Many time you publish a project or article in a magazine and then brace yourself for the outpouring of interest or controversy. But what you get is the sound of bored crickets.
Other times you write something that you think that no one could like. Something that has complex angles, ugly wood and is painted. And you get scads of e-mail.
Such is the case with the Moravian stool article I wrote for the December 2012 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine. I have gotten an inordinate amount of e-mail about this project, and not because there was a mistake in the article (there isn’t, as far as I know).
Instead, readers have been inspired to take up the challenge of the compound joinery – once they are clued into the secret of the “resultant angle.”
This week, I received an e-mail from Mark Firley, a member of the Hillsborough Orange Woodworkers group in North Carolina. The group, founded by Jim Campbell, gets together to build stuff and has an impressive roster of completed projects in its wake.
Recently they built the Moravian stool. And they sent photos of the results. Very cool.
Editor’s note: After more than two years of work, we are about to send “By Hand & Eye” to the printer. This 200-page book by George R. Walker and Jim Tolpin is unlike any other woodworking book I have ever edited, read or even thought about. It seeks nothing less than to change the way you see the world around you. As you might know, we are not fans of systems of designing furniture that rely on (bogus) secret formulas. There are “formulas” out there, but they are hidden in plain sight. “By Hand & Eye” is the “purloined letter” of furniture design.
In the coming days (perhaps tomorrow) we will offer this book for sale here in our store, with our regular pre-publication offer of free domestic shipping. Until then, here is a missive from author Jim Tolpin on the book.
— Christopher Schwarz
At right is the sign on the door that greets students as they arrive for our “By Hand & Eye” design workshops (which we offer here at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking and through Goddard College’s Port Townsend extension). For these folks (and for George and I), one of the most appealing and exciting things about this pre-industrial artisan’s approach to furniture design (as opposed to the typical and ubiquitous Industrial Arts approach) is the absence of mathematics. For many would-be woodworkers measuring to – and deriving divisions or multiples of – fractional dimensions and numbered angles is a huge stumbling block. It takes the fun right out of it in fact! That, and the effort of coming up with proportions – from the overall shape of the piece to the size of its internal elements such as rails and stiles, legs and drawer faces.
But in the artisan’s language of design and layout, if you can count to 12 and divide it up into whole-number ratios (and “12” is very amenable to these operations compared to “10,” by the way), you pretty much have a handle on all the math you’ll need to design anything from a cradle to a coffin to any furnishing in between. All the proportions needed to create durable and appealing wooden structures spring quickly and intuitively from a single dimension that responds to a functional constraint (you can only lift a pot of soup so high to put on a serving credenza) or to fit a certain space – as was the situation with my last project.
I’ve just finished constructing this all-hand-tool project: a Honduras mahogany bookcase to fit between two trim elements in our living room. So how did the design process go? Here’s how:
I started by taking a measurement of the available width. Wait, I take that back. I just stuck a stick across the wall and made a mark on it – I have no idea what the number, is and I still don’t. I then subtracted the overhangs my mouldings would produce (ascertained from a full-scale drawing of them) and that established the outside width of the case. I made the height of the case twice that distance (a 2:1 ratio – a nice, dramatic octave). The height of the base moulding is 1/12th the height, and the side stiles are 1/12th the width as is the top rail showing below the top cornice mouldings. The depth of the case fits the biggest book I intend to put in it, and the shelf spacing is adjustable. That’s it. The design was done. In less that half an hour I was off to the shop to do some woodworking.
This design language is not about magical rectangles; it’s not about arithmetic derivations; and no, it’s not about working to prescriptive formulas, either. It’s just simple, generative geometry that is just as much fun to do now as it was when you first met up with it in first grade! Welcome to the real (and reasonable) world of rational (i.e. able-to-ratio) numbers.
Progress has been slow on my book on Campaign furniture. The research materials are scarce, the projects are expensive and complex, and Lost Art Press has plenty of books from other authors for me to work on.
But I do have some good news to report.
1. I’m going to England this fall to visit a private collection of campaign furniture and spend some time with a restorer who has spent his career examining these pieces and repairing them.
2. Londonderry Brasses is developing a section of its catalog that will feature campaign brasses. I’ve seen the selection Londonderry plans to stock and it is impressive. So impressive that I purchased a new suite of brasses for this campaign chest, including the skeletonized pulls shown here.
I’m about to dovetail the five drawers for my second campaign chest. I’ve got also got four feet to turn and 32 pieces of brass that need to be inlaid into the teak. And then I have four more campaign-era projects to build to even come close to having a book to call my own.
I also have a book’s index to edit and lay out, a cover to design and a 180-page color proof to review today.
So I better stop writing this, make some coffee and do some real work.
I don’t use this blog to flog you with commerce, but this is a link worth checking out today.
ShopWoodworking.com has put a bunch of good titles (and one birdhouse book) on sale for 50 percent off. Except for the birdhouse book, this is all good stuff – including a bunch of my DVDs.
This sale ends today, April 10.
This is a good time to pick up some titles for your permanent library:
While I am trying to keep a stiff upper lip in my basement shop by working on a British naval officer’s campaign chest, the rest of the house is in a European near-riot.
This morning the postman dropped off another proof of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry,” which I’m going to start plowing into as soon as I stop typing this missive to you.
A few minutes later, the same postman stopped by to make me sign for a package from France. What’s this? He shrugs his shoulders and ambles away. I rip the package open with a knife and suddenly remember I had won this item via French eBay.
It’s a brass apron hook that looks like a workbench that is adorned with a bowsaw, holdfast, mallet and handplane. The bauble is surprisingly small – the brass part is only 1-1/2” long – and quite detailed – I can see the pegs that secure the tenons on the front leg.
Now all I need is an apron that works with these hooks. That shouldn’t be too hard to rig.
Also in the Inbox is a very interesting e-mail from Jeff Burks with an early – 1502 – depiction of a shoulder knife in use.
“As far as I know this is the oldest image depicting a shoulder knife in use, “Jeff writes. “The original was an intarsia self portrait made by Antonio Barili in 1502. I believe this was installed at the chapel of Saint John the Baptist in the Duomo of Siena.
“Antonio Barili (1453-1516) was an Italian intarsia designer, civil engineer, architect and engraver and a native of Siena. From 1483 to 1502 he worked in Siena Cathedral, providing carving and intarsia. This particular intarsia work was destroyed during World War II.
“The Latin inscription on the intarsia reads: ‘Hoc opus ego Antonius Barilis coelo non penicello D excussi an MCCCCCII.’ This translates to: ‘This work have I Antonio Barili made with the carving knife, not with a brush. In the year 1502.’ ”
One interesting description of this self-portrait comments that Barilis seems to be guiding the knife with a pencil in his right hand. Curious.
