Lost Art Press

Design Under Duress

Posted on by Lost Art Press

6board_enclosed1_IMG_8550

Building a project in front of an audience is one thing. Designing it and building it on the fly is enough to drive me to drink.

Earlier this year I did a two-day seminar for the Alabama Woodworkers Guild where I designed and built a six-board chest. While I usually do a lot work beforehand for classes, I was in the final stages of editing “Campaign Furniture” and was a bit task-saturated. Here was my prep work for that class: I threw some boards and tools into my truck and drove south.

Luckily, I’ve built a lot of six-board chests, and the resulting piece turned out well. In fact, I like this particular chest so much that I’m using it in “Furniture of Necessity.” As a result, I had to create a SketchUp drawing and cutting list after building the project.

As I was drawing the chest yesterday, I was amused to see that I had fallen into using some typical ratios while designing the project, even though I didn’t use dividers or a tape measure. I just looked, marked and cut. It really was “By Hand & Eye.”

The elevation of the case is 3:5, one of my favorite ratios. And the ends of the carcase – minus the legs – are 1:1, which is what I almost always use for my tool chests.

FoN_plate_chest
While these ratios make the chest’s appearance simple, they complicate the cutting list. If you have ever developed a cutting list from an antique piece of furniture, you probably asked yourself: “Why did they use these odd measurements?” You can chalk up the weird measurements to wood movement or the metric system, or you can realize that perhaps they weren’t measuring as much as we measure.

Here, for example, is the cutting list for the chest as built:

Six-board Chest Cutting List, Furniture of Necessity

No.    Name        T  x  W  x  L
1    Lid        3/4  x  14-3/4  x  35-1/8
2    Battens    3/4  x  1-5/8  x  14-3/4
2    Front/back    3/4  x  14-1/4  x  33-3/8
2    Ends        3/4  x  14-1/4  x 19-1/4
1    Bottom        3/4  x  12-7/8  x  32-3/8
1    Moulding    5/8  x  1-1/4  x  33-3/8
4    Feet        5/8  x  5  x  7-3/8

Yeah, I know. This cutting list could be simplified to use some rounder numbers. Or you could make this mental leap: There is no difference between hitting 35-1/8” or 35” or 35-7/64”. They are all numbers that are available to us.

— Christopher Schwarz

8 thoughts on “Design Under Duress”

  3. The 3:5 ratio works out at 1 to 1.666 which is close to the Golden Ratio of 1 to 1.618.

  4. Excuse my mental fog here but if the back and front are inset 3/4 doesn’t that result in 14 3/8 for the gross on the sides? Or am I missing a 1/8″ rabbit somewhere in the illustration. And yes I understand your final remarks above. Don’t mean to question the teacher here.

  5. Mental fog has cleared, I see the rabbit at the end of the front and back piece which I will assume is 1/16″ also carried to the bottom of each piece resulting in the overall finish at 14 1/4 for the width of the sides.

  6. As one of your contributors has said 3:5 is a ratio that roughly fits with 400BC Euclids determination “Phi” based upon the square inside the semi circle. This I believe is 1:1.615 or as I remember it one to one and half and bit.(3 plus 11/2 and a1/2) This spins forward to Renaisance Italy and Fibonacci in Pisa. A series of numbers that add in a curious way 1:2 then 2:3 then 3:5 then 5:8 then 8:13 . This echoes alarmingly the growth in nature seen in shells, sunflower, the human body and a ton of other stuff.
    Makers were taught this stuff, they used dividers, used their eyes, as you have done. Very rarely I believe, would number come into it. And we had better proportioned pieces than we do now as a consequence
    david savage
    http://www.finefurnituremaker.com

  7. ref your new 6 board chest. I need the hinge hardware which looks quite similar to the iron hinges pictured. Where can I get them?
    Rick

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