FIG. 1. CUT-AWAY VIEW FROM REAR OF SOLID END CARCASE. The runners rest in grooves so that they are supported throughout their length. No glue is used (except at the stub-tenon at the front) as this would cause the ends to split in the event of shrinkage.
That drawer runners must be strong is fairly obvious, but there are other equally important considerations to be kept in mind. For example, they must be square with the front and be free from winding. The latter point may not always be apparent. Glance for a minute at Fig. 2, which represents a cabinet seen from the side with the end removed. If the distance between runners and guides is measured it might well happen that it would be the same everywhere, and the work might be passed as in order. But the drawers would not run properly owing to the runners being in winding. This is a detail over which it is easy to trip.
When there is just one drawer occupying the whole space in a carcase it generally runs directly on the bottom, and the top acts in place of kickers. In a similar way the cabinet sides are virtually the guides. When there are several drawers, or when the lower part is occupied by a cupboard, however, it becomes necessary to add separate runners, guides, and kickers. The method of fixing these depends primarily upon the construction of the cabinet itself. For instance, the fixing in a cabinet with solid ends is rather different from that in one having panelled ends, because in the former allowance has to be made for shrinkage.
FIG. 2. IMAGINARY SIDE VIEW OF CABINET. The runners are in winding so that, although the distances shown by the arrows are all equal, the drawer would not run properly.
SOLID END CABINETS A reliable method for these is given in Fig. 1. It will be noticed that the mid-drawer rail is grooved at the back. This is to enable a dustboard to be fixed, but it incidentally provides a useful means of securing the runners, the front ends of which are stub-tenoned. When no dustboard is required the groove is cut in locally to provide a mortise in which the stub-tenon can fit. The runners are grooved with the plough at the same setting, then when the stub-tenons are cut it is merely necessary to make them line up with the groove.
It will be seen that the runners rest in grooves worked across the ends. This is essential for a really strong job because the grooves offer direct resistance to the downward pressure of the drawers. It is important, however, that no glue is used for fixing because, in the event of shrinkage, the ends would be liable to split. The best plan is to glue just the tenon and drive in a skew nail, partly to force the runner tightly home, and partly to hold it whilst the glue sets. At the back a screw is used, the wood being cut away to remove the groove and to enable a shorter screw to be used. Note that a slot is cut for the screw rather than a round hole. This enables the end to draw along the runner in the case of shrinkage, so avoiding splitting. The screw serves to hold the runner in place rather than to provide direct support.
Since there is no end to which the centre runner can be attached, another method has to be adopted here. It depends in a measure upon the kind of back being fitted. If there is a fairly substantial muntin in the middle it is often possible to cut a groove across it and allow the back end of the runner to rest in this. If this is not practicable the simplest alternative is to introduce a hanger at the back, as shown in Fig. 1. This can be conveniently dovetailed into the top rail. At the bottom it is again dovetailed, this time into the runner itself. The fixing at the front is by the stub-tenon as in the side runners. Skew nails again are advisable to prevent any tendency to pull out. Both edges are grooved for dustboards, and in this connection it should be noted that the back dovetail is set in at each side sufficiently to clear the grooves easily.
A guide is needed in the middle, and the best form is a plain square of wood glued and screwed directly on top. It is a good plan to make it slightly tapered in width so that there is a trifle more width at back than at the front, so giving easy clearance for the drawers. This is not essential, however. Many workers prefer to make the job exactly the same size back and front. What is important is that there is not less clearance at the back.
When there is a solid top to the carcase this prevents any tendency for the drawer to drop when opened.
Sometimes, however, a couple of rails are substituted, as in Fig. 1, and this calls for the use of a kicker as shown. One only is needed because the rails are built out in their width at the ends and provide the necessary support. The strongest method is to frame the kicker between the rails before the last named are glued to the ends. Alternatively, a stub tenon can be cut at the front only, the back being butted. There is sufficient give in the wood to enable the tenon to be inserted and the back pressed down. A couple of nails can then be driven in askew, one at each side.
Don Williams says his love of learning was probably fostered by the fact that his father was going through seminary when he was a child. Don grew up in a household without television. Instead, his family listened to classical music and read.
