Lost Art Press

Author: meghanlostartpress

For the Love of Yellow Wood

Posted on by meghanlostartpress
YELLOW PINE, HOT SPRINGS, ARK.
After years of working with yellow pine on our Arkansas farm, I
convinced myself it was an ideal wood for a workbench.

The following is excerpted from “The Anarchist’s Workbench,” by Christopher Schwarz. The book is – on the one hand – a detailed plan for a simple workbench that can be built using construction lumber and basic woodworking tools. But it’s also the story of Schwarz’s 20-year journey researching, building and refining historical workbenches until there was nothing left to improve.

Along the way, Schwarz quits his corporate job, builds a publishing company founded on the principles of mutualism and moves into an 1896 German barroom in a red-light district, where he now builds furniture, publishes books and tries to live as an aesthetic anarchist. Oh – and the PDF of the book is free (see the first sentence at this link.)

This following chapter should be the shortest one in the book and should consist of only the following paragraph.

The wood for your workbench should be the heaviest and cheapest stuff that you can obtain with great ease. Let it dry a bit before you build your bench. When you mill it, discard any bits that twist a lot or split.

Sadly, I know that paragraph won’t do because first-time bench-builders have enormous anxiety about every aspect of the project, especially the wood. And people who have built only one workbench (or watched a guy do it once) have fierce opinions on the topic that they spread far and wide.

The truth is that the number of wood species that are questionable for building a workbench is tiny. So, let’s talk about those first. Here are the woods I would avoid, if possible.

White Pines
I’ve built benches with white pines and they are sub-optimal for a couple reasons: weight and hardness. They are strong enough; mostly I object to how lightweight they are. A good furniture maker’s bench should be heavy so that it won’t move or shake while you work. White pines are remarkably lightweight, which is a great characteristic when making a tool chest (which should be mobile). [Editor’s note: Dude. That’s my bench you’re dissing. I weighed it down. It’s fine.]

A typical cubic foot of Eastern white pine (Pinus strobus) weighs 25 lbs. at 12 percent moisture content. A typical cubic foot of hard maple (Acer saccharum) is 44 pounds. That’s a big difference. Also, white pines dent when you look at them sideways. That’s not a deal killer, but it’s annoying.

Bottom line: I’ll use white pines for some parts in a bench, such as the stretchers or shelf boards, when the rest of the bench is made from dense stuff. But an all-white-pine bench is not my first choice.


WHITE PINE WORKBENCH, 2010
Megan Fitzpatrick’s second workbench was built using white pine
offcuts from a log home.

Eschew Exotics
The other extreme is to build your bench out of a wood with properties more like steel than cellulose. Purpleheart (Peltogyne spp.) is a prime example. A cubic foot of this atrocity weighs 56 lbs. at 12 percent moisture content. That weight seems ideal for the bench builder who wants mass. But working with it is agonizing. It brutalizes your tools, both hand and power. (Plus it looks like a Smurf with a skin disease.) Ipe (Handroanthus spp.) is another prime example. A cubic foot weighs a ridiculous 69 lbs. Cutting it with regular woodworking tools is like trying to gum a carrot to death.

Plus, these woods are stupid expensive compared to the woods easily available to a North American woodworker. If I lived in South America and could purchase these woods for a reasonable price, I’d probably give them some love. But here in the Northern Hemisphere, there are many cheaper woods that are plenty heavy and easier to work.


CHERRY SLABS, COLUMBUS, OHIO, 2010
At first glance, the slabs seemed big enough and sound enough to
make a workbench. But the rot caused some problems.

Avoid Spongy Woods
If a tree has been sitting on the ground a while, it’s likely that decay has set in. And the bugs built this city on rot and mold. Some of these trees end up at your lumberyard, especially if the seller deals in live-edge slabs or big pieces of wood for fireplace mantles.

Semi-rotted wood is fine for a conference table or fireplace mantle. That’s because it won’t see much abuse (and it likely will see a lot of epoxy). But if you put that same wood in a workbench, disaster might find you.

One of my workbenches had a thick benchtop of black cherry (Prunus serotina) that had been sitting out in the parking lot of a woodworking shop for a couple seasons. The price ($0.00) was right, and I could see some areas of the top were spongy. So, I filled these voids with a flexible epoxy that I tinted black. This was in 2010, and – oh my lord I just realized that this fact puts me at the forefront of the “bigslabs with epoxy pour” movement. Kill me.

Anyway, the epoxy wasn’t strong enough to stabilize the entire cherry slab for use as a benchtop. And during a public event a couple years later, Roy Underhill knocked a chunk off the benchtop while setting a holdfast in it. (And that’s why there are now two giant lag screws in its front edge.)

So, check any slabs for punkiness before purchasing. Probe any dis- colored areas with a pocket-knife, which will plunge into the bits that are too soft. Here’s one more clue: If you pick up a slab and it seems entirely too lightweight, it’s probably been turned into a Golden Corral by the insect world. Put the slab back.


REPAIR TO A ROTTED SECTION
Despite the epoxy, a chunk of the bench had to be bolted back on.

Some Red Herrings
If you remove the above three kinds of woods from your list of potential species, you still have an enormous range from which to choose.But some people will insist that you narrow it down even more. Don’t let them. Some people just like to be a bossy-pants, and so they come up with other hurdles for you to leap over when choosing a wood. Here are some dumb pieces of advice trying to lead you astray.

Use only light-colored species. This advice seems to make sense at first. A lightly colored bench will reflect light in a dark shop. It also will be easy to sight your plane soles against the benchtop to deter- mine if its cutter is centered in the mouth.

But in reality, its hue doesn’t make a ding-dong bit of difference.

Light-colored benches become dark with age. Dark-colored benches become light with age. Everything ends up as middling brown. I’ve seen old maple benches that look like walnut. And old walnut benches that look like maple. And working on either of these benches is no problem whatsoever. If you are struggling, sight that plane sole against a piece of wood on your bench. Or the floor. Or a piece of paper.

I’d probably pass on building an ebony bench because it’s just an expensively dumb choice for a workbench. But if I had some nice walnut or cherry that was dirt cheap and thick, I’d turn it into a bench without remorse.

Dumb advice, part two: Use only a closed-pore or diffuse-pore species. The theory here is that if you use an open-pored species, such as ash or oak, then the pores might collect metal filings or other debris that will scratch your work. I have never, ever found this to be a problem. Oak, ash and other open-pore species are great for building workbenches.

Part three: Use only hardwood for your benchtop. Again, this seems to make sense on the surface. A hard benchtop is nice. But “hard- woods” aren’t always hard. Basswood (Tilia americana) is an American hardwood. But it’s as easily dented as Eastern white pine. If a hard benchtop is your goal, then you need to start comparing the different Janka ratings of the species on your short list.

Janka hardness is a number that expresses the pounds of force required to push a steel ball (that is .444″ in diameter) halfway into a board. It’s a number you can easily look up if you want to go down the Janka rabbit hole.

I tend to lurk around the rim of the Janka rabbit hole. If the wood is really soft (Eastern white pine’s Janka rating is 380 pounds-force) I want to know that before I get building. (By way of comparison, hardmaple’s Janka rating is 1,450 pounds-force. Ipe’s is a ridiculous 3,510

pounds-force.) The hardness of a species is something to consider, but

it’s not my first concern. So, what is?

