"personalizing" your furniture

Re: "personalizing" your furniture

david weaver

I do none of that intentionally, but I will often leave tick marks from marking knives on the back sides of joints. They are unobtrusive, nobody will notice them and if they are seen at some point, nobody will be offended by them.

I always hope if I make anything (plane, shelf, cabinets, whatever...) that if I look at them again in 20 years that I will not have any glaring huge nasties on them (of course none of us would do that), but that I will look at the stuff and say that I'd like it if someone else made it and that it had decent personality without conveying a sense that the person who made it had their pants on WAY too tight.

I have never heard of anyone fixing interior dovetails, but I haven't read that much about furniture to find out who did what, but I would never want to do that.

I'd call it a lack of honesty in the furniture, just as much as purposely distressing furniture that's not intended just as a parts replacement - it's just in the other direction.

A restaurant near here opened a few years ago and in the desire to have furniture that looked old, someone had hammered a screw in the surface of all of the tables (just laid it on its side and hit it). There were hundreds of imprints of the screw on different tables. It looked idiotic. It was a lack of honesty about it, the same as G&G stuff shows to me a lack of honesty where the design features touted look more like interruptions shown off for the sake of bragging.

Lots of opinions here

Ron Harper

I really do not intend to start a big hoohaaa here, but I think Bill may be suggesting that it is OK to leave some slight imperfections that show that a piece was made on a bench by an individual woodworker. David has expressed distaste at dishonesty. I agree strongly with both. I know some hand tool woodworkers who leave the slight ripples left by a jack plane on the under side of table tops. I like it. I also know some power tool only guys that use a dovetail jig to make joints and then go back with a marking gauge to scribe a line so folks might think it was cut by hand. I do not like that. I do know some guys who make all of the small side of the dovetail pins smaller than a quarter inch, so the observant woodworker will know that they are hand done. That is too subtle for the general audience, but I like it. I do not think there is ever an excuse for sloppy work. But hand made pieces will always show imperfection. As we grow in the craft, those imperfections become harder to detect as we make fewer errors and improve at disguizing the errors that we make. I also think we have to be realistic about what we expect from ourselves. Particularly as hand tool craftspersons. I can study and watch Curtis Buchanan make a chair. I can do my very best to do it the way he does. I am not likely to succeed. I may get close but a skilled viewer can see the differences. I will bet he would tell you that the chairs he makes today are better chairs than the ones he made 20 years ago.

Some thoughts.....

roger lance

My dad and I built my house. The basement is not "finished", so the framing is exposed. There are random notes made by my dad on the floor joists and wall studs where he was doing some calculation or making a list of what we needed etc etc. This means a great deal to me when I now run across those notes and remember back to when the note was made. A little thing I treasure.

Years ago, I watched a TV show comparing/contrasting work attitudes/cultures in Japan, Germany, and USA. During a tour of a Bosch factory where kitchen ovens were made (I believe), the TV crew found a young worker on the floor reaching into the back side of an oven smoothing out his welds with a handheld grinder. They asked the young worker why he was making this effort as literally no one would ever see or know if his welds were left rough. He answered, "I will".

Thoughts from a learner.

Stuart Hough

When I look into the hidden areas and find those little pencil marks, saw cuts and such it helps me to get into the mind of that craftsperson. I learn as much about how they approached their work as I learn about how they put the piece together. My analytical side then takes the piece apart and learns the "why, what and wherefore" about each part and helps me to learn how to do this on my own. It really is like going back in time and learning from that individual in person. I'm sure we all have experienced that in many ways, and I really enjoy it. Then I learn that I MUST get off my duff and get to creating. I decided a while back that I, too, will leave those little clues for someone in ages to come.

Re: "personalizing" your furniture

Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA

"...so that any offending cracks would not be visible to the casual observer casually scrutinizing the back of a drawer..."

Any casual observer who removes a drawer in the interest of scrutinizing its dovetails has just failed the "casual" test.

