My July column for Core77 is now available to read (for free, as always) and discusses what I call the “exploitation” of wood. Here’s the direct link.
The column is, at its heart, about why you should learn everything possible about your raw materials – I seek to know wood as well as I know my wife, Lucy. And it demonstrates how this deep knowledge can be used using three examples from woodworking. In other words, it’s fairly woodworking-y.
The next column will be on the process and strategies I use to design furniture, especially the overall form. Yes, some of this is covered in “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” Some isn’t.
I wrote about the following trick to reduce splitting when nailing in “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” Since then, I’ve caught flack from people who say it’s not true. So much so that I’ve been doubting my own shop experience.
Here’s the problem: When you nail together a piece – especially using cut nails or Rivierre nails – it’s easy to blow out the end grain, reducing the holding power of the nail. Driving a tapered nail is a delicate balance. You need the nail to bite hard, so you don’t want to use a huge or too-long pilot hole. But if you use a pilot hole that is too small or short, the nail will split the work and ruin everything. Oh, you also have to account for the wood species and how thick it is.
It’s a balance of factors to get a good joint. (And that’s why I recommend you make a test joint before nailing together anything – especially if you’ve never worked with a particular brand of nail or species of wood.)
All this is a lot of set-up for…
A common split. This joint was unclamped when I drove the nail.Here’s the joint (a few inches away from the failed joint) after the joint was clamped hard while I drove the nail.
Here’s the Trick If you apply a bar clamp across the end grain of the joint, you can reduce the tendency of the wood to split out the end grain. The clamp has to apply significant pressure for this to work.
Today I tried a variety of strategies as I nailed together a mule chest using 40mm Rivierre nails. All the joints were in Eastern white pine. All the pilot holes were the same diameter (7/64”) and depth (7/8”). And all the holes were located the same distance (7/16”) from the end of the board.
Without a clamp, about half of the joints busted out the end grain (good thing I started at the rear of the chest). When I added a clamp and applied hard clamping pressure – what you would use to close a joint – the failure rate dropped to zero.
I wondered if I needed to have the clamp at full pressure. What if the clamp’s pad simply acted as a wall to prevent the end grain from fracturing? Nope. Clamp pressure – lots of it – was important to keep the joint intact while driving the nail.
I have all sorts of thoughts on why this hard clamp pressure works. But I am weary of theories. If you’ve read this far, give this trick a try yourself in the shop before pontificating in the comments.
Confession: I was greatly relieved that this trick still worked. The internet had made me doubt myself again.
You can greatly increase the strength of a woodworking joint by “sizing the joint” or employing “glue size.” But what the heck do those terms mean? And how does the process work?
The word “size” as it relates to an adhesive is a synonym for “washcoat” – a thinned version of the adhesive you are using. “Sizing” with a glue has a long history in our language, and it is employed in a variety of ways – fine art painting, house painting, wallpaper and other mechanical arts.
Basically, to “size” a joint means to apply a thin, preliminary coat of glue to a surface.
Why would anyone do this in woodworking?
I know you’ve been told this a thousand times, but wood is like a bundle of straws. The end grain represents the open ends of the straws. So when you put a liquid on the end of a straw, what happens? It gets sucked into the straw. When you put a liquid on the outside of a straw what happens? If that liquid is glue, then the straws get bound together.
This straw-like property is why end-grain joints in wood are weak. The straws suck the glue away from the joint, starving it of adhesive.
But what if we could plug these straws so they couldn’t suck the glue away from the joint?
And that’s what “glue size” does. The thin coat gets sucked into the end grain. After a couple minutes it begins to set up, which plugs up the straws. Then you apply a full coat of glue, and it cannot be sucked away from the joint – thanks to the plugs. So the joint becomes stronger as a result.
I’ve been experimenting with glue size for more than a decade. At first I thinned glue with water to create my “size.” That seemed logical. It turned out to be unnecessary. Simply paint a thin coat of glue on the end grain and the process works perfectly. Yellow, white and brown glues are all about 40 percent water already and are easily sucked into end grain without any thinning.
After I paint on the “sizing coat,” I wait a minute or two (or longer). The end grain will become dry as it pulls the adhesive in. That’s when I apply a full coat of glue on the end grain and on all face-grain surfaces of the joint.
It takes only an additional minute or two to apply a sizing coat during assembly. In fact, it can add exactly zero time to a glue-up if you simply start by painting all the end-grain surfaces first. Then paint the face-grain surfaces. Then paint the end grain again.
Does it work? The scientists at Franklin International have studied sizing and compared the strength of joints with and without it. As far as I know, they haven’t published a technical paper on this topic. But in interviews they contend that sizing the joint significantly improves its strength. After 23 years of working with the technologists at Franklin, I can say one thing for sure: They’ve never lied to me or led me astray.
