Other hobbies - cabinetmaking

[Cugel]

The manshed has been a busy place, what with the move to a new house and all. Many recent things have been utilitarian but here's one proper piece of furniture - a new small table to act as a diner for two (me and t'ladywife) as well as an extra kitchen prep surface.

The timber is English oak. The style is Cotswold Arts & Crafts after Ernest Gimson, which involves over-engineered structures reminiscent of haywains and similar farm carts of old (as seen outside The Repair Shop TV prog, for example). The finish is Liberon Finishing Oil and lots of inter-coat sanding with very fine sandpaper to get the dust & oil mix to fill the open oak grain, giving a smooth surface.

The joinery are: housing joints for the top and bottom cross pieces; mortise & tenon (4 per leg) to attach legs to bottom cross piece; bridle joints to attach leg tops to top cross piece. The table top[ is on loose but with a locater bar to stop it sliding off the under structure. The whole thing weighs a ton!

The small blue-grey circles are hand made slate coasters from a local lad, just right for perching a glass of wine on.

The chairs are Hereford-style ladderbacks made from green ash and woven elm bark strips for the seats, constructed many years ago from two freshly-felled maiden ash trees, by me and t'ladywife on a week's course with one Mike Abbot, well-known in green woodwork chairmaking. No glue in them chairs. All held together super-tight by clever grain orientation and subsequent shrinkage of the round-to-oval tenons and mortises.

Cugel

[Mike Sales]

Wow. That is beautiful and so well made. So are the chairs.
I have made several boats without having more than a fraction of your skill. Epoxy resin and various fillers make up for my bodging, and I hide the mistakes with paint.

[fausto copy]

Awesome stuff again, though I'd never heard of Hereford ladder back chairs and neither had my son who lives in Hereford and had trouble locating a couple of dining chairs.

[Lance Dopestrong]

Superb! Wonderful job. When you become my justice minister you'll be able to make a set of high quality gallows

[Cugel]

Wow. That is beautiful and so well made. So are the chairs.
I have made several boats without having more than a fraction of your skill. Epoxy resin and various fillers make up for my bodging, and I hide the mistakes with paint.

"Bodging" is an interesting word. The makers of chairs identical to those in the pics used to be known as chair bodgers, which sounds like the chairs were nae gud.

The practice was for some capitalist to pay the wood-dwelling folk for the various parts (such as the chair rungs made on a pole lathe or the other bits made on a shaving horse with a drawknife). Another would put all the bits together to make the chair frames; and yet another would weave the seat. All this tended to be done on a piece-work basis and so the parts were often made too hastily - i.e. not well - and the chair assembled poorly. Is this where the meaning of "bodged" as "done too quickly and without care" comes from? Etymology is a fascinating thang.

Cugel

[Cugel]

Awesome stuff again, though I'd never heard of Hereford ladder back chairs and neither had my son who lives in Hereford and had trouble locating a couple of dining chairs.

Various parts of the well-wooded Herfordshire was full of chair bodgers once upon a time. They made ladderbacks like those you see in the pics, with some small variations.

There are many ladderback chair styles from different parts of Britain. These styles all got a bit homogenised when chair-making was commercialised in Victorian times. Previously the various green woodworking items (many dozens of different everyday objects) were made by the folk that used them - or at least by the village carpenters (often more than one per village).

Cugel

[Cugel]

Superb! Wonderful job. When you become my justice minister you'll be able to make a set of high quality gallows

Ha ha - I have actually thought of making a small gallows as a garden ornament, from those chunks of mysterious timber I've scavenged over the years which remain a bit mysterious and unmatched by other bits sufficient in quantity to make a piece of furniture all of the same stuff.

But what if I'm hoisted by my own petard, as I stumble when weeding the shallots and fall into the gallows rope! What if the ladywife gets tired of me and arranges such a scene, claiming a large life insurance as she assures the rozzers it was just an accident, honest officer......?

I did once turn a nice truncheon out of ekki (dense, hard, dark pink flecked with white) for a neighbour, on the lathe. He assured me he would never use it in anger. But what if he used it with a cold hard stare after calm reflection!? Anyway, I also made a small mallet of the ekki for hitting chisels with, as it's hefty and tough. I call it ekki-thump.

Cugel

[Cyril Haearn]

Make a fail-safe gallows of balsa wood that breaks under load

[francovendee]

Nice work Cugel. I've always found working with wood very satisfying and therapeutic.
I'd spent my working life in light engineering which I enjoyed but at home working in wood was my choice.
I stopped making articles for the home when good timber became harder to find.
I moved over to ship modelling, again very enjoyable. Never matched the standard of other modellers but they please me.
Fine craftsmen, employed to make items on commission, get far more pleasure from the work than the eventual owner.
Working with your hands is like a tonic for me.

