Random tangents
So not every piece of woodwork has to be fine and finished to be fun…
It’s surprising how much fun 5-to-13-year-olds can have with hammers and nails so long as someone older is there to do the branding and the sawing 🙂
But dear grief, it’s rough work and now I feel I need to remake a doll’s school locker properly in something nicer than badly warped pine and poplar offcuts 😀… Read the rest
So fathers day was coming up and dad’s just finished the first year of a law course so lots of desk time and books involved. And then I noticed this on accidental woodworker:
Well, a desktop shelf that’d fit in the corner and leave room to hide pens and such underneath should be about right, and I had a nice piece of sapele…
…yeah, no. Turns out sapele is a total pain to plane with a normal handplane because of interlocking grain. By the time I’d resawn it from 6/4 down to just under 3/4inch thick and then flattened the resulting planks I’m down to just a shade over a half-inch thick and that just doesn’t look right for a shelf. So I abandoned the sapele to future box-making duties, and ordered a toothed plane iron to deal with the remaining sapele in my store.… Read the rest
So, lots of people who make stuff in wood (going back a few hundred or more years) made a mark on the stuff they build (assuming it’s good enough). Usually in an out-of-the-way place, even one where you’d have to disassemble the piece to find it; like signing one of two faces before you glue them together.
Sometimes it was a simple stamp made with a metal stamp and a few taps of a hammer:
Sometimes it was a paper sticker, and sometimes it was branded:
This wasn’t done out of the same sense that triggers graffiti by the way – some guilds from the 17th century onwards made it mandatory to mark every piece a workman made. Not every guild, but enough that it was considered commercial rather than odd or vain.… Read the rest