Bench Project - Part III

About a million years ago, I started designing a new bench (sitting not work) to replace an existing bench that was on death's doorstep. Last week I put saw to wood and got started. Here's the progress so far:


What? It doesn't look familiar? Well, it has been a while since you saw the design. You remember, I worked on it forever. Here's a reminder:



There, see it now? No? Hmm. Yeah, probably not. Seems like I completely abandoned that design and just started building something different without a whole lot of thought going into it. How unlike me.

This one is supposed to be more "church pew like". We'll see...

Oh, and the original bench? The one that was about to fall apart. It's still there. Even though it is not well made, it is made of real wood. I just bang the doweled joinery back together every other day and it carries on - a daily demonstration of the power of real wood. Try that with pressed sawdust!

Mystery Cabinet

This cabinet belongs to some friends down in Oregon. There is something about it that I just love, but there are a lot of things about it I can't quite figure out. Every time I see it, I seem to find some new detail that adds to the puzzle. I'd love to figure out a general history if possible.


I'm pretty sure it is old, maybe as early as the 1700's. I don't have anything solid to base that assumption on, so of course I could be way off. It does have many indicators of age - for example it shows a major repair and some hardware replacement on this drawer front.


The sides of the same drawer show what I assume to be rodent damage. I'm thinking that the repair on the front was for something similar. Also, on the hand cut dovetails, note that the groove for the drawer bottom was left exposed in a pin, rather than being concealed by the tail.




The inside of the upper door panel clearly shows marks from a heavily cambered plane iron.


I really like the inlaid stars.


The crown moulding is a little strange. It's a fairly complex profile, but not smooth at all. It's wavy, like it was carved and not planed. Hmm.


Finally, there are the turned bun feet. Is it normal for the front and rear feet to be different? And I don't know why, but every time I see those feet I think of Bermuda. Where did that come from? I just don't know...


Anyway, if you have any insights or ideas about this cabinet, please comment, I'd love to hear them.

Rocking Chair Repair

Here's another old furniture repair post, and also a lesson on the importance of grain direction.

This old rocker had a broken runner:


A closer look revealed how the sawn runner split down the grain. If the runners had been bent, with continuous grain, this couldn't have happened.


I didn't need to disassemble the chair; it was easy enough to loosen the screws and rotate the broken parts to get at the surfaces needing glue. The brown fuzzy strip is adhesive backed felt to protect the bamboo floor.


Here's the clamp swarm holding things put after glueing:


The glue probably would have been enough, but just to be sure I removed some of the felt and drove two finish screws across the joint. To insure that the screws pulled everything tight, I bored two different size pilot holes. First I drilled a small pilot hole (the size of the screw's shank) the full depth of the screw, and then bored a larger hole (the size of the threads) just as deep as the break. This way, the clamping effect was between the threads of the lower part and the head of the screw.


To replace the felt, I squished the new felt with clamps until it was the same thickness as the older felt. Although I am confident this repair will hold, I didn't want to tempt fate by putting a lump right under it. Confident is confident, but safer is better.

Oh, and although I already pointed out that bent runners would not have failed this way, I also concede the point that these sawn runners lasted almost 100 years. So there you go...

Old Dresser Drawers

I've been repairing some old family furniture lately. This oak dresser with mirror was in great shape except that the drawer bottoms were falling out.

The drawers were made with Knapp joints (also called pin and crescent):


This machine cut joint was popular for about thirty years (approx. 1870-1900), before machine cut dovetails took over. The pins are not dowels, instead they are formed out of the drawer front. There are some interesting resources on the web - just google "Knapp joint". Apparently, it is a strong joint. These have held up fine for over 100 years of use.

What didn't hold up were the drawer bottoms. Made from a single piece of thin, solid wood (much more appealing to me than plywood)each bottom fit into grooves on the front and two sides and was nailed into the bottom of the back. Unlike plywood however, the solid wood shrank. Eventually, the bottom shrank enough for the front to pull out of the groove. It then sagged under the weight of the drawer contents until it started pulling out of the side grooves as well. Not good.

On my recently completed candle till, I am hoping to avoid this problem by setting the nail in a saw kerf to allow it to move, while the front is glued into its groove. Of course that drawer is so small it really isn't an issue.

Here's a shot showing how the bottom has shrunk about 1/4" and pulled out of the front groove:


I thought about repairing these drawers with the technique from the candle till, but instead I decided to try the least invasive approach first. So in the end I pulled the nails from the back edge of the bottom, reseated the bottom in the front groove, and then renailed the bottom.


My thinking was to see how long this would hold up. If I get another 100 years out of it great! If not, I can try more drastic (well, not really drastic, it's just a little glue...) action later.

There's one mystery about this dresser that I haven't figured out yet. While I was working on it, the grain on the front of the drawers didn't look quite right to me. I started to think that it might have been "grained" with paint or stain. Now, looking at the fourth pin up in the first shot, you can see that the drawer front is actually a glue-up of two separate pieces (two grain patterns) but on the front of the drawer, the grain appears continuous. I'm pretty sure it's been "grained", possibly to hide the glue line or to give it a more uniform grain pattern. The top half is quartersawn but the bottom is flatsawn, so if it is white oak, the ray or fleck would not be the same. Hmm.

I think I need to look at the drawers again...

Jamestown Joinery

More from our school trip back east. Here are a few pictures of the reproduction furniture at the Jamestown living-history museum in Virginia.



















