Signpost is a free ezine from Bob Dillon Windsor Chairs. It is the mission of this monthly ezine to explore the history and contruction of Windsor chairs as well as other aspects of life in early America. For more information please go to Signpost Info. To SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE, see below.
An Ezine from Bob Dillon Windsor Chairs
Issue No. 17 -- October 5, 2001
Contents:
- News
- The Chairmaker's Tools, Part Three
- Excerpts from Democracy In America, Volume 1 by Alexis de Toqueville
- Look Before Leaping by Tamim Ansary
NEWS:
At long last, Signpost #17 is here. Sorry for the delay. While my attention was focused on other things, summer went by, and two or three months simply slipped away.
We begin this Signpost with the third and final part of "The Chairmaker's Tools." Not that I have included all the tools in my shop: I could talk about chisels, or splitting wedges, or handsaws, or sandpaper, or any number of other things, but they are not specific to chairmaking or traditional woodworking. In case you missed them, the series started with issue #15 and continued in issue #16.
Next, I've chosen some excerpts from Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy In America. This work, in two volumes, was published in the 1830s after a lengthy visit to the United States. His aim was to see what might await his native France which, despite its own revolution, had yet to choose democracy.
I end with an essay which some of you will have seen already -- it has been widely distributed on the internet. Look Before Leaping bears heavily on recent events, and I believe it is well worth reading.
Until next time,
The Chairmaker's Tools, Part Three
Shave Horse
I spend a lot of time sitting in my shop -- not due to laziness or because I make chairs, but because I do a considerable amount of work on my shave horse. This is a simple contraption designed to hold a piece of riven wood while it is worked with a drawknife or a spokeshave.
The work piece lies on the sloped "riser" and under the "dumbhead." (The dumbhead is the short length of 2X6 screwed to the top of the arm, not the guy sitting on the bench.) The arm is fastened to the ramp with a steel rod which becomes a pivot. Since the foot pedal is at a greater distance from the pivot than the dumbhead, applying pressure with my foot results in lots of leverage and a very tight grip on the work. The additional holes in the arm (see closeup) allow me to adjust for different thicknesses of wood.
It is at the shave horse that I rough-shape spindles, clean up turning blanks before they go on the lathe and rough out bows and sack-back arms in preparation for bending.
Lathe
Right View
Left ViewMy life as a full-time chairmaker began when the shop where I was employed was sold and the new owner moved it away. Instead of looking for another job, I simply declared that I was now self-employed. But in the early months, with customers in short supply, I had time on my hands and I spent some of it building this lathe.
My shop-made lathe is built almost entirely of wood: pine for the base, oak for most everything else. Though it is not as heavy and vibration-free as one would like a lathe to be, for this most basic kind of turning work it has performed surprisingly well.
There is a large variety of tools available for turning, each with its own intended use or a specific shape to cut. The tools in the photo are not all that I use, but they are the basic ones. The gouge is used for concave cuts (coves) and for general shaping. I use the skew chisel mostly for surface smoothing after the piece has been shaped. The parting tool is used to cut convex shapes; a narrower one is used to cut (part) down to specific diameters.
With the lathe I make legs and stretchers for all my chairs; armposts and short spindles for arm-chairs; stiles (the two main uprights) for fan-backs, and seats for stools.
Steam Box
It's no secret that one of the distinguishing features of a Windsor chair is a back made from bent wood. For this I rely on straight-grained oak riven directly from logs, and a steam box to cook it in.
Steam boxes are generally homemade contraptions and take various forms. Mine is a plywood box about 6" X 6" and 72" long. On the bottom are two holes, each just big enough to hold a "two-pound" coffee can. The cans rest on the burners of an electric hot-plate . As the water boils the box fills with steam.
From a cold start, I steam bow blanks for two hours -- probably a little longer than necessary, but not so long that the wood gets too soft and collapses into folds on the inside of the bend. When ready, a piece is pulled from the box and quickly wrapped around the proper form.
Hewing Hatchet
A turning blank which has been split from a log is made lathe-ready by trimming it to a rough octagon. Usually this can be accomplished with a drawknife, but sometimes it is desirable to remove the bulk of the trim with a hewing hatchet.
A look at the detail photo on the right will show you that this is not just any hatchet. The hewing hatchet is flat on one side, like a chisel. This causes it to "lead" to the flat side when it enters the wood, allowing you to chop down the side of the turning blank, quickly removing excess wood and leaving a reasonably flat surface. A larger version of this tool, the broad axe, was once used to square up logs for use in construction. You may have heard the term "rough-hewn beams."
Scratch Stock
One last tool I would like to mention is the scratch stock. I use this simple, shop-made beading tool to decorate the front face of the bows on continuous-arms and bow-backs.
I made my scratch stock from a scrap of cherry wood and a small piece of a discarded saw-blade. The blade has been shaped with files to produce a narrow groove called a quirk as well as half a bead (see this photo). I complete the bead detail with sandpaper. The resulting decoration is called a quirked bead.
The scratch stock is used by pulling it along the work piece, tilted at first so that the blade contacts the wood at an angle. With each successive stroke, the tool is held progressively more upright until, on the final pass, the blade is perpendicular to the wood allowing it to cut its full depth.
