Stiles for joined stools

splitting stiles

I split some stock today to make the stiles for some joined stools I am building lately. These finish out at 2″ square, so I started with stuff a bit larger than that. This blank I am splitting is 2 feet long, and will yield about 6-8 stiles. In the photo, I used a wedge to knock off the juvenile wood at the heart of the tree. This wood is usually too twisted and fibrous to be useful. Once that’s split off, the following splits go easier and cleaner. The next step is to use a froe and club to further split out the stock. In most cases, I split the stock evenly in halves, this time I cheated it over a bit, because there were five stiles spread across the outermost section of the bolt. With  a short piece of straight-grained timber like this, sometimes it works to split an odd number of pieces. It’s a gamble. Today I won. Sometimes the log wins.  

riving stiles with a froe

hewing

 The hewing is quick work, aimed at removing the bulk of excess stock. I use a broad stance, with my right foot well behind me, and holding the stock in the middle or even the foreward portion of the chopping block. This way, any errant blow of the hatchet has a chance at hitting the stump, or at worst, missing my leg.  Notice that I have choked up on the handle as well. I’m not removing too much stock, so very heavy blows are not called for.

I first plane two adjacent faces straight and true, and square to each other. I use two planes, a “fore” plane, by some called a scrub plane – and a jointer to finish the surface.

planing with jointer

After the first two faces are planed, then I mark the thickness and width of the stock, and hew away the excess before planing the next two faces. Here are some details of the hewing process; the first step is called “scoring” the stock. I have made a mark, in this case with a marking gauge, sometimes with a chalkline. The stock is held at an angle, and beginning towards the bottom, I chop into the stock to a depth just above the marked line. These are light cuts, intended to break the fibers of the oak. The next step is to hew them away, preparing the stock for planing. For this step, the stock is shifted a bit, making it more vertical than before. The hatchet is swung and/or dropped to chop away the scored segments of oak.

scoring

 

finish hewing

 

So there is a good deal of back & forth; the sequence is splitting, hewing, planing, then marking the finished size, more hewing & more planing. It takes longer to describe than to do it, thankfully. I position the hewing stump, or “hacking stock” as one seventeenth-century record calls it, right beside my bench, and the hatchet hangs on the wall right beside that. So I can shift easily between planing at the bench and hewing at the stump…after photographing making one stile, I timed one without pictures and it was a little over 10 minutes from the riven stock to the finished planed stile. Not too bad…

turned chair

Eliot chair repro

 

I finally got this turned chair done. the finish took some tinkering – the customer wanted it to look like the original’s present appearance…so I approximated that look with modern dyes – brown, red & black.  Then lineed oil over that. It’s made of ash, with an oak seat. The original was made for John Eliot, probably in Boston. I think it dates from the first half of the seventeenth century.

Here’s a detail showing the spindles between the arm and the seat list. There’s 24 spindles, five different lengths.

detail, Eliot chair repro

cupboard’s upper case

test fit, no kids

 

Really no photography to speak of today, so I got a little further along on the upper case I’m making for the MFA. The door is just friction-fit into its opening here, I have to double-check the notch in the hinge-side stile before I go cutting…then it will swing on wooden pintle hinges.

The upper side rails will engage a mortised block in the front, which will be supported by pillars 3 1/2″ in diameter, and connected across the front by a long cornice rail. I am searching for a maple log now to do those pillars. The side panels are the ones that get painted ovals & circles. So the framing is well past the halfway point, then the paint will slow things down again.

Here is the related cupboard from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY before its restoration, this photo, c. 1900, is taken from Frances Gruber Safford’s excellent book American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: vol 1. Early Colonial Period: The Seventeenth-Century and William and Mary Styles.

[blog note: I have gone back & added a tag “cupboard restoration project” for anyone who is interested in seeing more of this project. So I think you could search for that tag, & it will display them all…(I think) I have not added entries on it in any particular order, and not all steps are represented, but several entries discuss the project. ]

test fit of cupboard case

helpers test-fitting the cupboard section

I thought I might get a little clean-up done around the shop today, but with these two helping, that’s like backing up for a headstart…they did scrutinize the test-fit of the upper case cupboard section I’m making for the MFA.

