The following is excerpted from “The Anarchist’s Design Book” – an exploration by Christopher Schwarz of furniture forms that have persisted outside of the high styles that dominate every museum exhibit, scholarly text and woodworking magazine of the last 200 years.
There are historic furniture forms out there that have been around for almost 1,000 years that don’t get written about much. They are simple to make. They have clean lines. And they can be shockingly modern.
This book explores 18 of these forms – a bed, dining tables, chairs, chests, desks, shelving, stools – and offers a deep exploration into the two construction techniques (“staked” and ”boarded”) used to make these pieces that have been forgotten, neglected or rejected.
But this isn’t really a book of plans. “The Anarchist’s Design Book” shows you the overarching patterns behind these 18 pieces. It gives you the road map for designing your own pieces.
Cutting tapers on legs with a jack plane and a smoothing plane is simple work if you have only a handful of legs to do. But if you need to do a production run of legs – 10 or more – you might want to switch gears.
One way to speed the plow is with a band saw. Saw the leg square and tapered on the band saw. Then finish the job with a jack plane.
But the easiest way to do it is with an electric jointer.
The first time I learned this process from woodworker Troy Sexton in the 1990s, I thought it looked dangerous. It’s not. I’ve used this procedure for more than 16 years in production work without a single incident. But if you are skittish, skip it.
Troy told me that this operation came to him in a dream. He’s one of the smartest woodworkers I know, and after you try it, I think you’ll agree with me that it is brilliant.
A foot at first. If this is your first time out, mark the finished foot size on the leg.
Here’s an overview of the process.
Decide how much material you want to remove from each face of the leg at the foot. Let’s say it’s 1/4″. So you need to set your jointer to take half that amount (an 1/8″-deep cut). Lock it. You are done setting the jointer.
Set the infeed table. If you are going to taper a face of a leg by 1/4″, set the infeed table to remove 1/8″.
Decide how long the taper needs to be. Let’s say you have a 30″ leg and you want the taper to be 26″ long. Divide that in half (13″). Clamp a stop-block to your jointer fence so it is 13″ away from the top dead center (TDC) of your jointer’s cutterhead. You are done setting stops.
Set the stop. The leg should stop halfway along the taper.
Take your leg and push it into the cutterhead foot first until it touches the stop-block. Lift the leg off the jointer’s table. Repeat this process for all the leg faces that you want to taper.
First cut. Push the foot of the leg into the cutterhead. Stop at the stop. Lift the leg off the machine. Repeat for every face that needs to be tapered.
First-cut results. It looks wrong, but it’s right.
Remove the stop-block.
Now push the leg through the jointer a second time. This time the top of the leg goes in first. And you need to press the leg down against the table so the top of the leg “pops a wheelie” (for lack of a better expression) as you push it across the cutterhead. Cut all the faces this way and you will have a perfectly tapered leg in just a few minutes.
Pop the wheelie. A substantial push stick will push the leg into the correct position for the second pass. This time the top of the leg is first across the cutterhead.
Final results. This leg is tapered almost perfectly to the lines drawn at the beginning. Finish the job with a handplane.
Note that this process is far safer than using most commercial tapering jigs for a table saw. Those jigs are designed to remove fingers as much as create tapers.
Editor’s note: These days, we skip the stop block and simply mark a line in Sharpie on the fence.
Look closely to just right and above center, and you’ll see 10″ marked on top of the joiner fence, and a line down the face of the fence. Reach that line, and it’s time to lift the leg off.
The following is excerpted from “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years,” a collection of the storied editor’s Chips From the Chisel, column, which ran in the front of every issue of The Woodworker for three decades.
What our full powers are—we shall never know exactly this side of the grave, but we can have a wonderfully interesting time trying to find out.
There are times when, looking back on our lives, we get a sudden sense of pattern. The kind of thing that happens when an artist, who has been plotting out a design in a series of small dots, which to the eye of the beholder look quite unrelated, joins them up with lines and curves and we become aware of the design, which he will enrich with colour and other decoration till the whole thing glows with life. It seems as though, in our own lives, the tiny dots, the small pointers which give direction to the whole, are the choices we make, those deliberate choices which in however small a way are strong enough to give some new direction to our activities or to the thoughts governing our activities which will end by colouring the whole.
