Re: Curious about age of members. I'm 71
Ralph Lipeles
I'm eighty. I lived in the Bronx, NY and watched them build the building that Housed Albert Constantines. I was 13 then. My first project was a cigarette box for my parents. Neither of them smoked but in those days, when entertaining, cigarettes were always put out for the guests. I went to Constantines, on my bicycle, and looked around. I then purchased 1 sheet of 1/8" mahogany. I bought the mahogany because it was inexpensive and I could cut it with a veneer saw. Albert Constantine and the Constantines manager, John Koven, let me take scraps of veneer that had broken off from larger pieces and had fallen on the floor. I first made the box, gluing the pieces together with white Elmers glue. I then veneered the 4 sides, cutting strips of veneer and gluing them on the box one strip at a time. I made the fancy top from many of carefully cut pieces of veneer held together with a tape that they called veneer tape. It was brown paper with an adhesive that you had to wet to make sticky - like the closing tab on an envelope. I assembled all the pieces of veneer for the top, glued it to the top of the box and then trimmed away the excess veneer. The finish was varnish. I was told to put on a coat a day for a week, a coat a week for a month, a coat a month for a year. I don't think that I waited a full year. The final finishing was rubbing. First with pumice and water then rottenstone and water.