“But much to my parents’ dismay, I veered off into jazz as my primary interest, so they were pretty much convinced in my teenage years that they had picked up the wrong kid in the hospital,” he says.
Don maintains a love of jazz.
Jazz can loosely be defined as a combination of polyphony, syncopation and improvisation — simultaneous but independent melodic lines playing at the same time with unexpected and off-beat rhythms achieved extemporaneously. For Williams, jazz is not only what he listens to, still to this day, but serves as an outline for how he lives his life.
A self-proclaimed conservator, educator, scholar and all-around inquisitive guy, Don was a curious child who delved deep into varying topics – some unexpected – and from a young age, found connections.
“I think that being interested in many things, not everything, but many things allowed me to gather a lot of information,” he says. “And since I didn’t necessarily accept the rubric of the classroom, I think I’m able to see connections between distinct bodies of knowledge that wouldn’t necessarily be apparent if you were stuck in the tyranny of specialized knowledge.”
Don believes that the whole notion of specialized knowledge is a modern thing. “In the past, our predecessors in much earlier generations saw knowledge as the continuum rather than a series of cubbyholes,” he says. He mentions Robert A. Heinlein, who famously wrote:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Don believes pluralism and knowledge to be good things. “That’s part of why I was able to study lots of different things, both formally and informally, and manage to synthesize them into some body of working knowledge,” he says. “It doesn’t necessarily [make me] an expert at anything, but it does make adaptable I think.”
But expert, he is. In many things.
Williams spent his early years in southern Minnesota, and his adolescent and post-adolescent years in South Florida. His mother was an office worker, his father a pastor. Williams is the fourth child out of five.
At that time there was a program in Florida called the Faculty Scholars program that pinpointed high-achieving students on factors outside of grade point average. Williams had his high school guidance counselor convinced he was a solid “B” student.
“And then when the senior standardized placement test results came back, she literally left her office, came and dragged me out of class and read me the riot act,” Don says. He had received the second highest score in his very large high school.
This test result, through the Faculty Scholars program, allowed Don to begin college as a junior. He enrolled at Florida Atlantic University planning to double major in economics and political science. “This was 1972 and everybody was pre-law in 1972,” he says.
Improvisation
Around this time Don was working in the finishing room of the now-closed Schindler & Son, then a well-known restoration shop in West Palm Beach, Fla. “I found my attraction and interest at the workbench,” he says. “[The work there] was so much greater than the stuff I was studying in college that I dropped out of college around the beginning of my senior year. It just didn’t pull my fascination.”
Don began working full time for Schindler in 1974, and there met Nick Hlopoff, an internationally renowned decorative art conservator. “He was an exotic figure to me,” Don says. “Being a kid of the Midwest, Baptist parentage, here was this fellow who was an ethnic Russian, born and raised in Paris, trained by his father to care for artworks of exquisite importance.”
Nick, who lived outside of Detroit, would come into town and use shop space to care for the artworks of one of Schindler’s clients. “He was the guy who introduced me to the world of museum conservation as a livelihood,” Don says.
So Don decided to go back to college. “I still didn’t know precisely the path to art conservation as a career so I did the closest thing I could find which was to go to the University of Florida and major in architectural historic preservation.” But a year and a half in, the university changed its curriculum in a direction Don didn’t like. So he left school again.
Don worked in restoration and reproductions at Colonial Woodworking in Archer, Fla., and then in 1978 got a job at Maddox Foundry and Machine Works. “I worked as a patternmaker, which is ultra-precise woodworking,” he says. “I mean, ultra-precise.”
At Schindler’s, Don learned all about historical furniture, having worked on thousands of old-money European and French furniture pieces for wealthy clients in Palm Beach. At Maddox, he learned all about precision woodworking.
Polyphony
It’s the early 1980s now, and Don has married Carolyn, who he met on a blind date at his sister’s house. Carolyn wanted to pursue graduate work, and Don wanted to pursue art conservation. So they chose the southern most of the four colleges in North America that offered both — University of Delaware. Don enrolled in an undergraduate art conservation program, which was an interdisciplinary triple major of studio art, chemistry and art history. “Those are the very disparate disciplines that are the foundation for art conservation,” he says. “It’s fully left brain and right brain, both evolving simultaneously.”
