I’ve met a few guys like this out here in the hinterlands. I’ve often said I was Northern by birth and Southern by the Grace of God. I might amend that now given my affection for life on the fringe of Appalachia.
I’ve been beat by the end of the day between yard work and such, and another round of “rearrangeritis” (h/t Stumpy Nubs) in the shop. I’ve probably not done much real work at the bench in three or four months. Between finding a young fellow to take over all the yard work and winding down some sporadic family travel I hope to be back making sawdust and shavings in a month.
I may have already recounted the story of a presentation I was making at a regional woodworker’s club 25(?) years ago, and prior to my presentation there was a Show-N-Tell among the members, as there usually is for gatherings like this. Well, this particular episode was all about incredibly complex and even convoluted jigs enabling the members to not work wood but rather to machine wood with great precision. I recall rolling my eyes so hard it could probably be heard throughout the room. I mean, real woodworkers work wood by hand, not by machines or power tools and certainly not with jigs. Jigs! For cryin’ out loud. Were these guys even “real” woodworkers?
I have since become, to quote Lyndon Johnson, “Smarter today than I used to be.” Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Roubo’s jig for gluing up coopered panels.
The second major barricade to fall in the bigotry against jigs was during the initial phases of the Roubo Project. Roubo was all about jigs, forms, and templates. In a world where the typical craftsman was only a few days ahead of malnutrition anything that helped get him from Point A to Finished and Paid For was a requisite component for working and getting fed, sheltered, and clothed.
But the first hurdle for my obstinance was when I dove deep into the world of Samuel Gragg’s Elastic Chairs. There is simply no way to construct these without having a boat load of jigs for every step of the journey, from preparing the stock to steam-bending the parts to sculpting the seat rails and crest rail, through the ultimate assembly. I spent dozens of hours in that research trying many different schemes for the jigs involved.
When I started down the path of making a scaled-down version of the Gragg chair for L’il T I had hoped to have it done long ago, but then life interfered and I’ve just now returned to the shop after almost three months’ absence. I finally completed the inventory of jigs needed and will now turn my attention to prepping the hand-riven stock.
Among the multitude of planes that I own and use, the five previously mentioned are my Pantheon. Three more planes are “near misses” for one of three reasons. First, even though the tool might be called “a plane” it might not really be a plane in the most common sense of the word, that being a tool to make lumber flat, smooth, true, to a specific dimension. Second, it might not be as integral to my own work, in other words my projects might not require this or that tool. If your projects do require this tool, wonderful. Finally, I wanted to make sure the Essential Planes were not gargantuan or heavyweight; my Pantheon are things that would be found in a reasonably-sized traveling tool box. Admittedly, these restrictions are idiosyncratic and almost arbitrary, but so be it.
One of the tools in the “near miss” category is my sweet little #43 mini plow plane. Though technically a groove cutter rather than a stock prepping tool, it is called a plane in the lexicon so I will do so too. Were I more of a frame-and-panel sorta guy (I have recounted about how I am a premium plywood user for panel construction, even to the point of laying up my own custom veneer plywood) it would be right up there in the Mount Rushmore of planes. If you produce a lot of small boxes and furniture like RalphB over at The Accidental Woodworker it would be a perfect fit. The fact is I do not make much frame-and-panel work so this little beauty mostly sits on the shelf, patiently awaiting those few projects where it is an integral asset. If you do build a lot of frame-and-panel work, especially small to medium sized, this could easily be one of your two or three most important tools. I know that if I migrate in that direction, it will be for me too.
All that said, I do own two of these plow planes, one for the shelf in the shop and the other in my traveling tool kit; it breaks down to a very small package that fits into a #1 mailing envelope. You just never know when a frame-and-panel project will strike.
Up next – not a bird, not a plane, but for me a supertool!
When choosing “the essential planes” the sorting factors differ from person to person, and my selection definitely reflects my interests and projects. These three planes, combined with the previous pair, fulfills my needs for 99% of the work I do, and, as an added benefit, don’t weigh much or take up much space.
