My parquetry design for the tool cabinet is a residual memory from the Roentgen Exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in February 2013. Which itself makes for a somewhat amusing story.
I detest cities.
The bigger the city, the greater the animus.
It sorta explains why I live happily in a county of fewer than 2500 people, almost 200 miles from Ground Zero. That means I view NYC pretty much as a barbarian coven. During my career at the Institution I had to travel there several times to work at the national design museum, The Cooper Hewitt Museum, and near the end of my tenure to install the Chinese Pavilion exhibit in Queens. Mrs. Barn had to hear my griping about these trips and that fetid megalopolis for weeks before and after the fact (I never did get used to the stench of the place). I recall once riding the train with my pal MikeM to Manhattan for an editorial meeting at Simon&Schuster, and as we walked out on to the sidewalk from Grand Central station I instantly turned to him and said, “Okay, I’ve had enough. I’m ready to go home.” I may be twice his size but he is Sicilian, so he won the argument. That particular book in question never came to pass mostly because by the time push came to shove, I had lost interest.
A couple months after I retired, I announced to Mrs. Barn that we would be making a day trip to NYC to attend the mondo Roentgen furniture exhibit at the Met. Her dumfounded expression confirmed her suspicion that aliens had abducted her husband and replaced him with a metrosexual or some other life form. I was adamant that we would not stay overnight so we caught the 5AM train and arrived at Penn Station about 8.30. Rather than subject myself to the subway system or a cab ride I made her walk all the way to the Met. That’s 3-1/2 miles.
My friend M, a conservator at the Met, gave us a guided tour of the exhibit complete with a running commentary of some of the technical features of the pieces she had examined and conserved. It was a grand day, complete with lunch at the fancy schmancy Met restaurant and an afternoon session examining the contents of the Duncan Phyfe tool chest before a delicious meal at a restaurant en route back to Penn Station and heading home, arriving sometime around 2AM. The day was totally worth it, even for an urbaphobe like me.
Anyhow, even though the Roentgens were best known for their innovative veristic marquetry creations, I found greater resonance with their parquetry. Some of those parquetry expressions never left my consciousness and when it came time to start noodling this tool cabinet the visual memories came flooding back. Almost immediately I gravitated to an alternating diamond-and-stringing concept for the presentation surface. As I mentioned before I was using 18thC white oak for my veneers rather than the exotics favored by Roentgen patrons.
Equipped with my vision for segmented 60-120-60-120 parallelogram diamonds I started rough cutting the sawn veneers from which I could begin to assemble the diamonds which would then be sawn and trimmed en toto.
I recognized early on I had to devise a precise method to both saw the 30-60-90 triangle segments, and then to layout, saw and trim the completed diamonds perhaps even more precisely.
Several months ago while dining with Elderdottir at her house I was telling a friend of hers about my experience as a college radio station program host, when I hosted a weekly Tuesday evening jazz program and was in the rotation for every other weekend of late-night jazz on Saturday. One byproduct of this era was my acquisition of thousands of vinyl records, now in storage in the space above the master bathroom. Elderdottir’s friend was very excited about it (I believe she is a vinyl record buff herself) so we tried playing a record on the living room turntable. The turntable had not been used in almost thirty years and did not work well. On examination I could see the cartridge had been damaged, or at least the stylus had been damaged and was unusable.
In the intervening months I found a new stylus cartridge online an ordered it. FYI $25 cartridges are now $150. One of the items on my Thanksgiving Week agenda was to install the new cartridge and see if the turntable was still operable. It was, except for the “Cuing” function, which I hope is just womperjawed and creaky from sitting unused for three decades.
Elderdottir retrieved one of the two dozen large boxes of records from the storage compartment and when I looked through them I knew instantly which one had to be the first choice for the re-commissioning ceremony – the proto-punk Holly Beth Vincent album Holly and the Italians. Soon the living room was rocking.
Last I heard Elderdottir was planning on having friends over to listen to her dad’s old records while they drank tea. A wild bunch they are.
BTW I hope your Thanksgiving was as celebratory as ours, as we were reminded of the blessings and trials God has placed in our lives to draw us closer to Him, and this year was especially noteworthy as L’il T is now part of our lives (and he is progressing nicely!). Mrs. Barn has been cooking up a storm and in her glory, ministering to and surrounded by the family she loves (plus she and the Barndottirs play board games every evening, something that holds zero interest for me).
As I slowly move forward with my ultimate tool cabinet the reminders and memories of the Studley Tool Cabinet are ever operating in the background as I strive to integrate the maximum inventory of tools into the space. Fortunately (?) my tool cabinet will be five times more voluminous than Studley’s, which presents a multitude of opportunities and headaches. Sure, I can include five times as many tools, but like Studley the multi-layered layout must be accomplished by hand and trial-and-error. I expect that hugely time-consuming process will continue to infinity and beyond, or until I run out of tools to put inside.
