Refocused

“Never let yesterday use up too much of today.” Will Rogers

From the vantage point of Thursday night, it appears - barring unexpected distractions - that the upcoming weekend should finally find me getting my wood cut to length. The carport is finally clean and my trusty Bosch 4000 tablesaw - which I unwrapped from its plastic tarp cocoon and brought inside last weekend - also cleaned up quite nicely. No more excuses: the plumbing in the house isn't leaking any longer and it's not raining outside. The weather, in fact, is slated to be perfect this weekend and I don't have an extraordinary amount of precheduled commitments to get in the way.

It appears, though, that I've taken so much web space here lately lamenting all that's been getting in my way (story of my life, I suppose,) that I've unexpectedly relegated the very first entry I posted here -  the one with all the chair pictures - to the archive bin. To rectifie this and to simply provide a nice on-topic image to get us back into the spirit of things, here's that pretty color photo - enlarged, this time - of the 1925 Chair With Spring Seat to provide some fresh inspiration. Enjoy.

More distractions and storm preparation

"For three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow. But phone calls taper off."  Johnny Carson

No sooner did the plumbers pack their tools on Thursday afternoon, after digging out some impressive holes in the plaster behind my kitchen cabinets and drilling through brick in one place to route new pipe, than the phone decided to die. Actually, I can take some blame for this. My wife will tell you that it's all my fault, of course, but I'll parse out some pointed criticisms to various on-the-cheap phone repair jockeys, who, over the ensuing years, insisted on adding sloppy patches to old lines, instead of simply routing new and fresh cables to the 3 outlets needed in our little mid century ranch bungalow.  Here's what happened . . .

It was unknown to any of us if the plumbers would need access to our attic crawl space to perform their magic. So, the day before they started, we were instructed by them to empty the closet where this access point is and keep it an available option. It turned out, of course, not to be needed for the plumbing job. But it did remind me of the very antiquated electronic security system box (no relation to the far more modern one we use) that resides up near the closet ceiling. As long as the house was in cosmetic ruins anyway, it seemed like a good time to finally yank this sucker off the wall. Three wires were attached in the back. Two came out as short pigtails, attached only to the back of the box. The third wire needed to be cut and this was the one, of course, that killed the phone.

I was in no mood to troubleshoot this thing and, after taking off numerous days from work this past week to deal with plumbing issues, it was decided to simply call in an electrician to get it done quickly. The repair turned out to be a single wire patch inside a junction box, where the phone line enters the house. This simple wire jumper bypasses the 50 or 60 odd feet of various vintage antique wiring junk laying up above the ceiling. I also requested another wire to emanate from this junction box, so that I could run a new line to other outlets of my choice  . . . on my own and at a later date. Since our electrician figured he wouldn't be getting additional phone line routing business from us after he was done, he charged a rather stiff premium for his little patch job. We'll use our plumbing crew again, when those sort of upgrades are needed. They were a bargain. But, after paying these sort of prices for a simple phone line jumper patch that took about half an hour,  I'll be routing my own new phone lines through the attic, thank you very much!

Meanwhile, after a couple of days of carport cleaning, the outside of the house is looking much better. What remains in the way of boxes and other junk, though, will have to be stuffed back into the newly emptied shed rather quickly . . . at least temporarily.  We're about to get hit with a major winter rain storm that is slated to begin tomorrow night. So, tomorrow morning will be a bit of a scramble to prepare for it. Fortunately, the table saw, which has been carefully stored underneath a heavy plastic tarp for the past year or so, is about ready to be extracted from the carport - and this is where my wife will give me the look of horror - it's coming into the house for the weekend. The cleaning that needs to be performed (more of a dusting than a de-rusting, it appears) will occur in my dry back room, while the storms pass overhead and outside these next few days. When the dry weather finally returns (Tuesday is the latest prediction,) I'll place the saw on my back patio and finally cut my chair wood. Needless to say, I'll keep you updated.

