scribe lines

October 27, 2009 pfollansbee carving, historical references, techniques carved oak, Follansbee, green woodworking, oak furniture, seventeenth-century joinery

scribed layout on face of chest — joinery scribed on face of chest

A reader asked about the scribe lines I left showing on some carving recently. In seventeenth-century work, I find them running the gamut, from scribed on the face of a piece, such as the chest front above, to being barely if at all discernable. It is quite rare to not see some scribe lines somewhere on the piece…

In thinking about why the layout for the joinery is on the face of this stock, I have worked on the notion that it helps to transfer the layout from one rail to its mate, or one stile to its mate, etc. Thus hold two mating pieces edge-to-edge, and then transfer the lines right across the faces. Then carry them across the edges with a square and awl. And yet I can’t then explain why this chest (below, from the same shop as above) laid them out on the front face, and the inside face too…

scribed layout on inside face of chest

While I have this file open, here is some carving from one of these chests, and its scribed layout is still visible on the face of the carving. Some of it is hard to pick out, but the margins, compass-work, and three vertical lines that divide the panel into four segments vertically…as well as the lines struck across the panel to locate the compass’ leg for centerpoints for arcs.

carved panel, with layout scribed

scribed lines carving — detail of scribed lines for carving

Back to the one that started this line of thought, here is a detail from the pews from Totnes, Devon. The scribed lines are faint, but there are three horizontal lines struck here; a centerline, and an upper & lower line to locate the arches of the motif.

carved panel, Totnes pews

There’s lots more, usually we find mortise gauge lines, alignment marks in the form of triangles and/or arrows, and chisel-and-gouge-cut marks to identify & dedicate mortises and tenons. I’m glad they left them there, it’s like a road map for me. Makes my job easier.

Devon furniture on display in Exeter

October 25, 2009 pfollansbee seventeenth-century joined work, seventeenth-century originals carved box, Follansbee, green woodworking, oak furniture, seventeenth-century reproductions

James Conrad, a regular reader of this blog, sent me a comment about an exhibition next week in Exeter, Devon, England. It includes several pieces of joined furniture, mostly chests, made in the area. Devon is significant in New England furniture studies because furniture made there is clearly linked to that made in Ipswich, Massachusetts. c. 1660-1700.

Folks familiar with my carved work will immediately see the influence this material has had on me . I have not seen the pieces in the exhibition, but have been to Devon before and seen a number of works from that area, among them these church pews in Totnes.

Well, I didn’t need church pews here in the house, so I adapted the carvings to fit a box to store junk in:

Here’s the links to the exhibition details. There’s some great carving there…and I’ll not say more for the time being…

http://www.maineantiquedigest.com/stories/index.html?id=1550

http://www.marhamchurchantiques.com/exhibition

better than nothing

October 24, 2009 pfollansbee carving, tools & materials carved oak, Follansbee, green woodworking, oak furniture

This piece of wood looks like a bad day at the workbench; knots & cracks enough to really test one’s abilities. I put it here to show that the recent posts I had about riven radial stock are the “best-case” scenario…but when you have no first-quality “stuff” then you use what you have available. Just to show it can be done, here is the front of the photo above.

So Nathaniel wondered the other day, what use is the flatsawn board I pictured earlier; I say if you have no better, then use it. It will be more difficult, and require more care, than riven stock. But it’s workable. then when you get some nice riven stock, you’ll have something to compare it to.

Here’s a flatsawn white oak panel I carved.

I forgot stability

October 20, 2009 pfollansbee tools & materials Follansbee, green woodworking, oak furniture, riving

splitting radial panel stock with a froe

In my last post, the one about riven oak & how great it is, https://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2009/10/18/theres-oak-then-theres-riven-oak/

I forgot one of the most important aspects of riven, radial oak – the stability! It shrinks very little across its face, thereby allowing the joiner to work the wood while it is green, and therefore easier to cut/plane/carve/mortise, etc.

You do need to select the log with care. To be able to rive parts efficiently, you need a dead-straight log. This then will behave best when it loses its moisture, less tension, thus less distortion. Mostly imperceptable.

One reader asked about the lengths that riven stock is best for; and in my work the largest challenge length-wise is making an oak chest lid of three or four radially-split boards edge-glued together. I have one underway now, the boards are about 58″ long, 1″+ thick, and seven or so inches wide. It takes a really good log to get those riven without much wind, or twist in the faces of the boards. So usually these are riven oversize, and hewn to rectify before planing. Otherwise most everything is four feet or less for joined furniture; in many cases quite short. For instance, muntins in a chest are about 14″-17″ long…very easy to get from a log.

I find a riving brake essential for careful riving of anything more than two feet long…here’s one I use a lot. A large wooden tripod, with cross-bars fastened to its front legs. Jam the stock in this crotch, and that allows you to exert pressure on the split to help direct it if it is going astray.

I learned this brake from my friend Daniel O’Hagan, who is pictured in Scott Landis’ The Workbench Book using one of these contraptions. The thing I like about it is that the stock is held parallel to the ground, so you can apply pressure easily. Other brakes I’ve seen leave the workpiece tilted up to the sky, and it’s harder to manage them that way. Says me.