Less problematic, at least in principle, is the decorative treatment of the presentation surfaces. There I have a starting premise and need only to fine tune the execution. My goal is to assemble a complex diamond-and-stringing parquetry surface evocative of the creative genius of Abraham and David Roentgen who, like many of the monumental French ebenistes, were Germanic. My parquetry surfaces will be based on some of their work, but without the over-the-top exuberance. As for decorating the interior surfaces, I have plenty of black dye, mother-of-pearl, and “bone,” both genuine and artificial.
Since beginning the project my efforts have vacillated between fitting the tools inside and mapping out the parquetry process. For the latter I needed to create a very rough proof-of-concept panel that could provide useful information about tinkering with the size and proportions, and the process of executing whatever/wherever I wound up.
One of my foundational starting points was to use wood from Roentgen’s era for the veneers. Fortunately I had a large inventory of leftover white oak scraps from the FORP gatherings in Georgia, which employed timbers that were literally growing at the time the Roentgens were active. While none of the wood pieces were sizable, they were certainly process-able.
With a newly tuned bandsaw and brand-new, variable spaced teeth bandsaw blade I set to work making enough sawn veneer to execute the sample panel.
Stay tuned, this project will consume dozens of blog posts over the coming months.
My longtime broadcaster friend Brian Wilson invited me back on his show Something Completely Different Tuesday to discuss the elections, or perhaps more precisely, the electorate. Find it and listen at your own risk. If pungent opinionating and analysis is too much for you, avoid it.
While this blog is not really about my family, there are times when it needs a good mention. Such posts may not interest you, but quoting Mollie Hemingway, “My spiritual gift is that I do not care what you think about anything.”
The cabin is hauntingly quiet now after a long weekend with both daughters, one son-in-law, and L’il T filling every cubic inch with love and joy. Even when he is fussy (teething) L’il T is a joy and truly a Godly blessing. He is completely captivated by this white fur on my face, stroking it every time I held him. Heart-melting moments.
One of the motivations behind the visit was a celebration of LtCdr’s birthday, but even more was it was deer hunting season. He spent several days sitting up in the woods for hours at dawn and dusk, bow-and-arrow at the ready. Of course, his only score was at dusk on their last night here. We spent until almost midnight dressing the carcass. My mouth is almost watering in the anticipation of the venison roasts yet to be cooked.
The skill set related to hunting is not one I possess, so it was a grand time of bonding with the father of my grandson. Given my age and visual limitations it is not likely I will ever be a good hunter, or even any kind of hunter, but I learned a lot about hunting in conversations with LtCdr over their visit. No doubt it could come in handy as the nation seems hell-bent on becoming Venezuela, where things got so bad they ate the zoo animals.
Our little community is down to one chimney sweep, a not inconsiderable logistical problem when there are probably around a thousand fireplaces and woodstoves in use here. Getting on Rick the Chimney Sweep’s calendar early is an important consideration, and this year we did not get on the calendar as early as we should. But just in time for chilly weather he worked us in to clean out our beautiful stone chimney. Fortunately, our exhaust flue is not prone to build-up and combining that with the choice of fuel — always well-seasoned hardwood — gives us a lot of latitude, chimney cleaning-wise.
The easy part for Rick is to climb a ladder to the top of the chimney and sweep it from the top down a la Bert the chimney sweep from Mary Poppins. I’m not afraid of heights but Mrs. Barn insists that my amygdala is not as sensitive as it should be so I take more risks than I should. Thus, she is delighted we can hire someone to work at the height required.
Rick is, among other things, an enthusiastic spelunker so crawling around in the fireplace behind the insert suits him just fine. He gave our fire exhaust system a clean bill of health and said that we may not even need an annual cleanout.
His ministrations were just in time as the temps will drop precipitously over the next few days with snow coming next Tuesday and Friday. I expect we will fire it up in the next 36 hours or so if for no other reason than Li’l T and his parents are visiting for several days and we want to keep him warm.
As for the barn, it is easy enough for me to disassemble and clean the stovepipe, which I did last spring.
All set.
PS I’m about halfway through the task of splitting and stacking firewood for next winter, and by the time I finish with the entire mountain of wood in the parking area next to the barn I’ll be ready through winter 2024/2025.
My original work on artificial tortoiseshell was presented in Amsterdam almost exactly twenty years ago. I think the conference publication was about eighteen months later.
Here is the link for the PDF on my “Writings” page:
One of the outcomes from my current developments will be an updated and more detailed monograph to be posted in that same directory. I’m also noodling a video on the whole process. My videographer Chris is now much harder to schedule, with a full-time job, a new/old house, and a wife and two tiny kids, so I will probably try to figure out how to do two-camera filming in the studio. My digital SLR has a microphone port so I think all I need to do is start figuring things out.
Stay tuned.
P.S. I will probably make some full blown tordonshell in the coming fortnight based on my latest results.
One of my regular podcast listens is The Darkhorse Podcast hosted by husband-and-wife Biology professors Drs. Heather Heying and Brett Weinstein. Though our general worldviews are definitely not overlapping too much I enjoy their conversations immensely as they are informative, gracious, and usually good-humored. Their quiet earnestness and quest for truth (with little tolerance for b.s.) keep me listening.
