Wmsburg Furniture Conference reports?

Re: Wmsburg Furniture Conference reports?

Mike Jurnigan from Suffolk, VA

>Give me a little time, I just got home an hour ago and I am waiting for Dave Sawyer to show up for dinner. (Stealth Gloat There)

Mike

OT picture post help needed

Adam Cherubini

>I have trouble getting decent quality pics down to 40k. Are you guys linking to some other webspace I don't know about? Can someone advise me as to an easy way to post my monster pictures? I can usually knock them down to a few hundred kb fairly easily.

Adam

Re: OT picture post help needed

Dan Donaldson

>Adam, if you have problems, email them to me and I will fix them and send them back.

Re: OT picture post help needed

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>I run mine through Photoshop, choose the "Make a Copy for the Web" option, at which point you can vary all sorts of stuff to get them small enough.

Pam

Re: Long Report

Barryvabeach

>I went to the first seession so I got home on Saturday afternoon. Overall it was fine, though I didn't pick up as much as I did in some of the prior years. I have no interest in making Windsor chairs, but the demonstration by Curtis ( and Pete) was extremely impressive. He split, then drawknifed his rear spindles in no time at all. Old tool fans would appreciate that he uses a spofford type brace for all his drilling. He also discussed the type of bit, but I didn't catch the name. He wasn't a fan of jennings pattern bits because when he drills at an angle, the side spurs don't start cutting quickly enough and the holes turn out fuzzy. He also showed how he sized the tenons on the spindles ( using a jig with a hole and a router plane clamped to it) to fit within a few thousands of the mortise. He "super dries" the tenons in a box with a lightbulb for a day prior to assembly so they fit very tight. He didn't super dry one of the tenons during the demo and it split the mortise. Mack did some nice volute carving and also showed how to lay out a simple shell. My favorite part, though probably not everyones, was a demo by David on upholstery - I can never get the corners to lay flat and he showed that twice. One nice thing they did this year was that a number of presenters stayed after, or showed up before, and did some question and answers at benches in the lobby. Since the presentations dealt with chairs, there was very little use of straight chisels and bench planes ( I learned a lot about them in prior years) though they did use hollows and rounds a few times. There was a lot of discussion of mortising at an angle - I think the first chair had 24 mortises - only 2 of them were 90 degrees to a reference face. The others were angled in at least one plane. Course, with a Queen Anne chair there aren't many straight faces to work off in that nearly everything was angles or curves. They announced that next year would focus on 17th century furniture and would feature Col. Williamsburg joiners, not the guys from the cabinet shop - so that might present something different. I took lots of pictures, though I doubt most would be of interest to anyone. Another thing that was interesting was Pete's discussion of finishing the pine seats of the chairs. He says he uses a heat gun on it before finishing and that drives the sap to the surface, he then cleans that off with naptha, and then follows with a dye and BLO - varnish mixture ( IIRC). He said that if he skipped the first step, he would get blotchy pine, but that by driving the sap out first he got a much better finish. Both he and Curtis were amazingly fastidious about their chairs - they didn't want teh slightest hairline gap at any mortise, and Pete didn't even want fuzziness at the entry of the mortise. Any questions fire away. Barry

Re: OT picture post help needed

Adam Cherubini

>I guess I'm thinking guys are uploading pictures to some www, then using links in their posts. I'm not sure how to do that. Does woodcentral have some webspace somewhere for such things?

Adam

Re: OT picture post help needed

Dan Donaldson

>The short answer is no. What they are doing is uploading their pictures to some personal webspace and then linking to them. Most internet accounts provide some web space for each qccount, although they may be limited in the number of hits allowed per month, which can easily be wxceeded when linked from a large website like WC. There are also free picture hosting services, which , again, you have to be careful that they allow direct linking to the pictures and also allow enough hits that you don't exceed their allowance. I am not familiar with those, but many here are and maybe one of them will chime in.

without Photo$hop

Clay C in Miami

>Adam,

I don't have Photo$$$hop ... nor do I try to host the pics elsewhere. I'm sure there are better ways, but here's what I do. It reliably gives me sharp pics at around 640x480, sized below 40 kb.

