When measuring my car and drawing up the plans for my first Dutch chest, I forgot two things: the handles and the caster assembly.
Which means, as you probably can guess, that the chest does not fit in my car.
After considering all the options – remake the handles, saw the chest in two like a lady at a magic show, going to Home Depot and buying tool bags – I concluded it would be faster (and more fun) to build a smaller Dutch chest.
This one is a mix between the first chest, some other historical examples and one that Roy Underhill owns that I examined last year (read about that chest here).
I also took the opportunity to try some different things in this chest.
1. The top has clamps (breadboard ends). I did this – instead of battens – to make a sawtill that was lower in profile.
2. The removable front panel has battens that extend beyond the bottom edge of the panel. These allow me to use a simpler locking mechanism (more on this later).
3. I used wrought nails from blacksmith Peter Ross. My one-word review: Dang.
Anyway, I’m going to paint this sucker today and will talk more about it in a bit.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Also, I’m going to build a lower unit for this chest – a la campaign furniture – after a suggestion from a reader.
A little knowledge about trees goes a long way toward improving your woodworking.
You don’t need a degree in dendrology to build a desk. But you do need intimate knowledge of how our raw material grows and – more importantly – how it responds to its environment after it has been cut and dried.
This knowledge allows you to tame the wood into the shapes that you have envisioned in your head. And it ensures that your furniture will endure the seasons and age with grace and aplomb.
That is why I am particularly pleased to announce the latest book from Lost Art Press: “With the Grain: A Craftsman’s Guide to Understanding Wood” by Christian Becksvoort. This is the book about wood that I wished I’d had when I started woodworking.
It is, above all, succinct, easy to understand and perfectly suited for the furniture-maker. As important as what is in its 144 pages is what is not. It’s not a detailed analysis of cell growth. It is not a heap of tables and equations for figuring truss loads in residential construction. It is decidedly not a scientist’s approach to the material.
Instead, “With the Grain” contains the facts you need to know at the lumberyard, in the woodlot and in the shop. It gives you enough science so you understand how trees grow. It explains the handful of formulas you have to know as a furniture-maker. And it gives you a hearty dose of specific information about North American species that will inspire you. Becksvoort encourages you to use the trees in your neighborhood and makes the case that just because you cannot find catalpa at the lumberyard doesn’t mean it’s not a good furniture wood.
You’ll learn to identify the trees around you from their silhouette, leaves and shoots. And you’ll learn about how these species work in the shop – both their advantages and pitfalls.
Becksvoort then takes you into a detailed discussion of how wood reacts to it environment – the heart of the book. You’ll learn how to calculate and accommodate wood movement with confidence and precision. And you’ll learn how to design furniture assemblies – casework, drawers, doors and moulding – so they will move with the seasons without cracking.
There’s also a chapter on how to manage a small forest or copse of trees – how to care for them, encourage them to thrive and harvest them. You’ll learn the basics of cutting, stacking and drying the wood, if you should ever have the privilege of harvesting your own lumber.
“With the Grain” is a major revision of an earlier work by Becksvoort titled “In Harmony with Wood.” While a lot of the raw data on trees hasn’t changed, Becksvoort updated the text, drawings and photos to incorporate more details and strategies for dealing with wood movement.
Like all Lost Art Press books, “With the Grain” is printed and bound in the United States on acid-free paper. The binding is Smythe sewn. The book is hardbound with a green cotton cover. The book is $25.
“With the Grain” is at the printer now. If you order it before the publication date (Feb. 20), you will receive free domestic shipping. After Feb. 20, shipping will be $7.
“In the past, the carpenter’s guild enjoyed great prestige. To be a house carpenter was to know how to lay out and join, with precision, the often huge systems of trusses needed to support the enormous weight of a roof in stone or tile. At the time it was very learned work, and lent to those who practiced the art an uncontested predominance.”
— René Fontaine, architect
On the 31st of January, 1783, André-Jacob Roubo stood on a platform 38 meters (125 ft.) above the streets of Paris, which spread out around him in all directions. He was just below the pinnacle of the wooden dome he had designed to cover the round interior courtyard of the Grain Market near the center of the city. The structure spanned 39.5 meters without any internal support, and it had been constructed of an uncountable number of spruce planks, laid out and precisely joined by a small army of carpenters.
Far below, the carpenters were removing the last of the scaffolding that had supported the structure during construction, and, from a safe distance, a large crowd had gathered around the small band of officials from the market and the city.
There had been no volunteers to join Roubo at the top. Would it all come crashing down?
Paris’s grain and flour market, a stone’s throw from the Louvre and the river Seine, had been finished in 1767. The land set aside for the project formed a rough pentagon, and it was decided to build a round building with a courtyard to maximize the available light from the arches on the exterior and interior walls of the building. Over the years, the central court had been haphazardly filled with various rudimentary structures to shelter the merchants as the commerce grew.
France loves its bread as much as it loves its wine.
When the merchants in the market grumbled about the lack of space and the shambles in the courtyard, Paris listened and decided to put a roof on it. It would have been possible to build pillars to support the weight of the structure, but in the spirit of the enlightenment and of Paris, they decided to stretch the limits of the possible, and they engaged a couple of architects to build a dome.
