Designing My Workshop, Part 2: Other People’s Workshops

In Part 1, I shared a brief description and some lessons learned from each of my past workshops. Today, we’ll explore a few of the exceptional workshops of fellow woodworkers that inspired and informed my own design. (Be sure to click the links for a more in-depth look than I offer here). One thing you might notice if you’re familiar with these folks: They’re all Windsor chairmakers. Though it wasn’t a conscious decision to focus on the shops of Windsor chairmakers, it will come as no surprise if you’ve followed my interests on this blog. These guys use the tools that I like to use, and they work in ways in which I like to work. They designed their shops to be efficient with hand tools (and they know a thing or two about aesthetics to boot).

Greg Pennington’s workshop:

Dimensions: 18′ x 36′ (648 sq.ft. on the ground floor, plus a loft and porch)

Construction: Timber frame, asphalt shingle roof, clapboard siding, wooden floors and wall paneling.

What I Like About It: Okay, let’s be honest. Greg’s shop is freaking gorgeous. Exposed post and beam construction, endless expanses of wood from floor to ceiling, windows on every wall. If I had unlimited time, this is the kind of shop that I would prefer to build. It’s a big, it’s inviting, and it’s finished out to a tremendous degree.

But… Greg uses the space to teach chairmaking workshops for several students at a time. It’s quite a bit more space than I can justify for the work that I do and the equipment that I use. And though the idea of a timber frame is appealing, I lack the tools and experience required to do an efficient job of timber framing. I’m completely on board with the wooden paneling and big windows, though.

Curtis Buchanan’s workshop:

Dimensions: 16′ x 20′ (320 sq.ft. on the ground floor, plus a loft and porch)

Construction: Timber frame, metal roof, board-and-batten siding, wooden floors and wall paneling.

What I Like About It: At less than half the size of Greg’s shop, this workshop is an appropriate size for a single woodworker – after all, it’s been the birthplace of Curtis’ phenomenal chairs for more than 20 years. It features wood floors and paneling and windows throughout. I especially like the well-used porch that wraps around two sides. A porch is the natural place to use a shavehorse, and it provides a lot of extra workspace for minimal effort. The unpainted exterior is attractive, unpretentious, and it saves time and money.

But… Curtis’ only power tools are a lathe and a bandsaw. I will be looking to house a few more electron hogs than he does, so a bit more space might be handy.

Elia Bizzarri’s workshop:

Dimensions: 18′ x 28′ (504 sq.ft. on the ground floor, plus upstairs)

Construction: Stick frame, metal roof, clapboard siding, wooden floors and wall paneling.

What I Like About It: Killer paint scheme. I would totally copy it, if it didn’t utterly clash with my green-and-tan house paint. Besides that, I love the big double doors for moving equipment in and out with ease and the triplet of north-facing windows above a massive workbench. Like the other two shops, the wall paneling and flooring is wood, and it has a loft for storage. The size is just about perfect. An under-appreciated design element that I really like is the generous roof overhang. In the balmy Deep South, where wood rots if you sneeze on it, adequate protection from the weather is critical if you intend to use wood siding.

But… I really want a porch on my shop. Besides that, this approaches my Platonic ideal.

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So there you have it. Those are the three workshops that were agitating my gray matter as I sat down to make plans for my workshop. From these shops, and from my own experiences, I made a list of, let’s call them “first principles” for my workshop design. I’ll cover them in the next installment.

Designing My Workshop, Part 1

So, your new home is near-perfect, but devoid of a workshop. What’s a woodworker to do? If you’re like me, you are probably already skilled at gravely underestimating the time and scope required of even the most mundane projects. Naturally, you’ll convince yourself that building your own workshop will take less than a year of your free time, most of which has been long-affianced to raising three children, a dog, and ten chickens, maintaining a home, a large garden, and a small forest, and the occasional leisurely outing to appease your patient wife. Naturally.

All kidding aside, I have a number of good reasons for choosing to build my own workshop. 1) It’s cheaper.

Okay, one. I have one good reason to build my own workshop. But I have budgetary constraints and a high tolerance for self-inflicted stress. My dad lives ten miles away. He has a fully hydraulic Wood-Mizer sawmill and a surplus of logs. So lumber is pretty close to free. My labor is free as well (Note: If my boss is reading, don’t get any ideas). Aside from the lumber and labor, the major expenses in a workshop are sheathing, roofing, nails, screws, wiring, and insulation. Back-of-the-napkin math suggests that I can build my shop for at least 80% less than than I could pay someone to build it.