If you use Windows XP:

1 - Open the folder containing the pics

2 - 'Highlight' the pics you want to shrink (single-click, or ctrl/single-click for multiples)

3 - When you do this, a menu item appears on the lower left that says 'email this file' - click that

4 - A box opens, select 'Make all my pictures smaller' box

5 - Mail auto-opens, send the pics to myself, and copy the mailed/shrunken pics.

I can shrink them with Irfanview or Picasa, by reducing size and quality, but I seem to come out with fuzzier/more pixelated results than this method does. I remember there's also a work-around using MS Word, but Word is slow to open for me, and it wasn't much simpler than this.

Clay

Re: OT picture post help needed

paul womack

>I have trouble getting decent quality pics down to 40k.

Adam; Check out my picture in the morticing thread.

If you deem the quality of those to be "decent", I'll gladly tell you how I did them.

BugBear

Re: OT picture post help needed

William Claspy in Cleveland

>If you deem the quality of those to be "decent", I'll gladly tell you how I did them.

Hang Adam, I'm listening! :-)

Even the thumbnails I create are bigger than 40k.

Bill

Re: Wmsburg Furniture Conference reports?

Greg Betit, Vergennes, VT.

>Here is a digest of my notes from the conference:

I went to the conference to see Curtis Buchanan, but I was wowed by the Colonial Williamsburg�s craftsmen and curators. Their dedication to learning and the amount of skill and knowledge they have amassed blew me away. Explanations about chair design and it�s relationship to the order of columns, etc., the nomenclature of the parts and regional differences in design and joinery features, original finishes, etc. overloaded me with information. The blacksmith gave a presentation with video clips showing how he makes a mortise chisel. One of the points that the conference made several times by different presenters (including St. Roy during his after banquet talk) was that these olden guys worked their butts off. They finish with a 1 � lb cut of seedlac, about 15 coats. The last few may be padded.

Curtis Buchanan was more than I expected, even considering the fact that they ate up a huge amount of time fooling with getting the great wheel lathe to operate. He talked about tool sharpening, and how he modified cheap tools to meet his needs- like a metal spoke shave ground with a travisher�s sole and it�s handles whacked off. He demonstrated how he makes all the chair parts. The jigs that Pete Galbert invented to hold workpieces and help with a accurate drilling were explained and used during the demos. There were handouts for sources of supplies, an illustration showing the orders of columns juxtaposed against a chair, Mack Headly�s bow-coping saw, and where to use what sized gouge when carving a volute

Curtis uses hot wet rags and a heat gun to help extend the heat during bending or to tweak a bend afterwards. He says white oak bends best, red oak rives and shaves best. He likes to turn with green sugar maple (Despite John Alexander�s research that concludes that 80% of the undercarriages of original chairs were red (soft) maple. He uses wooden tool rests when he turns, and he only uses a caliper to define the major diameter. The tool he uses to make the double baluster bead is a skew ground straight across, crowned like a scrub plane blade. Once they got the lathe going he demo�d it all, but most people couldn�t see what was going on because the camera that projected on the big screen was at the wrong angle. I was sitting on the lathe bed to help stabilize it and saw it all.

He believes in extremely tight joints, and doesn�t believe in compression in stretchers (pre-load). He says the joint is to keep legs together, not spread them apart. The jury is out on this for me. It�s not what I�ve been taught elsewhere. I�m wondering if any glue gets into a joint as tight as his, and am leery about the risk of splitting the parts on assembly.

He uses a 6 degree taper. Most modern chair makers use an 11 degree one. He says that the fact that musical instrument tuning pegs use 6 degree tapers is a clue that they hold better.

