A Surprise Buried in the Mesquite

This evening I sorted through my stash of mesquite and found a few boards wide enough to make the 1839 Schoolbox featured last summer in Woodworking Magazine.   I cut the front back and sides to their rough dimensions, jointed one edge of each and cleaned up the other on the tablesaw.   Then I wheeled out my planer--the one I installed fresh blades in just yesterday--and started milling the mesquite to thickness.   I had made a couple of passes on each board when I saw this come out of the planer:

From Mesquite Surprise

That little sliver of white in the knot is actually a little sliver of metal.  My heart sank.  I was sure it was a nail or a screw and my freshly sharpened blade now had a nick in it.

I got out a screw driver and began poking around in the knot trying to dislodge the metal, but it wasn't behaving like a nail or a screw.  For one thing, it was, well, softer, and it wasn't coming out.  Then it dawned on me that the metal was actually lead, and that was a bullet stuck in the board. 

From Mesquite Surprise

From Mesquite Surprise

The good news is that the planer blade is OK.  Now, all I have to decide is whether to hide the bullet on the inside of the box, or let it show on the outside.  I'm leaning toward the latter.

Lessons From A Delivery Guy: How to Build Durable Furniture - Fine Woodworking

I found this blog series on Fine Woodworking and it contained such a wealth of really good, common sense advice regarding furniture design I decided to re-post it here.  When we design furniture, or even cabinets, we sometime forget that it has to pass through doors and negotiate tight corners on its way to final resting spot.  Great article!

Lessons From A Delivery Guy: How to Build Durable Furniture - Fine Woodworking

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Campaign Table

My friend Calvin has been carrying around an old fold-up table for as long as I've known him (which is a very long time). He had it when we were students together at LSU, and he'd dragged it with him to North Carolina and back in the thirty years since. But the old table had become so worn that it been banished to the back porch when he asked me to take a look at it. It was a simple pine table, painted olive drab, probably World War II military issue. It was so old the paint had become chalky. A bit of trim had broken off, and the screws that held the whole thing together were beginning to work loose. I wish I had taken some "before" pictures, but I didn't.

The photo gallery shows how the original table looks like now.



I suspect Calvin's "fold-up" table is actually a modern member (probably World War II era) of a family of furniture known as "campaign furniture." Campaign furniture was designed to be easily packed up and moved from place to place, as in a military campaign or scientific expedition. The British, in particular, turned campaign furniture into a higher art form during the glory days of the empire from the late 18th century to the beginning of the Great War. (Interestingly, there is a surprising lack of literature on the style. The one authoritative reference, British Campaign Furniture: Elegance Under Canvas, is a relatively recent publication (2001) and has been out of print almost since it was published.) The most common pieces are tables, desks, and chests (dressers) and while some of it can be quite crudely constructed, there are many examples that have been finely crafted from nice hardwoods like mahogany, trimmed in brass with recessed pulls.

As I folded Calvin's table to carry it home, I knew that reproducing it would make a perfect weekend project. But little did I realize what an interesting challenge it would turn out to be.

Quest for the desk of my father (Part I)

[Note: This blog entry was originally posted in October 2006]
Quest for the desk of my father – Part I

This week I purchased a book by Mark Bridge called, “An Encyclopedia of Desks.” I already had another book devoted to desks by Garth Graves called, “Desks You Can Customize.” Several years ago I picked up Bill Hylton’s “Illustrated Cabinetmaking” mostly because of the section on desk designs. Whenever I pickup an American furniture book, I always head to the section on desks first. There is a reason for my obsession with desks.

When my grandmother died, my father inherited a piece of furniture he called “a secretary.” It was a big and old, a little rickety, and had lots of cubby holes filled with old family photographs and long unread letters. One of the more intriguing things to us kids was that the writing surface of the secretary was covered with a green felt pad that Dad had doodled on when he was a kid. The secretary sat in a position of prominence in our living room, a room we rarely used.

When our family gathered together after Dad passed away, we talked about the various things of his we would like to eventually have when Mom gave up housekeeping. First and foremost for me was that secretary. It wasn’t just because it reminded me of Dad; there was more to it than that. Even though I knew it wasn’t a great piece of furniture, there was something about it. It had nice proportions. I liked the angle of the writing surface. I liked the layout of the interior. It was functional and purposeful.