Joint Stool or Table, 1720-1750, maker unknown. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
“From colonial times and into the 19th century, every town and hamlet in Rhode Island supported woodworking shops along main streets and wharves and in farmstead backyards. The artisans developed regional styles; every few miles, different floral and striped patterns became popular designs for mahogany, walnut and pine furniture.”
That is the opening line of an article from the July 29th New York Times. It is a short article packed with information about regional furniture studies and work on databases, including Rhode Island, the Antebellum South and Boston. The article opens with a description of a new exhibit, “Art and Industry in Early America: Rhode Island Furniture, 1650-1830,” opening in August at the Yale University Art Gallery. You can read the article here.
The Joint Stool or Table (description here) is from the Rhode Island Furniture Archive. Although details and current locations for each piece are not always known, where available, you can get dimensions, inscriptions, provenance, construction and a bibliography.
Slat-back Armchair, 1800-1825, attributed to Thomas Taylor. Photo by Cherry Fletcher Bamberg.
This armchair in the vernacular style still has traces of red paint. It is currently in the collection of Historic New England. The previous owner, Cherry Fletcher Bamberg received it through “descent in the family of Thomas Taylor.”
Pembroke Table, 1785-1790, John Townsend. Winterthur Museum.
The Pembroke table description includes, “The gadrooned molding applied to the lower edge of the stretchers is held with screws.”
The main page of the Archive is here. Go explore. I’m going to look up “gadrooned.”
I’m more or less following the script of The Naked Woodworker for my workbench, making adjustments as necessary to accommodate the differences in sizes and shapes of lumber that are available to me here in Ecuador. I used the two-bucket sawbench illustrated in my prior post to build a “real” Mike Siemsen-style sawbench, and then used that one to build a second, twin (fraternal) sawbench.
Workbench material
I’ve been amassing the materials for the workbench over the past few days, most recently with a trip to a different lumber vendor, Maderas La Morita.
Their sign could use a little work…A fraction of the lumber for sale at La Morita, several different species
I ran into a bit of a language difficulty while there, not understanding the difference between tabla and tablon (roughly the difference between “board” and “plank” in English). I would have thought that the two words were fairly interchangeable, but apparently not so. Anyway, I got confused, which made the person trying to sell me the wood confused, which made me even more confused. But it all worked out in the end.
I was looking for some 3/4″ pine, which they did not have. “Not a problem! We’ll just make some.” (Loose translation.)
And so they did. They took a thick pine slab and resawed it for me on the spot:
Changing out the blade on the tablesaw; the one that was mounted wasn’t quite big enough to span half the width of the plankA couple of passes through the thickness planer, and we’re good to go
The pine lumber that I have is surface planed and jointed on one edge, but rough on the other. The leg assemblies of the Naked workbench require the two sides of the leg plank to be (or be made to be) reasonably parallel, which would be easy to do if I had a workbench, which I don’t. So I screwed two pieces of scrap to a 2×6, so that I could wedge a board into the tapered gap between the scraps:
My first vise
The improvised vise holds the board surprisingly securely, and I only crashed my plane into the wall once.
The Kywi that I’ve been buying most of my tools and hardware from has a decent selection of screws for wood and sheet metal, but hardly any bolts at all, so I wasn’t able to get the necessary carriage bolts there. But have no fear, because just down the road from our house in Tumbaco is La Casa del Perno (House of Bolts), and they had just what I needed.
All the bolts you want, all the time
Elsewhere on the tools and hardware front, I previously mentioned that I might buy another saw and make it a dedicated rip saw. I did just that, and now you can see why I was hesitant to buy it earlier:
Shark? Maybe. Saw? Definitely not.
I’m clearly going to have to spend a bunch of quality time with the saw to get the teeth into reasonable shape, but so it goes. I did discover something that I had somehow missed on previous trips:
Saw sets. In blister packs.
Knowing that a saw set is available to me makes me less reluctant to fiddle with the set of the saws that I have.
Almost two years ago Chris sent me a pre-publication copy of “The Book of Plates” and gave me free reign to color, cut-out and otherwise manipulate anything I found in the plates. Yesterday I started work on the index for “Roubo on Furniture” and now get to read the descriptions of each scene, tool and work method in the plates. Most of the plates that I transformed into dioramas and collages are from the furniture book and seeing them again was a reunion with old friends.
