We’ve had a couple people place inadvertent double orders: one when a book is first available (right when we send it to the printer), then again six weeks or so later when we post that the book is now in stock. (I get it…given my bourbon intake since March, it’s a miracle that I haven’t placed a double order!)
So, if you think it’s possible you’ve placed an order but cannot remember (or if you simply wish to check the status of an order), here’s how, in pictures (and captions).
At lostartpress.com, click on LOGIN (upper left)Enter your email and password (or in my case, Chris’s (masked) email and password…I’m drunk with power, not bourbon!), then click “Sign in.” (If you’ve forgotten your password, no problem. Click “Forgot your password?” to reset it.)After you’ve signed in, you’ll end up on your “My Account” page, which lists all your orders. Here, I see “Unfulfilled” on Chris’ most recent order…so I know there’s something ordered that has not yet left the warehouse. So, I click the blue order number at far left. And yes indeed – Chris has already ordered “The Anarchist’s Workbench,” but it has not yet left the warehouse. No need to order another copy.
And if you’re wondering why Chris ordered “The Anarchist’s Workbench” – a book he wrote and that is not only free to download but for which the design files are available to him on the very computer at which I type this – it’s because Lost Art Press likes to replicate your order experience from time to time, just to make sure everything is working as it should – from placing the order to the packing and shipping to delivery.
Author’s note: Campaign-style furniture is probably the first style of furniture I became aware of as a child. My grandparents collected it, and my grandfather and father both built pieces in this style while I was growing up.
But it was stupidly impossible a little trying to get my fellow editors at Popular Woodworking Magazine interested in publishing any pieces in this style. I tried for years while I was employed there. Then I proposed several articles as a freelance writer. All were turned down.
Fed up, I threatened to take my proposals to Fine Woodworking instead. And finally, Popular Woodworking got real interested.
The articles were received well enough that I decided to write this book. There are few readily available sources on Campaign furniture, which is amazing as it spanned 200 years and traveled all over the globe (a result of the British Empire’s expansion). Plus, this style influenced many Danish Modern designers.
So I traveled to Great Britain to learn about it first hand from the experts at Christopher Clarke Antiques, and to dig through military records.
“Campaign Furniture” has sold fairly well – we’re in our fourth printing. And someday I hope to write a follow-up book on the furniture that resulted when the woodworkers in the British colonies got a hold of these forms and interpreted them. It’s amazing stuff.
— Christopher Schwarz
Editor’s note: Hmmm…I don’t remember ever turning down a freelance article from Chris…wasn’t me!
— Fitz
The following is excerpted from Christopher Schwarz’s “Campaign Furniture.”
The shelves I built for this book are based on a unit I admired in one of the Christopher Clarke Antiques catalogs. The original was made from teak; mine is mahogany. While the only joinery in the whole project is cutting two dados, you will become quite an expert at installing butt hinges. It takes 12 hinges to get the whole thing to work. And installing the hinges precisely makes the shelf unit sturdier and makes it collapse more smoothly.
Profile
Assembled
Begin With the Uprights
The two ends of the unit – called the uprights – look best if made from a board that is the full 9-1/2″ width and has the grain’s cathedral running up its middle. If wood is scarce, the shelves can be made from narrower boards that are glued up the final width. The shelves are usually covered by books, so they don’t show.
Cut the uprights to 24-1/8″ long. The extra 1/8″ is for the kerf when separating the top from the bottom. Before making this critical crosscut, mark the uprights with a cabinetmaker’s triangle so you can easily distinguish how the pieces should be reassembled with hinges.
Then crosscut the uprights at 11-1/4″ up from the base.
Before installing the hinges, cut the decorative shapes at the top and bottom of the uprights. The base is half of a circle with a 3″ radius. The top is a simple ogee that is 2-1/2″ tall and switches from concave to convex on the center of the width of the upright.
Now is the best time to remove any machine marks from the uprights. You’ll find that planing or sanding the boards after installing the hinges is a bad idea – it can make the mechanism sloppy.
Fig. 10.9 Chop & rout. To cut a hinge mortise, first chop across the grain deeply. Then chop parallel to the grain more shallowly to avoid splitting the work. Pop out the waste with a router plane.
First Install
When you hinge the two pieces of the upright together, you want zero gap between the top and bottom piece. Lay out the location of the hinge mortises with care. Mine are set in 1/2″ from the long edges of the uprights. And before you cut the mortises, clamp the top and bottom of the upright together and show the hinge to your layout lines. They should match.