So I’m building my own workshop. Now the hard part is settling on a design. Blank slate. Endless possibilities. Where to begin? In the words of George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I have worked from multitudinous shops in the past. They all have something to teach:

2005-2007: 30′ x 30′ insulated metal building. Shared with my dad and younger brother, along with their mechanic tools, welding equipment, etc. Ample room in theory, but in practice, the shop was a cluttered mess due to and abundance of users and equipment and a lack of storage. Honestly, a great deal of the cluttered mess was attributable to yours truly – but over the years, I’ve found that a shop space that is too large is simply an invitation for clutter, because it always seems as though yesterday’s mess can be moved aside…until it can’t. And then you’ve got your work cut out for you just to get organized again.

2008-2010: 10′ x 20′ plywood shed. It was rotting from the ground up when I bought it, so I jacked it up, layed an extra layer of cement block, and re-built the floor. I wired it, insulated it, and paneled it with 1×12 pine. I spent far more time working on the shop than working in the shop. Even so, I quickly learned that 10′ is too dang narrow for a workshop. This was not the smallest shop that I’ve worked in, but due to the awkward dimensions, it was the least user-friendly (even after all of the cosmetic and structural improvements).

2010-2011: 20′ x 20′ cinderblock garage with dirt floor. No windows, bare lightbulbs, and sparse outlets. In spite of the austere surroundings, I build some rather nice stuff in this shop, including my first ladderback chairs. However, nothing short of starvation could convince me to work in a windowless, dirt-floor shop again. Aesthetics aren’t everything, but they are something.

2011-2014: 24′ x 40′ garage. 9′ ceilings, ample windows. The back of the shop was partitioned into two smaller rooms, one of which I kept for storage, the other I maintained as my hand tool shop. This could have been an ideal workspace, except for the inconvenient fact there was no door on the front of the shop. And money was too tight to actually add a garage door. I made peace with the constant maintenance required to keep the rust gremlins at bay, and I did some of my proudest work in that shop.

2014-2015: No workshop for nine months. I sold my tablesaw, planer, and drill press put the bandsaw and lathe in storage.

2015-2016: 12′ x 16′ plywood shack, slowly being devoured by an adjacent sand dune. Only enough room for a workbench and a lathe. Despite the crowded quarters and minimal equipment, I re-discovered the joy of woodworking in this shop. With no fancy equipment that I could rely on as a substitute for actual ability, I focused on projects that were suited to hand tool woodworking, and my skills improved markedly. I found it necessary to maintain an exceptionally neat workspace, and to work on only one project at a time, because there was simply no room for clutter.

2017: No workshop again. My tools are stored in the basement, waiting to be awakened in their new home. The drafting table awaits.

Because I am also a nerd in addition to being a woodworker, I decided to plot out my shop size over the past dozen years. Of note is the fact that the quality of my work has steadily increased even as the size of my shop has varied wildly during that time. The lesson here is that the size of my shop might have an effect on the efficiency and enjoyability of my woodworking experience, but not the quality. Honestly, this should come as no surprise to anyone who has actually put steel to wood.

In the next few posts, I’ll highlight a few workshops that I haven’t worked in, but that served as inspirational/aspirational starting points for my design; cover the basic principles that guided my design; and finally, I’ll finish up with the blueprints that evolved from those principles.

A Revelation

One of the reasons I was most looking forward to Greenwood Fest was for the opportunity to look over Dave Fisher’s shoulder as he did some letter-carving. Dave is a maestro at this work (for example, here, here and here). He has even done a blog post specifically about lettering. But a blog just didn’t quite give me the confidence to try it – I wanted to see it in action.

To be honest, I have tried letter-carving in the past, but I was never particularly happy with the results. In fact, I actually carved my initials into the very first spoon I ever carved, six years ago in 2010. I had no sloyd or spoon knives at that point. I carved the whole thing with a gouge and a drawknife, and then I carved the letters with a chisel. The spoon is quite good – I still use it every week:

Despite being made from a soft, open-pored wood (catalpa), this thing still does an admirable job of scooping mashed potatoes onto a plate.

