Lost Art Press

This Try Square is a Little Bit of BS

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To reward myself for finishing my edit of the translated text of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry,” I spent the morning in the shop finishing a try square that had no connection whatsoever to Roubo or the French people.

It’s the small try square from Benjamin Seaton’s famous tool chest that is featured in the must-have book “The Tool Chest of Benjamin Seaton: 2nd Edition” (Tools and Trades History Society).

The first edition was fantastic; the second edition is twice as good. It features lots more data on the tools thanks to the careful measurements and drawings made by Jay Gaynor and Peter Ross at Colonial Williamsburg. Their scholarship pushed this book into one that is rivaled only by “With Hammer in Hand” on early tools. So buy it. Right now.

I bought the second edition the week it was released and have been poring over the drawings for months now (One quibble: The hand-lettered dimensions are too small in places.)

One of the many surprises in these drawings was the detail on the wooden try squares that young Seaton built for his toolkit. The photos make them look like two flat pieces of wood and barely worth note.

But the drawings point out details that made me start building a run of these squares to put to use. Here are some of the details:

1. The blades taper in thickness. They are thickest at the stock (about 1/4”) and taper to .065” slightly at the tip to .16.

2. The blade is joined to the stock with a double tenon. This is a little trickier to make than an open bridle joint.

3. The stock of the square is beveled at the top, bottom and outside edge.

I had milled and mortised about a dozen stocks using wood that was left over from a campaign chest. This morning I discovered that all but four of the stocks had cast horribly. So those wonky bits will become something else.

For kicks, I fooled around with making the blades on the band saw, but found that was a fool’s errand. It was much faster to taper them using a jointer plane and saw the tenons with a tenon saw.

All in all, this square was noticeably more complex to make than the square shown in Roubo.

— Christopher Schwarz

Catch Up With Narayan Nayar

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narayan_studley_IMG_3989Narayan Nayar has revived his long-slumbering blog, etherfarm.com. Narayan is a frequent contributor to Lost Art Press products – he’s photographing the H.O. Studley chest, he created the chapter-opening photos for “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” and has helped me gain 10 pounds.

Narayan’s blog will surely cover woodworking, food and photography. So if you like any of those things, check it out.

— Christopher Schwarz

André Roubo: Elbow Grease, Tallow and Books

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Editor’s note: The below entry is part of a series of articles we have commissioned Brian Anderson to write about André Roubo in preparationd for the publication of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.” Brian, the translator for “Grandpa’s Workshop,” also wrote this entry on Roubo’s famous dome.

It must have been a popular topic for the local gossips – the apprentice joiner André Roubo begging, here and there, a cup of lard or tallow from the taverns and housewives in the Paris neighborhood.

A boy from a poor family begging a cup of lard for his mother to cook, would have been one thing. But the young André did not want it to cook with, but to fuel a simple oil lamp for light to study by. At the time, in the 1750s, it would have been rare enough for an ordinary worker to even know how to read. Spending money on  learned books on geometry, mathematics, perspective and design and then plowing through them would have been a scandal in itself.

Roubo had been born in 1739 into a working class family. His father was a joiner, but according to the noted French architect, Louis-Auguste Boileau, who wrote a short biography of Roubo in 1834, the father was a worker of the crudest sort. The young man, apprenticed to his father at 12 or so, soon realized both that he loved the theory and practice of joinery, and that if he did not want to spend his life doing the lowest sorts of work for pennies a day, he would have to figure a way up and out himself.

Boileau wrote that he threw himself into his studies, going hungry sometimes to purchase his first books out of the pittance his father allowed him for his work. The young joiner attracted the notice of others with his enthusiasm, talent and thirst for learning as he worked for his father, eventually becoming a joiner in his own right.

But his big break came when a noted architect, Jean-Francois Blondel, took Roubo under his tutelage and gave him free tuition to his well-regarded school of architecture in Paris.

AMAND Jacques-François (1730-1769) : L'atelier du Sieur Jadot
AMAND Jacques-François (1730-1769) : L’atelier du Sieur Jadot

For five years, Roubo worked in his trade during the day; and then evenings, weekends, every free moment available, he spent pouring over the lessons Blondel set out for him. Mathematics, mechanics, perspective, design, different types of drawing. Plus, the building blocks of architecture, which also gave him enormous insight into his own trade.

