Marcus Sly - Furniture Making and Design

Working out the details of some cabinet doors recently had me thinking about the way in which methods and techniques which were once vibrant and alive become hackneyed.  How we can make use of those methods if we need to, without being formulaic?

An illustration of the sort of methods I'm talking about is found in the ways we can take a moulding round the inside of a mortise and tenoned frame.  

The simplest way to treat this sort of frame is to leave them without any edge moulding at all as in the doors on the shaker style cabinet below:

The Shakers were obliged to leave their frames unadorned like this because they had a religious rule which forbade the use of fancy mouldings.  This simplicity, handled with care, can look rather lovely in an austere way.  However, those of us who do not have our options limited by religious strictures have more choices!  There may be times when we wish to create a different mood or feeling.

For example we may want to soften the effect of the right angled edges.  This can be done by running chamfers round the inside of the frame.

The chamfers are easily done except at the corners.  The frame in the picture above uses Mason's mitres, which are shown in more detail below.

This can look fine, particularly if the chamfers are not too big.   However there are a couple of things which, under certain circumstances, will niggle with this solution.  Firstly there is a bit of end-grain left exposed where the chamfer on the stile meets that on the rail [see picture below].  This will show up as a dark patch when a finish is applied.  Secondly the outside line of the chamfer on the stile is offset against the tenon shoulder, and is therefore not integrated visually with the other lines in the frame.

Below is an alternative.  Mitering the rebates on the frames gets rid of the exposed end grain while making it simple to take the moulding smoothly round the corner of the frame.  In the picture below I've shown a rounded moulding rather than a chamfer.

There is now, however, a different niggle.  The picture below shows how the tenon shoulder is offset and doesn't visually relate to the other lines of the frame.

 A solution to this is to put a bead into the moulding, the outside edge of which lines up with the tenon shoulder.

Suddenly we are in another world.  Everything ties together and, if done with refinement, looks rather sophisticated.

Another approach with a similar result is to scribe the tenon shoulder to the moulding on the stile.

This looks slightly different because there is a need to make a small step or shoulder round the edge of the moulding.  This is in order to avoid the tenon shoulder coming to a feather edge where it meets the stile, which would look ragged.  To my eye this is a bit less elegant than the mitre and bead solution described previously.  Nowadays it is used a lot in joinery and in cheaper furniture because it is relatively quick and easy to cut this joint on a machine.

These examples show how taken-for-granted features which are often believed to be purely arbitrary and decorative actually have a coherent logic and purpose.  Further illustration of this can be found in the mouldings which are often used to disguise wood movement by casting shadow lines and drawing the eyes away from gaps between components which open and close seasonally. 

These sort of features are found endlessly, with equally endless variations, in antique and reproduction woodwork of all kinds.  They can be produced efficiently in standard sizes using specialised tools such as moulding planes or router cuts.  Techniques which started out as a creative response to a problem have become formulas, and tend to powerfully evoke a feeling of 'old fashioned-ness' through association. 

I'm a furniture maker who wants to draw on the richness of the woodworking tradition, but I also want my work to be, and feel, relevant to the age in which I live.  The fact that people before us have already worked out such effective answers to many of the problems we meet in our work is both a curse and a blessing.  It is a blessing to not have to be constantly reinventing the wheel.  It is a shame, though, if having those options available turns woodworking into a sort of selection process rather like going shopping; choosing from a list of well known, tried and tested options solely on the basis of personal preference, convenience or economics. 

I would rather my work involved a deeper creative engagement than this.  At the same time I don't want to get caught in trying to find new ways of doing things 'just to be different'.  I'm more interested in finding a quality of 'freshness' in my work rather than originality per se.

How can we achieve this and avoid the "shopping basket mentality"?  Two things may help. Firstly we can avoid the use of standardised mass production tools where possible.  I include old fashioned moulding planes in this category, as well as the more modern profiled router cutters and spindle moulder tooling.  Shorn of these crutches we are forced to see what we are doing freshly, and may find that there are more interesting and subtle ways of handling old construction methods than we might have thought.

Secondly, we need to take our search for "rightness" in the pieces we make as deep as we can.  There needs to be a reason for everything.  From the large scale form and structure down to the very subtle details our decisions need to be justified in terms of the whole.  Everything must tie together.   This may involve us in a subtle shift in thinking.  Instead of taking our methods to a problem, the problem becomes a way to understanding and discovering methods - old and new.  Then everything is a discovery, even if it has been done before.  This will show naturally, giving our work a natural freshness even as it draws on the work of the past.