And the letters are neat enough, but also pretty bland and lifeless. Not something I really want to showcase on all of my spoons:

I didn’t try to carve letters again for three more years. When my first son was born in 2013, he spent nine days in the NICU. There wasn’t much that I could do for him, but could carve a spoon for him. I decided to try carving letters again. By this point, I had proper spoon-carving knifes, so I attempted to do the letters with the tip of my sloyd knife. The sentiment was laudable, but the execution was not. It’s the thought that counts?

Sweet sentiment, sloppy execution. Sorry, Elam.

Anyway, after that I was pretty much ruined on letter-carving until I had some proper instruction. After quizzing Dave about his tools, techniques, and unspoken wisdom, I was ready to give it another go. The biggest takeaway? A knife with a short blade and a rather tight radius near the tip seems to be mission-critical. He uses the tip of a pen knife. I had this little guy which seems to be close to the proper geometry:

The radius of the tip could be a little tighter, but it’s a lot better than a sloyd knife.

After sketching a simple design that I liked, I did my best to follow the lines, being careful not to cut too deeply (but also not being too timid either. No need to go over the same cut five times to get to the proper depth). Long, flowing lines like this were actually pretty easy to execute. It’s the stopping and starting that makes it tough!

Elam’s new spoon: a significant improvement.

I was pretty pleased with how Elam’s new spoon turned out, but the cursive lettering was tricky. I highly recommend starting with all-caps font. Straight lines are a lot more fun than tight curves. It might be impolite when sending emails to your co-workers, but it’s perfectly acceptable to shout on a spoon.

My daughter’s spoon turned out even better.

I was on a roll, so I decided to keep going. I carved a quick spoon while I was at Greenwood Fest and ate with it all week. Peter Follansbee made it “famous” on his first blog post after the event (sixth picture from the top). In honor of its provenance, I decided to give the spoon an appropriate name:

So now I have a new skill that I’m not altogether embarrassed about. Score one for the home team, and Tip o’ the Hat to you, Dave Fisher.

Plimoth

A place that has been on my bucket list for a number of years is Plimoth Plantation – the living history museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts where Peter Follansbee worked for 20 years, and cut his teeth as a 17th-century New England joiner. Sadly, most of the museum’s long-time reenactors departed in what seems to be a less-than-amicable split a few years ago, and Peter was among them.

Nonetheless, I decided to swing by on my way to Greenwood Fest a couple of weeks ago, and I wasn’t disappointed. Peter’s fingerprints are all over the place.

A few of his pieces (including the court cupboard and the chest with drawers pictured below) are housed inside climate-controlled buildings. These painted pieces are admittedly a bit garish to modern eyes, but they give you a chance to see the pieces as the would have looked when they were brand new, 350 years ago:

Details of the court cupboard

Riven oak, roughly planed on the inside

Side-hung drawers

Neatly joined side panels

Split turnings and geometric moldings

The court cupboard

A chest with drawers

 

Most of Peter’s work can be found in the village: a collection of mostly one-room timber frame cottages. The buildings are as quaint as you can imagine: sheathed in weathered, riven oak clapboards, topped with roofs of thatched cattails, each one with a neat kitchen garden in the back yard. If someone had a bed-and-breakfast that was set up like this, I’d be the first to sign up!

A barn

Fenced paddock

Kitchen gardens behind every home

A place for cows

Looking down on the village

Repairing the siding

Riven clapboards

 

The home’s interiors are dimly lit but surprisingly welcoming. There are no “fireplaces” to speak of – just a rocked wall in a corner where the cooking and heating fires are built. Some of the homes have real chimneys, but others just have a small vent atop the gables that keep the smoke moving out of the house. It was more effective that you might imagine! All of the homes were appointed with a bed and basic kitchen implements, not to mention a slew of joined oak furniture.

No “fireplaces” – just a rocked wall in one corner.

A spartan “kitchen”

A re-enactor with freshly steamed mussels

Spoons – looking properly English

Wattle-and-daub infill between the timberframe members

Cool workbench.

 

There were chairs of all kinds from basic joint stools…

A simple, painted joint stool

Joint stool top. Notice the protruding pegs that hold the top to the frame.

…to proper joined and turned chairs:

A proper English wainscot chair.

A turned chair, looking very Dutch. Many of Plimoth’s early residents had previously lived in the Netherlands

I forget what Peter calls these chairs. I call ’em ladderbacks, but he has a different name.

 

Not to mention carved boxes of all kinds:

Box with a till

Peter started to mark out this carving, then for some reason he gave it up…I love seeing this stuff.

