Drawn But Not Yet Built

Here are a couple of sketches I made recently for a prospective job. My plan on this piece would be to use a milkpaint and linseed oil finish. The diamond grid in the doors would be a custom-fabricated brass grille with pleated linen hanging behind that. As drawn, the piece is a full six feet wide. I would probably use casement stays on the doors so they would be well supported in the open position.

Installation Day 2

Today was my second full day installing the pair of bookcases I've been working on for one of the new Lock Lane condos. The great electrician Don Brewster met me first thing this morning to take care of rewiring the electrical and cable outlets in the cases. In the early evening I got started on the trim for the larger of the two pieces--I'll finish up installing moldings and hanging doors tomorrow and the next day.

Next Up: Locke Lane Cases

I'm starting full-steam ahead on a pair of painted colonial built-in cabinets with arches, keystones, fluted pilasters, and raised panel doors. I owe a lot to Wendell Garrett's fantastic book American Colonial (ISBN: 1885254997) for design inspiration. Cases of this kind typically had scalloped shelves and were used for the display of porcelain and other valuables. I've adapted that form for the storage and display of books. I particularly like the keystones in this design, which are modeled on one at the Morris-Jumel mansion in Manhattan. To my eye, it almost hints at art deco.

Locke Lane Condominiums

I'm in the early design phase of a project at the old Locke Lane apartments on Grove Avenue. The apartments have been renovated into beautiful, high-end condos, and one of the new owners commissioned a pair of built-in bookcases for his living room. I'm getting to the point where I'm happy with the basic proportions of the case work, but am fussing a lot about details, like whether or not the heads should be arched. Here's where the sketch stands at present.

KENTWOOD MOLDER: BEWARE

The following is a post I made to the Woodweb.com site on February 13, 2008. The forum's moderator contacted me a few hours after I posted to inform me that she had pulled the post for failure to adhere to Woodweb's posting guidelines. Because they cannot independently verify complaints of this kind, they do not allow them on the site. Nonetheless, I feel it is imperative that information of this kind be available to prospective buyers of any machine that poses such serious health threats in the event of a malfunction. I am confident that if my former employers had access to information of this kind, they would have purchased a different molder.

Despite my criticisms, I want to emphasize that I perceive Stiles Machinery, which markets the Kentwood Molder, to be an excellent company in general. I have written very favorably about them in previous posts, and as a woodworker, I have enjoyed the use of many of the machines they sell and service. While negative perceptions like those I share in the post below may decrease the likelihood that those in the market for a molder choose a Kentwood, nothing I say could affect Stiles as adversely as a serious injury resulting from a machine of unacceptably low quality.

Lastly, if anyone reading this would like to respond to any aspect of this post, I will gladly publish any reasonable comments.

Here is the original post from Woodweb:

I had previously posted anonymously about Kentwood Molders, advising prospective buyers to contact me first. At the time, I was concerned about adversely affecting my employer's relationship with Stiles. At this point, my misgivings about the machine far outweigh that consideration.

The molder has been nothing but trouble. Spindles have spun out of their housings. Heads have locked onto spindles. Belts have disintegrated while scarcely under load. Latches and other small parts have failed, at times leaving the machine inoperable. Yesterday, the guard on #3 vibrated loose, made contact with the spinning head, shattered, and sent shrapnel flying throughout the machine. One piece of shrapnel actually pierced the acrylic hood.

I cannot overstate my misgivings about this machine. In my view, it should be taken off the market. Please feel free to contact me with any questions.

Be safe.

Ginter Park Bookcases Pt. 1

I recently began work on a set of built-in bookcases for a home on Ginter Park's lovely Wilmington Avenue. I plan to track the project's progress here on the blog as I make my way through it. Though specific details vary from job to job, most projects go through a series of similar phases. With built-ins like these, my first step is always to make a very detailed three-dimensional map of the room.

The map of the room which will house the bookcases is pictured below. I generated it using 3D drafting software and my extensive field notes. Initial measuring of the space took about an hour, and making the drawing was another few hours-worth of work. It's very important to me that I get this map just right. Because of settling, old houses like this one rarely have plumb or square walls. The various kooky angles that result directly affect the dimensions of the cases as I'll detail in a later post. My concern at this point is that all those angles and dimensions are accurately represented in the model.


As you can see in the model, the house already has a case on the lower right-hand side of the fireplace. It's a mystery to me why the left-hand side did not also have shelves. When I'm finished, cases will go from floor to ceiling on both sides.

