While undertaking some recent reorganization of my basement workshop in Elderbarndottir’s former house (she got married in November and moved to her husband’s house) I came across this nostalgic and beat-up picture from early 1977, hiding behind one of the shelving units. This French secretaire was my first really high-profile/high-value furniture restoration project at Schindler & Son of the Palm Beaches, where I started working in late 1974. Unfortunately I did not take any detailed pictures of projects at this point of my career – had this happened once I was a museum conservator the project would have been documented with hundreds of photographic images to go along with the written reports. I probably took a picture or two of the interior, it was spectacular. Bat that was almost 50years ago and cannot recall that detail.
Somewhere I have a picture of a Riesener cabinet from the same client, but that picture has not turned up yet.
Prior to this I did a lot of run-of-the-mill restoration for “ordinary” antiques along with a boatload of custom finishing and refinishing; before Schindler’s I was a “scratch and dent man” at a couple of furniture stores.
This project arrived in pieces in the back of Ambassador So-and-so’s Mercedes station wagon. The secretaire bore the inventory stamp of the Chateau de Saint Cloud. It should come as no surprise that the culture from which the word bureaucrat is derived should be punctilious about household inventories, but there you have it.
Over a period of a couple weeks, I reassembled it and made repairs to the rosewood and tulipwood veneers, then finally a couple of days of shellac pad polishing. “Pop” Schindler came almost every day to watch and guide me, it was on this project that he introduced me to hot hide glue.
This was a seed for my fascination with exquisite European furniture, especially of the French variety (along with our company’s work at the Wrightsman estate in Palm Beach and their furniture collection), and was truly the acorn from which my fascination with Roubo sprouted. It was also the prompting for me to embark down the career path of conservation; I entered that stream in 1981 at Winterthur Museum while I was a student in college.
Early on I had decided to incorporate demonstrations to the program at Handworks, and in order to have something on which to demonstrate I made a set of parquetry panels.
I’d begun these some weeks before, you can follow their development in my earlier post about Bandsaw Parquetry. One of the points I was trying to get across was the importance of surface preparation so I was going to start with some surfaces that REALLY needed preparations.
Finally, after two weeks of assembling stuff to go, two days of playing TETRAS loading, unloading, and reloading the truck full to the brim, off we were. After two long days of driving, we got to Cedar Rapids for a good night’s sleep before heading down to Amana for the Handworks set-up. I wish I could’ve said confidently that I prepped thoroughly and tied up all the loose ends but the odds were near 100% that several hours into the set-up or Handworks itself I would remember something I left behind.
John and I showed up bright and early for setting up, the building opened at 9AM and we were there around 9.15. I think we were the first booth to be completely set up
Here is a walk around the Festhalle during the set up time. Upcoming posts will document other spaces and activities for Handworks.
I was in my usual spot, on the center row near the Lie-Nielson booth up on the stage, and between Jeff Hamilton in front and Gary Blum to my rear, with Matt Bickford across the aisle on one side and Patrick Leach on the other. I took the picture of the main space from the stage, where L-N set up very late in the day. While they were working on their display Tom Lie-Nielson stopped by and we had a nice long chat.
My setup took only a couple hours, leaving lots of time to visit with friends from years past. I especially cherished the time with the Bickfords, folks who are definitely on my wavelength.
Across on aisle were Matt Bickford and a chairmaker I did not know (there were actually a lot of exhibitors and tool makers I did not know),
and across the other aisle was Patrick Leach’s seductive vintage tool emporium. Amazingly enough, I escaped the weekend without buying a single tool.
Immediately behind/adjacent to me was Gary Blum with his innovative workbenches and accessories, and hand planes.
Konrad Sauer was just down the way with his spectacularly high-performance planes,
then Lost Art Press. I think Gramercy Tools was between them but had not set up when I was walking about.
Benchcrafted was the booth greeting the visitors immediately on entry. It makes sense, they’re the ones who pulled the whole event together.
Back in the corner was innovative genius Jeff Miller who was showing off this device that hollowed out bowls. It was the coolest thing I saw at the event. Over his shoulders you can see the Lee Valley booth, but they had not begun setting up yet.
Rounding out the Festhalle setups from that time was Ron Brese, closest to Benchworks at the other end of the center row.
With the rest of the day free we had a chance to go visit all the other booths in the three other venues, although some of the booths were not ready until late in the day or even the next morning.
We were girding our loins for a wild couple of days starting at 10AM the next morning.
Remaking the Japanese mortising saw into a premium veneer saw was straightforward, but, as in the case of any instance where you must first break apart a perfectly functonal quality tool to do so, gave me pause. I thought about it long and hard, even going to the extreme of ordering a duplicate tool. In the unlikely case where the “remaking” went south I would still have the original capability.
The mortising saw business end did a great job at the cutting, but the long neck made the saw somewhat floppy and unwieldy for repeated and routine veneer work like the hundreds of cuts I will be making for the tool cabinet parquetry. Somehow that floppy neck had to be dispensed with. Once I settled on a simple strategy it was, like I said, straightforward.