Chop out the mortises and clean up the bottom of each mortise with a router plane. The depth of these mortises should be the exact thickness of the hinge’s leaf.
Fig. 10.10 Punch it. Clamp the top and bottom together to ensure the parts are aligned and stay that way as you install the hinges. I use a center punch to mark where the screw holes should go. Fig. 10.11 Go for gold. The better the fit, the better the mechanism will work. Plus, unlike with most hinges, these are visible from the outside of the piece.
I install hinges with the assistance of a center punch and a birdcage awl. Punch in at each hole in the hinge leaf. Drill your pilot hole. Follow that up with a few twists of the awl. This three-step process makes a nice tapered hole for the screws.
When installing a lot of brass screws, I make life easier by cutting the threads in my pilot holes with a steel screw that is identical to my brass ones. I’ll drive the steel screw into each hole with an electric drill/driver. Then retract it. This makes it simple to install the brass screws without chewing up their slots.
With the hinges installed on both uprights, determine a good location for the dado that will hold the sliding shelf. The dado has to miss the screws from your hinges and be in a place that will fit your books both above and below the removable shelf. My dado is located 3/4″ up from the bottom edge of the top upright.
Remove the hinges and cut the 3/4″-wide x 3/8″-deep dado on both uprights.
Hinge the Shelves
The next step is to install the hinges on the shelves. Install hinges on the underside of the top shelf and the top surface of the lowest shelf. These hinge mortises are also set 1/2″ in from the long edges of the shelves and the depth of the mortises is the same as the thickness of the hinge leaf.
Fig. 10.12 Not in the way. This 3/4″-wide x 3/8″-deep dado is placed in a spot where it won’t interfere with my hinges’ screws.
Install all eight hinges before attempting to attach anything to the uprights.
The next part is where you need to be careful. If you make a mistake the shelves will not fold flat. Here’s the important fact to remember: The hinge barrels of the top and bottom shelves need to be equidistant from the hinge barrels in the uprights.
On this unit, that magic distance is 7-1/4″.
Put another way, the top surface of the bottom shelf needs to be 7-1/4″ from the hinge barrels in the uprights. And the bottom surface of the top shelf needs to be 7-1/4″ from the hinge barrels in the uprights.
As much as I dislike measuring, this is one place where it’s difficult to avoid. Lay out the location of the hinge mortises on the uprights for the bottom shelf only. Then do something that could very well save your bacon: Place the parts on your bench in a pseudo dry-fit and check your layout a few times.
The hinge mortises in the uprights are different than the mortises everywhere else in this project. For one, they are larger because they have to hold both the leaf and the barrel of each hinge. Second, they need to be deeper than the thickness of the hinge leaf.
If you make these mortises too shallow, the finished unit will wobble. If you make the mortises too deep, the hinge will bind and nothing will open or close.
How deep should each hinge mortise be? The thickness of the hinge plus half of the complete hinge barrel (that’s both the knuckle and the pin). On your first mortise, my advice is to sneak up on the perfect depth. When you find the proper depth, the shelves will stop at a perfect 90° to the upright.
Then lock in that depth on your router plane and don’t change it until you are done mortising.
Screw the bottom shelf in place. The uprights should fold flat against the bottom shelf. With the unit all folded up, you can use the layout marks to put the upper shelf in the correct spot without any real measuring.
Make the four mortises for the top shelf and screw everything together. The unit should fold completely flat. If it won’t fold flat, your mortises are in the wrong place.
The Middle Shelf
Cut the middle shelf to its finished length and plane it until it fits snug but slides smoothly into its dado. To increase the stability of the unit, I added a 2″-wide “dropped edge” to the underside of the shelf. Usually a “dropped” edge acts like a brace to keep a shelf from sagging. In this case it helps stabilize the carcase.
I cut the dropped edge to a too-tight fit between the uprights and used a shooting board and a plane to get it to fit just right. Then I glued it to the underside of the middle shelf while the middle shelf was in place between the uprights.
Fig. 10.14 Deeper mortises. To ensure the stability of the finished unit, these mortises need to be a little deeper so the shelf will stop at 90° to the uprights.
Fig. 10.15 Here’s the trick. Carry the location of the hinge mortise for the lower shelf onto the edge. Then carry that line over to the other upright (which is folded against it). Pull that line down and you have made the most critical layout line for the next set of hinge mortises.
