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.
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.
3. If you are planning on picking up your pre-ordered copy of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible” at Woodworking in America (or perhaps buy a copy at the show), please stop by the Lost Art Press booth at noon on Saturday, Oct. 19.
We will have many of the people involved with the project available to chat about the book and sign your copy. We’re not sure how long the event will run — it depends on how many people show up and what other obligations the authors, translators, etc. have.
Soon we also will be announcing details of a book-release party on Thursday, Oct. 17, at a local Cincinnati restaurant. We’re still running some numbers.
Sign up for Woodworking in America, Oct. 18-20. I mean come on, do you really need to weed the garden that weekend?
Our revised edition of Joseph Moxon’s “The Art of Joinery” is only a couple weeks away from going on press and will be released in November – just in time for the holidays.
“The Art of Joinery” was the first publication of Lost Art Press in 2008. That book has been out of print for several years now, and used copies are fetching obscene prices on eBay and Amazon. We originally sold the book for $17; we’ve seen it sell for $300.
The fully revised second edition will sell for about $21 (a significant savings over $300) and will be twice as thick. What’s in it?
1. The text from the first edition – a lightly edited adaptation of the original 17th-century text that made the odd grammar, spellings and sentence structure easier to digest.
2. Commentary. I’ve written about each section of the book, trying to amplify Moxon’s writings with photos and additional drawings from other sources (such as Randle Holme’s “Academy of Armory”) to put Moxon’s work in context and make it understandable to a woodworker. The revised edition will reflect a lot of things I’ve learned since 2008.
3. All the illustrations have been paired with their text explanations – no flipping back and forth between text and drawings.
4. The unedited and unchanged text, exactly as Moxon wrote it. We reset it in an historically appropriate font so you can get the real-deal old-school stuff.
5. A selection of plates from Andre Felebien’s earlier work, which Moxon might have copied for his work (you decide).
6. A complete index by Suzanne “Saucy Indexer” Ellison, who made the excellent index for “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”
The book is ahead of schedule at this point thanks to designer Linda Watts. I was planning on designing the book myself (which is what I do with my own work), but I realized that I had been ready to design the book for almost two months and had not done squat. So I called in Linda, who designed the entire book in about 10 days. Yay Linda!
So tonight I’m proofing Linda’s layout and we will have this to the printer in less than two weeks. We’ll have complete details and a pre-publication free-shipping offer in mid-October.