[Mike Sales]

"Bodging" is an interesting word. The makers of chairs identical to those in the pics used to be known as chair bodgers, which sounds like the chairs were nae gud.

I know what bodging means. I was employing the modern usage.
A nice boatbuilding word for you. "Gerald".
This is the technique of shaving the thickness of overlapping clinker planks as they near the stern so that they lie flush.

[Cugel]

Nice work Cugel. I've always found working with wood very satisfying and therapeutic.
I'd spent my working life in light engineering which I enjoyed but at home working in wood was my choice.
I stopped making articles for the home when good timber became harder to find.
I moved over to ship modelling, again very enjoyable. Never matched the standard of other modellers but they please me.
Fine craftsmen, employed to make items on commission, get far more pleasure from the work than the eventual owner.
Working with your hands is like a tonic for me.

I give a lot of furniture away. "Wot!" cry the cash-lovers. "For nowt"!

They miss the point - your point that the craftsman gets immense pleasure from the making. Often, as I finish a piece, I can't wait to get it out the door to start the next one.

As to the timber - I get all mine free. Immense amounts of highly valuable (in every sense) timber is thrown away by dafties who prefer MDF stuff from Bodged & Queer, purveyors of saggy cupboards reeking of formaldehyde-based glue. I have fellows who rescue some of this old timber stuff as it heads for landfill or bonfire. There's stuff you can't buy for love nor money - Brazilian rosewood, old growth teak, afromosia ......

One must seek out the building trade men (or even the wimmin) and butter them up a bit so they'll rescue nice wood for you when they're on a "refurbishment" of some pub or other old building. Sometimes I give them drinking cash but usually it's the promise (and eventual delivery) of something made with a portion of the timber they rescue for me.

*****

When I was a bairn, 175 years ago, the local museums of Tyneside were full of beautifully-made models of ships of every kind. There were a lot of very good craftsmen in Tyneside, many working in the shipyards, who liked to make these models as the ultimate expression of their knowledge and abilities. Some of the models were immensely detailed, with every winch (often working) pipe and porthole. Many models were large - a couple of yards long (it was always yards in them days) housed in a vast glass case. The Museum of Science and Technology within a large Newcastle park adjacent to The Town Moor was best for these models - dozens of them.

Cugel

[Cugel]

"Bodging" is an interesting word. The makers of chairs identical to those in the pics used to be known as chair bodgers, which sounds like the chairs were nae gud.

I know what bodging means. I was employing the modern usage.
A nice boatbuilding word for you. "Gerald".
This is the technique of shaving the thickness of overlapping clinker planks as they near the stern so that they lie flush.

I was wondering if the chair bodgers (once an honourable trade or ability, practiced with skill) gave rise to the modern notion of bodging (as in making a mess of it) because of the Victorian piece-work chair-making industry that demanded chair bits of low cost and fast production, rather than well-made whole chairs for a decent payment to the makers. The quality of such chairs was low - perhaps an early example of planned obsolescense?

What's the etymology of Gerald, then? I'd seen the practice of edge-thinning such planks when watching a programme about how a Viking longboat was build but didn't know it was called ....Geralding, a Geralded plank...? I seem to recall a word something like straking?

Cugel

[Tangled Metal]

As I kid I got a matchstick model making kit. It had a child safe stick cutter, wood glue and a bag of headless matchsticks. The accompanying booklet had ideas. Does that count as a hobby?

I did too. Cut a few sticks, glue a few together and realise I didn't have the patience to carry on. I went and found a good book to read instead. Did that count as a hobby, reading? I was building up my mind and general knowledge.

Right now there's a part of me itching to become creative with making things. I suspect personality flaws stop it happening. Woodworking is too slow, I need a few things going on at once, ADHD style. Slowly working a piece of wood with a plane would have me bouncing off the walls.

Having said that in school woodworking classes I was often the only one to not mess up. I followed instructions precisely. If it wasn't for peer pressure I'd have had perfect items made. As it was I deliberately broke a dwelling hole with the hand drill so it wasn't perfect. I guess age has bred impatience in me.

[Tangled Metal]

I thought chair bodging referred to the way it was done by eye and skill without measurement or designs. A good bodger could look at something and make what's needed without a tape measure or engineering drawing.

Somewhere along the line it became synonymous with poor work.

[Mike Sales]

What's the etymology of Gerald, then? I'd seen the practice of edge-thinning such planks when watching a programme about how a Viking longboat was build but didn't know it was called ....Geralding, a Geralded plank...? I seem to recall a word something like straking?

Cugel

I think you are referring to the planing of a landing on a strake so that the next has a wider landing, though the two are still at an angle to each other, with a step in the surface. A gerald is cut at the end of strakes, at a transom, so that the step runs out and the edges of the planks are flush. I hope this is clear.
I'm afraid I don't know the etymology either.

Edited to add that strake means plank.