Lost Art Press

Time 2020-10-08 05:02:27

Web Name: Lost Art Press

WebSite: http://blog.lostartpress.com

ID:74293

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I’m a furniture maker first and a writer second, or maybe third (after, perhaps, being a master of tangential side projects). So, when I approached writing “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” my biography of the cabinetmaker who was the founder of the woodworking school I attended, it seemed appropriate to take part in retracing some of his steps as a craftsperson.In Krenov’s body of work, there is one piece that always stood out to me for its graceful presence and idiosyncratic form: 1977’s “A Playful Thing,” detailed extensively in Krenov’s third book on cabinetmaking, “The Impractical Cabinetmaker.” The piece is a pivotal demarcation in Krenov’s output – both a reprisal of his 1962 “No-Glass Showcase of Lemon Wood” from the earliest stage of his career and a harbinger of his future output of leggy cabinets on stands. I also had the pleasure of seeing the piece in person; Krenov kept it and it is still in the family. Seeing it in person confirmed its appeal to me.So, in February of 2019, I started my own version of the piece. I was happy to have both Krenov’s original drawings for the piece (published in “The Impractical Cabinetmaker”) as well as the insight I’d gained from examining much of his work. I had a pretty good footing to start on. But the understated form of this cabinet hides the complexity of its execution. Between the veneer work, the drawers that pass through both ends of the carcase, the carefully carved and chamfered legs and rails, and the drive to make every inch just right, even from unlikely views below or above, it is a real skill test. By the time I started this piece, I was five years out of the College of the Redwoods (now The Krenov School), and while I like to think my skills are always improving, the truth is that this kind of work requires constant practice and refinement of execution to be done properly and gracefully. I had some uphill battles.Krenov’s original was made with East Indian rosewood and Andaman padauk, woods I wasn’t going to hold my breath looking for these days, but after trips up to Keim Lumber in Millersburg, Ohio, and C.R. Muterspaw in Xenia, Ohio, I came home with some stunning gonçalo alves for the stand/drawer fronts and densely figured soft maple for the veneered surfaces. I rounded those out with aromatic cedar for the drawer bottoms, hard maple for the drawer sides and African blackwood for the pulls, and I’m pleased with my choices. The result, which I’m happy to still have in our bedroom a year and a half later (and 750 miles from Covington, Ky., where I built it), came out in the way as do many reprisals or reiterations of another maker’s design: different and telling of my process, but in the spirit of Krenov’s original, I think. Are the proportions exact to Krenov’s original? No. Is the shaping identical? Definitely not. Am I James Krenov? Well, come on, of course not. But in making this piece, and walking a few months in Krenov’s shop slippers, I learned quite a bit. I noticed certain aspects of the piece’s construction that betray Krenov’s history: the dexterous use of a knife in carving the legs and the pulls recall his early life spent carving with a jackknife in Alaska; the aesthetic touch of stepped chamfers and an almost architectural composition echo his teacher, Carl Malmsten, whose roots were firmly planted in the English Arts Crafts movement.There is a second stream of influence the piece has exerted over the year and half since I finished building it. With an open and inviting showcase area, what Krenov referred to as a “stage,” it is too hard to resist constantly rotating and replacing small objects to showcase. I find myself picking up the objects in residence and looking them over, something I wouldn’t necessarily do if they were tucked away on a shelf or in a glass cabinet.And this action, the constant consideration and handling of small, fine objects, might be the most impactful effect this piece had on my consideration of Krenov’s work. Krenov often insisted that his showcase cabinets “complemented” the pieces they displayed, and while the cabinet itself might be artfully done or worthy of examination, it wasn’t doing its job well if it couldn’t elevate or showcase its contents. While I’d read Krenov’s words regarding this, actually living with something that encouraged this interaction made it clear. Throughout his lectures, personal papers and his books, Krenov mentions craftspeople from other mediums, like the potters Bernard Leach or Eva Zeisel, in that light, showcase cabinets like “A Playful Thing” make perfect sense of his role as a cabinetmaker. It may be a “chicken-and-egg” problem – whether his appreciation for small crafts came before his penchant for making showcase cabinets or vice versa, but either way, living with this piece has made it clear how Krenov saw that role.You can’t write a book by building cabinets. Nor can you build a cabinet just by digging through lumberyards and antique stores. But if you can balance these experiences in just the right way, they might just culminate