motifs. (I wasn't allowed to take interior photos, but here are a few expired real estate listings that show interior shots, here and here.). Not only is the interior immaculate, with fantastic built-ins, trim, and woodwork throughout, that a look at this detail. A few decades ago, when this neighborhood was rougher, the original sidelights of the dramatic front door were vandalized, and replaced with simple plate glass...

... but over the last few years, they did research on the original glass, found old photographs, and rebuilt it to look like this...

Simply fantastic. The event was great, and I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do. My own maxim was reinforced - don't fight your home's style, embrace it, or get a different house. Anytime someone tries to think they're clever and quirky trying to make a Victorian home in Swedish modern, or an art deco house into a Georgian, you're going to fail, and it's going to look terrible.

So, keep our eyes open out there, there's a lot to learn, and lot to inspire your woodworking.

Drawing Table, part 2

July 21, 2016

(This is a continuation of the "Drawing Table" series, click here for part 1 )

The top of the table is a classic breadboard top. And as it's the most visible part of the whole piece, I wanted to find boards with some nice figure. I found a gorgeous nine foot wide cherry board, that, when cut into three sections, would be enough for the main part of the top. It had a mix of light and dark wood, but I knew it would look great laminated together. I liked the contrast it would produce. The rest of the cherry was easy source on this run, as the hardwood dealer had plenty on hand, and back at the shop, I got to work.

The lamination of the top went well, and before I cut the long tenons for the breadboard ends, I wanted to make the ends first. Those were cut with a hollow chisel mortiser, and cleaned up with a chisel. I was then able to transfer the mortise locations to the top, and then cut the tenons. I did those with a guide and a router, and then cleaned it up with a rabbeting block plane and router plane. I then cut out the sections to make the haunches and long tenons with a hand saw, and cleaned up with a chisel. Finally, holes were cut for the pegs, and the ends were begged onto the top, with the out two holes on each side elongated on the tenon to allow for wood movement. There's a lot of work that goes into such a top, but it's worth in, as it stays flay, level, and allows for seasonal movement.

Next, I was able to focus on the legs and feet. The base features thick legs, with a dado to house the upper part and allow for adjustment, tenoned into a large mortise in the thick feet. The feet gave me a great opportunity to add an architectural element, and laid out a series of shoulders and curves. The tenons were cut by hand, and cleaned up with a router plane.

The large dados/housings in each lower leg was a tricky cut, as I had a lot of material to remove. I ended up using a large straight bit in a router table to clear out most of the waste, then cleaned it up with a chisel. The last part of the base was a stretcher that joined to the two halves, joined with a wedged through tenon. The top section was similar to the bottom, with two smaller "legs" joined by a stretcher. Both pairs of legs needed holes drilled through them to allow for adjusting the table height. Then the last little bit was the tilting portion that connected to the top. I made two shaped brackets, pre-drilled with holes for the top, and detailed with a simple curve. These were then pieced along the tilt access in line with the tilt access on the top of the top legs. To add rigidity, I added a faceted dowel between the swivel points.

with the base together, I could attach the top, and see how it all worked together, and it did. I then took it apart, and did the fitting for the hardware, including mortising in the casement window stays that controlled the tilt of the top.

Although I still needed the bottom pencil rest, I was ready to finish, and worked on the rest while the finishing process was underway. For cherry, I usually apply a clear shellac. But in this case, I decided to try an amber shellac, which had the effect of "accelerating" the way in which cherry darkens over time. Fresh cherry is very pink, but mellows to a nice medium brown after a couple of years (sunlight depending). Adding the amber shellac gets it closer to that aged cherry look, and will result in a nice blend once the cherry itself ages. So I applied the finish, spraying each section separately; bottom base, top base, and top. After several coats of shellac, sanding in between, I applied paste wax with a 0000 steel wool pad.

I then re-assembled everything, appealing the hardware, and finally screwing on to the front end the pencil rest.

I couldn't wait to get this table installed in my office. But once I did, I soon realized I needed some accompanying parts to make the whole setup work well. So I built a few quick projects. I built a shaker style pine wall shelf for drawing and drafting tools, a cork bulletin board with a cherry frame for the wall behind it, and a little pine tape and pencil caddy to rest on the back edge. And while I originally clamped the drafting light to the top edge of the table, I later made a little wall mounted clamping surface for the light (the lamp clamped to the table made the light too shakey).

And with that, I had a nice little drawing and drafting station on my little office. The only piece I have left to build is a nice stool, as the big box store mystery wood knockoff I'm using now wants to fall apart on my any day now. Having a place dedicated to drawing has been wonderful for helping me work out furniture designs, and slowly my drawing skills are improving.

And finally, I recently had a great photo session for the piece, and posted those on the gallery. Take a look at the final piece here.

Drawing Table, part 1

July 17, 2016

Being able to make plans and drawings is an essential skill in building. While not all woodworkers (including myself) need to slavishly follow measured drawings to make furniture, the process of working out proportions, construction details, joinery, and overall form before making sawdust is a core step in any build.

