Innehållsförteckning för July - August 2023 från Quercus

I love steambending. Always have done. My first chair, made when I was 16, was built with strips of thin ply that had to be steamed to get round the tight corners of my simple Scandi design, before being removed for drying and then gluing. I’ve made others since, my favourite being constructed using the Tage Frid freeform lamination way, twisted around a skeletal frame. So it was with a touch nostalgia that I’ve recently spent a week in the woods making a traditional Windsor, and then a ‘virtual’ weekend in ‘virtual’ Cumbria watching over his shoulder the bending genius that is Charlie Whinney. Then there was the week, as you will learn next issue, making a dovetailed box in East Sussex, which I might now finish with milk paint…

Early in June Charlie Whinney, known for his remarkable steambent furniture and installations, and for his book Wood & Steam, ran a long weekend course for beginners. We’d have liked to join forces, especially having started making his bentwood dinghy project from the book, but the course was already full and anyway Cumbria is a long way from the Isle of Wight. Instead we chose to pay £40 for Charlie’s experimental live Zoom opportunity, to share the lessons and watch the projects being made by participants. There were actually only three visible Zoom guests, Quercus, woodturner Louise Wilde and sculptor Lovisa Johansson, who shares Charlie’s passion for bentwood installations. We were flies on the walls of the Whinney Studio workshop. That alone was an eye-opener, his rustic, ordinaire style quite…

After enjoying the recent delightful weather, a thunderstorm broke and forced me indoors to write my latest contribution. I mused on what subject I might cover and serendipity provided me with a wonderful opportunity: Lukasj Giergasz had just posted a new video on Youtube. I think it represents what many hand-tool workers seek from the Internet, a chance to imagine and hope that with our modest resources and limited time we too can create something of quality. He sets out to make a small wall-hung cabinet from readily available material (white pine) and sets out to do so with a limited hand-tool selection. The videography is high quality with no grating narration simply some limited music and the sweet sound of a sharp plane. Lukasj cleverly shows us a number…

Inspiration can cause a chain reaction. This particular one started with a student, a book, a workbench and is then finished with a look at a very appropriate surface finish. I have posted regular updates on Instagram of Andy Flynn making his workbench. He had been on a couple of short courses with me and then he read a book called The Intelligent Hand by the late David Binnington Savage. In this book David discussed the importance of having a good solid workbench, in fact the chapter was eloquently titled ‘the stone beneath all other stones’. Andy then asked me If I would consider this as a teaching project and could I also source the timber. He would then come into my workshop once a week over a period of…

It might start to look other wise, but I don’t usually depend on Quercus to find something to do. Honest! However, when I read the article in QM15 about the book on Simple Japanese Furniture building, based on the 1953 book by the KAK design company, I was intrigued. Instantly, the picture of that little stool with pinched legs caught my eye. Oh, I would really love to make that! As it was not long till Christmas, it helped my wife to know which book I wanted most. And then to my delight it was under the tree when presents arrived. It took until March before there was enough space and time to start making these stools. As luck would have it, I had some western red cedar (Thuja plicata)…

While buying Christmas stocking fillers for our children about 15 years ago we hit on the idea of tape measures. They were dirt-cheap imitations of the Stanley PowerLock bought at a market stall but they kept the kids amused for hours and, notwithstanding that I’ve dismantled the tapes at least twice to repair the lock mechanism, they’re still going strong today. Meanwhile a small mountain of electronic toys must have found their way into landfill. Already the owner of a French-made Stanley 10ft Dynagrip tape, a largely plastic model but likewise still functioning after 20 years of hard knocks, it was taking those cheap tapes apart which piqued my curiosity as to how the tape measure worked and the steps in its development. The original Stanley PowerLock is a design…

Look down from Westonbirt Arboretum’s Tree Top Walkway and you can’t help but notice a yard of open workshops, smell the smoke wafting from a stove and hear the click, click, click of pole-lathes at work. That’s Westonbirt Woodworks, one of the Arboretum’s hidden treasures, where chairs are made and sold, where courses are run, and where apprentices are given a leg-up to become professional woodworkers. For 20 years, courses have been run by chairmaker Paul Hayden, teaching enthusiastic students, many of them beginners, how to make a ‘Windsor’ in six days. “We try to offer,” says Paul, “a combination of teaching serious skills while being playful, irreverant and inclusive.” Some 2500 participants have made chairs with Paul and his team of assistants, learning how to use a pole-lathe, an…

Removing and looking under the floors is always frightening as one never knows what to expect. With the bouncy and fallen floors, I thought I was ready for what awaited. But as it turns out, I was more surprised than I anticipated. The house, believed to have been built close to a century ago, had been abandoned for six years. Together with the client, we started to work on renovating this kominka (traditional Japanese house). As expected, there is a lack of support for the floors and damage from termites. But the most surprising were the layers of stones stacked on top of one another to hold up the posts. My best guess as to why this happened was that the original stones upon which the posts stood had sunk…

