New Blog to Follow 10/29/2009
I was really excited to learn a couple of months ago that George Walker would be writing a new column for Popular Woodworking starting next year. While I have been fooling around with classical design for the last few years, it was George's articles in Fine Woodworking, Popular Woodworking, and most recently, his DVD on design, that really have helped me to refine the way I design pieces. It's obvious from watching his DVD or reading any of the past articles he has written that he has spent a lot of time studying this topic, which in my opinion, is an under appreciated aspect of our craft. Today, I was pleased to read the Woodworking Magazine blog and find out that George now has his own blog to complement the column he will be writing for Popular Woodworking. The blog is called Design Matters, and if his first post is any indication of what's to come from the blog or the Popular Woodworking column, I for one am looking forward to his future content. His first article is going to be on proportioning a raised panel door. If you've been following my blog for awhile, you might remember my two posts on a similar topic. I'm very curious to see how similar our two methods are and how they differ. I eagerly await the new column. Kudos to Popular Woodworking for seeing the opportunity with this fascinating topic and leading the way, yet again! What Defines a Masterpiece? 10/20/2009
Well, I was planning on doing another podcast this week but Mother Nature has different ideas. My wife and I went away for our anniversary over the weekend and ever since returning I've been sick. Needless to say, my shop time has been nil and I certainly don't feel up to filming a podcast. So instead, I thought I'd share a few interesting photos from the trip. We visited Winterthur over the weekend and toured the house and galleries. For anyone with an interest in period furniture, Winterthur is a must see. H.F. Dupont was a collector of all things early Americana and Winterthur was his 1000 acre estate where he displayed them for all of his guests. Everything from silver to fine china, fabric, paintings, and of course, furniture. One could easily spend days just looking at all the pieces in the house (we only got to see the 5th floor). Then of course there is the gallery and a free library open to the public.  In this post I want to focus on one piece in particular. Pictured first is a description of a highboy built by the Dominy shop between 1791 and 1806. Note that this particular piece was one of the most expensive pieces produced by the shop. Based on that fact, I think it is safe to assume that this piece was considered a first class piece at the time. Today, a new reproduction of a piece like this from a custom cabinetmaker would probably cost you about $7,000. However, as we look at the piece, it becomes very obvious that what was acceptable and expected in a piece of furniture in 1790 may not quite be what our standards are in the present day.  I found it interesting first that a piece with such early features was built so late in the period. The piece is unmistakably Queen Anne Baroque in style, yet most tastes during this part of the period, which was after the revolution, were for furniture in more of what we would today consider the Chippendale or Federal styles. This piece, being very symmetrical and devoid of any excess ornamentation, clearly doesn't fit the Chippendale ideals and certainly is not suggestive of the Roccoco in any way. But it is still a beautiful piece, and in my opinion, it's restraint from being overly ornate is its strong point. For what it's worth, this happens to be my favorite style of early American furniture.  Looking a bit closer, we can begin to see some of the construction methods used by the original builder and mentally disassemble the piece. Pegs in the leg block to hold the tenon into it's mortise suggest that clamps weren't likely needed, at least not for assembly of the cases. This is a very different way of thinking than we are accustomed to today. However, looking over the piece, it becomes clear that the maker probably didn't use clamps for any part of the assembly. The joinery used made clamping unnecessary.  I find these two pictures particularly interesting. Note the sliding dovetail used to fix the drawer blade to the case. This is the same drawer blade, just opposite sides of the front of the case. Note how the dovetail on the left has a single angled cheek while the dovetail on the right has two angled cheeks as we would expect. What happend to that left dovetail? Would you have done the same or would you have made a new drawer blade so both dovetails matched? This drawer blade was not unique to this piece. None of the blades had matching dovetails. In my eyes, this is glaring evidence that the masters who made these pieces were much less concerned with perfect joinery than we are today. Go back and look at the picture of the entire piece again. Do you seen the different dovetails now that I have pointed them out? Did you notice them the first time you looked at the piece?  