Fig. 10.16 Glued in place. Adding the dropped edge while the case is assembled removes the risk of it sliding around as you apply clamp pressure.
Finishing the Bookshelves
Take the shelves apart and clean up any tool marks you missed before. Remember: The less material you remove the sturdier the shelves will be. Break the boards’ sharp edges with sandpaper or a plane.
This project has a simple finishing schedule: two coats of garnet shellac followed by a coat of black wax. The shellac colors the mahogany a nice dark honey. The black wax gets lodged in the pores and ensures the other people on your voyage to India won’t think you a “griffin” who is out on your first tour.
I can’t bring myself to write a post about completing a job and welcoming our clients home without expressing heartfelt sympathy to all those who have lost their homes, and more, over the past few days to fire or financial devastation. Making things – whether furniture, books or buildings – is a source of joy. Seeing them happily used is an honor. Seeing them destroyed is heart breaking.
Yesterday we finished the kitchen I’ve been tracking here in occasional posts, and the Robinson family moved home. The job took much longer than usual, thanks to the pandemic. We’d planned to do the bulk of the work while the homeowners were in Europe, where Ben Robinson was scheduled to spend a good chunk of the summer with students. When reality put the kibosh on Plan A, we discussed Plan B: the family could live at home, cooking on an outdoor grill, and we’d seal off the kitchen workspace to keep construction dust (and droplets) to ourselves. Then we realized that wouldn’t work, either – the project included reworking the full staircase to the finished basement, as well as the steps to the upper level, and replacing the front and kitchen doors. In the end, Ben and Jenny took their three children, two cats and much of their kitchen’s contents to a rental, and then another. (There was more than the usual rental property available for sublet this summer, as many students at Indiana University-Bloomington had left town due to the pandemic.)
The same view, before: tile floor, falling-apart cabinets, non-functioning appliances, useless bulkheads and a wall that blocked the kitchen from the living room.
Same view, early on, with mobile scaffold for painting the ceiling.
Home! Jenny sent this picture last night.
Here are a few more pictures from before, during and after, followed by a list of sources and suppliers.
A pair of shelves with integrated lighting defines the kitchen from the living room now that part of the wall between them is gone, while offering storage and display space. (I’ve written two posts about how I built these and how we installed them at the Fine Woodworking blog. The first is here. The second will be published there soon.)
We based the design of the white oak baluster and railing on an original screen at the mid-century home of some good friends; the angled slats are spaced for code compliance. The small white oak door on the wall opens into a cavity at the inside corner, replacing a blind corner unit that previously occupied the space.
A set of 15″-deep cabinets spans the transition between living room and kitchen, providing secondary prep space and generous storage. The base color is Real Milk Paint Co.’s Boardwalk, with Granny Smith, Dijon and French Gray colors.I topcoated the milk paint with Minwax satin oil-based polyurethane.
I painted the upper shelves for this set of cabinetry in colors related to other parts of the house, tinting some basic colors (Tree Bark or Willow, Boardwalk and Sunflower, if I recall correctly) with white.
It should go without saying that Tony supervised all my work in the shop.
Mark rebuilds the stairs to the basement.
John Dehner does the last clean-up while Mark loads tools in the truck.
The passageway between the living room and kitchen is now about 1′ wider than previously, which makes moving from one space to the other far more comfortable – you no longer have the sensation of passing gingerly alongside a mountain crevasse. To get the extra floor space, Mark reworked the stairs to the finished basement, moving them forward (toward the basement). He rebuilt the stairs with white oak treads and risers.
A glazed door to the carport brings more light into the room.
Before: The original built-in at right wasted a lot of space. Ben and Jenny used a shallow cabinet (almost invisible here, but you can see a little of its face just to the left of the original built-in) for additional storage. Needing yet more storage space, they had an assortment of shelves along the south and east walls, which made the room feel cluttered.
Detail of the BTC light fixture with the house’s original limestone fireplace surround.
John Dehner trimmed the threaded rod with a reciprocating saw while Mark held the rod steady. The rod is concealed in shop-made white oak tubes.
In 2007, a lightweight box showed up on Christopher Schwarz’s desk from Joel Moskowitz, who runs the Tools for Working Wood store in Brooklyn, N.Y. Inside was “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker,” a book first published in 1839 on working wood by hand. It was one of a series of books that introduced young people to the basic knowledge of trade skills: baking, coopering, printing, joinery and more.