I agree with others that the signs that a real person was here making this object add to its emotional value. Along this line, we have a lot of furniture from my grandparents, some of which came down to them from family members, and I flat love the chalked marks from the shipping companies on the back panels of the furniture. It gives a real sense of history.

Re: "personalizing" your furniture

TomD

1) as far as creating a personal approach for making furniture, as far as that goes, that is fine. You can decide on any approach you like. Nobody will agree with your approach. At one point the great and the good might have thought they were being worshipped, but we know from the net that there are always a diversity of opinions, and nobody really gets much buy-in except from the absolute sycophants. And I mean all that sincerely, by all means your furniture should reflect your personality.

2) When I started searching for lathes, one of the realizations I had was that often the bad lather were a better deal. Take South Bends, they made lathes in a wide range of levels. In the day, there were huge differences in price. Today they all cost pretty much the same, and there is a well developed market for them. Why would someone accept one of the less featured or well made lathes over a better one? Lack of knowledge is one reason, but even among the knowledgeable, often the cheaper ones saw very little use, and are in mint condition, so today they are worth as much. My point being that one can't real anything into the survival of artefacts, necessarily. There are Bills out there who believe cheap crap lathes were better made, which is not true, and they certainly didn't perform by other criteria either, but they are around today for a variety of reasons.

3) I would definitely fix interior dovetails, because the ones at the back are often more heavily loaded, and bad joints are a structural problem. I have seen joints fail. Also because I have that particular kind of involvement.

4) Making perfect joints is one of those tasks that is faster than doing bad work. Finishing to different levels is hugely time consuming. Cutting perfect joints is well within possibility and takes less time, so the only reason it doesn't happen is because people suck at the work they have undertaken. Leaving a pencil line in is one thing, missing the cut to it is another. Finding a pencil line probably means the fit was not terribly critical or the piece particularly refined. It is possible that is one reason for the survival of trash, it migrated to heated accommodations, and generally dealt with abuse better.

correction to point 3

Bill Tindall, E.TN.

The dovetails on the back of drawers are hardly stressed in normal use. It is for this reason that these dovetails in antique furniture are fewer to save labor.

For whom are you building furniture?

Derek Cohen (in Perth, Australia)

It strikes me that some woodworkers love to make furniture for other woodworkers, whether they do his consciously or not. Leaving measurements (where they are visible) or searching for build notes seems to be something that would interest only someone with construction on their mind, and not a purchaser or a family member. My wife is not interested in how I made a piece of furniture. Her only concern is whether she likes the look. She may notice minor mistakes when waxing, but otherwise does not search them out. My son probably does not even notice that there is something new in the house. The eyes of my friends begin to glaze over when I suggest they check the dovetails or the clean intersection of the mortice and tenons.

I am, of course, interested in construction methods as much as any other woodworker. However I do not want this staring me in the face when I examine a piece. When I examine a piece I look at the finished product - the way we planned it to be. Aesthetics, joinery, wood choice, balance, style .... all these are relevant for me. I do not need to see raw evidence of the build to determine these factors, and nor do I want them to be there in the furniture I build. I very much doubt that someone someday is going to be puzzling over a piece of mine as a relic of the handmade past. It should last that long.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Re: theory 3b

TomD

Yeah they are. When a drawer is pulled forward the contents either via the back or even the bottom load the rear panel. This is often more suddenly loaded than the handle if contents shift to the back with a crash. Which explains all the fixes in the back of drawers.

So you have theory "a" that says we should emulate the work of these hacks because they knew what they were doing and reduced the quality in the back through subtle and precise work, that we should copy; or one has theory b that they handed the backs to their apprentices and figured nobody would see it, and it would last at least 30 years, something I prefer not to copy since for me to hack it up like an apprentice would require me to spend more time at it than to do it like the master. I would have to take time to make marks, saw wildly, and design in poor fits that look credibly like the work of a guy who was sweeping floors a month ago.

