Neader influced furniture construction

Re: Neader influced furniture construction

Tim of San Leandro

>"With sandpaper and power tools it seems that you can pay a lot less attention to choosing good wood"

Yes...you can do this with hand tooling as well and it often is done. This...IMO...is the biggest difference between exceptional and mediocre. Take time to carefully select your stock and properly use the grain and color for the various parts and overall style. You can build a piece of absolutely the finest construction techniques and perfectly fitting joinery but it will turn out mediocre at best and likely look haphazard if you don't pay attention to wood...while you can biscuit everything together very quickly but have spent the time to carefully match the stock to the parts of the piece and get an enviable work.

Getting good grain appearance is also a reason why I don't like the idea of alternating pith and sap on a glue up panel. Good appearance of the panel is most important. Good design/construction technique will keep the panel flat.

Re: Neader influced furniture construction

Moses Yoder in White Pigeon, MI

>A good infill plane will leave only very small tearouts when planing reversing grain, which can then easily be finished with a scraper. A lot of wood does not have grain that is easily planed, with grain reversing throughout the board, which is probably why the search for better smoothing planes led to an infill.

I would say that the average person building furniture today probably knows less about their trade than the average furniture builder in the mid 1800's to early 1900's. Modern glues also have to be taken into consideration; I think a joint with hide glue would have to fit better than a joint made with titebond, and still probably wouldn't last as long, especially in warm humid environments. My wife's mother and grandfather both have some very old pieces that are still in great shape, and I hope to build some nice pieces that last just as long.

Re: Neader influced furniture construction

Alan Hamilton

>Eric,

Certainly craftsmen paid very close attention to grain orientation when gluing up panels or in applications such as yours, but I disagree that they would toss perfectly gorgeous, and expensive, stock because of its grain. There are certain processes that virtually guarantee that they would have to plane the "wrong direction" and they learned how to cope when they couldn't avoid planing into the grain.

In panel raising, for instance, unless the craftsman was blessed with having two matched panel raisers, one plane would have to be used on all four sides. There is simply no way to avoid planing the "wrong" direction. The same is true when making certain kinds of moldings, and making window sash.

An extremely sharp iron, a tight mouth and a very light cut will go far in reducing troubles. When possible, skewing the plane also works. I find some woods, like poplar, behave better if they have a couple very thin coats of shellac. And if all else fails, using a scratch stock to remove the last few fractions will just about always work.

With your sort of trouble, I would first try the sharpest possible iron I could make, along with a very tight mouth and an extremely light cut. I've found that this will work more times than not. But if I still couldn't get a good cut I would drag out the scrapers.

On one of my visits to Williamsburg I talked with one of the craftsmen in the cabinet shop about this very subject (it was he that suggested I try shellac). He told me even though there was no commercially available sandpaper way back then, they had alternatives that worked the same way. He showed me a piece of shark skin that they use like sandpaper. It was rough with a tooth to it, and it sanded about like about a 150 grit paper. He also showed me some "glass paper" they make themselves. They ground up already broken glass as fine as they could in a mortar and pestle; they used hide glue to stick the glass to a stout paper. This too worked well. They also had fine wood files and scrapers which he told me they use more often than the shark skin and glass paper.

Alan the long-winded

Sand Paper Historicaly

Todd Hughes

>18th century London tool merchant Christopher Gaberial listed "Glass Paper" in 1791. In a few years he was selling "Emory Paper". Must have been popular because he had over 5,500 sheets on hand to sell.....Think it is a large mistake to think that sand paper was not available or used 200 years ago.....Todd

Re: Neader influced furniture construction

Jonathan Kaplan (OR)

>As Alan noted, another option would be to use a card scraper rather than sandpaper in a case like this. Often this will be easier, faster, and certainly more pleasant, than sanding, and will often yeild very nice results... And they are cheap!

jk

old time wood selection

Bill Tindall, E. TN

>I see many very old, and finely constructed, pieces with knots in the panels and tops. I remember a trip to the Met to see furniture and was amazed that a table on display had a huge knot in its top. Very fine trees were certainly readily available in days of old but it would appear that lumber ready to use was probably very expensive given the effort to log and saw the trees and the time to season the sawed lumber. So I suppose if a board got sawed and dried, and it had a tight knot, it got used because it was too valuable not to use. Furthermore, I commonly see plenty of pick out in many of these old pieces.

I suspect the typical modern day amateur uses better lumber and spends more time selecting and finishing it than the typical cabinet maker in days of old that was trying to make a living making stuff. And we only get to see the pieces that held up for 200 years. All the ones that fell apart because the lumber wasn't sufficiently dry, or weren't adequately designed or constructed, wound up in the wood pile.

What the modern amature lacks is the hours of practical experience using hand tools that the old full time cabinet maker had. Many of us close this gap with modern materials and machines.

Re: Sand Paper Historicaly

eric from maryland

>todd,

Interesting -- Somewhere I read that sandpaper was not commercially available until the 1900's -- seems to be in correct. Thanks for the info

Cheers

Eric