It’s not often that I’m thrilled to paw through another man’s garbage, but when that man is Frank David….
Teak is expensive stuff – upwards of $50/board foot at times. So every cut counts. And when it came time to buy stuff for the interior guts of this campaign chest, I was thinking of using walnut, pine or oak. But then I saw a magnificent pile of narrow teak offcuts while hunting through the stacks of lumber at Midwest Woodworking.
These pieces of 2-1/2”-wide, 4/4 rough stock were the leftovers from rip cuts made decades ago. Frank stashed them in the attic of his shop in Norwood, Ohio. Some of his employees asked if they could have these teak “rippers” to burn for firewood in their homes.
Frank merely raised an eyebrow at their request.
These rippers are perfect for web frames. So I purchased a few of these (at about $15/board foot) and built the two web frames for my latest campaign chest with them today.
Like all the other old pieces of teak from Midwest, this stuff is like a buttery dream (which is better than a wet dream but not as good as a lard dream) to work with. And I saved enough teak from my wide boards to scrounge just enough teak to make a copy of Napoleon’s desk for my book on campaign furniture.
Today marks a major milestone in the production of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.” Designer Wesley Tanner has sent us the first 126 pages of the book for us to mark up.
It is gorgeous work on Wesley’s part.
For those of you waiting on your copy, you’ve probably figured out that we’re running behind. We’d hoped to have the book out this month, but we’re still proofing the pages. Everyone working on this project wants this book finished, but everyone also wants it (apologies in advance) as perfect as possible.
So I’ll be editing this book in Australia this month. Don Williams and Michele Pagan will be checking the text (again) from their homes. I’ll post updates on the process when we reach another significant waypoint.
And no, I’m afraid we don’t have a price settled on either version of the book – we have to have a final page count to get a good quote from the printer.
Because I don’t have any more good information, I’ll merely distract you with this photo of a shiny object we do have in-house this week.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Tomorrow I’ll post an update on “By Hand & By Eye” by George Walker and Jim Tolpin. It’s near the finish line.
Lately I’ve been getting hammered via e-mail because I’m using teak (Tectona grandis) to build my latest campaign chest for an upcoming book. The comments go something like this:
“Don’t you see the hypocrisy in publishing ‘With the Grain’ – a book that advocates using local species – and then using teak in your own project?”
It’s a fair question, and one I struggled with as I embarked on writing a book on campaign furniture. Furniture built in this style was made from a wide variety of tropical and domestic species, however most of the pieces I’ve encountered have been made from mahogany, teak, camphor and (less frequently) English oak.
When I started planning the projects for the book, I toyed with the idea of using domestic species for the projects – walnut, cherry and white oak for the most part. And while that’s an option I plan to present in the book, I decided to go with the historical species for building my projects.
It was a tough decision because I rarely use exotics. If you look at my published work since 1996, I think you’ll find the vast majority of my projects have been built with common domestic species, occasionally to the detriment of the project itself. Tansu made with sugar maple? Rice paper lanterns built with white oak? Workbenches built with Southern yellow pine?
This campaign chest would look wrong in shagbark hickory.
Exotics come with political baggage. And I dislike politics. Exotics are sometimes unethically harvested. They can be sold in a corrupt system that is unfair to workers and harmful to the environment and habitats. Now, I know that you can find 10 sides to this argument, and if you launch into this nuttiness in the comments below, I will close my eyes, put my hands over my ears and chant, “nunga, nunga, nunga.”
For me, the question was only this: Can I make something beautiful and enduring enough from these three boards to outlast the life span of this magnificent tree? To make the tree, in effect, nearly immortal?
This campaign chest is my own design, and yet it stands upon the shoulders of every chest I have studied and lived with since I was a child. The joinery is the best that I can do. The brasses I’ve purchased are older than I am. Though this isn’t the most technically challenging piece of furniture I’ve built, I am aiming for it to be my best.
So I walked into this project with my eyes open, knowing that the wood carried a high price – both in real and environmental terms. But I also knew that this chest was going to be one of the high points of my furniture-making to date.
