From an illustrated version of Giles of Rome’s, De Regimine Principum, early 16th century.
It is not often that my love of tool geekery and word geekery coincide. But over several posts about “Grandpa’s Workshop” and the besaigue (bisaigue) there have been some questions about the tool and how to pronounce the word.
It is pronounced, bees-ay-goo with the last “o” there kind of swallowed.
Maurice Pommier the author and illustrator of the book, offered up this info on the origins of the word.
From the “Robert Dictionary:” feminine noun, dates to the 12th century, from Latin, “bis acuta”, sharpened twice – a carpenters tool with two cutting tools, one a mortise chisel, the other a chisel.
From “Larousse Dictionary:” feminine noun, from Latin “bis” – twice, “acuta” – sharpened.
The gold standard for traditional tools in France is Daniel Boucard, who has published several books on the topic including “Dictionnaire des Outils” and traces the first mention of the word to 1160, and says that the word was originally spelled “BESAIGÜE”
“You could just buy a window like that in a store. But maybe not in oak, or not unless you went to a joiner. What kind of wood did you use for the bottom part there?”
“At school we had real benches, you know made of beech.”
“That’s made of two boards? Ah, OK, but you don’t have that kind of machine that you use to make the edges flat… Yes, a jointer.”
“Papa, when are you going to finish my bow?”
“Where are all your real tools?… You know the electric ones, um with tables or something?”
“You made that with that? I see those kinds of planes all the time at the flea markets. You don’t have a router?”
“Hey Coppette, I saw something like this in that book you translated. Take it. No, it’s your’s. I have a couple of them, and I never use them.”
I can’t imagine the comments I will get if I get pretty good working wood with my hands.
Editor’s note: Normally, we would not post a blog entry such as this, where a writer abuses a fine Belgian ale. But because this is Brian Anderson, who happily translated “Grandpa’s Workshop” for all of us, I am willing to cut him some slack. This time. If he abuses anything more than a saison in the future, however, we will have to come down hard upon him.
“A cowherd on the Route de Chou”, near Chimay, Belgium, by Camille Pissarro, 1874
Among the rolling hills and pastoral landscapes of southern Belgium, a countryside of old stone houses with red-tiled roofs and fresh-faced rosy-cheeked milkmaids, a community of Trappist Monks has been lovingly crafting truly divine beer since 1862.
Among those beers is Chimay Blue. As the monks write, “This authentic Belgian beer, whose tinge of fresh yeast is associated with a light rosy flowery touch, is particularly pleasant. Its aroma, perceived as one enjoys it, only accents the delightful sensations revealed by the odour, all revealing a light but agreeable caramelized note.”
The other evening, I happened to be sipping a glass of that particular nectar of the gods, bubbling it gently in my mouth, and then exhaling through my nose, delighting in the yeasty freshness and the rosily caramelized aromas. Was that indeed a floral hint of vanilla beans? But anyway, after finishing an estimate for some translation work and jointing some drywall, I was rummaging around the net for old paint recipes, and there it was:
Beer Paint!
“Distemper made from beer is prepared by mixing pigment and beer (Dark lager as “Rød Tuborg” or “Gamle Carlsberg” is said to be the best (this is an English site but a Danish source) in a way that the paint is having great covering power and is easy to apply.
When working with minor works, for instance decorating like woodgraining or marbling, the beer-colour is often mixed on the palette. The pigment is placed on the palettte, if necessary mixed with other pigments. You dip the brush in the beer and mix the colour on the palette. Use an artistic brush.
Beer paint is often used as a glazing but is not waterproof. If you apply a lacquer afterwards it will make it waterproof.
Qualities: Mat with a beautiful reflection of light. Some of the pigments are glazing but they do not come off.
Drying: 1-2 hours.
Use: Only indoors and only on absorbing material: Paper, setting coat (dry), rough or planed wood.”
Wow, how cool is that? But while I have known folks to get pretty distempered while drinking beer, especially if you spill theirs on the rug, what the heck is distemper paint? Paint in which the binder is a diluted glue, I learned.
Well, why not. They say beer is watery bread, and bread is made from flour, and flour mixed with water was long used as a glue….
The bad news: you have to use good beer. At the store the next day, I was torn between Guinness and the Chimay, but the Chimay was really the only choice because I didn’t need all that much beer to make enough paint for an experiment, and I like Chimay better than Guinness, which is the good news about the bad news about the good beer. No waste. Unless you mix too much paint.
The other thing about beer paint is that apparently the beer should be flat. So that afternoon I found myself whisking beer in a small bowl to get the gas out of it. Cue Roger, my neighbor, who gives me tools, and knocked on the kitchen window, needing a hand.
“Brian, why are you stirring beer in a bowl?” he asked me when I opened the window, taking in the open bottle of Chimay Blue on the kitchen table.
