Interdisciplinary Crossover

As a cabinetmaker with an academic background in religious studies,* I’ve been asked more than once whether I specialize in building church pews.

Interdisciplinary crossover has occurred on just three occasions. Once I was asked to turn a part for a ceremonial scroll at a local synagogue. Then I built a display cabinet for a Presbyterian church.

The most recent coincidence of woodworking and religious studies is the sound booth I designed and installed for Bloomington’s First United Church.

Photo by Kendall Reeves, Spectrum Studio of Photography & Design spectrumstudioinc.com

The booth consists of a platform built by congregation member John Turner, a retired union electrician, who engineered the wiring plan.

I slept well for the first time in days after that 9′ monster was finally set in place. I couldn’t have done it during this exceptionally rainy summer without the help of a strong and careful crew from A Better Way Moving & Storage.

I had the simpler task of designing and building the cabinetry that would go inside the booth–the three-drawer base seen here through the glass and a two-door base at the opposite end–along with the exterior assembly.

The panels  enclosing the booth are built from 1-1/4″ (net) solid cherry with custom-veneered, sequence-matched cherry panels laid up on a 1/2″ m.d.f. substrate by Heitink Veneers. In other words, heavy. Complicating matters was the decision to have the solid framework stained to match the glass and wood wall between the entryway and the sanctuary, while leaving the panels “natural.” Fun. (I’ll share that technique in my next post.)

Veneer flitches at Heitink. I chose  cherry with “bubbly” figure .

John Dehner and I after gluing up the 9′ x 5′ panel with seven sections: a stressful experience, to put it mildly. Immediately after this (I know…it should have been before), I invested in a half gallon of Titebond Extend.

I designed the lattice pattern on the north section of the booth to echo a latticework wall far across the church, which is visible in person but impossible to capture adequately on camera because of the distance. The pieces are simply glued and pinned in place. To locate them accurately, I used spacers cut from waste plywood.

The left section of the north wall is actually a lockable door.

The completed audio booth from inside the sanctuary. Some of the pews may be removed in the future. For now, the booth had to occupy precisely this footprint. Photo by Kendall Reeves, Spectrum Studio of Photography & Design spectrumstudioinc.com

*specializing in aesthetics and ethics, not religious history or comparative religions, etc.

Behind the feathery crown

Whether or not you find a piece of furniture attractive at first sight, your opinion of the piece will certainly be enriched by insight into how it was made.

For years I’d seen a grouping of pieces made by the Showers Furniture Company prominently displayed at the Monroe County History Center:

 

I thought them grotesque: gaudy, cheaply made, masquerading as something of higher quality than the ample signs of their factory production revealed. But in the course of researching and writing my book about Hoosier cabinets I developed a surprising appreciation for such modest furnishings, which, precisely because of their factory production, were affordable for millions of families during the early 20th century.

So when you look at the odd piece in the snapshot below, where my friend Mary Beth and I were hamming it up for the camera at the opening of a furniture exhibition, I hope you’ll see beyond the goofy, two-dimensional “crown,” the overwrought legs, and the busy mix of wood species to the solid materials, traditional craftsmanship, and scholarship I invested in the piece, which I produced as part of an educational project funded by an Indiana University arts grant.

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This page from a 1933 edition of the Sears & Roebuck catalog shows the china cabinet and sideboard pictured above. This model and the other pieces in the suite were sold for several years, into the ’30s.

A magazine advertisement shows another popular Showers product: fancy cabinets for radios.

My design followed many hours at the Indiana State Library researching Showers pieces from the early 20th century. It’s a riff on the mass-produced treasures of the 1920s that flaunted the day’s most popular trends for everyman. What’s contemporary about my take is the use of materials that were locally grown or salvaged{1}, with traditional joinery in place of fabrication processes designed for mass-production.

To wit: Traditional mortise and tenon joinery for the drawer section of the three-part ensemble…

… and dovetails, of both the sliding (a.k.a. “French”) variety, as seen below, and the socket variety, cut by hand, in the making of the drawers.

Here’s a shot of the drawer case’s framework–what you see here is the front, where the drawer face will eventually go–routed with a dovetailed slot that will hold the decorative bracket at the left side of the front. The decorative bracket destined to be glued into this dovetailed slot lies on the bench.

To make the legs for the base framework I turned the rounded sections on the lathe, then carved the flutes by hand with a gouge and mallet.