This is another picture that I think is thought provoking. First, note the nails holding the knee block to the leg. This was common practice with cabriole legs. However, also note the fix that was made to the bottom of the side panel. Is this an original repair done by a cabinetmaker who accidentally made a bad cut or a restorer not very good at their job? Also notice the back of the leg block. It's full rough width if you can't tell. The rear of the leg blocks of the back legs weren't cut flush to the case but left straight. Would you have done something like this (I certainly wouldn't). I always find looking at these old pieces to be very thought provoking. How would the original maker have done this or that? Why did they do this or why didn't they do that? If there was money on the line and I needed to meet a delivery date, would I have done anything differently? It's interesting to me to try to put myself in their shoes for a short while and try to understand what circumstances made them make the decisions they did. But even more gratifying to me is seeing the work and reassuring myself that my dovetails don't have to be perfect and my surfaces don't have to be 100% tearout free. After all, dovetails are just a way to hold two boards together. There are much more important features that make a piece a masterpiece. Oh, and in case the furniture isn't real interesting to you, here's a gratuitous tool picture.   Shannon Rogers' recent blog post about the George Walker seminar from WIA reminded me that I've been meaning to post this blog for a few weeks now. I recently purchased and viewed George's new DVD "Unlocking the Secrets of Traditional Design". After watching the DVD, all I can say is "Yes, finally!" For anyone who designs their own pieces, or wants to step outside of the world of preprinted plans and start designing their own pieces, this DVD is an invaluable tool. It's clear, concise and most of all, simple to understand. While all of the information presented in the video was not new to me, there was enough in it to make me start rethinking about a design I have in the works. Let's start at the beginning with a brief overview. George starts us out by looking at a magnificent 18th century New England church entryway and the architecture surrounding the door. To the uninitiated, it seems off topic. What does this door have to do with designing furniture? However, George continues on to break down this piece of architecture into simple elements and then explains how traditional furniture designs were based on architecture, and it all begins to come together. From there, George takes us back to his shop, and begins to talk about how furniture is composed of simple geometric shapes. He demonstrates how even the most complex pieces of antique furniture can be broken down into simple shapes with simple ratios. Most gratifying of all, he does this with a simple pair of dividers and a straight edge. There's no measuring, no dial calipers, no calculators and no complicated formulas. It's traditional design in its simplest and most basic form. The way in which George demonstrates the different design principles is exactly how I would image it would likely have been done in an 18th century shop. Having rulers that could only measure down to 1/8" to 1/16" or so, and probably not extremely accurately at that, it would make sense that our woodworking forefathers would not have relied on measurements. They simply would have been much too inaccurate. However, as George so skillfully demonstrates in this DVD, with a simple pair of dividers, one can be extremely precise. George uses a handful of basic ratios in the video, such as 1:2, 2:3, etc. He also touches on some of the ratios used in the classical column orders of architecture and describes how these ratios migh be used to proportion different parts of a piece of furniture. George uses the proportions of the Doric order in his examples, but it is very obvious from his overview of a couple of the other orders how using a different order might change the feel of a piece to make it feel lighter or stronger. While not an all inclusive delve into the orders, it is enough of an intro to make one want to pull out Chippendale's Director and start studying. One of the things that George does not touch on in his video is the use of the oft debated Golden Ratio. There have been a lot of articles written about the Golden Ratio's use in furniture design and for a log time, many furniture builders, myself included, embraced the idea and ran with it. However, after using the ratio in previous designs, I'm not so convinced that it was a common practice to use it historically, and I think this is why George doesn't mention it in his video. The fact is, the Golden Ratio isn't something that is simple to proportion when building furniture with a simple pair of dividers. It's simple to do on paper with dividers alone, but the actual implementation of it on a board isn't so simple without making templates because the Golden Ratio isn't based on whole number proportions. However, the simple ratios and column order proportions that George demonstrates in his DVD are easy to use on paper and in practice on a board. The final thing George does is enlightening, especially to those thinking that his methods would only apply to traditional period furniture. To show that this isn't so, George designs a chest of drawers, in real time. On the left side, he designs the piece in a period style while on the right side, he uses the same proportioning tools to design a contemporary piece. The result proves that timeless design is timeless. In summary, in answer to the question of whether I would recommend this DVD, I respond a resounding "YES!" While all of the information may not be new to you, there is plenty of information to make you think, presented in a way that a beginner with no design experience can still grasp. It's definately a DVD for all skill levels. Even if you have no intention of designing your own furniture from the ground up, the video will still give you valuable tools and techniques that you can use in your shop. The demonstration of the usefulness of a simple pair of dividers is worth the price of admission in itself. Design Part 2 08/17/2009