Goodbye Beckstoffer's

After 110 years of continuous operation, H. Beckstoffer's and Sons of Richmond's Church Hill have shut their doors. Over their century-plus of hard work they supplied Richmond's builders with countless lineal feet of fine millwork, the highest quality doors, and decorative architectural woodworking of every conceivable kind. Employees were notified of the firm's closure upon their return from the New Year's holiday. It almost makes me feel guilty for complaining about the turkey I received as a Christmas bonus.

My friend Clay and I went over to see the old mill this afternoon. He took a bunch of pictures while we were there, a few of which are included below. More can be seen here.

Brobdingnagian Brackets Complete

I finished the massive fir brackets this morning. See the photos below for the play-by-play.

Once I had my 6" x 15 1/2" x 70" slab glued together, I needed to cut out more manageable blanks. I used one of our big 36" Powermatic bandsaws to cut the slab into three pieces.



Here are the three blanks. The next step was to trace the pattern I'd made (see previous posts) onto the blanks and saw out the shapes. As you can imagine, it took some time to shape the profile with the saw, a block plane, and a couple of different sanders.



This photo shows the three almost-complete brackets after sawing and sanding.



Below you see a finished bracket, complete with its backing board. Each bracket must have weighed 20 pounds or so. I can't imagine how huge the house they're for must be.

The Mother of all Magazine Racks?!

Here are some shots of a magazine rack I recently completed for an addition to a beautiful Craftsman bungalow in Westover Hills. A special thanks to Clay for getting me this very enjoyable piece of work!

The rack is made from quarter-sawn white oak. The finish is antique oil (which goes on easily and is hard as nails) and wax. The lower two rails are slightly bevelled top-and-bottom to form a sliding dovetail where they meet the stiles.

Enormous Fir Brackets

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I'm working on a set of three enormous fir brackets.  These will fit under the soffit of some huge home.  They will be 20" tall and 6" thick, projecting off the exterior wall about 21" total.  The pattern I'm using is shown below.  I took the full size drawing from our drafting department and glued it to a piece of 1/4" ply to make my pattern. 



After I'd used the fantastic Fay & Eagan 429 (see previous post), I glued-up five 1 13/64" x 15 1/2" x 70" slabs.  Below, you can see one of the slabs in clamps.  I frequently use the printmaking brayer you see on top of the slab to spread large amounts of glue quickly. Stacking all five slabs yields the required 6".

Once all five slabs were glued together, I stacked them one on top of the other and used a caret to mark one edge.  Harrison taught me to use carets in markups because they convey a great deal of information.  In the photo below, the caret indicates 1) the placement of each slab relative to every other; 2) which surfaces receive glue and which do not; and 3) which side I'm working from on each slab.  Someday I'll do a whole post about carets and their multiple uses.

At this point I was almost ready to start gluing, but I knew I needed a way to register the slabs since I'd soon have roughly 30 square feet of wet glue causing them to slip and slide every which way while under pressure.    My solution was to drill two 9/16" holes in opposite corners of the slabs in the waste material.  I could then drop 1/2" dowels into the holes to keep the glued slabs from going cattywompas. In this photo you can also see the considerations I thought about with regard to grain orientation at the ends of the boards.

A coworker helped me spread the glue across the slabs' interior surfaces, I dropped the dowels into their registration holes, and then the whole assembly went into this massive press.  I'm not sure what it was originally designed for or why we have it, but it's handy for face gluing large, heavy pieces like this one.  The red gun at the top is a pneumatic driver that screws the clamps down.  There are four or five clamps per beam, all of which can be located side-to-side.

This last picture shows the assembly under pressure in the press.  The 4-by material is simply blocking we use to keep from having to drive the clamps all the way down.  The air driver makes a hellish racket.  When I go in on Monday, I'll take my huge timber out of clamps and start bandsawing the brackets.

Elegy to an Old Machine

I started a set of three massive exterior fir brackets this past week. They are 20" tall, 20" long, and 6" wide. Because fir timbers of that size aren't available to me, I assembled a bunch of dressed fir 2-by material and glued it together to make my stock. More about that process in a later post. For now, here's the basic shape of the brackets:



To create perfect glue joints, I used one of my absolute favorite old machines, a Fay and Eagan No. 429 Automatic Glue Jointer and Edge Molder, which we all just call "the tongue and groove machine." Check out the video below to see it in action.



Lastly, here are a couple of old pictures of this amazing machine. You know, this one is so ancient that it doesn't even have ball bearings--just very, very old (but still entirely functional) Babbit bearings.

