The Editor's Mailbox

Furniture news from the front

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 13:39:37 GMT

(Editor's Note: The following dispatch arrived in our e-mail inbox earlier this week. It's a testament to military resourcefulness, among many other things.)

Hello!

I am a UH-1N helicopter pilot, currently deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom at Al Taqaddum Air Base, Iraq. One of my most favorite things in my care packages from home is the latest issue of Fine Woodworking.

Being my Squadron's resident woodworker, I was asked to improve things around our spaces. Your latest issue (#192) included plans to make an Adirondack chair, so I decided to make one with the limited resources I had out here. Specifically, I used wooden shipping crates and 2x4s for materials. The tools I had were a jigsaw, circular saw, screw gun, router and bits, and a miter saw I was able to borrow from another resident unit. I found a chisel that was in poor shape but managed to get it tuned fairly well using the scary sharp method.

In a few days of free time I was done, and the chair has seen non-stop action since.

Attached is a picture of the chair I made, just so you can see how it turned out. I had to modify some things based on what I had to work with but I think it turned out well and will provide a comfortable chair for a good while. It's nothing close to the level of work in the magazine, but for me, it is "Iraq good."

Thanks for making such a great magazine.

All the best,

Ryan "Heywood" Fair, Captain
United States Marine Corps
Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 369

What a Grind: Wharton Esherick Exhibit

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 17:36:12 GMT

posted by: Mark Schofield

As I descended the steep spiral staircase made entirely of wood, I couldn’t decide whether I’d entered a scene from the Hobbit or was on board a medieval ship. Wharton Esherick (1887-1970) began building his studio in 1926 and finished, what had by then become his home, forty years later. It’s now a museum.

Welcome to Middle Earth? Wharton Esherick's idiosyncratic studio.
Photo by G. Widman for GPTMC

Many houses rely almost solely on wood, but few use it in such creative ways or take such care to avoid straight lines. From the dining area floor, made from a jigsaw puzzle of different fruit woods given away by a local sawyer as scrap, to the two-pronged shelf support made from a tree root, each Esherick creation has, quite literally, a twist.

At the foot of the spiral stairs, there is a sunken area displaying a collection of Esherick’s sculptures, while at the top is his bedroom complete with counter-weighted trap door to keep sawdust out of the room.

The exterior of the museum.
Photo courtesy Wharton Esherick Museum

If you visit the museum before the end of the year you can also catch the museum’s 14th annual thematic woodworking competition, "Not the Same Old Grind." Designed to encourage creative thinking and the development of imaginative forms for everyday objects, this year’s task was to create a salt and pepper grinder. The 22 finalists, whose pieces were all thoroughly shaken and ground by the jury, display amazing creativity, as evidenced by the three winners.

In third place, William Smith’s Talking Politics on Capitol Hill in maple and walnut captures precisely the word-in-your-ear stance of a couple of lawmakers. Luisa Lehrer and Ernie Post took second place with their pair of triangular pieces entitled Tango. The winner was Terry Ryan’s Calla Lilly Vase in maple and mahogany. At first glance you’d never grab this piece to season your scrambled eggs, but I’d love to have it on my kitchen table and I think Wharton Esherick would have found a place for it too.

The winners. Left, Luisa Lehrer and Ernie Post (2nd place). Right, William Smith (third place). Center, Terry Ryan (first place).
Photos courtesy the Wharton Esherick Museum

The museum, located about 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia near Valley Forge Park, is open on Saturday and Sunday afternoons; call (610) 644-5822 for reservations and directions.

--Mark Schofield is the managing editor of Fine Woodworking magazine.

A Day at Wood Week 2007

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 16:32:46 GMT

posted by: Asa Christiana

I was recently invited to Virginia Tech to help kick off “Wood Week,” giving a keynote speech and teaching two classes. What I found in Blacksburg, Va., was a wonderful campus and a vibrant wood science department doing things with cellulose that I never dreamed of.