But it’s not only a how-to; it’s presented as an engaging fictional tale that tells us of young Thomas, a boy apprenticed to a joiner’s shop in a rural English town. He begins his apprentice years sweeping the shop, managing the hide glue pots and observing the journeymen.
Then (plot twist), Thomas is told to build a rough box for a customer who is leaving on a journey that same day. We get every step of the project, from stock selection to construction to delivery, when Thomas brings along an envelope of cut nails for the customer so he can secure the lid shut before his trip.
Thomas goes on to build a school box and finally a large chest of drawers, while he learns the joinery and personal skills to become a journeyman.
Chris and Joel re-published the book in 2009 (it is now on its fourth printing) – and to go along with the historic text (included in its entirety), Chris constructed all three projects, with step-by-step instructions and drawings, and Joel wrote a section that explores the social structure of England in 1839, and woodworking during the period.
It is available in hardcover and as a searchable PDF; it is also the only Lost Art Press audiobook – recorded by Roy Underhill. That project was at the request of a school for autistic children, so that students could listen then build the projects.
Most modern woodworking texts are silent on the topic of nails. Ernest Joyce, the author of the widely distributed book “Encyclopedia of Furniture Making” (Sterling), put it thus:
“Apart from panel and veneer pins, the furnituremaker has little use for nails except for softwood work etc.”
I couldn’t disagree more. While it is surely possible to build furniture without ever driving an iron nail through wood (just ask a Shinto temple builder), that is neither an expedient nor historically accurate approach to building traditional Western furniture.
Antiques of the highest caliber bristle with nails – you just have to know where to look. Examine the cabinet’s back for rosehead nails. Do you see how the moulding and cockbeading are attached? How about the glue blocks that support the entire case piece behind the feet? In some cases, even the dovetails are nailed. And though some might contend that nails in antique dovetails were part of a shoddy repair job, that’s not always the case.
Wrought Roman nails taper on all four sides and are prone to split your work, which is why cut nails were invented. Cut nails taper in their width but not in their thickness. Making them is expensive, which is why wire nails were invented. Wire nails are cheap, hold OK and don’t require a pilot hole, which is why they are extremely popular.
But before you scoot down to the hardware store to pick up some nails, read on a little farther. Those might not be the right nails for you. The first recorded nails are Roman nails, which appeared about 5,000 years ago and had a good long 4,800-year run. Roman nails are basically square and taper on all four sides to a point. They were handmade.
I’ve used nails like this, and they are tricky. You need a pilot hole, and you have to place your nails so they are as far away from the ends of boards as possible because these nails wedge your work in all directions. So splitting your work is easy – unless the wood is green.
In my opinion, the best nails are those that Thomas used in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.” Thomas used cut nails, which are much different than both the Roman nails (sometimes called wrought nails) and the modern wire nails used in carpentry today.
Wire nails are made from long spools of wire – no surprises here. The wire flies through a machine that snips it to the proper length, then a machine “upsets” one end of the wire to create the head and sprays the fastener with some sort of adhesive or coating, depending on what the nail is to be used for.
So wire nails are either round or basically square in section (the square ones are used in pneumatic nail guns). They don’t taper in their length. They are incredibly cheap. They also don’t hold particularly tenaciously (with some exceptions), though they are excellent for carpentry or situations where you don’t need a bulldog grip.
Reproduction furniture makers who use hand-driven nails still typically use cut nails, just like Thomas did. Why are they called “cut” nails? These fasteners are sheared from a sheet of steel stock. (Imagine a Kit Kat candy bar being broken up into individual sticks. It’s a bit like that.) However, instead of being round or square, cut nails are rectangular in section; they taper in width but not in thickness.
Like Roman nails, cut nails require a pilot hole, and you want to mind the wedge shape. If you apply the wedging action against the end grain of your top board, the nail will hold well. If you apply the wedge into the face grain, you might split your work.
Cut nails were the nails of choice in the 19th century. They were made in large numbers at the beginning of the century but were driven to near-extinction by the less expensive and more convenient wire nails by the end of the century.
In the “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker,” the reader is advised to learn how to straighten cut nails that have been bent and then discarded. This activity might seem like quaint parsimony, until you’ve bought a few boxes of these fasteners. Modern cut nails are made using the same machines and processes as they were in the 19th century and, as a result, they are expensive.
I pick up every nail I drop. I straighten (or try to) every nail I bend. It’s a bit of a meditative skill. Tap the nail with a lightweight hammer while holding the fastener on an anvil or a steel plate. Many small taps are better than one mighty blow.