My final three Essential Planes are;
The scrub plane is simply part and parcel of my work in that they get rough wood flat (but not smooth) fast. I find myself using one more and more and the power planer/jointer less and less. A great part of that development is the nature of my projects — I make almost no large scale “cabinetry” — and the steeply cambered iron works wonders at getting things flat. Even on my large-scale projects, mostly workbenches, the scrub plane is a jewel when it comes to flattening gigantic slabs of wood that don’t even fit into the planer anyway.
I’ve got both metal bodied (LNT) and wooden horned scrub planes and use them interchangeably.
Next comes the toothing plane, perhaps peculiar to my work in that I do a lot of veneer work and laminations for which the toothing plane was designed. The serrated, or “toothed” iron is perfect for getting surfaces prepared perfectly for gluing together and there are regional techniques whereby all secondary surfaces are flattened quickly. Again, not smooth, but definitely flat. Admittedly I own far more toothers than I need (13) but you should have at least one and incorporate it into your work. It really increases production efficiency.
Finally is a plane probably in most of your tool kit, the rebate/dado plane. When it comes to making wide channels to fit pieces of wood together, or cleaning up the inside corners of joinery, nothing can compete with a rebate/dado plane. I would say that it is a tool perfectly designed to do one essential thing, but it is more than that. It is great for shooting moldings the Roubo/Bickford way.
Up next, three tools that may or may not be “planes” per se, and whose utility depends on my projects. If my work was a little different they, too, would be in the pantheon.
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.
Last winter I started to finish the doors for Mrs. Barn’s clothes cabinet I built many moons ago using recycled chestnut lumber, warts and all, from an old, dismantled shack on the hill.
After preparing the doors (built as a single unit then sawn apart) with some scraping and burnishing with a polissoir, I laid down a seal coat of gloss Pratt & Lambert 38 varnish, a long-time favorite of mine, which I sanded lightly once it was hard (oil/resin coatings do not dry so much as they harden via chemical reaction).
I applied what I thought would be the top coat of Pratt & Lambert 38 “Dull” varnish because that would leave the surface looking most like raw wood, and set the still-wet doors aside to resume work “some day.” Well, “some day” was a couple weeks ago. To say the least I was surprised at the outcome of my previous work.
The evidence of age and deterioration that I had purposely left on the surface as an aesthetic design element had turned completely white. What happened was that the wet varnish pooled in the recesses and the flatting agent, almost certainly a microscopically fine silica, was present to such a degree that it imparted total opacity to the finish film in those areas.
I’m pretty sure I know how to solve the problem, but I have never encountered something like this before.
Over many years due to some fortuitous opportunities, including the generosity (?) of fellow woodworkers cleaning out their stashes of stuff, I have managed to acquire an awful lot of veneers. Those that are unusual or rare go one place in the barn, but the large majority is mundane and gets stacked on a pair of cot bases on the floor directly overhead of my studio space. There is nothing special about this pile of veneers other than the fact that for the most part this is vintage, heavier weight material than you would routinely find today. Most of it is in the range of 1/20″ to 1/30″, in poplar, walnut, maple, ash, cherry, and birch.
Even If I was manufacturing furniture, I would never use all this up.
So, what to do?
I’ve been contemplating making small, elegant boxes, mostly with either parquetry/marquetry or fuaxrushi presentation surfaces. Some of the boxes would be straightforward cubic shapes, others bombe’. What better foundation for these decorative techniques than ultra-high-quality veneer-core plywood? I have long believed that a static substrate of high-quality plywood is superior to a dynamic solid wood substrate with its inexorable rheological response to environmental moisture change. I could spend the big bucks to get marine or aircraft plywood, or I could just make my own.
So, I will. I have had excellent success in the past making small epoxy/veneer plywood panels for little projects and will now make that my SOP for fancy little jewel boxes. For larger pieces, say 12″ x 18″ or maybe a little larger, I will need to make a veneer press. For bombe’ panels I will need to construct forms and devise a vacuum press.
In the end, it is all just more fascinating stuff to do in the adventure that is life at the barn.
The tool cabinet is really three big boxes, one being the main box of 48″x42″x14″, and the two outer hinged boxes are each 48″x20-1/2″ x 4″. I built the big box first and outsmarted myself some, a lesson I learned in time to change the way I built the two door boxes.
