If you are coming to Woodworking in America next month (or even if you aren’t), please consider attending our book release party at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 17, at A Tavola Pizza, 1220 Vine St. in Cincinnati. (Sorry the book-release party is fully booked.)
And if you can’t make it to the book-release party, be sure to join us in the WIA marketplace at noon on Oct. 19 for a second book signing with many of the principals involved in the translation project.
— Christopher Schwarz
In our excerpt of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry,” A.-J. Roubo offers a recipe for staining wood red using a concoction made using horse dung and urine.
Here’s the recipe:
Before finishing the dyeing of wood, I believe I ought to give a least-costly method of dyeing white wood red, which is done in the following manner:
You take some horse dung, which you put in a bucket of which the bottom is pierced with many holes, and you place it above another bucket, into which falls the water from the dung, as it gradually rots. When it does not rot fast enough, you water it from time to time with some horse urine, which helps a lot and at the same time gives a red water, which not only stains the surface of the wood, but penetrates the interior 3 to 4 lines deep. In staining the wood with this dye, one must take care that all the pieces be of the same species, and about equal in density if one wishes that they be of equal color throughout. This observation is general for all water-based stains, which have no palpable thickness nor even appearance [they leave no residue or any evident change in appearance], which requires the cabinetmaker to make a choice of wood of equal color and a density as I mentioned before.
Woodworker Jonas Jensen of Mors, Denmark, is making this stain and documenting the process on his blog, Mulesaw. Follow along – but be warned, if you don’t like pictures of dung you are not going to like the instructions.
And just a reminder, the standard edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” is almost finished at the printer. If you want the book with free domestic shipping, be sure to place your order before Thursday, Oct. 10.
The standard edition is available in the store here. We have some deluxe versions still available, though the supplies are dwindling. Click here for details on the deluxe edition.
— Christopher Schwarz
The Sterling Historical Society presents PeterGalbert from Robert McKay Jones on Vimeo.
With all the (well-earned) hoopla about our Roubo translation, we haven’t been talking as much about the other projects coming up from Lost Art Press – including a fantastic book on chairmaking by Peter Galbert.
The book is essentially written, and now Peter is making the illustrations (by hand, natch) for the book. I’ve been editing the text and I can say that it is outstanding. And I say that as a chairmaker, not as a publisher. Look for it in 2014.
If you’d like an introduction Peter and his way of working, check out the above video shot at the Sterling (Mass.) Historical Society. If you’ve had the benefit of taking a class from Peter or attended one of his seminars, then you know his book will be nothing less than fantastic.
— Christopher Schwarz
When you start working in the world of furniture that folds and unfolds, it’s easy to get your frontal lobe into a blender. Even though you know that this contraption should work, you don’t actually believe it until you build it.
With this folding officer’s desk, I had six butt hinges all turning in different directions. So keeping inside and outside all straight as I screwed them in kept me flummoxed. And I kept wondering how much spacing I should leave between the folding aprons and the inside of the legs (my experiments with the mechanism told me the answer was “none”).
But still you worry.
So it was satisfying for the table base to snap open and shut perfectly on the first try.
Now I just need to build the folding desktop, which locks the base in the open position. I’d better get the jack plane sharpened up – the top is 24” wide, and I have only a 13” surface planer.
— Christopher Schwarz
You don’t see bareface tenons discussed much, but they can sometimes be the right joint when you need some extra strength.
For those of you new to joinery, a bareface tenon is a tenon that is missing a face cheek. Instead, the face of the workpiece acts as a tenon cheek.
The primary disadvantage is you give up the face shoulder that can conceal the rim of your mortise. And you might be giving up a little strength against lateral forces – sometimes called racking forces.
But you get some real advantages, too. You can use a thick tenon and still have a beefy mortise wall. This is helpful with workbenches and many table constructions in my experience. It makes a joint that is robust enough for drawboring with little risk of you cracking the tenon or the mortise wall.
Plus, you have one less shoulder to fit – there’s no chance that an inside shoulder can interfere with the fit of the shoulder on the outside. Oh, and the joint is less work to make.
I wouldn’t use a bareface tenon when you could easily see the inside surfaces, and a ragged mortise wall might be evident. But for apron tables and the like, it’s definitely a joint to consider.
— Christopher Schwarz