How much the wood costs, per pound.

That might sound weird. Let’s talk about it.

Let’s Talk About Weight
When you compare the weights of species, you need to make sure the comparisons are all at the same moisture content (12 percent is the typical comparison unit). You can compare the density of a species by comparing its “specific gravity,” which is a method that compares the weight to a cubic meter of water. Or you can look at the average dried weight of a cubic foot of the wood (also at 12 percent moisture content).

These are useful, but I think you can also make some important comparisons by factoring in the local price of a species. It’s like buying meat at the butcher. Is rib eye ritzier than hamburger? The price per pound helps us answer that question (and yes, it is).

For example, a cubic foot of hard maple consists of 12 board feet of maple. If maple is $4.73 a board foot, then a cubic foot of maple costs $56.76. That cubic foot weighs 44 lbs. Or $1.29/pound.

Longleaf pine (a yellow pine) is 78 cents a board foot (for No. 1 grade), so a cubic foot costs $9.40. That cubic foot weighs 41 lbs. Or a remarkably cheap 23 cents per pound.

Because I live to poke fun at Ipe, let’s run those numbers. Ipe costs $17 a board foot, so a cubic foot costs $204. That cubic foot weighs 69 lbs. So Ipe is $2.96/pound. Not a great deal at the wood butcher’s.

The chart (below) compares some of the common U.S. hardwoods and softwoods using typical Midwestern retail prices circa 2020 (this is not wholesale or trade pricing). This cost-per-pound calculation is simple to do yourself using your local prices.

Here’s how: Take your cost per board foot (use 8/4 prices) and multiply that by 12. That’s the cost for a cubic foot. Now divide that number by the weight of a cubic foot of that species (a statistic that is easily found in books and online). The result is the cost per pound.

Do the Math
From the chart, ash looks like a good choice among the hardwoods. The problem with that assessment is that by the time you are reading this book, white ash might be almost extinct. The emerald ash borer has devastated the ash forests in the United States. So, you might not be able to buy it at any price. And if you do find it, you want to ensure it hasn’t rotted. We have been plagued by punky ash for the last few years as the sawyers have milled up trees that have been standing dead.

Aside from ash, poplar and the maples are a great bang for the buck. Both are easy to work, readily available and fairly cheap by the pound. I’ve made workbenches using all three species and think they’re fine. Neither is considered a noble species for a workbench, like European beech. But as long as you aren’t out to impress anyone, go for it. You’ll have no problem finding those species at almost any lumberyard in America.

But if you want to go full redneck, read on.

Softwoods that are used for structural members in home construction – the yellow pines, Douglas fir, hemlock and some spruces – are an outstanding value. They are heavy, cheap and readily available at any lumberyard. After working with them most of my life in residential construction and workbench building, they remain my No. 1 choice for workbenches.

Here’s why: Anyone can buy it. You don’t have to search out a specialty lumberyard or set up a commercial account. Just go to the home center if you want (though I always prefer family lumberyards). They have plenty.

Also important: They have plenty. A typical home center or family lumberyard will have hundreds of planks of 2x material in the racks on any given day – everything from 2x6s to 2x12s – with lengths from 8′ to 16′. At a home center, you can spend hours sifting through the racks to find the best boards – the employees don’t care. At a family lumberyard it pays to ask permission (they will sometimes be happy to help you). Either way, just be sure to restack the lumber nicer than you found it.

Here’s another buying tip: Some lumberyard chains carry No. 2 yellow pine, others carry No. 1. The price difference is minimal, but the quality isn’t. No. 1 is worth the extra nickels. If you find a yard that deals in No. 1, you might be able to buy all the wood for your bench in one swoop. If you buy No. 2, you might have to hit all the yards in your town, county or region.


YELLOW PINE NEEDLES, HOT SPRINGS, ARK.
Yellow pines are identified by how their needles are bundled on a
twig. Yellow pines typically have two, three or five needles
per fascicle (or bundle).

Yellow pine is easy to work. I’ve built yellow pine workbenches using only hand tools, and using a full-on machine shop. It’s friendly stuff. Yes, there can be some knots, but if you pick your boards with care, you’ll have almost none of those to deal with.

So there must be disadvantages. Yes, but they are slight. Construction lumber is sold in a wetter state than hardwood lumber. While hardwoods are typically sold at about 12 percent moisture content (or at equilibrium with some environment) that is not the case with construction lumber. It is wetter.

How wet? In the Midwest it might be 15-20 percent moisture content. On the West Coast, it might be even wetter (as in wet enoughto ooze and squirt water). So, you need to gather up what you need to build your bench, cut it to rough length, stack it and wait a bit.

It might also be “case hardened” because it was kiln dried too quickly. When lumber is rushed through a kiln it can develop tension that is released when you cut it. It’s particularly obvious when you rip a board. Sometimes the wood will pinch so hard on a blade it will stop a 3-horsepower table saw like pinching out a candle.

How do you deal with this? It’s not difficult.

1. Plan to cut things a bit over-wide. And have some wooden wedges handy to keep the kerf open when you rip the wood. After that first rip, a case-hardened board will usually lose all of its fight.

2. Make your rip cut to a shallow depth at first – less than half the thickness of the board. Then raise the blade, flip the board end-over-end and finish the rip.

The final disadvantage: Softwoods are uber-redneck. No one is going to “ooh and ahh” over your choice of yellow pine. It’s the mullet of the forest.


$175 WORKBENCH AFTER 20 YEARS OF USE, 2020
The yellow pine in this workbench is now about as hard as maple and
moves little with the seasons.

The True Cost of Yellow Pine Per Pound
I’m not a trusting soul. After I calculated the cost of yellow pine per pound (23 cents) based on published statistics, I decided to see if that worked in the real world. So, I weighed several 2x12x8s and came up with an average weight of 30.4 pounds each.

These were boards I’d had in my shop for months, so they had likely lost some of their water weight (as all softwoods do). Plus, the boards in this particular pile were fairly average – not full of sap or with lots of heavy summerwood. In other words, they were a bit on the light-weight side.

Each of these boards cost $8.81 each, so that’s 29 cents per pound – about 6 cents per pound more expensive than the published weight tables indicate. But still a great deal.

I wondered, how did that work out after surfacing the boards and gluing them up? What was the cost per pound of “finished” yellow pine?

Here’s how I calculated that. The benchtop for the workbench at the end of this book is made from nine 2x12s, ripped in half, glued up and planed so the top is 5″ thick. Nine 2×12 x 8s cost $79.29. After gluing up the top, I managed to weigh it on a heavy-duty scale we use for shipping crates. The top weighed 240 pounds. That’s 33 cents per pound. Still a bargain (if you ask me).


POPULAR WOODWORKING, FEBRUARY 2001
The opening spread for the $175 workbench article, my first
published workbench plan.

Back to the $175 Workbench
As I built the “$175 Workbench” for Popular Woodworking I encountered all the advantages and disadvantages of yellow pine mentioned above. A fair number of the boards were case hardened, so gettingthem ripped and glued up was a challenge. It took two of us to wrangle the laminations for the benchtop.