Life returning to normal

"I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion."  William Shakespeare

After spending a long weekend without running water in the house (you don't realize how much you miss it until you don't have it,) I'm happy to report that our plumbing situation is on it's way to returning to a state of normalcy . . . and it's not going to bankrupt us. Our plumber was easily able to bypass the offending portion of old and rotted pipework buried in cement slab under the bathroom floor. Water now comes exclusively out of our faucets instead of seeping up through the tile work. While hot water is temporarily unavailable in the kitchen and in one of the bathrooms, the other bathroom and the washing machine have both hot and cold again. While not perfection, this is a completely livable situation for us for now.

Without going into the minutia of plumbing design, all I'll say is that the stuff installed above ground in the mid 1970s add-on of our 1956 house was done correctly (following the then-current building code) and with good materials (I can't say enough nice things about 0.75" diameter copper pipe.) This, potentially, saved us several thousands of dollars that a total house repiping could have ended up costing us. Along with an insurance settlement negotiated today and a very reasonable estimate for getting the rest of the pipework properly configured, we should have complete and functioning hot/cold plumbing - as well as a much needed brand new hot water heater - sooner than later. I'm going to sleep well tonight with that new found knowledge.

Not knowing if my house was going to be invaded on Tuesday and Wednesday with a complete plumbing crew ready to tear into my walls to install new pipe,  I took provisions to get time off work these next two days to watch it happen and witness the household monetary funds deplete accordingly. Now, instead, I can work outside in the carport (beautiful weather forecast, by the way,) at a comfortable pace and I have a certain amount of confidence that the table saw will be unearthed very soon. We're back on track, folks. Life is good.

Water, water, everywhere

"You only have to know two things to become a plumber: shit runs down hill and payday is on Friday." anonymous pipe fitter.

Remember on my previous post where I alluded to "unrelated roadblocks that life throws at you from day to day"? Well, I'm living through one of those right now. My wife and I were greeted with a large puddle of water in the hallway Thursday afternoon when we came home. First thoughts were that the hot water heater near there finally gave up the ghost. A handyman was located ASAP. In the meantime, we had to turn off the water at the main and begin a sort of in-house camping adventure.

It wasn't until this morning, however, that we finally figured out that our problems were far more involved. The water heater is still reasonably tight. That's good. But the 56 year old galvanized steel pipes buried in the cement foundation have rusted away and water is now fissuring through the bathroom floor tile grout. I took the day off work to talk with plumbers and insurance agents, both in person and over the phone. Nobody, of course is available on Friday to do anything for us. That won't happen until Monday afternoon.

In the meantime, showers will occur at the nearby health club and meals are now either brought in from the outside, precooked, or exist as ready-to-eat. Hand washing, tooth brushing and simple cleanups now require extra effort that you don't fully appreciate until you have to expend it. Toilets are filled up to the point at which we can't handle the smell any longer and we then run out to the street to turn the water main on, long enough to replenish the tanks before quickly flushing. Then, we mop the fissured inlet water from the bathroom floor once more, after shutting off the mains. Our modern water-oriented miracle appliances, such as dishwashers and washing machines, are currently rendered useless. Good thing there's a coin-op laundromat down the street.

We're probably going to be living like this at least through the middle of next week and this, of course, puts everything else - including artistic chair building pursuits - on the back burner for now. Savor those drawing from last week, ladies and gentlemen. I promise I'll follow on with additional progress as soon as possible.

One bit of good news, though. I happened to drop by the local Home Depot earlier this week with shed restoration questions. I was referred to the Pro Account Sales Desk and spoke with a woman there, Deborah, who was a wealth of knowledge and who generously spent a good deal of time answering my questions about framing, covering materials, insulation and roof design. She obviously knows her stuff and was able to present it to me without the typical "good ol' boy" pretense you sometimes get from these hardware store guys. Turns out she's got an architecture degree (!) and this was among the first jobs she could find upon arriving to town not too long ago. Six months from now, of course, she'll probably working her real trade out of some swank office and charging for such design and construction advise accordingly. But while she's still dressing up in the trademark orange apron at the local big box, I'm going to stop by often and get all the shed design advice I can absorb, while also stocking up on supplies.