Chris Swan, curator of furniture did a great presentation on how Windsor chairs were originally finished. Until about 1780 the only color they used was a green from the pigment verdigris. This color is not very permanent, going from turquoise to green in a matter of weeks. The original chair he showed that had originally been this color green looked black. He took verdigris pigment, mixed in some linseed oil, ground it with a marble mortar and a marble grinding plate, and then mixed it to the right consistency for paint. He used the formula in Nancy Goyne Evan�s latest book on Windsor chairs.

Peter Galbert did most of the talking, but the topic was how Curtis Buchanan finishes chairs. Curtis likes tool marks on spindles, but doesn�t want any on the seat. They use milk paint, admittedly a �modern� finish. Instead of 1:1, they mix it 3:1 water to dry powder- and strain it to get rid of the chalky lumps. Heat the seat with a heat gun and wipe it with naptha to get rid of the pitch. Use extrabond, at least on the seat. Rub everything but the seat with grey scotch brite, then go back over everything with steel wool. The second coat is usually a contrasting color, and Pete mixes it 5;1 to allow the first color to poke through more. He uses linseed oil and spar varnish over that. Curtis uses a similar coat followed by wax.

Greg

Couple questions...

Scott in Douglassville, PA

>Thanks for the great write-up, Greg. I'm wondering:

- What spokeshave he reground to make the travisher (was it a 151?), and

- Did he give any explanation why he puts his undercarriage in tension? Thought that compression had been pretty well established as a historical fact.

I'll bug you for more finishing detail later... ;^)

Scott, hating garage cleanup about now

Re: making pictures smaller

paul womack

>First up, I'm no expert, but I get by.

Second, there's a entry in the FAQ about this.

Third, if you want to check my credibility, here's my website and some photos in a gallery. If you think those photos are bad, you're welcome to ignore everything I say!

OK. Onwards. And BTW, I use Gimp, because it's free, and I work on Linux. Most of what I say should apply generally.

I'm talking about this image in my recent post in the "Mortise chopping query" thread.

The original photo (per my Canon a510) was 2048x1536 (AKA 3 MegaPixels), which would be around 9 megabytes without the wonders of JPEG.

The actual file was 794K (around 10 times less).

Stage 1 of reducing the image is cropping. Unless you're really good (and confident) with your camera, most photos have "extra" stuff around the subject.

Use the cropping tool to get rid of all this extra. In my case I could crop to 1566x1455 (6.8 Meg raw, down from 9)

Stage 2 (optional, fancy); make a selection of the unimportant parts of your picture (often by selecting the good bits, and inverting the selection) and then blur it. This allows JPEG to compress these unimportant areas later. It's better not to have detailed backgrounds (like carpet) for this reason.

Stage 3 lower the resolution. For on-screen viewing around 350-450 pixels is enough. Use the scaling or sampling dialogue to reduce the width to 450. The image is then 450x418 = 565K.

Stage 4 jpeg, without the trimmings. In GIMP I use "save as" jpeg, and use "advanced options" and show preview. show preview is VERY handy, because it means you're told the file size, and can see the effects of tight JPEG'ing.

In this case life was rather simple, since my image was quite small. Anyway, the options you *want* are

progressive (often makes smaller file, and a Good Thing in general).

You want to turn OFF EXIF data (fascinating stuff, but takes valuable space) and thumbnail (ditto ;-)

The remaining option is the most obvious; it's effectively "how much" quality to keep, since JPEG can throw away quality to save space. In general quality of 80 or more (in GIMP) is almost perfect; numbers below this start to gradually cause visible degradation.

If taking the quality number down makes the picture look too bad for you, your only choice is to go back to the sampling stage, and sub-sample to a smaller number of pixels (e.g. 400 instead of 450; this reduces your file size by around 25 %) and try again. You must go back; scaling 450 pixels into 400 will generate horridness.

And, yes, I can do this quicker than I can talk about it.

BugBear

Re: Couple questions...

