We have them in stock here as of 7:45 p.m. Eastern. (SOLD OUT)
What. Why. How.
Editor’s note: As we wrote about in August, longtime LAP author Don Williams is writing a new book, “A Period Finisher’s Manual.” Don is a conservator, craftsman and author of many articles and several Lost Art Press books, and the maker of Mel’s Wax, a patented archival furniture care product. This post has been adapted from his new book’s introduction. Don is currently editing the manuscript and taking lots of pictures at the finishing bench.
It’s probably not the best marketing approach but now that the first draft of “A Period Finisher’s Manual” (APFM) is in the compewder it is probably time to scribe a few words about what it is not. That’s right, what it is not.
Even the title gives a clue; it is not “The Period Finisher’s Manual,” not “The Complete Finisher’s Manual” nor “The Ultimate Guide To Finishing.” Regardless of the subject or context those kinds of book titles almost always make me roll my eyes audibly. Epistemologically they strike me as pretentious and implicitly fraudulent; even The Bible confirms there was a lot more going on than there was time and space to record it all. I am personally not burdened with undue humility, but any book I write is by definition incomplete. To quote the punchline to an old joke, “An expert is a guy with a briefcase a long way from home.” I’m at home so my work can only include a portion of knowledge. So my title is “A Period Finisher’s Manual.”
Another thing APFM is not is a slavish catechism of pre-industrial finishing practices. No, you will not need to don knee breeches and replace your electric lights with tallow lanterns or wax candles in order to comply with the thrust of its message. You do not need to be strictly limited to the materials and tools available to the 18th-century workshops of London, Paris or Williamsburg. Certainly these form the conceptual and practical foundations but are instead the guides to thinking about finishing compatible with the technologies and aesthetics of the past. It’s sorta like the tag line for Don’s Barn: “Where modern craft meets the past.” APFM is about a way of working at the woodfinishing bench that transcends the limitations of orbital sanders and catalytic spray lacquers. Hint: You are probably not astonished when I suggest that old-timey hand-worked surfaces and their finishes are the more beautiful option. Just my opinion, of course (but I am right).
Were I forced to describe APFM briefly, it would be “The What, Why, and How approach to traditional woodfinishing.”
What?
“A Period Finisher’s Manual” is not any sort of definitive survey of finishing materials and processes. It is a selective review of just a few materials and practices predating the Age of Synthetic Chemistry: a few waxes, a few varnish resins, and a few oils, applied (or not) with elegantly simple tools. The greatest attempt to recount a complete inventory of materials and processes available to the finishing enterprise was the magnificent WWII-era undertaking “Protective and Decorative Coatings” by Joseph J. Mattiello, consuming multiple volumes and almost 4,000 pages. Yes, I own and have scoured the set, along with its 1970s-era successor “Treatise on Coatings” by Myers and Long, and the most recent “Organic Coatings” by Pappas, Jones and Wick.
I could enter into writing APFM with the expectation that the reader would undertake a thorough study of these tomes beforehand, but that would likely be an unfulfilled expectation. So necessarily APFM will be restricted to materials and information the reader is most likely to actually use.
Why?
Recently I was corresponding with my friend John, a former seminarian, about the meaning of a particular passage in the New Testament. At one point in the discussion John said something to the effect of, “You can only get so far in this without reading Greek.” What does that have to do with woodfinishing (other than the possible implicit divinity of the craft)? Well, in the very same exchange John reminded me of my exhortation to students that, “In woodfinishing you can only get so far without learning some chemistry.” That said, “A Period Finisher’s Manual” is not a chemistry textbook. Rather than bombarding you with such exquisite knowledge, even though it would no doubt thrill a small cohort of readers, APFM integrates chemistry and its parent, materials science, as I believe necessary for the finisher to understand why things happen as they do on the surface of the wood. Solvent theory, molecular weight, adhesion, rheology, film formation, gloss, diffractive index, surface tension and many other components of successful finishing are essentially manifestations of molecular properties.
So too is color, even though I spend almost no time or words on the subject. APFM is not a color technology book, at least in the context of historic dyes and stains on bare wood. I find little use for ancient recipes for chemical wood stains in my own work so the topic is not addressed in any meaningful depth here beyond japanning and interlaminar glazing.
The need for understanding materials science in the finishing room is a constant theme running through the art form. One vignette from my own past is a fairly omnipresent reminder to me. Forty-five years ago, while working as a “scratch and dent man” for a furniture store, I was charged with touching up a set of bilious French Pretentious bedroom furniture. (Pop Quiz – Q. What’s the difference between a furniture repairman’s “touching up” and a conservator’s “inpainting?” A. About $75/hour.) Though I have a pretty good eye for color and layered finishes it was a struggle to get to an acceptable appearance, in the end involving the forcible integration of powder pigments with a concoction of spirit varnish, oil paint and latex. With these three totally incompatible materials I got it to work through the sheer application of energy, in this case the forced agitation with a brush. I was so pleased with the result that I bragged about it to my friends. Hey, I was 19.
