No, I have not forgotten the Ultimate Portable Workbench and will return to it very soon, but last week I spent a day resolving one of my frustrations with the massive oak Roubo bench. Until now I have just had open storge underneath it, and even though I put contents in boxes and milk crates it was not a particularly useful setup. Given my intention to reorient priorities in the shop and gather all my marquetry tools into one place, now was the time to make a change.
Way back in time I acquired a large number of drawers from surplused (read: thrown away) museum collection storage cabinets and have used them variously as cabinets themselves with a piano hinge, parts trays, etc. In this instance I tossed together a cabinet box into which I could place five 24″ deep x 36″ wide drawers to hold marquetry and parquetry tools and jigs. It was nothing special, just Baltic birch sheet stock and aluminum angle drawer supports.
I am pleased with the new accessory for the bench and shop and await my own decision on drawer pulls to complete the project. Sometimes I am a fussy client.
My friend Tom standing in front of Walt’s tool cabinet when we were visiting him in Staunton. I very much like this style of standing tool storage.
For a variety of reasons – desire to consolidate my core tools into a compact-ish volume in preparation for the “some day” time when I do not have a 7,000 s.f. barn, organizational order (my friends are laughing out loud right about now); work flow; parquetarian/channeling-Studley indulgence; antipathy for floor level tool chests — I plan to spend a good part of the next two (?) years constructing, decorating and outfitting a large standing tool cabinet in my studio. It will reside in the space currently dedicated to my saw rack and whatever is on the floor underneath it. I was really impressed by my acquaintance Walt’s cabinet and plan to use his as an inspiration for mine.
Rather than making it out of solid lumber with dovetailed corners my plan is to construct the box/doors entirely from 3/4″ & 1/2″ Baltic-birch plywood and sheathed in a yet-undetermined parquetry pattern (a la Roentgen?) using veneers sawn from leftover FORP workbench scraps. This project has been gestating long enough that I scrounged scrap 18th century French oak from the original Roubo bench-building workshop in Georgia.
The cabinet box will be roughly 48″ high x 42″ wide x 16″ deep with an open space between the base structure large enough to fit my Japanese tool chest.
Leave it to me to attempt a masterpiece project that almost nobody will ever see.
So, I’ve got this ancient 1930s era scroll/jigsaw, a Boice Crane Model 900. It is to my mind the tool form against which all others are measured. Acquiring it was my introduction to Tall Tom, my woodworking pal of lo these many years. He was at a community yard sale selling tools and carved walking sticks and had a small vintage Delta scroll saw at his booth. I checked it out and decided to pick it up on my return trip after browsing the yard.
It was, of course, gone when I did return. I engaged the seller (Tom) in conversation. He mentioned that he had another one back at the shop but it was too heavy to haul to a flea market, so we arranged for me to come see it at his shop. In the end we agreed to a trade; I would give him some turning lessons and he would give me the scroll saw. Little did I know that for many years I would be found in his shop on Wednesday evenings, and that he would make several trips with me to the barn (the picture is from 2011).
I am determined to get this saw rejuvenated and outfitted for marquetry work. Since I have a large wooden wheel I made for a treadle lathe, why not combine the two and make the Boice Crane something akin to a Barnes Velocipede Saw on steroids? If it works out it would be a superb marquetry saw.
So that is what I will try to do.
… to prepare for.
This week I was formally disinvited from presenting at the Winterthur marquetry conference this upcoming April, so those scores of hours over winter I had budgeted for creating my Boullework demonstration and writing the subsequent book chapter has now been cleared from my schedule.
As I was chatting recently with a woodworking friend about my presentation at the conference, he asked, “Do they know about your attitude regarding Covid protocols?” Gobsmacked, it had never occurred to me. Given our daily lives in the least populous county east of The Mississippi, it is simply not a common part of the conversation for people with whom I associate. Yes, Covid is a real pathogen and yes it has impacted our community (many, if not most, of the people I know here have had it), but we live our lives normally without disruption and do not obsess about it. I realized I should extend the courtesy of informing the conference organizers explicitly of my position, which I did in unambiguous terms.
Our county has been de facto mask-free for 18 months with numerous public gatherings like concerts, civic commemorations, seminars, etc., aside from some of the “larger” businesses like our local banks, the courthouse, school, and the medical center (the only entity for which masking makes a lick of sense). We talk face-to-face, we shake hands and hug, we dine together in homes and restaurants, we conduct business with each other as normal.
Our church suspended worship for a month in early 2020 then resumed worship and encouraged masking for another few weeks, but has met continuously since last Spring with all protocols being voluntary. Has there been Covid in our congregation? Certainly there has but everyone has recovered nicely, even our pastor who became the most gravely ill of the cases in the county to that point. Ditto every other church in the county (the Mennonite Church has exactly two adults who have not had Covid). Even the banks do not require masks for customers, only the staff are wearing them, which creates an exceedingly off-putting atmosphere. We have had hundreds of cases in our county of 2100 people, but only two “Covid deaths,” both of whom for which the pathogen was merely the final straw for exceedingly compromised personal health.
In short, I informed the Winterthur marquetry conference organizers that I have not and would not be getting any of the experimental gene therapy injections, nor would I wear a mask while in attendance at the conference. If they were fine with that, great. If not, well, “Houston, we have a problem.”
