decorative surfaces

Sweet Home (from) Alabama

Whew! Concluding a few months of mostly traveling we got back to Shangri-la late Sunday evening after driving non-stop from Alabama, where L’il T’s family just moved (we were “helping,” a/k/a grandparenting L’il T and his brother).  Travel advisory — avoid Chattanooga if at all possible, the construction and attendant constriction made it a more than an hour of stop and go experience at 97 degrees.

I am looking forward to resuming some semblance of norma life, including full days in the shop.  This is made possible by the cessation of travel for most of the foreseeable future, along with finding a sturdy Mennonite lad to do most of the yard work.  We were spending 3-4 days a week just keeping the grass cut, brush beat back, and trimming the edges.  This young man could do what is necessary in 3-4 hours, rather than 3-4 days.  Oh, to have the exuberance and fortitude of the young!  That plus a $10k lawnmower makes a big difference.

Other than routine chores around the homestead I’ll be preparing for a Labor Day Weekend shindig at my friend Tim’s place, celebrating the historic crafts of our ancestors.  I’ll be assembling a vintage-form tool kit to fit into my antique cabinetmaker’s tool chest which has been used as storage for the past couple decades.  So, I’ll be there with tools and one of my Nicholson workbenches, in period costume, probably making a small dowry chest.  If you are in the region, stop on by.

In addition I’ll be ramping up for my only teaching event of the year, a 3-day Introduction to Historic Woodfinishing workshop near Charlottesville VA.

And resuming work on my magnum opus tool cabinet, and oh by the way L’il T is now big enough to use a step stool to wash his hands and brush his teeth.  The ones I made for his mom and aunt are still in service after 35+ years.

And my traveling tool kit needs completing.  As do a couple of Gragg chairs.  And those half-finished Studley mallet exercises, and the patterns for the genuine replicas.  And the custom oculars for my rifle scopes, bypassing the now nearly defunct right eye (dominant).  And the boat load of writing and editing staring me in the face.  And setting up a video system to make in-shop vids after I get the Gragg video edited.  And tuning my ripple molder.

And, and, and…

The Ghost of Samuel Gragg Comes A’Callin’

 

 

2023 is shaping up as a pretty Graggtastic year in the shop.  I am in the home stretch of the copious pinstriping for one chair to be delivered.  A second client’s chair is fabricated but I have not yet begun the painting, and a third chair is about half built.

 

Then last week I was contacted by someone who has a Gragg chair with a broken arm, and based on the images they sent it just *might* be ONLY THE THIRD ORIGINAL, COMPLETE  ELASTIC ARM CHAIR known to exist!

There is the completely overpainted chair at the SI that I kept in my conservation lab for almost two decades, trying unsuccessfully to persuade the curator to allow me to remove the overpaint.

Then there is the beauty at the Carnegie in Pittsburgh, and the heavily restored one in Baltimore.  Unfortunately at the moment I cannot find my overall photos of the BMA chair but I have a large folder of detail shots.  As I understand it the Baltimore chair was missing some elements that were newly fabricated and integrated to make a whole chair.

This newest chair has a tricky repair to be made to the arm, and the putative client inquired about me making a new chair to make a pair with the old one.

On top of all of this excitement there are several new Gragg-ish projects on the drawing board.  Without revealing all the cards, consider that 1) we have a new grandson, and 2) the front porch of our Shangri-la cabin is rocking-chair-tastic.

Finally, I’m at long last seeing the light at the end of the tunnel for the “Build A Gragg Chair” video set.  Whether that light is sunshine or an oncoming train I cannot yet be certain, but I remain hopeful.  At the moment I am estimating the series to be more than a dozen half-hour-ish episodes, and Webmeister Tim and I are noodling the mechanism for the on-line offering.  I’ve had one faithful donor sending me a small contribution every month (THANK YOU JimF!), but we need to come up with a system for processing the $1.99(?)/episode charge without viewers crawling up my back as the episodes are released.  One approach I will almost certainly NOT take is a subscription model.  I’ve spoken to some subscription-based content creators and they are unanimous in their regret.  No matter how much content they create, their subscribers want more, and more often.   I want no part of that.

Now the only thing left in the equation is the resolution to the question, “Why am I not as energetic and productive in my 68th year as I was in my 28th?”

‘Tis a mystery.  Who knows, if I can solve that problem, I may even want to offer another Gragg chair workshop if there is interest.

Samplin’

On Saturday morning I will be making a presentation to the Howard Co. (MD) woodworker’s club on the topic of shellac finishing.  Somehow I’ve got to cram enough content from a three-day workshop into 75-minutes to make true believers out of them.

The only way I can think to do this is to “Julia Child” it, so for the past couple of weeks I’ve been spending a few minutes here and there creating in-step sample boards, allowing me to jump into each step for a couple minutes and start with raw plywood and end up with some highly polished surfaces.