But, and here’s the kicker, I still own that workbench. And it has taught me other important lessons about construction-grade softwoods, yellow pine in particular. Here are two: It doesn’t move much in service and it gets harder and harder with age.

True and embarrassing fact: When I started woodworking, I assumed that softwoods moved more with the seasons than hardwoods. This was based on working with home center softwoods. I’d buy what I needed and start working it the same day. By the end of the day, the wood would be a warped mess. And sometimes unusable.

The real problem was that the pine was wet and hadn’t acclimated to my workshop. And – here’s another fun fact – all woods tend to move a lot as they expunge that last little bit of water to become at balance with their environment.

So, I was working with pine at the worst possible time.

If you let softwoods dry for a few weeks, the stuff barely moves at all when you plane it and saw it. In general, softwoods move less in service than hardwoods.

I also love how yellow pine gets tougher with age. I’m told that this is because the sap hardens, first to copal then (after a couple million years) into amber. The difference is dramatic. When I purchase newly cut yellow pine, I can dent its soft earlywood with my knuckle or fingernail. After a year or two, it seems as hard as Formica.

My yellow pine bench was still soft and spongy when I finished it in 2000. Soon after that, the magazine had an evening event where we brought in a bunch of local readers. We did this sort of social event every few months or so. Sometimes it was for a focus group. Sometimes it was to test some new tools from a particular manufacturer.

After this event, a bunch of readers gathered around my new workbench and asked questions, which went something like this: “Nice bench but, yellow pine?”

Once again, I was unprepared. All I could manage to say was that it was cheap and heavy. The readers didn’t disagree with me, but they also weren’t impressed.

That’s when I decided to plow into the book “Wood Handbook: Wood as an Engineering Material,” which is published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This book is free online – our tax dollars paid for it – and it is filled with all the numbers and terms that will impress people: modulus of elasticity, modulus of rupture, rolling shear strength, tensile strength and (the term that will always get you laid if you bring it up at a bar) Poisson’s ratio. I also learned that most wooden roller coasters and telephone poles are made from yellow pine.

The “Wood Handbook” proved what I knew in my heart: yellow pine is an outstanding workbench material. It is heavy, strong and stiff. I then had the numbers, and I could use them to defend my choice of yellow pine.

However, there’s no need to get into a discussion of those facts and figures. Or to reproduce the tables that explore wood as an engineering material. That’s because any decent design for a workbench renders most of those tabular charts moot. If you make your benchtop so it’s between 4″ and 6″ thick, even balsa wood is technically stiff enough to do the job. Pick a somewhat heavy species, and your thick benchtop will provide all the weight and stiffness you need – even if your bench’s legs are white pine.

In other words, a thick benchtop renders the pointy-headed statistics a bit meaningless. Simply overbuild your bench – especially the benchtop – and almost any species will do

An Interlude in Shanghai

Posted on by meghanlostartpress
Figure 3.1: The bridge entrance to the main temple complex of Putuo island, as photographed by John Thompson for his book “Illustrations of China and Its People,” published in 1874. Mount Putuo is one of four sacred mountains in Chinese Buddhism and has been a center of worship and pilgrimage since at least the 10th century A.D.

The following is excerpted from “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” by Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney. 

After years of research and more than 150 interviews, Gaffney produced a definitive biography of Krenov, featuring historical documents, press clippings and hundreds of historical photographs. Gaffney traced Krenov’s life from his birth in a small village in far-flung Russia, to China, Seattle, Alaska, Sweden and finally to Northern California where he founded the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program (now The Krenov School). The book brims with the details of Krenov’s life that, until now, were known only to close friends and family.

The newborn Jim would remain in Uelen only through the winter. Even in this faraway place, at the edge of the Asian continent, soldiers began appearing with the incoming merchants. They arrived to solidify the new revolutionary government’s control of even the most far-flung districts, and the post-revolutionary civil war between the Bolsheviks and other rival factions had spread east. The first boat in the spring of 1921 carried a message from Dmitri’s parents, who had fled St. Petersburg for Shanghai like many other wealthy Russian emigrés. They urged the couple to join them in the safety of their new home, and Dmitri left immediately for nearby Nome, Alaska, to make arrangements for their travel. The family would travel down the western coast of America and then west across the Pacific, the journey through Russia now being too dangerous.

“I resented the thought of family reunion,” Julia wrote. “But I could not possibly stay in Uelen alone with my baby.” Her resentment at the reunion stemmed not only from her distaste for her in-laws and the nobility they represented that she had flourished apart from, but also her parting ways with the Chukchi people. “Not a day was I unwell during the three years in Uelen. And now I had to leave the life I was fit for, the people I loved.”

But with the Russian civil war spreading to the outpost, with the Bolsheviks having reestablished control of Chukotka, her husband’s quick preparations may have been doubly motivated. Dmitri, perhaps happy to leave the remote outpost to join a semblance of the old Russian society, quickly sent back for his wife and newborn son, who boarded a schooner from Uelen to Nome – American territory.

In Nome, Julia and her child were subject to significant cultural whiplash. The simple fur garment that the Chukchi had given her son, made from fawn-skin, was swapped out by visiting nurses for diapers and outerwear. The couple and their son caused a stir in the small Alaskan city.

“‘The wife of the Governor of Siberia (imagine – Siberia!) and her son’ were the silly captions in the Nome papers,” Julia remembered, poking fun at the title given to her by the press; no such governor existed, though Dmitri may have given his short-lived title of “Chairman of the Chukotsk Regional Council” to lend weight to their plea for assistance. They were housed by the mayor of Nome, who also sent nurses and food to the young family, as the Krenovs waited for a few days before boarding a ship to the mainland United States. The Alaskan government footed the bill, to be reimbursed by Dmitri after he was able to make contact with his family in Shanghai. When Dmitri did make contact with his parents, they were only able to send a small sum for their travel, and so the couple made their way to Seattle and boarded a Japanese freighter, the Suo Maru, destined for Shanghai.

The trans-Pacific trip was trying for Julia and her newborn. There were no private cabins, only bunks, and Julia spent much of the trip seasick, leaving Dmitri to care for the months-old Jim. In the South China Sea the ship met a typhoon, and it only barely made its way to the port of Shanghai.

The family was greeted at the port by a valet, a young Chinese man in the employ of Dmitri’s parents, who fetched them from the docks. The family was brought home, after their trying trip on the freighter, by a luxurious Victorian carriage to the residence of “Mr. and Mrs. K.” The home was on Bubbling Well Road, a famous district known at the time as a wealthy and fashionable area, with tree-lined streets frequented by automobiles, a relatively new technological arrival to the Chinese city.

Figure 3.2: Dmitri’s parents’ mansion in Shanghai on Bubbling Well Road. The context of the exotic flora and blurred rickshaw in front of the house betray the locale of the photo, which otherwise is similar in form and aesthetic to the Art Nouveau and Eclectic styles of architecture Alexander Krenov is credited with in St. Petersburg, where 16 buildings attributed to his designs as an architect still stand. Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.

