Lost Art Press

Category: Projects

Different Hardware for ‘The Schoolbox’

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After building a half-dozen versions of The Schoolbox from “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker,” I’m beginning to dial in the design of the small chest to suit my taste.

I am still enamored with the overall proportions and scale of the chest, but I’ve tweaked the decorative details. Here’s a summary of my alterations.

1. Instead of a flat chamfer on the mitered base moulding, I switched to a 3/8” square ovolo. Also instead of mitering the corners, I dovetail them and carve the corners with a chisel.

2. On the lid, I use a cove (made with a No. 6 round) instead of a chamfer. These two changes to the mouldings make the chest look more like a nice piece of furniture than a traveling chest for a kid heading off to boarding school.

3. I’ve not yet found strap hinges that I like that are the right size – the ones I used on the first version are too big. Until I get a blacksmith to make me some, I’ve switched to these gorgeous iron butt hinges from Whitechapel Ltd. They come with great old-school screws.

4. I added two small iron chest lifts. They look nice and make the chest easier to pick up and move. The ones shown on the chest are vintage, but Horton Brasses make lifts that look exactly the same and are the same small size. Click here.

I’ll be building another one of these Schoolboxes at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking  Sept. 4-8, so I’ll have another opportunity to try some other changes, perhaps to the dovetail spacing. There are still a couple spots open in the class. More details are here.

— Christopher Schwarz

I Can’t Find the Item Number for That

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One of the few truths in woodworking is this: The hardware you choose is as important as the boards you select, the joinery you use and the finish you apply.

Cheap, mismatched or poorly scaled hardware will ruin a piece – like using ramen pallet wood for a highboy.

At the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, one of the museum’s largest public collections is its ironwork display. This fantastic ferrite section contains everything from hinges and locks to gates and signposts. I spent as much time looking at the museum’s ironwork as I did at its furniture. The beauty of these handmade articles was enough to convince me that I need to make friends with a blacksmith.

Take a gander at this unremarkable and thoroughly mongrelized cupboard. The piece dates from the 14th century and was said to belong to the last Abbot of Whalley. During its lifetime, it has been scraped of its original finish. Shortened. New back. New shelves. And an extra foot added to the middle.

Despite all this, the piece is impressive because of the hardware. Forget about the inconvenient design of the cupboard (only the two center panels open), or the split wood, or that the top that is made from the gnarliest piece of wood I’ve ever seen in a museum. The hardware is awesome, and it makes this forgettable piece into something worth preserving.

Now if I could just find the item number for this hardware in the Lee Valley catalog….

— Christopher Schwarz

Gallons of Garbage

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Last year my spouse did something completely insane for my birthday: She bought me something I asked for (but I really should not have).

It was a used bourbon barrel – white oak, banded in steel hoops and charred on on the inside. With a nice big bung hole. My dream was to have one of these barrels as my garbage can at the end of my vise. No more plastic for me. Just a giant gaping black maw of charred oak with some sweet bourbon redolence mixed in.

That was June 2009.

The barrel arrived via truck. No box. Just a label and a barrel. Still, I was excited as Hello Kitty on mini-crayon day. I rolled the barrel back to my shop. But before I wrangled it down the stairs I had a bad thought. What if it wouldn’t fit under my workbench?

A quick check with my tape measure confirmed the drunken obvious: The barrel was actually taller than my bench. So I’d be ramming my handplanes into it. Dejected, I rolled it next to my Karmann-Ghia, where it has sat for 13 months.

After seeing some of the barrels at the Maker’s Mark distillery this May, I became inspired to revisit my personal cask of shame. I decided to cut it down. Give it a flattop. Remove more than 6″ of material and not have the staves fall apart on me.

Here’s what I did. I “borrowed” a silver Crayola from my daughter and used a 1″-thick scrap to mark a line that was 1″ offset below one of the hoops. Then I took a 5/8″ drill and bored a hole adjacent to the wax line. Then it was less than three minutes of work with a jigsaw, cutting around the barrel until the top fell off. Inside were four bungs. Four?

The inside was as black as I’d imagined. I stuck my head in to inhale the sweet smell of aged bourbon.

Sniff.

It smelled like a wet bonfire.

Oh well. I rolled the barrel to my shop. It fit perfectly beneath the bench. I put my plastic garbage can out at the street. Good riddance. And what about the top of the barrel? Don’t know. I rolled it next to the Karmann-Ghia. Maybe next year I’ll deal with it.

— Christopher Schwarz

Footwork and Casework

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One of the interesting things about the “Joiner and Cabinet Maker” are the construction details you can find in almost every sentence. I’ve read the book at least six times now, and every time I dip into the text I unearth something I hadn’t seen before.

It’s not because the book is Pynchon-esque in its density. It was, after all, written for the crafty 19th-century adolescent. Instead, it’s because I’m a little different every time I read it.

For example, I’m quite enamored with the feet on the Chest of Drawers in the book. The author is open-ended about the method for creating the ogee curves on the feet, saying only that you should take your time to get them looking nice.

Then the feet are mitered at the corners and we’ll pick up the story from there:

“To strengthen the mitre, which is glued and sprigged together, a strip of wood an inch square is glued all down in the inside corner, and sprigged also to the sides. It is better to leave this corner piece a little longer than the sides, to pro­ject perhaps a quarter of an inch below them, so that if the floor on which the chest is to stand be a little uneven, a small piece may be cut off one leg or other, as may be required. They are fastened by glue and sprigs; or, which is better, by screws through the thinnest part of the sides into the chest bottom, and by a couple of sprigs driven in slanting through the upper part of the corner piece. The legs should be placed with the two faces flush with the faces of the chest at the corner. They may be farther strength­ened by two blocks of wood to each; an inch square, and as long as there is room for, glued into the corner, and sprigged both to the leg and the chest. These blocks are shewn in fig. 9. It is not usual to put in so many sprigs in making and fastening on the legs; but then they soon come off, and have to be glued and sprigged at last, with the chance of having been broken first. So Thomas thinks it best to make a good strong job of them at once.”

For me, this is interesting stuff. The people who taught me about antique furniture and the like always insisted that these glue blocks were held in only with a hide-glue rub joint. If there were nails or screws in the glue blocks, then they were added later by the owner or a ham-handed “restorer.”

Yet here we have evidence that some of the nailed glue blocks might be original. So thanks Thomas. This is another lesson I’ve learned from a 14-year old. And it’s a bit more useful than the last lesson I got from a young teen-ager (which was that my blue jeans legs should drag the floor if I wanted to be “cool”).

— Christopher Schwarz

Faithful Reproductions for the Faithful

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This summer I’m building a few reproductions of pieces from the White Water Shaker Village that I will donate to the village’s caretakers. I want these reproductions to be as faithful as possible, but I’m wondering just how far I can go on faith.

Take, for example, this 13′-long bench. It’s all in walnut and nailed together with cut nails. The curves in the base are clearly cut with some sort of turning saw with a little rasp work behind. The notches for the aprons were sawn out.

So far, so good.

I think the top piece was milled on some sort of reciprocating saw. The marks on the underside are too regular to be pitsaw marks. They’re not planer marks (like I’ve ever seen). And they are certainly not circular saw marks.

Is somehow reproducing these marks on the underside important? Or should I treat it like I would treat any non-show surface – fore plane it and call it done?

In other words, I want to use fairly authentic methods. I’m just not sure how far I should (or even can) take this.

We’ll be publishing plans for four of these White Water pieces in Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine in the coming year. This bench is the simplest project. The other three projects should get your heart thumping pretty hard.

— Christopher Schwarz