The plates have tremendous detail but having the matching text is like have the sound turned on. Part of Plate 4 is a description of proper storage of wood and protection from the elements. Roubo provides meticulous instruction on stacking the wood and how to achieve the angled “rain diverters” at the top of each pile.
Adding dimension and color to Plate 4.
In preparation for this indexing assignment I pulled my special china pattern out of storage. I like my china pattern to match the book.
Later in the week I’ll revive the Birds of Roubo and the trash-talking Chairs of Roubo.
Check out the right leg of the workbench in this 1826 plate that Jeff Burks dug up from “Les Amusemens de la Campagne” (Vol. 3) by M.A. Paulin Desormeaux. Take a look at Fig. B there. It’s a small cleat used for edge-jointing.
Here’s Jeff’s translated text:
Fig 1. of the plate represents the workbench. A is the head of a screw clamping a strong board against the front leg forming a vise; when you want to work on a board, you take it from one end in this vise, and the other end is placed on the small cleat B same figure. And if need be is maintained with the help of a holdfast placed in hole C.
I’ve not seen a cleat exactly like this one before. But I have seen cleats that retract below the workbench’s top or are removable. Woodworker Yoav Liberman has a metal removable one on his bench that is made from some bed hardware I believe.
The only place Peter Hardwick had where the tool cabinet could be displayed was inside his unused fireplace surround in the cottage parlor. Appropriately, the surround was some of Studley’s handiwork from the Quincy house. (Photo courtesy of Sandor Nagyszalanczy)
The Fan Frenzy Begins In the late 1980s Peter installed a new chimney in his home, and, in doing what guys do on such a momentous occasion, invited a friend over to show off his newly completed project. This friend, an insurance agent, saw the tool cabinet, recognized its special-ness and encouraged Peter to insure it. This event, Peter said, “Opened a can of worms!”
Peter tried to figure out exactly what it was that he had and how much to insure it for, and so he turned to FineWoodworking, the Smithsonian and an antiques appraiser for answers. At FineWoodworking magazine, Senior Editor Sandor Nagyszalanczy took the call and carries the memories vividly.
In early 1988, Nagyszalanczy made arrangements to go visit it during another scouting trip to Maine. When he opened the chest, it was, and I am quoting him, “Jaw dropping to floor!” He set up to take the photographs that eventually entered directly into our collective consciousnesses via the back cover of that magazine.
At that moment, Peter’s life of stewardship of the tool cabinet changed forever. In an age before e-mail, the result of that single back-cover image – and the ensuing posters – was an onslaught of actual “fan mail” for the tool cabinet that overwhelmed him. He received so much mail that he rented a dedicated post office box just for the unsolicited correspondence being forwarded to him by FineWoodworking. Peter’s only regret from this period was that he did not save the fan mail.
The Smithsonian One of the correspondents was the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Curator David Shayt. While on vacation, Shayt visited Peter and they struck up a fast friendship based initially on their mutual interest in the tool collection, but it soon evolved to reflect the fact that both men were affable and genuinely good guys.
At the time, Peter had a dilemma. He owned a family heirloom that was also a monumental piece of Americana, and he was concerned about its security and preservation in a simple Maine farmhouse. Shayt proposed a temporary solution. What if Peter loaned the tool cabinet to the Smithsonian for a 10-year period, during which the Smithsonian would bear all the responsibility for it? Once again, Peter reached an agreement to foster the care and preservation of a genuine national treasure, a theme that has touched him throughout his life.
While at the Institution the cabinet was conserved and exhaustively documented, and included in a small vignette adjacent to the exhibit “Engines of Change:The American Industrial Revolution 1790-1860,” with several other tool chests and cabinets for various trades. Though the larger exhibit lasted almost 20 years (late 1986 to mid-2006), the Studley tool cabinet was included for perhaps only a third of that time, probably from about 1992-1999. No doubt seen by thousands of woodworkers there, the Internet has numerous accounts of woodworkers who were captivated by it. I spoke recently with one visitor, a woodworker, who recalls it “being displayed a long way back from the glass, and in the dark.”
During the time of the Smithsonian possession, the collection was photographed and documented, and underwent a thorough cleaning and some conservation treatment, as well as being included in the small exhibit. Meanwhile, the torrent of fan mail kept coming, becoming even more of an avalanche with the issuing of the poster, then a FineWoodworking article, a second edition of a poster and finally a third. The maelstrom of mail led Peter to reconsider his continued ownership of the collection.
And it was one of those letters that again changed the course of the Studley tool cabinet’s history.
