It has been far too long since we held a puerile contest here on the Lost Art Press blog. And while driving home from our extended-family Mother’s Day celebration, my thoughts turned to (of course) hide glue.
I love hide glue in all its forms. I love it hot. I love it cold. I love it fresh. I hate it old.
The one thing I don’t like about hide glue is that I want more choices. There are only two brands of liquid hide glue out there: Titebond and Old Brown Glue. Both are fine glues with excellent qualities. But I think woodworkers deserve a third hide glue.
The contest: Name that hide glue.
While driving home I came up with what I thought was the most brilliant name ever for a glue made from a boiled animal. Are you sitting down? Good.
Deathgrip Hide Glue.
Aaaaaand, thank you. In the throes of personal glee I sent that idea to a few friends via SMS (aka, a text). One of them shot back with a name for hide glue that clearly eclipsed mine. I cannot, however, share it with you because it is so offensive that I just don’t have the stomach to endure the pile of hate mail that would follow.
He came up with a second one that I can print: Sticky McDeadhorse.
While not as funny, it is funny.
So here’s the contest: Give us the name of the next best hide glue by midnight May 16, 2012. The one that makes me laugh out loud the most wins one item from the Lost Art Press store. It can be anything that we currently have in stock.
All you have to do is post the proposed name of the glue and your e-mail. If you don’t send me your e-mail, I cannot contact you if you are the winner.
While the raw leather adds a nice Conan-like smell to my shop, I’ve got to finish the legs, stretchers and backrests for the Roorkhee chairs.
My finish of choice: garnet shellac – Tiger Flakes from Tools for Working Wood, to be specific. I love the stuff. It mixes like a martini, is easy to spray and gives me just the right color for vintage stuff.
Of course, spraying shellac always attracts the attention of the new neighbors behind us.
“It’s OK,” I’ll yell. “You can eat this stuff. They put it on strawberries and apples and pills and…”
The neighbors go inside and start closing their windows.
I guess that’s what you get for building a new house in the drainage swamp behind our house.
When I spray lots of pieces like this, I string up a clothesline between a tree and basketball goal; then I hang the parts on some wire hangers. This is how I learned to spray doors while working at the ThermaTru door company. Of course, I don’t have an oven to bake on the finish like I did at ThermaTru (that’s OK, shellac dries fast.)
And there was one more big advantage to spraying at ThermaTru – birds wouldn’t crap upon your work. The inside of my campaign chest still has some poo shadows.
Yesterday I went to our local Tandy Leather store and got a crash course in leatherwork from one of the guys at the store who makes gear and armor for re-enactors. Yup, I’ve decided to make the leather seats for the Roorkhee chairs from scratch.
Well, almost scratch, I didn’t raise the cows or murder them.
There is a surprising amount of overlap between the crafts of leather and wood. Sharp tools. Shaping curves using moisture. Dyes. Finishes. Metal hardware. After all, in both crafts we’re dealing with a fibrous, natural material. One just happens to have roots. The other one moos.
I’ve done some basic leatherwork before – covering an ottoman with pigskin, recovering spring seats for side chairs etc. But nothing this involved. But it looks like fun and these sling seats are a good beginner project.
I bought three unfinished skins, which should be more than enough for two chairs. I wanted to have enough to make a few mistakes. And I want to make some Anarchist underwear – whipstitching and rivets all around.
With a mighty (OK, a wussy) whuppin’, I assembled two frames for these Roorkhee chairs. All in all, they aren’t bad. Only one joint out of the two chairs keeps popping out. I’ll fix its wagon in the morning.
Tomorrow I’ll clean them up and finish them with shellac. Then it’s off to the upholstery person, whoever that is. I still haven’t been able to get a shop to return my phone calls. Perhaps I need a sexier voice.
After I got the first chair frame assembled, I put down my dead-blow mallet for a minute because I was stunned by something I hadn’t seen before. The frame is the spitting image of an Egyptian bed from one of Geoffrey Killen’s books on Egyptian furniture and woodworking tools. I cannot put my finger on the book this evening. (Note to self: Cane the librarian yet again.)
In the meantime, I was amused to receive a poem about Roorkhee chairs and the J Lo “too much junk in the trunk” problem that some of us suffer from. I will warn you, there are a couple adult words in this ode, so don’t read it aloud in Sunday School, OK?
— Christopher Schwarz
Madam, over here is a chair called a Roorkhee,
not hard to pronounce, rhymes with dorky.
Roam the world and sit unflappable,
‘cuz the damn thing is quite collapsible.
This chair is not for me it would seem,
I am much too broad ‘cross the beam.
Yes, madam, he said with a sigh,
I can see you are really quite wide.
These curves I have are my problem,
Too much here, there, and a big bottom.
But, madam you must not despair!
The Roorkhee is your kind of chair.
For you it is eminently suitable
it has the quality of being scootchable!
Take a seat and alack and alas,
the Roorkhee can handle your ass !
One of the things I most like about making furniture is something that’s rarely talked about: It is a lot like being a 15th-century explorer.
You sometimes venture into places that you think are new and untouched, but like the Genoese, you find that people have already been there and built great things. What you do next could make or break your piece’s design.
As I’m building these Roorkhee chairs I’m using an original as a pattern and trying to stay as close as possible to the vintage lines, materials and measurements. As I turned the legs, I found that the cylinder shape near the top of the legs is not just decorative and it’s not just intended to reduce the weight of the piece.
It is, instead, a perfect grip for the human hand. The cylinder on the original is 1-1/4” in diameter and 3” long, with a wide bevel at the top and bottom (which is no fun to turn, by the way). When complete, this grip makes it easy to pick up the assembled chair and move it. Brilliant.
Modern interpretations of the Roorkhee have stunted this cylinder or turned it into a vase-like turning that isn’t easy to grab or hold. Stupid moderns.
Another good detail: The original chairs are exactly as deep as they are wide. This allows all the rails to be interchangeable. So when you assemble your Roorkhee in camp you don’t have to label your parts – tab A into slot B. No matter how you assemble it, it always comes out the same. Newer commercial versions of the chair add width but not depth. This requires the user to pay more attention when assembling the chair.
And this is the point in the project at which I think I must depart from the original. The original chair has 16-1/2” of space between the legs. Stop reading for a minute, pick up your tape measure and determine how wide you are at the hips. I’m 15” wide. That would give me 3/4” of space on either side of a traditional Roorkhee.
When I build stick chairs, I have always used about 18” between the spindles or legs of the chair. When I build Morris chairs, it’s usually about 23” of space. My gut says I should make these chairs have 18” to 19” space between the legs. It is, after all, designed for lounging.
But my gut can be wrong, like when I thought it would be a good idea to eat one more seafood sausage. So I’m going to make a version with 16-1/2” between the legs – but I’m going to use cheap poplar dowels for the rails.
Then we’ll see if my gut fits. Literally.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. As I wrote this blog entry I kept thinking how furniture could be an “undiscovered country.” To impress Megan Fitzpatrick, I thought I’d trot out the Bill Shakespeare quote about that from Hamlet:
To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?
But that’s not me. I have less culture than a petri dish at the CDC. This is more my (lack of) style.
This is the final cruise of the Starship Enterprise under my command. This ship and her history will shortly become the care of another crew. To them and their posterity will we commit our future. They will continue the voyages we have begun and journey to all the undiscovered countries, boldly going where no man – where no one – has gone before.