In the shots belowe, I was riving the sapwood off some stuff for a pair of stilts I had to make last week. My friend Marie came by & I asked her to get some shots. Thanks, Marie.

there’s oak, then there’s riven oak

October 18, 2009 pfollansbee tools & materials Follansbee, green woodworking, oak furniture

The other day I bought this piece of wood at one of the large “home-improvement” stores. This piece of kiln-dried red oak is 1/2″ x 6″ x 24″ – thus one board foot. Price, about $7. I actually paid less than that, because there was no sticker on it, and the cashier couldn’t find the price. So it was about $4.50. From my standpoint, this piece of wood is about as bad as it gets, the only way it could be worse is if it had a knot in it.

I bought it to compare with the red oak I use every day, the radially-riven stuff, from a freshly-split log. Here’s three boards, one of mine, then a quartersawn red oak and finally this tangential-sawn, or flatsawn board.

riven, quartersawn, and flatsawn red oak

to understand them better, let’s look at the end grain. Hopefully this picture is big enough to see the growth rings in the first two boards from the left, (running horizontally in the photo, across the thickness of these boards) and the medullary rays running perpendicular to the growth rings:

The riven board has its rays running almost right on the faces of the board. The quartersawn board has its rays running close to the faces, at times running out of the faces. The flatsawn board mostly has its growth rings running parallel to the faces of the board. The most stable of these 3 is the riven board, and in additon, it’s the easiest to work with…there is little or no disturbance in its fibers, thus easy to plane, carve, etc. Below is a detail of the riven and the quartersawn boards. When I work the riven stuff, people often say “Oh, it’s like quartersawn stock…” and my standard reply is that this is what quartersawn wood wishes it was… Notice that the rays in the quartersawn board are running at an angle to the faces of the board. It’s not a bad piece of oak, it’s just not the best.

I get even pickier than that, when I can. I also want the oak to have grown slowly. Here are two extreme examples, both riven and planed in my shop. One grew about 30 or more years per inch; the other about 3 or 4 years per inch. Technically the faster growing oak is stronger, but seventeenth-century furniture is overbuilt anyway, so strength is not a factor for my work. I want ease of working, and also I find the slow stuff more pleasing to look at. The marks I made on the slow-growing one below are ten years.

(l) slow growth, (r) fast growth red oak

Here are the faces of these two boards:

The fast one was too much trouble, I threw it in the firewood pile.

I just checked a local hardwood dealer’s website, and they have quartersawn white oak on sale for $7.50 per board foot. When I buy the log, I pay about $1 to $1.50 per board foot. I am sure once I have all my labor in it to rive and plane it into boards the cost become quite high. No mind, I get all the wonderful work of riving and planing that stuff, and the stock I get can’t be beat.

new mortise chisel

October 16, 2009 pfollansbee tools & materials Follansbee, green woodworking, mortise and tenon joinery

The work I do requires lots of mortises each year. A chest like this has 26 mortises, a joined stool 16. They are almost all 5/16” wide.

For many years, I have tried several different mortise chisels, English, French, modern, antique, cheap, expensive. Some came from who-knows-where. Most of them worked out all right, some better than others. But now I am packing up the bunch of them, I just got one that is just what I need – a nice stout old-style English mortise chisel, but brand-new.

While I was at Woodworking in America earlier this month, I met Joel and Tim from Tools for Working Wood. Over the course of the weekend, we talked a lot about tools. No surprise there. In particular, I had wanted to see their Ray Iles mortise chisels.

This tool is just as advertised. Its form is an old standard shape, tang chisel fitted into an oval handle. No ferrule. [here is the blurb from Tools for Working Wood, I’ll let Joel tell the whole story… ]http://www.toolsforworkingwood.com/Merchant/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=toolshop&Product_Code=MS-MORT.XX&Category_Code=TBMC

The shape of the beech handle is quite comfortable; and the chisel’s blade is thick and strong. I found that the amount of pounding I was used to is excessive for this tool. If I drive it as hard as I did my previous mortise chisel, it’s too deep…so not a bad thing to have it work a little lighter. I have only chopped about half-a-dozen mortises with it this week, so I plan on making another joined stool next week. Then I will chop all 16 mortises in a row and see how it works. My first impression is that this tool will sail through the task.

Here is the Iles sitting beside the one I mostly used, the Sorby sash mortise chisel. I’ve used the Sorby for years, (with a replaced hickory handle & hoop) – but the thicker shank of the Iles moves more wood up the bevel when you drive it in the stock. A friend of mine would say, “it has something to do with physics” and I would add “geometry” as well.