More next week . . .

More drawings to ponder

"Eternal nothingness is fine, if you happen to be dressed for it."  Woody Allen

I continued the messy and relentlessly dull process of cleaning my filthy carport and adjoining shed through this past weekend, still with the explicit and more enticing goal in mind of finally getting my table saw unearthed and calibrated. It turns out that my shed (a long rectangular affair constructed with 2X4s on a cement pad) is going to require, at the very least, a new roof. So, as I'm prepping the saw for the chair wood, I'm sure I'll be cutting some roofing lumber as well. Good thing that the nice not-too-warm and not-at-all-rainy weather is holding out down here in the Sonoran Desert. I keep telling myself that this is the time of the year to do all this dirty stuff outside and that I'll be rewarded in mid summer with a tight shed. The table saw - and other tools too big to store in the house - will finally have a clean, dry place to live when the inevitable mid year monsoons and dust storms arrive. While we're all waiting for - or, in my case, working towards - the eventuality of when chair wood finally meets saw blade, here's a few more drawings to mull over.

There should be enough presented below, in fact, for anyone reading this blog to beat me to the punch and build a copy of this chair for themselves - at least the basic frame - before I do. When I ran my old model airplane web site and discussion forum on Jetex.org, I occasionally found myself spending weeks drawing a plan and posting it there, only to find that one of my online buddies would build a copy of my design before I could even clean off my worktable and make one for myself. I don't think I have enough viewers on this blog just yet to find that happening, but I'd be pleasantly surprised, actually, to have someone out pull this off. Even in the best of times, I'm a notoriously slow - yet fastidious and exacting - builder.

The first drawing for this post (below) shows the six different components comprising the basic frame. Each component is given a 4-view and requisite dimensions in inches. You'll note that four short laths are required per chair, as well as one each of the medium and long ones - all 0.875" X 0.875". Two each (four total) of the 1.75" X 0.875" legs and two cross braces are needed for each chair.

The centers of the small circles indicate where dowels will eventually be drilled, which I've now decided doing exclusively with the Miller dowel system (more on that in a moment.) The dimensions - in addition to showing overall lengths, widths and depths - show the distance between these drill point centers. Note, for instance, that the medium length lath has its drill points spaced at a greater distance than those found on the short and long laths.  Drill point locations are also noted on the 1.75" X 0.875" cross brace 4-view. In all instances, the drill points are centered on these pieces (ie: at 0.4375" on 0.875" wide ones and at 0.875" on the 1.75" wide one.) As far as the legs are concerned, each one receives a 0.25" deep X 1.75" wide dado at the noted location.

The next pair of drawings (below) show completed front and rear leg assemblies. A 3-view of each assembly, hopefully, makes it clear as to how these parts line up. Note the location of the drill point circles. Beyond the fact that the rear leg assembly is taller than the front and includes the longest 0.875" X  0.875" lath, the two assemblies are essentially front-to-rear mirrors of each other.

The final drawing on this post (left) illustrates the orientation of the two horizontal cross braces and the medium length lath that spans them. Note that the horizontal cross braces overhang the front and rear edges of the legs by 0.25".

As mentioned above, I'm now eschewing the time-honored blind doweling technique described in previous posts in favor of using the newly developed Miller dowels at all attachment points. This will not only speed up the assembly process considerably but, by all accounts, I should have stronger joints when it's all said and done. I recently purchased one of the dedicated 2X sized Miller drill bits along with some of the matching 2X red oak dowels.