A popular tool among many woodworkers is the 3D drawing software Sketchup, which they use to (relatively) easily lay out, design, and proportion furniture and woodworking projects. Furniture can be laid out, virtually "built" in 3D, then studied, rotated, scaled, textured, dimensioned, and adjusted easily. Sketchup is a great tool, as it is free, widely used, well documented for woodworking uses, and runs on both Macs & Windows machines. And with my background in IT and computers going back several decades, learning how to use it came very quickly for me. I and fairly handle in it. I once designed my entire kitchen cabinet project to within a 16th of an inch using Sketchup, and it was invaluable. But I'm not so keen on using it as my primary design tool anymore.

The first issue I have with Sketchup woodworking is that using it involves spending lots of time in front of a computer, something I do more than I want to already for work, some entertainment, and of course writing this blog and promoting myself as a woodworker. It's hard to get excited, and remain undistracted, in front of a computer. There's always something else to check, look at, and fiddle with. It's hard to keep my furniture design inspiration going when sitting down at the computer, again.

The next issue that comes into play is that I've wanted to become much better at drawing, sketching, and illustrating by hand. This has been reinforced by the excellent hand drawings I've admired in older woodworking books (as well as some new ones!), as well as in the design ideas expressed in the book By Hand & Eye by George Walker & Jim Tolpin. Back in high school, I chose drafting classes as my elective courses for all four years. This was back before computer assisted drafting (CAD), and we instead used pencil, paper, and mechanical drafting arms to learn drafting skills. I enjoyed it then, and as a result, I can knock out a fairly serviceable technical drawing when needed. But it wasn't art class, and it wasn't drawing class, so when the rulers and T-squares go away, my drawings start to get a little shakey. But the satisfaction of making a good, useful drawing is still there today, and while I need more practice, the freehand drawing I've done is still proving useful and satisfying.

OK, so I wanted to draw more, but now I had another problem: where to do it? The surface of my workbench is a lousy choice. While level, it isn't exactly forgivingly smooth, and any pencil line finds way too many dings and dents along the way, piercing the paper and making drawing there useless. It is also too flat and low. I could clear stuff off my kitchen table, but that's also too flat, and I don't want to stick the ends of my compass into the nice table top a thousand times. I have a self healing mat I could put down, but that's a little spongey, or I could get a piece of hardboard and... and... etc. OK, I'm a woodworker, why not build a nice drawing table?

Right around the time I was mulling all this over, I happened to be in a little shop in the neighborhood, and saw this drawing / drafting table being used for coffee and scones.

I liked the simple design, and the adjustability, and saw I could make one pretty easily from some simple 1" x 3" pine. So, that's was my starting point, and over the next few weeks I worked through what I liked and didn't like about that table's design. The example piece was pretty basic - no frills, not fancy, and designed to get the job done. However, I knew that I wanted something that would be special, and a little more fancy than just-enough-to-get-it-done. My table needed to be a special place where I could feel creative. I wanted to personalize it, and add some extra fit and finish to take it up a notch. I needed to bear in mind that I shouldn't go crazy and have this project take decades to complete - I wanted to get drawing! So I looked for a balance between crude / simple, and fancy / special.

I did research on other drawing and drafting tables, and I found a lot of great (and not so great) examples. I took elements from one or the other until I settled upon my final design. One element that I really wanted to incorporate was the metal hardware for the tiling mechanism. I saw many vintage or antique tables with these great semi-circular tilt support pieces, sort of like this...

... but short of buying a whole antique table and using the hardware, I could not source modern versions of this anywhere. I finally settled on using casement window stays, which work really well. I can't say I like it as much as the semi-circular hardware, but I'm pretty pleased with how they worked out.

So with my design down, I was ready to build. That's coming in part 2.

Book Display Shelves

July 13, 2016

I recently received a commission for an interesting project. A friend of mine, Mary Clare Butler, is an artist that makes hand bound and offset printed books. She was presenting in a show of her work, called "Inland Sea" (read about the Inland Sea project and her process & books on her site) and needed a way to display them. She wanted a wall mounted shelf, but one that wasn't perpendicular to the wall like a regular bookshelf, but rather tilted so that the books would be at an angle to the viewer / reader. She wanted some nice finished wood for the shelves, and came to me to build them. We looked at several wood species, and she was drawn to cherry with an amber shellac finish. I measured the books, and set about making the final size and design.

Closed, each book measures 9"w X 12"h, making them 18"w x 12"h open. There were six books to be displayed, so playing around with that, I found that three books per six foot shelf left a nice amount of space between the books. That meant two shelves, that might or might not have been placed next to each other to make one long twelve foot shelf.

The first element to figure out was the angle of the shelves. After trying several, 30° seemed about right. We knew they would be about 3 1/2 to four feet off the ground, and we wanted to make sure the books were easily seen by both the short and tall. With the angle decided, I turned to the side brackets. I could have simply made them triangles, but that looked too dull and "construction" like -- this was a chance to be a little creative and add a design element. After a bit of drawing, I worked out a classic unequal cyma curve (or ogee curve) that looked nice.