Greg Betit, Vergennes, VT.

>Hi Scott,

I can't remember exactly what spoke shave that was. I was going to take a picture after that particular presentation but the batties died on my camera. The tool wasn't out when I came back with the camera operative.

The stretcher joint has been one of the Great Debates here and in other forums. Curtis Buchanan didn't go into an explanation as to why, just sort of implied that it was the right thing to do. In use, the forces want to splay the legs apart. You see all sorts of factory chairs with the stretchers falling out of their sockets because of this action. That's because their joints have no holding power. Pre-load has no holding power either. It just stresses the legs to splay out, so that they won't go any further as the chair is used. This puts a lot of stress on the seat joints, but most of them seem to take this stress just fine. Curtis' method creates a mechanical joint that can hold. I have no idea if any of them come loose, but he's one of the most successful chair makers around, so I sincerely doubt that any come apart.

To me his tight, bone dry tenon is scary. It will swell once assembled, and it's probably prone to splitting the piece it's socketed into. Once that happens you have lost the mechanical strength of the joint. Plus watching for parts that might split when I'm assembling a chair is a couple notches above the red-line on my excitement meter. Birthing a chair is excitement enough, thank you. Not to say I'm not going to try it...

Greg

My report

Adam Cherubini

>It was great to meet Greg in person. Unlike Greg, I went to learn more about formal chairs.

The Southern chairs recreated featured straight, square, front legs and an H leg stretcher. The rear legs angled in at the bottom slightly. Also the seat was narrower at the back than the front. As a result, the M&T joinery was a nightmarish combination of ultra precise lengths and ridiculously complex shoulder angles. It may be helpful to note that generally speaking, the rail/stretcher tenons are straight with the grain, not angled. So the mortises are all cut at slight angles with respect to the reference face. Its not an overstatement to say the Hay shop's execution of this joinery was flawless. These joints were completely gapless and seamless as if the chair were machined out of aluminum and the grain painted on. Ditto for the hand planed surfaces. I saw zero tool marks and work that could only be described as "machine quality". Estimated completion time per chair was give at 50-60 hours. A side conversation indicated that this was probably only possible after several chairs were completed.

Mack Headley's carving technique is just astounding. He is quick, doesn't seem to make mistakes, and his carvings are beautiful. By the way, he is explaining the process as he carves, and the project is not held down. So he's talking, checking the monitor to make sure his work is clear on the cameras, while the project is moving, steadied only by a single planing stop and his forearm. A half dozen Addis chisels and 10 minutes later, the volute is done, and he's doing the ground work for the shell adjacent to it.

The ease with which the joinery and carving was done validated the quality achievable with hand tools. But the complexity of the joinery combined with my personal experience with those tools and similar joints left me wondering whether the trip was encouraging or discouraging.

Adam

Angled M&T's

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>One technique I learned at Homestead when I made my first rocking chair is to draw a template, so that after the first chair of a given style you no longer need measure the angles, just work off the template. Saves enormous amounts of time and brings the job down to earth.

Pam

Re: Angled M&T's

john jesseph

>Hi all; just got back this morning- will post pics etc. later. The joint Adam is referring to is angled and "twisted"- kind of a subtle effect (but interesting) in the finished chair.

Re: Angled M&T's

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>Yep, same on rocking chairs. Look forward to your report.

Pam

Re: My report

paul womack

>The ease with which the joinery and carving was done validated the quality achievable with hand tools.

Hmm. I'm reminded of a technique quote.

A famous woodturner (if someone really insists, I'll find the source) was asked which tool he used to make beads.

His answer was: "which ever one is in my hand".

He didn't swap tools "just" because the work needed a bead at this point...

He "just did it". THe word "just" implies it was easy. It was. For him.

BugBear

My observations

Jim Crammond in Monroe, Mi.

