Once you become aware of staked furniture, you will find it everywhere. Today I was finishing up a marathon 12-hour session of editing “The Woodworker: The Charles Hayward Years” and stumbled on this short article from the February 1964 issue.
It’s billed as an exercise for beginning turners. And while I’d probably add some rake and splay to the legs, it’s a pretty charming piece as-is.
The most interesting detail of its construction is that the author recommends you cut the mortises before turning the legs. That works when you have 90° angles everywhere, but is a mess when you get into compound-angle joinery.
Luckily in “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” I have a way of dealing with this sort of compound-angle joint that is embarrassingly simple. Here’s a clue: Buy a set of spade bits and an extension for your drill.
One of the benefits of not teaching this year (or the next) is that I have some extra time to visit friends and hang out in their shops. Yesterday I visited my friend and toolmaker Raney Nelson of Daed Toolworks at his shop in Greenfield, Ind., a small burg outside of Indianapolis.
Raney makes bad-ass planes, mostly miters and coffin smoothing planes, and I was one of his first customers to order a miter plane from him when he opened his doors of business after years of research and development.
The infill miter I own from him is superb. It’s so nice that it was one of the few high-end tools I didn’t sell off when I left my job at Popular Woodworking Magazine and radically reduced my tool inventory.
Raney’s shop is a freestanding structure located on the cusp of a hill that overlooks bottomland and pretty much nothing else – though his house is about 30 paces away. The structure looks small from the outside, but it actually is three floors with an incredible amount of space. As a result, Raney can keep his metalworking and benches on the main floor. In the basement (with a walkout garage door), he has a complete suite of woodworking tools. The third floor is for storage, packing materials and (for now) photography.
The main floor features four woodworking benches (and people say I have a problem) – everything from an Ace Hardware special up to a gargantuan French oak Roubo. This bench area is where he keeps his computer, his music (a turntable in a shop? Awesome) and a 6’ coffin stuffed with books and papers.
All the walls are lined with woodworking and metalworking hand tools. This area features a nice wooden floor.
Immediately adjacent to this is the metalworking area, which is filled with a milling machine, lathes, a surface grinder, metal band saw, grinders and all the other accoutrements of the toolmaker. It is all incredibly tidy – like a well-run machine shop. And yet Raney is hard at work on two infills for customers when I visited.
I took a bunch of photos while he wasn’t looking, and so below you have a tour of his shop. It’s a sweet set-up – something to study and be a little jealous of.
We dug up a few boxes of sweatshirts and T-shirts and are offering them in the Lost Art Press store at a significant discount.
Last year we started using a fulfillment service to print our shirts and sweatshirts, which is why you can offer them in a wide variety of sizes and colors. Before that change, we stocked all our own stuff, and this is the excess inventory that was caught in the middle of that change.
A bed built under the post-war Utility Furniture scheme in England. On display at the Cheltenham museum.
Perhaps one of the most testing times of furniture-making was that of war time and the immediately following years, when utility furniture came into being. Certain restrictions had to be placed on the methods of construction and the weight of timber used. It was realised that the items had to be reasonably durable, but the stringent requirements of the times made it necessary to keep timber sizes to the minimum. At the same time, although all unnecessary weight was avoided, there was a limit below which furniture would be unsound.
Compared with furniture of the Victorian and earlier periods, utility furniture was lightly built, but most people today have come to realise that much early furniture was unnecessarily heavy, and that in some ways lightness is a virtue providing that strength is adequate.
A problem that confronts the man in the home workshop is that of the thickness and width he should make the various parts. To the furniture designer or craftsman the decision is largely one of appearance only, because over the years a tradition has grown up in which the sections are more or less settled within certain limits.
If this sounds like blindly doing a thing for no better reason than repeating what was done before, it should be remembered that trade practice is generally founded on what experience has shown to be sound. Sometimes you can get away with slighter material, but it is often because you have to, either because the cost is too great otherwise, or because larger stuff is not available.
In any case we have to realise that, except for first-quality things, furniture today is not built for posterity as it used to be. The day when furniture was intended to be handed down to later generations has largely gone. Ask any young couple of today whether they want to start their home with things from the home of their parents, and you will invariably be told that such old-fashioned stuff does not interest them. Perhaps they are right. If the true craftsman dislikes the idea of making a thing that is not intended to last, at least the younger generation is entitled to its view of what it wants.
— Charles Hayward, from The Woodworker, February 1961