Here’s the base assembly with its front and back rails and center stretcher:

and now the base frame with the drawer case and drawer:

For the solid walnut top of the base ensemble I wanted to carve a gadrooned edge similar to the one on this Mission style library table I’d seen at a junk shop, but without the intermediate veins:

My first attempt resulted in this simple version–carved, to be sure, but not what I was aiming at:

After a carving course with Mary May and before the opening of the State Museum show, I made a new top with better carving that looks more “rolled.”

The door, like the carved top of the drawer assembly, is made from walnut with traditional mortise and tenon joints designed to fit a rabbeted frame. Here’s the top rail with its tenon partly cut:

and here’s one of the mortises with apologies for the fuzzy shot:

The door is hung on traditional non-adjustable butt hinges:

Next came the scrollwork, my favorite feature of the original Showers pieces that inspired Corona Plumosa. Hands-on investigation of the Showers suite at the Monroe County History Center (with kind permission from then-director Diane Ballard) revealed that the original scrollwork was cut from a material not unlike our contemporary medium-density fiberboard (mdf). Armed with this precedent I chose a sheet of discarded 1/8th-inch-thick mdf that had come to my shop as protective packing for an order of custom-veneered panels. Once I’d calculated the dimensions and layout of the scrollwork, allowing for the parts that would be concealed behind the rabbet, I made a full-scale pattern in 1/4-inch plywood and checked everything for size:

… then cut it out using a jigsaw, spokeshave, and files. I actually preferred the unstained version of the scrollwork shown here:

… but knew that it looked too contemporary for my piece.

Looking through the door in the image just above, you can see one of the animal faces formed by the burly maple when I bookmatched the panels for the back. I didn’t even see the faces until months after I had completed the piece, when I was showing the maple to a client who was considering using the remaining boards I had in stock for a dining table top. He pointed out the faces.

The finished upper cabinet:

{1} Burly silver maple from Joe Davison of Davison Hardwood Quality Specialists in Spencer, Indiana; quartersawn red oak salvaged from a tornado-felled tree that had once grown on the site of Indiana University’s first home; and walnut from a tree that had lived on my husband’s property in western Monroe County.

 

 

 

Floating Vanity for Fine Homebuilding

Photo by Charles Bickford, courtesy of Taunton Press

I knew I’d be in for some ribbing when I said yes to doing an article and video for Fine Homebuilding’s Master Carpenter series. No, I am not a carpenter, let alone a master carpenter; I don’t know how to frame a house, build a roof, or engineer a staircase, and I have the highest respect for those who do, such as Mark Longacre and Chris Sturbaum, two contractors with whom I work on a regular basis. Furthermore, I groan every time I hear someone call him- or herself a “master”-anything. As an augmenter of titles, “master” tends to be more of a marketing claim than an indicator of substance. Most of the professionals I know who have actually mastered their craft do not call themselves master craftspersons.

But the series is called Master Carpenter. I’m not responsible for the name.

Senior Editor Chuck Bickford photographs the drawer faces and doors while videographer John Ross steadies the ladder.

Engineering the vanity was more challenging than its simple appearance may suggest. The architect who designed the piece specified that it hang from the rear wall and be made with a removable center section, allowing the ensemble to be easily converted for wheelchair access.

Challenge #1: Gravity

While upper cabinets in kitchens are routinely hung from back walls, they tend to be shallow–usually just 12 inches. When a kitchen has deeper upper cabinets, those are typically attached to adjacent casework or a side wall for extra support. Many floating cabinets are installed in alcoves, where walls on both sides allow the entire depth (that is, front to back) to be supported. But in this case, the weight of the 21-inch deep cabinet and its concrete counter would need to be supported solely from the back wall. Whether I used a cleat or heavy-duty brackets, there would be considerable stress on the joints between the tops and sides of the cases. To minimize this stress I decided to take at least some of the load off the top corner joints by adding hidden support beneath the cabinet sides. This additional support would also counteract shear.

Challenge #2: Fasteners

If the center section was ever removed, the sides of the drawer sections would be exposed, so they, along with the ends, would have to be finished. Having the center section removable also called for a neater-looking means of attaching the cases to each other than my usual twinthread cabinet screws run through the face frames, which would leave ragged holes if the center case were taken away.

A third challenge–this one posed by the peculiar exigencies of the assignment

A third, though not the final, challenge was presented by the need to crate the cabinets and ship them via UPS to Newtown, Connecticut, where they would be installed in Taunton’s Project House. These cabinets were large and heavy, but UPS, the shipper of choice in this case, has limits to the dimensions and weight of packages it will accept. Having calculated the weight of the cabinets while figuring out which support brackets I would use to hold them on the wall (that calculation had to take into account the plywood, the drawer boxes, the drawer slide hardware, and the MDF doors, drawer faces, and end panels, in addition to the concrete counter), I now had to factor in the considerable weight of those support brackets themselves, plus the angle iron, and the OSB* from which I would build the crates.

