Logan Cabinet Shoppe

Thanks again to Duane for donating the #4 for the upcoming podcast on tuning and using hand planes. Just thought I'd do a quick post of the square and marking gauge I made for Duane as a thank you gift for his donation. I decided on a matching two tone theme utilizing walnut and maple for the tools. The square also has red oak pegs.

Thanks again Duane! Your tools are on the way.

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.

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?

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.

Whenever hand tools are discussed, handsaws, planes and chisels take center stage. However, without the layout tools, none of these tools would be able to do their jobs accurately. Still the layout tools just don't get the attention they deserve so I'm dedicating Episode # 3 just to them. I touch on what to look for when you're shopping for them, how to check them for accuracy and how to use them properly.