We were supposed to have finished this three-legged campaign stool more than a week ago. Then our kids got sick, and “To Make as Perfectly as Possible” raised its perfectly ferocious head.
So today, Ty Black and I started tying up the loose ends. He started hand-stitching the seat for the stool – instead of doing it by machine. Because that is a cool thing, I shot a short video of the process that should convince you that it’s pretty darn easy to do.
Me? I chucked the legs back in the lathe and turned a dome shape on their ends so that the legs wouldn’t rip the “sex machine” leather. Plus I added a couple more coats of wax while the legs were on the lathe. I then stripped the zinc off the steel hardware (see a video on this process here) and aged the brass bits that tie the whole stool together and allow the legs to rotate and splay without giving you an amateur enema.
Anyway, we should have photos up tomorrow of the finished stool. The prototype sits quite nicely.
“I sit on a man’s back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.”
— Leo Tolstoy on authority, “Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence” (1886)
My bank was open today – an oddity for President’s Day – so I took out as much cash as I dared and ventured to Midwest Woodworking in Norwood, Ohio.
The goal was to get some teak for the drawer fronts of my next campaign chest, plus some clear sugar pine for the drawers.
(Yes, I know that many campaign chests used no secondary wood. But many did, especially the ones that were intended for domestic service, according to a couple dealers I’ve interviewed.)
Buried in a stack of teak that was about 10’ off the ground, I uncovered the one teak board I needed. It was like the tree had grown this way to become the most perfect drawer fronts for my chest. It was 8” wide x 175” long, the cathedral was perfectly centered on the board and the two pin knots in the board were exactly 38” apart from one another. Perfect for drawer spacing.
Also, we dug up some old teak “rippers” that Frank David of Midwest sold me at a considerable discount. “Rippers” are the 2”- to 3”-wide stuff that falls off from a rip cut. These rippers are quartered or rift and perfect for web frames. So I grabbed three of these.
I brought my daughter Katy along and Megan Fitzpatrick – their presence skyrocketed the estrogen content of Midwest, and they helped me pull the lumber from the stacks and break it down to fit into Megan’s Subaru.
Today I also pulled out the hardware for this chest. If this next part sounds like a gloat, it is.
All the brasses for this project are cast vintage pieces of original hardware that were never used. The cast pulls are still wrapped in their original papers. The brackets and corner guards are cast (not stamped) and are the perfect color and vintage.
I found them all on eBay and paid only $100 for enough hardware for two chests.
When I break down rough stock, I almost always use three sawbenches, a framing square and a handsaw.
Even when I had access to a monster radical-harm saw, I stuck to my handsaw because the process gave me loads of information that is lost in the roar of an electric tool.
The biggest advantage to using a handsaw is it makes you consider your cuts with care. I am less likely to make a mistake when I have a handsaw and a line. It might just be a personal problem, but fast machines encourage me to work at a faster pace, which makes me more prone to mistakes.
When I’m handsawing, I tend to repeat a quote I heard from an instructor at Lee Valley Tools: “Go slower. It’s faster.”
Also, the handsaw gives me buckets of information about the wood it’s chewing through. The saw tells me which boards are wet, which are dry. It reports back if there is a lot of internal tension in a board. Dense boards and lightweight boards are easy to pick out.
Plus you can sense when something has gone horribly wrong. Like tonight, when I was breaking down the rough-sawn 20th-century teak for my next campaign chest.
I cut down all the major parts of the carcases with no problem. But when I started cutting out the drawer fronts, the saw had this to report back: Dude, this ain’t teak.
Under 40 or 50 years of crud and dust and splinters, the saw found a very hard and dry mahogany. This first cut saved me from making a terrible set of mistakes when cutting out my drawer fronts.
That’s the good news. The bad news is I need some more teak for the drawer fronts.
Time to donate some plasma.
— Christopher Schwarz
Addition (2-18-13): I dug up from my notes the source of the quote. His name was Ian (don’t have his last name) from the Lee Valley store in Winnipeg.
Today I had a weird feeling. Not the kind in your pants – the kind in your head.
Because of a combination of odd events this afternoon, I ended up with about two hours of free time. No crushing deadline to meet. No frantic e-mails to answer.
So I designed the next chest for my book on campaign furniture. This one will be made using 40-year-old teak from Midwest Woodworking, which has been sitting in the corner of my shop for many months.
When I design a piece that won’t be painted, I begin by measuring all the pieces of lumber that I have picked out for the project. Unless I’m building an exact reproduction, I let the wood on hand provide the overall dimensions. If I have 17”-wide stock, I’m not going to draw a 20”-deep case.
Most of my teak is 18” wide. I have a 12’-long board and a 10’-long board. Plus three 50”-long boards and a shorter 13”-wide board for the drawers and thick chunks for the legs. These boards encouraged me to draw a chest that is 17” x 35” x 35” and that sits on 4”-tall turned feet.
How do I know that this will look good? I’ve spent the last two years (actually longer) collecting images and dimensions for campaign chests I like. I started looking at their overall sizes and sorting them into chests that were on the wide side and those that had a subtle vertical aspect to them.
This chest is going to be a little taller than it is wide. I pulled out images of about a dozen chests that are taller than they are wide and started sorting them into ones that had drawer arrangements I liked and those that were forgettable.
Then I fired up SketchUp.
When I draw things in SketchUp to build them, I draw only the things I don’t know. I don’t draw the joinery if it’s stuff I know how to make. I don’t draw drawer sides and bottoms and internal guides, runners and kicks. I know how to make all that stuff – drawing it will only slow me down.
If there’s wacky compound joinery, I’ll draw that. But that’s pretty uncommon.
When I work in SketchUp, the major question I want answered is this: Will this project look like something that will avoid the burn pile for the next 200 years? This is SketchUp’s superpower. You can draw a chunk of something and look at it from an infinite number of perspectives. You can put it in a room, by a loom or on the moon.
So I drew a bunch of 17” x 18” x 35” boxes and sketched drawer fronts on them. I drew a bunch of feet. Then I put the boxes together and looked at them from a bunch of perspectives. For a project like this, the entire sketching process took about an hour.
Before I quit SketchUp and fetched a beer (Bell’s Hopslam), I made a cutting list for the major parts and took that down to the shop and confirmed that the lumber on hand will support the design on screen.
And finally, with chalk in hand, I’ll start sketching my cutting lines on the rough stock.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. What about the stuff I draw for magazine articles? That is a totally different process. That’s when I draw everything the reader doesn’t know. So I draw every part, every joint, every assembly. But I do that after the project is complete.