Geometric-looking carving pattern

Lunettes

This was my favorite carving: a dragon! It seemed like an unusual departure from most early English work.

 

For me, the best part about the visit to Plimoth was the opportunity to appreciate the visual impact of Peter’s work in situ. When you see 17th-century carving as it is meant to be seen – i.e., in dim dwellings primarily illuminated by raking light from small windows or lamps – it makes perfect sense. The shallow relief carving stands out proudly in these conditions. The chests and cupboards looked alive in the humble cottages, as compared to similar pieces in the immaculately lighted and air-conditioned environs of the museum.

I was also reminded that homes from this period, with their hewn timbers and organic wattle-and-daub walls, were not deprived of texture as we are with our sterile sheetrock boxes. It doesn’t take much to stand out against a blank slate. These pieces that seem garish or “busy” against a plain background fit cozily into the more lively interiors of their day.

So, while I don’t necessarily intend to switch my focus to Jacobean carving after my visit to Plimoth, I can certainly say that it was an inspiring and informative visit. The chance to touch this furniture, to open doors and drawers, and to photograph (without getting yelled at) is a rare opportunity at any museum. I wished very much that I had been able to visit five years ago, when Peter and Paula the rest of the Plymouth Craft gang still inhabited the grounds. But it’s safe to say that their spirit is still present, and it will be for a long time.

A Simple Tool

Make a Windsor chair, and you’ll find yourself mounting a lot of 2″ stock on the lathe. Mount a lot of stock on the lathe, and you’ll probably find yourself wishing for a fast and accurate method of marking the centers.

I’ve used several different methods for marking centers, and never found one that I considered satisfactory. If you have squared-up stock, you can mark an “X” across the diagonals to approximate the center. It’s quick, but more often than not you’ll find that your stock is somewhat less-than-square, in which case, it’s inaccurate. If you’re using riven stock, it’s not an option at all.

Another method that I have used is taking a small compass and guesstimating the center, moving the central leg about until I find the proper center point. This is more accurate, and it works even for riven stock, but it’s also slow – and you end up with multiple center points (though I always try to mark the “correct” point more deeply) which can be confusing. A better solution is in order.

I came up with this simple tool:

To use, just center the tool on your stock with your fingertips, and give it a good whack with a hammer. You’re left with a perfect dimple, right in the center, that makes alignment of your blank on the lathe a snap.

I assume the tool is pretty intuitive, should you wish to make your own. Just pop a blank on the lathe and turn it to a cylinder of the appropriate diameter (2″, in my case). Make sure the bottom is perfectly flat or slightly concave, so it will be easy to center on your spindle blanks. Then drive a nail into the center (the tailstock conveniently makes a dead-center dimple) and clip it off about 1/8″ proud.

I made mine pretty with some fancy turned decorations and a coat of oil, but a simple cylinder would suffice. I figure a pretty tool will be less likely to get confused with a scrap and tossed into the kindling bucket when it’s inevitably dropped in the shavings.

This is the quickest and most accurate center-marking method I’ve ever used. It works just as well with riven stock as it does with sawn, and it will tolerate maybe 3/8″ of variation in the thickness without much loss in accuracy. They’re so quick and easy to make, it’s not a problem to make another center marker, for say, 1-1/2″ stock or any other thickness that you commonly use.

Muscle Memory

It’s been a long time since I’ve made any serious attempts to play the piano. When I lived by myself in a small brick house on a mountainside in North Georgia, I practiced somewhat regularly. My great aunt gave me an old perpetually out-of-tune upright that sat in the living room of my painfully outdated ranch house, and when I tired of painting bedrooms and laying tile and tearing out fake wood paneling, I’d pick out a song and sit down at the piano during the evenings, trying to teach myself to play it.

I have no formal musical training, aside from a couple years of abusing the trumpet in elementary school. I definitely wouldn’t say that I can read music. It would be more accurate to say that I can interpret music, in much the same way that I can interpret French, with the assistance of Google Translate. I just see five parallel lines and an oval with a tail and think “Every…Good…Boy…Does…A-ha! That must be a D. Now I can find middle C and count down one key, and there’s the D on my keyboard!”

I never developed that instantaneous recognition of the notes and the seamless connection between my mind and my fingers that is required of a musician. Learning to play a song was a long, slow process that relied on careful practice and memorization – essentially cutting out any vestiges of consciousness and eventually getting to the point where I could rely entirely on muscle memory to play a song. I don’t recommend this method – it’s a shitty way to learn music – but I will admit that it is a very powerful way to learn one specific song. Eight years later, I can still bang out a nearly flawless rendition of the intro to “Don’t Stop Believin'” whenever I sit in front of the piano.

