“Imperial units should only be used when measuring general levels of rebel scum.” — Fake AP Stylebook
I leave for Germany on Thursday to teach three classes at the workshops of Dictum GmbH, one of Europe’s leading supplier of hand tools.
The hardest part of the trip might surprise you. It’s not the food or the beer (duh). It’s not the time difference, the language barrier or even dealing with the completely different cultural woodworking tradition (bowsaws, horned planes, pins-first dovetails, etc).
It’s the metric system.
I don’t dislike the metric system. Far from it. After three years of teaching at Dictum, plus many years of dealing with readers from metric countries, I appreciate its base-10 elegance. But it really jerks around my brain switching back and forth between the two systems. Especially when I get the occasional student who uses Imperial. And don’t get me started on the one who spoke Esperanto.
This year I’ve been getting a jump on the switch to the metric system by spending the last four days writing up all the materials for the class in metric and not using a conversion calculator. It’s like I can almost “speak” metric. Almost.
Now if someone could explain what the German Burger King’s “Long Chicken” sandwich is, I think I’ll have assimilated.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. This blog entry is also a reminder that if you e-mail me or post a comment on the blog that I might not be very responsive. I won’t be back in Kentucky until June 28. And if you are seeking to burgle us in the meantime, you’ll have to deal with the ferocity of Lucy and her four attack pussies.
The Roorkhee chair is like my Catholic spouse – everyone in town is a cousin, second cousin or great cousin.
Here’s a real interesting Roorkhee cousin: A gunsmith’s chair that is on the showroom floor of William Evans Ltd. in London. These photos were taken by Australian woodworker and blogger Glen Rundell.
Though the William Evans chair has a lot in common with the Roorkhee (wooden frame, leather seat, portability) it also has different bones. Instead of breaking apart, this chair folds up like a chair at a church picnic. It has a framed seat and back instead of a simple piece of loose leather. And I could go on about the bamboo turnings and arms.
But I won’t. Bottom line, the two forms have a lot of attributes in common.
You can now purchase “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” – complete and unabridged – for your Kindle, iPad or any other reader that accepts ePub files.
The price is $16. You can purchase the Kindle edition here. The ePub version for iPad iPhone and other ePub reader is here.
Like all our electronic products, these are supplied without any form of Digital Rights Management – DRM for short. DRM restricts you from moving the file to other devices, or requires a password, or is just generally a nuisance.
We do not care for DRM. And I am pleased to say that pirating of our products has been minimal. So thank you for being ethical citizens.
“The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” was a complex book for us to convert into an electronic edition, thanks to the hundreds of illustrations and the copious footnotes. I am happy to report that the book is complete with all the footnotes – you access them by clicking on the superscript number in the text. You will then be taken to a section of the book containing all the notes. The function works quite well.
One last note: Several customers have asked if we will be offering package prices on the book, electronic book and the forthcoming audiobook version read by Roy Underhill. After much debate, we have decided to keep all these products separate and simply offer each at the best price possible. We think $16 is a fair price for a DRM-free book of this complexity.
The act of naming something is, in my view, a kind of violence. But it also is a helpful form of shorthand.
With furniture, the most common way to name it is by its ornament (Chippendale, Arts & Crafts, Ikea). This name gives us a rough idea of what it looks like, perhaps when it was built and maybe even some of its construction details (mahogany, through-tenons, confirmat screws).
But what if the piece of furniture doesn’t really have much ornament? What if we are unsure as to when it was built? What if the piece appears in the furniture record made out of every conceivable hardwood and softwood?
What do we call this furniture? One term is “vernacular,” though that word casts a net that’s too wide. Vernacular encompasses 15th-century trestle tables with wedged through-tenons and pine shelves assembled with drywall screws in a mall kiosk.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about furniture on an X/Y axis. The X axis is ornament, from no ornament to all ornament (think Grinling Gibbons). The Y axis is construction quality, from bombproof to being a bomb ready to explode when the humidity changes.
This X/Y axis creates four spaces and four kinds of furniture, and it gives us a sliding scale that we can use to discuss how furniture is made. Let’s talk about these four types.
