Category: Campaign Furniture

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.

With the stool’s hardware mechanism working fine, this morning I made a set of three stool legs from mahogany left over from a run of Roorkhee chairs in 2012.

My design for the legs was inspired by the foot of an original 1898 Roorkhee, which is essentially a slightly flattened bead. I also added four grooves that straddle the holes through the legs and turned a gradual taper from these holes down to the ankle.

The fun part of the job was finishing the legs on the lathe. With the lathe spinning, I rubbed on some beeswax from farmer beekeeper and woodworker Will Myers (thanks Will!). Then, with the lathe still spinning, I used Roubo’s polissoir to burnish the mahogany and drive the wax into the wood’s pores. A final polish with some rough cotton cloth (an empty bag of grits) produced the final sheen.

I don’t know if it’s a non-non to use a polissoir on a spinning lathe, but it sure made short work of the finishing process.

For the seat, Ty Black is cutting out some of my “oiled latigo” leather I bought for a Roorkhee chair for a customer. That leather is from Wicket & Craig and has the shop nickname of the “sex machine leather.” It’s impossibly buttery and beautiful.

On Friday, I hope we’ll get the second prototype assembled – after I age the hardware.

— Christopher Schwarz

Oh, One More Thing…
During the last 10 years, the most common question I’m asked (aside from, “What wood should I use for my workbench?” Answer here.) is, “How do you manage to write, edit, build and teach as much as you do?”

I know that most people are paying me a compliment with the question. With others, the implication is that I don’t build all the projects I show here. Or that I sub-contract out the construction or finishing. Or that I am just really skilled in making photo-realistic images.

Here’s the deal: I went to journalism school and cut my teeth at a newspaper where we wrote 400 to 500 original pieces a year. I can write a blog entry, such as this one, in about 15 to 30 minutes without much forethought. It just comes out – like water from a well or crap from a porta-potty, depending on how you like my work.

Also important: I don’t watch TV, don’t like sports, don’t have a lot of friends and don’t have any other hobbies besides woodworking and listening to music while woodworking. Considering how much time I devote to the craft, I actually should be a lot better and a lot faster.

Today my daughter Katy was home sick and asked to give me a hand in the shop building a prototype of the Andre Roubo campaign stool.

We made the prototype using 1-1/8”-diameter dowels made from some spongy wood from Southeast Asia. We’ll make the real campaign stools from mahogany spun on the lathe and leather scraps leftover from the Roorkhee chairs.

Today was all about getting the hardware working with the holes and the sticks. When everything is tuned correctly, the legs fold out without flopping out.

Today I taught Katy to use her first machine: the drill press. She drilled the holes in the legs. Her holes looked great because she drilled in from both ends and her holes met in the middle. My hole was so ragged that Katy was compelled to take a picture for you.

Note that we threw this one in the garbage and used her legs instead.

The hardware is the interesting thing. I’ve resisted making these stools in the past because the old books show making the hardware by soldering some round steel stock together and then threading it manually.

Instead, we’re using 5/16” all-thread rod that is bisected by an eye bolt to make a three-way joint. It works very well. The hardware is secured by washers and brass acorn nuts. Tonight my leather-loving shop assistant, Ty Black, is going to stitch up some different seats for us to try.

I hope (and also don’t hope) that Katy is sick tomorrow.

— Christopher Schwarz

The idea that Cuban mahogany was used in the best English eighteenth-century furniture is a myth, propagated by earth twentieth-century authors such as Percy Macquoid and Herbert Cescinsky, and since established as “fact” by constant iteration. The statistical and other evidence housed in the Public Record office shows that no Cuban mahogany was imported either directly or indirectly into England before the Seven Years’ War (1756-63). This is confirmed by the Letter Books (of Gillow furniture company), which show not only that Cuban mahogany was an introduction of the 1760s, but that its quality fell far short of its modern reputation.

— “Gillow and the Use of Mahogany in the Eighteenth Century,” Adam Bowett, Regional Furniture, Volume XII, 1998