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— Christopher Schwarz
Make a Table or Stool Part 2: Marking Out the Joints
In a table or stool construction either the legs or the rails may be marked out first. This example starts with the rails. Cramp together the long and short pairs, with true faces out and true edges down. Mark each end with a knife and square (Fig 96). Then uncramp the pairs, square round the lines (Fig 97), and carefully saw off the waste. It is important to saw this cleanly in order to be able to gauge nicely on the end later. First gauge the set-in, at about 3mm (1/8in.), and then the haunch (Fig 98). The set-in is purely cosmetic, to conceal any irregularity in the joint.
The haunch provides a bridge at the top of the leg, helping to prevent the mortice splitting and at the same time, by its added width to the tenon, reducing the possibility of the rail twisting in the leg. The haunch should be about a quarter of the tenon width. Some writers will say a third but this seems to reduce the tenon too much.
To mark out the legs, put them together with the faces and edges as shown (Fig 99) then turn them over and mark them on a blank face. Mark the total length, leaving some waste (which should be shaded) at each end. The waste must be about 20mm (3/4in.) at the top or jointed end.
Offer up the rail, and from it mark the haunch, set-in and rail width (Fig 100), square these across and uncramp. Square these lines onto the other blank face. The total length lines are squared right round (Fig 101).
The thickness of a tenon is normally about one third of the rail thickness. It is not taken from measurement but is the size of the nearest available chisel to this size. The traditional hand mortice chisels vary considerably from the nominal size. Machine chisels are quite accurate and are now becoming metric. Hand mortice chisels are much thicker than the common firmer or bench chisel (Fig 102), which is very liable to break when levering. The extra thickness of the mortice chisel is also a help in preventing it from twisting.
Set the mortice gauge carefully to the chisel (Fig 103) then set to its position on the rail, commonly central. Without changing the setting, mark out the mortices on the legs (Fig 104), gauging from the true face and the true edge. Mark the tenons similarly, gauging from the true face.
Beginners will find it helpful later on, when sawing the tenons, if a thick, soft pencil is run in the gauge marks. This produces a double pencil mark (Fig 105). The waste should be very clearly marked with pencil, generally by diagonal shading. (The method adopted in the illustrations is to avoid confusion with the end grain, and is not typical.)
Note: It is a good idea to number the joints to avoid confusion. This should be done on parts not involved in the cleaning-up process.
— Robert Wearing, from Chapter 2 of “The Essential Woodworker”
Sawing the Roubo Way
One of the daunting tasks Michele, Philippe, and I face in bringing “To Make As Perfectly As Possible” – the furniture-making sections of Jacob Andre Roubo’s “L’Art du Menuisier” – to an Anglophone audience is probably similar to the problem of a modern Francophone reading it now in the original language – Roubo frequently (always?) assumes a depth of knowledge mostly lost to contemporary craftsmen. His offhand remarks about doing something this way or that way often leave gigantic holes of information, information he presumed the readers would possess. To write it down would either “dumb-down” his masterpiece or insult the reader’s intelligence and experience.
In a world of flakeboard furniture and polyurinate varnish, understanding Roubo without a little help may just be a futile gesture. Even Philippe has expressed frustration with these hurdles at times, once exclaiming, “I cannot tell which is more difficult, the English or the French!” Despite being an experienced patternmaker and metal caster I found myself scratching my head with his descriptions of fabricating furniture mounts (hardware).
My main grunt-level tasks in the production of “To Make As Perfectly As Possible” are two-fold, involving first the massaging of the transliterated text into language comprehensible to a modern woodworker, with a lot of informational back-filling; and second, to replicate some of the tools and processes presented on the pages of the original volumes. To that end I have built a number of tools, jigs, and mock-ups to assist me in presenting them to you as written and photographic essays. There is no point in perusing Roubo without getting the whole picture, or at least as whole of a picture as we can paint.
My latest exercise has been to use the frame saw Roubo illustrates for the re-sawing of lumber, or more precisely, the sawing of veneer from solid stock. I use the term “more precisely” self-consciously for reasons you will learn in a moment. Using the tool reiterates the level of hand skills required to do what Jacob Andre treated as being akin to breathing air, so natural as to not need a lot of explanation. Like much of Roubo, attempting to replicate the work is a challenging and humbling experience.
