A few days ago blog reader (and the Lou Gehrig of the woodworking blogosphere) RalphB asked about my use of the pumice block to smooth the surface of my parquetry Kindle case. The use of pumice blocks is well documented in historical accounts, although explicit or specific details are often missing.
I use a pumice block from the plumbing section of the hardware store (I order them by the case). Normally they are used for deep cleaning of porcelain and enameled fixtures to remove mineral deposits and stains. They work equally well for evening out irregular wood surfaces such as those found when assembling parquetry or marquetry from sawn veneers, where regardless of the care in the initial veneer sawing a fair bit of irregularity is manifest.
I generally use a pumice block as the step following the toothing plane/Shinto rasp, moving the block in a circular fashion on the substrate, yielding a fairly smooth and even surface about what you might expect with 60 or 80 grit sandpaper. Following the pumice block with a card scraper and polissoir, the result is quite pleasing.
Once all the veneerwork was finished and the banding in place it was time to flatten all these irregular surfaces. Using a variety of tools, including a toothing plane and a Shinto rasp, I soon had things even enough to use a pumice block to smooth everything out.
With my tacking iron I impregnated all the show surface with a generous application of molten Blend 31 wax to serve as a grain filler and foundation for a little bit of padded shellac yet to come. Using a fresh single edge razor I gently scraped off the excess wax to get down to the smooth surface, which was evident when I buffed the scraped surface with a piece of linen. Little places of voids were filled in with more molten wax after the buffing revealed them.
The two halves of the Kindle box are different because I was mostly trying to use leftovers from other projects.
In laying out the first of the parquetry patterns I was finding peace and solitude while listening to an audio book rather than news or similar podcasts. As always I laid out the patterns on kraft paper, gluing the pieces in place with a dab of stick adhesive. Once I had built the pattern beyond the boundaries of the field I flipped it over and glued it “face down,” this time with PVA since I needed an adverse-environment-resistant construction. Using a foam sheet between the paper and the plywood caul assured the pieces would conform intimately with the substrate. Their irregularities on the surface are irrelevant as the surface will be smoothed to a finished foundation.
Using a straight edge and my Japanese mortise saw I trimmed the field to the designed size. I noted with interest the amount of curve that was introduced to the homemade epoxy/veneer plywood through the use of the water-based PVA emulsion to lay down the parquetry. Fortunately that cupping diminished in about 72 hours.
It was then time to saw the simple banding strips from a block I made long ago, fitting the corners with a 45-degree shooting board, then glued them in place along the perimeter of the field.
I have found the best method for holding the banding in place during the gluing is essentially the same as described by Roubo — wide head pins.
The next day I laid the edge decoration, which was just thin, cross-grained pieces of the sawn veneer. Once those were done I began the process of removing all the thickness variations and creating the perfect foundation for the finished surface.
With the slim plywood “box” done for my new Kindle case it was time to move on to the tricked-out phase. That involved the assembly of a parquetry pattern from my inventory of 60-120-60 parallelogram lozenges.
I knew right away that I did not have enough lozenges cut and trimmed to complete the job so I took some of the wood strips from my selection and sawed another bunch, enough to fill my little box to the top. I then shot the edges on my dedicated shooting board, fist shooting one pair of adjoined edges then rotating the lozenge onto the upper station, first planing one edge then flipping the lozenge and planing the adjacent one. I find this entire process of building up a stack of lozenges to be extremely calming, an especially respite in this current week. Plus, it let me put my sublime c.1810-50 Robert Towell miter plane to good use (fortunately for me Towell was careless about stamping his planes, otherwise I could not have afforded to buy this uber sewwt tool. Take note of the near-invisible opening in the sole!) I would have used the parquetry shooting plane I made last year but for the life of me I could not find where I put it. Sometimes having 7000 s.f. and several non-adjacent work spaces can be a curse, and this is one of those times.
With enough of the finished lozenges in-hand I started setting them down on kraft paper after first drawing right angle bisecting lines to guide the work.
