Category: Campaign Furniture

Lately I’ve been getting hammered via e-mail because I’m using teak (Tectona grandis) to build my latest campaign chest for an upcoming book. The comments go something like this:

“Don’t you see the hypocrisy in publishing ‘With the Grain’ – a book that advocates using local species – and then using teak in your own project?”

It’s a fair question, and one I struggled with as I embarked on writing a book on campaign furniture. Furniture built in this style was made from a wide variety of tropical and domestic species, however most of the pieces I’ve encountered have been made from mahogany, teak, camphor and (less frequently) English oak.

When I started planning the projects for the book, I toyed with the idea of using domestic species for the projects – walnut, cherry and white oak for the most part. And while that’s an option I plan to present in the book, I decided to go with the historical species for building my projects.

It was a tough decision because I rarely use exotics. If you look at my published work since 1996, I think you’ll find the vast majority of my projects have been built with common domestic species, occasionally to the detriment of the project itself. Tansu made with sugar maple? Rice paper lanterns built with white oak? Workbenches built with Southern yellow pine?

This campaign chest would look wrong in shagbark hickory.

Exotics come with political baggage. And I dislike politics. Exotics are sometimes unethically harvested. They can be sold in a corrupt system that is unfair to workers and harmful to the environment and habitats. Now, I know that you can find 10 sides to this argument, and if you launch into this nuttiness in the comments below, I will close my eyes, put my hands over my ears and chant, “nunga, nunga, nunga.”

For me, the question was only this: Can I make something beautiful and enduring enough from these three boards to outlast the life span of this magnificent tree? To make the tree, in effect, nearly immortal?

This campaign chest is my own design, and yet it stands upon the shoulders of every chest I have studied and lived with since I was a child. The joinery is the best that I can do. The brasses I’ve purchased are older than I am. Though this isn’t the most technically challenging piece of furniture I’ve built, I am aiming for it to be my best.

So I walked into this project with my eyes open, knowing that the wood carried a high price – both in real and environmental terms. But I also knew that this chest was going to be one of the high points of my furniture-making to date.

I made my choice. And now you can make yours.

— Christopher Schwarz

Several readers requested a video on how I remove dovetail pin waste with a drill press. Today I was making more dovetails for my next campaign chest and shot this short video. Enjoy! Or hate!

Read the post and see the video here.

— Christopher Schwarz

While there have been too many words written about dovetails, there has been far too little written about using wood compression in the joint.

The only time I hear it discussed is on the woodworking show circuit, when a demonstrator is dovetailing a purpleheart board to accept a white pine one. The demonstrator has a wide margin of error when he assembles the joint because of what Glen D. Huey calls “the mash factor.” You can compress pine – a lot – when it is dovetailed into a stout wood.

In my shop, I use wood compression when cutting dovetails to keep things tight without splitting. Here’s how.

After I cut the first half of the joint I show it to the other half and use a knife to mark the shape of what I want to remove. Then I saw out the joint, but I stand off a tiny wee little itsy bit from the knife line.

How far I stand off depends on the wood. With soft woods, such as white pine, it might be 10 thou or so – I’m just guessing at the measurement. With hard woods, such as cherry or walnut, it’s less. With oak or teak or maple it’s almost nothing. I leave the knife line and the tiniest sliver possible. But I still leave something. Everything compresses.

— Christopher Schwarz

For me, the hardest part of making half-blind dovetails isn’t the sawing. It’s chiseling out the waste between the pins. So when I have a crapload of half-blind dovetails to make, I use my drill press and a Forstner bit to bore out the bulk. Then I finish up with a regular bench chisel.

I’m in the midst of a sea of half-blind and full-blind dovetails for my latest campaign chest. All together, I have 16 half-blind corners, two full-blind corners and 10 through-dovetail corners to make. In my book, that’s a crapload.

I set my drill press so that it bores just shy of my baselines – I don’t trust its depth stop. (The stop has bent many times; I should replace it.) So there’s still some chopping and paring I need to do with each joint.

With any luck, I should have the lower carcase of this chest glued up this afternoon. And thanks to my drill press, I’ll have saved several hours I can devote to editing some upcoming books. That’s also removing waste, but it’s a process that my drill press can’t help with.

— Christopher Schwarz

But what of this new style that has been struggling through to beauty in these post-war years? One sees the impressionistic school of pre-war days. One sees a war-racked England, struggling to get away from its own nerves – the nerves that it inherited form the past. The race feels intensely that things must change.

There are creations like flashes of lightning, or the stars seen by one dazed by a blow; jazz designs in upholstery, sideboards with the oddest shapes stuck on their ends, things designed to meet eyes that are too weary to rest.

— The Woodworker, April 1933