In the end, it was clear that I would have to carry some of the parts with me in luggage–the cabinet parts in my suitcase and the brackets in my laptop case.

Not sure what the TSA officials thought when they opened this 50-pound suitcase and discovered a bunch of cabinet parts padded with a lot of newspaper, an old towel, and a pillow. (Clothes? So overrated.)

Laptop, hair iron, toiletries, and Hebgo brackets from Hafele.

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The cabinet’s most glorious feature is the face veneer, custom-pressed onto a water-resistant MDF** substrate by Heitink Veneers. I chose this particular veneer, which is characterized by robust grain with sapwood and the occasional resin pocket, to celebrate the life of the tree. In my view, this style of cabinetry is about nothing if not the beauty of wood.

Ryan Lane and Jarred Black of Heitink Veneers present a cart laden with a mouthwatering selection of cherry, from rustic and knotty to foot-wide pieces of clear heartwood, densely curled.

*oriented strand board

**medium-density fiberboard, a premium substrate for architectural veneers

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The Project House in Newtown really is a project.

Chuck carries photography and video equipment to the front door.
(Broken windows by courtesy of vandals)

A quick tour of the place will take Homebuilding readers back to features on wiring, insulation, drywall, hanging doors, and building a charming garage. In each case, camera angles, lighting, and cropping have been expertly employed to conceal the larger milieu: an empty house with granite veneer siding.

The house happened to be on Taunton-owned property, and it has proved ideal as a stage for article and video projects. For me, one of the most impressive features of the place was the dry-laid granite wall outside.

Fitting an MDF end panel with a Lie-Nielsen plane struck me as heretical, but that was the only tool available for the purpose, Photo by Charles Bickford, courtesy of Taunton Press.

Photo by Charles Bickford, courtesy of Taunton Press.

The vanity project appeared in Fine Homebuilding #236 (June-July 2013), then made the cover of Fine Homebuilding’s 2014 special-interest “Projects” publication.

Videographer John Ross gives the thumbs up. Photo by Charles Bickford, courtesy of Taunton Press.

 

New desk for an old building, Part 3

Continuing the back story of the new reception desk at the Ivy Tech John Waldron Arts Center.

The Joinery

I used traditional joinery for most of the desk, although the construction was complicated somewhat by the need for the desk to be disassemblable.

An early scale drawing shows one end of the desk

There are five main panels, each made from plainsawn white oak. Rails and stiles are connected with mortise and tenon joinery. The panels float in grooves.

The two outside corners ended up being too narrow for frame-and-panel joinery; the panel would have been so narrow that it would have looked silly. Hence the slab construction, as it’s known.

Slab end and other parts mocked up during construction

The panels and these two outside corners are mitered and butt-joined, held together with screws so that they can be taken apart if necessary. Because the desk had to be disassemblable, the pilasters were affixed with screws, so that they could be removed. These pilasters are made from plainsawn white oak, mitered and joined with glue and brads:

Full-scale layout, seen from above. (Note how narrow the panel would have been. Hence the slab construction.)

 

Illustration showing mortise and tenon joinery, reproduced from Ernest Joyce, The Technique of Furniture Making (London: Batsford, 1970). The parts shown do not incorporate a groove to accept a panel, but would be applicable to the construction of a table.

The working parts of the desk, on the inside, include counters and casework with drawers. The receptionist’s side has a case with a file drawer and two smaller drawers, while the guard’s side has a file drawer, a general purpose drawer, and a pencil drawer mounted on the underside of the counter. The drawers, made of red maple from the Good-Woodling Woods, are dovetailed. Drawer bottoms of scrap plywood from other jobs are housed in grooves. File drawers are mounted on full-extension, heavy-duty file hardware; the other drawers operate on full-extension undermount slides. The drawer boxes, as they’re called, are fitted with oak faces to match the rest of the desk.

This illustration and the one showing "mortice" and tenon joinery are reproduced from Ernest Joyce, The Technique of Furniture Making (London: Batsford, 1970)

The counter miters are glued and fastened with “tite-joint” hardware. As I learned during the process, this hardware is designed for 3/4-inch thick material. The first miter I attempted to join according to the instructions would not lie flat, and a call to the technical department of Knape & Vogt confirmed my suspicion that the pressure across the joint was being exerted too close to the

underside. The technician, who said he had not heard from anyone trying to use the fasteners for 1-1/2-inch thick material, suggested drilling the holes deeper so that the bolt joining the two sections would pull at the center of the material, instead of closer to the underside. His recommendation worked.