Roger is a kind neighbor with an unusually flexible mindset when it comes to stuff like this. But he was a painter before he was a roofer before he was a plumber. Beer paint was not working for him. He shook his head. “Come on, I have to hang a water heater on a wall down in the Port (an ancient little neighborhood down on the Cher River in my village). The damn thing is too heavy.”
The water tank was sleek, streamlined even, like a re-entry vehicle for a space probe, and the manufacturer had thoughtfully coated it with some kind of greasy wax for the kind of special sheen that spells quality when you are shopping for a water heater. It was impossible to get a grip on the thing: the perfect mix of form and function in design if you would like to torture the people who need to actually install it.
After Roger taught me a number of French idiomatic expressions that one could be jailed for using in public, and dislocating a disk, I mixed up the paint. After messing with it a bit, I found that with the Chimay beer at least, it works better as a kind of wash or stain, but it works best if you gently warm the mix and let the alcohol and some water evaporate.
So I grabbed a stool I made a while back out of some offcuts in glue-lam birch and scraped and sanded the wax/stain off the top to see how it worked.
Looks like a fine beer distemper. Dries hard with no smell.
After a coat of shellac. Works just fine.
— Brian Anderson
IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP when speaking of distemper, monks, shellac, woodworking and mad chefing: A remarkably efficient way to receive an early morning tonsure by your distempered wife using an antique saw is to leave a coffee jar full of shellac flakes, of the same brand that your wife uses in her warm milk in the morning, on the kitchen counter where she might mistake it for a coffee jar full of coffee.
“In the past, the carpenter’s guild enjoyed great prestige. To be a house carpenter was to know how to lay out and join, with precision, the often huge systems of trusses needed to support the enormous weight of a roof in stone or tile. At the time it was very learned work, and lent to those who practiced the art an uncontested predominance.”
— René Fontaine, architect
On the 31st of January, 1783, André-Jacob Roubo stood on a platform 38 meters (125 ft.) above the streets of Paris, which spread out around him in all directions. He was just below the pinnacle of the wooden dome he had designed to cover the round interior courtyard of the Grain Market near the center of the city. The structure spanned 39.5 meters without any internal support, and it had been constructed of an uncountable number of spruce planks, laid out and precisely joined by a small army of carpenters.
Far below, the carpenters were removing the last of the scaffolding that had supported the structure during construction, and, from a safe distance, a large crowd had gathered around the small band of officials from the market and the city.
There had been no volunteers to join Roubo at the top. Would it all come crashing down?
Paris’s grain and flour market, a stone’s throw from the Louvre and the river Seine, had been finished in 1767. The land set aside for the project formed a rough pentagon, and it was decided to build a round building with a courtyard to maximize the available light from the arches on the exterior and interior walls of the building. Over the years, the central court had been haphazardly filled with various rudimentary structures to shelter the merchants as the commerce grew.
France loves its bread as much as it loves its wine.
When the merchants in the market grumbled about the lack of space and the shambles in the courtyard, Paris listened and decided to put a roof on it. It would have been possible to build pillars to support the weight of the structure, but in the spirit of the enlightenment and of Paris, they decided to stretch the limits of the possible, and they engaged a couple of architects to build a dome.
It was a complicated project. There existed in the world at the time domes of a similar size, the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul was 31 meters, the Pantheon in Rome, 43, and the Duomo in Florence spanned 44 meters. But as the noted French architect Louis-Auguste Boileau wrote in a short biography of Roubo in 1834, the market had been built over a number of much older foundations of uncertain strength; and the structure, with its relatively thin walls and all the arches, had not been designed to, and could not possibly be expected to support the weight of a dome in stone and/or brick. Plus, it was a market after all, and the money and time needed for such a structure would have been a deal-ender.
The dome would have to be built in wood. But who could design and build a wooden dome with a span of 39 meters? One of the architect’s assistants had the answer: There was only one man in France who might be able to get the job done.
In early 1782, Roubo received a visit from the young architects, Legrand and Molinos, who had been engaged for the project. He listened to what they wanted and said he needed a night to think about it. The next day, he told them he would do it, but only on condition that he would be free to build the dome as he saw fit.
The details of the conversation were not recorded. But as Boileau wrote, Roubo, who had just finished his masterwork, the series of books “L’art De La Menuiserie,” had an ace in the hole, another book two centuries old. One can imagine him listening to the architects outlining the project and its constraints, and then after asking a night to think about it, pulling a dusty big book off the shelf in his study or in a library. “Inventions to Build Well at Low Cost” (“Inventions Pour Bien Batir à Petites Frais”) by the architect Philibert Delorme, who had worked much of his career for the French king, Henri II, but had been mostly forgotten by Roubo’s time.