Roubo proved as apt at these studies as he had at the practice of joinery, but Boileau notes that unlike some presented with a similar opportunity, Roubo apparently loved his craft. He loved to work wood, and was not tempted to move “up” into architecture.

Blondel was also a practicing architect, and a member of the French Academy of the Fine Arts, and his young protégé also proved adept at extending his circle of acquaintances from the people he met through the school and among the architect’s circles of friends and colleagues.

These connections would later prove invaluable, as Roubo’s thoughts turned from his studies to writing his own books.

— Brian Anderson

Not much to do with Roubo, of course, but too cool not to include.
Not much to do with Roubo, of course, but too cool not to include.

The Tramp Stamp for Woodworkers

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hooks

I wear a shop apron almost every day, and so I’ve always wondered about “apron hooks,” which are shown in R.A. Salaman’s “Dictionary of Woodworking Tools.”

Here’s his entry on aprons that mentions these devices:

Carpenters and other woodworkers traditionally wear a white twill or canvas apron with a large pocket in front. It is fastened around the waist with long tapes tied in front, or with hooks that have decorative ends.

Yup. You read that right: Fancy stuff that is hooked above your buttocks. And yes, one of the hooks shown is a four-leaf clover, indicating you have a lucky butt.

I don’t think I want to know what the heart-shaped hook means.

But I am intrigued by the hooks because some days I can’t tie a bow behind my back.

— Christopher Schwarz

The Next Campaign Chest

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Today I had a weird feeling. Not the kind in your pants – the kind in your head.

Because of a combination of odd events this afternoon, I ended up with about two hours of free time. No crushing deadline to meet. No frantic e-mails to answer.

FeetSo I designed the next chest for my book on campaign furniture. This one will be made using 40-year-old teak from Midwest Woodworking, which has been sitting in the corner of my shop for many months.

When I design a piece that won’t be painted, I begin by measuring all the pieces of lumber that I have picked out for the project. Unless I’m building an exact reproduction, I let the wood on hand provide the overall dimensions. If I have 17”-wide stock, I’m not going to draw a 20”-deep case.

Most of my teak is 18” wide. I have a 12’-long board and a 10’-long board. Plus three 50”-long boards and a shorter 13”-wide board for the drawers and thick chunks for the legs. These boards encouraged me to draw a chest that is 17” x 35” x 35” and that sits on 4”-tall turned feet.

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How do I know that this will look good? I’ve spent the last two years (actually longer) collecting images and dimensions for campaign chests I like. I started looking at their overall sizes and sorting them into chests that were on the wide side and those that had a subtle vertical aspect to them.

This chest is going to be a little taller than it is wide. I pulled out images of about a dozen chests that are taller than they are wide and started sorting them into ones that had drawer arrangements I liked and those that were forgettable.

Then I fired up SketchUp.

When I draw things in SketchUp to build them, I draw only the things I don’t know. I don’t draw the joinery if it’s stuff I know how to make. I don’t draw drawer sides and bottoms and internal guides, runners and kicks. I know how to make all that stuff – drawing it will only slow me down.

If there’s wacky compound joinery, I’ll draw that. But that’s pretty uncommon.

When I work in SketchUp, the major question I want answered is this: Will this project look like something that will avoid the burn pile for the next 200 years? This is SketchUp’s superpower. You can draw a chunk of something and look at it from an infinite number of perspectives. You can put it in a room, by a loom or on the moon.

So I drew a bunch of 17” x 18” x 35” boxes and sketched drawer fronts on them. I drew a bunch of feet. Then I put the boxes together and looked at them from a bunch of perspectives. For a project like this, the entire sketching process took about an hour.

Before I quit SketchUp and fetched a beer (Bell’s Hopslam), I made a cutting list for the major parts and took that down to the shop and confirmed that the lumber on hand will support the design on screen.

And finally, with chalk in hand, I’ll start sketching my cutting lines on the rough stock.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. What about the stuff I draw for magazine articles? That is a totally different process. That’s when I draw everything the reader doesn’t know. So I draw every part, every joint, every assembly. But I do that after the project is complete.