Category: Personal Favorites
I Don’t Know, Let’s Say 90 Percent
When you design a cabinet, chair or tool chest, it’s too easy to let the following words slip from your lips:
“I made it to fit my needs, my body, my tools. Like anything custom-made, it needs to suit the user exactly.”
To me, that’s a cop-out. When designers sketch out kitchen cabinets or bookshelves they don’t base the depth and height off the client’s books, dishes and glassware. There is a sweet spot for designing these pieces that can accommodate a wide variety of household objects and books.
The same rules are out there for chairs, tool cabinets, workbenches, dressers, chests and the like. Yes, you can make a cabinet that is designed to fit a specific shrunken monkey head you brought back from the rainforest. But if you open your eyes and do a little math you can design a cabinet that will suit any shrunken primate head from any continent.
The worst offender when it comes to over-customization is – in my opinion – chairs. I have sat in some awful custom chairs. Beautiful, yes. But after a few minutes of sitting it felt like the chair was trying to inseminate me. Or at least make me turn my head and cough.
As I start to squirm, the most common excuse from the owner is: The chair was not made for you. It was made for someone who is smaller/fatter/shaped differently/a giant praying mantis.
I call bunk. Good chairs, cabinets, tool chests, workbenches, stools, bookshelves or whatever should be able to serve a variety of masters. I don’t know, let’s say 90 percent of the people. Just about anyone can sit in one of Jennie Alexander’s chairs and say: “Wow. This is an amazing chair.” And that’s because Jennie paid close attention to both history and the human body. She did her research. She thought it through and didn’t settle for: this chair fits this person.
It takes a lot more design work and thought to find that sweet spot. But the result is a piece of furniture that will be coveted instead of kicked to the curb.
— Christopher Schwarz
The History of Wood, Part 40
Forgotten Details of Cooking & Screwing
Whenever I have to wait in a doctor’s office, I don’t mess around with their pile of last year’s Time magazines. I bring my own really old magazines – and this week it was issues of The Woodworker from 1916.
Tucked in amid the magazine’s 10-part series on making your own poultry gear (no lie), I found two little gems worth sharing here.
The first article, “Screws and Screwdrivers” is the kind of article that most people would skip over. After all, what is there to say about this basic operation? As always, if you read The Woodworker closely you’ll pick up details and fine points that are worth knowing.
This short article even discusses a pattern of screw – the improved American form – that I’ve not seen before. Sure, the shank is familiar, but the head?
The second article is on “Hay Box Cookers.” I do almost all the cooking in our household, and I enjoy exploring old cooking techniques as much as I enjoy old woodworking stuff. So this article was aimed right at me.
Hay box cookers are like the CrockPot of the 19th century. The cooker is a wooden box filled with hay. When you make a stew, you bring it to a boiling point. Then you take it off heat, cover it and put it in the hay box cooker and shut the lid for two or more hours.
The hay insulates the stew (or boiled bacon, yum?), cooking it slowly without any more energy. And you can’t scorch the food. There’s even a recipe book out there.
— Christopher Schwarz
The History of Wood, Part 39