 While I don't always go through the trouble of drawing out projects in a lot of detail, I felt that my current design project was going to be fairly complex so I thought I'd do some additional detail design. So I started with my general outline from the last post and began breaking it down using some of the design tools I mentioned below and some others I have mentioned in a previous post to work out some of the smaller details of the wall unit. I started from the bottom to work out the base molding first. Imposing Ionic column proportions on the height of the base cabinet, I used the height of the column pedestal (1/5 of the height of the base cabinet) to arrive at the height of the base molding. This looked good to me so I proceeded to work out the proportions of the feet. Most pieces of this nature look sort of like a built in unit, with a solid base molding that wraps around the piece. While this looks ok, I wanted to refine my piece a little and make it stand out as a piece of furniture and not a built in unit. So I decided to give the piece the illusion of having bracket feet like a chest of drawers would have. I say illusion because I don't really want to make the cases the typical dovetailed boxes on top of frames with feet like a chest of drawers would be since most of the side feet will be hidden by the adjacent boxes. It would be a lot of extra work that would never be seen. So instead I'm going to apply the "feet" to the fronts of all the cases and the outer sides of the outermost cases only just like a baseboard molding would be, except I'm going to scroll the base molding to look like furniture feet.  To work out the design of the "foot" I played with several of the proportional tools until I came up with a design that looked good to my eye. I started by imposing the proportions of an ionic column and entablature on the height of the foot. The column and entablature are broken down into six equal parts to arive at the height of the entablature (1/6) and column (5/6). Using the proportion of the entablature, I established the height of the sticking that I would put on the top edge of the base molding, i.e. 1/6 of the height of the base molding. From here I played with some other proportioning "rules" until I got a foot that looked nice to me and seemed to fit the proportions of the overall piece well.  After playing with some proportions for awhile, this is the "foot" design I came up with. It has a similar style to some bracket feet I have seen on some antique pieces from the middle third of the 18th century and to my eye looks very appealing. You can see how a lot of the different parts of the "foot" are related to each other and ultimately the height of the base molding.  After going through similar exercises for the cornice molding, waist molding and doors, this is what I came up with. Many of the parts are proportioned based on some of these "rules", however, as I mentioned in the previous post, there were also a few "it just looks good there" moments that have no basis on geometry, common ratios or column orders. Sometimes you just have to go with what looks good to your eye. I'm still a little undecided about the top of the piece as it seems a little light in relation to the bottom. I think it's because we decided to go with open shelves at the top instead of doors. I may still decide to add doors to the top to balance out the piece or possibly add face frames to the front of the upper cases to give the top a little more needed "weight". What do you think? How I Design 08/10/2009
It's been kind of slow in my shop lately. I haven't really been working on anything in particular now that the built-in and my shop desk have been done for some time. Summer is always a slow time for me in the shop as my family prefers outdoor activities when the weather is nice. However, I am gearing up and preparing for a major project for the fall once the summer activities slow down some and the vacations are all but over. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to share some insights on how I design a piece of furniture. I don't work from pre-printed plans but I will use pictures and/or drawings as inspiration for just about all of my pieces. However, as my wife will tell you, the pictures are merely a starting point. So it will be with my newest undertaking as well. Ever since we finished renovating our family room, we've been making do with a cheap Walmart TV stand. Other projects and pieces of furniture have been higher priorities up until now so we've simply dealt with the ugly plastic veneered particleboard stand, knowing that we would design and build a nicer piece at some point in the future.  My wife had an idea of what she wanted, but I always like her to find a few pictures of ideas that she likes as a starting point. She knows that I won't build the piece as pictured since the factory made stuff is typically junk, but the concept is really what I'm after, not the design. So for our family room, we found several pictures like this one. Now media units like these are obviously not period pieces, however, whether you are into period furniture or modern contemporary styles, the methods of designing and constructing them are no different. At first glance, this might seem like a very intimidating piece. It's pretty tall and very wide and there are a lot of doors, shelves and possibly some complex moldings. The trick to designing and building pieces like these is to break them down into small manageable steps. In this case, I'll break this down into 6 pieces of furniture that will later go together to look like one large piece. If you were designing an 8 foot tall Newport style secretary, the process would be no different. Now, while my preference for building furniture is to use tools and techniques similar to those used in the 18th and 19th centuries, when it comes to designing, I humbly embrace CAD drawing programs. Not because they can make accurate drawings (which they obviously can), but because it's so easy for me to scale drawings, proportion parts and move pieces around without having to have a large drafting area and a lot of pencils and erasers. I'm working on my drawing skills, especially when it comes to things like carving, but for rough dimensioning and proportioning and just getting some general ideas about scale and proportion together, CAD is hard to beat.  