Knowing what I now know about material properties, I have to wonder if at some point later the touched-up areas simply exploded off the surface. As my late friend and colleague Mel Wachowiak used to say, “With enough force you can pull the tail off a living cow.” I guess the same is true for incompatible woodfinishing materials. I got them to work together under the whiplash of vigorous mixing, but some understanding of the chemistry involved sure would have helped me then and it will help you in your future projects.
Which leads directly into another descriptor of what APFM is not – a stuffy academic book. I won’t say that Chris put his foot down, but he did suggest in a most emphatic manner that any book with hundreds of footnotes was unlikely to be appearing in the LAP catalog. Any technical citations will simply be folded into the folksy banter of the text. If you have read my other books or follow my blog you will know what to expect – big words when necessary, good humor always.
How?
“A Period Finisher’s Manual” is not a book of “how-to” tricks. Pets and circus animals do tricks, craftsmen have skills and techniques. (I’ve literally warned editors if the word “tricks” ever appeared in concert with one of my articles our working relationship was terminated.)
Instead, APFM is my attempt to describe a systematic approach to woodfinishing, complete with several dozen detailed verbal and visual descriptions – basically the How? culminating the What? and Why? considerations I mentioned above. By walking through a variety of finishing projects, complete with conceptual rationales and step-by-step visual representations, I hope to instill you with the confidence to embrace finishing as something to be anticipated with a delight rather than be feared and loathed, and ultimately, shortchanged. I have seen far too many examples of wonderfully designed and skillfully crafted woodworking projects that were betrayed by their makers’ puking some polyurinate on the surface with little understanding and less care.
Decades of woodfinishing (and teaching same) confirm that despite its vagaries it can be a predictable step-by-step process built on a foundation of technical and artistic understanding. So, I’m organizing the book’s contents the same way I organize the concepts and practices for my own woodfinishing, resulting in predictably good results.
Perhaps I should have titled it “A Predictable Finisher’s Manual,” or even “A Contented Finisher’s Manual.”
Because in the end, it is also not unpredictable and definitely not intimidating. It is in essence the very reason we make stuff.
— Don Williams
Building the Seat of a Cardigan Chair
This is an excerpt from “Welsh Stick Chairs” by John Brown.
Having cut out the seat, the first job is to clean up the sawn edge. Here is a wooden jack-plane in use. I very rarely buy new tools. They are expensive and mostly made of cheese. A plane like the one I am using costs about £10, and the blades are thicker and made of much superior steel, either cast or laminated. Put an edge on that and it will last several times longer than a new iron for a modem plane. There are many good dealers who sell old tools. I often find interesting items on market stalls.
Having cleaned the seat up, I have to decide which is the top and bottom. Only experience can tell me this. What I am trying to do is get a good ‘picture’ on the completed seat, a nice grain pattern. As it has to be scalloped out, this is not always easy to tell. I mark the top and bottom with a pencil line 2″ from the edge. The marker gauge is a simple oak tool that one of my sons made many years ago.
A sculptor’s adze in use to ‘bottom’ the seat. This is not a traditional way of doing this. I have and can use the full size gutter adze. However, if you look at the average dining-chair seat you will notice very gradual curves and probably a maximum depth of 1/2″, possibly only 3/8″. I like to cut in from my pencil line at a much sharper angle, and by using a small adze I can more easily control this. Also, I leave less to do with the finishing tools.
The small adze has a curve across the blade. It is used across the grain, and several passes must be made to achieve the right depth. All wood of the same species varies. An oak on a hill, in a valley, parkland oak, oak grown in windy conditions; they are all a bit different. None varies more then elm. Even a different part of the same tree can have totally different characteristics. I recall sailors talking about a ‘soldiers’ wind – blows both ways at once. Well, the grain in elm is similar. This is a nice piece and is behaving well.
Chamfering the underside of the seat. This is one of the ways of taking the chunkiness out of the seat. Sometimes I round the bottom, some chairs I leave the edge at its original thickness, just taking off the arras top and bottom. All this is purely for appearance, and I go through phases, sometimes favouring one way, sometimes another. I have to do this part after chopping as otherwise the seat is difficult to hold in the vice.