in work that is more than the sum of its parts. I can’t say I’m sure I got there with my cabinet, but the cabinet helped me consider Krenov’s life and work. Ingenious Mechanicks is my least successful book – commercially – but it probably the one I m most proud of. The research the Suzanne Ellison and I performed for the book involved sorting through thousands of fine art paintings. I had to travel to Germany and Italy to see examples of low workbenches first-hand. And the reconstructive archaeology was challenging. Writing the book forced me to appreciate what can be done with few tools and no vises – just stops, gravity and wedges. This approach infiltrated my everyday work at the bench, and I am faster and better for it. It’s not fair to our early ancestors to put words in their mouths. We don’t know how dry their wood was when they started to build their workbenches. Was it fresh from the tree? Dried for 20 years? Something in between?We can guess, which is what most people do. Or we can build a bunch of workbenches from woods in varying degrees of wetness and observe the results through several years. This second path is much more difficult than sitting naked in the dark at your computer keyboard – fingers covered in the dust of Cheetos – and pontificating online. But it’s the path I took.Here’s what I’ve found: Dry wood is the best. But because you are unlikely to find big slabs of wood that are totally dry, then dry-ish wood is great, too. What I mean by dry-ish is somewhere about 20 percent moisture content (MC) or less. When you use dry-ish wood there are rarely any unhappy endings that involve splitting or warping. The wood will settle down quickly – within a year or so – and the benchtop won’t require more than a couple flattenings.My next choice is wood that I call “moist.” This is stock that is somewhere between 20 percent and 50 percent MC. This sort of stock is what I usually look for when building massive oak workbenches for customers. It’s stuff that is about 6 thick and has been drying for a decade.This wood has some drying to do after you turn it into a workbench. Expect some shrinkage and checking on the end grain. It will calm down after a few years and four or five flattenings of the benchtop. My only other caution with moist stock is to not rely on glue for the joinery. Because of the wetness of the wood, water-based glues (yellow, white and hide) won’t be effective. I recommend you rely on drawboring and wedging.Finally, there is fresh wood, stuff that was a living tree less than a year prior. This stock is fairly easy to find and fairly cheap, but it can be tricky. Water-based glues aren’t a good idea. And you can experience significant warping and checking as the wood dries. My first precaution is to use a species that is easy to dry, such as red oak. Look for a slab where the grain runs fairly straight through the face and the edges. Orient the slab so the heart side is your benchtop (with the bark side facing the floor). And paint the end grain of your completed benchtop with a latex paint to slow the drying, especially if your bench will be in a climate-controlled shop.At 1 p.m. Eastern tomorrow (Tues., Oct. 6), Peter Galbert will carve a chair seat right in front of your very eyes on Mary May s live-streamed Twitch TV channel. The web address is: twitch.tv/marymaywoodcarver.You don t have to have a Twitch account to watch, but if you want to ask questions or interact in any way, you do. Twitch is free and can be watched online, or through the free app for either iOS or android.If you can t make the live stream, you can watch the recorded show afterward on Mary s Twitch channel.I don t keep a diary, I just look back at Instagram to see what I was doing on any given day. This is how I know The Chairpanzee was born on 11th April, as nothing more than an idea in search of a good name. That day, in the early stages of my COVID-19 infection, I sat at my desk designing a new low back chair. I used other chairs I admire as a reference point, noting their rake and splay angles to understand the visual effect they generate. Rake and splay are all very well on a drawing, but when it comes to making a chair what we really need are a sightline and a resultant angle for the legs. This approach allows us to drill with reference to a single sliding bevel (set to the resultant) which is positioned along the sightline. It struck me that a simple device to tell us those sightline and resultant angles based on any given rake and splay would be a useful tool to own, which brings us to today.There are published tables available to use as a reference, but for this product I went back to first principles, enlisting my older brother (an Engineering Ph.D.) to do the hard bit. Shortly after, armed with lines of data, the first prototype was born. An important concept from the beginning was to return both the sightline and resultant for a single setting of rake and splay, which led to the double-sided design. Every good product needs a memorable name and, having christened an earlier product the Bevel Monkey, it seemed only right to continue the simian DNA line. My son George eventually won the pun-off on a family walk, coming up with the perfect name: Chairpanzee.Collaboration is a key aspect of product development; it leads to ideas being challenged and ultimately creates a better end product. A good idea is also worth nothing without a route to market, so with both of those principles in mind, Chris Schwarz and I formed an alliance to develop a product that would become part of the Crucible range. We pulled apart the flaws in the first prototype, which was too big and suffered from racking sliders that jammed. We also needed to scratch an itch that Chris had: the thought that a wheel-type gauge might fit the bill. We got to a wheel gauge eventually and I still have a fondness for its Fibonacci-like pattern of holes, but it would have been too big and too expensive to produce. You have to be willing to drown a few ideas in the river on this journey.By prototype three we were zeroing in on the concept of a double-sided slider, which could be produced to a high quality at an affordable price. We made an important step toward a printed product, which allowed us to reproduce detailed graphics and fine data on a durable surface. Laser engraving had been a useful development tool, but ultimately too costly as a production solution. Following creation of the graphics and layout, we arrived at the end of the story with prototype number four, which looks exactly like the product you ll be able to have in your hands very soon (pictured at the top of this blog entry).“Drew’s books and tool sales were invaluable to me in the 90s as I explored traditional woodworking. There was a fascinating world within the brown cover of his 1978 book ‘Country Woodcraft’ and Drew and Louise were really living it. From Louise’s baskets to a carved hauling yoke to bowls and spoons, I found wood, and the working of it, honored.” The following is Peter Follansbee s “Foreword – Now” to Langsner’s “Country Woodcraft: Then and Now.” Drew and Louise Langsner began their woodworking classes at Country Workshops in 1978 and ran them until 2017 – more than 400 classes in all. The instructor list reads like a who’s who of green woodworking, featuring Wille and Jögge Sundqvist, Jennie Alexander, Curtis Buchanan, Brian Boggs, Carl Swensson, John Brown, the toolmaker Hans Karlsson and more. Working with and alongside these great craftspeople, I’d bet Drew has seen more green woodworking than anyone alive. There’s so much content rattling around in Drew’s memory, and now he’s distilled much of that information into a new expanded edition of his 1978 book “Country Woodcraft.”The world was young when the book first came out. If you wanted information like this back then, it was more than a click away. Mail order was the standard order of the day. That’s how I got the book. Then just a couple years later, a notice in small print in the back of Fine Woodworking alerted me to the existence of Drew’s then-fledgling school called Country Workshops. A long trip from Massachusetts down to North Carolina, and my world changed forever.But the book started it, along with John Alexander’s “Make a Chair from a Tree,” which was published the same year. “Country Woodcraft” was a project-based book that really taught techniques, starting off with felling and splitting trees into usable sections and going through the making of all manner of household and farm implements. This book is where Americans first saw Wille Sundqvist make wooden spoons; Drew and Louise met Wille in 1976, then brought him to their farm two years later for some of the first courses their school ever ran. The hewn wooden bowls stem from the same source. White oak basketry and poplar bark boxes are among the many projects included here that they learned in their adopted home of southern Appalachia.Now with the updates to this seminal book we have the benefit of all of Drew’s continued exploration. Having watched Drew now for much of 40 years, I can tell you he puts a tremendous amount of thought into his woodworking and teaching. Drew has always wanted to know how to use this tool, that technique, but also why to use them. And how to make them better. He has searched out great craftspeople and toolmakers and learned as much as he could from them, adapting and blending ideas from one to another. Refinement has been at the forefront of his work. Being a teacher and overseeing others instructing classes, Drew’s focus is often on how to convey his ideas to students. And they get more than their money’s worth. “Life-changing” is an adjective often used to describe students’ experiences at Country Workshops.Reading the new edition of “Country Woodcraft” was as exciting for me as reading it the first time all those years ago. Great depth and detail, showing us what has changed his thinking through the decades and why. Things Drew couldn’t have known back then are carefully explained now – even down to what to do with the shavings! Many of us remember when the book first came around, but now the great influx of interest in green woodworking, spoon carving and other related crafts will introduce this well-deserving giant in the field to a whole new audience. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Join 34,807 other subscribers Email Address

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