In the next year or two I want to travel to South Korea and lately have been researching temple stays. One temple that is very appealing is Jeondeungsa Temple on Ganghwa-gun Island, Incheon. The temple is located within the Samnangseong Fortress and is the oldest Buddhist temple in Korea. Daeungjeon, the main hall, was built in 381.
Besides a week of fresh air and contemplation there are ancient trees and beautiful temple architecture to explore….and the legend of the lovelorn carpenter. It seems the head carpenter of Daeungjeon had love issues.
There are variations to the legend as one would expect after 1,635 years. Some say the head carpenter met and fell in love with a local woman who scorned him and stole his money. Heartbroken and miserable he carved four figures of women and placed each one under the eaves of the temple roof. The small crouched figures are easy to spot under the lovely wood and faded paint of the eaves.
My favorite version (of course it is!) is more specific as to the intentions of the carpenter: his wife grew tired of waiting for him to return and left him. He carved the small crouching figures holding up each corner of the roof to symbolize his wish for her to carry a heavy burden for the rest of her life. Omo!
Good morning! I hope you all had a good weekend and are ready for the week to get rolling. I know I’m not (I’m blaming it on allergies) but here’s hoping better things for you. It’s a big week with Woodworking in America taking place so take time to read the forum now before you start trying to keep up with all that is going on in Cincinnati. Remember, if you have a question about our products, procedures in our books or anything related to Lost Art Press, the fastest way to get an answer is our forum. Check it out here.
Plow Plane: Avoiding Tear-out Adrian is making frame-and-panel doors with quartersawn wood that has some wild grain on the edges. The question is, are there any tricks for avoiding tear-out on the edges of the groove? Weigh in here.
Barrister Book Shelf Russell has some antique and collectible books that he would like to protect and he is considering building a barrister book shelf to do so. He is wondering if anyone out there has built one before. Perhaps you have some pointers for him?
Shellac and Milk Paint Has anyone used shellac over milk paint? And if so, how did it turn out? A few readers have given there opinions and one caught my eye. George coated his milk paint with General Finishes Enduro and I loved the result (picture at top). What is your solution?
Roy’s Spring Pole Lathe Completed I have seen a lot of people excited to try building this project shown in Popular Woodworking Magazine. This is the first image I have seen of someone’s completed project. Congrats Markus, and it sounds like you are having a lot of fun with it!
It was a grueling week at the Appalachian Shangri-la as Michele and I spent more than 40 hours reviewing the page proofs of “Roubo on Furniture Making;” me reading aloud every jot and tittle (including punctuation and typography), while she followed along in my replica of the original French volume. It was a paradoxical sprint and marathon as we raced to review in minute detail each word, number and illustration of the new almost-450-page book. We stopped frequently to clarify the meaning or context of a word, phrase, or sometimes even a whole paragraph, leaving approximately a bazillion notations on the pages, mostly about capitalization and italics.
One thing is certain – it does reinforce the assertion that “l’Art du menuisier” was a work for the Ages and can serve as a vital part of any contemporary woodworker’s tutelage, now and for the conceivable future.
Consuming the entire manuscript in one stretch gave us, for the first time, the so-called “view from 40,000 feet.” And what a magnificent view it is! Not only did our appreciation grow through this high-altitude panorama, but we also began to notice subtle and not-so-subtle themes emerging, concepts and phrases we had not noticed before when we were focusing on much smaller units of the whole. This new appreciation was so affecting it provided us with the impetus to actually change the name of the book.
For our first volume, “Roubo on Marquetry,” I chose the lead portion of the title, “To Make As Perfectly As Possible,” from a phrase that Roubo used as exhortation throughout those sections of his original masterpiece. Never mind that it brought about perhaps the most unwieldy title of any woodworking book anywhere, ever. “To Make As Perfectly As Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” does not roll effortlessly off the tongue or the keyboard. Our expectation was that this lead phrase would serve equally well in the title for “Roubo on Furniture Making” and any subsequent volumes, which it would have done admirably, but after this week we are heading in a new rhetorical direction.
Throughout the often lengthy, detailed passages – and “Roubo on Furniture Making” is almost twice as long as “Roubo on Marquetry” – the Master invoked the sentiment and phrase, “with all the precision possible,” and we are eagerly purloining it as our own for this book.
So, I will be hand-delivering our marked-up copy of the proofs of “With All The Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture Making” to Lost Art Press this coming Thursday at the Crucible Tool premier.
John and I finished building the above rolling book display this afternoon. Pocket screws and Dragonply aren’t my favorite materials, but they do get the job done in a hurry.
If you are in the area tomorrow, please stop by and check out our new holdfasts, T-shirts and two new Roman workbenches. Also, the Main Strasse Oktoberfest celebration is running this weekend. Good news: good beer and sausages are two blocks away. Bad news: Parking won’t be as easy.
No matter who shows up, I’ll be there rasping my new vise nuts so they fit my hands just right. (Wow, after reading that sentence I doubt anyone will show up tomorrow.)
A few days ago I was working my way through a German website and in a footnote came across two verses of a 19th century Shaker song. I found the song in the Smithsonian Folkways collection and it turns out the two verses on the German site were the second and third verses. Here are the notes from the Smithsonian collection:
“They sang whenever there was an appropriate occasion…at work…at social gatherings…while marching from one place to another.
One of the songs they sang while at work expresses eloquently their passion for perfection in everything they did and in every item they made.”
So far I have not found the title of the song (if there is one), no sheet music and no recording. It is up to you to sing the song as you see fit.