Tomorrow I plan on fitting the door into the frame, and trimming the rear stiles of this section where they get toenailed to the separate rear frame.

after I clean up what the twins hath wrought…

tenons: 17th-century joinery

sawing tenon shoulder

Yesterday I was cutting some tenons for a joined stool I have started…and I find this is one of the hardest steps to photograph. What I am after is a tenon front shoulder which is slightly angled; and a rear shoulder that is cut behind the line, thus not involved in the joint really. Here’s two period examples:

tenon shoulder detail

 

the next  one is a “barefaced” tenon, i.e. it has no rear shoulder at all. This one is a side rail of a chest, the notch in the stile is for a drawer runner.

barefaced tenon

Typically, I layout the joinery first, using an awl, square and mortise gauge. After the tenons are marked, I cut any moldings that decorate the rails, then saw the shoulders. (see photo at top of this post, using a mid-20th c. Disston backsaw, sorry Mike) I hold the rails in a modern bench hook, the wooden jig for securing stock on the benchtop for sawing. We have no period reference for this workbench aid, but it’s one that I keep in the arsenal just the same.

After sawing all the shoulders, then it’s time for the fun. I split the waste off the tenons, it’s quick and easy, & it works.

Here the rail is held in the “double bench screw” as Moxon and Holme call it. Think of it as the precursor to the modern handscrew.

splitting tenon's waste

 

There’s slightly more to it than that, but not much. With straight-grained stock it’s a great technique. Here’s the roughed-out tenons, which just require paring with a chisel to finish them off to the proper thickness.

roughed-out tenons

box-making class Country Workshops

When I was 18 years old, I was an art-school dropout, and had inherited a basement shop full of modern (c. 1960s) power tools. I had started to learn a bit about using them, and quickly found that I was a bit intimidated by them. Fortunately for me, by the time I was 20, in the fall of 1978 an issue of Fine Woodworking dropped an alternative into my lap. It featured 2 articles, one an excerpt of the book Make a Chair from a Tree, by John Alexander, the other an article on riving by Drew Langsner. I ordered Alexander’s book, and while I waited for it to arrive, read the 2 articles til they were worn.

 In 1980, I saw an advertisement for a week-long class in chairmaking, being held at Drew & Louise Langsner’s craft school Country Workshops, to be taught by John Alexander. I didn’t drive at the time, had practically never been out of New England, wasn’t much of a woodworker, and was terminally shy. I wrote to the address, signed up for the class and made plans to get down to western North Carolina. I was not the star student in the class, to say the least.  

Alexander teaching chairmaking at Country Workshops, undated

 The class really inspired my interest in this craft, and I stumbled along on my own for a few years. Then I returned to Country Workshops by the mid-1980s, and was for the next five years or more a regular attendee at a number of classes – timber framing, white oak basketry, spoon carving, coopering, as well as ladderback chairs with Alexander and American style Windsor chairs. A woodworker from eastern Pennsylvania named Daniel O’Hagan was one of the teachers I met there, and it was his example of using exclusively hand tools that got me to give away all my machines and power tools. I have never missed them.

 

woodenware class, Country Workshops, early 1990s

 

The late 1970s/early 1980s were an excellent time for green woodworking, a term that I think was coined in print by Alexander. He used to tell us that it was “in the air.” Lots of books, workshops, and activity in this field then…and central to it was Country Workshops. Drew & Louise have worked for 30 years making the workshops happen, bringing in teachers of the highest caliber, finding and eventually selling the best tools designed for the work, and keeping it going year after year, always improving on the facility and the format. (See their website for details of the types of classes they offer www.countryworkshops.org ) Everyone I have ever talked to has had nothing but great praise for the experience of taking a class there. The students come from all over, national & international, and it always is interesting to me that a disparate group can come together over a common appreciation/interest in traditional “green” woodworking and spend a very full week totally immersed in the given subject.

 

 Drew & Louise are still plugging away, and a couple of years ago my wife & our then nearly 2-yr old twins chugged all the way down there so I could teach a class in making a carved box. I am delighted to be returning this summer to repeat that class. Drew tells me there’s a couple of slots left, so if you are inclined, drop him an email at langsner@countryworkshops.org  There’s classes year-round and the details are listed on the website.

www.countryworkshops.org

Country Workshops students, carved box class 2007

  

PF carving demo at Country Workshops

   

some details of my workbench

PF workbench

 

I recently got an email asking if I would describe my workbench a bit. I made it about 8 years ago; and it’s pretty basic, but functions quite well. For me anyway, a friend of mine worked at this bench for a weekend once, and said he hated it…hurt his back. I told him he’s too tall. Bench height is about 32″ so not all that short. The bench is not an attempt at a period bench, we know too little about 17th century benches to make that exercise practical. But I intentionally skipped vises and other modern fastenings; I did include a sliding brace for supporting long stock for edge-planing. No 17th century evidence for that…