Virginia Tech is famous for its "Hokie Stone," limestone cut from the university's own quarry. it gives all the buildings a beautiful consistency, whether new or old.

Early September was obviously a touchy time at the university, with students just back on campus after last semester’s devastating shootings. The night after I left, Dave Matthews, John Mayer, and other musicians gave a free “Concert for Virginia Tech” in the football stadium.

An interim memorial was set up in August for the victims of the April 16 shootings.

I got to know the head of the wood science department, Paul Winistorfer, earlier this year, when we spent a few long days together in front of a big flat-screen TV, clicking through hundreds of pictures and picking winners for Veneer Tech’s annual Craftsman’s Challenge. He bent my ear about Wood Week, his department’s yearly effort to raise awareness of its offerings and connect students with industry partners. He assured me that his engineering-minded students and faculty would enjoy some exposure to the craft of fine furniture making. I was doubtful that a bunch of college kids would care about woodworking, but I cleared my schedule, enlisted some help at the office, and put together an hour-long PowerPoint slideshow on “the science and artistry of fine furniture.”

The speech
I delivered my keynote speech to a very engaged audience of 60 or so students, staff, and local woodworkers and furniture fans. I explained how custom furniture makers must be renaissance men/women of sorts, at once engineers and artists, in order to marry form with function. I started with George Nakashima and ended with Brian Boggs, tracking the evolution of the modern “woodworker.” The audience laughed at my jokes, nodded (the right way), and then treated me to a wonderful Q&A session, where almost everyone joined in: asking about the state of the craft, the culture in general, and of course, the magazine and web site. We bemoaned the lack of shop classes and the disposable nature of today’s furniture, and we all expressed the hope that culture will again turn toward handcrafted things. It was a rich exchange; the audience’s passion and knowledge surprised me.

After the lecture and the lively Q&A, conversation continued with a hardy few. That's me at the left.

The students
I also taught two classes, with 30 to 40 students in each, talking to interior design students about well-made furniture and giving a mixed group of design students (apparel, architecture, interiors) a sense of how a studio furniture maker approaches design. These were not wood science students, but part of the goal was to remind them about Wood Week and beautiful things that are made with wood.

I spoke to a group of design students about custom furniture. Nobody nodded off, even though my talk was right after lunch. I took that as a good sign.

I used handouts of relevant articles from Fine Woodworking, covering design principles and the design process, and students saw how different designers take similar approaches. A couture garment, for example, must be beautiful, comfortable, durable, and functional, a lot like a chair. We all are stuck with key dimensions, based on the human body and human activities, and we all benefit from the designers that have gone before and the classical design principles that go back thousands of years. We talked about how humans tend to respond to lines and proportions found in nature, whether it is the golden ratio--found in everything from human skeletons to the orbits of planets--to the fair line seen in a bending blade of grass.

The department
Before I left the next day to catch my plane in Roanoke, I managed to fit in a tour of the Wood Science department itself (the full name is the Department of Wood Science and Forest Products, College of Natural Resources), the best department of its kind in the United States. This turned out to be the best part of an already great trip. I saw students and faculty (funded by dozens of industry partners) working on:

nanotechnology, where wood is broken down to its molecular components and beyond, and reassembled into startling new products, like luminescent or anti-fungal films and coatings, finishes that change color with light or heat, and a wood-like building material that won’t absorb water and so won’t rot or swell.

pallet and shipping container research. Hardwood and corrugated cardboard comprise the largest use of hardwood in the U.S.! Better shipping materials can save billions of dollars in fuel, wood, and damage prevention.

In the pallet lab, designs in wood, cardboard, and plastic are torture-tested to simulate loading, impact, and ease of use for pallet jacks.

faster-curing adhesive systems for sheet goods and engineered wood products.

an experimental vacuum kiln, which dries wood perfectly in a fraction of the usual time.