I’m also taking the tack of using only (well, at least mostly) locally available supplies, including Bulls-Eye shellac, fine artist’s brushes, good rags from the thrift store, Woodcraft or a good hardware store, etc.

Prepping for Tordonshell Demo

Labor Day weekend will be the inaugural 18th Century Craft shindig here in Highland County, where I have been asked to demonstrate tortoiseshell craft.  Events | Fair Lawn Farm (visitfairlawnfarm.com

Since tortoiseshell is a restricted material I will be focusing my efforts on the making and working of tordonshell, a convincing substitute I invented many years ago so that I could make Boullework, starting with a pot of hot hide glue and a few select additives.  At the time I was contemplating patenting the formula, but then I con$ulted with a patent attorney and found out how much it would co$t to go through with it.  Phooey on that, I just published the paper and moved on.  (The estimate wa$ for a completed application and patent to co$t $25-50k.)

Along the way I made a lot of tordonshell things to make sure it mimicked tortoiseshell accurately, which will be of great interest to the powder horn crowd.

For the rest of this week and into next week I will be gathering the materials and rehearsing the demonstrations, beginning with discussions of the materials themselves and the making of tordonshell so that all the attendees can go home and make it themselves to use in their own craft work.  It will also be a dry run for my next video project which I hope to begin filming this winter.  I keep telling myself I cannot start a new one until I get the Gragg Chair video edited and posted on line.

More Boullework Adventures

As I continued preparations leading up to last Saturday’s Boullework presentation to the SAPFM Blue Ridge Chapter I was able to make good progress once I discovered the cause of my earlier frustrations.  Which was, as I realized once the initial center cut was completed and the material removed, that the first blade break resulted in a small fragment being embedded in the kerf.  Every succeeding blade was damaged by encountering this fragment, continuing the sawing difficulties.  When you’re talking 0000 blades it does not take much to throw them off.

Getting a little more sawing done and assembling the demo materials was pretty straightforward.

I even made a scute of tordonshell.   Fun, fun, fun.

PS  Since I am on the home stretch for reviewing the Gragg chair video (probably about a dozen finished half-hour-ish episodes plus a bonus episode or two) and creating the edit sheets for the project, I am casting my brain forward to next winter.  I am thinking about a shorter series on Boullework, Don-stye.  Or at least revising and updating my original monograph from my presentation in Amsterdam.

Some Days The Magic Isn’t There

It’s been quite a while since I 1) did any Boullework and 2) made a public presentation.

The last week or two I’ve been going through the exercises I’m demonstrating this coming Saturday to the SAPFM Blue Ridge Chapter, everything from making tordonshell to cutting some new Boullework panels.

When I assembled the metal and tordonshell packet and set about to sawing, the magic just wasn’t there.  On a normal day once I get in the rhythm I can go for an hour or longer per saw bade, sometimes even half a day.  But not this particular day.  Sigh.

I was snapping blades like I was trying to break pasta.  It took me four hours to saw a 1/2″ circle (and a pretty raggedy one at that) and I broke more than two dozen blades in the process.  When I swept up the pile was truly impressive, but my camera was not handy.

Bad posture?  Bad lot of blades? (it really does happen some time)  Packet too thick?  Rusty antiquated shoulder?  Vision problems?  (well, that is a given)

Some days are just like that.  I’ll aim to get the bear tomorrow.

Ebonizing

One of my initial design/aesthetic choices for the standing tool cabinet was to make the prominent detailing to be black, along with the entire interior.  In the former case it was to set off the comparative blandness of the oak veneer, about which there will be exhaustive posting in coming weeks, and in the latter it would serve to set off the tools themselves.  As to the ebonized stringing in between the parquetry I am not yet fully convinced — I may instead go with rosewood which will serve the primary purpose equally well, although it will not tie-in with the interior well without further design– but ebonized interior is already a fait accompli.

The ebonized stringing for the proof-of-concept parquetry exercise representing the outer skin began with a piece or two from the pile of 1/4″ tulip poplar I had on hand, itself a raw material for yet another proof-of-concept for some fauxrushi I am prototyping.  Using water soluble shellac as my coloring medium, a/k/a India Ink, is a method I use frequently.

The big box store pieces of tulip poplar fit a flower pot tray perfectly, so I used the tray as the immersion bath for the board.  After soaking it all night the surface was really black.

Even then when ripping the bards on the bandsaw it was apparent that the interiors were not well dyed, so I repeated the tray and India ink step again with the strips.  The result was a pile of 1/4″ wide ebonized stringing strips.  That might sound a tad wide to you but remember, the front presentation of the cabinet as 4-feet-by-3-feet.

As to the interior, I noted that the soaking of the plywood with India ink yielded a very desirable surface, black-ish but still retaining the character of wood, a result not really possible with something like gel stain or il paint.

