I have always liked Mission and Arts & Crafts
furniture. Back in 2013 I built a Greene
& Greene inspired hall table out of cherry and curly maple with ebonized
accents.
Before I go on a little history of architects Charles Greene and Henry Greene. They were born in Ohio, in 1868 and 1870. As teenagers, the brothers studied at the Manual Training School of Washington University in St. Louis. They then attended a two-year program at MIT's School of Architecture in 1891 and in 1893 moved to Pasadena CA opening an architectural office focused on residential buildings with an Arts and Crafts aesthetic. Their unified design of building and furniture with its intricate wood joinery is a demonstration to form and function in Mission and the Arts & Crafts design.
Using my original SketchUp drawing I changed the primary
wood from cherry to red oak and did several scaled down versions ending up with
two versions having only a couple differences.
One is the top and shelf material being changed from wood to some sort
of stone. The other is changing the
curly maple drawer face and panels to another figured wood like Leopardwood or
Zebrawood.
Digging through my supply of oak gave me this starting
stack of pieces to be used for the over ¾” thick members. There are other ½” to ¾” thick pieces that
will be needed but that material is in the wood rack.
My first step is to break down the 6/4 thick rough sawn
planks into surfaced, square and flat pieces.
This plank is about 11 ½” wide but has cupped about 3/16” as it dried
out. Fortunately, it looks like the cup
is mostly centered on the plank in a “V” shape rather than a curve.
The solution is to cut down the bottom of that V which is
almost at the center of the plank using the circular saw and a guide to get a
mostly straight edge. Here the plank has
been securely clamped down, the straight edge in place and the cut made with
the circular saw.
After the plank is cut in half the clamps are removed and
as the photo below shows there is just a little bit of cup that needs to be
removed.
Running the planks through the planer is next. Fortunately, the planks do not have any twist
and only one has any bow and another a little crook. None of these present any real problem to
take care of. The photo below shows the
planer setup with one of the planks on the infeed side of the planer ready for
its first pass through.
Below shows the outfeed side and the shop vacuum hooked
up. Out of frame is a control box that
has both the planer and vacuum plugged into it.
The control box senses when the planer is turned on and then it starts
the vacuum. That runs until the planer
is shut of plus about 10 seconds to clear any chips out of the vacuum
line. The nice thing about this control
box is that it can accept power from two different circuits which is needed
because the total draw of both the planer and the vacuum would overload the
breaker and cause it to trip. Once the
rough-sawn planks are run through the planer I end up with a pretty decent
surface that allows me to see if there are any defects that weren’t visible
before. For these there were a few but
nothing major. 
The next step is to clean up and flatten the circular saw
cut edge. To find the high spots an 8’
level is set on the edge and a playing card is used to find the gaps between it
and the board. The high spots are marked
then a hand plane is used to remove them gradually flattening the edge. This process is repeated until the edge is
pretty flat. A playing card is about
one-hundredth of an inch thick and that’s my out of straight tolerance. A jointer would do the same job much faster
with a lot less elbow grease but I don’t have one as there is a little problem
of cost. A good 8” wide 6’ to 7’ long
bed jointer with helical cutterhead would set me back between $1,700 and $2,500
which I don’t have so my 18” long Fore plane gets used and I get a cardio
workout. I do have an electric hand
plane that gets used if the edge is really bad but this one wasn’t all that far
off. It took maybe 10 minutes to
straighten.
The near end of the board had a little taper of about
three-hundredths of an inch that would have required me to plane 90% of the
edge down to get the last 10% straight.
Rather than do that I added a spacer consisting of three slices of a
playing card held in place with blue tape.
Not to worry, the taper will get cut away in the next step.
To get a parallel edge to my just hand planed edge I use
the table saw with a rip blade. The 8’
level gets clamped to the fence and it acts as a long reference edge that
averages out any differences in the hand planed edge so the cut edge is
straighter than the one on the board.
Here everything is set up ready to go.
Once this edge is cut the board is rotated end for end, the newly
straightened edge is set up against the level and my hand planed edge gets a
trim. That’s because while I can get a
pretty straight edge my skill level is not up to also making that edge square
to the faces. One quick pass through the
table saw gives me a straight and square edge.
At this point I have a cleaned-up stack of lumber with
straight edges and mostly flat faces. A
couple of them have a few areas where the rough sawn surface is still visible
but nothing that can’t be easily flattened or worked around when I cut them
down into smaller pieces. This may not
be enough for the whole project but I believe it will get me the main thick
pieces. Other thinner parts will come
from other stock on hand.
Next Up – Leg Layout & Mortising Machine
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