Tannewitz XJW Table Saw Manual

This morning I created an electronic copy of the manual for the Tannewitz XJW table saw we have at work. Mid-20th century machines like this one were so well made. Their cast iron bodies weighed a ton or more and dampened vibration to an extent rarely seen in contemporary machines. Saws like this one can be had at auction for around $1,200; a comparable new 16" table saw runs in the $6,000 range.

The manual itself is a small work of art. The last ten pages or so are mimeographed copies of hand-drafted schematics. I've included some of my favorites below.

If you would like a full copy of the manual (it's for machines from the mid/late 1960's), send me an email, and I'll happily send you the file. Hopefully it will also soon be available from the Old Woodworking Machines Publication Reprint site.



This is a schematic of the blade raising assembly.  Nowadays it's almost impossible to imagine someone doing drafting of this quality by hand.

Here is my favorite of the schematics in the manual; it details the blade guard. I wonder how long it took to make this drawing!

WELCOME GOOGLERS

Every day, this site welcomes somewhere between 20 and 50 people who have been directed to it by a Google search.  Often, they've entered a search term like "how to fit boxwood stringing" or "Tannewitz  bandsaws" or "cupola roof framing."  If you're one of these people, and you're pondering some kind of woodworking question, it sure would be nice if you sent me an email.  I may not be able to answer your query, but at least we could puzzle over it together.


As for the Dante scholars who end up here...sorry, I can't help you.


Before I go, here are pictures of the fir louvers I just finished.  The second picture shows the weird cutout that was in back of the original.  I have no idea if it needed to be reproduced exactly, but I went ahead and did it for fun.  The difficulty was that including the cutout necessitated four different sizes of slat in each louver.  Does anybody know why these louvers had the cutout?  Another good reason to send me an email!

Woodworking Sites I like

In lieu of anything interesting to photograph at work, I thought I'd post links to some of the woodworking sites I frequent. If you know of cool sites I'm missing in this not-at-all-exhaustive list, please leave a comment.

When I want to drool over amazing mid-20th century machines (like the Tannewitz band saw I very nearly won at auction last week), I head to the Old Woodworking Machines site. There you can find all kinds of useful information, including years of manufacture, parts lists, photographs, and so on. I've found it very helpful recently while restoring the old Craftsman lathe I inherited from my grandfather. By the way, it's a good thing I lost that auction for the Tannewitz--after I'd placed my high bid, further research uncovered the fact that the thing weighs 3000 lbs. I think that's more than my car.

Many people think that Garrett Wade is the best catalog for tools, and while it is very nice, I prefer Lee Valley. They produce three catalogs, one each for woodworking, woodworking hardware, and gardening. Each one is good for many hours of couch-based perusal. I recently bought a set of their hardened steel scrapers and have been wowed by their performance. Ditto for the rare earth magnets they sell.

If you're curious about state-of-the-art "wood technology" equipment, head over to the Stiles Machinery site. If you work in a shop like the ones I've worked in, then the products on offer at Stiles may look like science fiction. But they're real! I swear! I've seen them.

WoodWeb is a useful site for all kinds of things, but I mostly look at it to find old machines for sale and for woodworking jobs. It's not that I'm looking for a job, mind you--I just like to know what's out there. You know how it is. If you go to WoodWeb looking for machines, be sure to try the Woodworking Machinery Finder a ways down the left-most column on the home page; it's different than the online classifieds.

Industrial Recovery Services seems like kind of a sad business to me, but I'm sure glad they're out there. They liquidate old mills and shops that go under, and there are incredible deals to be had at their auctions. I just got a 72" machinist's straight edge for well-under what a new 36" one would cost. I love precision measuring instruments. A lot. This is where my wife would fake pushing a pair of glasses up the bridge of her nose while cough-speaking: "NERD." Takes one to know one!

Lastly, I mention Fine Woodworking because the online subscription, which is about $5.00 per month is an incredible resource. I use it over and over again and I can't overstate its utility. I wish I could say the good people at Taunton Press were paying me to say this, but they're not. If you want to avoid reinventing the wheel before attempting some new process in the shop, do two quick keyword searches at the Fine Woodworking site--one that searches the magazine's archives and a second in the "Knots" forum, where other subscribers share their techniques and insights.

Homemade Knives!

In brief, here's what I learned down in North Carolina:

1) How to make a knife template from a customer's sample moulding. The template is depicted below. This one was made by hand, but where I work, a computer controlled router churns these out. Incidentally, it's signed not because of its incredible beauty, but simply to differentiate it from my classmates' templates.



