If you’ve ever met Mary May, author of “Carving the Acanthus Leaf,” then you probably know this already: Mary does not do anything halfway.
Her book is an exhaustive look at carving this iconic motif with hundreds and hundreds of detailed drawings and photographs that illustrate the process. But if you still need some more assistance, Mary has you covered.
Having a 3D representation of what you are carving is a great advantage. So Mary offers resin castings for sale of all of the carving projects in her book. These castings were made from the actual carvings in the book, so they are a perfect match for the instructions and step photos.
You can purchase the castings individually or the entire set. Details are here.
Another option is to purchase an instructional video about each leaf where Mary walks you through the process step by step. Her videos are excellent (you can sample them on her site). They are offered in full HD and can be downloaded or streamed from her site. Details on the videos are here.
The half pin on the right did not have hide glue applied to the end grain. Note that this photo was taken after the glue had dried but before the joint had been cleaned off.
While at David Savage’s shop, Rowden, a couple years ago we assembled a bunch of dovetailed tool chests using hot hide glue. That’s not weird. What was weird was how some of the students applied the glue.
They brushed the glue on the interior surfaces, knocked the joints together and then brushed glue on the exterior surfaces of the joints.
That was weird to me.
I’ve been in shops all over the world – traditional and modern. And the only time I’ve seen hide glue applied on the outside of a joint is during hammer veneering.
It was a whirlwind two weeks in Devon, and I didn’t get to ask David about that process. But when I came back to the United States, I started fooling around with it myself. During the last couple years I’ve gone back and forth between the two methods both with hot hide glue and liquid hide glue.
In talking with David, he called it the “Juicy Lucy” school of gluing. Sometimes at Rowden, David said they also use the “Sahara”method. This is where you have been successful if a small bead of glue comes out bearing evidence that glue has been used in the assembly.
I’m not a glue scientist, and what I have been doing is not a properly controlled experiment. It’s building furniture. What I have observed is that applying hide glue to the outside surfaces of a joint – especially the end grain – can make a good joint a wee bit better. It’s not a dramatic difference. But the end grain seems to soak up the adhesive and swell a tiny tiny bit.
But wait – doesn’t this affect finishing? Not with hide glue and traditional finishes. Hide glue is transparent to most finishes. So I plane off the exterior surfaces like I normally do (usually a swipe or two with a smoothing plane) and it’s done.
Should you change your gluing technique? Not if you are happy with your results. But if you are a curious person, give it a try and decide for yourself.
One of the curious frustrations in researching “Ingenious Mechanicks” was reading the reports from archaeologists who speculated on how woodworking tools were used or objects were made. It became obvious that some of these guys didn’t know the difference between a dovetail and a mortise. And hadn’t ever cut one.
Not all archeologists are like this.
Check out this fantastic article from the Archaeology.org site about the joinery in a 7,000-year-old well. Not only do they do normal stuff in the lab, but they try to remake the well with tools available at the time. And start with the tree.
“You have to handle things. By using stone tools ourselves, we can see what works and what doesn’t work,” says archaeologist Rengert Elburg. “Because from your writing desk you can’t say anything.”
I put it a bit more crudely in “Ingenious Mechanicks:”
“It’s not fair to our early ancestors to put words in their mouths. We don’t know how dry their wood was when they started to build their workbenches. Was it fresh from the tree? Dried for 20 years? Something in between?
“We can guess, which is what most people do. Or we can build a bunch of workbenches from woods in varying degrees of wetness and observe the results through several years. This second path is much more difficult than sitting naked in the dark at your computer keyboard – fingers covered in the dust of Cheetos – and pontificating online. But it’s the path I took.”
“As an instructional text, it probably has more process images than any other book on carving that I own,” O’Brien writes. ” … I can’t imagine more instructional detail being provided. If the book were composed of pictures alone, it would be worth the cost.”
O’Brien, a skilled carver himself (check out his letter carving here), writes that carving is one of the more elusive areas of the craft. “While it is disguised as woodworking, it really has more in common with drawing,” he says. “Realizing this took me a long time. The skills required for executing a carving with curves and flowing lines come from a different part of the brain than the skills we use for the predictable hard and straight lines of milling lumber and cutting joints. Think of the chisel as a drawing tool, not a cutting tool. Mary provides ample instruction on how to design, draw, and lay out the acanthus leaf and explains that this is important, not only for the task at hand, but also in order to develop our ability to see and execute fine details.”
O’Brien talks about the Eureka moment he had while reading Mary’s section on sharpening, the importance of storytelling when discussing technique (and how Mary’s memorable tales enhance the book) and, well, the fact that the book is a steal.
“The amount of time and labor evident in the making of this book belie the comparably low cost ($49 or less for the PDF version). It’s hard to imagine creating this much text and countless images in such a superbly designed, printed, and bound edition – in the United States no less!”
I’m in Charleston, S.C., this week to inventory my father’s belongings and start figuring out what to do with his possessions and his house. I also have one important personal task: retrieve a workbench I loaned him many years ago so I can restore it.
I made the bench in 2002 or 2003 for Popular Woodworking (you can see it here), and it stayed in the shop until I loaned it to dad in 2009. Like many of my early benches, it’s made with yellow pine and Veritas bench bolts – still a great combination that I recommend for bench builders. These days, however, most of my customers prefer giant oak slabs.
After my bench moved south, it endured multiple hurricanes and tropical depressions, including Bonnie, Matthew and Irma. My dad’s house is in a low-lying area with the shop on the ground floor, so there were a couple times my bench was afloat during storm surges.
Today I took it apart. This process should take 10 minutes. But everything – everything – was rusted, jammed and degraded. Wood screws that should have accepted a Phillips head were rusted to the point where nothing would unscrew them (except a hacksaw). The metal drawer slides were about 50 percent rust and required lots of persuasion to expectorate their drawers.
But the wood was in surprisingly good condition. The laminated top hadn’t split. The Veritas Twin Screws still turned (despite heavy rusting) and even the plywood edge tape on the drawer cabinet was in perfect condition.
Tomorrow the bench begins its journey back north, where I will clean it, replace the rusted parts and true up the benchtop. It’s going back to work. And I hope the that worst weather it will ever see is a Midwestern thunderstorm.