A scratch stock can be used to produce an infinite number of small decorative edges, limited only by the woodworker's ability to create the cutter. It is particularly useful in duplicating a molding for repair or reproduction work, or in places where a molding plane cannot function, such as the curved bow of a Windsor chair.
Excerpts from Democracy In America, Volume 1
by Alexis de Toqueville, 1835from Chapter II: Origin Of The Anglo-Americans - Part II
The English Government was not dissatisfied with an emigration which removed the elements of fresh discord and of further revolutions. On the contrary, everything was done to encourage it, and great exertions were made to mitigate the hardships of those who sought a shelter from the rigor of their country's laws on the soil of America. It seemed as if New England was a region given up to the dreams of fancy and the unrestrained experiments of innovators.
The English colonies (and this is one of the main causes of their prosperity) have always enjoyed more internal freedom and more political independence than the colonies of other nations; but this principle of liberty was nowhere more extensively applied than in the States of New England.
It was generally allowed at that period that the territories of the New World belonged to that European nation which had been the first to discover them. Nearly the whole coast of North America thus became a British possession towards the end of the sixteenth century. The means used by the English Government to people these new domains were of several kinds; the King sometimes appointed a governor of his own choice, who ruled a portion of the New World in the name and under the immediate orders of the Crown; this is the colonial system adopted by other countries of Europe. Sometimes grants of certain tracts were made by the Crown to an individual or to a company, in which case all the civil and political power fell into the hands of one or more persons, who, under the inspection and control of the Crown, sold the lands and governed the inhabitants. Lastly, a third system consisted in allowing a certain number of emigrants to constitute a political society under the protection of the mother-country, and to govern themselves in whatever was not contrary to her laws. This mode of colonization, so remarkably favorable to liberty, was only adopted in New England....
If, after having cast a rapid glance over the state of American society in 1650, we turn to the condition of Europe, and more especially to that of the Continent, at the same period, we cannot fail to be struck with astonishment. On the Continent of Europe, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, absolute monarchy had everywhere triumphed over the ruins of the oligarchical and feudal liberties of the Middle Ages. Never were the notions of right more completely confounded than in the midst of the splendor and literature of Europe; never was there less political activity among the people; never were the principles of true freedom less widely circulated; and at that very time those principles, which were scorned or unknown by the nations of Europe, were proclaimed in the deserts of the New World, and were accepted as the future creed of a great people. The boldest theories of the human reason were put into practice by a community so humble that not a statesman condescended to attend to it; and a legislation without a precedent was produced offhand by the imagination of the citizens....
The settlers of New England were at the same time ardent sectarians and daring innovators. Narrow as the limits of some of their religious opinions were, they were entirely free from political prejudices. Hence arose two tendencies, distinct but not opposite, which are constantly discernible in the manners as well as in the laws of the country...
Thus, in the moral world everything is classed, adapted, decided, and foreseen; in the political world everything is agitated, uncertain, and disputed: in the one is a passive, though a voluntary, obedience; in the other an independence scornful of experience and jealous of authority....
These two tendencies, apparently so discrepant, are far from conflicting; they advance together, and mutually support each other. Religion perceives that civil liberty affords a noble exercise to the faculties of man, and that the political world is a field prepared by the Creator for the efforts of the intelligence. Contented with the freedom and the power which it enjoys in its own sphere, and with the place which it occupies, the empire of religion is never more surely established than when it reigns in the hearts of men unsupported by aught beside its native strength. Religion is no less the companion of liberty in all its battles and its triumphs; the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims. The safeguard of morality is religion, and morality is the best security of law and the surest pledge of freedom....
(Tocqueville arrived in the United States from France in
1830, traveled widely, and talked to President Andrew Jackson,
ex-President John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster and many others.)
Look Before Leaping
by Tamim Ansary, a writer who lives in San Francisco
I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." One talk radio host said this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but, "We're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later, another TV pundit asked if we "have the belly to do what must be done."
And I thought about these issues being raised especially hard, because I am from Afghanistan. Even though I've lived here for 35 years, I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.
I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.
But the Taliban and bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan," think "the Jews in the concentration camps."
It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims. They would exult if someone came in and took out the Taliban and the rat's nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, "Why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban?" The answer is, they're starved, damaged, incapacitated, exhausted. Credible international aid organizations estimate that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan -- a country with no economy, no food. Two million men were killed during the war with the Soviets. There are millions of Afghan widows -- and the Taliban has been executing women for being women. The soil is littered with landmines. The farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely.
In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat. Only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only help the Taliban -- by crushing the same people they've been raping all this time.
So what can be done, then?
Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done," they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Pushing aside moral qualms and killing innocent people, what's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.
And guess what: that's bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that?
Bin Laden does. Anyone else?
Courtesy of TomPaine.com, a journal of opinion inspired by the great
patriot Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man.
Sources
- Make a Windsor Chair With Michael Dunbar by Michael Dunbar
- The Woodwright's Shop : A Practical Guide to Traditional Woodcraft by Roy Underhill
- Restoring, Tuning and Using Classic Woodworking Tools by Michael Dunbar
- Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
- TomPaine.com
Further Links:
- My About Windsors Page has links to many online
sources of Windsor chair information.- Signpost Archive
- Bob's Bookstore
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