Tim Talma reviewed “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” by Jennie Alexander and Peter Follansbee in the latest issue of “Period Furniture,” the newsletter of the Society of American Period Furniture Makers (SAPFM).
“Although the joint stool outlined in the book is a simple project compared to other projects of the period, this book covers everything. This includes the history of 17th-century joined furniture, tools used in its construction, the wood and how to get it….”
While I love the title of this book, I sometimes think I should done a better job of emphasizing that this is a dead-nuts simple introduction to hand-tool woodworking with a minimum number of tools and the wood in your backyard. And it makes you want to build.
“The author’s enthusiasm for the subject definitely rubs off on the reader,” Talma writes, “and makes you want to go right out and build this stool, which I probably will do, once I find the right tree.”
I was also sent two new reviews of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” from different points of view. Ludovic Drochon reviews the book in French here. And then goes on to describe how he built his chest (a nice red one) here.
The other review is on the Highland Woodworking blog by Kelley O’Toole and it is from the perspective of a beginning woodworker. Also cool: Our Lost Art Press books are featured on the cover of the latest Highland Woodworking catalog – a big honor in my book.
Well, actually it was more like a 12-board chest, but they were 2-meter-long skinny tongue-and-groove floorboards that I glued together, so I guess it still counts. I have ended up using quite a bit of the tongue-and-groove pine, either 3/4″ flooring or 3/8″ wainscoting, for different things. The wood I get here in France is maritime pine from plantations down in the Landes region near Bordeaux. Not a fine Bordeaux of woods to work, certainly, and not for fine furniture. But it comes dimensioned, planed and sanded on two sides in widths from 4″ to 8″. Saves a lot of time when gluing up boards or making frame-and-panel sections for furniture or traditional paneling. It’s also dirt cheap, well under a buck a board foot. And with a little filler for the knots, it takes a beautiful paint, oil or varnish finish.
I am putting the finishing touches on a guest bedroom in my house here in the Touraine region of France. The bedroom had been basically a hay loft with a kind of adobe floor laid over split chestnut sticks and plastered underneath, but when we bought the house it had most of the wiring and drywall in place. So anyway, I’ve been plugging away at finishing it out, hanging and jointing drywall, repointing the exposed stone with lime mortar, and laying a “random”-width pine floor and building in some storage. A bed was next on the list, after I cut and moulded and installed the baseboards, and finished painting everything, and installed another built-in bookshelf to cover some junction boxes that could have been installed more discretely.
But then this Schwarz character, as Peter Follansbee likes to call him, started going on about these six-board chests. Which are really kind of cool, I thought. What could be better for the foot of the bed, to hold linens and whatnot? Plus I needed something else to do with some of the offcuts and extra boards from the floor.
Firing up my old German ECE moving fillister to cut the rabbets.
The nails I used for the sides and bottom are some German boat “nails” I ordered a while back. Nice hand-forged looking head, square shaft, mostly used with a rove as rivets to join lapstrake or clinker boat hulls. You drill a hole in the fitted planks, drive the nail through, drive the washer-like rove down over the shaft of the nail, cut the shaft leaving it a bit proud, and then use a backing iron and a hammer to mushroom out the shaft over the rove. They call them clinker hulls because of the noise the hammers make heading the rivets. (For the top I used regular wire nails, with the zinc on the head filed off, clenched over)
As nails though, this batch at least was not as advertised, because the “chisel” point was not actually pointy enough to be driven into a stick of butter with anything short of a sledge hammer.
My name is Brian and I individually sharpen my nails.
I was fitting the hinges when the girls came up and claimed the chest for their toys. Have to fit a sliding till it seems. And then build another one. No, two.
“You have two daughters, Papa.”
I also wanted to dive into milk paint. I found a mom-and-pop operation based somewhere around Lille near the Belgian border, ordered a couple of packages and then began checking the mailbox. And checking. So after a while I sent off an e-mail about my order.