I also learned that the department offers the public 20 to 30 “shortcourses,” including using portable sawmills and drying lumber, and a free project plan for an economical and effective homemade solar kiln.

A big part of Wood Week was the Career Day Fair, featuring a host of employers and industry partners. A visit from NASCAR's Ward Burton helped buoy attendance.

Winistorfer’s pet project is a planned $20 million facility for the world-class department, replacing an undersized building that has been added to over the years in piecemeal fashion. The new center will be even more effective in attracting students and industry partners.

--Asa Christiana is editor of Fine Woodworking.

Photos: Virginia Tech Dept. of Wood Science & Forest Products

Back to School and Loving It

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:51:35 GMT

Posted by: Charlie Reina

You’re never too old or too smart to learn. So my father reminded me many times during my know-it-all youth. Now that I’m older (though still not smarter) than he ever was, I can appreciate the wisdom of his words. In fact, I’ll add to them: The older you are, the more enjoyable learning is.

If you don’t believe that, ask any of the eight 40- and 50-somethings who recently took Phil Lowe’s Fundamentals of Woodworking course in Beverly, Mass. Ask me; I’m one of them, and I feel as though I just had the best vacation ever.

In the shop with Phil Lowe. Lowe joints an edge for a FWW #191 Fundamentals. Charlie’s class took place in the shop where this photo was shot. Photo: Steve Scott

I can hear you: “Woodworking fundamentals? And I’m reading his blog?” Well, listen up. This was a course in how to use the fundamental tools of the woodworker in fundamental fashion. In other words, how to do the work of tablesaws, planers, jointers, and routers by hand -- with planes, chisels, and scrapers. If you think that’s easy -- even for those of us who actually use hand tools from time to time -- think again.

Flat, square, and parallel sound easy to do, and with the right machines they are -- up to a point. You still wind up with blade marks from your tablesaw, possibly snipe from your jointer, or a board with parallel but crowned and cupped faces from your thickness planer. That’s where finely tuned and sharpened hand tools come in: to finish the job. If you use them from the very start, the job won’t involve sawdust, or require safety glasses or ear protection. Instead, you’ll listen for the crisp, clean whoosh of your smoothing plane as it lifts curls of wood as thin as tissue and as long as the workpiece itself. (I brought home a translucent 10-foot curl, so impressing my wife that she had me take it out to the workshop immediately.)

We spent the first day of class on flat, square, and parallel. The introductory lesson was on sharpening a plane blade the Phil Lowe way: Simple and straightforward. Phil advocates the hollow-grind method, so we began at the bench grinder (the only power tool we used all week) and made our way back to our waterstones -- just two, 800 and 1200 grit -- for the edge sharpening, and our leather strops for honing.

Starting point. Lowe's students start off handplaning a face (marked with a loop), the sides and ends, and the opposite face of an 8-in.-by-10-in. board so that they’re flat, square, and parallel. Each edge is then chamfered or rounded with the plane to precise dimensions.

Now came flat. Stroke after stroke with our #4 planes on one rough-sawn face of the poplar board that Phil’s henchman, Freddie, had milled for each of us meticulously out-of-square, with no two corresponding dimensions anywhere near equal. (Although I, myself, have achieved this feat often, I would not have thought it possible intentionally.) Check and re-check with a straightedge; If there’s light between it and any part of the surface, keep planing … and planing … hitting the high spots … shifting side-to-side to straighten twists … rocking forward and back … using your legs more, your arms less … watching the shavings curl ever thinner, ever longer … until the surface is perfectly flat and silky smooth.

And so it went with square and parallel. More planing and checking, first on an edge of the board, keeping it flat over its length and square to the planed face across its thickness, then, with two reference surfaces established, on one end of the board and, finally, on all three remaining surfaces, leaving each perfectly parallel to its opposite.