I noticed an interesting phenomenon when I would teach myself in this manner. I’d practice for a couple of hours, making quick improvement but still fumbling through the difficult parts. Eventually, I would reach a plateau during that session, and any further attempts to push on would only result in regression. Reaching that point was my cue to stop.

The next day, I would sit down to play, and often my fingers would nimbly execute the parts that had given me trouble the day before. There was always a finite limit to the amount of progress I could make in a single session, but it seemed that a period of rest allowed my mind to subconsciously tweak its instructions to my hands and fingers to the extent that I often made more progress between practice sessions than within them. It was a strange, but reliable, phenomenon.

In general, I don’t know that this insight relates very well to woodworking. Unlike playing the piano (or any instrument), most woodworking processes are not inherently driven by tempo. If I’m planing a board, I can plane quickly or slowly – it only matters that the plane has enough inertia to plow through the cut. I can stop at any moment to check the board for straightness or twist, or to sharpen the iron, or to modify the cutting depth. Same with a handsaw. If I note that the saw is veering off course, I simply slow down, adjust my grip, or maybe change saws. As a hobbyist, time is not of the essence; results are.

For sure, frequent practice to build muscle memory plays an important role in your speed and efficiency as a woodworker, but the nature of our craft means that even the greenest amateur can achieve stunning results if they proceed slowly, with patience and attention.

In much the same way, I could easily play Chopin, if there were no requirement that I hit the keys with the proper cadence. I’d simply take a few seconds to ensure each note I strike is the correct one, and suddenly I’m a concert pianist, right? Of course, that’s not how music works (fortunately for the audience), but it’s not a completely inaccurate analogy for woodworking. The finished masterpiece is not time-dependent; all that you see is the culmination of hard-won proficiency and patient exertion. Greater proficiency requires less exertion, and vice versa, to achieve the same effect. How much of each factored into the piece can be difficult to quantify ex post facto.

I’m certain there are many exceptions to this dichotomy, but one that has become clearer to me in the last six months – around the time I began building Windsor chairs – is woodturning. Unlike many hand-tool processes, the rhythm of lathe work is strictly enforced by the spinning wood. This remains true regardless of whether the radial velocity is imparted by a tether attached to a foot pedal, or (as with my lathe) some distant coal-hungry generator attached to a diminishing series of metallic wires.

Attempt to violate the rhythm, and your work will suffer. When rolling a bead with a skew chisel (the hardest single process in turning a chair leg), the handle starts low and gets raised; the tool is rotated along its longitudinal axis; and the entire tool is slid along the tool rest. All at the same time, with precisely correct coordination of the movements. If ever there were a time-dependent process in woodworking, this is it.

I’m not sure that it’s possible to understand the complexity of this procedure if you’ve never attempted it, but Curtis Buchanan’s video above does an excellent job of breaking down the individual steps. The consequences of failure, depending on how you go about failing, can be as simple as cutting an ugly bead instead of a beautiful one, or as sudden and dramatic as a snake-bite when the edge suddenly catches the wood and slams it into the toolrest. (And that’s happened to me more often than I care to remember.)

Curtis Buchanan baluster leg detail

With woodturning, practice is more than just a useful thing that will help you accomplish your work more quickly in the future – it is prerequisite to the ability to even accomplish the work in the first place. I’m not saying that it isn’t possible for a beginner to walk up to the lathe and manhandle a length of maple into a familiar shape, but I am saying that you can’t simply scrape and sand your way to perfection. The difference between the work of a master is conspicuously different from the work of the less practiced hand. The fairness of the curves, the cripsness of the fillets, the proportions of the major and minor dimensions, and the way that the shapes relate to one another – to the critical eye, there is no way to feign mastery of these virtues. And I am far from a master.

So, on Monday, I walked into my workshop and fired up the lathe. I turned one leg in just over an hour. The second leg was going well enough, until I cut the cove 1/8″ too thin. (I broke that one in half – not in anger or frustration, but just so I wasn’t tempted to actually used it.) And the third leg took even longer than the first, maybe an hour and a half. With midnight approaching, I turned in for the night, a bit dismayed that I had regressed in the intervening month since I completed the last chair.