Winter Projects (and well beyond) – Honing (skills, not tool edges)

When it comes to workshop skills, perhaps like some (?)/many (?)/ most (?)/all (?) of you I think of myself deficient in every respect, certainly compared to where I want to be.  Some of the skills I intend to practice more in the future include engraving and checkering.  The checkering is pretty straightforward, the tool kit is small and all you need is a workpiece and a vise to hold it.  Got those.  Oh, and dozens/hundreds/thousands of hours at the bench doing the repetitions that impart skill.  By the way, none of these pathways require talent, a good thing since I am sparse in that category.  But skill? I can do that especially since so many of the practices in my shop are inter-related and cross-re-enforcing.

Just do it, stoopid.

Engraving is a little involved since it requires freehand facility at the micro scale.  In addition to my pretty compete set of hand gravers I also have a first-generation Lindsay Air Graver, one of the most astounding tools I have ever encountered.  Think of a road construction jackhammer.  Now miniaturize it down to palm sized, and instead of an asphalt splitting tip it has a precision engraving tip.  Now you have a Lindsay Air Graver.  I bought a used one and its companion Silent Aire Compressor almost twenty years ago for a couple of conservation/replication projects that would require enhancing some well-worn engraving, and they sufficed brilliantly.  I never became fully facile with the tool, the project did not require full-range ability but rather simply tracing some worn lines, and to be truthful I did not have the time to dedicate at the microscope to make my lines fluid.

My first step down this path was to get my compressor tuned up and ready to go.

Done.  The beauty of this compressor is that it is literally so quiet it can reside in the shop next to the bench.  It’s about as loud as a refrigerator and is frequently used in dentist’s offices.

The next pathway is checkering, to me a much simpler enterprise than is engraving.  Still, I need to spend more time working at full scale/full speed on gunstocks and tools for it to become second nature.

Some years ago my friend Tred deposited a classical French marquetry chevalet in my space, and I played with it a bit.  I simply need to spend more hours in the seat using it to become good at it.  The kinesiology of the tool is foreign to me as I have spent the past 45 years cutting marquetry in the up-and-down motion.  That much muscle memory is a challenge to overcome.  If I am going to have a variable-speed, hand-powered machine take up more space than a table saw, I’d better make use of it.

I do not pretend to even aspire to follow the masters well, but I can certainly and earnestly be inspired by them.

Finally, for this post at least, I come to the area where talent would be a great help — drawing and decorative painting.  In order to most fully exploit my efforts at replicating urushi laquerwork I need to be able to draw and paint much better than I can now.  I hope that more hours of practice will yield a more amenable result, even if it is simply copywork.

I think I am able to reach that level of competence: this is an unfinished class exercise, a pastiche of a Johannes Vermeer painting I executed in college almost 40 years ago.

Armed with my stack of pattern books I will head down this path and hopefully not wind up in the ditch.  Good thing I am planning on working in the shop another 35 years.

Clean-up “Christmas”

One of the aspects of having a humungous Fortress of Solitude like the barn, four stories of 40′ x 36′ space, is that there are a multitude of nooks and crannies into which things can be tucked, stuffed, crammed, lost, and re-discovered.  I call these instances my own “Clean Up Christmases,” when I come across treasures I had forgotten, or at least misremembered.

Such has been the case recently when prepping the classroom for this coming weekend workshop Historical Wood Finishing.  As the first class there in over two years, the space had, shall we say, devolved.  That pesky Second Law of Thermodynamics; they tried repealing it but it just didn’t take.  It has taken me over two weeks to get it ready for the group on Saturday.  The level of “rearrangeritis” (full credit to James “Stumpy Nubs” Hamilton for coining the phrase to describe an all-day travail when moving one thing in his crowded shop) has been monumental, and monumentally rewarding on several fronts.  It has also given me time for contemplation about future projects, a topic I will address in numerous upcoming posts.

At the moment I am mostly reveling the rediscovery of two caches that were set aside for some future completion.  The first is the two sets of brass Roubo-esque squares fabricated before and during that workshop more than two years ago; all it will take is a day or two with some files and Chris Vesper’s sublime reference square to get them up and running.

A second trove is the pile of French oak scraps from the multiple iterations of the FORP gatherings in southern Georgia.  I brought them home in order to turn them into veneers, probably oyster shell style, to use on some as-yet-unknown project.  That “unknown” identifier is becoming more “known” as the days go by.  Then, much like my shop being the only one in the county with two c. 1680 parquetry flooring panels from the Palais Royale in Paris, my tool cabinet will be the only one with veneers from some c.1775 oak trees from the forests surrounding Versailles.

Who knows what other “Christmas” presents I might find during the never ending effort to impose order on my space?  Stay tuned.

An Upcoming Distraction – Fauxrushi

During his recent visit to help set up for next August’s Gragg Chair Workshop my pal John presented me with these three little vessels for me to experiment with as I build an inventory of fauxrushi experience.  I can hardly wait to get to them.  John has a Rose Engine Lathe and is always looking for new avenues of artistic expression with it.  I made sure to send him home equipped with several wood chunks with which he can play, including a bolt from a holly tree, some tulipwood, and others.  I await the results of  explorations from his end.