It was fun to see the furniture in its actual setting (or close anyway). I'd like to know more about these. Who made them? How were they made? What were they based on? If I ever get back there I need to dig around a little and see if I can't find someone to answer these questions. Next time...

Bench Project - Part II

Okay, I finished the "sketch" of the new bench design. "Sketch", because I didn't actually draw it - it's more of a photo shop type deal. I started with a photograph of a bench that I liked, but it wasn't quite right. I decided to try an experiment with the computer; it was fun, and frustrating too.

First, I cut the bench out of the original picture - fairly sloppy, as I was none too sure this would even work:


Then I did the following to get the first version of the sketch:

1. Made "repairs" to the bench - missing back slat etc...
2. Transformed to B&W - just thought it would look better this way...
3. Cut a chunk out of the middle of the bench to shorten the overall length.
4. Merged the remaining pieces back into one bench - you can still see the "scar" if you look closely, it's particularly easy to spot in the bottom slats...
5. Reconfigured the back and side slats. Basically, every two slats where joined into one wider slat - so 14 back slats became the 7 in the final design.
6. Ran a "pencil sketch" filter to make the image more sketch like; this also helped to blend the changes/additions into a more uniform whole.


Of course the bench will need a cushion, so for the second version I did the following:

1. Created a virtual cushion for the bench.
2. Shaded the cushion for more of a 3D effect.
3. Applied a texture filter to give the cushion a more realistic surface.
4. Applied the same "pencil sketch" filter to the cushion so it would look like it belonged in same sketch as the rest of the bench - well, sort of...


Now I need to work up some measurements from the images, make adjustments as required, and get to work!

Exploring an Old Marble-Top Chest of Drawers

Several months ago, while down in Oregon, I had the chance (and time) to explore an old marble-top chest of drawers. Now, I live in Alaska and there is not much in the way of antiques up here, so whenever I get the chance I check out what I can find. This particular chest held a couple of surprises (at least for me).


First, as soon as I opened a drawer, I saw hand cut dovetails. I was expecting the perfectly uniform (and boring) rows of dovetails made by machine because I had already formed an idea that this piece was made in a Victorian Era factory.

This is probably a good place to mention that I don't have much experience dating antique furniture. I would love to get better at this, but mostly I have a hodge-podge of book knowledge and a very curious mind. So I muddle through and have a lot of fun playing "Antiques Roadshow", but really for the most part, I'm just guessing.


After getting over this initial surprise, I noticed what I though to be a split in the end of the drawer front. Then I thought "Wait, it's to perfect, it almost looks like a saw kerf."


Further investigation confirmed it - whoever made this chest used a technique I have never heard of before. They used a saw to rip a kerf in the end of the drawer front to form the ends of the half-blind dovetail sockets. Huh.

Here's a shot from under the drawer:


My first reaction was that this seemed sloppy. But it would also be fast. Not sure how I feel about this idea. It doesn't bother me when the saw kerfs from cutting the tail sockets are visible on the inside of the drawer front. Of course, those can only be seen by looking inside the drawer. This kerf is visible as soon as the drawer is opened. However, it is not visible when the drawer is closed, so I guess it comes down to whether you want your drawers looking clean when they are shut, open, or open with the inside visible. The maker of this chest clearly only cared about how the drawers looked closed, and probably valued the time saved more than the aesthetic lost. Interesting.

While I was looking at the underside of the drawer, I noticed something else that surprised me. The drawer bottoms were single wide boards that had been resawn with a circular saw blade. A big one. The radius was in the neighborhood of 10" - so that would make it a 20" tablesaw. Whoa.


After the hand cut dovetails, and the interesting and somewhat questionable technique used to cut them, I had been changing my idea about this being factory made. I was leaning back towards the idea of the chest being made by a cabinet maker in a small shop. Now this 20" table saw made me think factory again. Hmm. Of course, I suppose a saw mill might have been able to provide these boards.

I also found a history of repairs on the chest.

First I noticed a very poorly done repair to one of the drawer sides. The bottom edge must have worn down and needed replacing. It looks like someone attacked it with a chisel and then slapped a new piece of wood on top of the uneven surface. Sloppy, but it is working.


One of the dovetails has been patched. I think this was done at the time of construction. It looks like part of a tail was split off, and a replacement wedge was glued on.


Looking at this repair, I felt a sense of kinship with the builder. It gives me a strange sense of hope. While whoever build this chest had more experience and skill than me, he did make a mistake that I would make, and fix it exactly how I would fix it. Somehow I find this encouraging.

The chest is veneered with what I think is walnut. I don't know much about veneering at all. I assumed that the side of the chest would be veneered in one piece, or that if the veneer was not wide enough, it would be joined independently of the substrate. On this chest, the two pieces of pine that were joined to make the side were apparently veneered before they were joined. I have no idea if this is normal - it is definitely not how I though it would be done.

Here's a shot from inside the chest - note the knot in the pine and the vertical joint between the two pieces:


Here's a shot of the outside in the same spot. You can see the seam and the knot:


The last thing of note was a "W" carved in the underside of the marble top:


I wonder about the marble top. This seems like a factory item. Could a small cabinet maker order the top and make a chest to match? Maybe.

Here's where my thinking is on this chest: early Victorian, made by a single cabinet maker, or a large shop/small factory that used some mass production techniques but still did some handwork.

This was a fun experience - I learned a little, and came up with many new questions and ideas. If you have any thoughts to add or corrections to make, please leave a comment.