This week I’m finishing up a set of Roorkhee-style ottomans for a customer, and today I applied Liberon Black Bison Wax (dark oak shade) over the two coats of garnet shellac.
This is one of my favorite finishes for campaign furniture. The garnet shellac warms up the mahogany; the dark wax fills in the pores and tints any pink left in the wood.
My youngest daughter, Katherine Schwarz, is working for Lost Art Press this summer, doing a lot of photography and website maintenance. So I asked her to shoot this quick phone video to show the before and the after.
Katherine and I will make a few professional videos this summer, including the long-promised video on sharpening scrapers and a video on our Crucible Pinch Rods. The phone video above is not indicative of the quality she can produce (she’s in art school).
The sideboard Nancy made for her book about English Arts and Crafts furniture for Popular Woodworking’s book’s division. Photo by Al Parrish. 2017.
Author Nancy Hiller will discuss her forthcoming book “Kitchen Think” on a new video discussion group called Bench.Talk.101. The free event takes place at 8:30 p.m.-9:30 p.m. (U.K. time) on Thursday, July 16. If you are in the United States, the event takes place at 3:30 p.m. Eastern time.
There are multiple ways to enjoy the event. About 5 minutes before the event begins on Thursday, you can go to Bench.Talk.101’s Instagram bio and there will be a link to join the discussion. Or if you have Zoom installed on a device, you can join the discussion via this link.
If you miss the discussion with Nancy, it will be posted afterward here on YouTube. If you click on that link now you can view the previous Bench.Talk.101s to get a feel for the format.
Bench.Talk.101 is a freewheeling and informative chat, and Nancy is always a sharp and interesting person to interview.
Fresh-mixed shellac is an excellent film finish, and we go through a lot of it in our shop. Here is how I mix it up for general use as a furniture finish (i.e. not as a barrier for urine, smoke or sap).
We use Tiger Flakes from Tools for Working Wood. There are lots of good shellac suppliers out there. But once I settled on Tiger Flakes, I stuck with Tiger Flakes. I like consistency and predictability with my finishes.
I use pure-grain alcohol: Everclear from the liquor store. Hardware store alcohols (which have water, methanol and/or other chemicals) don’t dissolve shellac as well. And they can be poisonous. If you can’t buy Everclear, I recommend you visit Kentucky! (Other woodworkers I know buy ethanol through medical supply catalogs and report that it’s not too much of a pain.)
I mix up shellac in a “one-pound cut” or even a little weaker. That is one pound of shellac per 1 gallon of Everclear. There’s a handy chart here that helps you through the math for smaller portions. While many prefer a “two-pound cut,” I prefer to apply more thin coats than a few thick coats. You can, of course, easily thin down a thick shellac.
I use a magnetic stirring gizmo. This $30 gadget allows me to pour the ingredients in a plastic beaker, drop in a magnetic stirbar and walk away. In about an hour it mixes the shellac completely. Some people prefer to pulverize their shellac with a grinder used for coffee beans. That works, too. I prefer the magnetic stirrer because I can pour an entire pound of shellac into an entire gallon of alcohol and walk away. No pulverizing small batches of shellac. But that’s just personal preference.
Then I filter the shellac through a paint filter or cheesecloth. Amazingly, the Tiger Flakes never contain any bug parts, so there’s nothing really to filter out. But I do it anyway just to be sure.
Then I label and date each glass jar of shellac. We use it so quickly, however, I’ve never had any expire.
In “The Anarchist’s Workbench” (download it for free here) I mention that the device we now call a “Crisscross” from Benchcrafted was once called “St. Peter’s Cross” or “Croix de St. Pierre.”
Several people have called foul, saying (as the record states) that St. Peter was crucified on an upside-down cross, not the X-shaped cross shape created by the mechanism. It was instead St. Andrew who was executed on an X-shaped cross. So the mechanism should be called the St. Andrew’s cross.
The reason I continue to call it St. Peter’s cross has nothing to do with religion, personal ignorance or trying to offend. I promise. Instead, the first place I can find a reference to the mechanism calls it “St. Peter’s Cross,” so I use the original name until I can find an earlier reference.
The reference is in the 1890 book “Every Man His Own Mechanic” (Ward, Lock & Co., London) by Francis Young. Young writes:
“This ingenious contrivance for keeping the inner surface of the cheek of the bench-vice parallel to the outer surface of the board that forms the front of the bench is the “Croix de St. Pierre,” or, “St. Peter’s Cross,” as it is called on the continent, where it is very generally adopted and used by all carpenters and joiners.“
Young might very well have been mistaken in calling it “St. Peter’s Cross.” Or perhaps Young called it that name for a reason we don’t know. Until I can find an earlier reference, I’ll continue to use the name that Young used when I talk about the mechanism’s history. And I’ll use “Crisscross” when referring to the modern mechanism.
Shortly after “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” was released I got a nasty call from a reader.
“I’m a graphic designer. I own other Lost Art Press books,” he said. “And I have to say this new book has a terrible, amateurish design.”
“Exactly right,” I replied.
Each of the three books in the “anarchist” series takes its design cues from different points in history, reflecting something about the book’s content or storyline. (This is true for all of our books; we don’t have a house style.)
“The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” is supposed to look like a manifesto set on a Macintosh. The chapter headings were made with a clicky label maker. The body copy is 11-point Cochin, a free font, and is set on a 17-point baseline (way too much space between the lines). The font used for the quotations is Courier 8 point, another freely available font.
From a broader perspective, the book doesn’t have a formal “grid,” which is the underlying structure used by most page designers when setting columns, photos and drawings. Photos intrude into the body copy in awkward ways. Yet, the book is (I think) still readable from a typographical perspective.
For the second book, “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” I looked to 18th-century pattern books and 17th-century texts. The book’s physical size is the same as Andre Felibien’s “Des Principes de l’Architecture…” The body copy is Caslon 12 point (on 13-point leading). Caslon is from the early 18th century (circa 1722). The style of the subheadings, the drop capitals and even the running heads on the pages are all ideas swiped from early books.
Plus, of course, the book’s copperplate etchings by Briony Morrow-Cribbs add to the overall older feel to the book. The idea behind the book design (and the book itself) was to treat vernacular furniture with the same respect as the high-style stuff.
The third book, “The Anarchist’s Workbench” (download it for free here), is from an entirely different place. It is meant to echo the books of the early 20th century that were set with Linotype machines. The body copy is, again Caslon, but the letters are set tighter. The type is 10.5 point on 12-point leading. In fact, all of the text in the book (except the data page at the front with the ISBN) is set in some form of Caslon – a common feature of books of this time.
Unlike the other two books, the text is carefully justified to look more formal and present letterspacing that looks like it was done by a real designer. The images and text are locked to a rigid grid system. The design is (supposed to look) mature. And that mature design is supposed to reflect the ideas in the book (poo jokes aside).
Apologies for the “behind the scenes” content. I get asked sometimes why our books look so different. This is why.