My first step was to replicate the saw illustrated in Plate 278. (I would say that this plate is “one of my favorites,” but in a book with 382 fantabulous plates the exclamation rings hollow.) Rather than jump into constructing – and hand cutting the teeth – a 4′-long x 4”-wide blade frame saw, I began with an uncharacteristically modest version. The first frame saw I built employs a 28” rip-tooth blade I bought at a mail order tool store. The frame itself is 8/4 rock maple with stout but unglued mortise and tenon joints. Wimpy it is not. The hardware used to affix the blade to the frame was made with 1/2″ carriage bolts from the hardware store. Using wrenches to tighten the retaining bolts I can get the blade so tight it sounds like a piano string if I pluck it.
The second step was to construct a suitable vise to hold the work piece. Attacking solid stock with a 3 TPI rip blade requires some pretty robust clampification. At first I tried my Emmert K1. Too wimpy for the big pieces (as a congregant in The United Fellowship of Emmert, it pains me to write this). Next up, the twin-screw face vise on my workbench. Even though it has 1” Acme-thread screws and a 3” x 6” jaw, it was not up to the task because the jaw flexed too much as the screws were over 3′ on center. I had no desire to build the saw bench Jake illustrates, so I adapted his design to built one and attach it to one end of my workbench. My base jaw is 6” x 6” x 26” bolted to the bench legs, and the moving jaw is 4” x 6” x 26”, all of vintage white oak. The screws are hand cut 1-1/2” x 6 TPI maple and are 22” on-center. Let me tell you, some clamping pressure can be achieved with this puppy.
Working alone, since I was too eager to wait for a second sawyer to be recruited, I tossed some old growth antique cypress lumber into the jaws and started sawing. Holy Cow! Re-sawing a 6” piece by myself, I averaged almost an inch and a half per minute. Effortlessly. Eight inch old growth mahogany? Like butter. With the weight of the 8/4 maple frame pulling the sharp teeth through the wood, all I had to do was keep it moving back and forth. And steer. Evidently I need some new driving lessons.
My only negative report is that the saw is so stinking precise that it has no forgiveness in its heart, it amplifies any errors on the part of the sawyer. Keep to the line and everything is glorious. Wander a little bit and you have nicely cut firewood. In a 24” cut I wandered off-line over 1/16”. Sigh. There is simply no recovering from a mis-direction, an unfortunate feature to this technique that I found disheartening, since almost every other technique of hand sawing allows for some recovery from a wandering saw. Not this bad boy.
To use this simple and powerful tool effectively requires a level of hand skill precision I do not yet possess. A second sawyer wouldn’t hurt, either. Admittedly, I am new to the tool and my skill with it can only increase with time. But it was definitely an exhilarating and humbling exercise. Check back in with me in a couple months.
And these old-timers cut 18” wide veneers less that 1/12 of an inch? Yikes.
“To Make As Perfectly As Possible” has much more detail including step-by-step construction. Stay tuned.
— Don Williams
‘Anarchist’s Tool Chest’ T-shirts Coming Soon
Details this week.
The Lost Art of Living
A lot of my friends dream about finding a place out in the country that has a few acres of land, a huge barn for a woodworking shop and an abundance of quiet.
Not me. I’ve always loved cities, especially the old sections. I like 19th-century architecture, alleyways and the bustle of city life. I also like being able to walk everywhere I need to go and being in close quarters with restaurants, coffee shops, bars, street vendors, theatres and all the crazy little businesses that crop up in a metropolis. Heck I even like the constant hum.
For the last 15 years, I’ve lived in one of the older suburbs in Cincinnati. Our house was built in 1928, I can walk to the grocery stores, the kids can walk to school and we are less than five minutes from downtown Cincinnati. It’s a nice, leafy suburb. We would be fools to leave.
But I have been plotting the next move for Lost Art Press (and my family) and am eager to leave suburban life forever. Just down the road from us is Covington, Ky., an older city right on the Ohio River and across from downtown Cincinnati.
It has a huge inventory of old residential, commercial and mixed-use properties. And I have started scouting buildings. I want a storefront on the ground floor for my workshop and our publishing activities. And I want to live above the shop. I want a back alley. A loading dock. A tin ceiling.
Lucky for me, Covington is lousy with properties like this. Even luckier: My spouse feels the same way that I do about this crazy plan. Her family owned a drugstore on Madison Avenue until Covington’s economy collapsed and all the stores moved to the suburbs. They lost their drug store. So moving back to Covington to set up business has some emotional appeal.
Last weekend I started looking at some buildings up for sale to get a feel for the market. The first stop: A building on Madison Avenue, one block down from the old drug store.
That property turned out to be wrong in too many ways. But the process – and the view from the sidewalks of the city – felt exactly right.
— Christopher Schwarz