2) How to use that sample to grind knives to be used in the moulder. The knives are depicted below. These are ground from stock M2 steel, an alloy containing Molybdenum. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the knife grinding machine (which costs more than $30k) is really just a fancy version of a key grinder. A stylus guides the spinning grinding wheel across the template's pattern, and transfers that pattern to the the knive's edges. Grinding the knives takes about 20-30 minutes.




3) How to set up and run the moulder. Below you'll see the moulding that was run from the knives I ground. Once the machine is set up, it can change the dimensions or add profiles to all four faces of a piece of stock, and it can do this very quickly.




As I have mentioned, the company which offered this class, Stiles Machinery, is a leader in "Panel Processing" (working with plywood and MDF) and "Solid Wood Technologies" (working with wood). Having worked primarily in small shops, I've not seen the kinds of machines for sale in Stiles' showroom, and I'd wager that very few of my woodworking brethren have either.

Allow me to offer some examples:

Stiles sells machines which can apply a cured, high-gloss finish to a plywood cabinet component in about four minutes.

I saw people running assembled 5-piece maple doors through a multi-head sander, and when the doors came out of the machine, most recently having been sanded with 400-grit flaps, they were in amazing condition to take a finish. The doors looked like they'd been hand-detailed, not like they'd been sandblasted.

The showroom included gang rip-saws through which rip wide pieces of stock are transformed into multiple moulder blanks in a matter of seconds. Ditto for the incredible cut-off saw and robotic hopper.

You know, I really try to make this blog a technical, informative one, and not one where I wax philosophical about stuff. I try to steer clear of opining and editorializing. BUT, the stuff I saw last week has really got me thinking about what we mean when we talk about craft, and about the future of craft in the face of these kinds of capabilities.

Let's imagine that there's a continuous scale which has on one end a single person producing a piece of furniture entirely by hand, and on the other, several acres of servo-driven, robotically fed, software optimized big-box machines spitting out cabinets. Let's say that the fit and finish produced by these two efforts ultimately reaches the point of total equality. Is that awesome or sad? Is it both?

There have been craft traditions (The Arts and Craft Movement, The Roycrofters) which have rejected the machine in favor of "the best I can do" by hand work alone. Most fine woodworkers these days blanch at the thought of production machinery or factory furniture. But, at the same time, most fine woodworkers daily take advantage of technological advances their predecessors didn't have access to, like electricity, improvements in tool steel, and the like. So where does the continuous scale from all-hand-work to total-machine-work move from useful and cool to simply dehumanized and dreary?

I don't know. If you know, please post a comment.

The Wood Mechanic Hits the Road

I'm in Greensboro, N.C. for training on the two machines pictured below. The first one is a fancy knife grinder, which grinds the profiles into the tool steel used in shapers and moulders to create mouldings. One makes a template which the machine follows to guide a grinding wheel across the surface of blank tool steel. Basically, it works like a big, expensive key grinder. It used to be that the templates were cut out of 1/16" mild steel and filed by hand, a process that could take hours. Nowadays, one simply outputs a CAD drawing to a little desktop CNC router that cuts the template from a sheet of acrylic. It even etches in a job name if you want. If I ran "CuteOverload.com," that little router is the kind of thing I'd put on it.

The second machine is a state-of-the-art six-head moulder marketed under the brand name Kentwood and sold by Stiles Machinery. Competing brands include Diehl, Wadkin, and Weinig. Moulders have been around since the mid nineteenth century when someone got the bright idea of combining jointing, planing, and moulding operations into one machine. The early ones were belt-driven monstrosities that ran from a central shaft that powered all the motors in the shop. I imagine they had a "parts" bucket next to these things, not for machine parts, but for people parts. In any case, a moulder is capable of quickly and accurately producing large quantities of any straight moulding used in a building. In fact, 2 x 4's and other dimensional lumber is milled in a moulder,which reduces the rough stock to the final dimension and rounds the corners. We use ours for anything from white pine shoe moulding to 9" crown moulding. Until we got this new machine, we were using one from the late 30's and another from the mid 80's.

I hope to post more updates as this training week continues.

Lastly--please send me some emails; I'm lonely down here!

Seven Oak Newel Posts

Last week I worked on this set of seven large fluted oak newel posts. The photos below show the newels at various stages of completion. I used lock miters on the upper column and splined miters on the lower, larger column. The mouldings were made to match those in a photo provided by the customer.