There were 17 incoming students in Don’s program, but by the end of the first semester of the second year, Don was the only one left. “For most people either the hard science is going to weed you out or the fine art is going to weed you out,” he says.
A semester shy of graduating, he received three job offers in the museum field.
“I accepted the job offer from the Smithsonian with the promise that I would finish my studies and get my degree.” He did. It took him another year and a half of commuting one day a week to Delaware and back, but in 1985 he earned a B.A. in “Technology of Artistic and Historic Objects.” (The degree is now, more simply called “Art Conservation.”) Don was the program’s first graduate.
One of the ironies of the Smithsonian gig was that Don was hired in part to be on a team that was developing an art conservation graduate degree program, even though he hadn’t received a graduate degree himself. “So my time for the first couple of years was split between working on the curriculum for this new master’s degree program and doing hands-on caretaking and inquiries and research into the materials and artifacts that related to the Smithsonian.”
Don was 29 when the Smithsonian offered him a job. “You pinch yourself,” he says. “You just can’t believe it.” In his later years, when working alongside his best work friend, Melvin Wachowiak (“With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture” is dedicated to him), Don says they would often say to each other how unbelievable it was that they were being paid to do this type of work. “Because it was so much fun,” Don says.
Don describes the small group he worked with as semi-autonomous, with a think-tank-like culture. “We were given just extraordinary latitudes in pursuing the intersection of our interests and Smithsonian collection needs,” he says. His official job description, which he wrote, was 15 pages long. When asked to distill that down he says this: Be productively curious.
He was. And he was good at it.
“Part of my success in this poly-dimensional disciplinary world was that I could synthesize information from completely unconnected sources,” he says. “I hope I’m not bragging about it but it’s just a way, it’s a familiarity with the way I work. My wife has identified me as severely ADD so that’s perhaps worked out well there.”
A cabinet by the French-born 19th century New York cabinetmaker Alexander Roux.
Don’s restoration is on display in Washington DC.
Day to day, Don said he got to “literally intrude into the fabric of some of the most prominent artifacts in the history of the nation. And so some days I was working on irreplaceable treasures, and some days I was just sitting and reading. And still, the paycheck showed up at 12:01 a.m. every other Tuesday morning.”
The pieces that most interested Don during his time at the Smithsonian weren’t those with historical prominence but rather those that had “attractable degradation.” He talks about a 19th-century replica of a 17th-century French desk with spectacularly decorated marquetry but was run-of-the-mill in the 19th century.
“But it was in the Smithsonian collection,” he says. “And it was undergoing really catastrophic damage because the carcass underneath it – the veneer was coming apart. Working on that was really an amazing experience. But it wasn’t owned by anyone important. It wasn’t made by anyone important. It was a typical sort of French replica that an industrialist of the gilded age would have in their sitting room or library to kind of evoke a false nobility.”
Don also worked on a desk that was one of the earliest and largest examples of artificial tortoise shell. “I’m nuts about tortoise shell,” he says. “I’ve invented a really persuasive imitation tortoise shell for my own work so studying that piece was really great.”
The Mace of the United States House of Representatives
During the second half of Don’s career he was very much involved in the caretaking of the Mace of the United States House of Representatives (look it up on Wikipedia). “Most people don’t know about it, but it is one of the biggies, it’s right up there with the Liberty Bell,” he says. “For me, that was a such a powerful, powerful artifact symbol for us as a nation. And that has touched me to this day.” For 20 minutes Don’s work on the Mace was featured in a C-SPAN documentary called “The Capitol.” (The next time you watch C-SPAN, and they offer a panoramic view of the House Chamber in the Capitol Building, you’ll see the Mace at the very left edge of your screen.)
After more than 25 years of service to the Smithsonian, Don left his job on the last day of the last pay period of 2012. “I was ready,” he says. Don describes the Smithsonian as a scientific arts bureaucracy wrapped inside an academic bureaucracy wrapped inside a federal bureaucracy. “For us, geological timeframes were not merely some abstract idea, that’s how things worked sometimes,” he says. “It was pretty clear that my own particular interests no longer coincided with the organization that I worked for. That’s not malevolence or anything else. People’s priorities change. My priorities stayed pretty much the same, my organization’s priorities changed. They offered me the chance to retire at the age of 57 with lots of years of woodworking left and I said, ‘Wow. That’s pretty good.’”