Over champagne at a celebratory dinner, Julia was encouraged to continue teaching English in the new city, not to indigenous children but to “a host of former generals, civil servants, professors and members of the Russian colony in exile.” These Russian expatriates were eager to learn English, perhaps sensing that Shanghai would only serve as a temporary home before an ultimate resettlement across the Pacific. In fact, the Communist Party of China was founded that year in Shanghai, modeling itself after the very revolution that had cast out Julia’s students; Shanghai, too, would soon scatter many of these privileged parties abroad.

Julia attempted in vain to find some comfort in urban Shanghai. And despite her teaching job that connected her with other Russians of noble birth, she felt ostracized and foreign in her new home. She found some comfort in observing “the ancient culture and proud past of the Chinese,” but she resented the segregation and intrusion that the European settlers had introduced in the city.

Her son’s life also was dramatically impacted in the move. At the insistence of Dmitri’s mother, a Chinese “amah,” or nurse, was hired to take care of the young boy. Julia grew fond of the young woman, whose appearance she described in her memoir as “pristine.”

“She was a slim young woman, gentle, quiet, endearing, in immaculate white coat and trousers,” Julia wrote. “Her hair with a bun in the back was so flat and glossy that one could have thought it lacquered or glued.”

The family spent their first year in the company of Dmitri’s parents; Julia taught the expatriate Russians English, and Dmitri worked as a consulting lawyer with his father’s architectural firm. But after their first summer in the city Julia sought a refuge outside the center city, perhaps wishing to win back a degree of independence from her husband’s family and hoping to escape the brutal heat of the city (which often soared over 100ºF). She made friends with another young Russian family with a daughter the same age as James. The families heard tell of a refuge, the temple island of Mount Putuo at the mouth of the Yangtze River, about 100 miles southeast of the city.

The Krenovs managed to find their way to the 1,000-year-old monastery on the island, and after a night in a small outbuilding, were given an audience with the dean of the temple. They had hoped to rent a small flat on the island for the summer, to escape the heat of the city – but the dean informed them there were no private residences on the island. However, the dean offered to construct a small building on the property in a week or two, and the Krenovs would be allowed to stay there, paying only a small rent.

After returning to the city to make arrangements, the family departed a week later to take up residence on the small sacred island with their young Chinese servant and James’s amah.

Figure 3.3: Julia’s photo of the Puji Temple on Putuo island. The island now has three main temples, Puji Temple, Huiji Temple and Fayi Temple, though in its heyday, it had upward of 82 temples, spanning its thousand years of history in the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.

“Poo-too was a fairy-land,” Julia recalled, using a phonetic spelling of the island’s name. “The temples were surrounded with parks and ponds with legendary, century-old carps lazily moving, or standing among the lotuses.” The family attended daily services, with chanting monks in processions through the columned old temple building, and Julia found a subject on which she could focus her newfound sociological interests. She was fascinated by the ancient Buddhist philosophy, though her interest was objective; her heart remained with the Arctic people’s philosophy, and she found the monks’ philosophy “too introspective for my active temperament.”

Young James was just shy of 2 years old by the time the family made its way to the island, in the summer of 1922. The past year in Shanghai had seen the family split up, with James being cared for by his amah. On the island, the family was together in their simple homestead among the monks. The time on the island are among James Krenov’s earliest memories.

Figure 3.4: Julia sits on a wall in Mount Putuo with her 2-year-old son. While
Jim’s amah accompanied them to the island, Julia was able to spend more time with her son while away from Shanghai and out from under the propriety of her in-laws. Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.

One particular vignette from the island would become a favorite story of James Krenov’s years later, one that reflected the influence of the worldly upbringing of the young Russian boy. His amah was herself a Buddhist, and would frequent the shrines of the temple each morning, with the child in tow. On one such morning, as the amah sat on her cushion in prayer, 2-year-old Krenov knelt beside her, imitating her posture. “He, too, knelt down beside her, folded his little palms carefully and bowed his head,” Julia remembered. “I felt tears tickle my eyes.” The monks of the temple were struck by the gesture. The family was an oddity on the island, but the island’s inhabitants were seemingly as interested in the curiosities of its new tenants as the visitors were struck by theirs.

Their months on the island began with a welcome relief from the heat of Shanghai, but the adventure from the security of the upper-class neighborhood of Dmitri’s parents was not without its misfortunes. The first exposure to the unsheltered reality of the people of Putuo came with the yearly pilgrimage many Buddhists took to the island. Hundreds of worshipers arrived at the island and a large party of “beggars” accompanied the arriving ships. Many of these poor pilgrims were ill with a stomach ailment, the Krenovs were told. Julia’s friend, another European who came to visit the island, had a tonic that she hoped might alleviate the suffering of the ill, who were kept outside the gates of the temple. Julia and her friend went about administering the medicine, and the next day, they found their patients had moved on. They were later informed that the beggars had in fact brought cholera to the island, and the outbreak had claimed the lives of dozens of the pilgrims. The family had shared the same water source, but managed to escape the illness.

Figure 3.5: The island of Mount Putuo is famous for its ancient trees, having been cared for by generations of temple caretakers. Among the 238 species of trees and shrubs on the island there are 63 species of rare trees and even one, the Putuo hornbeam (Carpinus putoensis), that exists nowhere else. Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.

The mishap that ended the family’s time on the idyllic island was a typhoon, a commonplace event on the East China Sea, that battered the unsheltered coastal islands. The Krenovs and their servants were moved from their small abode to the main temple, and after the worst of the storm, they emerged from the temple to find that the simple structure the monks had made for them had been leveled. Defeated and with the summer heat fading, the family returned to the mainland and Bubbling Well Road. Dmitri was happy to be back in the company of the expatriate Russians, whose dinners and receptions reminded him of his privileged days in St. Petersburg. Julia avoided such events under the pretext of working on her notes from the Chukchi culture, raising her child and tutoring her students – in fact, she later wrote in her memoir, she was tired of the tedium.

“I longed to get away from it all,” she wrote. “Had I been alone, I would have walked, if need be, through the hordes of the Semionov’s cossak bands that were raging and terrorising people near the Russian border.”

Julia wished to see her parents and return to St. Petersburg, despite its political upheaval, but the events unfolding back home in 1923 prevented her from doing so. The Russian civil war had ended, but the establishment of the USSR would have left her without the luxury of her upbringing, and had claimed the family home or possessions she might have returned to. In this period, she lost contact with her family in St. Petersburg; they may not have been there to receive her.

Their time in Shanghai, too, was coming to a dramatic end. Dmitri’s parents made plans to leave Shanghai for France. The older Russians may have been fleeing the nascent Chinese Communist Party established the prior year in Shanghai with support from the new Soviet state, or were growing restless in China and wished to return to Europe and the lifestyle they had left years earlier. Their journey was planned across the Pacific, where Dmitri’s father would exhibit his paintings in San Francisco and London.

Julia and Dmitri were left with a difficult choice. The young couple and their son might have remained in Shanghai without the support of Dmitri’s parents; Dmitri’s brother, Boris, stayed in Shanghai for another several decades until an eventual relocation to the northwestern United States in the late 1940s. But this option was not taken, perhaps because of Julia’s distaste for the old-world culture from which she had now grown distinctly apart. They considered a trip west to France, where they might have some chance of meeting Dmitri’s parents after their trip across the Pacific, but Julia was afraid of crossing the Indian Ocean, as the journey by boat was a long and risky voyage through the tropics. Julia didn’t think she could have withstood it, especially with a 2-year-old son in tow.

