One of the nice things about teaching different places is you get to see how each school has its own personality or vibe, if you will.
I can say this: If you like taking classes at Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking, you’ll feel right at home at William Ng’s school in Anaheim, Calif. Like Kelly, William has a laid-back, almost soothing personality. And (also like Kelly), William takes his equipment very seriously.
(Teaching here made me realize how much I’ll miss teaching at Kelly’s this year – he’s taking a sabbatical for a year to travel and do other stuff.)
On Monday we began turning legs for Roorkee chairs on sweet Oneway lathes and began boring the leg mortises on a monstrous General drill press. We also started all the leatherwork for the chairs by making what seemed like a mile of belting material from vegetable-tanned leather.
Teaching the class made me realize I have a slight dimensional error in “Campaign Furniture.” I’ll publish an errata tonight after class.
Today we crack into the chromium-tanned hides that will make the seats and start the tricky process of making the socketed mortises and tenons that create the chair’s frame.
So next time your family wants to go to Disneyland, simply agree. Send them there and book a class down the street with William Ng. Win-win.
Stools that have an X-frame for the base are some of the oldest pieces of seating furniture (aside from a stump and buttocks). Sometimes called a “curule,” they were, quite literally the seat of power in Roman times.
These X-style seats have long been produced in metal and wood and were very common campaigning items, according to the Army & Navy Co-Operative Society catalogs. The stool shown above is featured in the 1907 catalog and cost 2 shillings and 1 pence (the catalog entry is shown on page 304 of my book, “Campaign Furniture”).
Thanks to dumb luck, I acquired one of these stools for $25 and have been traveling with it every since. It is remarkable.
When assembled, the stool is 16” high, 15” wide and 8” deep. It can hold my weight (and more) with ease. When knocked down, it is 12” x 8” x 1-1/2”. The stool weighs less than 4 lbs.
I’m bringing this stool, my Douro chair and some pieces of furniture I built to the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event in Charleston, S.C. Details are here. On the day before the event, I’m giving a free lecture on the origins of campaign furniture at the American College of the Building Arts. The public is welcome. Details on that lecture are here.
The first campaign chest I built I used sledge feet – simple square blocks that raised the lower case off the ground.
Soon after, I received a pleasant note stating that I had made an amateur mistake. Campaign chests with sledge feet were merely missing their turned feet.
I felt like a fool at first. It was like sculpting a female torso and leaving off the naughty bits. After recovering from my shame, I started looking around at original source material.
First I checked my copies of the Army & Navy Co-Operative Society catalogs. Sure enough, all the chests shown in my copies had turned feet that screwed into blocks in the bottom of the lower chest unit.
But something else nagged at me.
As you know, we love old paintings and drawings here at Lost Art Press. Thanks to Jeff Burks, Suzanne Ellison and our own efforts, we have amassed many hundreds of images relating to woodworking from Roman times to the present. These are important, if sometimes flawed, documents that are as important as written, if sometimes flawed, accounts.
An Officer’s Quarters at Newry, Northern Ireland, C. 1870
So I began scanning my library of paintings and drawings relating to campaign furniture. Sure enough, I immediately found several that showed campaign chests in use on their sledge feet – no turned feet.
There are several explanations: The turned feet were still in the lower drawer or had been destroyed by bugs or water. Or perhaps the owner of the chest was lazy or didn’t care for the feet. Or perhaps that chest was made without the turned feet.
No matter what the explanation, don’t feel like you are wrong if you don’t include them on your chest. Personally, I really like the feet, but some people are turned off by turning.
In 2004, I purchased my first-ever custom anything. A handplane. It was a ridiculous financial move.
I had two young daughters (age 7 and 2), a low-level editing job and almost no disposable income. Lucy and I were throwing every dollar at our mortgage so we could be debt-free and able to do something uber-nutty – like run an independent publishing business.
But after meeting toolmaker Wayne Anderson, I became obsessed with the miter planes he builds. Somehow I scraped up $800 and ordered one. When I finally received the tool, I was overjoyed. It was one of the most beautiful tools I had ever seen, much less owned.
A few months later, thieves at a woodworking show outside Philadelphia stole the plane from my workbench. I was working our booth alone for a short period. Someone distracted me by making a ruckus at one end of the booth. When I turned back around, the plane was gone. (Read about it here in the WoodCentral archives.)
Insurance covered the theft, but I was bummed because they stole my favorite tool. Lots of things get stolen at woodworking shows – I’ve lost mallets, marking gauges, combination squares and (of course) books. I’ve actually had it easy. Some vendors have lost cash boxes with thousands of dollars inside.
To help in the hunt for the plane, Wayne actually stopped making that model, which made it difficult for the thief to fence it on the legitimate market. And Wayne put the word out with his customers and fellow collectors to watch for the tool.
Lo and behold, the plane turned up last week. And just like a stolen sports car, the tool was a wreck when it was recovered. The miter had been caught in a flood and the steel parts were deeply corroded. The brass sides were heavily tarnished and the iron was a bubbly mass of iron oxide. The most unusual fact: It hadn’t been sharpened in 10 years. I could recognize my edge on the tool.
But even in that sorry state, the plane was still fricking beautiful.
I worked out a deal with the plane’s honest new owner to trade another plane for the miter. And today the miter arrived.
After I unpacked it, I took the photos for this blog entry and began stabilizing the rust and damage. I have a long restoration process ahead of me, but it’s going to be satisfying work. Some of the damage is irreversible, but that’s OK with me. We all get a few scars in life.
As for the whole story, you’ll have to forgive my obliqueness. The above text is all I can really tell you. I’m not one to seek out justice, revenge or punishment for stealing a tool. So this is really the end of the story – until the miter is creating beautifully polished surfaces again.
With “Campaign Furniture” shipping out of the warehouse (we should be current on orders by Monday), one would think I am sick of the style. Or that at least I would take a break.
Quite the opposite. When I finished my first book on workbenches in 2007, I plowed forward with research into other forms, which continues to this day. When I finished “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” in 2011, I built smaller chests, experimented with different tool-holding doo-dads and explored two Dutch versions.
So right now I’m building another folding bookcase, measuring my Douro chair and playing with a folding stool that I’ll be posting a video of soon. The stool is small enough to fit into a purse. Or my man-bag.
The folding bookcase (detail shown above), will be featured in a future issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine and is different than the one in my book. The new one is mahogany, has glass doors and has cool sawtooth shelf standards.
I hadn’t made this style of shelf standard before, and so I fretted about the angles, but they turned out to be so easy that a mouth-breather could do it, and they work very well. I’ll detail the process in the article and will be using these in future projects.
Sorry for the lame blog topic today – I was expecting an important package and I missed the mailman. So until tomorrow…. Or Saturday after Jeff’s posts.