We spent the rest of the week making joints. Not the loose and lazy joints that so many of us have gotten used to making, but joints with parts trimmed for only the tightest of fits. The simple edge joint: two boards with mating edges planed so flat and square that they don’t need clamps during glue-up (and, when put under severe stress, break apart along grain lines, not the glueline). The pegged mortise-and-tenon joint, with offset holes that force the peg to draw the tenon tightly inside the mortise; no glue needed.

Pegged in place. The mortise and tenon in this joint are planed so precisely that it takes just one small, tapered peg to draw and hold the pieces tightly together without glue.

And, finally, Friday’s work: the half-blind dovetail. Four tails, three pins, two half-pins, all trimmed by hand to sharply scribed lines, creating a front-corner drawer joint that taps together to a tight and classy fit.

Pièce de résistance. The course culminated with each student creating a half-blind dovetail joint by hand -- with a dovetail saw, chisels, a mallet, and a huge sense of accomplishment.

Could we have done all this without the course? I suppose so. We could have used our jointers, tablesaws, thickness planers, routers, and mortising jigs and gotten the same results in just a few hours, but what would we have accomplished? Instead, we spent a glorious week learning (or re-learning) the most basic skills of this wonderful endeavor, and with them, earned at least some right to call ourselves woodworkers.

Oh, and Phil even took us on a field trip -- to the Peabody Essex Museum, which is in Salem, a few miles down Rt. 1-A. It was filled with period furniture, much of which Phil had a hand in restoring: Chippendale chairs, Queen Anne tables, Boston highboys, and a slew of pieces carved by Samuel McIntire-- all constructed with hand tools and techniques like the ones that occupied us all week. I think we all envisioned ourselves making furniture like that, and it was a heady feeling. Not so heady later, though, when people out on the street chuckled at the “PEM” stickers we had neglected to remove from our shirt-fronts. I was just glad the place we had visited wasn’t called the Peabody Museum of Salem.

Photos: Charlie Reina, unless otherwise noted

AWFS07: Sunrise on The Strip

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 15:26:58 GMT

Posted by: Asa Christiana

LAS VEGAS--When we're not crawling the aisles of the AWFS fair here, or making small talk at industry cocktail parties, we editors occasionally find time to do normal things like exercise.

At my hotel, Paris Las Vegas (Fake France), the fitness center is called a spa so it can charge $25/day. When Las Vegas became the No. 1 convention city in the U.S. a few years back, plied by with showgoers on expense accounts, it suddenly got very expensive. So the treadmill was out.

Workout option No. 2 would be a run, but it is supposed to reach 112 degrees today. It’s a dry heat, everyone says. Yeah, like the oven. So I woke up early to try my luck at dawn. It was a nippy 85 or so at 5:30 a.m. The conditions actually were fine, except for the fact that you don’t really sweat—the dry air evaporates it instantly.

The weird part was The Strip itself. The Vegas Strip is always surreal, but not many people get to see it at dawn. There was me; another few walkers, joggers and runners; a couple pairs of working girls heading home for the day, swearing like sailors; a passed-out college guy, abandoned by his buddies to sleep it off on a classical Roman marble bench; and a hundred janitors, spraying down the walkways outside each gambling Mecca.

I tiptoed across the slick pavement. I slowed to a jog to watch the maintenance boat sailing across the lagoon at the Bellagio, the crew adjusting underwater nozzles on the famous dancing fountains.

The lower-rent casinos have open entryways, maybe hoping to draw people in more easily. I enjoyed passing by those joints, where I was treated to a blast of air-conditioning. And in front of every casino, the music was still cranking away on an endless loop--flamenco, hard rock, Sinatra—playing to empty sidewalks. I had forgotten my I-Pod, so I didn’t mind.

Here and there I did see a tourist or two, but mostly The Strip was deserted, at least for this one hour. But by the time I got back to the hotel, business was picking up at the card tables and a few people were already drinking at the bar. That can only mean it's time to get back to work.