One of the kitchens among those in the book I’m writing for Lost Art Press is in a newly built house on a hilltop in a spectacular rural location. When the clients first contacted me about their kitchen, they described the architectural character of the house as “farmhouse style.” But their architect’s drawings – beautiful artifacts in their own right – launched me into a mini-rant on this widespread misnomer.
The story behind this simple, affordable cabinetry for my clients’ kitchen will be in the book.Google “farmhouse style” and you’ll find thousands of links to furnishings, blog posts and print publications based on misinformation. On the one hand, you’ll find vapid marketing-speak such as the following, in a post billing itself as “The Ultimate Guide to Farmhouse Style”: Farmhouse style is “unpretentious” and “all-American,” according to the author. “Nodding to its homegrown roots, farmhouse style homes have a collected-over-time look, complete with old-school prints, distressed furnishings, and vintage finishes.”[1] The kitchens and other rooms provided in this post by way of illustration are indistinguishable from those of suburban condos across the land, although you may find a throw pillow or dish towel made to evoke associations with old flour sacks, or an old saw with a barn painted on it hanging over a door.
On the more substantive end of the misinformation spectrum you’ll find images of dining rooms with wide-plank floors, exposed beams (whether real or made of high-density polyurethane such as the brand-name product Fypon), vaulted ceilings clad with reclaimed wood and interior walls of exposed brick or stone (again, whether structural or simply a decorative product applied to the surface, which some traditional masons derisively call “lick ‘n’ stick”) as illustrations of farmhouse style. Here, some effort has at least been made to relate to an aesthetic traditionally found on farms. The problem is one of misidentification: The aesthetic is drawn not from the farmhouse, but from the barn.
Historically, farmhouses have simply been houses on farms. They were (and still are) built in the prevailing architectural style of their time and location – a simple 1890s Gothic Revival here, a charming 1920s story-and-a-half bungalow there, a 1915 I-house or a 1950s ranch. These real farmhouses are visible in rural areas across the country. Not having yet had a chance to photograph a few for the book, I’m illustrating this post with examples from a favorite alternative source, a building almanac for farmers published by the United States Gypsum Company in 1946 – clearly in an effort to sell the company’s building products in addition to providing a variety of practical advice. Several years ago, my friend Kim Fisher (my version of Lost Art Press’s Saucy Indexer) came across this gem and sent it to me.
“Mrs. M.” recommends adding a screened porch. Remodeling advice for farm homes in the 1946 “Business of FARMING Building Almanac: 748 Ideas for Building-Remodeling-Decorating.” (United States Gypsum Co.) Notice the radical change to the architectural style of the house from the “before” to the Colonialized “after.”
“Use color for a common denominator,” advises the 1946 “Business of FARMING Building Almanac: 748 Ideas for Building-Remodeling-Decorating.” (United States Gypsum Co.)
Historically speaking, there is no such thing as “farmhouse style”; it’s a mish-mash of superficial farm-evoking tropes, albeit one that tens of thousands now refer to by that name. In reality, the association of “farmhouse style” with exposed structural elements and a stripped-down, whitewashed aesthetic derives from the culture of barns.
As I revise and expand “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” I’m also examining the pieces I built for it five years ago to see if I can learn anything to improve them.
The Boarded Tool Chest in Chapter 15 is one design I was worried about. When I make a tool chest, I dovetail the ever-loving snot out of it. The boarded tool chest, however, is all rabbets, nails and glue – like a cheap kitchen drawer.
But I built it on a leap of faith. In February 2015 I saw Jonathan Fisher’s tool chest at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. It had survived 200 years and was in good shape – no major repairs or loose joints. Plus, I had come to really appreciate the holding power of cut nails and Roman nails. After making some test joints, I tried to take them apart and ended up destroying the wood before the fastener would give up.
The Fisher tool chest at the Farnsworth Art Museum in 2015.
The chest shown here is one of about five or six boarded tool chests I made. I kept this one to use as a site box as we remodeled the storefront in Covington. For the first three years of its life, it held carpentry tools and was battered endlessly as I dragged it around the first floor and machine room. (Eventually I added nice casters that I’d scavenged from another chest.)
Now the chest holds tools for students and still sees some bumps and bruises. It also serves as a sawbench, a stool and a way for short people to reach things in high places.
Honestly, I have no problems with how the chest has worked. The corner rabbets are as tight as the day I made them with hide glue and rosehead nails. The tills – also nailed – still move smoothly and nothing has come loose. The pine top has remained flat thanks to the oak battens on the underside.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a dovetailed tool chest. But for home woodworkers who might not have the time for such a complex project, building it with roseheads, rabbets and glue is a sound alternative. Just make sure your joints are tight, you use the right nail, your pilot holes aren’t too big or too deep, and you size the end grain of the joint before assembly.
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