And so, after three years in Shanghai, the Krenovs made the choice to sail east to the United States, far across the Pacific Ocean, an exodus many upper-crust Russian expatriates were making after their expulsion from the new order of Communist Russia. They would have their last taste of luxury on this ocean crossing, not in the hold of a Japanese freighter but in a cabin on the Empress of Asia. This would be their last time together in the Eastern hemisphere, but the family would soon return to the white Arctic north, this time on the Alaskan side of the dateline, and among an indigenous people in a starkly different and impoverished situation.

Introduction to Leg Angles

Posted on by meghanlostartpress
One angle. The bevel gauge is set to 15° and has been placed on the sightline on the
underside of this sawbench. This “resultant” angle allows you to drill the holes for your
legs with one line and one setting of your bevel gauge.

The following is excerpted from “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” by Christopher Schwarz. The new, expanded edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” is an exploration of furniture forms that have persisted outside of the high styles that dominate every museum exhibit, scholarly text and woodworking magazine of the last 200 years.

There are historic furniture forms out there that have been around for almost 1,000 years that don’t get written about much. They are simple to make. They have clean lines. And they can be shockingly modern.

This book explores 18 of these forms  – a bed, dining tables, chairs, chests, desks, shelving, stools – and offers a deep exploration into the two construction techniques used to make these pieces that have been forgotten, neglected or rejected. 

“The Anarchist’s Design Book” is available for order in print, or you can download a free pdf (and you don’t need to register, sign up for dumb marketing or even tell us who you are). Just click through this link and you’ll find the download in the second sentence of the first paragraph – the one in italics.

“Rake” and “splay” are terms chairmakers use to describe the compound angles of chair legs. If you look at the front of a chair (the elevation), the angle that the legs project out is called the splay. If you look at a chair from the side (the profile), the angle of the legs is the rake. (These angles are usually pretty low numbers – 5° to 15° – in typical work.)

I’ve built chairs for more than a decade, and I don’t mess around with describing or measuring rake and splay much, except to explain it to other builders.

Instead, I use the “resultant angle” – one angle that describes both the rake and splay – and “sightline” – a line where the leg appears to the eye to be dead vertical. You can calculate this angle with trigonometry, but there is a simpler way to think about compound leg angles for those of us who consider math a cruel mistress.

First you need to find the resultant angle and its sightline. You find this by locating the point at which a single leg appears to be perfectly vertical.

If I’ve lost you, try this: Sit on the floor with a chair in your house. (Make sure you are alone or are listening to Yes’s 1973 “Tales from Topographic Oceans.”) Rotate the chair until the leg closest to you looks to be perfectly 90°. Imagine that one of your eyes has a laser in it and can shoot a line through the leg and onto the seat. That laser line is what chairmakers call a “sightline” – an imaginary line through the leg and onto the seat. Put a single bevel gauge on that imaginary line and you can position a leg in space with a single setting on a bevel gauge. That setting is the “resultant angle.”

Most plans for Windsor chairs include instructions for laying out the sightlines and the resultant angles for setting your bevel gauge. But what if you want to design your own chair? Or you want to build a table, desk or footstool using the same joinery?

So put away the scientific calculator and fetch some scrap pine, a wire clothes hanger and needlenose pliers. We’re going to design and build a simple sawbench with five pieces of wood and compound angles. This model will give us all the information we need to build the sawbench.

Leg layout. Here I’ve laid out the leg locations in this half-scale model of my sawbench.

Build A Model
When I design a piece of staked furniture, I make a simple half-scale model using scrap wood and bendable wire. This method helps me visualize how the parts will look when I walk around the finished object. The model also gives me all my resultant angles and sightlines without a single math equation.

I first learned this technique from Drew Langsner’s “The Chairmaker’s Workshop.” I then adapted his method a bit to remove the math. Let’s use it to design a sawbench.

Take a piece of 3/4″ pine and cut it to half the size of the finished sawbench. The finished top will be 2-1/2″ x 7-1/4″ x 17″, so make the top of your model 3/4″ x 3-5/8″ x 8-1/2″. Next decide where you want the legs to be and lay out their locations on the model. Each of my legs is located 1-1/4″ from the end of the model and 7/8″ from the edge. A lot of this is “by eye” so don’t worry too much.

Now snip four pieces of wire from a clothes hanger to 10″ long. This wire will represent the legs of the sawbench. Drill a snug through-hole for each “leg” on your model. Put a little epoxy into the hole and tap the wire in.

Guided by wire. The wire should be
strong enough that you can tap it into its
hole on the underside of the model.

Now comes the fun. Set your bevel gauge to 7° using a plastic protractor. Look at the model directly from the end of the board. Let’s call this the front of the sawbench. Use needlenose pliers to bend the wire legs so they all splay out 7° from the top. Try not to manipulate the rake.

When they all match your bevel gauge, change the setting of the bevel gauge to 14°. This will be the rake. Look at the sawbench directly from its side and use your pliers to bend the legs to 14°. You might have to tweak things a bit so all the legs look the same.

Make the rake. Use the pliers at the base
of the legs to bend them to 14° to match
your bevel gauge.

Turn the model on its feet and look at the result. You will be surprised by how easy it is to spot angles that look wrong. Adjust the wires until they all look the same and the sawbench looks stable.

Find the Sightline & Resultant Angle
Turn the model back over. Place a square on the bench with the blade pointing to the ceiling. Rotate the model until one of the legs appears to be 90° in relation to the square. Place the handle of your bevel gauge against the long edge of the model and push the blade of the bevel gauge until it appears to line up with both the leg and the blade of your try square. (Hold your head still.)

When the tools align. Rotate the sawbench until the leg looks vertical compared to
your square. Adjust the bevel gauge until its blade aligns with the leg and square. In
the photo I am pushing the blade toward the vertical line made by the leg.

Lock the bevel gauge. This is your sightline. Place the bevel gauge on the underside of the model. Butt it against one of the legs and draw a line. You have now marked the sightline. (By the way, it’s about 64°.)

Now find the resultant angle. Unlock the bevel gauge and place the tool’s handle on the sightline. Lean the blade until it matches the angle of the leg. Lock the gauge. That is your resultant angle – about 15°.

Mark the sightline. Use your bevel gauge to draw in your sightlines on the underside
of the model. You are almost done. Unlock the bevel gauge.

If your head hurts, don’t worry. It’s not a stroke – it’s geometry. Once you perform this operation a single time, it will be tattooed to your brain. This chapter will explain how to lay out the resultant angle for your sawbench – you’ll have nothing to calculate. But the act of marking out the sightlines will – I hope – make the concept clear and remove your fear of compound angles in chairs.

The result. Put the handle of your bevel gauge on the sightline. Set the blade to match
the leg. That’s the resultant angle – you just did a good thing.

John Ruskin & ‘Happenings’

Posted on by meghanlostartpress
The façade of the Ashmolean Museum.

The following is excerpted from “The Intelligent Hand,” by David Binnington Savage. It’s a peek into a woodworking life that’s at a level that most of us can barely imagine. The customers are wealthy and eccentric. The designs have to leap off the page. And the craftsmanship has to be utterly, utterly flawless.