Recently they discussed the inter-relationship between science (I loved how it was described as a tool rather than a sacred totem) and the structured problem solving inherent in artistic creation. Part of the reason for my interest is fairly obvious, my career was spent occupying the space resulting from the intersection of materials science and artistic and cultural artifacts in the world’s largest museum complex. At one point of my career trajectory, I was a principal in a project to create a high school interdisciplinary curriculum merging the hard sciences with the world of artifacts and art. As I said in the funding proposal for the beta-test, “When the scientific analyst describes a material as having such and such properties and the artist says he wants art materials to accomplish this or that expression, they are talking about the exact same thing but from a different perspective.” My organization’s priorities changed with new management and the project was never brought to fruition.
I think you just might find Bret and Heather’s comments to be interesting. This specific topic begins around the 23-minute mark.
Many years ago, when I was Director of the Smithsonian’s Furniture Conservation Training Program, I was meeting individually with each student in preparation for their fourth-year fellowship, during which they were required to undertake a project that would result in their Master’s Thesis. The students had great latitude in their projects, some were purely historical aesthetics, some were about historical technology or craft, and some were analytical.
After our conversations I would arrange for each student to have a “mentor” to help them with guidance along the way. For those projects reliant on analytical data I brought in a highly respected statistician with a specialty in experimental design and data analysis to advise the students in designing their project, gathering data, analyzing that data and formulating the conclusions. One of the great beauties of DC is the abundance of research institutions and their scholarly communities. (The stories the statistician told me sotto voce about “research” shenanigans made me distrustful of any “science” ever since, even before the anti-“science” of the past three years. One tale literally revolved around a “researcher” bringing in a box of lab notebooks and dropping them on the statistician’s desk the with the instructions, “My conclusion for this project is XYZ so you need to review this data and arrive at this conclusion.” As the experimental designer told me then, “science” is not a thing, science is a process, and if the process is corrupt then the outcome [data and conclusions] is worthless. From that perspective I can barely withhold laughter when public luminaries now tell us to “follow the science.”)
Back to my student. The topic proposed for the thesis project was an evaluation of shellac properties, the particulars are lost to me at the moment. I only remember that the number of variables combined with the number of identical samples required for a statistically valid set of results would have require formulating and preparing approximately seven million samples. Needless to say, the student changed their project rather fundamentally.
Which brings me to work I am undertaking in the studio right now and probably for weeks or months to come. I am not the trained experimental scientist in this household — that would be Mrs. Barn — but I am fairly able to harness and focus my curiosities from time to time. My demonstration of making my artificial tortoiseshell several weeks ago has re-lit that fire for me and I have been working on refining the formulation and process ever since. Although my paper from two decades still stands up well, it only gets about >95% of the way to a really good imitation vis-a-vie the physical properties of genuine tortoiseshell. >95% is not the same thing as ~99%, which is where I want to go.
Like my student’s those years ago every variable change requires a group of samples to be formulated and made. Unlike the putative shellac researcher I am NOT weighing each variable as random and equal. I am not making the number of samples that might be required if the variables were purely random; I am testing one variable first, then applying the second variable once the first spec is established, then the third once the first two are established, etc. Even so I am creating hundreds of samples to assess for their properties based on a menu of options I must consider.
What grade of collagen should I use?
What concentration?
Which plasticizer (if any)?
At what concentration?
Which protein reaction catalyst to use?
In what proportion?
In solution or infused ex poste?
How long to cure?
At what temperature?
My tools for this undertaking are fairly simple and non-specialized; an analytical digital scale, disposable pipettes, disposable cups, a old microwave, an ancient ebay stirring hotplate, a rice steamer (most samples curl when they dry and need to be steamed flat), drying screens, and a desiccating chamber, a/k/a a Gammo pet food storage unit filled with conditioned silica gel. By far the most time for the sample involves drying them to the lowest moisture content possible, at which time the most extreme properties become manifest. Yes indeed, most of the time is watching samples dry.
There is simply no point in ongoing daily blogging about that, or in changing formulations by a hundredth of a unit proportion, but I will report back when I have results that I find encouraging in directing my final minute adjustments. In the meantime when there is radio silence on the blog, you can assume I am either splitting firewood for next winter and beyond, or tinkering with formula minutiae.
One of my real headaches at the moment has to do with a German chemical component that has a) become unavailable, or b) become unaffordable. My current dwindling inventory was a 100g jar given to me by the president of a chemical company almost twenty years ago, and in the intervening years I have seen the price go from a couple hundred dollars a kilo to several hundred dollars per kilo to a few thousand dollars a kilo to a quote yesterday of almost $100k per kilo. I’m really wishing I’d bought a big bucket of it fifteen years ago. Obviously, I am doing my best to work around that headache.
I am a complete sucker for a sublime artist’s brush and probably own ten times as many as I need (well, make that definitely, not probably; I’m getting ready to order a few more Kolinsky’s right now).
Recently my friend JoeA sent me the link to this video and I have watched it more than once already. Aspirations must have a focus target, and this is certainly one of those for me.
High quality tools both bring out the best work and require the most attentive care. Hence, the Special Feature on cleaning and caring for brushes in my woodfinishing video (currently out of stock but more copies are in the pipeline).
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