Marcus Sly : Cabinetmaker

The oak wardrobe is now finished and fitted. 

The picture below shows what it replaced. As you can see it was quite an improvement and transformed the feel of the room.

I'm on the the home straight with the wardrobe now and am starting to get prepared for the next major project.  I have been commissioned to make two fine bookcases to go either side of a fireplace.  They will be in oak again, which seems to be becoming a pattern!   I should be starting on these in earnest by the end of this month - watch this space...

The blog has been a bit quiet recently as I've been concentrating on getting through a lot of bitty jobs that have been in the way of finishing the oak wardrobe I'm working on at the moment.  It's finally starting to come together!

This project is now finished and awaiting delivery to the client.  It fulfills three functions, serving as a coffee table and a bookcase, while under the glass top is a display space.  It is built from native elm with an oil finish. 

Dimension are 2' x 4' x 1'8".

Having recently waxed lyrical about the virtues of milk paint, I'm now going to do the same for clay paint, which I've been using in the last couple of days.  This is another eco-friendly product, which is non-toxic and rather pleasant to apply.  It gives a matt finish and I sometimes use it for the interiors of larger pieces of built-in furniture like wardrobes.  Due to its very high solids content it has a rather nice richness to the colour which, in some lights, almost seems to glow.   If you want some you can purchase it from The Treehouse.

It can be extremely nerve wracking gluing up a piece which may have taken many days work.  The clock is ticking, the glue is drying, and there are never enough hands free.  If things go badly wrong one can be in serious trouble.  Usually I like working on my own but at glue up time I always wish there were a few more pairs of hands to help! The trick is to plan meticulously, use a glue with a long open time, don't rush, no matter how fraught one feels and... remember to breathe!

This glue up was quite complex - the base and panels took most of the day.  Then it was a matter of fitting the top - ironing out all the little imperfections with hand planes until I had a snug fit.  I put the top on with out gluing it and stood back to admire the effect.  I was met with a slight sinking feeling.  Something seemed not quite right. It's interesting how gluing up - which makes the decisions one has made in the course of doing the piece irrevocable - can heighten ones critical awareness!  Somehow, in spite of the shaping I had done previously, the corners  and line of the top felt wrong - not quite how I had intended.  I had a cup of tea and then came back and looked again.  Yes - it was definitely not quite what I had hoped for.  

It's can be quite  stressful to make changes at a late stage, and I had planned to finish the glue-up by the end of the day, so I wrestled with my conscience for a bit, trying to convince myself that it "would do".  Another cup of tea and I realised that -no - I would not feel happy to leave it like that.  So I spent a couple of hours adjusting one edge of the top with a spokeshave.  Finally I felt that I had something which worked better.  I remember reading David Pye saying that the difference between something which sings and something which is forever silent is often very small.  I was reminded of this while I worked.  A very slight change in the profile of an edge can make all the difference....

When using traditional materials in the workshop I'm sometimes suprised by just how good they can be.  Its tempting to think that modern products are inevitably better than old ones due to the relentless march of progress.  Sometimes they are of course.  Often, though, the older product will be just as effective and nicer to use.  A case in point is milk paint, which I have been using in a current project.  Made from entirely natural materials (essentially casein from milk, and lime) entirely non toxic, and can be sanded to a lovely smooth finish. Much beloved by the Shakers, it has a subtle mottled colour variation which just seems to sit perfectly next to the natural variation of timber.  No modern paint can match it for character.  It also bonds incredibly well to the wood as I discovered when I needed to remove some!  It seems a shame that attractive and very effective materials such as this are so often overlooked.

If you want some milk paint in powdered form you can get it from here.

A lot of time spent woodworking is noisy, repetitive, dusty and exhausting - satisfying but not necessarily much fun!  Fortunately there are also parts of the work which are very creative and enjoyable.  Today I've been shaping the top of a combined coffee table and bookcase.  I started with a square-edged frame which was rather blocky and uninteresting as it came off the machine.  I wanted to give the whole table a slight sense of tension or taughtness which I felt was lacking.  I also wanted to reduce the apparent thickness of the top.  The sides of the top had needed to be cut quite thick in order to accommodate a display space the client requires underneath.  Left as it was would have looked rather ponderous. It's often surprising how much small changes in the line of an edge can affect the apparent size and feel of a piece.  This is part of what makes handmade furniture so special compared to that which is mass-produced.