And one more piece of advice: If you cannot save the entire nail, snip off a straight section and use that as a headless brad for finer work.
If you can’t afford cut nails, the next best thing is to buy cement-coated wire nails (which are actually coated with a heat-activated resin). Furniture maker Jeff Headley uses these, and he modifies the head by beating them with a hammer on an anvil to give the head a squarish shape. When installed, these hold well and look like cut nails.
How to Choose the Right Nail
The number of styles of cut nails is bewildering, and they all look similar and have odd designations for their lengths. Even today, nails are sold using the original pennyweight system.
What you need to know about the pennyweight system today is that a 2-penny nail (and “penny” is typically abbreviated as d) is 1″ long. Each additional pennyweight adds a 1/4″ to the length of the nail on up to 10d nails, which are 3″ long. (Nails longer than 3″ are sold differently. If you need nails longer than 3″, however, you’re not a furniture maker.)
Naturally, you are wondering what length of nails you should stock up on to build furniture. Most of my furniture work requires 4d (1-1/2″ long) and 6d (2″-long) nails. There is a formula you can use, however, to arrive at this same conclusion.
Whenever you nail two boards together there is a board on top and board below. It’s the board on top that you want to pay attention to when selecting a nail. How thick is this board in “eighths?” A 1/2″-thick board is, for example, four eighths. A 3/4″-thick board is six eighths. Convert that number to pennyweight. So to fasten a 1/2″-thick board, use a 4d nail. To fasten a 3/4″-thick board use a 6d nail.
Of course, pay some attention to the board on bottom – you don’t want the nail’s tip to poke out the other side.
So now you know what lengths you need. What about all the different styles of nails? There are three commonly available styles of nails that I use to build furniture. And there is one style of nail that is difficult to find (in the Midwest, at least) but easy to make. Here are the four styles and what they are good for. I’m going to use the names that Tremont Nail Co. (tremontnail.com or 800-835-0121) uses because that company is by far the largest modern-day supplier of cut nails.
Here are the four types of nails used in typical furniture construction: wrought head nail (left), fine finish standard, cut headless brads and sprigs.
Fine Finish Standard Nail: This type of nail holds carcases together. It has a pronounced taper and a large head, so it will wedge up your workpieces well and hold tightly. Its strong wedge is a two-edged sword. It also will readily split your work if you aren’t cautious.
Cut Headless Brads: These slender nails are excellent for attaching moulding. They don’t have as pronounced a taper and are skinny things, so they aren’t suitable for full-scale case construction. But their scrawniness is ideal for jobs where the nail head will show, such as attaching face frames (with the assistance of glue). I typically add a 3/16″ bead detail to my face frames, and these nails sneak into the quirk of the bead nicely. Note that the maker says these brads are headless; that’s not entirely true. They have a small head.
Clinch Rosehead Standard: Rosehead nails are great for attaching cabinet backs or anywhere you want the nail head to shout, “I’m a nail.” There also is a version of this nail (that is more expensive) called a “wrought head nail” that has a black finish and a head that looks hand-finished. Use this nail when you want to shout, “I’m an old nail.”
Sprigs: You’ll see this nail mentioned many times in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.” Sprigs are headless nails or nails that have a head on only one side of the nail – they make something of an “L” shape. I have yet to find a reliable source for these nails, so I make my own by clipping the heads off of the cut headless brads listed above. Sprigs, as you will find out, are great for attaching delicate mouldings or for lightweight structural applications.
Using cut nails involves some know-how and a special shopmade tool, which we’ll cover in building the Packing Box, the first project in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.”
Corner cabinet with round front in Wharton Esherick’s kitchen (Photo: Lauri Hafvenstein)
One of the most eye-popping kitchens in the recently published book “Kitchen Think” is in the home of 20th-century American sculptor Wharton Esherick. As with the rest of his home and studio, located just west of Philadelphia, the kitchen is a product of exuberant creativity unfettered by concern for convention – think natural materials, organic forms and *color*.
Whether or not you’ve visited the place in person, there’s an opportunity to visit virtually on Sept. 13 from 4 to 6 p.m. (Eastern), when the Esherick Museum holds its annual fund-raising party. Enjoy the company of some fun and thought-provoking folks familiar with food, kitchens and more; enter the drawing for a three-legged stool made by Rob Spiece of Lohr Woodworking; ask questions about pizza, pantries or pot racks during the interactive portion of the party via Zoom. More information and sign-up here.