Then on Tuesday, I reeled off two more legs, each better than the first two, in 35 minutes apiece. It felt good to see real progress after a hitting a plateau the night before. It felt familiar.

Perhaps, with enough practice, my hands will simply remember what to do without the refresher. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to walk up to my lathe and crank out a baluster leg in 15 minutes. Perhaps, when that day comes, I’ll find a piano and play a little Journey to celebrate. You know, if I still can.

Stop Being So Clingy.

This is may be a mundane blog topic, but I hope some find it useful as well. On the rare occasions when I’ve used full-size patterns to cut out my furniture parts, I’ve typically relied on good ol’ spray adhesive to stick the patterns to the wood. It works, but it also sucks, for many reasons:

1. You only get one chance to orient the pattern properly. Don’t you dare try to slide it around or remove a wrinkle after it’s stuck.
2. It’s expensive.
3. Removing the pattern is a messy process that usually involves soaking the paper with mineral spirits and waiting a few minutes to peel it off. Then you have the pleasure of wiping off the adhesive gunk.
4. Do we really need another disposable aerosol canister in our lives? No, we do not.

Fortunately, there is a better way, and it’s already in your kitchen cabinet:

That’s right, all-purpose flour. Dump a handful into a bowl, mix it with water until you have a soupy consistency (it should be thinner than white glue), and brush a generous quantity onto the pattern with a paint brush.

Apply the pattern to the wood, remove any wrinkles, and re-position it if need be. It’s very forgiving, and you have a few minutes to work with it. I found that applying a coat of water to the pattern after it’s in place helps it adhere completely. Now just wait a half hour until the pattern is completely dry, and it’s ready to cut. To remove the pattern, brush it with water and it comes off easily after a minute or two, and the flour paste wipes off with a wet cloth.

Cheap, simple, effective, non-toxic, and you already have the materials in your home. Seriously, what’s not to love?

One final tip: I bought a huge roll of kraft paper from the hardware store a few years ago. I use it for everything: the kids color on it, it makes a snazzy heavy-duty gift wrapping, you can roll out a layer as a drop cloth for painting, and it of course it is excellent for making full-size furniture drawings and patterns. And I still have another five years to go before it’s all used up.

Inspiration Doesn’t Strike…

You have to work for it.

At least, that’s my experience. Maybe that means I’m not very creative. Actually, I’m quite certain that I’m not very creative. I am analytical to a fault, and indeed, many of my blog series (The Name of the Grain and Woody Wednesday, for example) as well as my job title (Forest Resource Analyst) reflect that. Perhaps that’s why I naturally gravitate towards historical furniture forms. There is something comforting about building furniture in a tradition that incorporates the evidence of a thousand years of failures and successes. Why re-invent the wheel when it’s already been refined by countless generations of craftsmen more competent in their trade than I can ever dream of being?

More often than not, when I find myself departing from tradition, it’s to accommodate a special piece of wood that simply doesn’t fit into the classical canon of furniture forms. Such is the case with my current project. My dad asked me to build an end table. He already had the wood picked out for the top – a slab of white oak 15″ wide, 40″ long and 1-5/8″ thick. It’s a lovely piece of wood, cut from a crotch with plenty of flame figure – but it also has plenty of defect.

The wood was cut in a manner that is opposite from the way that a crotch would normally be sawed. Woods like walnut, cherry, and birch normally display the best figure when the crotch is sawed, as my old friend Tom would say, “like a pair of britches lying flat on the floor” – with each fork representing a leg. Oak, on the other hand, usually presents the best figure when the wood is sawed perpendicular to the customary orientation.

Typical method for sawing oak crotch. Note that this is the opposite from the usual method.

The problem with this method is that it includes the pith in every flitch. Anyone who has ever sawed their own hardwood lumber is well aware of the problems with the pith. The juvenile wood immediately adjacent to the pith often has a life of its own, bending and twisting as it dries. And the nature of wood shrinkage means that the odds are good that you’ll have cracks in any board that includes the pith. My dad’s slab was no exception.

The slab of wood at issue.

Fortunately, the slab was large enough to salvage a sizable chuck of wood while completely discarding the pith. The result was an elliptical tabletop, 13″ wide and 24″ long.

Keep the best, chuck the rest.

