One of the many vernacular furniture forms I’m fascinated with is the Orkney chair, which combines joined pieces of wood (sometimes driftwood) plus woven straw for the back.
The chair saw great commercial success starting in the late 19th century when David Kirkness began making them in large numbers in his workshop in the Orkney Islands, Scotland. Kirkness’s shop made upward of 14,000 chairs in his lifetime, according to the V&A exhibit.
The chairs are still made today commercially by such makers as Robert H. Towers, SCAPA Crafts and Fraser Anderson. And there is a robust market for them among antique dealers.
I like them, particularly the hooded version, because they combine joinery with lipwork, where complete chairs would be made of woven straw.
The V&A’s furniture exhibit currently has three of Kirkness’s chairs on display and they are delightful. As always, it’s much different seeing an object in person than on a flat screen.
If I’m granted another lifetime, one of the things I’d like to do is to create audio tours of museums designed for furniture makers.
Yesterday, Lucy and I spent several hours in the British Museum, and I kept thinking: “Dang it, I don’t want to see any more sculptures of battles or boobies. Show me people working.”
If you look close, there’s a wealth of information on furniture, tools and craft in general in almost every room. You just have to look with care and at the right things. For example, instead of looking at the mummies in the display case, check out the corner joinery on the box that held the mummy. Is that a nailed butt joint or something else?
In the Greek sculpture section, you can skip the people reclining with a jug of wine and instead check out the klismos chairs (shown above). These early chairs look insanely contemporary with their curved legs and (in some images) curved backs. The design of this chair rears its head every time classicism makes a comeback in the decorative arts. During the last few thousand years, furniture makers have made the curved legs in a variety of ways – cutting them from solid, steambending and bent laminations. I wonder how the originals were made?
Exhibits of Roman artifacts (every European town has them) always display a wealth of tools and nails. The British Museum calls out this tool as a drawknife used for making barrel staves. They could be right. I think it looks like a scorp, which could be used for hollowing out many objects, including bowls and chair seats.
Even the religious stuff can have woodworking undertones. These small bronze bowsaws (about the side of a quarter) were left as a votive offering at early Christian churches during Roman times. I love how these slightly stylized representations of bowsaws even show which way the teeth cut.
After I finish making audio tours of all the world’s museums, then I’ll compile a book of all the best woodworking scenes in literature. And a film of all the best woodworking parts in movies.
The most important thing the bench does for you is hold a job whilst you work on it. (I remember my early days without a bench, struggling to hold work with one hand whilst cutting with the other. I am amazed I came out without more damage to my digits. The opportunity to saw off part or all of my hand was a daily event.) The bench is just a giant, flat holding device that allows you to get into the correct position to do the work properly. You are then free to concentrate on balance and being in control. That’s what matters – control.
There are a few things a cabinetmaker’s bench has to be. It has to be heavy. You will be exerting horizontal and vertical forces on it, and you don’t want it moving around – so spend some money on timber and make it heavy.
The bench is just a giant, flat holding device that allows you to get into the correct position to do the work properly. You are then free to concentrate on balance and being in control. PHOTO: WR PHOTOGRAPHY
Make your bench to suit your height. This is critical. Many benches I see are very low. The bench height we suggest has rewarded us with strong, undamaged backs. It’s a high bench surface set up for general planing. To determine the right height for you, stand alongside a bench. Bend your elbow. Extend the forefinger and thumb of your left hand. Touch your thumb to your elbow. The point of the forefinger is where your benchtop should be. This will do for almost all work. In case you do need to get on top of a job, keep a small “hop-up box” stored beneath the front rail.
The bench has to have tool well. This is the place to gather the tools in use for a given project. The working surface of the bench should be kept as clear as possible at all times. The benchtop is for the job at hand – nothing else. We know that this game is about skill with speed, and speed is about organisation and picking up and putting down tools fast. Thinking ahead, not being slowed down by a lost chisel in a pile of shavings, is key. We go nuts about such professional practice at Rowden. At the end of day, we put tools away sharp. I know you are tired, but sharpen your tools, sweep the benchtop, sweep the floor – then go home.
Kentucky turkey-wing bench brush.
Benchtops need to be swept down regularly to keep them free of dust and shavings. Christopher Schwarz sent me this brush as a memento of our visit to Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill. Just look at the design and workmanship! The ends of the bristles thin down to fine strands, and at the bottom they form not a straight line but a gentle arc. Perfect for this job. Look at the binding wrapping elegantly in groups of three, then a gap, gathering more with the movement of each group of three down the handle. At the base, the full handle is bound with an inexplicable hanging hook, coming from the centre of the binding. How did they do that? This, Chris calls a Turkey Wing, I call it the best bench brush ever to have been made.
A clean, well-lighted place.
You can go a long way with great bench, a bag of good, sharp hand tools and good bench light. As my eyes have dimmed, the number of bench lights I need has increased – but you will likely need only one, a good one that can be moved around all over the place.