It was a complicated project. There existed in the world at the time domes of a similar size, the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul was 31 meters, the Pantheon in Rome, 43, and the Duomo in Florence spanned 44 meters. But as the noted French architect Louis-Auguste Boileau wrote in a short biography of Roubo in 1834, the market had been built over a number of much older foundations of uncertain strength; and the structure, with its relatively thin walls and all the arches, had not been designed to, and could not possibly be expected to support the weight of a dome in stone and/or brick. Plus, it was a market after all, and the money and time needed for such a structure would have been a deal-ender.
The dome would have to be built in wood. But who could design and build a wooden dome with a span of 39 meters? One of the architect’s assistants had the answer: There was only one man in France who might be able to get the job done.
In early 1782, Roubo received a visit from the young architects, Legrand and Molinos, who had been engaged for the project. He listened to what they wanted and said he needed a night to think about it. The next day, he told them he would do it, but only on condition that he would be free to build the dome as he saw fit.
The details of the conversation were not recorded. But as Boileau wrote, Roubo, who had just finished his masterwork, the series of books “L’art De La Menuiserie,” had an ace in the hole, another book two centuries old. One can imagine him listening to the architects outlining the project and its constraints, and then after asking a night to think about it, pulling a dusty big book off the shelf in his study or in a library. “Inventions to Build Well at Low Cost” (“Inventions Pour Bien Batir à Petites Frais”) by the architect Philibert Delorme, who had worked much of his career for the French king, Henri II, but had been mostly forgotten by Roubo’s time.
The book included way of building various kinds of arches, using ordinary planks intricately joined with pegs, notches and wedges. The arches are joined together using an integral network of wedged crossbars to form a vault or a dome. The result is a remarkably light and modern construction that concentrated the stresses in tension and compression to take advantage of the strengths of wood and prefigured similar designs in iron and steel. It was in sharp contrast to traditional wooden roof structures based on the triangle, where the maximum span was dictated mostly by the wood available in suitable length and dimensions for the base.
The construction took only five months. But, as you can imagine, when building a new type of structure at that scale requiring countless thousands of pieces of wood that are shaped by hand to very high tolerances by a small army of carpenters, all did not go to plan. Boileau in his biography wrote: “(H)e encountered difficulties of every type, and personally checked and adjusted if need be, the numberless pieces of wood… ”
So on that January day, the last of the scaffolding was taken away. The crowd held its breath. And nothing happened. Roubo’s design had worked. The waiting crowd swarmed into the Grain Market and carried Roubo away on their shoulders in triumph.
The dome was roofed in lead and copper with large vertical strips of glass to illuminate the interior. The structure performed as designed for almost 20 years until it was destroyed in 1802 by wood’s ancient enemy: fire. The dome was later rebuilt in iron, and the work took not five months, but five years to complete, between 1806 and 1811. The building now houses France’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
Boileau wrote that the innovative structure made Roubo famous throughout Europe and brought in a lot of business both in Paris and from around the continent. It is also said that the dome was much admired by a later visitor to Paris, the then-American ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson, who famously had a thing for domes.
— Brian Anderson
Editor’s note: You can order our special edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” until the end of January 2013 and guarantee you will receive a copy. Details in our store.
Many of my students delight when I make a mistake or a misstep in class. Not because they are cold-blooded wankers, but because they like to know that all woodworkers screw up at times.
So let me say that these workbenches would be totally delightful to my students.
I lost a whole day when building the movable block for the the wagon vise. After cutting all the joinery, tweaking the blocks to a piston fit and creating all the joinery for the screw and garter it came time to make the dog hole.
I chopped it at the wrong angle – 3° slanting away from the other dogs instead of 3° the other way.
I also lost a day experimenting with different ways to affix the benchtop to a table. Fail, fail and fail again I did. Finally I came back to my original notion – angle iron – which worked brilliantly.
And making the little bench chihuahuas was an entire afternoon of stupid ideas accented by blunders, dead ends, two trips to hardware stores and – ultimately – a five-minute operation that created awesome little dogs.
Even though I have years and years of experience, building something new is never a perfectly orchestrated unicorn square dance.
But the benches are done – finished and functional. The story is written. The SketchUp drawing is sketched. The digital photos are processed and off to Popular Woodworking Magazine. I am ready for a beer or 12.
I am asked the following question a lot – that usually means I should answer it.
Question: I am building a trestle table based on the one you built. I have a dumb question. I was lucky enough to find 5/4-thick, 18″-wide walnut for $4/bf. I can most likely get a two-board top, but both boards are too wide for my planer. When gluing up the 32″-wide top, should I flatten the face of the boards then glue? Or should I first glue and then flatten?
Answer: There are many ways to do it. Here’s what I do.
1. I scrub/fore plane both faces of the boards so I can see the grain and select the best faces.
2. I select what will be the show face of the boards and decide on their arrangement. I try to get all the grain running in the same direction, but appearance is more important than grain direction.
3. I flatten the show faces, joint the faces and get them ready for smoothing. Then I joint the edges.
4. I glue up the top, taking every precaution to line up the seams on the show faces. I ignore seams on the still-rough underside (except to make sure the seams close up under clamp pressure).
5. After the glue is dry, I fore plane the underside so it is roughly flat — flat enough to sit flat on the table’s base. I leave the traverse marks from the fore. I consider it texture.
6. Then I dress the show face of the top so it looks good. Not flat — just pretty. If I did a good job of lining up my seams, I can start with the smooth plane. If I had a bad glue-up, I start with the jointer set rank, or (shudder) with the fore plane set for a small bite.