The problem, at this point, was that I had very little historical precedent to work with for designing the base. Oval end tables – especially tables that utilize a piece this thick – are scarce. Now, this isn’t the first time I have found myself in “modern furniture” territory. I detailed my design process for my tripod kitchen table in the early annals of this blog. Basically, it involved typing some descriptive keywords into a Google image search, plucking out a few designs that I really liked, and modifying them to suit my preferences. In this case, however, Google was of no help, and I found myself starting from an empty slate.

So, I did the only thing a non-creative person can do in this situation: I sharpened my pencil and got to work. I started sketching stream-of-consciousness until I stumbled upon an idea worth pursuing. I’ll warn you, the process (or maybe just my sketching ability) isn’t pretty:

Most of the sketches belong exactly where they are: on the cutting room floor. But I thought that the sketch at the bottom right of the first page had potential, so I explored it further on a second page, playing around with the dimensions of the members as well as the horizontal and vertical proportions of the whole structure. I really liked the way the curves flowed through the joinery and the arch at the bottom reflected the ellipse of the top. I decided this design was the winner.

I’m too lazy for prototyping, but a full-size drawing is time well spent.

It was time to make full-size drawings – a step that I rarely take, but I felt that it was necessary to get a realistic idea of the proportions. My first iteration, with 3″-wide members, was a bit to heavy, so I revised the drawing to 2″ members. That looked right to my eye, and I was satisfied enough with this drawing to begin the painstaking process of animating the idea in ligneous flesh.

But as always, the ultimate question is not “Does it look good on paper?”

Butterfly

“The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.”

-George Carlin

I felt like a caterpillar last week. My latest project involves an oak crotch so riddled with cracks and shake that would have been better suited to the firewood pile were it not for the alluring flame figure of the grain. Just making the slab usable involved inlaying a dozen butterfly patches to stabilize the defects. Few people will look at the end result and understand the work involved, but it was enjoyable work nonetheless.

I’ve always found butterflies to be a bit tricky to make by hand. They are small and annoyingly difficult to clamp. The solution is to keep them attached to a larger block for as long as possible.

1) Mark out your cuts on a piece of wood that is quite a bit longer and wider than the butterflies that you intend to make.

2) Cut a few kerfs down to the “waist” of the butterflies. You can also cut between the butterflies, or you can wait until after the next step.

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3) Using a chisel that is wider than your board, chop out the bulk of the waste, then carefully pare down to the lines, being especially careful to keep the sides of the butterfly perpendicular to its faces. Side note: Trying to cut these things using just a backsaw is a fool’s errand. You can do far more accurate work with a chisel, and it really doesn’t take any longer. Trust me, I’ve tried it both ways, and this is the way to go.

4) Now you can free the butterflies from the blank. On the opposite side, cut another kerf to the waist and remove the waste with the chisel.

5) Now your butterflies are ready to inlay. I made a variety of sizes to avoid a monotonous look. I can match the size of the butterfly to the size of the crack.

6) To inlay the butterfly, begin by locating it on the crack and carefully striking a line around it. Deepen the line with a chisel, tapping lightly with the mallet. The outlining is the most critical part of the inlaying process, so keep your focus and do it right.

7) At this stage, methods will differ. Some people like to use a router to remove the bulk of the waste. I would rather sell my first-born to cannibals than use the screaming-devil-spinny-tool when it isn’t absolutely necessary, so I opt for a cordless drill and a Forstner bit instead. I shoot for a depth somewhere between 3/8″ and 1/2″. It isn’t critical, as long as it’s consistent.

8) The remaining waste is evacuated with a few chisels. Very handy to have a bevel-edge chisel with a bevel that actually goes all the way to the edge for this task. It’s nice to get the floor as consistent as possible, but more of your focus should be on getting the walls vertical and cutting right-up-to-but-not-over the scribe lines.

9) Don’t spare the glue when you put these things in. Tap it in with a hammer, saw it flush, and level it off with a hand plane. Ahhh, that’s a nice fit. Ten more to go…

Norwegian Nuptials

Last summer, my wife and I took an all-too-short trip to Norway to attend the marriage of my wife’s high school friend Idun. Ten years prior, Idun spent a year in my wife’s hometown as an exchange student. The two became close friends during that year, remaining in touch ever since.

We had previously considered a trip to Norway to celebrate our own nuptials six years ago, but our meager finances at that time precluded such an extravagant excursion, and we happily booked week-long trip to Yosemite National Park instead. It turned out that delaying our trip was providential decision, because the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience a traditional Norwegian wedding (as an invited guest, that is) was without a doubt the highlight of the trip.

