diy wood

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.

Whew! Schools out for summer! Now maybe I can get back into the shop!

I did manage a little work in the last couple of weeks. Here's some shots of the cupboard with its new "antiqued" hinges.

First some before and after closeups:





And one of the cupboard in the sun, which happens every morning in the summer, and is exactly the situation in which the old, shiny hinges really bugged me. I am now much happier...

A while ago I finally finished the Shaker cupboard project - mostly. In the final push, I just went ahead and used the nickle plated hinges "as is", even though I knew the bright, shiny finish would bug me. It did.

Well, I finally got around to antiquing the hinges. Here's what I came up with: fire. I made a small fire in a metal bucket, threw the hinges in the coals and left it alone until it was cool. They came out looking funky, but a quick wipe with an oily rag took off the surface layer (oxidation? ash?), exposing the steel underneath.





I really like the color - it has a nice, varied, aged look to my eye. Next step is actually putting them on the cupboard. I hope that doesn't take another year...

Well, it's been a little crazy around here lately. Between the general chaos of the end of another middle school year, and shopping for a new vehicle, I haven't had much time, or energy for the shop. But Teague's first bithday was last week, and I did suceed in making him a special present.


A skunk bench for a little stinker!

After cleaning up the caulking irons, I just couldn't put them back in the ammo box they came in. I had a vague idea that an airtight box, while certainly keeping moist air out, would also trap moisture in with the irons and would probably not be the best home for them. That seems like a good, practical idea - but of course there was more to it. I just didn't like the ammo box - not for these irons. It didn't make me happy. This might sound familiar...

Anyway, I needed to design and build a box for the caulking irons and this seemed like a good excuse to try an experiment. I've noticed that many pieces built by old timers have a certain "funky" element to them. They don't seem to follow any "rules" of design, and they sometimes flat out break them. But they have character in spades and are wonderful, unique pieces. Often times it seems that there was a material influence on the final form. Maybe they used what was on hand - a thrifty use of offcuts. Sometimes they aren't successful - the piece feels heavy or clunky - but sometimes it is successful, and the piece has a wonderful, funky, organic, improvised quality (and I mean improvised in a good way - like a jazz solo - not like a shoddy cover up...).


For this project/experiment, I decided to restrict the materials I could use, design as I went, and see what happened to the final product. I could only use scrap, or left-over wood and hardware. This was going to be a quick box - no worries about perfect surfaces etc.

Here's what I ended up using:

Wood:
Some pine shelves I took out of a cheapo CD cabinet I resurrected from Salvation Army
A piece of mahogany left over from the wood stove fence project
A chunk of 1x2 that was formally a sticker for a wood pile
3" hunk of 3/8" dowel
1 bamboo skewer

Hardware/fasteners:
Cheapo piano hinge from aforementioned cheapo CD cabinet
Screws from the wheel of homeless fasteners
Nails - aluminum tacks! From - well, I don't know where these came from...


The tools to be stored set some dimensions and the material available set others. The caulking wheel was 16" long. I only had two pieces of the pine shelving longer than that. Since I needed the two sides and the top and bottom to be 16"+ I had to get four out of two. One piece I ripped down the middle. This became the two long sides of the box. To hold all the irons the box needed to be wider, so I resawed the second piece and ended up with two thin (approx. 5/16") pieces for the top and the bottom. The ends I made from one of the shorter shelf pieces.

My original idea was to use wooden pins as hinges, so I made two cleats for the top that would overlap the ends of the box and provide me with a location for the pins. After making those from part of the 1x2, I couldn't work out the details of the pins/hinges, so I scrapped that idea and cut a chunk of piano hinge. Then I found the tacks, and used those to fasten the hinge to the back and the top. The front edge of the lid looked funny, so I ripped a strip of mahogany and glued that across the front edge, overlapping the ends of the cleats. Better, but now the base looked odd. More ripping of mahogany strips and I attached a mitered base to the box. Not too bad, but the box still looked top heavy.


I ignored that "problem" and moved on to the handle. I did find an old metal handle, but attaching it to the thin top would have required adding a strip of wood under the lid. I avoided that by sawing and carving a wooden handle and screwing up through the lid into the handle. Not only did that solve the practical challenge of how to attach a handle, it somehow solved the top heavy aesthetic problem as well (at least to my eyes). Unintentionally, the handle came out with an "Asian" flavor, and paired with the top being wider than the base, it gave the whole box a quasi pagoda nature. Weird.


To keep the lid from just opening when I pick it up by the handle, I made two locking pins from the dowel and the bamboo skewer. Then, to avoid losing them, I made two holes in the top edges of the ends to hold the pins. This also has the bonus feature of propping the lid open so it is obvious that it is not locked.


Two coats of bright red milk paint pulled the whole thing together and hid the different woods used. I followed the paint with my own mixture of mineral oil and beeswax.


I think this experiment was successful. The box is functional and has a pleasing design in a funky, improvised, unique way that keeps drawing my attention back to it. Much more enjoyable than the ammo box.


Here's the tool kit for this project:

Okay, first I should say that I am not in any way short on projects, or potential projects. Seriously. But, sometimes I just can't say no. Here's the latest example.

Last month, while visiting family in Oregon, I'm walking through an antique store. A real one. Which probably doesn't overly excite you, except you probably don't live in Alaska where 99.9% of "antique" stores are actually "junk" stores. So, anyway, I'm drooling all over the store. I turn a corner and there is this cute little arts and crafty rocker.


I'm about to move on, when I see the tag. $35! What? In Alaska, assuming you could find something like this, it would be at least $100 to $200 more. Now I'm interested. The tag says "as is"- hmm. I start to give it the once over.

The joints are loose. No problem. That's good really (already planning ahead). One of the metal supports that holds the seat springs has broken and someone "fixed" it by jamming a board in there. Not comfortable - true, but it is fixable. And the rockers aren't original. The holes in them don't match up with the legs. More serious, but I'm not collecting, and it still has my interest. And come on - $35!

So I buy it. I did try to resist, I mean I don't need any projects - did I mention that? But two day's later it's sitting in my Mother-In-Law's garage. Now to get it home to Alaska. I thought about checking it on the airplane. Don't laugh. Up here we check stuff that seems crazy anywhere else. If you go to the airport in Anchorage you will see various duck tape wrapped objects on the carousel: moose racks, guns, huge coolers full of salmon, guns, TVs (in boxes), fishing poles, guns, BBQ grills, a case of Tabasco, more guns, groceries etc. But after thinking about the prices they are charging these days, I opted for Old Blue. The U.S. Postal Service to the rescue!

Step one. Take the rocker apart. No problem - the joints are already loose. Except that someone has tried to hold them together by nailing through some of the joints. I dig these out with minimal damage using a tool I made from a screwdriver that I sharpened and put a "vee" notch into with a file (got both at the local hardware store - a real one! No borg!). While taking it apart, I manage to read part of the decayed sticker that tells me it is The Phoenix Chair Company's Model # 21434, from Sheboygan, WI.


Step two. Box it up. The postal service has a web site that covers pricing. If you ever find yourself in this situation (I doubt it, but who knows...)it's a very handy guide to knowing how big you can go before prices hit the roof.

Step three. Mail it. Done. I've now more than doubled my investment. I'm still happy.

Step four. Wait. Parcel Post to Alaska can take weeks. Especially when the volcano keeps messing around.


Step five. Put it back together. This will be the fun one - but it will have to wait. But one fine day, the rocker will rise from the ashes like a Phoenix...err...from the boxes...whatever. Fun.

Caulking irons.

One day I WILL build a boat...

In the meantime, I enjoy watching Bob Easton build his Fiddlehead.