Houston had a problem.
The host institution would not allow me to attend under those terms, so I will not. I have my views and they have their rules, and apparently never the twain shall meet. I certainly bear no ill will and hope the conference is a resounding success! If it is live-streamed I will probably check into the proceedings.
An unexpected batch of time cleared? Check.
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.
I’ve signed on as one of the speakers for a Spring 2022 conference at the Winterthur Museum on the subject of marquetry. Like many other events over the past two years it has been scheduled, cancelled and re-scheduled, to the point where I am not fully informed myself. (In 2020, 13 of my 13 teaching and speaking gigs were cancelled. It was quite delightful to not travel much, hunkering down in Shangri-la instead [“social isolation” is any day ending in “Y” here in the hinterboonies]) I believe it is in late April but don’t hold me to that. I won’t discuss the other speakers yet as I think the Program is still being finalized, but my presentation and subsequent publication will be on the topic of Boullework.
I have already sketched out my presentation/demonstration in my mind, bringing it into realm of reality will occur over the next eight months. That progress will be documented periodically on this screen.
This is a demonstration-heavy gathering, so if the topic interests you it would be a great opportunity to interact with some very passionate and accomplished folks, both on the stage and in the audience.
Winterthur is a few miles north of I-95 in northern Delaware. I worked there while going through college and have many fond memories of it, both the grounds and museum are magnificent.
Stay tuned.
Going back many years I was an enthusiastic supporter of the concept of a vertical marquetry saw as an alternative to a horizontal chevalet, a machine I never got the hang of. I’m not sure if I was the first person to raise the concept to Knew Concepts but certainly I was in there early with encouragement and specific concept and design ideas. The development of the tool took many years and trips down many rabbit trails, not the least of which was the passing of our beloved friend Lee Marshall from Knew and the transition to Brian’s sole leadership and all the logistical and legal details that entailed.
Then came the day several months ago when the very first unit rolled off the assembly line and shortly thereafter arrived on my doorstep. I assembled and used it just enough to get the sense of the tool, then put it away since I had so many other things in my pile of things to get done. Well, I am finally returning to the tool. The first thing was to find a permanent (?) home for it in the workshop. At the moment that location is the end of my oldest and dearest friend in the shop, my Emmert workbench.
Time will tell if this is the final resting place for this magnificent machine, but for now it is working just fine.
Much of the goings-on in the shop are Christmas-gift related and therefore must wait a while before recounting them on this page. But one recent veneering exercise revealed the foibles implicit in being distracted by other activities, and what happens when you (by that I mean me) lose your concentration.
I was creating a fairly simple pattern from some rosewood veneer and everything went well and I managed to assemble the pattern with one little scrap I had to use.
When I glued down the veneer to the substrate I simply forgot to anchor the composition into the correct place on the panel, and lined it up free then placed the caul and clamps. Of course the whole thing shifted under the weigh pressure and I saw the next day that everything was out of whack.
I tried to lift the veneer by soaking it with acetone, but it was too set for that to work. All I accomplished was tearing everything up. It was off and that was that. Now it’s off to the trash can.
Now my only question is, was this simple rookie mistake or a geezer mistake?.
In many instances, cutting dovetailed open mortises through a Roubo bench top for example, a 30-60-90 layout gauge only has to be “close enough,” however you define that term. All one layout line has to do is match another layout line, and as long the two lines are struck with the same tool off the same reference plane all is well.
During last year’s workshop we all made one or two of these triangles, and like I said above, they work just fine. Laying out the hypotenuse with dividers was all that really needed to accomplish (the hypotenuse of a 30-60-90 triangle is exactly twice the length of the short leg), using my Chris Vesper sublime refence square for the 90-degree corner.
But what happens when you have to create a series of lines coming from different places, and they establish the perimeters of pieces that must match each other precisely? That is exactly the case of laying out a basic “starburst” or “dice” pattern parquetry composition. I used to be content with simply laying out a sawing jig using a small plastic triangle from a middle school geometry class set, but since I have moved to shooting the edges of all the lozenges to minimize the joints even more, I needed to make myself a truly precise triangle square to set the fence for the shooting board.
Starting with one of the brass triangles left over from the workshop two summer ago I determined to make a 30-60-90 square that fit the bill. Once I had the angles perfect I could then solder on the shoe to the short leg of the triangle.
Tomorrow I will show how I did just that with a bench top geometry version of a Covid/PCR test, using a piece of paper and two popsicle sticks.
With the two halves of the Kindle case ready, I glued on band of leather to bring the two of them together. The gluing was only to the faces of the case with the back edges unglued so that the case could be folded open with the two halves face-to-face.
Once the two halves were put together I took some scrap felt from my rag bin and glued that into the cavity holding the Kindle. That was a nice effect, except for where I slipped with the razor blade while trimming the felt and cut off some of the cypress veneer. I hate when that happens, and will repair it when I get a chance.
With everything together and complete I spent a little time padding on some more shellac. I will probably repeat this periodically to build it up a bit more, but I wanted the case to get to work. I stuck on some velcro dots at the two corners to hold it together when not in use and called it “finished.”
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