1. Furniture of the rich who have taste – high-style ornamentation and outstanding joinery. This is almost always the furniture of the well-to-do. This category encompasses furniture from every era, from the Middle Ages up to five minutes ago. It’s period highboys from Thomas Chippendale. Prairie settees from Frank Lloyd Wright. Rockers from Sam Maloof. This is furniture that is built by commission – not manufactured. It is made by the best artisans by the people who can afford it. Its ornamentation might not be ostentatious, but it is still incredibly evident, distinctive and expensive to produce (think James Krenov). The furniture is also – for lack of a better word – specific and not vague. It represents the focused efforts of the builder and the customer to produce something unique.
2. Furniture of the poseurs – high-style ornamentation and crap craftsmanship. This is the world of Ethan Allen, Williams-Sonoma, Baker (and many other commercial manufacturers) who seek to provide furniture that looks like it belongs to the very rich at a price that the upper-middle class can afford. In general, this is the furniture that looks good (even great) from a distance but fails when examined closely. Wood selection is terrible. The finish is more obscuring than revealing of the grain. The interior components of the furniture are generic and have more in common with mass-manufactured furniture. Dovetails are made by machine. Mortise-and-tenon joinery is via cope-and-stick (at best). But most of all, it is manufactured – the parts are interchangeable with other pieces from the same run. And the detailing is, in general, somewhat generic. It is designed to appeal to thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of customers – not just one customer. So these pieces are never polarizing and almost always like melba toast: pleasant but not memorable.
3. Furniture of the desperate – furniture built only on price. With these pieces, style and craftsmanship are subsumed by the bottom line. This is the particleboard furniture covered in plastic veneer that looks like oak (if you have been drinking). It is designed only to hit a price point and provide a temporary function. It is constructed in a way that it will survive only about five years or one significant family move before becoming too wobbly to keep. It is designed by the opportunistic to fill the temporary needs of the desperate.
4. Furniture of necessity – high craftsmanship and low (to non-existent) ornament. This is the furniture of people who require, demand or desire durability and have no need for ornament or high-style detail. The most important aspect of this class of furniture is that it be useful, durable and able to remain attractive (or non-offensive) over a long period of time. Examples of this furniture: Institutional or work furniture, military furniture, servant-quarters furniture, school furniture, traveling furniture, library furniture, and (most of all) furniture made for and by craftsmen for their own use. While ornament is not entire eschewed, it is always secondary to the function and durability of the finished object.
So I know that the above classification is flawed. It doesn’t account for some outliers – low craftsmen who build bonnet-top highboys for their homes. The extremely rich who are content to furnish their homes from WalMart. The occasional piece of manufactured furniture that is transcendental – Eames chairs, Stella cafe chairs and so forth.
But it is better than calling anything that lacks carving as: Shaker.
This morning I mailed two Roorkhee chairs to customers on either side of the continent. It was a bit of a bittersweet job. I’m glad to have these chairs completed and out of the house. But the kids liked sitting in them, and I became enamored with them for some surprising reasons.
For one, they are damn comfortable – as comfy as a Morris chair. And they look good with our traditional/modernist furniture. But that’s not where my affection ends.
This week, my daughter Katy and I have been humping these chairs all over the city to photograph them – across parking lots, through parks and in and out of cars. I carried one of these chairs with one hand and while loaded with a complete photography and lighting rig. Even Katy was able to tote one of these chairs all day without any complaint – each chair weighs about 10 or 11 lbs.
And when it came time to pack them up to their final destinations, all the leather, brass and wood fit into a box measuring just 24” x 12” x 6”. With the packing material, the box weighed between 13 and 14 lbs. I could have packed them into an even smaller box if UPS had carried the right size.
Within a few minutes of packing up these chairs, I received two more orders for them.
I’m going to make only one more run of these chairs this year – I have books to edit, lay out and write. So if you want me to make one of these chairs for you, my recommendation is for your to make them for yourself. They are incredibly easy to construct, and my plans for them will be published in a fall issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine.
But if making them doesn’t interest you (bovine phobia?), here are the details for this last run of 2012:
• The chairs will be in genuine mahogany, finished with garnet shellac, just like the chairs shown above.
• All the hardware is solid brass or steel and aged to look vintage.
• On leather, I’ll offer a choice of colors for this run that ranges from the cognac color shown above to a rich black.
• The depth and width of the seat can be customized for you – the originals were quite narrow (about 16″ between the legs). The current run has about 17-1/2″ between the legs for “modern” hips. And I can go to about 19″ before engineering becomes an issue.
• The chairs are $750 each, delivered in the United States.