Personally, this book makes me want to draw and create every time I pick it up. It is a reliable source of inspiration to me, a reminder that creative time is not wasted time. And David’s writing is just fun to get wrapped up in.

I was fortunate; I was not destined for the production line. I was lucky enough to go to the wonderful art school at the University of Oxford that was set up by John Ruskin, the great theorist at the centre of the Arts & Craft Movement. Ruskin believed that art should be taught at places of great learning, that art students would benefit from being at the centre, right in the hum of the academic process, and that in turn those universities would be enriched by their presence.

Ruskin set up three art colleges: The Ruskin School at Oxford, The Fitz William at Cambridge and The Slade College at London University. Although The Slade has since prospered and gone on to become one of the greatest post-graduate art schools, I don’t believe that all three were universally welcomed by “the Dons.” The Fitz William is no more, and my own experience at Oxford suggested that The Ruskin School was not entirely loved by the University. We were always damned by the idea that as art students we could not be given a proper degree because we were “not academic enough.” The intelligence that we displayed daily was of the wrong kind for the Dons (the professors).

William Morris and his buddy Edward Burne-Jones were at Oxford at Exeter College. They shared lodging in the same street as me, but many years earlier and probably in much greater comfort. My time at Oxford was the late 1960s, concurrent with the brand-new contraceptive pills, very, very short skirts, the very beginnings of feminism and all the fun that entailed.

The Ruskin School was then situated in a wing of The Ashmolean Museum. We had three large studios, one of which was devoted entirely to life drawing and painting. Before you were allowed to draw from the nude you needed to serve a full term’s apprenticeship in drawing plaster casts of Greek statuary, mostly from the Parthenon. This was mind-numbingly dull, but it gave you great discipline in the simple task of looking very, very hard.

We were in a gallery in Walton Street about 200 yards from the Ashmolean. An ancient but much loved and respected tutor named Geoffrey Rhodes would slowly, very slowly, make his way from the school to the cast gallery. He was a small man who took tiny, painful steps. I was the only student diligent enough to be drawing at three in the afternoon. It was silent in the gallery. The outside door opened; I could hear Mr. Rhodes’ approaching footsteps. Tap, tap, tap. It took ages.

“Ah, there you are David,” he said. Slowly, he looked at my drawings, then put his whiskery head next to mine to see what I was looking at. To see exactly what I was looking at. “Ah well, not much I can help you with there, carry on.” He then turned and tapped his way back to tea and cakes in the staff room. Drawing is like that; there are times when words just don’t do it. Mr. Rhodes knew that, which is why he was universally loved and respected.

This was at the time of “The Hornsea Art School Revolt.” The school’s studios in London were being filled with dry ice, smoke and writhing naked bodies. “Happenings,” laced with LSD and weed, were “what we did now.” If you painted, it had to be a kind of Mid- Atlantic Expressionism: big vacuous canvases, lots of sloshing about and full-on freedom of expression.

I didn’t work this out until much later, but all these developments were about de-skilling young creative minds. The Conceptual Art that won the “Salon” and that has become the Official Art of my generation needs no skill – just ideas. For it, skill is a restriction and inhibition to creative expression. Which is, of course, nonsense.

What I came to learn at art school was how to draw, how to look, how to think visually. This was slowly, gradually being devalued and removed from the curriculum. All the skills were being chucked out of the art school window to the point that now, a generation later, we have few capable teachers left to teach the basic drawing skills.

I had come to learn to draw; I felt this in my waters. I loved the daftness of all this at Hornsea, especially the writhing nakedness, but something within me wanted to have the skill to draw and draw well, which meant practice. Ten thousand hours, they say, to achieve any skill or competence. Like a pianist, I knew that it was necessary to practice.

I had come to learn to draw, I felt this in my waters. I loved the daftness of all this at Hornsea, especially the writhing nakedness, but something within me wanted to have
the skill to draw and draw well.

The Ashmolean Museum is a wonderful place for a young, visual mind to explore. In it, there’s everything from Egyptian sarcophagi to Samurai armour, from Minoan figurines to Classical Greek statues. The classical Greek dudes were a big deal for me. They were in a long gallery between the drawing studio and the front door. A small ragged group of us would gather at the front for a cigarette every time the model took a break. We sat on the stone walls outside the main doors, got piles (hemorrhoids) and had monumental snowball fights. We really were a scruffy nuisance to have in a museum, but it was the best place to be. I absorbed the Ashmolean though the pores of my skin. In three wonderful, full years I knew what the artefacts of world culture felt and looked like. My eyes had wrapped around and embraced everything, whilst probably I knew very little. What I did know, however, included a small collection of Raphael and Michelangelo drawings of which I devoured every line and every nuance. It was BBBBBBBbrill. Did I tell you I had a stammer?

Stammering was an affliction I carried with me throughout childhood and school into my middle years. It was an invisible affliction. I didn’t look like I was crippled in any way, but to a large degree, it stopped me from speaking. My mouth would jam up with words beginning with “B” or “M.” I could see them coming up ahead in the sentence. It was like lockjaw – I was left humming, buzzing and dribbling, trying to push out a word that had jammed in my mouth. The more effort I put into getting the word out, the tighter the lockjaw.

To say this affected my life would be an understatement. Think what your life would be like if you couldn’t talk. That’s unfair. I could talk – it’s that I chose to not talk very much. It was irritating when it came to girls and no doubt restricted my sex life when I could have had much more fun. But isn’t that always the case? We all could have had much more fun when looking back. Much later, I was able to get past this obstacle, but that is another story for later.

I wonder if Burne-Jones and Morris got piles from sitting on the same stone walls outside the Ashmolean? They certainly inhabited the same space. For Morris, brotherhood and comradeship was a big deal. He gathered about him members of a group of young painters who were to become the rather pompously titled Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They later went on to paint up a storm. Then, they painted with startling lack of success, the walls of the Oxford Union.

Morris was always wrapping fellow artists and writers about him like a warm cloak. Blessed with a background that meant a few shillings were not a problem, he could focus on ideas and ideals. Here, Ruskin came to influence both Morris and his group. “The Stones of Venice” was a powerful and popular thesis published in three volumes between 1851 and 1853. The books examine Venetian architecture in detail. In “The Nature of Gothic,” a chapter in book two, Ruskin gives his view on how society should be organised:

“We want one man to be always thinking, and another man to be always working, and we call one man a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising his brother: and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.”

Wow. Tell that to Henry Ford.

I have worked night shifts at Black & Decker. I worked a machine that bored a part of the casing for an electric drill. These were the industrial “top of the range” drills. Learning to do this well took about two shifts. After that, what could I do to keep my mind occupied? I had a total number of casings to do in a shift; too few and I had the charge hand on my neck. Do more than this, however, and the union guy was going to give me earache. So you play: How fast can I go for an hour? Then how slow? How few could I make in the next hour? I needed the money but after a while, when I had paid my bills, I joined the 863.

Morris picked up Ruskin’s social ideas and ran with them. Known initially for his poetry, Morris again assembled a group of trusty creatives to create William Morris and Company. The goal was to create, improve, make, have made and sell stylish artefacts for the burgeoning middle-class home.