The principal section of the top is a white pine baulk, 4″ x 17″ x 8’+. That piece was sawn out & dried about 3 years before I built the bench. The framing is red oak. Butted up against the pine plank is a red oak board, about 8″ wide, which essentially makes the benchtop wider, about 25″ overall. This board is only about 1″ thick, so I had to do some finagling with the joinery to get the rear legs of the bench to support this board. So the rear leg rises up higher than the top edge of the apron, and there’s some blocking in there, fastened with wrought nails. There are pins set between the pine top and the oak board, to keep the oak board from sagging. the front leg is tenoned into the under side of the pine piece, with a bare-faced tenon. the front surface of the leg is in the same plane as the front edge of the pine plank.

end frame of bench

The sketch gives you some idea of what I did to frame the rear legs and the oak board. This sort of thing I solve when I get there, not on paper first. It worked out OK, but if I were to do it over, I would check to see what the Dominy shop at Winterthur Museum did for their benches. Wedged tenons fasten the long stretchers, these stretchers are about 3″ x 6″+. They have ledges nailed to their inner faces, to support shelving under the bench. Even though it’s main piece is pine, the bench does not move; it takes 2 people to move it easily, or one stubborn person to struggle with it.

As I said, mine is white pine. I chose it by default, a friend & I were making some benches for some classes we were teaching, and we had a large pine log around, so sawed that. In the end, I really like the softwood top. It grabs the wet oak pretty well. I worked at a hardwood bench for a while this past year – my stuff slid all around on me. The downside of the pine top is it’s easily dinged and dented, cut and generally worked over. But it’s easily re-planed as well, although I have not done so in years.

For holding, I mostly use the bench hook to plane against, see earlier posts on bench hooks. Otherwise it’s usually the holdfasts for grabbing stuff, like this chair leg held down for boring:

holdfast w chair post on bench

there are holdfast holes in the front legs of the bench as well,  for gripping something upright – for tenoning usually, or ripsawing. It’s great for planing, and that’s what takes up most of my time…

planing at the bench

draw an oval with a compass

painted oval & circle decoration

I need to paint some decoration based on ovals & circles on the cupboard project in my shop these days. We saw evidence of the layout on the original cupboard & its related objects. The one above has lost most of its paint, but the scribed lines are still evident outlining the decoration.

I looked up the steps in using a compass to draw ovals in Sebastiano Serlio On Architecture: Volume One, Books 1-5 translated from the Italian with an introduction and commentary by Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996).

drawing an oval w compass

I made a simple mistake in this one, but it’s just practice for that very reason. I scribed the two circles too close together. I still got an oval; but its proportions are off. Serlio’s directions say “draw two circles such that each touches the centre of the other.” …now if I only had the book in the shop with me, instead of relying on memory.

I mixed some black pigment in walnut oil, japan dryer and a little varnish, and started outlining the shapes.

painted decoration - first step

 

It will take some practice to get the squiggly lines right; so there will be more of this.  I hope to get permission to post some details of the originals, (the detail above is an outlaw, hence no context) the paint that survives on them is quite striking…

a few carving projects underway

carving a box front

 

I’ve worked on a bunch of carving this week; here I am carving a box front. This is the same pattern I used on the box I did for an article that appears in the most recent issue of Woodwork magazine. (#115, Spring 2009)

I have a few sample carvings to work up for the cupboard restoration that I am working on; that piece will have a lot of painted decoration, and I want extras so I can practice the painted parts. This one will also be a box front, if it survives its painting.

practice carving

carving detail

The picture below is the door for this cupboard, test fitted together. I carved this panel twice; and now I have it about how I want it. When the science people finish their samples and microscope work, I will get out some brushes and then it’s polka dots, squiggles and more.

cupboard door test fit

joined stool frame

joined stool assembly

 

I worked today on the assembly of a joined stool that was part of my presentation at the Colonial Wiliamsburg Antiques Forum earlier this month. Here I am dropping the last section onto the tenons. A bit of knocking it around and it all went together OK.

adjusting joined stool assembly

 

Then I drove in the oak pins to secure the joinery.

driving the pins

 

I was thinking about Judge Samuel Sewall (1674-1729) today while I did this assembly. I read parts of his diary some years back, and this stuck:

“Saturday, May 15. (1675) Brother’s house was raised, at the raising of which I was. Two Pins lower Summer.”    [footnote: Throughout the Diary, Sewall records driving nails or wooden pins in buildings under construction. This gesture of good will and voluntary association with the enterprise is traced by H. W. Haynes to Roman and Old Testament sources…]

 

This is one of those simple notes from the seventeenth century, that brings a whole mini-scenario alive. The general commotion of a house-raising, a crowd gathered around to watch, and the well-respected guest, or well-tolerated anyway…the carpenters saying, “Oh, the Judge is here. Better let him drive one…”

 

The quote above means he drove two pins in the lower summer beam, i.e. the connecting timber on the first floor. See M. Halsey Thomas, editor, The Diary of Samuel Sewall 1674-1729, 2 volumes, (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1973) p. 11.