I like to start by figuring out the general proportions of the piece. In this instance, because I needed to proportion 6 differnt cases, I started with the bottom center case for the TV. My wife and I figured out how high we wanted the case to be based on the height of our seating furniture and the distance that most of it was placed from the TV. With the height of the center case established, just about all of the general dimensions of the six cases were in some way based on the chosen height for the center case. To illustrate this, I'll describe the process I used to arrive at the general dimensions for each of the six cases for this project. We decided that the center case for the TV should be about 30" high. I decided to make the width of this case a 2/3 ratio of height to width. This made the case about 45" wide, which turned out would be a good width for the TV which is 41" wide. The side bottom cases were figured out next. Again, the height was set at 30" to be even with the center case. Using the 2/3 ratio again, this time width to height, resulted in the side cases being about 20" wide. For the height of the top side cases, I applied a 5/9 ratio (height to width) for the entire area covered by the top cases and the open space for the TV. This entire rectangle has dimensions of about 47" tall by about 85" wide, which made the top side cases 20" wide by 47" tall. Finally, I made the bridge case about 1/4 the height of the side top cases or about 12" tall.  After figuring out the proportions for the front of the case, I moved to the top view to determine case depth. A lot of this is dependant upon what will go into each case. I decided on a stepped design for aesthetic reasons as well as practical reasons. Not only does the step back of the top and side cases look nice, it aids in hiding the joints of the moldings. The cases are going to be modular to make them easier to move. Therefore, the moldings cannot span more than one case. If the side cases were the same depth as the center cases, the base, waist and cornice moldings would have a visible vertical cut line where each case comes together. This joint would be immediately obvious and not very attractive. However, by stepping the side cases back from the center cases, the moldings can meet at an inside miter, which will hide the joint much better and help it to look like one continuous mitered molding and hence one solid case instead of six separate cases. So I started with the bottom center case again since that is where the TV and A/V components will be housed. I decided on about 21" deep for this case. To arrive at the step back for the side cases, I subtracted 3" from the center case depth to get about 18" for the bottom side cases. Then to arive at the top case depths, I subtracted 6" from the corresponding bottom case depth to arrive at a 15" depth for the top center case and a 12" depth for the top side cases.  With the front and top views drawn, it was a simple matter to transfer the dimensions to create a right side view of the cases. From a drawing perspective, this is about all I will do. Going through this exercise helps me to arrive at the general case dimensions for each case. From here, I can build all 6 cases and then begin the process of fitting everything out. The doors, drawers, shelves and moldings aren't really important at this point because their dimensions will all be dependant upon the final dimensions of the six cases. All of those parts will be gauged as I go along. This allows me to make adjustments as I go as opposed to working from a cut list which makes adjustments challenging. One final note on designing your own pieces. There are a lot of proportioning ratios that generally look good to the eye, like 2/3, 5/9, 3/5, golden ratio, etc. These ratios can be used as tools for designing a piece's general proportions. However, they are ultimately just tools and your eye should be the final judge as to whether something looks right or not. Sometimes, what looks right to you just doesn't fit any kind of "rule". It just looks right, so you go with it. That's the best part about designing pieces yourself instead of working from pre-packaged plans. The final piece has your character designed into it, not some one else's. Desk Finished 06/01/2009
 Ever since the first time I read Roy Underhill's book "The Woodwright's Apprentice" I've wanted to build a version of his standing desk. I always thought it would be a great piece to have in the shop for making drawings, laying an open book or magazine or setting my coffee. It would also give me a logical place to keep pencils, scissors and other small odds and ends that typically get lost at the bottom of boxes and cabinets.  So over the last couple of weeks I finally got around to building one. I modified Roy's design slightly by adding a drawer to my desk. To do so I had to make the sides slightly higher and obviously add a bottom rail to the front under the drawer as well as a frame for the drawer to sit on. I also shortened the height about 3" from the drawing in the book as I'm pretty short and the original 48" height seemed just a little high for me to work at comfortably.  The piece is made of Eastern white pine, as with most of the pieces I make for the shop, because it's cheap, readily available where I live, cheap, easy to work, and oh yeah, cheap. I also like the look of it as long as it's not full of huge knots (a few pin knots are ok). The inside is currently just a big open space. I'll add a simple gallery in the future, but for now it will serve as extra storage. I'll also divide up the drawer in the future but that's a project for another day. I'm glad that I finally got around to making this piece. It is certainly a welcome addition to the shop and much better looking than the piece that used to occupy this space (ugly plywood junk cabinet). It's unfinished right now as I have not decided whether to just oil and wax it or give it a couple coats of milk paint and oil. I think I'll just leave it alone for now and let it get used to it's new home for awhile. The finish can wait. New Article: The Saw Bench 05/05/2009