Quoting the title of my least favorite song from probably my most favorite current band, I recently had a spectacular failure on something entirely mundane in the shop.
The locus of the action was my Kindle. I love having a Kindle, the ability to download and have a multitude of audio and textual books in-hand on a wisp of a tool is intoxicating. Plus, I can make the font size as large as I want, no small feature for someone with my eyesight. However, the Kindle is not a particularly robust tool and I fractured the screen soon after getting it. Nevertheless I continued using it without incident for a year until the design flaw in the re-charging port caused the unit to fail entirely and I replaced it. Mrs. Barn is on her second Kindle for exactly the same reason.
When my new Kindle arrived it was instantly apparent that the geniuses at Amazon recognized the re-charging port problem and upgraded the hardware considerably. Still, that would not really help me if I abused the unit physically to the point of breaking it. So, I decided to make a lightweight rigid case to house it. I had looked at a number of manufactured cases and even bought one but remained unsatisfied, hence my desire to make my own. I might have used some 5-ply 1/8″ aircraft plywood but unfortunately my inventory of this esoteric and very expensive material was inadequate for the project.
Instead I tried making my own, an undertaking I had engaged in numerous times. Over the years I have accumulated a sizeable pile of veneer sheets and this was a perfect time to consume a tiny bit of it.
Cutting several pieces from the long veneer sheets, I glued up some 5- and 7-ply panels using some PVA adhesive.
I stacked the wet panels on top of each other with a sheet of food wrap between them, as I done done many times before. Since I do not have a veneer press I added flat cauls and a couple hundred pounds of firebricks on top and let it sit overnight.
What I found the net morning on disassembling the set-up was not what I wanted, to say the very least. One of the plywood panels’ faces was perfectly flat, but the other was puckered beyond repair, or at least beyond any repair I wanted to spend my time on. Besides, I have a lot more veneer to play with.
Many years ago I was contacted by a lady who was cleaning out her late father’s garage. In it was a box she thought I would find interesting and useful. Apparently back in The Depression he owned a factory/warehouse building and one of his tenants, a pearl button maker, simply disappeared, leaving behind all his inventory. She said it was a box of pearl button blanks and offered it to me provided I pay for postage which I gladly covered.
I arranged for the shipping through parcel delivery service and waited for the arrival of what I figured would be shoe-box size of who knows what. Much to my astonishment two weeks later a two-foot cube of a box arrived filled with a couple hundred thousand pieces of mother-of-pearl!
I sorted it into storage containers which now fill three drawers of my large map case. I haven’t done much with it other than that and using it for the occasional inlay, but perhaps the time has come for me to inventory it more completely and offer it through the donsbarn.com store. There’s no way I can use it all.
Given the prominence of 60-degree angles in the worlds of parquetry and Roubo benches, during the “Making Roubo Squares” workshop earlier this summer I made a couple of 30-60-90 brass triangles, as did the participants after I demonstrated the lesson they learned in seventh grade Geometry class: the hypotenuse is exactly twice the length of the base of this right triangle.
I finally got my first one ready for battle, albeit without the decorative flourishes I had been wanting. I simply did not have the time at present but car return to add them when I do get the time.
I soldered on the lip for the base, then just cleaned up all the edges and surface and it was ready for action.
Recently while on my way to Greenville SC I stopped to have lunch with my friend (and frequent barn guest) B and his family. The signage in his neighborhood was, shall we say, lacking, so to compensate for that shortcoming and to help guide my way to his home he parked his truck out at the street with a familiar item resting on the window. He correctly surmised I would notice and recognize it and know to turn there. I chuckled when I saw it and turned up the driveway for a wonderful lunch and time of fellowship before resuming my trip
Many years ago when Knew Concepts saws burst onto the marketplace I met and was befriended by the gurus behind them, Lee Marshall and Brian Meek. There are not many tools that can change the way I work, but their saws did. As an outgrowth of our friendship I began to collaborate with them to refine their products and even begin down the road of developing whole new tools.