Larger Oakipage by Lovisa Johansson (right), one of the Charlie Whinney’s Zoom students, are made in green oak and shaped with jigs and free-form bending. Lovisa learnt techniques at an earlier workshop In Real Life. “In the beginning I was looking for pieces with straight grain. This is the wood that is easiest to bend. But when growing more comfortable with the technique, I started to embrace the expression I got from the wood that is less ‘perfect’. I recognised some aspect of life within the cracks and the knots. I enjoy building objects in the same way that a plant or a tree grows. The basic idea is enshrined in the seed, but the final shape depends on a web of circumstances.” Visit lovisajohansson.myportfolio.com to see more of Lovisa’s…

Like many readers, Quercus follows the Lost Art Press blogs by Chris Schwarz, and recently noticed a challenge to find the best location for a Carvers (or Pattern-Makers) Vice on the bench. Considering one must probably drill a hole through the top, unless there’s a dog hole the right diameter in the right place, this is a big decision. “Here’s my thought,” Chris writes. “Put it at the end of your bench, where a tail vise would go.” Chris suggests the hole is 3-4in in from the bench front and end, where the metal base can sit, and from our bitter experience don’t forget you’ll need space underneath for the long shaft and for the heavy ‘butterfly’ locking nut. The purpose is to speed up cutting with a tenoner, so…

Conor Carbery, Ireland The youngest of the entrants, Conor Carbery lives in Dublin, and has conceived the most humorous of all the box designs. Replicating an old television set, Conor has devised a veneered box with a door round the back for the Lie-Nielsen block plane. It is exactly this sort of entry that rewards the introduction of this competition. “It’s whitty, well veneered and fun,” agreed the judges. “Conor has done a great job veneering the box very well, though it’s not that practical especially as one might well lose the lid round the back.” Conor is 15, and has been a woodworker since childhood. “The first experience I had with woodworking was when I was seven years old and my grandfather took me into his shop,” he told…

There was a time when the success and value of a magazine was measured by the sack of letters it would receive from readers, the publication being considered a club. Then there was the time when readers would respond to emails requesting information, opinion or advice regarding a specific issue or question. For us this now happens through the comments made on Instagram and Facebook connected to Quercus posts. Take for instance the day we posted an image of a bench we are buying from Ian Parker (@ianparkerstudio). Ian designed and made workbenches with an innovative design for furniture-making courses he has been running. One end appears extended with a Y-shaped under frame, and we’ve always wanted to fit a bench vice on the right-hand end of a workbench, and…

The oak tree is emblematically and quintessentially English, an iconic national symbol above all other plants and animals. Of the many tree species to which the English have awarded their country name (others include elm and walnut, which will always annoy our continental cousins), it is perhaps ‘English’ oak that is most deserving, given its role as the material that was once at the heart of a mighty superpower. There are estimated to be more than 700 oaks named individually in Britain. Perhaps the most famous is the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire, in which Robin Hood is reported to have hidden to escape his enemies. One of the largest is the Bowthorpe Oak in Lincolnshire, thought to be more than 1,000 years old and whose girth measures 12.3m…

As Part Seven of their Democratic Chair Online Class, Elia Bizzarri and his guest star Curtis Buchanan turn to finishing with milk paints. From North Carolina, Elia, in his red beret, acts something of the sidekick, forever smiling, forever happy to admit mistakes as he fumbles around his workshop. There’s a touch of theatre, viewers surely convinced they’re being watched, eye-to-eye, by the lanky American, like a cheerful schoolmaster pushing his pupils to try something new. Across the way in Tennessee, in a window on the screen, Curtis opens by telling his audience why we might cover our handiwork with paint, such an unlikely thing to do. “We’ve got this beautiful wood and now you are proposing the we’re gonna cover it up with paint?” puts Elia, as if opening…

If you’ve been woodworking for any significant time, you’ll know that the wood you have at hand is not always the piece of wood you really need. While I’ve not yet figured an easy way to make a board longer or wider, I won’t discount it completely it if the wood shows a knot or a crack. If the board I want to use would impact structural integrity because there is a knot where joinery needs to go, then I’ll use a different piece. But if I can use that board somewhere else in the project where it can be visually minimised with a Dutchman patch, then I will still use it. The same is true if there is a split in the grain, which usually happens near the end…

Medieval revivalism, with a touch of Arts & Crafts, is how the judges saw Toby Watson’s clever box to have been inspired. It has some excellent details, with well-matched materials, and has been well finished. The proportions are good and the locking mechanism is fun and innovative. That a fine furniture-making judge can say nothing more negative than that the dovetails are a bit crude is a measure of Toby’s work. One might mention that though the fit for the plane is excellent, the lock doesn’t always work well, in fact it is sometimes tricky to open the lid. Toby’s solution is that you don’t have to lock the lid in the first place. “The lid can be closed without locking,” he says in his presentation, which itself is superb,…

Lee Valley’s latest honing guide, a replica of the Stanley 50, is cute and pocket-sized. With such a pedigree in the sharpening market, one hopes the Canadian company’s design is as good as the pioneering Mk1 and Mk2, and the recent Short-Blade model we so love. How frustrating then that it wouldn’t fit my Clifton 51/2 jack, nor my Stanley 91/2 block plane. The knurled brass nut is too large for the Stanley slot, and too loose for the Clifton because the position for a 300 honing angle puts the nut right over the slot’s frontal, access hole. Of course the block plane problem can be resolved by removing the screw every time you hone, but this feels rather too time-consuming. A friend leant me a blade that takes the…