Michele and Don at work on Roubo.
Don studying the tool cabinet of Henry O. Studley.
By now Don and Michele Pietryka-Pagán had already begun working on “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.” And Don had begun work on “Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley.” The Smithsonian (which demands right of first refusal on all intellectual property relative to your job when employed) had no interest in either. So he already had two projects dialed in that he knew were of interest to Lost Art Press. “I already had a working relationship with Chris and he was very much interested in the kind of scholarship I was trying to pursue,” Don says. “So really, Lost Art Press was a big part of my decision-making for this fairly substantial lifestyle change because frankly, it was a really, really good job. It was way too much fun, part of it, and paid way too much, but somebody had to have that job and it might as well have been me.”
So Don and Carolyn left Washington for a new life on a secluded property in the mountains of Virginia, which they had purchased a dozen years before.
Syncopation
These days, Don follows his muse. On the day we spoke he had plans to finish formatting photos for an article he wrote for Popular Woodworking Magazine. Then, lunch. “One of the advantages of me being here is that there’s always a fresh, hot lunch – every day. I’ll come down the hill and my wife will have made us a wonderful, wonderful lunch.” In the afternoon he’ll continue work on replicating a desk for a client.
He does a lot of writing. In addition to his woodworking-related writing he says he also has a “fairly vigorous email circle of circumstantial and political and economic commentary that I carry on with my virtual community of observers.” He also writes fiction – thrillers, specifically. His latest is about a museum conservator who has withdrawn to the mountains and gets drawn into a mystery dealing with documents hidden in a piece of furniture. Those documents threaten the structure of Western civilization, and the bodies start piling up.
“My wife says I like to do it because I get to put words in everyone’s mouth,” he says, laughing.
Often, while drifting off to sleep, Don says he’ll compose things in his mind — an artistic design, an essay on the state of the civilization, theological apologetics.
“One of the things that I celebrate the most is that I do not have to regimen my life,” he says. “It’s fairly mercurial. To be utterly frank about it I’ve reach a position of status in the artifact world that you know clients are willing to wait for whatever it is that I do.” (A recent call with once such client resulted in a request to call back after Christmas 2018.) “And I never for a moment take for granted that blessing. I’ve been restoring furniture and decorative objects with some level of accomplishment now since 1971. So that’s a fair amount of time.”
While Don says certain kinds of problem-solving skills are innate to him, he says his success is due, in part, to some marginal native artistic talent. “And I do mean marginal,” he says. “But through skill you can overcome limitations and challenges. Because skill is about repetition. It’s like in writing. The more you understand the meaning, the power, the organization of the words, the greater facility you have using those words for their intended purpose. And when you’re talking about working with artifacts it helps to be interested in and able to comprehend the nature of the materials from whence they are fabricated, the technologies by which they are fabricated and then the trajectory of their degradation. And I guess the thing that I am every thankful for is that I, for reasons unknown to me, can sort of put those pieces together. I’m not sure if that’s a talent or a skill or something else, but it’s something that I just sort of get.”
And frankly, he says, he loves being intimately associated with beautiful things. And not just aesthetic beauty. “Sometimes just thinking skillfully or thinking clearly or thinking creatively is a beautiful thing,” he says. “I love a beautifully crafted concept.” He says his daily expenditure of resources, time and energy spent on restoration is diminishing, “in part because there are other new avenues of rediscovering historical craftsmanship. The related expression is much more prominent on my horizon than before.”
Note Don’s toothing plane collection.
Don’s ideal week is not a whole lot different than what he’s doing now. He hopes to make more replicas of prominent, historic, smaller-scale furniture. He hopes to continue working for a very few number of clients whose collections he has a strong affection for (think: caring for tortoise shell). He has a series of sketchbooks, and the drawings in them are a car wreck between James Krenov’s car and André-Jacob Roubo’s car (his words). “I’m trying to apply some of the technology and artistic vocabulary of Roubo with the technology and artistic vocabulary of Krenov with a dash or two of some 16th-century Chinese furniture in there.” He likes writing. He likes collecting. He likes communicating. He doesn’t like traveling. For Don, a 50-50 mix of studio time and time spent at the keyboard is a good mix.
