In a break from your regularly scheduled programming, after all, all politics makes Jack a very dull boy, we are taking a trip through my woodshop.
In theory, wood, usually oak, walnut etc, enters one door, and something nice leaves at the end of a few weeks work. Along the way there are adventures, mistakes, inspiration and I wanted to share the process.
Get this right and you create an heirloom that will be treasured long after the maker is departed. Get it wrong and you just made an expensive mistake. Truth be told, most pieces are a mixture of "right and wrong", the trick is knowing where you can recover from an error while pouring heart and soul into the finished item. Manage that and others will recognize it.
All the photographs have extra "mouse-over" information, and all are click-able for bigger views - twigg
There is probably in the region of fifty hours shop time building this desk. That time is spread out over a period of weeks. Partly because I have other things I need to do, but there is also waiting around time, while finishes dry, or for other parts to arrive.
Figure this at a fairly modest $25 an hour, add in the cost of materials and shop supplies (those blades do not sharpen themselves, nor is sandpaper free), and you can see that this is an expensive business. Indeed, my selling price for the project about to unfold should be in the region of $1700 delivered, if I am to make any kind of living at all. Comparable pieces, even online, are running around $2000 ... so I'm reasonable!
In this instance the order is for a desk and two matching bookcases for the home office of a friend. Eighty board feet of oak, and twenty of maple for the drawers should just about cover it. To my dismay I later find that it doesn't, cover it, and that means yet another half-day to the sawmill for more oak. Oh well, it's a nice drive!
There are some real challenges to this project. First among them is that building desks and bookcases from solid hardwood is becoming quite rare. Pop into your local antique dealer and you will find them a-plenty, and you might need a substantial loan to buy one. In this day of, oh, I dunno, saving the planet, some hardwoods are becoming rare and expensive. I live in Oklahoma and whatever disadvantages that might bring with it, we do have an abundant quantity of good quality hardwoods; and are unlikely to run out anytime soon.
The easy way to do this is to make boxes and a desk top from plywood, or another composite, then face the pieces with oak. Making it is easy, the materials are cheaper and if you want that polished, factory fresh with everything perfect and in straight lines look, then that is the way to go. If you want a showhome piece made of dark wood with an unblemished appearance, similar to most of what you might find in your local furniture store, then you would use as little real wood as possible. It looks nice, and has about as much character as a house brick, and a particularly bland house brick at that.
The problem (opportunity?) with wood is that it is alive. When it is cut, dried then fashioned into furniture it continues to live. It simply enters the next phase where the particular characteristics of the wood are to be both appreciated and exploited. Plywood is cut to a dimension, and that is it until water gets to it, or you throw it out. Oak does not behave that way. It breathes. It takes in moisture and exhales it in the same happy manner, and every time it does that the wood moves. You can cut it to an accuracy of a few thousandths of an inch, but it will not remain that way for long. You have to accommodate the desires of the material. You have to let it breathe, let it move and when it has done that for a few years while being used as intended, it finds its way into an antique shop looking better than the day it was built. Either that or your children and grandchildren fight for it when they are dividing up the spoils of inheritance.
So making these pieces is a responsibility. Not simply to the person who is paying for it, but to their descendants too. This is an approach you bring to the work, not something one thinks about on a daily basis. I just cut wood and shape it into something nice; the wood is responsible for the rest and I can take no credit for that!
The thought process that goes into the design is where the allowances are made. For example, I cannot allow the wood to move too much across the face of the drawer pedestals. If that happens, the drawers will stick in the slides. I could fit old-fashioned runners for the drawers, but the client wants to be able to easily open them so full-extension slides are a much better option. No need to sacrifice modern advances entirely! This means that the pedestals have to move from front to back determining the grain direction. It also means the bottom cannot be glued to the sides, nor the desk top rigidly mounted on the pedestals. Do either of those things and there is a danger of the entire piece breaking itself apart. If the client lives in the Mojave and subsequently moves to Louisiana (why would anyone do that?), then I can guarantee it would fall to pieces. You allow for the fact that the desktop is solid wood, and thirty inches wide across the grain. That could move half an inch with humidity changes, yet only a tiny fraction along the length. When you look at old furniture and admire the dips and ridges, the slightly ill-fitting joints and general patina that describe age, these are the reasons why it becomes that way. They all left the shop looking damn near perfect, but that was three hundred years ago!
Wood of this type is bought by grade, and measured in board feet. One board foot being a piece 12" x 12" x 1", or any multiple thereof. I usually buy ten foot lengths of the best quality, mostly kiln-dried, with wider boards costing more. In this instance I had some eleven inch wide boards and they were reserved for the bookcase sides and shelves.
