Est. 1998 — 27 years of woodworking knowledge
Chair rail
Peter Ulmanis
>I am looking for some advise.
SWMBO wants a chair rail in the living room and wants me to build it. My question is what kind of wood should I use?
Color should be lighter than say mahogany but not too light, and should have at least some figure to it. My requirement is that the wood be pretty durable as my kid pushes the love seat into the wall alot.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Peter
Re: Chair rail
Charles
>If you can find some in your area, try mesquite. It is very hard and doesn't shrink or expand very much with changes in humidity. Thin pieces like the size of chair rail should be easier to obtain than wide boards.
Re: Chair rail
Adam Cherubini, NJ
>Can I assume from the location of your post that you intend to stick the molding by hand? If so, I recommend soft white pine. I don't often see unpainted woodwork in 18th cent homes. Late 19th or early 20th used a great deal of chestnut in my area (NJ), but that was all done with some form of power tool.
So herein lies the challenge this community is continually confronted with: We attempt to use 18th century technology to produce 19th century products. Our inevitable failures and capitulations reinforce the notion that the hand tool ways are impractical and inefficient.
When making architectural moldings by hand you must choose the materials for which your hand tools were designed (or face miserable failure). Pine is best, tulip is doable but more work for little benefit. Paint is the right finish, since, for chair rail, it is easily repairable.
The latest info I have seen suggests woodwork in 18th century homes was painted the same color. When paint became more available, the entire room would be painted the same color, with no exceptions made for trim, doors, or anything else.
Adam
Re: Chair rail
Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX
>OK, can't say I disagree with any of this, but would like to point out that the pines of 200+ years ago was substantially different than today. So do you mean to suggest that to deal with today's woods we should be using power tools?
Pam
Old growth timber myth?
Adam Cherubini, NJ
>Pam,
Here's a 1720 high chest by a Philadelphia maker.
Re: Old growth timber myth?(cont)
Adam Cherubini, NJ
>Here's a spy photo of the under side of this chest. Notice the knotty, crappy second growth pine at left. (I knock out knots with a hatchet too!) I was surprised to see it. This maker complained about the prices of walnut, and even used a used cedar shingle as a drawer bottom!
I wouldn't put too much stock in the old legend that trees were better then. It may be true, but not everybody had it, as this chest attests.
Yours,
Adam
i agree with Adam
Dennis
>Old growth just means more growth rings per inch and if you look around its still available today,not that most of us would like the price.
I hear that old tree's theory a lot and its just not true. My best guess is many years ago they used what they had,and some of that wood was just like Adam's pictures showed.
Dennis
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Re: Old growth timber myth?(cont)
Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX
>Well, Adam, point made to an extent. The 1700's furniture I've seen had, for example, beautiful long leaf pine for drawer bodies (back, sides, and bottoms), stuff I've seldom seen; although I certainly have limited experience. A friend gave me some long leaf cut offs that are beautiful; but he paid a premium for that pine.
So, my point is that poplar is considered much more appropriate for chair rail and carcass construction these days. Is this stuff as amenable to hand tool use as the old pines were?
It seems that one of the advantages of power tools is they can mash most any old wood and make something relatively smooth out of it, not too many concerns with fuzz, tearout and the like. Industrialization treats wood as just another material to be shaped to man's designs. I won't even get into plywood.
Pam
PS Are those nails or wood screws in that carcass?
Re: i agree with Adam
Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX
>Tighter growth rings means a lot when working wood by hand. BTW, please note that I don't disagree with Adam, just question the practicality of using hand tools on pine, poplar and the like for ultimate painting.
Pam
Re: i agree with Adam
Dennis
>The answer to this is simple to me, if had to have 2000lf of chair rail then bring on the molder or shaper. Now if i needed 10lf of chair rail,paint grade or stain grade then hand tools enter the picture real quick. And if its paint grade then who cares if i have tear out,paint,filler and sandpaper will take care of that.
But back to the original post,why put up a stain grade chair rail and let the love seat hit it? About time to anchor the love seat to the floor i think.....hehe
Dennis
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Re: i agree with Adam
Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX
>Again, I agree. My only point of disagreement, or maybe just contention, was that the woods of today are as good as the woods of yesterday for hand tool working and/or that even the ones that are are too expensive to be used as chair rail.
Pam
Re: Old growth timber myth?
Bob Smalser, Seabeck, WA
>As somebody who recovers a good number of old-growth logs from ponds and converts them to specialty lumber, I believe both you and Pam are correct.
Old-growth is a mixed bag just like second-growth...full of wonderful, tight-grained clear stock...but no shortage of pallet wood, either.
As a side note, tight-grained logs are available today in both old and second growth from uneven-aged forests among shaded trees, usually relatively small, but just as fine a wood.
But I believe the real answer to be that if you had to cut those boards with a pit saw after all the labor of getting that heavy bole harvested and up on bearers, then you wouldn't waste so much as one little stick of it, either.