The lines may not always be clear. There are always forces combining to pull us away from any deliberate choice. We may feel we need to make some real creative effort in our lives and to take up woodwork seriously in our spare time, having already dabbled in it a little, so that we become considerable craftsmen. But time is not elastic and the claims of family and friends and our own tendency to take the line of least resistance can easily divert us altogether from our programme unless we firmly dig in our heels. There is a world of difference between the just claims of others in daily living and the tendency to annex us altogether. You know the kind of thing—it is always happening. Only the other day I heard a group of youngsters discussing a popular boy, Jack, who had refused to accompany them on some projected expedition because he was studying for an examination. “Oh,” said one of his friends, “He must come. We’ll see to that.” I happened to know that examination meant a lot to Jack, who is desperately anxious to be a doctor, and wondered who would win. It is not easy for a popular sixteen-year-old to shut his head in textbooks, but that is the kind of decision in some shape or form that has so often to be made if we are going to achieve anything at all, and not only when we are young.
It is always easier to take the line of least resistance and go with the crowd, with the danger then that, instead of a design, the pattern of our lives may come to resemble a child’s meaningless scribble. We have to make choices and stick to them, even when it is not easy, if we are going to get any kind of satisfaction out of the business of living.
It is as though each of us is king of a little kingdom, which is ourselves. We have to keep control, prevent undue encroachments, give away to just claims, know when to relax and when to be firm, to keep a check over the foes within, which are our own weaknesses of temperament that, unchecked, could soon produce anarchy, and keep a particularly watchful eye on the thieves and snatchers of our time under whatever guise they come, time being the most precious commodity we have. Being human we shall fail often, but so long as we continue to make the effort, and in proportion to the amount of that effort, something worth while will evolve. The complete enthusiast, which includes all men of genius, has far less of a problem. His enthusiasm shows itself in a passion for his chosen work which refuses to be daunted by obstacles or hindrances, but must always be practising and experimenting. The custom of late years of publishing separate details of some of the pictures painted by the world’s greatest artists has been particularly revealing in this respect. It enables one to see the loving care, the passionate interest and powers of observation which have gone into the minutest part of a picture, the veins of a hand, the shimmer of light on silk and velvet, a dog quivering with excitement, a chandelier solidly and exactly portrayed, in all and every manner of thing each tiny detail perfect of its kind, and each representing not only the time spent in immediate execution but the hours beyond count which the artist has spent in acquiring his skill by drawing and painting everything within reach. For many of us enthusiasm is more fitful, wonderful when it comes sweeping us along on a glowing tide but liable to leave us stranded high and dry, our skill a mere adequacy or a job half completed. And it is at that point where determination has to step in to fill the gap.
But it is worth it. Only so can we hope to come within sight of our full powers, of our capacity for living. What these are in their fullness we shall never know exactly this side of the grave, but we can have a wonderfully interesting time trying to find out. Because the only way of finding out is by doing things and keeping on doing things as creatively and imaginatively as we can, and not scattering ourselves too much. Always remembering that we have to be like the gardener, who sacrifices most of his rosebuds by careful pruning in order to develop the few buds of his choice to their fullest extent. In a limited lifetime one cannot do everything, but it is safe to say that the choice of a craft like woodwork is sufficient to send one’s interests stemming out in all manner of directions, adding enough colour to one’s pattern of life to give a wonderful zest to living.
Monroe earned a degree in fisheries from Colorado State University before moving to Alaska. Turning down an offer with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he built his home, much of the furniture and later worked with master log builder, Lee Cole, in 1977. Building a trussed-log bridge over the following two summers led to his meeting Dick Proenneke – their mutual passion for craft and wildlife kindled a friendship until Dick’s death in 2003.
A graduate of The Krenov School of Fine Woodworking, Monroe has taught woodworking courses around the country and has written articles for Fine Woodworking magazine.
Today Monroe has given up part of his Saturday to answer your questions about woodworking, Dick Proenneke and a conversation he’s been having with himself and others about using tropical hardwoods.
Here’s how it works: Type your question in the comment field. Monroe will answer it. It is that simple.