>This was the third "Working Wood in the 18th Century" conference that I have been to and I have found them all to be inspiring. The venue is just about perfect for this type of conference. The auditorium is set up well with the audio/visual technology being first rate and allows ready access to the presenters. The subject of chairmaking did highlight just how uncomfortable the seating is after three days, though. I think it is also great to be able to explore Colonial Williamsburg and get ideas for project from the everyday items that are in the houses, shops and buildings that are on site. The furniture collection in the Dewitt-Wallace Museum upstairs from the auditorium is also worth seeing in its' own right.

I will probably never make the styles of formal chairs that was demonstrated by the Colonaial Williamsburg staff, but it was still interesting to see their approach to the design, joinery, carving, upholstering and finishing. Many aspects of what was presented has applications in the type of woodworking that I do. If nothing else it showed that if you approach a project step by step, it is not as overwhelming as it is at first glance. As others have said, just seeing Mack Headley carve a shell or volute was amazing, I have not tried any of that type of carving but after watching him, I think I could do it with some practice. The tips about transferring angles from drawings in the joinery and the finishing techniques that were demonstrated were also very practical.

I thought the high chairs that Peter Gelbert had made from the plans of David Sawyer and Curtis Buchanan were just about perfect. The attention to the details of leg splay, tightness of joinery, shape of turnings and surface preparation, to me displayed the best of Windsor chairmaking. I also enjoyed the segment on finishing Windsors, both from the historic and modern points of view.

One of the things I found most interesting and what I will take away from this conference is David Sawyer's numerous statements that there are many different ways to accomplish a certain procedure, just do whatever works for you. Typically these statements would come after he would explain how he approached a procedure and Peter Gelbert did it in the oppposite way, but they both had beautiful results. These statements were also juxtaposed with the questions from the crowd asking about certain specific formulas for finishing or the expectation that only one tool would work for a given job or there was only one way to go about a process. Just go ahead and do it and find out what works for you.

The other thing that I find great about these conferences is the access to the icons of furniture making. Where else could an amatuer wood butcher have conversations with Roy Underhill, David Sawyer, Mack Headley, Gene Landon and Jane Rees? All the presenters and attendees are open for questions and conversation and more thatn willing to share there knowledge of this vast subject.

All in all, it is a great way to spend some time in January and I would highly recommend it to everyone.

Jim

Re: My observations CW/FWW 2006

Dan O'Sullivan

>This is my 8th CW/FWW conference(all but the first one) and it was full of information that you can use in your woodworking journey. Curtis Buchanan and David Sawyer are just great windsor chairmakers. You can't find 2 guys with more experience and focus than these guys. I too echo the earlier comments on their "down-to earth" approach to building. There is no mystery here guys. You follow the recipe, make a few mistakes and build your next chair. It will be better. Just go back and think it over. When Curtis cut the shape of the comb with the drawknife in one stroke all my bells and whistles were ringing. I just never did that. Now I do and its easy. The key to these conferences is to pay attention to the subtle techniques and modify them to your building. Example: I have a drill press and I am not going to walk around it to use a brace. I have a brace, I use it in the field but... when I am in my shop I use the press. No point here other than the angle is the center of the effort --get it right. If you can get to CW/FWW in the future -- you won't be disappointed. You'd think I was pretty stupid if I said anything else after 8 visits. Good Luck

CW/FWW question

bill tindall

>How does one find out about future meetings and registration? I never heard of this gathering until mention was made of it on the Forum.

Re: CW/FWW question

Adam Cherubini

>The meetings are yearly, part of of CW continuing education program. They have information on their website history.org

Its my understanding that next year will be 17th century joinery. Even tho I work in 1700 at pennsbury, I'm not a huge fan of 17th c furniture. To my eyes its pretty much medieval furniture. But the people who work in 17th c stuff, especially John Alexander and all the good folks at Plimouth are so incredibly fascinating that this will be a session not to miss.

Adam

Re: CW/FWW question

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>Will John Alexander be there?

Pam