In addition to the A.J. Roubo translation of “L’Art du Menuisier,” we have been working on lots of other projects. Here’s a quick look at what the Lost Art Press extended family is doing in the final days of 2012.
1. The 6-board chest chapter from “Furniture of Necessity.” It’s complete, but I’m messing with it a bit as I worked on a chest for a customer this weekend. I’ll post it this week for a free download.
2. New LAP T-shirts. We have a new design and slogan. We’re ordering the shirts this week and they should be in the store by next week. They will be green and made in America. Details to come.
3. “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” audiobook as read by Roy Underhill. John Hoffman has finished up the editing on this project for me (thanks John!). It goes to get mastered this week. So it should be in the store before the end of the year.
4. A new book from Christian Becksvoort. Yup, we’ve been keeping this one under wraps. Chris revised one of his earlier books that is now out of print. The design is complete, thanks to Linda Watts, and we are working on the final editing.
5. “By Hand and By Eye” by George Walker and Jim Tolpin. That book is edited and just about ready to go to Linda to be designed.
We’re working on a bunch of other projects that aren’t listed above, H.O. Studley, my campaign furniture book and etc. I don’t, however, have any updates on those projects this morning.
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.
“There is a wonderful similarity between the traditional work of Korea and Japan and much of the early Cotswold School. The directness and honesty of construction and approach, with nothing contrived; the general lack of sophistication; the sheer joy and spontaneity that comes through into the finished work itself, which I believe is a direct result of contact with the materials at all stages with hand tools and hand skills. I now know what Edward Barnsley feared, and with some justification.”
— Alan Peters on the 1955 electrification of the Barnsley workshop. From “Cabinetmaking: The Professional Approach” (Linden)
The central idea in my next book, “The Furniture of Necessity,” is that there is a type of furniture that escaped the whims of fashion and has remained unchanged through the centuries because it is useful, simple, sturdy and (in a way) beautiful.
This is the furniture of the typical North American family that could never afford a highboy, a secretary or a carved bedstead. It is plain because ornamentation is expensive. It is sturdy because disposable furniture is a recent idea. And it is beautiful because we have always tried to shape our surroundings to please us.
You can call it “vernacular” furniture, but I’ve never liked that word because it’s a 10-dollar word used to describe a 2-dollar idea.
The furniture is fascinating to me because I see it as fundamentally different from high forms where the design is paramount, the materials are shaped to that design, and the techniques require a large kit of tools and significant skill.
What you see with the “furniture of necessity” is that the design is driven more by the materials than by a sketch or pattern book. The depth of a chest is dictated by the widest board on hand. Ripping a board down or gluing a panel up is a waste of time and effort. And in fact the entire chest’s design flows from that beginning width.
The techniques employed will focus on the fewest cuts, the fewest tools and the joints that will give the piece the strength it requires for hard, daily use.
And, most interestingly, I am finding these pieces are dictated by an inner brilliance and efficiency that can be decoded only by constructing the piece.
That’s why I’m writing this blog entry.
As I have built these different forms during the last couple years, I have stumbled on small flashes of insight into the minds of the original builders. For example, when building a six-board chest, here are some little things I’ve uncovered:
1. Why are the front and backs of these chests rabbeted? You can use shorter (cheaper) nails and assemble the chest by yourself.
2. Why are the nails through the lid and battens clinched into the moulding (it looks ugly at first)? It’s the only way to keep the lid flat.
3. Building these chests quickly is all about the order of operations. You can save time and material by cutting out your pieces in a very particular order.
4. A deep knowledge of the materials – pine, nails, paint – allows you to defeat many seasonal expansion and contraction problems.
But I know there is more stuff we can learn from these chests. And that’s why I am going to take an unusual step in the coming weeks and publish plans, procedures and text from my forthcoming book here on this blog so you can take it into your shop and use it. All I ask is that you build the piece. Don’t just think about it. Build it. And if you find a better way – either big or small – to build the piece that you drop me a line to tell me what you found.
If it’s a new bit of information, you’ll definitely get credit in the book, and the rest of the readers will end up getting a better book because of your efforts.
In the next week or so, I’ll publish my chapter on six-board chests here free for downloading. Until then, take a look at this SketchUp file that show my procedure, step by step. There’s more than enough information in this file to build the chest. The book chapter will simply tell you why I did certain things and not others.