Hand-planed miter

The grain in the brackets runs diagonally, to minimize the danger of breakage due to “short grain.”

Utilizing the natural strength of the tree (left) minimizes the likelihood of breakage due to what’s called “short grain” (right)

 

Frequently Asked Questions

 

Why didn’t you use quarter sawn oak for the whole thing? That would have been so much cooler.

Using quarter-sawn oak everywhere would certainly have been striking, if rather busy to some eyes. But for this desk, I wanted to focus on using locally grown lumber, and the quantities I found available worked out to allow for dramatic quarter-sawn panels framed by plain figure. This more restrained arrangement is also more appropriate in the context of the former City Hall lobby, the decoration of which is relatively modest—compared, for example, to the ostentation of fancy hotels and banks circa 1915.

 

Why is it dark red?

The wood trim around the lobby doors, like the newel posts at the base of the west staircase, is stained a dark mahogany color. According to a newspaper article published when the building opened as City Hall in 1915, the interior woodwork was stained to resemble mahogany. I provided a couple of stain samples, and the staff at the Ivy Tech John Waldron Arts Center chose this color.

 

Are those brush marks on the pilasters?

Good heavens, no! They’re the medullary rays, seen straight on.

 

Why do the brackets supporting the counter have their grain going diagonally?

The brackets, like the corner inserts at the bottom of the gates, have their grain oriented diagonally to minimize “short grain” and so avoid breakage. 

 

I understand there are worm holes in the drawers on Trina’s side of the desk. Does this mean there are worms living in the desk?

No. Any borers that may have been living in the logs would have been desiccated or killed by heat in the kiln, where the temperature rises to 145 degrees during the last few days.

 

THANKS TO: John Whikehart, Paul Daily, Trina Sterling, Eric Reynolds, Julie Anne Roberts, Doug Mattick, and Doug Giles of Ivy Tech; Will Murphy; Mark Longacre; Robert Woodling, Joe Davison, Kent MacPherson, and Darrin Kean, suppliers of lumber; Lee Huss, Miah Michaelson, and Julie Ramey at the City of Bloomington; Elizabeth Schlemmer, Lee Ehman, and Randi Richardson of the Monroe County History Center; Bob Miller and Cynthia Lea of Frank Miller Lumber.

 

 

 

New desk for an old building, Part 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

View of trees at Seminary Park. (Photo courtesy of City of Bloomington Parks Foundation)

The Lumber: Counters

The desk is built almost entirely from solid wood, most of which grew within 100 miles of Bloomington, Indiana.

The counters were made using quarter-sawn red oak from a tree that grew in Bloomington’s Seminary Park, original site of Indiana University. Construction of the seminary began in 1822, and classes were first held three years later. In 1883, after a devastating fire, the campus was moved about a mile north to Dunn’s Woods, its present location. Since the 1960s, the site has been a park.

On May 25, 2011 severe storms ripped north-eastward along the Bloomfield Road, felling numerous trees, among them the Northern Red Oak from which these counters are made. The next day, crews from the City of Bloomington Parks and Recreation Department were at the park to clean up the mess.

The massive root ball (May 26, 2011). Photo courtesy of City of Bloomington Parks Foundation.

The Parks and Recreation Department operates a lumber recovery program that urban forester Lee Huss humorously refers to as “No Log Left Behind.” Instead of sending usable logs to landfills or chopping them up for firewood, the department has them sawn and kiln dried by Robert Woodling of Good-Woodling Woods in eastern Monroe County.

Old friends Robert Woodling and Mark Longacre with the log, summer 2011

Sawn 2 inches thick, the boards from the Seminary Park oak were first air-dried, then spent two months in the kiln. After reaching the desired moisture content of 8 to 10 percent, they emerged from the kiln the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

 

Robert Woodling, left, with Lee Huss, City of Bloomington Urban Forester, with oak fresh from the kiln (November 27, 2011)

Each of the taller counters is made from a single board with the grain following in an unbroken line along its entire length. The rough-sawn boards were a little over 12 inches wide, though they had a few knots on the pith (the center of the tree) edge and some stretches of inner, or living, bark at the outer edge. After judicious sawing, I left a couple of minor knots (facing the working area) and inner bark (facing the public), because I wanted to honor the tree with a visible record of its size. It is relatively rare today to find a board of quarter-sawn oak 12 inches wide.        

