As a theoretical exercise, imagine a machine that processes furniture parts to that hundredth-of-an-inch level of precision. What would happen if we dial that machine back to wider tolerances? It would begin to spit out parts with greater variability across the board, maybe mill out dovetails with slightly uneven angles or generate chair-leg turnings that weren’t exactly identical. Let’s say that we can even program the machine to produce the parts with even more extreme local variations, perhaps leaving coarse milling marks on the underside of a tabletop or generating a drawer on which the sides are of differing thicknesses. These parts might be assembled with some difficulty, forming a piece of furniture that, on paper, matches the typical variations...
“When you’re looking to restore an antique plane for use, the good (and bad) news is that half the battle is often getting a good plane. Although you can bring most anything back into service, if you’ve secured a decent example, the restoration will be minimal.… Restorable examples can be obtained at antique stores, flea markets, tool swaps, or tool dealer websites. Be warned that they are usually pulled out of barns and attics, and often have the grime to prove it. In dimly lit antique stores, it can be hard to know which examples are worth investing time in and which are better used for stove fuel. There are a few simple things I look for, the first and...
Good ideas often come from unlikely places. My most recent inspiration came from a dusty old pile of books in an antique store where my wife uncovered a decades-old exhibition catalogue featuring the furniture of the Swisegood school of cabinetmaking. The exhibition opened in November 1973, at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and featured a growing collection of furniture made by a group of little-known craftsmen from the Yadkin River Valley in Rowan (now Davidson) County, North Carolina. One of the chief forms of furniture produced by the Swisegood school was the corner cabinet, and in leafing through the catalogue, I became enamored with the way these particular craftsmen mixed rustic, country charm...
We measured a range of objects, pre-industrial and machine-made, in areas not heavily subjected to wear: tabletop thicknesses, turning diameters, drawer-side thicknesses, etc. Using digital calipers, measurements were made at multiple points on each part and catalogued. The goal was not just to generate pages of numbers, but rather to establish some general guidelines – surface tolerances, variations in pre-industrial versus industrial pieces. We sought to define how irregular hand-prepped surfaces were, on average, and how this compares to those made using machines. To minimize the potentially confounding factor of warpage in our handmade test pieces, we also drew from a selection of Victorian and late Federal furniture to represent the machine-made pool. All wooden objects naturally fluctuate to some...
Early in my career as a woodworker I had great disdain for the term “Master.” The very mention of the title had me rolling my eyes. Even today I find it a challenging idea to come to terms with, because there are several contexts at the root of this title and all of them have a sliding scale. In this day and age, it is exceedingly difficult to say what makes a master, so let’s not get stuck in that quagmire and instead turn our focus to mastery. Mastery is the never-ending drive to refine our skills. I think mastery can be recognized when we see it. I know I recognized it many times during my “apprentice” years, as well...
After breakfast, we broke into our working groups of six to eight, each with different responsibilities as well as our own truss, to hew, cut, scribe, and assemble. It was wonderful to have the apprentices around. Most of them were young (about 15 years old), and though they were not yet skilled carpenters, their presence greatly expedited the sheer amount of hewing we had to get done. They also added historic accuracy to the project, as on old worksites there were likely a handful of experienced carpenters working alongside boys who did the bulk of the labor for little or no wages. Taking a step back from the action, it was awe-inspiring to hear the axes echoing through the ash...
The number of tools necessary for a woodworker to conduct his business varied of course with his occupation and with the size of the craftsman’s establishment. It is difficult to make a precise determination of how much of an investment was represented by a woodworker’s tools. Inventories are of some help but these must be used with caution because monetary standards varied from colony to colony and from state to state. Moreover, the age of tools listed in estates is not given and the depreciation factor is difficult to compute. Then, too, there can be no guarantee that the appraisers of an estate were familiar with tools and their value. Despite these precautions, useful information can be gleaned from estate...
Analyzing our data pools, it became apparent that handmade furniture doesn’t remain within its average tolerances the way machine-made furniture does within its level of precision. This 0.01" mechanized range is an absolute boundary, and for the most part there are simply no outliers beyond it. Straight and parallel are predictably regulated by machines, and are in fact necessary for the industrial manufacturing process. CNC machines, for example, rely on unmovable benchmarks that must be established to function properly. Throw a piece of tapered, warped, rough-cut lumber on the worktable, and you’re asking for trouble. However, the measurements we took from our pre-industrial examples were rife with outliers – areas of noticeable, often radical divergence from general tolerances. It is...
Show a rail to the table leg to determine the amount of reveal you’d like. (Many tables’ rails are not flush to the legs but are recessed a bit.) To envision how far the mortise should be from the leg’s outside face, you can set your mortise chisel to it. Typically, the mortise is approximately centered on the rail’s thickness. Mark the mortise position onto the leg with your knife and set your mortise gauge to scribe the lines. It is common practice to allow the gauge lines to run a little past the bottom mortise line, so don’t bother trying to make a perfect stop there. If you’ve resisted buying a mortise gauge, you really ought to remedy that....
What these men taught me about production work turned my world upside down. Originally, I had thought that production work would turn me into a machine making soulless objects. Those soulless objects for me were tied to a system that cared more about profit for shareholders and less about quality workmanship and design. But I had confused production work with mass production, because production work, in its most basic form, is intrinsically connected to the crafts. Throughout history, quality objects have often been made in large quantities with a high degree of skill by using craft production methodology. When I came to terms with that, the stigma of production work was lifted and I began to feel free to experiment...