“I would just like to continue what I’m doing both artistically and intellectually and stay healthy,” he says. “I’m going to be 62 coming up. I just returned from Florida where we celebrated my mom’s 100th birthday, so I figure I have about 40 good years of woodworking left so I want to be careful so I can do it.”
Don and Carolyn live in the least populous county east of the Mississippi. Folks keep up with him online at donsbarn.com. The Barn on White Run, a three-story 19th century barn he found on eBay, houses his studio, classroom, library and dorm space. It took several years to dismantle, move and rebuild the barn, but for Don, it’s a dream fulfilled, a dream he’s had since he was a teenager.
Don enjoys the solitude of rural living. Since he was a child he’s sought out remoteness and isolation. “If I have an mp3 player, that’s about all the human contact I need most days,” he says. “I love being out here. It is exceedingly remote.”
At least four times a year Don and Carolyn head over the mountains to Charlottesville, Va., where he visits University of Virgina’s ophthalmology department for some issues with his eyes. They make a day of it, eating a nice lunch and stocking up at Trader Joe’s and Costco. He also relies on online shopping, and says he’s learned to appreciate “the astounding sophistication of the economy and its distribution network.” Most items arrive in 48 hours.
“You know, I’m just at traditional guy pursuing my faith and my family out in the mountains here,” Don says. “I have daughters who I love to death and a wife who I’ve been married to for 35 years, hopefully we’re on our way to forever, but that’s pretty much it.”
Except, it’s not. His life is an eclectic mixture of conservation, restoration, woodworking, finishing, metal casting, collecting obscure books, tools and shellac (yes, really), writing, gardening, presenting, discussing politics and making connections between all of it while forever remaining curious. All while listening to podcast lectures. Or, of course, jazz.
My daughter Maddy has almost run out of our second batch of Lost Art Press stickers. So if you want some of these three recent designs, don’t tarry.
You can order the stickers one of two ways. For customers in the United States, you can send a $5 bill and a SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) to Maddy at:
Stick it to the Man
P.O. Box 3284
Columbus, OH 43210
Maddy will take your SASE and put three high-quality vinyl stickers – one of each design – in your envelope and mail it to you immediately. (If you send $10, she’ll send two sets; $15 will get you three sets). She also has been throwing in some bonus stickers….
For customers outside the United States (or those who don’t want to use an SASE), you can order stickers through Maddy’s etsy store. Stickers there are $6 for domestic customers. Because of the international postage, sets are $10 for international (sorry, but there are fees and this and that).
Maddy came home last weekend from Ohio State and we talked about how her sticker business was going. If you have ordered stickers from Maddy, you have made a huge difference in her life. This might sound corny, but now she can afford name-brand granola bars instead of the generic ones (this is a big deal). Also, she and her boyfriend could afford to attend a rodeo last month and saw a monkey ride a sheepdog that was herding sheep. She’s an animal science major (and animal lover) so this was really sweet (and kinda strange).
So thank you all. This little sticker business means I don’t have to sell my plasma so baby can go to the rodeo.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Please note that the puppy shown in the photo above has not been drugged or harmed by the sticker. He was running around trying to eat some garbage and then fell asleep in Maddy’s lap.
WOODEN spoons represent a small commodity which can often be made from what is more or less regarded as waste wood. Except for special cooking purposes, which necessitate lengthy shafts on the spoons, the ordinary article seldom exceeds about a foot in length, and hence all kinds of odd scrap sections can thus be utilised. Yellow pine is claimed to be worked most easily to the desired shape, but white pine and cheaper boxwoods have also been used, so long as the edges can be well trimmed. The wood must, of necessity, show no signs of splintering in any way, or foodstuffs might be contaminated. Sound branch wood, free from knots and of suitable size, is largely in demand for the work, and the diameter of the branches should preferably approximate to 3 ins.