For much of the past week I have been traipsing around New England doing research and photography for the late-2014 book “Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley.” More precisely, I was tracking down the four known bench vises with similarity to the two exquisite examples on Studley’s bench. (To understand fully the import of this trip, consider that 1) I dislike travel, 2) I was skirting blizzards the whole trip, and 3) my perception as a native of Flyover Country is that anything north and east of the Schuykill River is noted on maps with the warning, “Danger! Thar Bee Dragons”).
My first stop in this trek was at the home of famed ironmonger Patrick Leach, whose Blood & Gore site emits his monthly e-mail dose of vintage tool addiction. Most of you have parted with lucre in Patrick’s direction, and spending a few hours with him was an unmitigated pleasure. The workbench in his office holds two vises similar on the outside but distinct on the inside compared to Studley’s vises. One fascinating modification of Studley’s vises is the (retrofitted?) inclusion of a moving, housed dog on the end vise. Still, the similarities lead to some intriguing speculations.
Next I met with Tim Cottle for breakfast in southern Maine after he drove a couple of hours from his lair upstate. Tim acquired his vise in a swap with a neighbor who received four shop light fixtures in return. I offered to double his investment, but he declined with very little deliberation. Cottle’s vise is especially important to my inquiries as it is the only one of the six that is currently not attached to a bench, and Tim’s passion about the project led him to loan it to me for detailed study. The mechanism of his vise appears to be identical to Studley’s, and it only has one jaw, the movable one. I need to triple check very closely to make sure Studley’s vises are the same on my next visit later this month.
Finally, I spent some time in the well-organized shop of Dan Santos out on Cape Cod. He has a bench vaguely similar to Leach’s, with only the face vise remaining and the end vise missing. While the overall form and function are identical to the vises on Studley’s bench, there are some idiosyncrasies. The largest difference is the dovetailed ways for the moving carriage with the single jaw, with the rear unmovable jaw being a metal plate affixed to the bench. Santos’s vise is so finely tuned that a simple twist of the massive wagonwheel causes the jaw to move several inches simply on the inertia of the wheel, clamping a workpiece firmly based solely on that.
The vises in the aggregate are tantalizing, both for their similarities and their differences. It is clear that the general form was known in the piano-making trade, yet these are four distinct interpretations of that form. Admittedly, a sample set of six is hardly statistically valid, but they are 100 percent of the known iterations. They are all roughly the same size, they all have massive ~9 pound wagonwheels, they all have ~1 Acme-thread screws. Yet, four of the six have sliding platen/carriage construction, while two have round ways to guide the moving jaw. And the jaw profiles are not the same and the dimensions of the jaws – especially in thickness – vary widely, from about 1/2” thick to well over 1”.
Leach told me that Leominster, Mass., was once a thriving piano case-building city, and he speculates that these vises may have been built in the piano factories themselves based on a well-established form. It makes sense especially given the character of the wheels and screws, but given the number of piano factories producing astonishing numbers of pianos (c. 1900 it seems like nearly every household in America aspired to have a keyboard instrument of some kind) why are there only six of these beauties around? You would think that there would be more, many more. He recalls that the scrap metal drives of the two world wars melted down a lot of historic iron.
I became so impressed with the beauty and effortless precision of the vises on Studley’s workbench that I revised the book outline to include a chapter on them. Further, I have been fabricating foundry patterns for them and hope to have at least the patterns at Handworks in Amana, Iowa, and if I get lucky with time, perhaps an aluminum prototype. I also expect we will have Cottle’s vise at Amana. Eventually I will have a pair cast for me in bronze (except for the thread screw) and if the planets align, turn the patterns over to Jameel Abraham of Benchcrafted for manufacturing.
Over the weekend I was lecturing and teaching for the Society of American Period Furniture Makers’ New England Chapter and the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking, including updates on the half dozen books I have in progress. Afterward, three attendees approached me with information about similar vises they either owned or knew about, and I invited them to send me pictures and written description and accounts. I extend the same invitation to you via the comments below.
Several readers requested a video on how I remove dovetail pin waste with a drill press. Today I was making more dovetails for my next campaign chest and shot this short video. Enjoy! Or hate!