I always approach this process with some trepidation.  I adopt a free form and exploratory approach to the work, and there's inevitably anxiety lest I make a bad choice - which could be expensive!  The process always reminds me of fitting clinker planks in boat building.  Because of the whimsical nature of timber, wooden boats tend not to be exactly symmetrical.  It is therefore necessary to juggle the inevitable inaccuracies into an attractive whole - "if it looks right it is right", as my teachers repeatedly told me!  I approach furniture making in a similar way.  Wood grain can profoundly influence the effect of a curve or line, and it is necessary to take differences in the grain into account with each piece of wood even when following the same basic pattern.  This is one reason why abandoning machines and taking up hand tools is often so beneficial to the outcome of a piece.  With a spokeshave or hand plane one is able to make the subtle differences in shape necessary.

In this case I scalloped out the underside of each side of the top, which introduces tension, very slightly rounded the sides to harmonise with the base and add interest, and very gently rounded to the top edge to soften it.  The result is a much nicer piece of furniture - and the realisation that I need to make some changes to the bottom skirting as well....

Juhani Pallasmaa¹ writes that:

an architectural space frames, halts, strengthens and focuses our thoughts, and prevents them from getting lost.  We can dream and sense our being outdoors, but we need the architectural geometry of a room to think clearly.  The geometry of thought echoes the geometry of the room.

It's intriguing how profoundly we are intertwined - emotionally, physically, spiritually -  with the spaces which we move through and inhabit.  The same is true of the objects we use and are surrounded by.  They not only reflect us, but create us.   I think that if we are at all involved in making things for ourselves or others this is worth thinking on.  Can we produce things which have the potential to become a valued part of a person's inner as well as outer world?  And what might that mean in practice?

Just to be asking ourselves these questions may involve a shift in our approach.  It might lessen our preoccupation with "originality", "form" and "self expression", and give us clues about where a deeper meaning in our work could lie - within which originality, form and self expression can find their own, unforced place.

¹ Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, Wiley, 2005

The oak cabinet is now finished . As usual my aim was to create something simple, beautiful and well proportioned in which interest comes from the details rather than from overt decoration. This piece is a bit of a departure for me in that it has little exposed joinery and is a bit more self consciously refined than some of my previous work.

The shelf pins and door stops are made of rosewood, the handles are of elm. The cabinet itself is quartersawn oak.

Almost every piece of the cabinet is curved - but subtly. The idea for a curved cabinet grew from a wish to have a welcoming sense of enclosure for the objects on display when the doors are open (a line of thought which came from lookng at some of Krenov's cabinets).  Following on from that other curves became necessary to make everything balance. I like curves which add life without yelling for attention.  Less is very often more.....

Since during the last couple of days I've been hand finishing an oak cabinet, It's perhaps not unnatural that my thoughts have turned to the art of wood finishing!  In particular I've been thinking about polished finishes.  William Morris and the Arts and Crafts pioneers were against such finishes as a matter of principle.  They felt that the repetitive work involved was undignified for the craftsperson, and was a factor in the division of labour in manufacturing.   They felt this was damaging to the quality of manufactured items and the life of those who produced them.

I tend to at least partly agree with David Pye¹ that this argument is fallacious.  There is nothing undignified about the skill and labour required to produce such finishes - or necessarily about division of labour for that matter.  I also enjoy the look and feel of finely polished things when I come across them.  However I don't tend to use these finishes myself.  There are two main reasons for this. 

Firstly I find a more tactile feel which has something in common with wood in its natural state is equally pleasing, and is perhaps more valuable in an age when shininess can be produced very cheaply - and is applied to so many manufactured products as a matter of course. 

The second reason is a bit more subtle:  Fine finishes usually require that the individual pieces of wood are polished before the piece is assembled and glued together.  This is often the best way to go about things anyway.  However to not allow for the possibility of doing things differently subtly affects the design process.  Certain approaches to shaping and assembly are not possible if the pieces cannot be finished in situ.  As it happens these are just the sort of exploratory, delicately imprecise ways of working which perhaps have more in common with boatbuilding or joinery than traditional cabinet making, and which I find most interesting....

¹David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship,Herbert Press, 2007

I recently hung the doors on the the display cabinet.  As they are of solid wood there was quite a lot of jiggling involved.  With solid doors there is always the chance of the timber moving with changes in humidity and spoiling the fit.  This can be countered to a certain extent with careful timber selection.

I used knife hinges which allow a lot more subtlety in how the doors are placed. James Krenov¹ has a lot to say about this in his wonderful book "The Impractical Cabinetmaker".   They are tricky to fit and make me nervous.  In this case they came out OK I think...

¹James Krenov, The imparactical Cabinet Maker, Linden Publishing Co Inc, 1999