The bowl of the spoon may be anything from 1½ ins. in diameter upwards, but as a rule an oblong shape is preferred. Longitudinally, the bowl has a ratio of 2½ in length to 1½ laterally, and this ratio is more or less maintained with all sizes of spoons. The shaft seldom requires to exceed ½ in. in diameter, except where heavy cooking materials have to be stirred, whilst the handle is variable in size and shape.
The earlier practice of carving spoons by hand has largely been discontinued with the advent of improved mechanical methods, but improvised machines have been used by numerous amateur woodworkers.
GRINDING THE BOWL. Whereas other culinary wooden goods, such as potato mashers, rolling pins, etc., can be directly made by different turning operations, the spoon belongs to another category, as only the shaft and handle can be dealt with in this manner. In view of the strain put upon the wood during formation of the bowl, it is customary to prepare the latter first, and subsequently turn the shaft and handle.
The latest mechanism introduced for the purpose of forming the bowl directly consists of a pair of ribbed grinding wheels similar in shape to those used for oil drilling. The bottom wheel is bowl-shaped, with a hole at the centre to allow access to the fine sawdust which forms, whilst the upper wheel acts as the counterpart, and is semispherical (A and B, Fig. 1). Prevention of the ribs becoming clogged with fine sawdust is imperative to success of the operation, and these are cut sharply in spiral direction for both wheels, so that the motion causes the fine matter to descend continuously. If the rotation described a true circle, the bowl of the spoon formed would be circular, which thus limits its size; but in order to maintain the ratio of 2½ and 1½, the wheels are operated by a sliding cam, and in keeping with this motion both wheels are of greater dimensions than the ultimate shape of the bowl produced.
Where selected branch wood is used, it is trimmed and cut to strips, but blocks of scrap wood are reduced by the band-saw to the desired shape directly. The strips are simply held in position between the wheels, and a lever causes the upper one to descend until the desired depth of bowl has been made. This, however, is not allowed to go so far that dissection is made from the parent section, as otherwise difficulties would be offered to the subsequent turning of the shaft and handle. In the way the fitting of the section at the head of the bowl to the tail-stock of the lathe is simplified, the centre being marked off in the usual manner.
The sliding cam which causes the wheels to operate to and fro whilst rotating is not really what might be termed an innovation, as the method was copied from the shuttle mechanism used in sewing machines. The action is a grinding one, and the nature of the motion prevents accumulation of sawdust between the ribs.
The wheels with the ribs are made of exceedingly hard chrome steel which are not readily blunted, and the art of making them depends upon the final tempering and quenching. The exposed faces of the ribs are as hard as the tools used for cutting steels, and hence are well able to withstand the effects of the continual abrasion from the soft wood. Each strip of wood is exposed to the foregoing treatment, and then passed over to the turner’s bench.
TURNING. The rough turning with the gouge is done easily and systematically so as not to exert any undue strain upon the weakened section (where a fraction of an inch connects the cut bowl to the parent wood), and more time is devoted to the final skinning than is customary for heavier objects such as mashers, and rolling pins, etc. Heavier gouges could probably do the work much more rapidly, but might run the risk of weakening the connecting section and further putting it out of alignment.
The turned shaft and handle are finished with glasspaper when the spoon is complete except for the parent wood attached to the bowl. This was for many years removed with chisels by hand, but recently a guillotine device has been adopted which removes the surplus wood very rapidly. In each case the edges of the bowl require to be trimmed and polished with glasspaper, when the spoons are ready for the market.
We are making the final pass through “Roubo on Furniture” during the next couple weeks. Kara Gebhart Uhl is looking for mistakes that have eluded us for the last three years, Suzanne Ellison is updating the index and I’m building the book’s table of contents.
We plan to go to press with the standard edition of “Roubo on Furniture” in early January with a mid-February release. We also will publish a deluxe edition, which design Wesley Tanner will begin working on shortly. Details to come on how to order the deluxe version.
In the meantime, take a look at the table of contents. Whew.