Although red oak isn't an exact match to the European beech I'm using for the main structure, the color is similar enough to almost blend in. There is something desirable, actually, in having a slight contrast of color with these exposed dowels. I may even choose a darker, contrasting-colored dowel for some of the attachment points. I'm thinking, in particular, the four where the legs meet the cross braces, which will be the most exposed of the dowel heads. These might look particularly nice in teak.

So, what's left after the basic frame is built? Well, I'm still working out details regarding the armrests and armrest supports. There will be a basic mortise and tenon joint that will have to be performed on each of these, but nothing too outlandish or too hard to pull off. The seat and back - which both feature a significant bend in them - will be a bit more involved.

Making the seat and back will entail some interesting low angle finger joinery on the table saw with Baltic birch plywood, some jig building (make that LOTS of jig building) and then, finally, some veneering . . . certainly fun, but also certainly very time consuming. Then, mix in the usual unrelated roadblocks that life throws at you from day to day and you begin to realize that you're going to be at this little chair building project for a while. Plenty of time to think it all through and plenty of time to write about it.

Such are the luxuries, I suppose, of being - all at once - an introspective, meticulous and ploddingly lethargic woodworker. OK . . . enough bragging on my part for now. Back to the grimmer and more immediate cleaning the carport and dealing with that leaky shed roof . . .

A drawing to hold you over

"I had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it"  Groucho Marx

A funny thing happened to me on the way to dusting off my table saw this past week. I ended up cleaning my carport instead. I suppose this isn't all that bad of a thing, really, as it only makes my outdoor work area less cluttered and safer to use power tools in. But it killed off the time I had originally set aside to cutting my beautifully planed and rip cut beech to length.

The good news is that we are currently experiencing our fabulous February desert weather down here (mid 70° F range daytime highs and low 40° F range nighttime lows, as well as no rain in sight.) Better to do all this grunt stuff now that in a few months, when it will start to get painfully hot outside. If all goes well, I'll have the table saw tuned up and cutting wood by the next weekend.

Something that I'll have to pontificate upon here at length fairly soon is the joys of biodiesel. This is transesterified vegetable oil - a petroleum-free "green" alternative fuel - that not only functions beautifully in just about any automotive diesel engine, but is also a fabulous solvent for de-rusting metals. Part of the carport cleanup found me restoring a couple of old, rusted Jorgensen clamps to near-new condition with nothing more than about a cup of biodiesel and a ScotchBrite pad. There are no harmful fumes (it basically smells like corn oil) and you don't have to worry about it attacking most paints or messing up wood parts. In fact, it actually does a fabulous job of cleaning non-finished woods, such as ebony, rosewood and teak. Biodiesel will be certainly be the subject of an entire future post. Marvelous stuff.

Also this week, I managed to find a little time to clean up at least one of my ragtag computer drawings of this chair. The one below isn't dimensioned, but subsequent drawings will have those details. I'll also eventually post a few detailed drawings containing more information regarding the dado and the drilling/doweling process.

I already wrote a bit about blind doweling but, in case you're wondering what, exactly, a Miller dowel is (I'll be using them on the 4 leg-to-cross-brace joints, instead of the carriage bolts found on original examples of this chair,) here's a web link that will clue you in. 

'Til next week . . .

The Cartesian node

"A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of widths."  Stephen Wright

A Cartesian node . . . sounds like some sort of obscure part in the human anatomy, doesn't it? Or maybe some unsavory thing hanging off of said obscure body part that would require the assistance of a surgeon for safe removal? Actually, it's none of that.

Named for the 17th century French mathematician, Rene Descartes  - or, in actuality, for his Latinized name, Cartesius - a Cartesian node can be explained in proper mathematical terminology. But, dear reader, you're going to have to find someone other than me to do that for you. Much like Stephen Wright's aversion to widths, I get more than a bit flustered when letters like X and Y are part of equations that also contain numbers (this was all explained in my one of my junior high geometry classes, but I think I was home sick that day and it never did quite sink in.) So, in the interest of not to making an even bigger fool of myself by trying to communicate in a language I can't fluently speak, I'll simply give you some pretty pictures to look at and elaborate in plainer English from this point forward . . .

