In this episode I regale you all with my thoughts and recap of Jeff Headley and Steve Hamilton’s American Furniture: Casework and Construction seminar from WIA last month.
Here you can see Jeff and Steve hard at work trying to figure out how to assemble the Chippendale case
This is the half dovetail joint they passed around that was typical for attaching the drawer blades to the front of the case.
Here is a shot of the Chippendale Chest after the seminar with 2 of the drawers removed
And here is a Baltimore card table
In the Q&A session in the marketplace later, you were able to get up close and personal with the pieces and really see how they went together. This was a blast.
Finally I took a quick video of the process for fluting the quarter columns on the Chippendale chest using a scratch stock.
1 response so far ↓
1 Mark Mazzo // Sep 3, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Shannon,
Thanks for the nice tour of this session.
Jeff and Steve taught the Huntboard class that I took last May at the Marc Adams School. As you saw they can definitely provide some comic relief! But, I can attest that really know their stuff. Very knowledgable about period furniture and construction techniques as well as a nice mix of modern and traditional method to build it.
You mentioned that they tack the drawer sides together for the tails and they also remove a lot of the waste for half blind pins with the mortiser. I’m not sure if Jeff mentioned it, but he actually gang cuts the tails with the band saw, nibbling away the waste close to the baseline and then paring to the line with a chisel. Nice mix of new and old techniques there!
You made mention of outsourceing some aspects of a build in older times (i.e. turning a column). In the class I had with Jeff and Steve, they also noted that creating of bell-flowers and the like for inlay work on Federal style pieces was also something that was done as a specialty. The furniture maker would buy veneer inlays already cut and shaded from the specialist and he would then inlay them into the legs or other parts of the piece. It’s very interesting to understand that not every craftsman was a master of all things – I guess that gives all us amatures an excuse to fall back on!
–Mark
The Craftsman’s Path