I have been at Hancock Shaker Village the past five days and up to my neck in furniture. What a week it has been.
It is baby animal time at the village.
The hardest part of documenting anything here is trying to stay focused. Every time I go anywhere, in any building, I find items of interest. I am always finding things I have not seen before. Nonetheless, it has been a productive visit.
The buildings themselves have a lot of interesting details inside and out. If visiting HSV, take a behind-the-scenes tour; you won’t regret it.The view from my work room in the brick dwelling Monday morning when I arrived.
In the coming days I will be doing some more posts on my latest visit to the far north. In the meantime, back to North Carolina in the morning. Twelve hours alone in a car with Will is no good!
This excerpt from our latest book, “From Truths to Tools,” speaks to a rather esoteric, but highly useful, rule for use with scaled drawings:
Here’s a typical, traditionally drawn small boat plan:
To find the dimension of any particular part of the boat, we simply set the divider to the part – here the cap on the centerboard trunk:
Then we transfer the dimension (what the Greeks called, more precisely, a “magnitude”) to the graphic rule…
…and read the numerical distance of 3′, 6″. This technique eliminates the need for an awkward and hard-to-read scaled ruler and, furthermore, works no matter what scale the drawing is made to.
Turning spindles for chairs, settees or staircases requires a small set of tools and a focused group of techniques. Most furniture makers have little need for the tools and techniques of turners who make bowls, platters and art pieces.
That’s why chairmaker Peter Galbert designed this new video “Spindle Turning for Furniture,” which focuses entirely on the needs the furniture maker. Peter has taught hundreds of people to make chairs and has honed his turning instructions for people who have had little or no experience on the lathe.
Much like his book, “Chairmaker’s Notebook,” Galbert has managed to distill a seemingly complex endeavor – learning to turn from scratch – into a series of understandable skills and simple shapes that you create on the lathe.
Once you understand how to make these shapes – coves, beads and flats – Peter shows you how to combine these shapes. You’ll be shocked at how these simple shapes can be combined into beautiful and complex finished pieces.
One of the unique aspects of this video is that Peter spends a significant amount of time showing you how things go wrong during a cut and how to get out the trouble spot with minimum damage. He demonstrates these troublesome cuts, shows you the warning signs and then offers an escape route.
The video clocks in at almost four hours and covers everything you need to get turning spindles. Customers who buy “Spindle Turning for Furniture” will be able to stream the video on demand with an internet connection at any time, and can download the entire video to watch it on virtually any device (the video is 4gb). The video is free of Digital Rights Management (DRM) and costs $47.
Here are the major chapters covered in this video:
Materials How to select stock for straight grain, how air-dried and kiln-dried woods behave differently, how wet wood and dry wood turn differently, what you need to know about moisture content.
The Lathe and Tool Rest How to set up your lathe for spindle turning, choose the right centers, reduce vibration, select the correct speed.
Cutting Tools How to select the tools for spindle turning: parting tool, large roughing gouge, 1” roughing gouge, skew, fingernail spindle gouge, bedan tool.
Tuning and Sharpening How to get the proper shape on a grinder and then hone with diamonds.
The Concepts in Cutting Scraping v. shearing, understanding relief angles.
The Major Skills Cutting long grain v. end grain, learning to combine these two skills to cut coves and beads.
Tool and Body Movement Learn to move the tool and body to end up in a place of stability.
Putting it all Together How to combine these basic skills to make a baluster leg, armpost stretcher and stile.
Design How to combine shapes of different sizes to produce a pleasing result.
If you’ve ever met Mary May, author of “Carving the Acanthus Leaf,” then you probably know this already: Mary does not do anything halfway.
Her book is an exhaustive look at carving this iconic motif with hundreds and hundreds of detailed drawings and photographs that illustrate the process. But if you still need some more assistance, Mary has you covered.
Having a 3D representation of what you are carving is a great advantage. So Mary offers resin castings for sale of all of the carving projects in her book. These castings were made from the actual carvings in the book, so they are a perfect match for the instructions and step photos.
You can purchase the castings individually or the entire set. Details are here.
Another option is to purchase an instructional video about each leaf where Mary walks you through the process step by step. Her videos are excellent (you can sample them on her site). They are offered in full HD and can be downloaded or streamed from her site. Details on the videos are here.
Much like his book, “