 After years of [ab]use, my trusty saw bench is ready to retire. However, before I can retire the old I must make a new. So that was the project this weekend. New Design 03/04/2009
Don't be alarmed! The site is still here! In case you haven't noticed, I've recently started playing around with some additional HTML and CSS for the site and decided to change things around from the stock templates that my web hosting provider includes. I'm not very proficient with this stuff so I'm keeping it pretty simple right now but I wanted an updated design that wasn't so stock. I'll probably continue to play around with it but some of the differences you might notice are a wider content area, menus moved to the left hand side, a new, more appropriate font for the site title and a nice new period molding at the top of the page. So far I'm liking the new design. Group Project Update 02/09/2009
Well, I've been pretty busy the last couple of weeks so I haven't gotten a lot of shop time, hence there hasn't been much to blog about. I have progressed on the second pair of built-in door frames after mucking up the first set and I have the doors almost done so it's time to start thinking about the next projects. Sure, we need a new entertainment center for the family room and I'll be starting on that soon but I have also been thinking about the other project I alluded to late last year. I'm referring to the video project I mentioned in a December 2008 blog. For full details of my rambling thoughts on it see the original blog about it here. I received quite a bit of positive feedback and interest in the video series through both email and comments to the blog post so I do plan to pursue it. Tombstone Door Panel 12/30/2008
 To begin making the panel, I rough cut a board slightly oversized and plane it to final thickness. In my Cabinet for the Shoppe build I used a full 3/4" thick panel and planed a rabbet all around the back so the panel would sit in the same plane as the door frame. For this panel, I planed the panel thinner so that I would not need to plane a rabbet in the inside. The final thickness of the panel is gauged from the frame and is equal to the thickness from the front of the frame to the back of the groove.  I also scribe the depth of the bevel around the edges of the panel at this time. Since I do not have a dedicated panel raising and fielding plane, I use a rabbet plane to make raised panels. Since a rabbet plane has no depth stop, I need a gauge mark to tell me when to stop planing. In addition, I won't be able to plane the arched section so I will need this depth gauge to guide my carving. I don't scribe the depth of the field preferring to simply eye this depth as I plane and carve. It's such a shallow cut that a little inconsistency won't be noticed anyway.  Not having a panel raising plane, I begin this raised panel like I begin a square raised panel, by creating a rabbet all around the panel to define the depth of the field. I can plane the rabbet along the bottom and sides of the panel just like I would with a square panel. However, the rabbet at the the top shoulders and arch will need to be carved.  To begin the carving of the rabbet at the top of the panel, I use a wide bench chisel to define the field at the shoulders and a carving gouge to define the field around the arch. Here I'm using a 1/2", #4 gouge. The sweep of this gouge was a good match for the radius of the arch. To keep the scribe continuous all around the arch I always keep a corner of the gouge in the previous cut. I make a vertical stabbing cut all around the arch to the depth of the field.  I then use a very sharp bench chisel held with the bevel down to pare away the waste at the shoulders and around the arch. I pare down until the depth of the field in these areas matches the depth of the field in the areas where I planed the rabbet. Again, I do this by eye.  The last step is to bevel the panel. Again, at the bottom and sides of the panel I can plane the bevel using my rabbet plane. I then use a bench chisel to carve the bevel at the shoulders and arch, working slowly and trying to maintain a straight bevel from the field to the depth of the bevel at the outside of the panel. A little convex is ok and won't be noticed in the final panel but you don't want to carve this area to a concave bevel as it would be very noticeable. I use a chisel as wide or wider than the bevel to aid in keeping a straight line from the field to the outside of the panel bevel.  The last step is to fit the panel to the door frame. Make small adjustments where necessary to make sure the panel fits the frame snug but not tight. You want the panel to be able to expand and contract seasonally without binding but you don't want it to rattle around either. It may be necessary to disassemble the frame completely and fit each frame member to the panel one at a time to make sure you only remove wood where it fits too tight. The you can reassemble the frame and fit the panel to the assembled frame. | CategoriesAll
November 2009
       
       
        
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