— Christopher Schwarz
Preface xi
A Key to the Text xiv
The Woods Appropriate for Joinery 3
Section I. The Different Qualities of Wood 3
Section II. Fashioning and Stacking of Wood 7
Section III. The Cutting of Wood 13
The Art of Assembly, its Uses and Proportions 21
Section I. Different Ways to Elongate Wood 25
Some Tools Belonging to Woodworkers, Their Different Types, Forms and Uses 29
Section I. Tools of the Shop 32
Section II. The Tools Belonging to the Workmen 33
Section III. Some Tools Appropriate for Cutting and Planing the Wood 34
The Plate 11 Workbench: How it (Really) Works 38
Make Roubo’s ‘Winding Sticks’ 54
Section IV. The Tools for Marking and Making Joints 59
Section V. The Tools for Fretwork, and those for Cutting the Straight and Curved Mouldings 76
The Art of Drawing 89
Section I. The Way to Take Measurements 89
The Way to Draw the Work on the Plan 93
The Way to Prepare Joinery to Receive Carved Ornaments 95
Section II. The Way to Glue Wood 99
The Way to Construct Columns in Wood; Bases, Capitals, Entablature and Pedestals 103
Section III. The Way of Gluing Curved Wood 109
Joinery in Furniture, in General, and the Different Types 112
Section I. The Tools and Woods appropriate for Furniture 114
Ancient Furniture in General 115
Some Different Types of Seats in Use at Present 119
Section II. The Description of Folding Chairs, Stools, Benches, etc. Their Forms, Proportion and Construction 120
Section III. Descriptions of all sorts of [side] chairs, their decorations, forms, proportions and construction 126
The Way to Prepare Seats to Receive Fabric Ornamentation 135
Roubo on Upholstery 137
Section IV. The Upholstery of Chairs with Caning and the Art of Caning in General 141
The Way to Prepare Seats for Caning 141
Selection of the cane, the way of splitting it and the caners’ tools 145
Various Methods of Weaving and Diverse Operations of the Caner 149
Different Sorts of Seating Forms, Proportions & Construction 155
Roubo, Meet Reality: The Making of A Classical French Chairmaker 164
Section I. Description of all the major seats, like canapés, sofas, ottomans, etc. 181
Section II. Description of Private Apartment Seats, like Bathing-tubs, Demi-bathing tubs, etc. 193
Of Beds in General and the Different Sorts 201
Section I. The Beds of France: Forms, Proportions & Construction 202
Canopies of Beds, Commonly Called Pavilions or Imperials; Their Forms and Construction 210
Section II. Description of Polish-style Beds, their Proportions, Shapes & Decoration 220
Section III. Description of different types of campaign Beds, their shapes and construction 226
Section IV. Description of Daybeds, some Cradles and Cots 235
Tables in General and the Different Types 239
Section I. Different Forms and Constructions of Dining Tables 245
Section II. Game Tables and their different types, forms and constructions 249
Description of a Billiard Table, its form, proportion and construction 249
Description of Gaming Tables, their form, proportions and construction 261
Section III. Tables for writing and their different types, forms and constructions 270
Description of Dressing Tables and Night Tables, and others 293
Description of Screens and Windbreaks; their forms and proportions 296
Case Pieces Known under the General Name of Large Pieces 301
Section I. Description of Armoires; their decoration, proportions and construction 302
Description of Buffets; their forms, proportions, decoration & construction 309
Description of Commodes; their forms, proportions and construction 315
Of Solid Cabinetry Or Assembly in General 325
Section I. Description of the Tools of the Furniture Maker, their assembly and how to use them 327
Section II. Basic Elements on the Part of the Art of Turning necessary for the Furniture Maker 331
Some Screw Taps and Wooden Dies used by Cabinetmakers 343
The Machines Appropriate for Making Fluting for Cylinders and Cones 347
Description of the Machine commonly called the tool for waves 358
Reproducing and Using Moxon’s ‘Waving Engine’ 366
Section III. Different Locksmithing Tools for the Furniture Maker 378
The Way to fit the iron work for cabinetry 392
The Manner of polishing iron and copper relative to cabinetry 402
Section IV. Different Kinds of Solid or Assembled Cabinetry in General 404 Description of different sorts of embroidery frames 405
Description of a printing cabinet 417
Description of Gueridons and Small Tables 427
Description of Different Forms of Desks 430
Necessaries and Other Types of Boxes 437
