When my friend Sam, a restoration carpenter, bought a portable sawmill he volunteered to practice on the walnut logs from the tree my pal Bob and I felled a few years ago (as a lifelong logger/timberman Bob did all the felling with great expertise, I did the watching and cleaning up after). Though the walnut tree was a beauty, it was a beauty that cast an impenetrable shadow on one of Mrs. Barn’s prized gardening locations.
Nix one walnut tree.
For the last eighteen months the sawn walnut has been sitting in the middle of the large room on the main floor of the barn, awaiting the next chapter in its journey. That journey will come to fruition later this summer as Webmeister Tim will be coming to the barn for a week-long visit and our project for the time will be building him a workbench. He is a turner moving into hand tool bench work so we need to make sure he has a proper bench.
Although the slabs resultant from that felling and milling are not fully dried — the traditional rule of thumb was “one year per inch,” which means another couple of years to reach “air dry” — I think that they are far enough along that trajectory to allow us to move forward with making his bench.
NB: here in the mountains there are old-time timbermen who swear by a different rule for seasoning wood. For them, the time is “one year for the first inch, two more years for the second inch, three more years for the third inch,” and so on. By that measure these four-inch-plus slabs need at least another half-decade to be “air dried.” However, given the structure and features of a slab-top bench I think it is safe to proceed.
To get to that point I am prepping the thick walnut slab stock. Since I had to rip edges of the slabs in place I dusted off my 10″ Milwaukee portable circular saw for the first time since I can remember.
Sawing from one face only the saw got to within about 3/4-inch of a through-and-through cut so I finished up with my venerable rip saw.
I wound up with two beautiful half-slabs, en toto ~21″ x 4-1/2″ x 84″. I’ll leave them alone now until Tim comes and we can move forward, depending on the details he wants for the bench. I don’t have any machinery to handle something like these so there will be plenty of hand work from this point on.
In the meantime I am thinking about slabbing the white oak timbers that have been sitting outside the barn for several years. The smaller one on top of the pile is 8″ x 15″ x 102″. The bigger ones are a full 10″ x 15″ x 125″.
After a hiatus Michele and I are back at the Roubo grindstone. We are now looking forward to two or three or four years of near-constant work. Notwithstanding any reservations, we are determined to bring our final three sections of this monumental project to conclusion. Admittedly, if the ongoing social and political exploration of the boundaries of decadence brings about the ultimate collapse of Western Civilization, and the interwebz with it, that could be a serious glitch. As long as we can communicate easily between locations in the Virginia mountains, northern Vermont, and southern France, we will charge ahead.
In the aggregate, these three final sections — interior carpentry (windows, doors, stairs and floors); garden carpentry (surprising amounts on discussion of carving and design principles); and carriages (perhaps the coolest content of the whole encyclopedia) — are roughly 20% larger than Roubo on Marquetry and Roubo on Furniturecombined. LAP has indicated they want the whole pile all at once, so we are about to go “radio silent” for this portion of our working lives. I expect to post approximately zero times over the next couple years on this project.
At the moment my task is to photograph the text pages from my Leonce Laget facsimile set, then to crop and reformat those pages before sending them along to Michele to work from. At that point our well-established process will play out.
text page images to Michele
rough first draft translation back to Don for heavy editing and workshop-friendly annotations and ancillary content
round-robin between Michele and Don until we are both satisfied with the completed draft
completed draft translation and text page images sent off to Philippe (note to self, contact Philippe; he is now living back in France)
send “final” draft to LAP, to begin the round robin with them.
Unless there is a compelling reason, there is no need for me to blog any more about this until we are much nearer the finish line.
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.
Making ripple moldings, and by extension perfecting my ripple molding cutting machine, is going to be part of my life for as long as it takes me to arrive at the horizon. I am comfortable with the concept of my ripple cutter and will extend the invitation to my fellow ripplistas to spend some more time in the barn this winter/spring as I follow this trail.
In my current episode of rearrangeritis (my favorite Stumpy Nubs term) I’ve moved my machine into the heated studio in proximity to my finishing bench so I do not have that excuse to prevent me from noodlin’ it at my leisure. Well, if I had any leisure.
Thanks to some barbarian who chopped up (!) a First Edition L’Art du Menuisier, (!!) and should be condemned to copy the encyclopedia by hand a la The Adventure of the Red Headed League, I’ve got a lot of original Roubo prints to frame, mat and mount for a display gallery at the top of the cabin stairs, so I’d better get to it. This includes the plate of the ripple molding machine itself drawn and engraved by Roubo himself somewhat fancifully, given that he had never seen one in person and was simply imagining what it might be.
