Often when telling folks, woodworkers who replicate historic styles especially, that I have been a furniture and wooden artifacts conservator and restorer for more than four decades, they usually get dewey-eyed and exclaim something like, “Oh, it must be so great to work on furniture from the old days, when it was still good stuff.” True enough, I have worked on some old artifacts, the oldest wooden object was at least five or six centuries, but I often find the most challenging and inspiring projects and objects are more or less contemporary. Further, I recognize that my liking or disliking an artifact’s design does not make it good or bad. Still, I find some of the most fascinating furniture emerged from the minds of creative designers pushing the boundaries of design and fabrication. (Truth be told, a lot of the “great” furniture of centuries past was unimaginative replication, as social standing was much more involved with “keeping up with the [English or French] Jones'” than it was with good artistry or craftsmanship).
The 20th Century hosted the creative design genius of a multitude of awe-inspiring designers whose work I find much more engaging than their much older predecessors. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Greene brothers, Eileen Grey, Alvar Aalto, Peter Behrens, Charles Eames, Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Josef Hoffman, and Louis Marjorelle are but a few of the multitude of artists who made wood and surfaces express exuberant beauty.
It is noteworthy that many of the great modern designers were not artisans, and in fact some did not have a firm grasp on the details of how things were made. Thus, many times when the sketches were brought to reality the pieces of furniture they directed to be created had, um, shortcomings.
Such is the case with a pair of mid-century modern chairs I was asked to conserve recently. The client, a scholar of the arts, thought that these might have been prototypes from the mind of Milo Baughmann. It makes sense to me; they are reminiscent of some of Baughmann’s other work, and the construction details for the chairs were not the best resolution to the structural requirements for their use. Alternately, the chairs could be the product of the imagination for an acolyte of Charles Eames. Whatever the source, neither I nor the client have ever seen another example of this specific chair form (I like it so much I am trying to devise the making of some myself.).
The main problem with these two rocking chairs, well, one in particular, was that the cross member that bears virtually the entire weight of the sitter was 1) too weak to resist the forces of sitting adequately (especially since it was both undersized and much more figured that is appropriate for the location and requirements of the element), and 2) integral to the structure of the chair which simply could not be dismantled for the offending piece to be replaced without inflicting catastrophic destruction on the chair.
Over the next three postings I will describe my decision-making for resolving the problem and returning the chairs to full service, the execution of that plan, and finally note about the reassembly and a solution to dealing with the problem of wallowed out screw holes.
As they say about many things in life, timing is everything.
With winter setting in here in the Allegheny Highlands, I’ve been trying to time the winter shutdown of the hydroelectric system in order to avoid the carnage of last winter, as lengthy sections of the pipeline to the turbine froze and shattered. I planned for the shutdown to occur at dusk today. The system has been performing brilliantly, even with several consecutive nights with lows about 10F.
Today we took a trip across the mountains to get some lumber and groceries, returning just before dusk so that I could walk the line and shut the system down. The day was cold but sunny, between 15 and 20F as we headed out, and the turbine could be heard doing its little turbine work. As we pulled up on our return five hours later, parked, and got out, a sickening silence cut through the air. The gentle whine of the turbine was missing.
After quickly unloading the groceries (the lumber can stay in the back of the truck) I headed up the hill to see what the situation was. The situation? I waited one day too long. The water in the pipeline has frozen in place, and all I can do now is wait for the pipeline to thaw to determine the level of damage and make the repairs. Surely some will have to be replaced, but that might have to wait until spring. Had I closed the system down yesterday, I could have resumed it on the warmer days here. Now? Probably not until late March at the earliest. Good thing we added the extra solar panels last September. In the morning I will brush off the snow and get back to work on the various projects around here.
I also need to re-examine every part of the pipeline system, to get it perfect. Clearly, it is not so now.
It is now just past dusk here, and even though they are predicting a low of 2F tonight, it was already 1F a half hour ago. I suspect the air temperature will get to minus-5F or maybe even minus-8, and with winds gusting to almost forty miles an hour, that will yield a wind chill of around -40F.
If you come across any anthropogenic global warming crackpots (but I am being redundant) whack them with a snow shovel.
Winter is settling in here on the homestead, with a couple of inches of snow today and sub-zero temperatures due in a coupe of days, no telling what the wind-chill will be if the breeze gets up to the 40 mph range that is not uncommon out here. Although the weather is increasingly brutal and the pace of activities remains high, I wanted to take a minute to walk you through the wax works in Chez Barn.
I render the raw beeswax into purified material as I described here and then I turn it over to my wife for final processing. As a former experimental scientist she is pretty scrupulous about here approach, which has helped me a lot. She solved a problem I had been having in getting minute specs of debris in the raw material, and she observed the way I was working and straightened me out.
She takes the slabs of purified wax and melts it in a dedicated crock pot (the solar oven is not an option in winter here) and fills the silicone rubber molds “just right” on the kitchen counter. Once the blocks cool and are popped out of the molds, they move to the dining table where she weighs them each on a digital scale to make sure they are all 4.1 ounces. Then she cuts each printed label page in half and wraps the blocks, glues their end flaps, and sticks them in a box to be put on the inventory shelf in the living room closet. She can produce about 25 blocks on a good day, but less when she is busy with things like cooking, which she loves to do and I love her cooking too!
Then you order it and I send it to you.
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