So, the Sorby, Goldberg, no-name Garret Wade – all boxed up for posterity. This one hangs behind the bench, ready to go…

If anybody asks me now, what mortise chisel should I get…I’ll send them to Joel & Tim, no hesitation. There are many amazing tool makers out there now, I got to see many of them while at the conference. To my eye, this tool is in a different category from some of the others at the show. It really is a “tool for working wood.” It has no glamor, its “art” is quite subtle. Clearly there is great attention to detail in its manufacture, and it does just what it’s supposed to do. Just a good, old-fashioned tool made nowadays, for getting a job done efficiently. I don’t mean to imply that the “other” toolmakers these days are making tools just for show; I’m in awe of some of the tools I saw…but the simplicity of this one appeals to me for the type of work I do.

http://www.toolsforworkingwood.com/

New England Begins on ebay

October 13, 2009 pfollansbee historical references Follansbee, seventeenth-century reproductions

Last week I posted some reference materials for studies of 17th-c New England furniture. The other day Trent sent me a note about a copy of New England Begins that someone has up on Ebay…

I have no stake in this proceeding, but if anyone is out there needing a copy of this, it looks to be in great shape. An amazing reference for material culture studies of early New England…used to sell for $600 and up…if times were different, I’d buy it just to have an extra one…but of course, if times were different, it wouldn’t be $300 or less…

see # 400077735154 on www.ebay.com

carving video

October 12, 2009 pfollansbee carving, lectures & workshops carved oak, Follansbee, green woodworking, seventeenth-century reproductions

Well, I got “Hultman’d” the other day…
for those who don’t know what this means, it refers to Kari Hultman, whose blog “The Village Carpenter” http://villagecarpenter.blogspot.com/ is a regular stop for countless woodworkers. I finally met Kari at the Woodworking in America conference in Valley Forge where she shot & edited a video of one of my presentations there… then she posted it on her website, and I asked if I could stick it here too. she said yes.

thanks for the video work, Kari.

nails, not clamps

October 10, 2009October 10, 2009 pfollansbee carving, historical references, seventeenth-century originals, techniques carved oak, Follansbee, green woodworking, oak furniture, seventeenth-century reproductions

While I was demonstrating carving panels at Woodworking in America, I used a few different bench arrangements. It has been a while since I worked with bench dogs and vices; and for the stlye & method of carving I do, I am now re-convinced that my method of holding the stock to the bench works better than vices & dogs. this carving results in some pounding on the panel, which can bounce loose from dogs, clamps, etc. I managed to work with each bench OK, but back at my shop, when I put the panel down on the bench, it stays put.

I nail ’em down. Over the years, I have taken to nailing the oak panels to a pine board, and then fastening that board to the bench with 2 holdfasts. They stay down.

nails & holdfasts secure panel for carving

BUT, this is not just some whacky method of mine – it’s based on period evidence. I have found only one snippet of writing from 17th-century England about carving; John Evelyn in his book Sylva (1664) mentions that

“And yet even the greenest Timber is sometimes desirable for such as Carve and Turn…” (‘This extract from John Evelyn’s Sylva is from the © text by Guy de la Bédoyère. 1995 and used with permission’.)

While that quote will work its way into a discussion about moisture content, it has nothing to do with techniques used in the period shop. For that, we turn to the surviving objects, to see if they have any evidence, and they do. Here is a panel carved in Dedham, Massachusetts, showing the nail holes around its edges. there’s at least four holes, probably 5… (each corner, and one in a long side)

Next, I look for this technique in other works, just to be sure it’s not an abberation exclusive to one shop. So here are nail holes in panels from the Lakes District in England:

I tend to make my panels extra long, and position the nails holes in the waste piece that gets trimmed before fitting the panel…which presumably many joiners did. But now & then I find panels that show nail holes like those above. I leave the nails proud, so I can pull them easily when done. These are fairly stout wrought nails, so tapered square shanks that grab well…

PS: I FORGOT ONE IMPORTANT DETAIL. WHEN I BORE THE HOLES IN THE PANEL FOR THE NAILS, I ANGLE THEM SO THE NAILS PINCH THE PANEL DOWN TO THE PINE BOARD. THIS REDUCES THE CHANCE OF THE PANEL WORKING ITSELF LOOSE DURING CARVING.

home again

October 6, 2009 pfollansbee Uncategorized Follansbee, green woodworking, seventeenth-century reproductions

I returned the other day from the Woodworking in America conference in Valley Forge, PA. It was quite a time; met lots of people, saw many interesting tools & techniques. “Such a long, long time to be gone, & a short time to be there…” To demonstrate to woodworkers makes things so much easier than my usual day job.

I had only done a couple of woodworking seminar/conference type presentations before. This one went very well, I thought. Best move was having Roy Underhill be the dinner speaker. He keeps your attention to say the least.

I took almost no pictures; except for a few of the old molding planes Larry Williams & Don McConnell brought…

Right now, I am in the midst of a couple of days off, hence walking the beach instead of being in the shop.

So I will get back to posts tomorrow or so…meanwhile, the woodsy part of the web will have plenty of coverage, judging by what is already out there. So I’ll step aside from that. If you want to see a piece that I had a hand in, see this link to a hatchet/handsaw head-to-head. To paraphrase the Bobby Fuller Four, “I fought the saw, & the saw won…”

http://villagecarpenter.blogspot.com/2009/10/hatchetman-vs-blade.html

Thanks to Kari for the viddie…