Re: Some thoughts.....

TomD

"During a tour of a Bosch factory where kitchen ovens were made (I believe), the TV crew found a young worker on the floor reaching into the back side of an oven smoothing out his welds with a handheld grinder. They asked the young worker why he was making this effort as literally no one would ever see or know if his welds were left rough. He answered, "I will"."

Bosch being Bosch I would give them the benefit of the doubt. Competent welds are among the most expressive pieces of hand work, and beautiful if one gets them. Grinding welds makes them weaker, and can be a sign of bad workmanship, or an attempt to cover it up. There is a lot of myth making that goes around. That is why I do stuff to my own standards. That is why I don't lend tools. Other people don't get it, or march to a different drummer.

There was this story in my family of my great uncle, a farm boy, refusing to lend my dad a tool. He normally would have lent him most things, and I don't know the tool at issue. But we all thought it amazingly funny, my dad, the son of a successful joiner. But I later learned that my uncle was probably right as I have taken it way beyond where my dad was, as all of us have. I sure would never lend someone who couldn't sharpen anything. And beyond that I would have further reasons. So I just do stuff for myself. I don't mean I won't help someone else, one year I built 4 sets of stairs in the neighbourhood. But I am not lending a tool, or worrying too much about what other people think.

Re: "personalizing" your furniture

TomD

"Which got me to wondering about Krenov . I suppose he made perfect drawers. But when I am examining an old piece of furniture I take great delight in discovering a mark left by its maker- a pencil line, a notation, or some other personal indication that the was his piece (or hers). One wonders if given two otherwise "identical" pieces of Krenov furniture would the one with a pencil notation of say grain orientation or other stray indication of the maker fetch more in 2120 than the "perfect" one."

1) While the Krenov perfection thing got a lot of notice and continues to, it was just a product of the times; revealed structure, simplicity, honest materials, uniform levels of quality, it was the modern way. People got tired of it, but it shouldn't be treated as though somehow he came from Mars.

2a) Not finishing certain parts of furniture since it won't be seen, is sorta a self-fulfilling idea. Maybe the piece will eventually be moved, and the best place might have been out in the open, but because it was so ugly on the back, it gets put back in the corner. Isn't part of function not building in limitations like this?

2b) On the other hand, a lot of the stuff Krenov made, and what he said about it, probably guarantees it will be displayed in the open and admired from all sides. So while he may have aw shucks his way around, in reality it needed to be finished on all sides in order to deal with how it would come to be appreciated.

3) A lot of the comments about value are true, but irrelevant to how a piece should be built. Maybe some day the piece he sneezed on will be worth more since we will be able to bring him back from the dead. Does that make it a better piece of furniture?

People die, then the value of their stuff can go up. On the other hand it may be a blessing f

or them that they never live to see which minor works get elevated as a result.

I am not sure a pin hole where a compass went is a flaw, it might anchor it. Like the way marking gage lines are left on some dovetails. It is there on purpose. It would always have been easy enough to do a workaround to avoid the pin hole, or cover it up.

Re: Some thoughts.....

Patrick Gibbons

Tom, yesterday I was accessing my auger bits and braces. While I have all the sizes of bits, I'm really amazed at the shape so many of them are in. Many have been abused, especially how they were sharpened. Many of these bits were previously owned by those who should have known better.

Connection . . .

Steve Mackay

Like you, I love finding odd ball stuff from the past. Inside furniture, books and homes. Someone's gas bill from 1930 in a copy of Be Hur comes to mind. Think "the Purloined Letter". I've done pretty evil stuff with my work. Messages and notes that will probably make someone crazy when it gets taken to Antiques Roadshow 80 years from now. I think my best was making a needless cavity in the block forming a Patriot Radar, adding several ball bearings, then sealing it up and blending with great care. I know, long after I'm dead and gone, someone will puzzle over THAT one !

Ensign Pulver would have been proud