One of the tools I encouraged them create was a vertical oriented marquetry chevalet. Yes, I know that traditionalist and purists might snort at me for that position, but let me explain to you how much I care about that. (Cue the sound of crickets.) You can find my tale of encountering their initial engineering design prototype here.
Now for a little more background.
I have been cutting veneers for more than forty years, almost always in the context of repairing or replacing missing marquetry or plain veneers. I learned to cut it on a horizontal bench pin using a jeweler’s frame saw freehand in the vertical orientation.
Once I got to use a traditional chevalet, a hand powered machine that interestingly enough post-dates what many think was the Golden Age of Marquetry, my experience and muscle memory/work habits left me unimpressed with my own skill with the tool. I have seen others use it in a manner that could only be described as magnificent, but I have never developed a facility with the device to make it my default tool. (It might very well be the result of me not having thousands of hours behind the wheel, so to speak, with an intimidating task master peering over my shoulder. By the time I got to use a full-scale chevalet I was long passed the point of being intimidated about much of anything. Once you go nose-to-nose with a bind drunk idiot neighbor shooting a revolver in his back yard while my kids were playing in my back yard, everything else takes its proper place in the hierarchy of intimidation.) Instead, I always reverted to my older method in which I had honed my skills.
Once I saw Steve Latta demonstrate his version of a bench-top horizontal action chevalet I built my own, and I got better results with that than with the full scale, sit down version. Not yet great, but better. Still, I could see some great possibilities based on my execution of the concept.
Back to Knew Concepts. I was attracted not only to their jeweler’s saw frames but practically swooned once I learned of their Mark Series of fixed-orientation saws. I had to have one! I got one and again it changed the way I could work in the marquetry techniques I used, mostly Boullework style and double-bevel style. The Mark Series saw made cutting small pieces of marquetry (about a 6″ size limit) practically idiot-proof, and sometime I can be a pretty high-powered idiot.
Lee and Brian and I continued to correspond and meet at various woodworking tool events, and eventually I convinced them to give it a try. Our dinners together always seemed to result in a stack of napkins covered in design drawings and spec lists. Brian came to see me in DC, well actually he came to see my bench top chevalet — I was incidental to the trip (not really, I always thoroughly enjoyed my interactions with Lee ad Brian, both creatively and socially) — and he returned to Crazyfornia to begin designing a saw incorporating and fusing all our ideas. Soon computer generated design drawings were flying back and forth across the continent.
Then came the Woodworking in America 2016 when Lee promised to “show you something special.” I could practically see the twinkle in his eye just from the email. As I phrased it at the time,
“I encountered the working concept prototype whose gestation was several years, and as I worked with the tool I felt, more than heard, a thunderclap. Everything that had been was now no more.”
Shortly thereafter Lee fell gravely ill, and eventually passed away. Brian took the helm of the enterprise and the process of transition took all of his time and energy, and then some. We corresponded infrequently for a couple years, then a few months ago it picked up again and I asked him if the bench top vertical-cut chevalet was ever going to become a production reality. Knowing how swamped he was I sorta expected a note of the “Man I am just too busy to think about it,” variety. Imagine my delight when instead he wrote back and told me they were in the home stretch of the initial production prototype.
Last week a couple packages arrived arrived, and it is better than Christmas at the Barn on White Run these days. A whole lotta time, energy, and ideas have come to fruition.
You can find the background on this initial offering by Barn Attic Productions/Seed and Fruit Media here. I am working on getting an archive for all these videos on the site. Be patient with me, I am of an age and disposition that I still expect flames to shoot out of the compewder if I hit the wrong key.
In this episode of my recitation and demonstration of the techniques I use to undertake sensitive veneer repairs — sensitive to the artifacts, not your feelings — such that the compensation (that’s museum-ese for “repair”) is visual harmonious while leaving the maximum of the artifact fabric intact, I demonstrate my low-intensity method for cutting my own veneers on a bench-top bandsaw. I use this method frequently for a variety of applications, whether I need that one special piece of figured veneer for a repair or if I am cranking out veneer strips for doing French parquetry.
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