Workbench elevation.
Workbench Plan.
Workbench Profile.
The tool well collects everything from shavings to dust, tea mugs to half-eaten sandwiches. That’s what it’s for. The bench surface is golden territory – keep it clear and clean; do it no damage. When making this surface, you will respond to the timber that you actually have available. But don’t be tempted to make the bench surface too wide. You need to keep this surface flat, and if it’s very wide, you will need very long arms to flatten it…and the task will be tiresome and not done as regularly as it should. There will come times, usually when developing third-scale prototypes, that you use this bench surface as a datum reference surface – so it’s important to keep it spot on. Our practice is that at the end of every big job, the surface is dressed lightly with a bench plane. Just a shaving all over gets it clean, flat and new – ready for the next job.
The American Welsh stick chair I built in London last week. It’s made from European oak.
When I travel overseas, I sometimes take melatonin to help my body adjust to a new time zone. The good news: I think it works. The weird news: I have the strangest dreams when I take it.
This month, I’m in the U.K. to teach a few classes, take in some sights and do some serious chair research in High Wycombe, Wales and Ireland. Right now, I’m in London teaching a couple classes organized by Derek Jones at the school where he works, London Design & Engineering UTC.
On the night after my plane arrived, I was tossing about in the hotel bed, worried about the details of the chair class that was to begin the next morning. I took a tablet of melatonin and dreamt of chairs.
In the dream, I made a stick chair using plywood. The plywood arm was only one piece (and it had a doubler laminated on top). Here was the weird part – I was totally calm about the one-piece arm because there is no short grain in plywood.
Then I saddled the plywood seat and was fascinated by revealing the plies below with a travisher. It was like making a topographic map. The legs and crest were also plywood. The sticks were solid wood (I think).
When I woke up, I took a long hot shower to calm my pre-teaching jitters and realized that my dream wasn’t entirely stupid. In fact, by the time I had dried myself off, I had resolved to build a plywood stick chair.
Yes, I know you don’t like it. Please file your complaints with our Complaint Office.
Heck, I don’t even know if I like it, but I do know that I have to build it. When an idea gets under my skin – even a stupid idea – the only way to exorcise it is to construct it. So I’m going to pick up some Baltic birch ply when I get home and give it a go.
Full-panel construction, sometimes called slab or wide-panel construction, consists of a single board, or a series of boards glued up to form a wider panel. In a case piece, the grain would run up one side, across the top, down the other side and along the bottom. As reiterated from Chapter 1, wood moves across the grain but not in length. Consequently, a carcase built using wide panels will retain its height and width, but the front-to-back depth will vary depending on the seasons and humidity. In the case of a blanket box, the grain wraps all the way around, and the height varies from summer to winter.
Frame-and-panel (or stick-and-panel) construction consists of a relatively narrow frame running around all four sides of a panel, which, no matter what the size of the panel, is free to “float” in the frame, and has no bearing on the wood movement of the frame. Because the frame has long grain running up, across, down and back, the frame remains the same size year-round. There are pros and cons to both approaches, so let’s have a closer look.
Wide-panel pine blanket box. In this example, the depth and width remain the same, while the height changes slightly from summer to winter. DENNIS GRIGGS PHOTO.
Until the Middle Ages, Western furniture was all constructed of wide boards or joined panels. However, the Egyptians, as early as the reign of Tutankhamun around 1,300 BCE, used frame-and-panel construction for some of their very ornate pieces. The obvious advantage to wide-board construction is that it’s much less work. A six-board chest requires six boards, joinery or nails, and voilà, you’re done. If you’re going to use frame-and-panel construction for all six surfaces, you will require at least five pieces of wood for each surface, or 30 pieces of wood for the entire exterior case. All those pieces have to be edged, grooved and mortised or tenoned. Right off the bat, the frame-and-panel construction is much more work. Most frame-and-panel building is actually a hybrid, utilizing frames and panels for the sides, bottom and back, and a wide board or panel for the top. Nobody wants an expansion gap on a desktop or cabinet top. The same goes for shelves, and sometime bottoms, if the interior is to be used as a shelf. It just invites dust and crumbs to collect on any horizontal surface gaps. So the top of a desk or cabinet, or shelves made with single panels, have to be attached in a manner that allows wood to move with the seasons. With all that extra work, you get a cabinet that is extremely stable, and all those frames can be glued together in any configuration without having to deal with movement (except for the top and shelves).
Frame-and-panel Shaker tailor counter in figured cherry. This is more complex to construct than a wide-panel construction, but it’s very stable. DENNIS GRIGGS PHOTO.
Wide-panel cases go together much faster and look a lot cleaner, because there are not gaps or interruptions in the grain. Once the four sides are together, expansion and contraction becomes a major issue whenever grain runs perpendicular to an existing panel. Think doors, backs, web frames and mouldings. Most woodworkers opt for an approach that is a hybrid in those situations.