No disagreement
Adam Cherubini, NJ
>Pam,
I understood and appreciated your post. I just thought you'd get a kick out of seeing a piece of furniture, worth, probably 1.5M, with crap lumber in it.
No question about it, their lumber WAS different and we need to take the differences into account.
(I hope everybody reads this)
1) A good sawyer follows the secondary grain direction. The resulting straight grained stock is less likely to warp or cast and is easier to plane. A sawyer with a pit saw prefers to go with the grain since it cuts easier. A sawyer with a band saw mill has to know better (in my experience most don't).
Either way Pam's right here. The older straighter grained stock (whether it was straighter because of competition in the forest or it was sawn better) IS easier to work .
2) The narrow flat sawn stock we work with today presents several problems in our joints. Gluing up narrow flat sawn cherry isn't the same as a wide center cut board. For clarity sake, the glued up panels stink. The center cut pieces are essentially quarter sawn and much more stable. When we see cross grain joints in antique furniutre, we very often see quarter sawn stock in the mix. The best example is probably the problematic 6 board chest. Those front, nailed-on pieces are almost always QS.
So Pam's right again here: The old cuts of lumber make joinery easier/better.
Modern workers using crappy modern stock may have no choice but use hi tech tools and joints. I agree 100% with what Pam wrote. "New" woods need power tools. I couldn't agree more.
Adam
P.S. I've got a friend making kitchen cabinets out of hickory!
Re: No disagreement
Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX
>Yeah, I've seen photos of that piece before, but not the underside, a revelation, had no idea it was worth 1.5 millions.
As to the "Pam's right" section, I'm glad we agree on these things, but saddened in a way at what's been lost.
Pam
Re: No disagreement
William R. Duffield, on the Cohansey
>Thanks to curmudgeons like Adam, all is not yet lost. And partly because ofd fora like this one, these insights are being passed on, and will continue to be used to understand and build furniture that is true to the nature of the trees.
As to modern joinery tricks, "Let them eat MDF."
Re: Chair rail
Peter Ulmanis
>Hi,
I have been gone a few days and was surprised at the thread my question generated.
First of all, thanks to all who responded, but I'm afraid I'm still in a quandry.
The discussion on old vs new growth timber, while interesting, doesn't seem to help because, unless I am missing something, I believe any wood I buy will be new growth.
Right now I am leaning toward ash or poplar. Any thoughts on durability, workability, figure, etc.?
Peter
Re: Chair rail
Dennis
>Well my guess is the reason the thread went the direction it did was lack of information.
1. What are existing moldings?,are your trying to match that?
One thing for sure,if its going to get the crap beat out of it,then it really doesnt matter,you will be replacing ,refinishing before long.
Dennis
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Re: Chair rail
William R. Duffield, on the Cohansey
>My preference would be tulip poplar, for cost and especially for workability and stability. You might find it a little more difficult than ash to get a really good looking clear finish, as it is tight grained, without a lot of figure, and the color can be variable. It doesn't just soak up pigments and dyes, but it is not a difficult wood to stain, like cherry can be. Poplar is not as tough as ash, but it will not have problems ash may have with splitting at the earlywood rings. Also, if you ever decide to paint it instead of leaving it clear, poplar is just about as perfect a substrate for paint as you can find.
Re: Chair rail
Peter Ulmanis
>OK, I can see how you could get the impression that I was trying to match an existing molding.
My house is 15 years old and there are no chair rails. SWMBO loves chair rails. I plan to try my hand at doing it from scratch, using hand planes. Some sort of stain will probably be used, because I think the woods I am considering, ash and poplar would be too light. What I am wondering is, how do the two woods compare in workablity and finishing.
Peter
Re: Chair rail
Peter Ulmanis
>Thanks for the input.
Two questions:
1. Here in NH poplar is the only name I find. Is tulipwood a separate variety of poplar?
2. I don't understand what you mean by "splitting at the earlywood rings". I am not well versed in wood terms, but I am learning.
Peter
Re: Chair rail
William R. Duffield, on the Cohansey
>Well, there are more than one species of "poplar". The cabinet wood you are considering is "yellow poplar" or "tulip poplar" or "tuliptree" or Liriodendron tulipifera. It isn't a real poplar, like Lombardy Poplar of the genus Populus, but a magnolia. Some places, more likely out West, you find it all in the same stack in the lumberyard with aspen, but in NH, what you find should be the real thing, even though it doesn't grow that far north.
Woods like ash and oak and hickory are ring-porous hardwoods. HGenerally, that means that the large pores that carry water and nutrients up and down the trunk are concentrated in rings. The tree grows a lot more of these early in the growing season, and less later in the year. Wood like cherry and maple and poplar have much smaller pores, and they are more or less evenly distributed throughout the growing season, and therefore throughout the wood. The large early wood pores have to be filled on the surface to get a smooth finish, and are structurally less strong than late wood inside the board. That is why fast grown oak, which has wide rings and a smaller proportion of early wood compared to late wood, is stronger than slow growth oak.
Re: Chair rail
Peter Ulmanis
>Thanks for the information.
Peter