The other day I got a very enthusiastic but somewhat vague response with this photo. Apparently they are in the process of changing the milk supplier for their customers in the Touraine. In view of the terroir of the region, nothing less than skim Tibetan yak milk from Ganden Monastery will do, and they will be shipping as soon as this girl reaches maturity, and finds a suitable husband also capable of pulling the cart full of skim milk to Lhasa Airport.
OK. Clearly something had to be done.
From René Fontaine’s “The French Country House” (Seghers Press, 1977) here’s a traditional recipe for milk paint (slightly paraphrased).
“Here are a couple of recipes for types of paint, long forgotten. The bizarrity of the formula corresponds perfectly to the mentality of these people attached to the earth. We have no doubt as to the effectiveness of the paints.
“To a liter of skim milk, we add 180 grams of slaked lime, 120 grams of linseed oil and 2.5 kilos of Spanish White. In practice, we pour the skim milk over the slaked lime and Spanish White and gradually add the linseed oil into the mix, stirring constantly.
“For the second of these paints, we mix 140 grams of cottage cheese, 7 grams of slaked lime, 280 grams of chalk powder and 80 grams of water. Practically speaking, we mix the slaked lime with the cheese, a little water and stir in the chalk powder.
“For the last, something completely different: 500 grams of potatoes mixed with 1 kilo of chalk powder and 3.8 liters of skim milk. For this one, we boil the potatoes, after peeling them, and then strain the potatoes. We then pour in the skim milk, and stir while sifting in the chalk.”
Wow. As I understand it, it helps to add a couple of teaspoons of borax powder to act as an antibacterial agent and to help make the casein – the protein in the milk, which is the binder and a very strong glue in its own right – water-soluble. (Basically, milk paint is real cottage cheese mixed with a pigment and some chalk powder and/or slaked lime.) One can then use various kinds of earth pigments, or even gouache or oil paints to achieve various pastel colors.
Roy Underhill has just opened registration at The Woodwright’s School for the first batch of classes in 2013.
I’m teaching there twice in 2013. Details:
The Anarchist’s Tool Chest, Aug. 26-30.
Note that this class is full. You can sign up for the waiting list. I recommend doing that. People from the waiting list always get into the class.
Make a Six-board Chest, Oct. 12-14, 2013.
I think this is going to be the oddest class I’ve ever taught. The members of the class and I will all be building the same project, but the chest’s particular design will be guided by the material and tools at hand – plus a good dose of history and geomety I might add.
Hope you can join us in Pittsboro in 2013. And be sure to check out the other classes that Roy has listed on the site. Peter Follansbee has a cool class on a joint stool. Make a name stamp with Peter Ross. And of course, the classics: Mystery Mallet with Roy, Handsaw Sharpening with Bill Anderson, and Carving with Mary May.
If you are considering plunking down $400 on a book, you have every right to ask questions. And while I’ve answered as many questions as I can in the last 24 hours via e-mail, I’d like to offer even more details about our two forthcoming books: “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” and “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Furniture Making.”
Question: Why did you choose these two particular volumes – marquetry and furniture making – to translate and comment upon? Don’t you like carriage-making?
Answer from Don Williams: “These sections addressed the questions I had compiled over the past four decades in the business of finishing, patternmaking and restoration. It may be worth noting that this project began as a simple labor of love driven by my own curiosity, with originally no expectation of any audience interest.”
Question: WIll these two volumes be “complete” works?
Answer: Yes and no. The book on marquetry will include all four chapters that A.J. Roubo penned on ébénisterie. One chapter in the middle of this volume, Chapter 13: Tools and Machines for Furniture Making, fits better with the book we will be publishing on furniture making in 2014. So we moved it there.