I screw a block of wood under the seat to hold it in the vice. The tool I am using here is a small ‘round both ways’ plane with handles. This again is a home-made tool. Chair-makers traditionally used travishers. Travishers are very hard to come by. I suspect this is because most of them are hanging neatly on the walls of the High Wycombe chair museum, or, because of their scarcity, are in collections. I abhor this situation; tools are for use. On the three visits I have made to the chair museum at Wycombe, I have been the only visitor, and I stand with mouth watering looking at literally dozens and dozens of travishers. Such is life. My tool works well, however.
The next stage in smoothing the seat. This is a scorp. It’s a drawknife bent to a semi-circle and is really a cooper’s tool. The scorp has a bevel on the outside, so it is reasonably easy to grind and sharpen. I find that for this work an engineer’s vice bolted on top of the bench is essential. All the work is at a reasonable height, and my back does not suffer. I line the jaws with wooden blocks, and there is hardly a job in chair-making in which I do not use this vice.
I decided to put a bead around this seat. I don’t know why. It was quite unnecessary. I am using a block of wood with a screw protruding about 3/8″. The edges of the screw head are filed sharp. Of 400 or so chairs I have built I have perhaps beaded a dozen. On this chair it looks alright, but it would have been just as alright without it. There’s a lesson here somewhere.
God forbid that I should ever have a fire in the workshop, but if I did, and had to get out in a hurry, I’d make sure my dumbscrape was in my pocket. This is a magical tool. Called a cabinet scraper in the tool catalogues, it is sharpened to have a wire edge with a burnisher of hard steel. It cuts like a plane – see the curly shavings on this seat. When they come from the shop they are oblong, square-sided. For this kind of work the edges need grinding to a gentle curve. It is a most pleasing business using a scraper.
Ah, man’s vanity! This is the signature I put on all my work. I did it. Well, I did part of it. I have a partner – the Great Chair-maker – so I put a cross, as we Celtic people see it. There is no point in smoothing the underside of the chair. It does not show unless the chair is turned upside down, and working with hand-tools only, one tends not to spend time on unnecessary things.
— Meghan B.
An Alternate Ending for F+W Media
F+W Media Inc., the parent of my beloved Popular Woodworking Magazine, filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 on Sunday, reporting it has more than $100 million in debt and a host of problems with its e-commerce business.
You can download the entire filing here.
It will be easy for people to shrug their shoulders at the bleeding out of another mid-level media business. After all, who subscribes to magazines anymore? Or reads physical books?
I, however, would like to paint a different picture for you. Imagine the rest of this blog entry in the voice of Bob Ross.
It wasn’t the changing economy that (perhaps) mortally wounded this once-magnificent company. It was debt and venture capital, plain and simple.
When I started at F&W Publications Inc. in 1996, it was owned by the Rosenthal family, which started the company in 1913 around two magazines: Writer’s Digest and Farm (writing and farming were the “F” and the “W” in the name). The company owned its building outright. It had no debt. It had a fully functional warehouse. Its biggest weakness was it was a technological backwater. (When I left seven years ago it was, ahem, still a technological backwater.)
In 1999, we were told that the third generation of Rosenthals didn’t want to run the business, so we were being sold to a group of investors.
First order of business for the investors: Sell the building, grab the cash for the investors and sign a lease on a building in the suburbs. Borrow money to buy up other companies. Sell their assets (buildings, cars, coins). Reduce the workforce to pay the loan that you took out to buy the company. Pay the bankers.
With what money is left, try to improve the business.
When that doesn’t work, sell it to a new group of bankers. These specialize in cutting costs. Fire the experienced managers. Reorganize the way the company works. Borrow more money to buy even more magazines and websites. Cut their costs. Fire their people. Then sell the limping company to another group of venture capitalists.
And repeat until you end up in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.
As a publisher who sells old-fashioned books, I can tell you there is still a healthy appetite among people young and old for physical products. But they have to be products that are worth buying. That are made with great effort (and, at times, expense). And you have to protect your business by avoiding debt. When the bankers start running a publishing business, it’s game over. The only thing they are interested in printing is money.
My heart breaks for the poor SOBs who have been keeping the lights on at Popular Woodworking Magazine and all the other magazines under the F+W umbrella. Unlike me, perhaps, they stayed on out of loyalty (or desperation, perhaps) to make it work. The deck was always stacked against them because most of the revenue they brought in went right to the banks to pay the debt service.
My hope is that Popular Woodworking and the other magazines will end up with new owners – perhaps ones who love publishing more than they love insane margins.
Crazier things have happened.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. I know someone will ask, but we are not buying Popular Woodworking. I think the future is in scrolls of some sort. Or painting animals on rocks. Maybe gourds.