Beginning with four pieces of 48″x24″x3/4″ Baltic birch-ish plywood panels from the big box store, I ripped them all to 14″ wide and sawed rebates on the back edges to accept the 1/2″ back panel. I ripped a fifth 3/4″ panel to be 1/2″ narrower than the outer box elements in order to allow for the 1/2″ back panel since it serves as the center stile.
It was at this point when I outsmarted myself and wasted a lot of time to no great purpose when I decided to miter the corners. This was simply unnecessary and a step I avoided when building the matched door boxes. Given the set-up of my shop the only way I could cut miters on the ends of the box panels was to use my battery-powered circular saw, which is an excellent tool that works just fine. The time sink was in getting the 45-degree cut just right in order to accomplish the 90-degree corner. After some test cuts I got it right and had the four outer panels ready for assembly.
Once that was done I cut the dadoes in the top and bottom panels to receive the interior center vertical panel, cutting the shoulders with a Japanese saw, excavating with a router plane then finishing it off with a small dado plane.
I assembled the back panel from two pieces of 48″x24″x1/2″ plywood, using PVA adhesive and pinch dogs to hold the together while the adhesive sets. Pinch dogs are one of the treasures I discovered in the pattern shop, along with using nails and screws for clamping stacked elements together for painted curvilinear structures. In this case it’s not painted stack laminations, but the surfaces will be obscured entirely by veneerwork.
With all that complete the entire structure was assembled using PVA adhesive (I cannot assure that the tool cabinet will always be in the best atmospheric environment) and deck screws. I chuckle with the gasping and pearl clutching I am sensing out in the fruited plain. I augmented the corners with full-length mitered glue bocks using nails and PVA.
I learned my lesson with the bog box so I assembled the doors with butt joints and glued-and-screwed.
Whew, all the pieces fit together. The thing is so big I shoulda called it “the tool closet.”
When it comes to large scale furniture making, or at least when there are large expanses of flat elements such as sides, doors and backs of larger cabinetry, one of the constant challenges to makers is adapting to the movement of wood through the seasons by means of various assemblages. Long ago I developed the attitude it would be more efficient and more successful to use wood re-formatted to simply not move in response to environmental moisture. In other words, to use good quality plywood. That might make me a heretic in the fine woodworking world, and I will give that accusation all the consideration it deserves.
Okay, I am done with that consideration. As pundit Mollie Hemingway once remarked, “My spiritual gift is not caring what you think about anything.” That pretty much summarizes my attitude towards plywood as a legitimate fine construction material.
Frankly it is not a concern for most of my projects given the scale of my work. That said I have begun experimenting with home-made plywood even for some of my smaller work, consuming my copious inventory of veneers and marine epoxy to make nearly indestructible plywood like this. I will be blogging about this undertaking in the near future.
Sure, I know how to make frame-and-panel furniture and use it when it is stylistically appropriate, but otherwise I move on using good plywood for the panels of my projects. This becomes even more imperative for me when the ultimate purpose of the project is to express the decorative surface, either marquetry or japanning/fauxrushi. I just want the seasons to unfold with the carcass substrate not even noticing.
Over my 50 years of restoring and conserving ancient furniture I have seen far too many instances of a solid wood carcasses tearing apart the decorative surface to go down that road in my own work, as in this 19th Century French desk. Given the prominence of decorative veneerwork on my cabinet this phenomenon was one I did not seek to replicate.
This brings me to the construction choices for my tool cabinet, in some ways to be the culmination of my “making” undertakings. In point of fact this will be a huge (for me) simple box measuring roughly 48″ high x 42″ wide x 15″ deep. The cabinet has two purposes; 1) to hold as many woodworking tools as I can possibly cram in there on 12 (!) swinging panels, and 2) express the aesthetic of traditional Roubo/Roentgen parquetry (outside) combined with HO Studley’s inspirational aesthetic (inside). For this reason, I need a structure that is both robust and exceedingly stable if I want the cabinet to redound to my descendants. This pretty much means that I build the box and its doors out of Baltic birch plywood, for the most part 3/4″.
When you merge that preference with the additional facts that I am not set up to do large scale millwork combined with the ready availability of 24″ x 48″ “project panels” at the Big Blue Box store, my path forward was pretty self-evident.
Now the only real question is, “How many months with this adventure consume?”
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