The Muse came to Morris and found him working. (The muse has always got to find you working!) His inspiration was the English countryside, not just the generality but the very core of how nature fits together. I believe this is why the movement has so much resonance for us now. Not what Morris did – his shapes and forms, the wallpaper and fabrics – but why he did it, and the way he was looking at nature. Morris gave us a Victorian response. Why can we not look at nature and give a 21st-century response?

Morris rented Kelmscott House near Oxford – a beautiful, warm, stone house with a mature garden full of perfumed summer. During his time there he developed something that touches the essence of nature herself. His drawings were cleverly arranged into repeated images that could become wallpapers or woven tapestries.

It was typical of Morris to spend a part of the week “in the doing” – weaving, drawing, printing. The making was important to him, and he was not afraid to bring back old techniques. His textiles needed skills, looms and processes that could be found abroad and recovered from obsolescence.

The Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society poster below shows in part the ideas that were evolving – the artist and the maker shaking hands as equals, with mutual respect.

“Let you have nothing in your home that is not both beautiful and useful.” That was the strap line of Morris and Co.

Oscar Wilde answered that with: “The definition of Art is that it is useless.”

First-class, Oscar. His argument (which has little historical validity) in the following years won the day. The creative force of the 20th century has very largely created an art that defines itself as useless.

Leaving this battle (yet to be lost), the Arts & Crafts movement encouraged a new generation of makers, often young men and women with sufficient resources, to set up small workshops outside the cities that were close to nature. These were jewelry makers, potters, weavers, silversmiths. The new railways would take their product back for Morris and others to sell, and they could live the rural idyll.

It was the furniture makers who particularly affected me. They were part of a small group that settled near Cheltenham. Each year, I take a group of Rowden students to see their work at the Wilson Museum in Cheltenham. I do this to show them the freshness of the workmanship and to remind myself of the essence from which Rowden has come.

Rowden students examine a table base by Ernest Gimson at The Wilson Art Gallery in Cheltenham.

For me, their move to the countryside was most important. It was the closeness to nature, having it around you every day when walking the dog, seeing the changes in the hedgerow as season followed season. Remembered changes from last year become marked in your work. You get closer to the raw bones of nature, and your work benefits. You bring home bits of hedge and draw, not knowing why, but feeling that it is part of the process – and you trust your feelings.

Two brothers, Sidney and Ernest Barnsley, and a good friend, Ernest Gimson, all young, all recently trained as architects, took to this idea of living and making out in the sticks. They came to the quiet Cotswold village of Sapperton (not far from Cheltenham) and set up small workshops. Sidney Barnsley worked alone, always. Ernest Barnsley spent a little time with Gimson, but soon gathered a commission for work at Rodmarton Manor and became engrossed in that. Gimson is my hero. He worked not alone but with the help of both local and imported craftsmen. Probably learning as he went, Gimson, with his assistants, created a place that turned out extraordinary furniture.

The table shown above is made in solid English walnut with black Macassar ebony and pale green holly detailing. The boards of the tabletop are secured with a decorative dovetailed key. The hide glue would probably have secured the joint, but these were joints to express, to show off the workmanship.

Each year I delight in showing the freshness of the workmanship displayed in the wide chamfers worked in the hard black ebony. Tool marks are evident; they could only come clean off the spokeshave or drawknife. This is stunning work.

The goal of this small group was to make pieces with integrity, very largely by hand. There is almost no veneer from the early Gimson workshop; what you saw was what you got, all the way through. Gimson worked with local craftsmen, notably Henry Clissett and Edward Gardiner, who were skilled chairmakers. Clissett was notable for aiming to make chair a day and rush the seat in an evening. Gimson aimed to take these traditional chairs and improve the product, using his design skills in conjunction with the craft skills of Clissett and Gardiner.

The Edward Gardiner chair, also at The Wilson.

Here is an example that blows me away (above). This is a chair reworked by Gimson but made by Gardiner. Look at the chair back. Look at the arrangement of the back splats. Five of them all different, each getting larger as our eye climbs up that back. This chair is aspirational – it seeks to pull the eye up, a positive upward movement. Look at the chair legs. They can’t outward toward the top, welcoming the body into the chair. See how the back splats are arranged on the chair. Look hard. The centres are each wider, one from the next. The ends are each wider, one from the next. The splats are fixed with a negative space that is wider, one from the next. But look at the centre. The top of each splat is the same distance from the splat above. It’s as if all is upward energy, every element is up – but this is like a string in the centre of the chair back that pulls down. You don’t see it until you hunt – but it’s there.

This is what a good chair design does; it teases the eye to find the hidden logic. It is just there. You could not change one element without binning the whole lot. Gimson must have driven Gardiner mad (until the orders came in and the money followed).

It was not so much the work that grabbed me by the throat, it was the activity. These men and women were contrarian counter-culture beings, and I liked that. They set themselves up in the wilds of rural England when transport and communications were ridiculously hard. The move to the country was a serious decision and one I support, working at Rowden in the heart of rural Devon, with a lake to chuck the dog in and fields to walk.

The library at the Bedales School, which involved the talents of
several great designers and woodworkers.

Although Gimson is my role model, it was the other guy, Sidney Barnsley, the guy who worked alone, who had another most serious effect. He had a son, Edward Barnsley, who, confusingly, also became a furniture maker. Edward Barnsley came to work at and later own a workshop at Petersfield in Hampshire. The man who founded the Petersfield workshop was Geoffrey Lupton, a former apprentice of Gimson’s who was largely responsible for the library at the nearby Bedales School (above). The building was designed by Gimson, the tables in it are by Sidney Barnsley and the chairs are by Gimson. The building was started by Lupton but was completed by the workshop under the direction of Edward Barnsley.

I nearly wrote “finished by Edward Barnsley,” when really it was the team that he led – a group of clever intelligent makers, probably capable of telling the lad, “No boss, it’s got to be this way.” Our culture doesn’t allow us to name everyone; it’s bad enough to acknowledge they are even present – but they damn well are there. And it’s this presence, a team working together, with different skills pulling together, that makes something extraordinary.

The Edward Barnsley Workshop continues to the present day. In 1950 they took on apprentice Alan Peters, who went on to open his own workshops at Cullompton in Devon. It was this man who gave me a model to follow. I admired him so much. With a lovely Devon long house, the barns converted to workshops, the stacks of English hardwood drying in the sheds, and his two skilled assistant makers, he made beautiful, saleable modern furniture. He was the man I wanted to become. But that’s another story.

The Case for Hollows and Rounds

Posted on by meghanlostartpress

The following is excerpted from Matthew Bickford’s “Mouldings in Practice.” In this book, Bickford shows you how to turn a set of complicated mouldings into a series of predictable rabbets and chamfers that guide your hollow and round planes to make any moulding that has been made in the past or that you can envision for your future projects.

The first half of the book is focused on how to make the tools function, including the tools that help the hollow and round planes – such as the plow and the rabbet. Bickford also covers snipes bills and side rounds so you know their role in making mouldings. Once you understand how rabbets and chamfers guide the rounds and chamfers, he shows you how to execute the mouldings for eight very sweet Connecticut River Valley period projects using photos and step-by-step illustrations and instruction.