In a space of just 10” x 39” x 19-1/2”, H.O. Studley managed to arrange – with perfection – more than 250 of his tools into a dovetailed mahogany cabinet that has captivated tens of thousands of woodworkers since it was first unveiled in 1988 on the back cover of Fine Woodworking with a single shocking photograph.
After a brief stay at the Smithsonian, the cabinet was sold to a private collector and hadn’t been seen by the public for well over a decade. Studley’s workbench has never been on public view.
This book is an in-depth examination of one of the most beautiful woodworking tool chests ever constructed and presents the first-ever biography of Studley (1838-1925), a piano and organ builder in Quincy, Mass. It features measurements, details and photographs of all the tools in the cabinet. Every swinging frame, hinged panel and nook of this three-dimensional, multi-layered sculpture has been analyzed so you can understand how it folds in on itself like a giant piece of mahogany origami.
But most of all, you will see the cabinet in a way that only a handful of privileged people ever have. And you will realize that the magazine photograph that electrified the woodworking world in 1988 only scratches the surface of the cabinet’s complete magnificence.
The scale and density of the decorative details in the Studley cabinet limited each element, especially the inlays, to about a quarter the size of a postage stamp.
My late colleague and dear friend Melvin J. Wachowiak, Jr. once remarked that anything made more elegantly than necessary for its usefulness was Art. By that assessment, with which I agree, the Studley tool cabinet is unrestrained Art. There are a multitude of visual and physical moments in the cabinet that did not need to be there. Their presence is either to aesthetically enhance the whole, or to demonstrate the maker’s virtuosity at his craft and his delight in it.
The Inlays To a modern woodworker the tool cabinet might seem opulent, even garish, but in the late-Victorian world of organ and piano building, the exuberance made sense. The material vocabulary is what you would expect for a palette of inlays on a piano-maker’s toolbox: ivory, ebony and mother-of-pearl.
The inlay techniques Studley used on the cabinet were straightforward and exacting. For the round, button-like inlays he likely used a drill bit to excavate the pockets. The inlays vary in size, but most are in the range of 1/4″ in diameter plus or minus, with a few in the 1/8″-diameter range.
Almost all of the 136 ivory inlays are buttons or roundels.
On the right side of the cabinet, where Studley located sets of graduated drill bits, he marked the sets not only with engraved flat ivory roundels but also with half-spherical ivory buttons.
The 217 mother-of-pearl inlays are more evenly divided between buttons and roundels, and pieces of other shapes (alas, I did not conduct a count on that distribution). The shaped pieces were “made to fit,” but there is no way to identify which came first, the void or the infill.
Typically intarsia (a technique by which pieces are literally “inset” into a background) is accomplished by first creating the decorative element, then creating a void to fit that element by scribing the outline of the element on the background and excavating a void. My microscopic examination of the inlays was cursory and inconclusive, but I did not see any tool marks on the background surfaces.
Regardless of their material or shape, on all but a few of the inlays there are no irregularities until extreme magnification is employed.
With enough magnification you can receive a bit of comfort knowing that Studley was not a flawless automaton.
The opulence of using ivory buttons, inscribed with inked numbers to mark the progression of tool sizes (for example, the graduations of the drill bits) is awe-inspiring.
There is place for every drill bit in the graduated set, and an engraved ivory button for each drill bit. Also take note of the subtle but elegant treatment of the bottoms of the spacers between each Gothic arch; the curved double-chamfer is found in numerous locations throughout the cabinet, almost never glaringly obvious.
Concurrently, the mother-of-pearl elements used as mere decoration impart an intense luminescence to the cabinet, especially as the light or the viewing position changes.
The Sculpted Details The strictly sculptural elements of the cabinet, by which I mean those that are rendered and presented to the viewer in three dimensions, number literally in the hundreds. Because it is not possible to rank them in importance or even prominence, I will cluster them into four major areas.
First are the roundels, turned button-like elements scattered throughout the cabinet, never haphazard and always enhancing adjacent elements. There are many different sizes of roundels, ranging from about 3/8″ to 1-1/2″ in diameter. Most, but not all, of the roundels are festooned with round mother-of-pearl inlays at their tips, about which I will speak more in a bit. Each of the roughly two dozen roundels is turned from solid ebony.