As the angle and bracket design came together, I saw that a potential trouble spot was going to be where the top edge of the shelf met the wall. Walls aren't ever straight or flat, and trying to make a perfect little bevel to meet the wall smoothly along six or twelve feet just wasn't going to happen. So I turned to the venerable bead. Adding a bead to the top edge provides a design element and a shadow line that would plunge the actual contact between the shelf and wall into shadow, obscuring any irregularities.

Finally, I had to consider the stop or cleat on the bottom edge of the shelf that would prevent the books from sliding off onto the floor. This was yet another chance to add some detail. I decided to use two intersecting cyma / ogee curves, one along the face or width of the stop's outer edge, and then long gentle ones at each end. Where they intersected created nice shadows and added to the sweep of this otherwise utilitarian feature.

early design for the bracket

refined (but not final) design of the bracket

working out proportions and design ideas on the drawing board

With the design in place, I set about the build. The shelves were to be 14" wide, so I was hoping to find some wide cherry boards for this purpose. But the hardwood dealer didn't have anything that wide in stock, so I went with plan "B" (always have a plan "B" at the lumber store) and found some 8"-9" wide 8/4 stock, and re-sawed that to make book matched pieces. I flattened, jointed and lamenated those into the pieces I needed, and trimmed them to the final size.

This was good time to apply the top edge bead, so I did that with a beading cutter in my Stanley No. 45. I love that plane, and it made short and crisp work of it.

The bottom cleat was fun to make. I drew out the profiles I wanted, made some templates out of 1/4" hardboard, and traced them onto the stock. I then used a couple of the hollow and round moulding planes I have to cut the shape. That process is so much more fun than using a powered router. It is quiet, controlled, and all about finessing to get that final shape. And much more fun than trying to buy one or more dedicated router bits to make a particular shape. With the hollows and rounds, I just designed it, used the planes that were closest to the shapes, and cut it, without having to worry about specific tooling.

the final profile

hollows and rounds

convex and concave

I then laid out and cut the side brackets. While I was happy with the design, I remain nervous about the exposed short grain on the lower ends of the brackets. It's not an issue when they're mounted on the wall, but the thought of them getting snapped off in transit worried me (they did make it to their final installation without incident). The brackets were attached to the shelves using screws through cleats. The shelves attached to the wall with a French cleat system I made out of plywood. and attached those to the shelves with pocket screws. The french cleat is a simple and reliable system that makes them easy to adjust when installing.

bracket shape detail

testing... does it hold books?

finishing with amber shellac

A few weeks later I went down to the show to see them "in action", and I really enjoyed seeing people interact with them. The books were fantastic, and the shelves seemed to complement the natural and organic designs of the books quite well. I was pleased to see that the top edge bead did it's job, making the intersection with the wall nice and subtle. They ended up installing the shelves side by side to make one long, continuous twelve foot shelf, and that worked out fine. I was happy, and Mary Clare was happy. What I really enjoyed the most out of this project was being able to support and work with another artist / craftsperson, and complement their work with mine.

Mary Claire Butler

Mid-Century Modern Chair Repair

July 5, 2016

I recently received a job for a simple chair repair through my upholsterer. This mid century modern chair was missing a front apron/stretcher, and had some other structural damage. It had also once been finished maple with walnut feet, but had since been painted black. The challenge was to shape a new front stretcher that would match the design. With no before or finished images to go on, I had to guess.

I has some hard maple on hand that was a perfect match for the existing material. As this piece was obviously factory furniture, the joinery was either dowels or keyhole hangers. One of the dowel joints had broken and required re-building. I drilled out the existing broken dowels with holes slightly larger than the originals, and replaced those with strong straight grained oak dowels, and then re-glued with epoxy (second photo). The front (and rear) stretcher / skirt is "joined" with keyhole hangers (first photo). The worst part of that system is that the hangers requires screws that go into end grain on the mating piece. I had contemplated driving and inserting a cross grain oak dowel to give those screws some purchase, but as the client was on a tight budget, I had to give that idea up.

The fun part was fashioning the missing piece. At fist, I thought I was going to work an arch on the under side of the stretcher, but after shaping the top side where it meets the curved underside of the seat (bent plywood), it was clear that keeping the bottom straight made the most sense. I applied a matching round over to the bottom edge to match the other parts, using a spokeshave and block plane.

With the repairs and rebuilding complete, I had to sand and re-finish the whole piece. That's when I found the nice walnut feet on the bottom of the legs (fourth photo). I regretted not being able to take the chair down to bare wood. So I re-painted it, then applied clear shellac, and finally a paste wax finish applied with 0000 steel wool.

GALLERY

On Instagram

Drawer slips. Getting back to finishing up this dresser.

Following a 27” haircut after the correct size was figured out, here’s the percussion stand and the musician Bill in situ after the performance of Shank’s Mare at the Art Institute last week. It did not fall over.

A quick last minute project - a percussion stand for a musician performing in this weekend’s Shanks Mare show at the Art Institute https://www.artic.edu/events/4217/performance-shanks-mare , replacing the PVC think in the last picture. #shanksmare . Pine, maple wedges, shellac.