First entry: background and inspiration.

"Don't play what's there, play what's not there."  Miles Davis 

Well, here's where it all starts, I suppose: the first of what I hope will be many posts on this blog. I will have to admit that 2011 was a particularly strange year for me and I generally wrote off most of those 12 months as an ongoing series of mid life crises . . . lots of changes at work and in life; some good, some not so, a few unexpected pleasant diversions and a few blind alleys. Uncharacteristically, not much of anything got built by me that whole year. I vowed that 2012 would be very different in that respect and, thus far, it has been. This project, assuredly, will make it so. 

Over the 2011 Christmas break I decided to get involved in some sort of interesting carpentry project as the new year started. I happened to dust off my copy of Peter Drijver and Johannes Niemeijer's How To Construct Rietveld Furniture for some inspiration. What really got me going, however, was the a photo (left) that I found on the internet in early January. This isn't a design that can be found in the How To . . . book, but it has remarkable similarities to a series of Gerrit Rietveld pieces made in 1923 or 1924 for the Catholic Military Home in Utrecht, Holland. One of these "Military" designs, as they are called , a simple stool, is featured in the aforementioned volume. This gave me some very good technical details and dimensions to get started.

Using the detailed 3-view drawings published there and various photos found online, I drew up what I believe to be a very accurate rendering of the chair in Adobe Illustrator (a program I use for various drafting projects, among other things) and spent most of my free time in January at the computer, working on various 3-views and mapping out the details of individual parts. I'll clean up and consolidate these technical drawings to a more readable form and post them here at a later date. Eventually, a complete and illustrated set of "How To" instructions will be presented here.

Realities dictate that I'm not going to make a hyper-exact clone of this piece of furniture - which, by the way, is simply called "Chair With Spring Seat." For instance, I'm not going to paint my examples in bright primary red or use carriage bolts to attach the legs to the horizontal braces. But I'm willing to bet that my backward engineered drawing is extremely close to the proportions and dimensions of the original . . . allowing for the metric-to-inches conversion, that is. My logic for doing this follows that, since all the raw materials I'm buying (wood and fasteners) and tools that my subcontractors and I are using (width of table saw blades, diameter of router bits, etc.) are calibrated in inches here in the U-S, that's how I will be calibrating dimensions on my copies of this chair. If I was living in Europe or Asia and my materials and power tool settings were calibrated in the Metric System, I would go that route.

I'm completely comfortable "thinking" in both inches and millimeters, but I'm inclined to want to work in just one measurement world on any given project at any given time, if possible. Old habits die hard. When given a choice, I usually choose inches, as this is what I grew up with. But I'm not a slave to the fraction. Since I've become acclimated to drawing my plans on the computer in recent years, I've gotten used to expressing fractional inches numerically, or in decimal "machinist" inches. So . . . 1/16" becomes 0.0625", 1/8" becomes 0.125", 1/4" becomes 0.25", and so on. When it does come time to move back and forth from inches to millimeters (it's bound to happen eventually,) expressing fractional inches in their decimal equivalents makes far more sense.

Some subsequent email communication with Jaap Oosterhoff of the Central Museum in Utrecht gave me a little more of an historic background on this chair than I already had. It turns out that only one of them was made back in 1925 and it currently resides in Rietveld's famed 1924 Schroder house. Subsequent reproductions exist (a photo of one on the left,) but these were made at a far later date. As with most Rietveld furniture designs, this is simple carpentry and half the fun is making it yourself, while adding just a bit of yourself to the project along the way. I'm sure Gerrit would approve.

It just occurred to me that many who are going to read this haven't a clue as to who Gerrit Rietveld was and what's the significance of the Schroder house or the post-WWI De Stijl art and architecture movement. For a good cursory historical background, here is a Wikipedia link that will hopefully give some perspective for the new and uninitiated.

Still with me? Good. I'll just add that Gerrit Rietveld is one of my heroes on so many levels. I'm sure I'll have more to say about him, De Stijl and my take on the aesthetic joy of clean modern design at a later date. For now, though, back to the Chair With Spring Seat . . .

First, I had to decide what I was going to make this thing out of. Birch is the traditional wood for these sort of early to mid 20th century European furniture projects but, as I soon found out, it's VERY difficult to find good birch here in southern Arizona. Part of my dilemma arose because I was dealing with a wood structure made mostly of laths that measure in widths and thicknesses of  2.2cm or multiples thereof. 2.2cm is very close to 0.875" (7/8") and - if you want to be totally precise about the metric-to-inches conversion - 2.2cm is exactly 0.86614173" (yeah, try making a fraction out of THAT!) This was, presumably, a very common thickness for wood stock in Holland in the early 20th century. Most hardwoods here and today, however, are finished milled on both sides to 0.75" (3/4") and this includes all the birch I happened to run across. This is also true in regards to other commonly used American hardwoods, such as maple and red oak. While some of these hardwood varieties might also be available locally in so-called '8/4' thicknesses (realistically, around 1.5" when cured and finish surfaced on both sides,) I was unable to find any birch milled this way.

Fortunately, I happened to locate some particularly nice European beech, which is another sturdy hardwood you might find these sort of modern furniture designs being rendered with. The actual thickness of the finished stock I found was 0.9375" (15/16".) I purchased 10 board feet of this stuff - enough for two chairs - from Woodworker's Source here in Tucson on January 28 for around $67. I had them make cursory cross cuts at lengths I specified (slightly longer than the finished pieces I was going to need) and I was then was able to easily haul it away in the trunk of my car.

A local cabinet maker I met while searching out wood options, Peter Baer, said he would be able to cleanly power plane my beech down to the proper 0.875" thickness and then accurately rip cut the boards to the finished width dimensions of the laths and planks (0.875", 1.75" and 2.625".) I simply don't have the sort of machinery to do these steps cleanly and accurately myself, so I dropped off my stack of beech planks to him on February 3. All I would need to do after he was through would be to do some dado work with my router, make finished cross cuts to precise lengths with my contractor's saw and start gluing/doweling everything together. A pretty simple - yet satisfying - carpentry project, all in all, that would keep me out of trouble for a while. The bent ply seat and back? Well, that's going to be a bit of a challenge, but I've got some good ideas as to how to proceed there. That will be the subject of at least several future posts.

Just today, February 6, I got a phone call at work from Peter's shop, announcing that my wood was ready to pick up. When I get paid on Friday, I'll swing by and grab it. The real fun starts then.