The technical and artistic complexity of this one element is astonishing. The turned ebony plugs for the nickel-plated tube (there is one at each end) are adjacent to a series of ebony and mother-of-pearl roundels mounted on sculpted ebony backplates. To carry the power of the accomplishment even further, the swinging tab that restrains the tube in its shaped wire fitting is a spectacular carved ebony “L” with tapered chamfers on both sides of the two curves.
Closely related to the roundels are the drawer pulls and stopper buttons at the ends of the metal tubes containing tools. I include these 17 examples here because, like the roundels, they are small, turned ebony elements.
Second are the shaped decorative elements, which are further subdivided into those that are 1) functionally similar to the roundels in that they are applied to the background, or 2) movable tabs or catches used to restrain tools. Most of these from either category are further enhanced by mother-of-pearl inlays and reflect the element outline as a whole.
Of the first group, numbering roughly 90, many serve to frame a space but others are demarcations between tools belonging to a graduated set, such as the chisels and drill bits. The second group consists of about 50 ebony tabs.
In this single image you can see clearly eight movable ebony restraining tabs, six with inlays, and another five fixed saddles. For scale, the diagonal ebony piece is made to hold a 6″ rule.
The third type of sculptural enhancements are carved elements serving as stand-alone sculptures in their own right. The most prominent of these is the drop pendant that tops the arch above the niche containing the Stanley No. 1 plane. The detail on this element is breathtaking, all the more so when you consider its scale; it is roughly the size of a dime. There are only a dozen or so of these examples in the case, but they are spectacular and attention-grabbing.
The final widespread instance of sculptural exercises in the cabinet includes the arches and their buttresses, most notably around the set of four awls above the Masonic symbol, along with those around the chisels and the two sets of drill bits, which are in the upper right portion of the cabinet on the second and third layers. The arch-and-buttress vignette framing the awls takes its place proudly among the most beautifully designed and crafted artworks I have ever seen.
There are several diminutive carved ebony “S” scrolls in the cabinet, and this one acts as a support bracket where none is needed. Even at this scale, the entire detail is approximately 1/2″ in height, there is a minute chamfer to the edges.
Quantifying precisely the inventory of these decorative details is nearly impossible (is it a series of a dozen arches, or is it a single element of an ascending set of arches?) and frankly not especially useful.
But because you asked, I number the total of individual decorative elements to be in excess of 500.
Perhaps the most gifted craftsman I know recently replicated a single inlaid mother-of-pearl and ebony element from Studley’s cabinet and found it to be a vexing and time-consuming effort. If we fixate on the Herculean labors of Studley we might become obsessed with the mechanistic minutiae of envisioning and fabricating hundreds of stylistic touches, each consuming some quantity of a superb craftsman’s time.
The use of Gothic arches is prevalent throughout the cabinet’s interior, but nowhere is this feature more prominent than in Studley’s presentation of graduated drill bits. Appreciating this decorative feature requires the tools to be emptied to see the bare cabinet and the vision Studley had for it.
Instead I ask you to think of them – and the case itself – as a unified cornucopia in which the whole is infinitely more affecting than a summation of the magnificent individual components.
Editor’s note: There are many more photographs in the book than I’ve shown here of the artistic details discussed above.
Ania, checking out the fit of her backrest prior to sanding.
Last week’s Gibson Chair class – Chris’s first ever – was a rousing success. Only one person broke an arm (it was Chris), and everyone left with a gorgeous new Gibson chair in Ulmus rubra – red elm (with a red oak back rest), ready for finish. (I’m fairly certain every one is using a clear finish – this wood is too pretty to paint!)
But there is one mystery: Some of the sticks loosed some yellow powder upon planing…and we can’t figure out what caused this. I admit to spending but a limited time looking…because I’m busy and surely someone reading this knows! One possibility is “Elm Yellows,” aka elm phloem necrosis – but as far as I can tell from my limited reading, that disease turns the leaves yellow; there’s no mention of powder in the wood. I should also say that it doesn’t seem to have weakened the wood. Also, the powder didn’t bleed more out of the pores after further planing and a wipe-down with a rag. We did not do a taste test.
A single swipe down the stick picked up the above amount of yellow powder.