OK, that's much better. The 3 dimensional version of a Cartesian node (drawing, left) can be plainly described as a vertical post with couple of overlapping horizontal posts butted up against it (the word "adjacent" would be the more refined one to use here, but there's just something a bit more visceral and earthy about the phrase "butted up against.") One could also take that vertical post, by the way, and just as easily place it behind the two overlapping horizontal ones to get the same effect. Likewise, you can also reverse the order of the two overlapping horizontal posts and still have a Cartesian node.

Examine just about any piece of Gerrit Rietveld furniture from the De Stijl period and you'll see lots of Cartesian nodes. The vertical post ends up becoming one of the chair legs, for instance, and the overlapping horizontal posts  - variously named laths or cross braces - bring the four legs together. The beauty of this thing is that you can come up with a fairly strong wood joint by simply gluing your piece together this way. To get real and usable strength out of it, however, you'll need to also join together the adjacent pieces with dowels while gluing.

Take a look at the second drawing (left) for additional clarity. Well, actually, that drawing is still more grounded in mathematical theory than it is in carpentry reality. Sorry. The carpentry parlance for the technique its attempting to convey is blind doweling: dowels that are present on the inside bridging the two pieces, but which can't be seen after assembly. Unfortunately, the drawing gives the impression that it's possible to blind dowel all three. Not so. In reality, you can blind dowel the two horizontal laths protruding into the vertical leg. But, once that's done, the third dowel vertically tying the two horizontal laths together has to be drilled in such a way as to leave at least one end of that last dowel exposed. No big deal, really, if the resulting work is done cleanly. Rietveld, in fact, wasn't afraid to use rather prosaic looking carriage bolts or machine screws in place of a third dowel in these "gotta drill it all the way through" scenarios.

Back to reality . . . the photo (left) shows a closeup perspective of the rear leg joinery on a 1924 Rietveld "Military" chair, which is very similar to the chair I'm building. In this variation of the basic Cartesian node, there a two smaller laths present to tie the two rear legs together. Two more laths do the same for the front legs. These smaller laths (four in total) also capture the heavier horizontal side braces, which are there to bridge the front and rear leg assemblies. Look into the background of the photo and observe, on this particular Rietveld design, that the front leg is mounted on the outside of the horizontal brace instead of on the inside. Finally, the top laths - both front and rear - also provide a resting platform for the seat plank. This whole business of overlapping wood post Cartesian nodes really defined Rietveld's efficient furniture design philosophy and played into his larger goal of providing labor-saving carpentry techniques that could be accomplished largely with the use of (then) new and inexpensive machine tools.

I'll leave you this week with another unusual word to kick around: dado (pronounced DAY-doh,) which is yet another carpentry term. Imagine, for a moment, that the chair legs in the above photo have slots cut into them - maybe about a quarter or a third depth - that is just wide enough to allow those perpendicularly placed horizontal side braces to snugly rest inside. That's a dado. It considerably strengthens the already very strong doweled/bolted Cartesian node joint . . . and we'll be using this dado technique for our chair building project.

This sort of dado cut can be obtained with the aid of either a table saw or with a router. For reasons that I'll explain later, I'll be using a router on this particular project. Obviously, the width of the slot is critical. No need to be fearful of widths, mind you, but you'll surely want to pay attention as to what you're doing to make them as clean and accurate as possible. Accurate widths - and depths - will involve carefully setting up the router with something called a template collar, or guide collar, which has to be precisely centered around the cutting bit. A template - typically a flat piece of wood, metal or plastic, with a precisely dimensioned rectangular hole cut through it - then needs to be fashioned and securely clamped onto the piece of wood needing to be cut. If all goes well, you get a perfect dado. As to the exact details of how it's all done, with some nice pictures to go with it? Well, that's the subject of another post- or another couple of posts - for another time.