The ceremony was held in the historic and imposing Fjære Church, just outside the city of Grimstad, where the bride and groom have lived their whole lives. The stone walls of the church date to ca. 1150. The church is impeccably maintained, as are most old Norwegian buildings, it seems.

Fantastically pollarded trees dot the cemetery.

Front view of the church.

Side entryway. Note the different patterns on the entablatures just below the arch.

Rear entry. I love the imbalance of the quoins.

Rear of the church. The red clay roof tiles were ubiquitous on homes around Grimstad, while the wooden shingles were more typical of the stavkirkes that dot the inland of Norway.

This stone wall appears to have been here for a while.

 

I was particularly awestruck by the woodwork within the church. The work was completed discontinuously over several centuries. The balcony is dated 1708. The pulpit may be as old as 1500. The church contains two clocks, which date from 1660 and 1855. I would have loved to spent an entire afternoon poking around the church, but of course, I was there to celebrate a marriage and not to ogle ancient woodwork. Propriety (and by “propriety”, I mean “my wife”) compelled me to restrain myself, so most of my pictures of the interior were snapped hastily and/or surreptitiously.

Looking into the sanctuary. Impressive Gothic arches at the rear.

Substantial stone walls: 5-6′ thick.

Underneath the balcony

The highly ornate pulpit is variously dated from 1500-1700

The joined pews should be very familiar to Peter Follansbee.

I liked the marbled paint on the upper column and the ogee treatment at the ends of the beams.

Attractive carving on this column. The attention to detail is impressive.

The balcony is helpfully dated 1708.

 

The couple has friends from all over the world, and the wedding was very much an international affair. Guests were encouraged to wear wedding garb that would be traditional to their nationality. We intermingled with Scotsmen in plaid kilts, Arabians in bisht, Portuguese in their finest livery, and I (being a Southerner) wore my blue seersucker suit. Most of the guests were, of course, Norwegian, dressed in their quaint bunader, and the bride herself donned the customary silver crown. According to the bride’s estimation, perhaps only one in five Norwegian couples get married in their traditional dress – the common Western white-gown-and-tuxedo weddings are presently far more popular. I was happy to see that our friends chose the traditional route. It certainly made for a richer experience for their many foreign guests.

Welcomed into the kirke by a well-dressed kvinne.

Daughter of the bride and groom in her diminutive bunad.

The wedding ceremony itself was simply beautiful. I can think of no better word to describe it. The bridal procession was led, as tradition dictates, by a fiddler playing the Hardingfele, a variant of the violin peculiar to the southwestern part of Norway. The Hardingele is unique in that it has eight or nine strings, rather than the four strings of the familiar violin, and thinner wood. Four of the strings are strung and played normally, while the other four or five are understrings that resonate under the influence of the primary strings. The result is a haunting and emotional tone that is quite distinct from a normal violin.

The fiddler leads the recessional with the bride and groom close behind.

I could go on with some prolixity about the wedding, and especially the reception, which was one of the most enjoyable that I’ve attended, but I suspect that it was a bit of a you-had-to-be-there event. Instead, I’ll leave you with this 60-year-old video of a rural Norwegian wedding that seemed familiar, though decidedly more stodgy than the convivial affair that we attended:

 

Some highlights from the video:

• 3:03: The fiddler begins playing his Hardingfele as he leads the wedding processional out of the farmhouse (I’m not so sure that the music that plays in the video is actually of a Hardingfele. The film appears to be silent, and the sound of the instrument seems far less rich and resonant than I would expect. Might be over-dubbing of a regular violin, or I might be full of it.)
• 4:40: Ale bowls! Three lovely traditional Norwegian ale bowls appear and are passed around the crowd, starting with the Master of Ceremonies and proceeding to the bride, the groom, and the fiddler. The first bowl is absolutely massive, far bigger than the ones that Jarrod Stone Dahl makes.
• 5:30 and 5:47: You get a better view of the lovely double horse-head ale bowl, a type that Dave Fisher recently wrote about and then carved. I will definitely have to try my hand at this style of ale bowl at some point.
• 6:30: “Ancient custom decrees that the fiddler must not play his instrument on holy ground, so as they approach the church, he puts it discreetly aside and stays behind, while the others enter the churchyard. In Medieval times, the fiddle was considered a Pagan instrument.” No such objection exists today; at the wedding we attended, the guests were already seated in the sanctuary while the fiddler led the procession right down the aisle.