“High Wycombe itself has reacted to civic events with real enthusiasm over the years, and when any Royal event or visit has been arranged, pride of place among the bunting and crowns and other decorations has been the traditional arch of chairs which spans the road by the Guildhall. Rising over 30 feet, it consisted of a solid mass of six or seven hundred chairs surmounted by a row of the large more opulent armchairs on the top.”
— “The English Country Chair” by Ivan G. Sparkes (Spurbooks Ltd., 1973)
Several people have asked for drawings of the three-tiered Nicholson campaign chest I’m finishing up this month.
The bad news: I don’t have detailed drawings.
Good news: You don’t need them.
The chest is built using the same techniques shown in “Campaign Furniture.” The only differences are the drawer graduations and the fact that there are three cases instead of two. I suppose that the feet are a bit different, but I just made those up and you can do that, too.
Below is a zipped SketchUp file of my working drawing. It is just a box with some dimensions on it – nothing to get excited about (there’s a reason they have “sketch” in the name of the program). If you don’t own SketchUp, you can open the file in the free SketchUp viewer.
After the busiest Spring on record, I’ve managed to turn down the volume a bit in the workshop and return my focus to the new projects for “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” One of the projects I’m most excited about is a so-called Mule Chest.
I’ve always liked the format. It’s a chest with a couple drawers and it is incredibly easy to build with nails and rabbets. (Much easier than a traditional chest of drawers.) Mule chests look great in pine or an inexpensive hardwood. And they go together as quickly as a six-board chest.
In designing my version for “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” I wanted to retain its historical simplicity but bring the form into the present day. That meant reducing the ornamentation and adding some asymmetry.
It looks good on paper. And the mule’s skeleton is looking promising as well.
The good news is that if the design looks like crap, it will be easy to bang out another one with different proportions.
Even on my final project – pre-worm-food – I’m sure I’ll remind myself to “begin at the bottom or the back.”
What does that mean? Basically, whenever I perform an operation that will be repeated, I start by working the least-visible area. In a blanket chest, that means dovetailing the least-visible back corner first. When fitting drawers, I begin with the bottom drawer (which is the hardest to see when you are standing before the finished item). When installing hardware, I begin with the hinge, plate or pull that is hardest to see.
This should be obvious to everyone all the time. But when I teach classes and observe other woodworkers, almost all of them begin instead with the most visible joint, drawer, hinge etc.
Today I started installing all the strapwork and corner guards on this Nicholson three-tiered campaign chest. And I remembered to begin by first chopping out the mortises that will eventually face the wall. That allowed me to warm up and work out any details of my chopping and fitting process.
As luck would have it, these mortises (which no one else will see) also happened to be my most-perfect ones.
So drat. But still, always begin work at the bottom or back.
William Buttre trade label, 1813-1814. From the Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur.
High-backs, low-backs, ball-backs, sack-backs, crown backs. The terms used by chairmakers to describe the details of a chair are various and often confusing. The 1996 issue of American Furniture included a meaty article by Nancy Goyne Evans (author of many books and article on chairs) titled ‘Frog Backs to Turkey Legs: The Nomenclature of Vernacular Furniture 1740-1850.’