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.
With the detachable post vise finished I moved over to the opposite edge of the bench slab and installed a twin screw vise.
Unlike previous versions of the bench outfitting I’ve seen, I decided to cheat a little and use Roubo’s method of making it rather than the Roman version, as demonstrated in his veneer sawing bench from Plate 278 from L’art du Menuisier.
The projecting screws on the Roman version looked like a cracked kneecap waiting to happen. The true Roman version would have looked a bit like this mock-up, featuring a gift vise from my pal Derek Olson. Thanks a ton Derek. I use the vise/press a fair bit in the shop for veneer work, but as a feature of a low bench? No thanks. I’ve limped enough as it is (actually I am now walking without any limp for the first time since forever).
Instead, I drilled a horizontal 1-3/8″ hole into the edge of the slab, then tapped it with my Beale threading tap. I used a Forstner bit with an extension to get the depth of hole I wanted, about seven inches.
The tap was likewise too short for the hole so I augmented my tap handle with an extender from my 1/2″ ratchet set, which fit the end of the tap perfectly.
As the need arises I will drill and tap holes all the way down the edge of the bench so that I can put the twin-screw vise wherever I need it. The beauty of a low bench is that it is omnidirectional in use. If the vise is on the wrong side I just stand up, rotate my kiester, re-straddle the bench and sit back down to work.
With the two timbers glued into one slab I pulled out my trusty scrub plane and started hogging off material since the wind was a tad pronounced. I was able to get the initial pass finished out in the great room of the barn, and again put my mighty 10-inch circular saw to work cutting the slab to the 13″ width I wanted. As with the initial timber splitting I was left with an inch or so to cut by hand.
Moving the sized slab onto my Roubo bench in the studio I employed the Roubo technique for achieving the flat plane of the slab.
First I shot a rabet down each edge of the slab, using two pillared winding stick to determine when they were perfectly parallel to each other. My original Roubo winding-sticks-on-stilts were unavailable so I just used two hardware store aluminum bars sitting on identical blocks. Once I had the parallel edge tracks established I grabbed the scrub plane and got the surface flat in about a half hour each side. It’s worth noting that even though the wood was southern yellow pine, it was new growth SYP and much less dense than the timbers from the barn itself.
If I did not already own one I would be interested in bidding on this 4-foot (!) veneer saw at the upcoming May tool auction at Live Free or Die Tools. If you have case of the Roubos coming on, this might be the medication.
One of my quirks is that I usually like to lay a piece of sacrificial sheeting on top of my workbench most of the time, and today was my day to swap out the old one for a new one on the FORP Roubo bench. As I was making the swap I noted that it was also time to address one of the two main manifestations of Seasonal Affected Disorder that afflicts (?) wood in the natural course of events, sometimes called hysteresis, sometimes called rheological cycling, but generally known to us folks at the workbench as “wood expands, wood contracts.” One of the consequences is that when there are pieces of wood assembled with different grain orientations eventually they get out of sync dimensionally. In a Roubo workbench this become manifest as the tops of the leg tenons eventually protruding past the top of the slab.
As I was fitting new pieces of luan plywood to lay on the bench top I noticed that the tenons were quite proud of the slab, perhaps 1/16″. I only assembled the bench a couple years go and did not notice the issue when I laid the initial sacrificial covering at the time, but it was there now.
You might have thought that since the bench was initially fabricated eight years ago it should be fully settled into its new environment. Maybe, maybe not. If the old adage that wood seasons at the rate of “one year for every inch of thickness” is true then the answer would be “yes.” Since I moved to the hinterlands and talked to some of the local wood guys I have come to appreciate their view of seasoning woods, especially dense hardwoods. To them “one year per inch” does not hold true; instead they use a formula of “one year for the first inch, two additional years for the second inch, three additional years for the third inch,” and so on. By that metric my five-inch-thick bench top will pretty active for 1 year + 2 years + 3 years +4 years + 5 years, for a total of 15 years.
I dealt with the tenon ends directly in about an hour this morning, and will address the slight crown of the overall bench perhaps at the end of summer.
It might be worth reiterating that once I get a slab bench top flat I prefer to hit it with a toothing plane to give it a little texture. I lose none of the planarity but gain a lot of grip on the workpiece.
While browsing around the interwebz over the weekend I noticed that Rex Krueger featured Roubo’s winding-winding-sticks-on-stilts from our Roubo on Furniture volume. He is to be commended for bringing the message of hand-tool woodworking to a new audience.
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