To mark the release of “Campaign Furniture” next month, we’ll be releasing this T-shirt design, which amuses even my wife.
The front features a campaign-style chest of drawers from the 1909 catalog of the Army & Navy Co-operative Society. And on the back…
We’re using 100-percent cotton American Apparel shirts (made in Los Angeles) in an army green with white lettering. The shirts (4.3 oz. cotton) are printed by a small family-run firm in Noblesville, Ind. The shirts will be $20, plus first-class shipping in the United States.
Please note: Mouth-breathing hipster not included.
The shirts might be available a few days before the book. As the shirts will ship separately from the book (thank you, media mail regulations), we’ll likely put them up on the site a few days early so you can be wearing the shirt on the day your book arrives. I know no one will do that. It’s just too dorky to contemplate. OK, I’ll be doing that.
One of the treasures I inherited when buying my house was a falling-down chicken coop/rabbit hutch with (I can say without blushing) a brick shithouse tacked onto the end. It is in the courtyard, and was built in a hurried fashion, with the materials the farmer had at hand – some brick, some stone, concrete block, wood and a steel roof that had come loose at some point and was weighed down with odds and ends of heavy things. The toilet, judging from its style, was in use well into the 1960s, flushed with a bucket.
So, being the sensitive type, this fall I decided to have a go at renovating the ruin; I sought to maintain the fabric, the “built textures of the countryside,” as they say in the more sensitive kinds of house magazines.
I was sitting at the table outside, looking at the building and plotting my campaign when my neighbor Roger turned up and sat down.
The start of the rescue operation
“What are you thinking about, Brian?”
I told him I was going to fix up the chicken coop, and asked how he would do it.
He gave me a startled look, like he does sometimes, and took a couple of puffs on his cigar.
“Well, I’ve got a sledge hammer in the garage if you want, but you could just maybe give it a shove and save me the trouble of walking across the street. Probably faster, too.”
A couple more puffs, he laughed.
“Ha! ‘Course if you actually had any chickens, you could just find a feather and knock it down with that.”
So I got to work with some old bricks I had salvaged from a half-demolished chimney in the barn, learning the joys of bricklaying when one day my wife was watching me rip out some of the old rotten limestone. (The local stone is often very soft and porous; acids in the rain plus salts in the ground water can eat it up over decades.)
“It’d be nice if you could use some stone when you rebuild that part. Like it was kind of a patchwork, quoi. Roger gave you some stone, didn’t he?” she said.
Stone cutting. Why not? I remembered a book I had seen one time, and ordered it from the publisher’s site. “Pierre de Taille” (cut, or ashlar, stone) by Jean-Marc Laurent, Editions Eyrolles (2004). Turned out it is an excellent book. One interesting thing that struck me while reading it was how closely it followed Roubo. The tone and information is the same. The book is mostly oriented toward people looking to follow what a stone mason is doing on a renovation project of some kind. But in fact, almost all the info is there, set out in precise detail – the tools, how to use them, the sand and lime for mortars, the different kinds of stone, common problems in old stonework and how they should be fixed.
I needed to cut and dress some of the local stone. From this section: “The Cockscombs” (Chemin de fer, in French) “The straight cockscomb is used to dress the visible faces of a stone. It is made of a rectangular piece of wood (beech), to which is fixed a handle in the same wood, and in which on the other face cuts have been made with a saw. In the cuts, blades of tool steel, sometimes with teeth, sometimes not, have been embedded.”
The cockscombs are basically planes for stone, used on soft to medium stones, and are used for facings and mouldings, like wood planes. Laurent goes on for more than a page on these tools.
But how was I going to cut the old stones to more or less the right size? The next bit was on saws, and mentioned various types, among them “La scie type scie egoine” – that is, a regular hand saw, though the ones for stone have carbide-tipped teeth. In the end I tried a an old saw for wood that is too dull to use and had hardened teeth that can’t be resharpened. Worked OK.
Nothing earthshaking. You need the information, you can buy a book and get it. It’s obvious today that is how it works. You describe the tools, and then what to do with them to create what you want. But reading through parts of Roubo, and now the woodworking parts of André Félibien’s “Principles of Architecture,” it’s clear it wasn’t always obvious. Even just the idea that detailed information would or could be interesting to someone outside a given trade was actually quite new. Félibien was one of the pioneers, and it’s a fascinating book. Roubo created the form that we still use today.