That meant that everything else has to be joined lengthwise to produce wider boards. The desktop, for example, is thirty inches wide and is made of five, six inch boards glued and doweled. For the woodworkers out there, I have pretty much given up on biscuit joints. They add little strength but are supposed to be an aid to alignment. Well they don't actually align very well either, so I bought a fancy doweling jig that aligns boards so perfectly that they rarely need any thickness sanding. Money well spent, and those doweled joints are tough! For anyone expecting to see traditional mortise and tenon, or dovetail joints ... not on this piece because the construction doesn't call for them. Future projects will. I could have dovetailed the drawer boxes, and on some jobs I will, but this was done at a very special price, so I machined the joints and they will not break!
Equally true is that much of what has to be done is determined by style. Almost regardless of the finished appearance, the basic structure of a box, is a box. The final effect is created by the style you apply to the edges (and sometimes surfaces), and the finish you apply to the completed article. I am firmly in the camp of less is more. You will not find fancy curls, or elaborate carved reliefs, or any Victorian-type influences in anything I build. If I had to pick styles I favour, I would choose one word ... Simple.
This is not to reduce the workload. Most of the pieces you see are mass-produced on CNC woodworking centers. Every item is identical to the one make a few minutes earlier, and the only input from a craftsman was in programming the machine ... and I am being generous. These furniture pieces are not being singled-out for criticism, all I am saying is that they represent a completely different market.
So I would favour styles like Arts and Crafts, Craftsman, Mission, Shaker. When you produce work that uses the best wood you can get, then the simple lines emphasize the beauty of the material, rather than leading your eye away from the grain, and into the carved pineapple.
In some respects, a desk is a desk. It's broad format and appearance have some fixed dimensions, although the arrangement of the drawers, etc, can be modified to suit. In this instance, the client wanted at least one file drawer, and a drawer for other desky items. Given the space available I could fit in a five foot wide desk top, and two thirty inch wide bookcases. The art goes into determining the edge and face treatments, the drawer pulls and feet, and the final finish. Decent craftsmanship is always a bonus!
Having worked out the basic construction of the major pieces it is time to give thought to those finishing touches that marks this desk out as Handmade in America by Steve. The easy way is to buy hardware, the fun way is to make it yourself. I had some cherry and maple, and thought about combining them for the drawer pulls, but then inspiration took over. I decided to cut the front feet from three inch blocks of oak. Having done so I was left with eight off-cuts that were simply too interesting to discard ... that's when it helps to have a bright idea because drawer pulls matter, and we all like to think we have something unique; if it looks nice. There is a symmetry that appealed to me; re-purposing scrap material into something both functional and attractive.
The final stage in any build is applying the finish. You cannot, at this point, use finish to improve a poor piece, but you sure as hell can ruin a decent item with the wrong choices, or poor application. Again, this is an area where I have personal preferences, and they can be best stated, to no one's surprise it's
Less Is More. My own belief is that few items ever need much more than a very light or no stain, a generous application of Tung Oil, and some Paste Wax. We are making a desk here, not a piano.
Red Oak in particular is problematic. Its natural color ranges from white to almost pink, and when left un-stained is simply beautiful. When I made a bed for my daughter I finished it solely with polyurethane ... It is a bed, and she is a teen, it needed a tough finish. However, I am making this for someone else, and what they want matters rather more. The client wanted dark wood, broadly to match the other major items she has. So then we run into the other problem with oak. It has a very open-pored grain, and any end-grain situations will soak up the stain like it has been attempting to cross a desert and left it's water-bottle at home. This is why you end up with the characteristically well defined grain pattern on stained oak cabinets.
American cabinet makers did oak no favours by churning out billions of horribly dark and poorly crafted kitchen cabinets, throughout the late sixties and seventies. Oak has a bad rap, and it is not for any intrinsic reasons, but because it was neither respected nor accorded the care it deserves. You can mitigate the grain pattern in a number of ways. It is common to fill the grain with a compound that reduces the tendency to soak up stain. You can use a sealing sander that prevents porous wood from staining unevenly .... or you can simply put the stain on, and enjoy the glorious effect!
I went for glorious, and two heavy coats of Dark Walnut stain, which is about as dark as it is going to get without painting ... shudder! I was running hard up against a Thanksgiving deadline, and the weather had dropped very cold. Applying and drying stain and finish in an un-heated shop is tricky, so I borrowed the house and my kids had to be careful. I'm showing this picture because it gives the best representation of the final colour and finish. You can see the two pedestals and desk top ... and kids back packs, and other nonsense typical of a busy home.
It is quite difficult to accurately show finished colours on a screen, but the picture on the right isn't a bad shot. The desk top is finished, and awaiting only the hole for the cable gland, and final fastening to the pedestals.
When you get to this stage your mind turns from inspired to critical. The problem I have is that I know where every single fault and mistake is, and they tend to be what I see. Fortunately, others are usually more generous than that.
Here is where I have to apologize for the poor quality pictures of the finished item. I forgot my camera and grabbed these with my phone. I will replace them later when I get better ones.
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