The book included way of building various kinds of arches, using ordinary planks intricately joined with pegs, notches and wedges. The arches are joined together using an integral network of wedged crossbars to form a vault or a dome. The result is a remarkably light and modern construction that concentrated the stresses in tension and compression to take advantage of the strengths of wood and prefigured similar designs in iron and steel. It was in sharp contrast to traditional wooden roof structures based on the triangle, where the maximum span was dictated mostly by the wood available in suitable length and dimensions for the base.
The construction took only five months. But, as you can imagine, when building a new type of structure at that scale requiring countless thousands of pieces of wood that are shaped by hand to very high tolerances by a small army of carpenters, all did not go to plan. Boileau in his biography wrote: “(H)e encountered difficulties of every type, and personally checked and adjusted if need be, the numberless pieces of wood… ”
So on that January day, the last of the scaffolding was taken away. The crowd held its breath. And nothing happened. Roubo’s design had worked. The waiting crowd swarmed into the Grain Market and carried Roubo away on their shoulders in triumph.
The dome was roofed in lead and copper with large vertical strips of glass to illuminate the interior. The structure performed as designed for almost 20 years until it was destroyed in 1802 by wood’s ancient enemy: fire. The dome was later rebuilt in iron, and the work took not five months, but five years to complete, between 1806 and 1811. The building now houses France’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
Boileau wrote that the innovative structure made Roubo famous throughout Europe and brought in a lot of business both in Paris and from around the continent. It is also said that the dome was much admired by a later visitor to Paris, the then-American ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson, who famously had a thing for domes.
— Brian Anderson
Editor’s note: You can order our special edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” until the end of January 2013 and guarantee you will receive a copy. Details in our store.
Despite word from Tibet from my milk paint supplier that Agnes the yak was busy assembling her hope chest and flirting shamelessly with a certain strapping young specimen of yakhood, I decided that I needed to take the bull by the horns and get on with painting my six-board chest.
Vinegar, skim milk, a stainless soup pan, spaghetti strainer and a measuring cup.
I poured a liter (quart) of skim milk into the soup pan, let it warm on very low heat to the point where there were just the faintest hints of steam coming off it, and then added 4 cl (1.5 fluid ounces) of vinegar –stirring a few swipes, enough to mix, but no more. This is not a critical thing, the curds will form in one way or another. You can even just let it sit at room temperature, but that will take hours. The important thing is not to bring the mix to a boil.
The fresh cheese.
I did this twice, and the second time I ended up with much less cohesive curds. No matter. After washing, it looked the same. If you substitute whole milk and maybe a little cream, and lemon juice in place of the vinegar, the same process will yield a fabulous farmer’s (or ricotta or quark if you want to be fancy about it) cheese.
The finished cottage cheese, cement/lime-mortar pigment, and hydraulic lime.
You pour out the “cottage cheese” into a strainer lined with cotton cloth, and then rinse it under cold water two or three times. Given that vinegar is an acid used to curdle the casein milk protein and separate it from the whey, this is an important step in that a basic powder in the form of slaked lime or chalk is often added to the cheese, which if not rinsed could cause a chemical reaction that would spoil the mix, at least. Then I added water to a handful of slaked lime with a couple of pinches of borax mixed in. In place of the slaked lime, you could use various kinds of finely ground chalk powder, or nothing. The lime or chalk powder is a filler, and results in a more pastel color. But some just add the pigment directly to the cheese and go from there. The borax is to help break down the casein protein in the fresh cheese, increase the adhesiveness of the paint, and adds some anti-microbial protection.
It took a while to mix all of the lumps out. Would have gone faster with an electric mixer, but that would have been too much for even my remarkably tolerant better half. “Darling, you know I love it when you whip up a new recipe, but if you even think about serving rusty nails and hinges braised in vinegar this evening, you will be sleeping in the rabbit hutch tonight.” We don’t have a doghouse.
The other thing was I used a natural hydraulic lime, NHL3.5, instead of the non-hydraulic lime usually recommended, because that was what I had. It worked OK, but you have to use the paint quickly and stir often because the lime will start into its hydraulic set after a while, and the paint becomes useless.
The chest after two coats.
It doesn’t show in the photo, but I used a little more lime and a little less pigment for the second coat and it gave the chest the slightly two-toned look I was aiming for.
Mostly people use linseed oil for a topcoat over the milk paint to give it a little depth and a slight gloss. I wanted to finish the inside of the chest, too. You can’t use linseed oil inside a chest, especially one that will be used to hold clothes or linens, because it starts to stink after a while. So I opted for some lovely natural shellac I picked up a while back. Just the ticket.
Very slight gloss, nicely highlighting the cross-grain tear-out from the moulding plane. Whoops.
It’s done.
All in all a good experiment. Start to finish, making the paint is about a 20-minute process. There are a number of recipes online. Lots of different permutations, but the upshot is that it really isn’t that critical what you do or which ingredients/quantities you opt for, as long as you make enough for the whole job, or are looking for the slightly two-tone effect.