Here’s what Don had to say about that: “(Chapter 13’s) inclusion here in the original was always an oddity to me, since it really has almost nothing to do with ébénisterie and has everything to do with menuiserie. So I removed it from the volume on marquetry and moved it into the volume on furniture making. Once you see the final product, I think you will agree with my decision. Incidentally this Chapter 13 is mammoth, almost twice as long as any other chapter in the entire corpus, weighing in at nearly 100 pages in the original. And even though it has been translated, I have not yet unified it but estimate it at nearly 50,000 words by itself!”
The second book on furniture making will be “nearly complete” in its scope. We opted to omit the section on beds and some of the sections on geometry. Don says: “I have omitted those sections that discuss in exhaustive(!) detail the role of geometric rendering and layout for mostly architectural elements.”
As someone who has paged through all five volumes, I concur that the geometry section is huge and relates mostly to large-scale architectural details.
Table of Contents
As requested, here is our table of contents for these two books. These are still a work in progress, though any changes would be minor. Note that the page numbers refer to the page numbers in the original text, not in our editions.
“To Make As Perfectly As Possible: Roubo on Marquetry”
An Essay on Appreciating and Measuring the Value of Hand Work p1242 -1254
Conclusion of the Art of Carpentry p1255-1264
The different woods appropriate for veneering pp766-814
Section I: Description of “Wood from India” and its qualities, relative to cabinetry.
Section II: French woods appropriate for cabinetry.
Section III: Different dye compositions appropriate for tinting wood and the manner of using them.
Section IV: Thinning of wood for veneer-making.
Description of tools of veneering.
Section V: Appropriate carcass construction for veneering, their manner of construction.
Simple Veneering: general instructions pp. 815-865
Section I: Various Kinds of Compositions.
a. Manner of cutting and adjusting straight pieces and tools for same.
b. Manner of cutting and adjusting curved pieces and tools for same.
Section II: Manner of gluing parquetry veneer.
a. Finishing of veneer and different types of polish.
Ornate Veneering, called mosaic or painted wood pp. 866-897
Section I: Principal rules of perspective absolutely necessary for cabinet makers.
Section II: Manner of cutting, shadowing and mounting wooden ornaments.
a. Manner of engraving and finishing wooden ornaments.
Section III: Representing flowers, fruits, landscape and figures in wood.
About the 3rd type of veneering in general (aka boullework-DCW) pp. 982-1031
Section I: Description of different materials for construction of the 3rd type of veneering.
Section II: The skills one uses in the 3rd type of veneering.
Section III: How to work the different materials used in marquetry, such as tortoise shell, ivory, horn etc.
Section IV: How to construct marquetry and how to finish it.
“To Make As Perfectly As Possible: Roubo on Furniture Making”
Proper wood for furniture making pp. 22-39
Different ways of assembling wood pp. 45-48
Proper tools for furniture makers: different types, forms and uses pp. 49-89
Drafting and gluing pp. 273-291
Section I: how to take measurements
Section II: About wood glues
Furniture-Making in general pp. 600-633
Chair making pp. 634-664
Making case furniture pp. 743-765
Tools and machines for furniture making pp. 898-981
I shelved all of my personal writing projects to complete work on “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.” But I know myself well enough that if I don’t spend some time in the shop every day, I’ll spiral into a stressed-out, grumpy and sharp-tongued jerk.
So whenever I could take a short break during the last week, I’ve been banging out this Roubo bookstand in some very old and mild cherry. I considered making it to the exact size specified in the text of “L’Art du Menuisier,” but I think I must have been reading it wrong. My dirty translation had the book stand made from 8/4 stock.
I’ll have to revisit that passage some day. Perhaps next year.
In any case, this one is made from a board that was 1-1/8” x 10” x 21”. The whole thing took about three hours of shop time spread out over several days. I was going to finish it with a polissoir, but I had some fresh garnet shellac handy. If you haven’t tried building one of these from Roy Underhill’s article in Popular Woodworking Magazine, you should. They are as easy as tarte.
Tim Talma reviewed “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” by Jennie Alexander and Peter Follansbee in the latest issue of “Period Furniture,” the newsletter of the Society of American Period Furniture Makers (SAPFM).