I began by removing the bindings and set screw from the handle, which I then split along the blade tang with a sharp rap on a Sloyd knife.
The handle, being paulownia, cleaved instantly and cleanly, releasing the entirety of the metal blade.
Re-housing the tang to “remove” most of the floppy neck was a piece of cake. Using the tang itself as the template I marked then excavated a pocket of the exact dimensions of it so the two halves of the handle could be reassembled to incorporate it. I cleaned the tang and abraded it lightly, then reassembled the unit in the new configuration with epoxy.
To hold things steady until the epoxy set I wrapped the handled with some elastic tape and left it for two days.
Removing the tape revealed a now-perfect parquetry cutting saw. Now all I need is a perfect set of sawing templates.
Stay tuned.
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.
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.
Within view of the barn parking pad, where I process all my firewood, are two nice trees with mature burls. Those trees will likely suffer fatal injuries soon. Whether I make them into turnings or veneers waits to be seen. I’ve got lots of ideas for both options. One of my favorite pieces of furniture is Ruhlmann’s burl veneer cabinet with inlaid ivory bubbles. Hmmm. I’ve got a bunch of ivory, real and artificial, so…
This tree trunk is roughly a foot in diameter. The odd shape has me wondering how to saw up this one once I get it on the ground and in the shop.
This burl is almost a three-foot ball, so my creative glands are pumping out juices big time.
In addition to these two beauties, I’ve culled some very large forks from cutting up the big walnut tree we felled last year. Gotta be some outrageous crotch/flame grain inside them. I’m hoping to get up the mountain and harvest the firewood for winter 2023-2024 within the next month or two, and it would be a good time to process all of this stock.
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.
Recently my brother visited and dropped off a box I made for all the cards our parents received on their 50th wedding anniversary in 1993 (my older brother and his wife celebrated their 50th a couple weeks go and Mrs. Barn and I celebrated our 40th anniversary recently).
My memories of the project are a bit hazy, but I am pretty sure the core substrate is 1/2″ baltic birch plywood with walnut veneer for the sides and an unidentified figured veneer for the top.
The trim woods were tulipwood (dalbergia) and macassar ebony. It’s had a few bumps and bruises over the years but my mom had it displayed prominently in her bedroom during her final years. In retrospect I still find it a beautiful reflection of a loving marriage that ended with my dad’s death only a month before their 60th anniversary. Every time I cast my eyes on it I will celebrate their years together, and ours as well.
Given the nature of the smaller Kindle case I was making for Mrs. Barn’s 5×7 Kindle, as opposed to my earlier book style case for my own 8×10 Kindle, the assembly and finishing took a different path. Her smaller Kindle led me to create a “calling card case” style container into which the Kindle would be inserted, rather than the bookcase for my larger Kindle, into which the Kindle would be closed within folding panels.
This meant that the process for completing the assembly was entirely different as the interior had to be finished before the case was assembled, rather than after assembly with my case. Making sure the two halves of the case fit precisely I then glued the interior felt lining in place, leaving the case gluing margins clear. However, before I glued in the felt I glued a piece of thin polypropylene foam to the wood panels to assure a gentle pressure on the Kindle once it was slid in to prevent it from falling out due to too loose a fit. Dry fitting the pieces together with the Kindle in place to make sure I had the spacing correct, I then was able to glue the two halves together with PVA making sure to not have excess glue squeezing out into the interior space.
A little trimming and sanding followed by shellac and wax, the case was ready for Christmas and use as she travelled back and forth to the West Coast. Given the unfolding circumstances ex poste, namely the death of her dad in mid-January and our own family Christmas taking place in late February, the case may never be used for its intended purpose of frequent coast-to-coast travel. Nevertheless it was a pleasant and instructive exercise.
The design of the new Kindle case for Mrs. Barn’s smaller Kindle was a bit tricky as my idea was to create a version of a Victorian card case, in which the Kindle would reside. This meant that the tolerances for fitting it were closer than with mine, although that is a snug fit, but this one needed to slide in and out of one end of the case without being too loose or too tight. Armed with my home made plywood panels and a precise tracing of the Kindle I set to getting the pieces cut to size.
From there I began laying out the veneer patterns using some left over scraps from other projects. Unfortunately my first effort was a catastrophe as I failed to tape the elements in place before gluing them down under free weights. I tell myself that I was trying to keep too many Christmas gift projects in the air at once, but the simple fact is I just forgot to do what I should. Thus, the veneers shifted during gluing and were in the wrong place. Since I was using PVA the effort to remove and re-start would have been odious so I just tossed that piece and started that panel over.
I made sure to get it right the second time as I was almost out of the sawn rosewood veneer.
The second panel was done with sycamore, its bold fleck providing some real dynamism to the composition.
I made sure to tape the veneer compositions in place this time, and they turned out as they should.
Next time – assembling and finishing.
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