12-inch wide board, planed. The freckle-like figure is typical of quarter-sawn red oak.

 

The lower counters are made from the same tree, but for these I joined several narrower boards to obtain the necessary width.

 

The Lumber: Main desk

The frames and pilasters are made of plain-sawn white oak from Joe Davison’s Spencer mill. Joe sources hardwood logs within a 100-mile radius of Bloomington and specializes in highly figured hardwoods such as curly cherry, fiddleback maple, etc.

The boards I used were narrow and rather rich in defects. Joe considered them too poor to sell, so he threw them in for free with a load of poplar I was buying. As with much of the material in this desk, using these boards required considerably more labor than would have been required with graded lumber. But the frame parts are relatively narrow, and I was able to use them by carefully planning each board’s use, concealing characteristics such as spalting and knots, which are typically considered defects, in inconspicuous places.

Joe Davison in his shop

The panels are all made of quarter-sawn oak from veneer mill backer boards purchased through Brown County-based Quarter-Sawn Flooring. The panels are housed in grooved frames, which allow them to expand and contract with changes in relative humidity (though quarter-sawn lumber tends to expand and contract only minimally across its width and length). I applied the decorative moldings, which were made by Martinsville-based Indiana Hardwood Mills, after most of the finishing steps were complete.

With the exception of the section facing the west staircase, which is made of quarter-sawn oak from Robert Woodling’s own woods, the baseboards and plinths are made of scrap from other jobs. Most of this stock originally came from the Frank Miller Lumber Company of Union City, Indiana, an internationally respected supplier of quarter-sawn oak. Frank Miller Lumber buys 99 percent of its hardwood lumber from privately owned lands within a 500-mile radius of Union City.

The drawers are made of red maple from Good-Woodling Woods, a hundred-acre stand that Robert Woodling and his wife, Linnea Good, keep in FSC-certified classified forest, managed for timber and wildlife.

WTIU Weekly Special segment on the desk

See the Weekly Special program “A Walk in the Woods” in its entirety

Next time: Building the desk

New desk for an old building, Part 1

 

“Did you restore it?” asked a friend, on hearing my name in connection with the desk standing beside her. We’d just run into each other for the first time in several years.  I had not restored the desk; I’d designed and built it.  Some woodworkers might have resented her question, but I took it as a compliment: evidence that my work had fit right into place.

 

Part 1: Design

The project began in the fall of 2010. When a full-time security guard was added to the staff of Bloomington’s Ivy Tech John  Waldron Arts Center, it  became apparent that the lobby would need a larger reception desk. Paul Daily, the center’s Artistic Director, hoped to find a desk that would fit the period architectural character of the lobby in the 1915 building, originally constructed as City Hall.

In addition to this aesthetic directive, there were a few other requirements.

• The desk would need to occupy a minimum of space, since the floor of the lobby is relatively short and narrow, with staircases at each end.
• Its finish would have to be durable, since the center hosts frequent receptions.
• The desk would have to be constructed in such a way that it could be disassembled and moved out of the lobby if necessary.
• It would also have to comply with various ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) requirements.

Since the desk was for an educational institution, I decided to view it as a project that could educate members of the public about using locally produced and repurposed lumber, along with other aspects of the contemporary artisanal furniture business.

Research

Elizabeth Schlemmer, Genealogy Library Manager at the Monroe County History Center, searched for records of the lobby’s original appearance. Although she could not find images, her volunteer assistants, Lee Ehman and Randi Richardson, discovered an article in the Bloomington Daily World from 1915 that includes a general description of the space.

 

Elizabeth also searched for images of reception desks in other local municipal buildings of similar vintage but found none.         

Lacking a local model, I searched online for “1915 reception desk” and came across a site specializing in pictures of early 20^th-century offices. I printed out a variety of images from 1915 to 1917. To my eye, only one was right for the Ivy Tech John Waldron lobby, the original use of which, as City Hall, would have called for restrained dignity rather than humble functionality or pretentious display. At a meeting with Ivy Tech staff members Paul Daily, Julie Anne Roberts, Trina Sterling, and Eric Reynolds, there was consensus (even before I voiced my preference)  that the desk at the left side of this French image had just the right aesthetic:

 

Of course, this new desk would require a few changes to make it practical for 21st-century use–a pair of gates to keep out curious children; angled ends to ease the flow of between-class traffic in the lobby’s limited space; and some type of structural element at the outside corners to signal the counter’s protrusion to visually impaired individuals who rely on a walking stick for guidance.

 

 

Coming next: The Lumber