Staked furniture isn’t just for Moravians and chroniclers of public health in the Middle Ages.
It’s everywhere – once you open your eyes.
One of my favorite primary sources is Lewis Miller, a carpenter in York, Pa., who chronicled life in the 19th century with watercolors and text. The reason Miller is at the top of my list is he was a woodworker. So when he drew a workbench or a piece of furniture, chances are that what he drew is what it looked like.
So check out the sketch above titled “Christian Rupp and Kunkel, at the dinner Table, 1809.” The table is almost certainly staked. No aprons. It has boards that thicken the top where the legs intersect the top. And a drawer that hangs down.
And he shows staked construction again in this image: “Martin Weiser & wife, 1810, in his Tavern.”
As my house has been filling with staked furniture these last few years, I’ve begun to ask: Why have I not been building this stuff since day one (about 1993)?
A top with a scrubbed finish at the Cheltenham museum.
Editor’s note: Search around for information on how to achieve a “scrubbed finish” and you will encounter a comedy of chemistry. People try to achieve this with all manner of stains and caustic chemicals. A real scrubbed finish is simply bare wood that has been cleaned and cleaned – getting better over time. Alan Peters explains:
At times this (a flawless finish) disturbs me, for the surface that some admire and some craftsmen strive to satisfy has little to distinguish it from a piece of plastic laminate; for that is precisely what the surface has become, after the grain has been filled and endless coats of plastic film have been applied and painstakingly rubbed down.
Natural wood finishes, such as oil and wax, are very susceptible to marking in their early stages and do require care and attention. Frankly, this dilemma of finding wood finishes that leave the material looking like wood, resist marking, and improve rather than deteriorate with age, has dogged me and often defeated me these past 20 years….
For example, a scrubbed finish to an oak dining table, so favoured by the Cotswold School, is a beautiful surface, immensely practical in use, improving with age and developing a wonderful surface texture that would look fine in many situations, especially in the older farmhouse or cottage-style dwelling, and for most of the time it requires no more than a wipe over with a damp cloth after a meal.
However, it is also virtually colourless, just a bland uniform silvery grey. It has none of the colour variations of say a rosewood veneer or an oiled elm surface, and it is this richness of colour and grain that many of us find attractive about wood, so one has to move in this instance to a finish that heightens and preserves these characteristics….
Scrubbed and Washed Finishes
Ten years ago on moving to Devon I needed to make a pine kitchen/dining table quickly for our own use. Today, it is a beautiful golden colour similar to old stripped pine with not a bruise and hardly a scratch to be seen. We do not use a table cloth, only place mats, and we have never treated it at all gently. Yet, all that it has received in treatment or finish is a regular wipe over with a damp cloth after use and, once a month perhaps, it is thoroughly washed and scrubbed with hot water and household detergent. The hot water raises any bruises and scratches and the table looks like new, or rather, even better than new, for it has acquired a lovely patina now. There is no comparison with the treacly, bruised and scratched polyurethane surfaces so often encountered with modern manufactured pine tables.
A scrubbed finish is not restricted to pine, and I have used it for dining and kitchen tables and sideboards in oak, chestnut, pine, cedar and also sycamore. In the case of the latter, if an occasional wash with household bleach is substituted for the detergent, a beautifully white spotless surface will result.
My only regret is that I cannot persuade more of my customers to have this finish.
— Alan Peters, “Cabinetmaking: The Professional Approach, 2nd edition” (Linden)
One of my favorite stories is how the writers for “The Straight Dope” column sent a fake hand-lotion recipe to the “Hints from Heloise” column – mixing vegetable shortening and sugar. Heloise printed the recipe and added that she’d been using the concoction for years.
Go ahead. Go to the kitchen and try it. I’ll wait here.
I’ve been reading a lot about the Danish “soap finish” these last few months, plus the chemistry and history behind it. A lot of this research will be included in my forthcoming book (which, by the way, will have a new title, so I’ll call it “Formerly the Furniture of Necessity”).
This week I made and used a soap finish for the first time, applying it to an ash chair that also will be featured in the book. I like using the finish a lot. It’s basically an oil finish (from vegetable or animal oils) that leaves a waxy residue behind that can be buffed up. I’m going to put the chair into hard use in the house to see how it holds up and report back.
This post is to encourage you to give the soap finish a try, and to dispel some of the questionable advice I’ve collected on it.
First, on the sheen of the finish. While aged soap finishes I’ve seen on Hans Wegner chairs are indeed dead-flat, a new soap finish looks much more like a wax finish. I’d call it semi-gloss.
Soap soup. From mixing one quart of boiling water with one cup of soap flakes.
Mixing the soap finish is easy. I recommend you make a very small batch to get a feel for the different results you get from mixing soap flakes and boiling water. You can get everything from a soup to a bowl of exploded jellyfish to a stiff paste. A stiff paste is what I was after.
For my first batch I used one cup of soap flakes and one quart of boiling water. This recipe was a cruel joke. It made a grey soup that was suitable for washing clothes, not finishing furniture. When I applied it to wood it mostly made the wood wet and not much else.
Next I tried equal parts soap flakes and boiling water. This made the blown-up jellyfish parts (I hate jellyfish; I got one in my swimming trunks once and it burned my delicate parts). Even after I let this mixture cool, it didn’t make anything I was eager to apply to finish. It was too runny.
So I took an approach that I recommend you try: Boil a cup of water and pour about half of it into a cup of soap flakes. Mix it and see what happens. If it’s too runny, add soap flakes. If all the flakes haven’t dissolved, add a little water.
The result should be stiff and meringue-like. After it cooled it became a little harder and less mushy.
How to apply it?
You can put it directly on the wood, but I found that to be messier than the process recommended by Caleb James. Essentially you make a rubber like you would for French polish. Take a dollop of the soap and put it in the middle of a soft cotton cloth. Wrap the soap and twist the “tail.” The soap soaks through the cloth as you press it against the wood, applying a nice film after a few minutes of work – your body heat from your hand and the friction soften the soap nicely.
After the soap dries for a few minutes, buff it with a clean, soft cloth.
Some people have reported that the finish raises the grain. I didn’t find that. Perhaps they were using soap soup.
When I work on a complex design, such as this simple chair, I find the best way to modify the design is to take photos of the project from all angles, even awkward ones. Then I print them out and start sketching on them.
This process saves me hours of prototyping. In this case, I’m working on the crest rail of the chair, mostly the angle that is cut on the ends and its overall length.
For me, this is easier than modeling complex pieces in CAD. I know it looks primitive, but it works surprisingly well.