— Brian Anderson
Brian Anderson is a translator and woodworker living in France. He is translating the woodworking parts of André Felibien’s Des principes de l’architecture, de la sculpture, de la peinture… avec un dictionnaire des terms for Lost Art Press. The book is due out in the Autumn of 2014. Anderson translated Grandpa‘s Workshop for us.
I have often heard the fact stated, and I have noticed it myself when looking through some of our workshops, that the mechanics’ places in this country, in nine cases out of ten, are filled by foreigners. The building trade seems to present no exception to this general rule. Very naturally the question arises, Why don’t our American youths learn trades? Some blame it to idleness, but I think that is not a satisfactory explanation. Others say the boys prefer to measure tape, and appear to better advantage than they would as professors of carpentry or knights of the trowel.
There is one thing certain, foreigners do not make any better mechanics than our own countrymen. Our boys are no less ambitious to-day than they were 40 years ago, but still the fact remains that they are turning their backs on trades. I propose to try my hand at a solution of this problem, leaving the readers to judge whether or not I am right. I propose for illustration to take my own trade, one which, had Carpentry and Building been printed 20 years ago, would have had thousands of better posted men in it than it contains to-day. (more…)
The chair shown here was the first piece of furniture to ever register in my young consciousness. My grandparents had it in their house in New York, and I can remember it clearly when we lived there during my dad’s tour in Vietnam.
I was struck by the chair because it didn’t fit into the Platonic ideal form of a chair. Since that time, I’ve always loved this Victorian chair, and when it was up for grabs in my family, I snatched it.
Several readers have asked for some details on the chair after seeing the chair as a prop in a post last week.
The chair was made by E.F. Peirce & Co. (sometimes spelled E.F. Pierce & Co.) of Boston and was sold by Payne’s Furniture Co., also of Boston. Both companies marked the underside of the original rattan seat. Peirce was active as a chairmaker in Boston during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The chair is almost certainly oak.
The legs all have a major diameter of 1-9/16”. The spindles are 1” in diameter at the center and taper to 3/4” at the mortises. The front leg is 18” long. The three long legs are 26-7/8” from the floor to the point where they enter the armbow.
The armbow is made in three pieces. The hands are 1-1/8” thick. The backrest on top of the hands is 1-3/4” thick where it meets the arms and tapers to a point 3” above the two hand pieces. The seat is 16-1/4” square.
I have posted the photos at a resolution that is higher than normal. If you save them to your computer you should be able to use the dimensions above to piece together turning profiles and mortise locations.
Though I have been to England six times for work, sightseeing and research, I’ve never been asked to teach there (my wife says it must be because of my German last name). I love the country, and it has inspired a lot of my books and writings, from the Nicholson workbench in “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use” to “Campaign Furniture.”
So I am particularly pleased to announce I’ll be teaching two courses this July that have been organized by The New English Workshop, a group of woodworkers who are deeply concerned with handwork. The classes will be taught at the workshop at Warwickshire College in Leamington Spa. For Americans not familiar with England’s geography, that’s in the center of the country, a little southeast of Birmingham.
On July 21-25 I’ll be teaching The Anarchist’s Tool Chest, a traditional English chest that’s an intensive course on dovetails, handwork-based case construction, cut nails and bench planes. I won’t lie, the pace of the course is not leisurely, and it usually requires a couple of long days, which oddly always end up at a pub afterward.
During the class we build the carcase, lid and skirting of the chest. The internal structures are up to you at home. But we look at lots of examples so you’ll know what to do when you get home. I have been working out of a traditional tool chest since 1997 and have yet to find a better way to protect and organize your tools.
On July 28-29 I’m teaching the Dutch Tool Chest, a lightweight, portable and surprisingly durable chest. This is the chest I travel with and I am always pleased with how much the chest can carry and how easy it is to work out of. This chest is built using dovetails, dados, rabbets and lots of cut nails. It takes two long days, but we usually get everyone’s chest assembled and ready for hardware.
The organizers tell me the courses are already half full. If you are interested in attending or getting more details, visit The New English Workshop web site.
There are some other interesting components to these classes I’ll be discussing in the coming months, including the fate of the two tool chests I’ll be building during the classes. So stay tuned.
This trip is also an opportunity for me to do some research on campaign furniture, Gillows of Lancaster and a few other things I have brewing.