The term “moulding plane” is an inclusive one. Dedicated moulding planes (also called “complex moulders”) have soles that consist of multiple curves, flats, quirks, steeples and anything else centuries of art have imagined. Dedicated planes create one profile and do it well.

Fig. 2-1. Ovolo with two fillets. The profile this plane creates
is similar to that of a window sash.
Fig. 2-2. Cove with two fillets. Take note of the angle at which
these planes are held relative to the
wood. These planes are sprung; the
angle at which they are held is the
“spring angle.”
Fig. 2-3. Ogee with fillet. Like the other planes, this
ogee plane creates this single profile
at a single location relative to the
edges of the board, at a single angle.

These planes, when small, are easy to push and are often much quicker to produce a profile than any router bit, if only because the router surface needs to be sanded. A 1/8″ side-bead plane creates a bead along an edge that is ready for finish after 10 quick strokes. A thumbnail plane creates a convex ovular shape and adjoining vertical fillet, and can consistently and quickly cut profiles along 20 edges of five drawers in a dressing table. A 4″-wide crown moulder, with help from a few friends (and perhaps a horse), creates a complex cornice that is completely uniform from piece to piece across splices and from wall to wall and through mitered corners.

The profiles these planes create are precise, uniform and consistent. Therefore, any time a uniform profile is needed, but the mouldings cannot be cut from a single long piece, a dedicated plane is desirable. A drawer, after all, has four sides – and the lips of individual drawers may sit a mere 1/2″ apart – so efficient consistency is required.

There are dedicated planes that execute just about any moulding, including all those already mentioned. Many of these dedicated planes are also desirable for the craftsman who produces the same edge many times, such as a harpsichord maker who adds a small quirked ogee to the bridge of multiple harpsichords made months apart.

Fig. 2-4. Dedicated harpsichord bridge. This common profile in Italian and German harpsichord bridges will always be 5 minutes away from completion for the user – less if the tool remains set up.

These dedicated, single-profile planes, however, serve little purpose to the craftsman who produces numerous small lengths of moulding in an ever-changing portfolio. These single-profile planes are dedicated to one profile and, like most router bits, they do only one thing. Though the profile these create can often be manipulated to some degree (by removing a fillet, for example) specialty planes are without value if you need to control the details of a profile, or create something with major or even minor differences.

To fresh eyes, the complex profiles integrated into these planes’ soles are apparent; the integral fences and depth stops the planes often include, however, are not. The fences require the plane to contact the edge of a board as a reference, limiting the plane’s angle, spring and location. The depth stop ensures a consistent depth of profile, but often makes it impossible to use the plane to create part of a larger, more complex moulding.

Fig. 2-5. A complex moulder. The width of the iron is the same as the cutting edge illustrated above. No portion of the iron is present at the fence and depth stop. When the plane has progressed to the extent that the depth stop registers against the face of the stock, the iron will stop contacting the wood.

Most dedicated planes also demand proper setup steps to be performed prior to their use.

Without the minimal rabbeting setup in the example in Fig. 2-6, significant edge maintenance will be required because the edge closest to the fence takes dozens of passes more than the edge closest to the depth stop. When the edge nearest the fence deteriorates, the entire blade profile will need to be sharpened in order to keep the iron matching the sole.

Fig. 2-6. The rabbets required. The minimum number of rabbets desired for using a complex moulding plane is similar to those created when using hollows and rounds. You, the user, will need to determine how much stock removal is necessary for each profile. I imagine there are times when preempting a complex profile with a rabbet plane, plus hollows and rounds, is ideal. After all, these few planes with individual curves are easier to maintain than a highly complex profile.

Fig. 2-7. Many passes required. The portion of the iron that is closest to the fence may take 40 passes before the edge farthest away takes one. When it is time to sharpen, the entire edge must be addressed, despite only a small portion needing it.

The genius of dedicated moulding planes is in their absolute consistency, made possible largely by their integrated fences and depth stops. However, these same features also limit the versatility of the planes, and make them poorly suited to address many people’s primary motivation for investigating moulding planes: eliminating excess tooling.

The planes we will discuss in the pages to follow do not share these limitations. We are going to focus on rabbets, hollows, rounds, snipes bills and side rounds. Each of these planes serves a different function. All these planes, however, share a similar characteristic: They have neither integral fences nor depth stops. Without these two characteristics the planes are remarkably versatile. And by using simple stock preparation techniques, the user can impose steering and depth control on the planes to direct and focus their versatility to create all manner of profiles precisely and simply with just a handful of planes. These planes have no fences. We will make guides. These planes have no depth stops. We will make gauges.

But how do these tools work? These planes cut specific portions of an arc in a profile. Each size cuts a segment from a circle of a specific radius. While a plane’s cut matches the circumference of a specific circle, the percentage of the circumference is up to the user. There are no fences that need to be registered on the work, no spring lines to obey and no depth stop to adjust.

Fig. 2-8. The limits of side beads. A 1/8″ side bead can efficiently establish that profile on the edge of the board. It cannot make a bead set in from the edge or the convex portion of an ogee as the No. 2 hollow does above.

With hollows and rounds, the plane that cuts a side bead on the edge of a board is the same plane that cuts the convex portion of an ogee set 1″ from the edge of a complex waist mould. Unlike a dedicated moulding plane or even a Stanley No. 45 plane, these planes do not need to reference an edge while being held at a specific angle.

Whether the specific arc created by these planes falls along the narrowest edge of a board or onto the widest portion of a linenfold panel, the arc’s location is not predetermined. If the arc you need is a minimal 60° of a circle or more than 180°, that function is not determined by a depth stop. Whether the arc stands alone or in a sequence is a decision made by the user, not the planemaker.

These planes do not have predefined purposes other than cutting an ideal radius. Executing any moulding along a straight edge is achievable with these planes – whether you are making moulding on a board that will be applied beneath the top of a piece or even to the top itself.

Fig. 2-9. Geometry of the sole. The sole of this hollow and this round is one-sixth of a circle. The sole’s width is equal to the radius of the circumference it creates.

The soles of hollow and round planes represent 60° of a circle. Thanks to basic geometry and the properties of an equilateral triangle, we know that the width of each plane’s sole is equal to the radius of the circle each creates.

These hollow and round planes generally come in pairs, one convex sole (round planes) and one concave (hollow planes). The pairs vary in radius, which means they also vary in width. There are several numbering systems used when describing these planes, some dependent upon the maker, some on the origin of the tool. For this book, the following numbering system will be observed.

In this system, the plane’s number (usually stamped on its heel) designates its radius in 16ths of an inch up to 3/4″, or 12/16″. The numbering system then breaks, as subsequent planes increase in radius by 1/8″ instead of 1/16″.

There are a few other planes we need to learn about that assist the hollows and rounds – snipes bills, side rounds and rabbet planes.

Hollows are to rounds as snipes bills are to side rounds: The first has a concave sole and cuts a convex shape, while the second has a convex sole and cuts a concave shape.

Fig. 2-10. Other planes. Snipes bills (left) and side rounds are helpful planes for some profiles.

Fig. 2-11.
The rabbet. A rabbet plane is
rectangular in form and
cuts square rabbets.

Many people look at the above planes and, for good reason, do not recognize their purpose. But you soon will.