Читать книгу Draw Manga - Tom Carpenter - Страница 15

“Style” is a bit of a double-edged sword when it comes to woodworking. Borrowing from a particular furniture style is a good way to ensure that your project design will work out, but paying too much attention to the period of a piece can limit your creativity and even cause you to lose sight of the most basic goal: creating a nice furnishing for your home. But as you work through the basic questions you need to answer when starting to develop a project plan, it is still a good idea to take style into consideration—especially if the piece you build will coexist with other furnishings of a definite style.

Another good reason to consider style is that it can help you make some initial decisions about the difficulty of the project you want to attempt. If you’re a beginning woodworker, for example, you should consider some of the easier to build styles such as Mission, Shaker, country, contemporary, and modern. They tend to incorporate simple shapes with less complex construction techniques, and rely more on relative proportions to achieve their appearance than they do on complex details. This is not to say that these styles are not for more advanced woodworkers, since some pieces made in these styles can be very complex. It’s just that these styles are easy to simplify using modern woodworking techniques, thereby eliminating some or most of the complex joinery. More complex and detailed styles, such as early American, Victorian, classic, traditional, Queen Anne, and gothic, should not necessarily be ruled out from the outset. Making your piece using one of these styles may be challenging, but could also be very rewarding.

The photographs on these two pages give a good illustration of the effect style has on the appearance of a piece of furniture. By comparing and contrasting the characteristics of each of the nine chairs shown, you’ll get a fair idea of which features define each particular style type. Although some of the elements are unique to chairs, look for details you find appealing and, if you’re interested in tackling a period woodworking project, use the information as a starting point for investigating a little deeper into the style you like.

Folding Chairs

Typical features: Hinged legs and seat to fold flat, often slat-built, not technically a design “style” but still a good option.

Danish Modern

Typical features: Spare, open design, graceful curves, strong horizontal lines, often built with teak and dark non-wood accents.

Contemporary

Typical features: Irregular shapes, parts made from laminated sheet goods, no ornate detailing.

Windsor

Typical features: Arched back frame with spindle infills, scooped seats, splayed legs connected by spindle spreaders.

Shaker

Typical features: High backs, round or tapered legs, woven seats, simple and graceful appearance.

Mission

Typical features: Simple, square joints, narrower slats and spreaders, mortise-and-tenon joints, usually quartersawn oak.

The wood movement factor

One of the very first pieces I built was a solid oak coffee table that I made for my brother and sister-in-law. I was a novice woodworker way back then, and I didn’t know much about wood movement. I built the piece in the summertime using a design that defied the laws of wood movement. I delivered it and they were happy. Six months later, in the middle of winter, I got a call from my brother. He said: “The strangest thing happened last night. We heard this big bang. I went downstairs and found the coffee table you built us had exploded and was lying on the floor in pieces.” I haven’t made that mistake again.

~ Bruce Kieffer

Veneer

Making your own veneered panels is a great alternative to using manufactured plywood. Using veneer allows you to apply thin solid wood edgings to particleboard cores, and then apply the veneer on top of that construction. With the edging strip under the veneer, you get the look of a solid wood panel, but with a stable construction like plywood provides. Plus, using veneer gives you the opportunity to really get your creative juices flowing with all the different ways you can match the veneer sheets together. Using it is an option you should consider if you’re a moderately experienced woodworker and you want total control of the finished look of the project you plan to build. There are many good books available that can teach you how to make veneered panels if this technique is new to you. By veneering your own panels, you can also make “custom” sheet goods with unusual or exotic faces not found in lumber yards or building centers.

Exotic and distinctive veneer types include: (A) Zebrawood; (B) Birdseye maple; (C) African Padauk (vermillion); (D) Madrone burl; (E) Maple burl; (F) Purpleheart. All shown with oil finish.

Outdoor projects require rot-resistant lumber, like the cedar being used to build the planter above. The species of wood you’ll use can impact the longevity of your project.

Solid wood, plywood or veneer? Will you use only solid lumber, or a combination of solid lumber and hardwood plywood, or even make your own veneered panels? Once again, this decision is most often dictated by the style you’ve chosen. Sleek modern styled projects almost always are built using plywood with solid wood edgings. This is because of the necessity to account for wood movement. The doors and drawers used on modern styled pieces are flat panels with small gaps between the parts. Even if you live somewhere where the relative humidity is constant all year long, using solid wood for these parts would be a bad idea.

Choosing hardware & finishes. Decisions about functional hidden hardware such as concealed hinges, drawer slides, and fasteners, as well as decorative exposed hardware, such as butt hinges, and door and drawer handles, need to be made as part of the design process. If you’re trying to make a decision about some piece of functional hardware that’s new to you, and you’re not completely sure how it will work, then now’s the time to make a simple prototype. Let’s use a drawer slide as an example. Say you choose a new style drawer slide that you haven’t used before. Staple together four boards to imitate a cabinet, and four boards to imitate a drawer (this is as sophisticated as a prototype need be). Mount the slide and see that it functions as you want it to. Doing this will also give you an idea of how forgiving the mounting tolerances will be. This is important to know since it may require you to preform the construction with a greater degree of accuracy than you’re accustomed to.

Choosing your decorative hardware can be more difficult because of all the choices available. Looking in hardware catalogs is a great way to start, but you should make your final decisions with an actual piece of the decorative hardware in your possession.

The time to choose a finish is also during design, not after your project is built. You want to know far in advance how the finish will look and how it will be applied. Unless you’re very familiar with the finishing product you plan to use, you should test it on a large scrap of the actual project stock.

If you plan to stain your wood, you’ll need to make more involved samples. You need to find out in the design stage how the stain looks on a large sample, and you need to know how easy or difficult it is to apply. Some stains are harder to apply than others. Gel stains and other thick stains tend to be more difficult to apply, and oil stains somewhat easier. When planning to use a difficult-to-apply stain, make samples of inside corner joints. Since a stained inside corner has to be wiped cross grain, that can have a huge effect on how the stain looks there. To complete your stained samples, also apply the topcoat product you plan to use. The topcoat will alter the look of the stained board in most cases.

Use sheet goods to build cabinetry. Contemporary cabinets often are made with visible reveals between the doors and cabinet box. As a result, even a little warpage will be easily noticeable. Since plywood and other sheet goods are much more stable, you’re less likely to have warpage problems using them than with glued up solid wood panels.

Test hardware on working project prototypes, especially if you don’t have any experience with that type of hardware. Drawer slides, especially, vary a great deal in installation method and in acceptable tolerance for error, and they can impact the required size of the drawer opening.

Test finish products on scraps of the same type of wood to be used in your project. Once you’ve made a selection, retest your choice on a larger scrap board to get a more accurate idea of how the finished project parts would look.