Category: To Make as Perfectly as Possible, Roubo Translation

Come on children and gather ‘round, and let me tell you a secret about a Frenchman renowned.

Ready?

The manuscripts of Roubo were not perfect.  Shhh.

I admit it, right now I am simply taking a moment to escape the gut-grinding work of polishing words, backfilling those areas where old J.A. didn’t tell us everything he knew, or at least didn’t tell us everything we wanted to know. In addition to hundreds of editorial comments inserted into the text, in order to mitigate the passages where the reader will likely scratch their head and say, “Huh?” I wrote almost a score of additional explanatory essays to fill in some of those voids.  While these have been roughly done for some time, it is only lately that we have begun to add the visual descriptions to go with my verbal explanations.

Making the process even more tedious is my own ambivalence to the world of photography. It’s just not a bug I ever caught. While I truly appreciate skillful and creative photographic imagery (for example I am literally agog sometimes at the artworks emerging from the back end of Narayan Nayar’s camera when he is shooting the H.O. Studley tool cabinet) if you absolutely positively needed a great photo, I would not be the first person to call.

Still, with copious counsel from Chris and Wesley Tanner, the book’s designer, we are on the way to completion.  The lights are in place, the reference color bar is included, the cameras are on their tripods and the exercises are being replicated.  Lights. Camera. Action. Or more precisely given the often slow shutter speeds in my grotto, “Lights, Camera, Inaction.” We don’t keep track of the pictures we are taking, but a rough estimate would be a bazillion. It is all glamour, all the time.

The final result is most gratifying as it emerges from the cramped cave-like quarters of my basement workshop (by comparison Chris’s workshop is positively capacious), and integrated into the essay text. In the end this process represents beautifully our vision for “To Make As Perfectly As Possible.” As meaningful an accomplishment as a scholarly translation would be, it might be little more than a historical curiosity on a dusty library shelf if left alone. Instead we want these volumes to inform and transform you as an artist. We hope that my extra 15,000 words and Michele’s 125 photographs – added to the 94,000 words and almost 350 engravings from Roubo – help do just that.

— Don Williams

One of the first curiosities encountered in Andre Roubo’s discussion of the finishing component of fine furniture making is this weird whisk broom in Plate 296, Figures 8 & 9. On one hand it makes sense: The finishing room and the workpiece must be kept clean and tidy for work to proceed skillfully and flawlessly. But you have to admit that is a weird looking whisk broom.

Of course it isn’t a whisk broom.

It is instead a tool that was completely unknown to me at the start of this project: a corn straw burnisher. Roubo offers fewer than 100 words describing the tool and its use. Yet that tool has fundamentally changed the way I work. As the last tool to touch the surface prior to the application of finish, or in some instances the tool that actually applies the finish, vigorously scouring the surface with it imparts a radiance to the substrate that cannot be adequately described, it must be experienced.

At the opening of the “finishing” section of the chapter I inserted the following commentary.

In the English language craft lexicon, the word “polish” can mean three distinct processes. First is the smoothing of the surface with scrapers and abrasives. In the time of Roubo, these abrasives would include sandpaper and shagreen (sharkskin or ray skin) pumice, or vegetable reeds and fibers. The second usage of the word “polish” involves the application of a resinous varnish or some other film forming “finish” applied to the prepared surface. Finally comes the application of a maintenance coating such as wax furniture polish or something similar whose purpose is to impart a degree of high gloss, usually temporary. In addition Roubo uses the word “polisher” to mean a variety of tools, including abrasives, burnishers, and applicators. Since Roubo is not explicit in his syntax, I will attempt to distinguish amongst these many concepts in the edited translation and make the distinction readily apparent to the reader.

This obscure, rude little tool fits all three descriptions, and it has made me a better finisher. I have found it so valuable that I have made several (the process is described in detail in “To Make As Perfectly As Possible – Roubo on Marquetry”), and have recently found a craft broom-maker with whom I am working to make as many as I or anyone else wants.

Whenever I show it to a fellow craftsman and demonstrate, as I did during one of the Dinners With Roubo at WIA, light bulbs go off. My students have shown me the results of their work using it. Unanimously they declare it was a missing link, a tool to bring their finishing to perfection.

It will make you a better finisher, too.

— Don Williams

I have written periodically about the effect this project is having on me as a person and craftsman. I am finding that even in the areas where my knowledge is less shallow than others, Andre Roubo’s observations and instructions are bringing new insights to my work.

Take, for example, the working of a surface in preparation for the application of the presentation coating, whether varnish or paint. Being a child of the 20th century experience-wise (but of the 17th and 18th centuries philosophy-wise) I was often at odds with a finishing trade replete with sandpaper and power tools, spray guns and catalyzed this or two-part that, where polyurinate was the standard for many finishing enterprises. No wonder so many woodworkers look at finishing as not only a Lost Art, but a Dark Lost Art!

I recall my first encounter with “serious” woodworking in the flesh at an Ian Kirby workshop around 1978 or so. As we introduced ourselves around the room – believe I was the only person under the age of 50 – I introduced myself as a finisher. It made sense because even though I engaged in a broad range of activities in the shop, finishing was where I felt most at home and where I flourished. Had I introduced myself as the head of a bat-head-eating cult I might have garnered less response. Every eye in the hall grew wide and mouths hung part way open, fearful trembling apparent at the thought of someone who actually enjoyed doing this most dreaded part of a project. It was almost as if the other students would have drawn back except the chairs were bolted to the floor.

Flash forward to my current review of the manuscript and building many of the tools and exercises in the book. In his description of Plate 296, discussing the topic “The Way to Finish Veneer Work, and Some Different Types of Polish,” the first thing Roubo does is pick up a plane. A toothing plane. Yes indeed, the finishing process begins long before the varnish pot is even in the picture. I expand the concept even further. Woodworkers, your attention to finishing a piece of furniture properly begins basically as soon as you conceive the project.

Yet the tools and materials of the finishing enterprise are fairly simple, according to Roubo.

The proper tools for finishing and polishing cabinetry in general, are the scrapers of all kinds with soft English steel blades files, the pumice stone, dog-fish skin [sharkskin, shagreen], horsetail rushes, polishers, simple and elaborate wood sticks for burnishing and applying polish, and rubbing cloths. Other ingredients are wax, lac, colophony, rotten stone, charcoal, olive oil and whiting.

Simple, huh? But sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to get right. But when we do, the results are simply spectacular. And that is my goal for you.

— Don Williams

The latest French work which treats of joinery is Rondelet’s “L’Art de Batir.” It is also the best foreign work on the subject that we have seen; but it is not at all adapted to the state of joinery in England. In practice, the French joiners are very much inferior to our own. Their work is rough, slovenly, and often clumsy, and at best is confined to external effect.

The neatness, soundness, and accuracy, which is common to every part of the works of an English joinery, is scarcely to be found in any part of the works of a French one. The little correspondence, in point of excellence, between their theory and practice, leads us to think that their theoretical knowledge is confined to architects, engineers, &c. instead of being diffused among workmen, as it is in this country.

In cabinet-work the French workmen are certainly superior, at least as far as regards external appearance; but when use, as well as ornament, is to be considered, our own countrymen must certainly carry away the palm.

— Encyclopaedia Britannica 7th Edition 1842 Joinery Article by Thomas Tredgold C.E.