The Case for the Case.
By any measure it's a conformist Arts and Crafts piece. It's a simple design made of quartersawn English Oak and held together by traditional joinery. Solid wood joinery comes in three flavors. Butt joints, mortice and tenon joints and dovetail joints. This piece has versions of each one of them. The whole consists of two parts, the case and the ‘stool’ base.
Within the whole there are details designed to allow for shrinkage and expansion.
A handmade drawer has many steps in its construction. I wrote about it in the magazine American Woodworker in 1996. You can access the article HERE.
It is the most logical and sequential process in making furniture by hand methods. My introduction to the process was in 1953 when I made a drawer for the first time.
Of course, before you make a drawer you need to make a case, a box, a hole into which it will fit. In the American Woodworker article, I described a case which my students would make prior to making the drawer. It is a very simple, easy to make piece of European plywood tongue and grooved together. This essay may be a sort of redress; an attempt to set right the score for my underplaying the importance of the case in that article.
Drawers come in singletons, they also come in twos, threes and more. The collective name for them is a chest of drawers. The chest is an integral part of the piece and there are two ways to construct it. As far as I know, we don’t have a name for either method. One is four flat boards joined to form a box with a back. In this structure the sides of the chest are the guides for the drawer as it is opened and closed. The alternative is a construct akin to a face frame. Here the drawer is guided by a narrow rail usually mounted on the drawer bearer rail; the sides of the chest play no part in the guiding.
The photograph here is such a case. I wrote about it with John Kelsey in the 1998 October issue of American Woodworker. You can access it HERE.
The structure made of four flat pieces was an outgrowth of the Arts & Craft Movement in Great Britain. I encountered it when I began my studies at Loughborough College at the age of twenty. I use “encountered” because all of the working methods and furniture designs were a result of the movement developed by furniture makers such as Ernest Gimson, Sidney and Ernest Barnsley, Peter Van Der Vaals and the like. It was a serious learning experience to go around the workshops and to simply stand and observe. Everything was made of solid wood, everyone worked using hand tools and the design was Arts & Craft derivative.
In my second year I opted to make a three drawer chest of drawers. The rectangular “chest” stands on a base of four legs and four rails. Its overall dimensions are 30 inches high, 32 inches long and 16 inches wide. The “cutting list” was taken off the working drawing and passed to Arthur. His domain, the enclosed wood yard, was a short walk from the shops. Arthur was old and grumpy. He wore a threadbare tweed jacket with a torn pocket, a grey flannel shirt and a tie. In my three years visiting him to pick up material, his attire, like his bonhomie, never changed. Arthur had a small staff who were not seen. Their insight must have been a result of the years and the times spent sourcing material because their selection was superb.
After sorting out the daunting pile of lumber you have to get over the sort of ache that comes when you’ve just done something that takes your breath away or when you are up a ladder and a can of paint went overboard. Your stomach turns cartwheels. The road ahead stretches out of sight but you have to make a start. And the start is to butt joint the case pieces to width. But before you can begin making shavings, comes a big juggling act. Which is the best looking side of each board? How does one board marry best with another for color and grain? Which side is in or out? And finally which is top or bottom, left or right?
You don’t have to look too closely at these images to realize that this piece has not enjoyed the life of a cosseted, fussed over pedigreed piece of Arts & Craft work. Indeed, it has all the evidence of hard times, even some physical abuse. Although it has always been in my possession, I can’t imagine how it survived the odyssey. Lack of respect along the way may be down to the fact that it was never completed. That was because two weeks before finals in my second year I was called back into military service. At that time in the UK, National Service was two years full time and a few weeks of Territorial Service, something like The National Guard. The regiment I was seconded to was going on maneuvers and they “invited” me to go along.
The alternative was a little room with bars – not the kind with liquor.
The day I walked into the Dower House, my hall of residence at Loughborough, I met Lofty. Derek Knowles was six foot one, not tall by American standards but enough to get you the nick name the Brits give to such folk. For the next two years we roomed together and we shared a bench together. The bench was big with a vise at each end on opposite sides. Two things remained to be done on the chest, six pulls and six drawer stops, before I had to leave. Lofty managed to turn six pulls. They were installed dry but tight into three eighths diameter holes. After time and shrinkage, a couple got lost. Eventually, I put a dab of glue on the remainders until I had time to make new ones.
The drawer stops never did get made. That could have been something of a reason to not afford the chest the respect it deserved. I had radiused the edges of the fronts with the intention that they would protrude about an eighth of an inch. Without the drawer stops they came to rest as they impacted the back panels. The drawer fronts at that point are inboard of the edges of the case and the rails. I must tell you there is a no more effective way to give a chest of drawers an unfinished air than to inset drawer fronts with radiused edges. The visual reverses your intention. For the photo shoot I made the stops, the six pulls are photoshopped, three remain.
Backs got the same attention as any of the other sides. The two three quarter inch thick muntins are mortise and tenoned into the case with their face inset an eighth of an inch from the case edge. The panels are flush with the face of the muntin. They have a tongue on all four edges. The top and bottom form a shoulder with the case, the edges are made with a gap so the panel can shrink and expand. This is the first of the details, which allow for wood movement. It’s a common solution for panels but the scratch molding detail is a typical Arts and Crafts nicety.
To create a balance of shadows a bead is molded on the edge of the panel with a scratch stock. Much care is taken to get the lines of the bead molding and the gap shadow to be equal. A year or so later the panels have shrunk and the gaps are what they didn’t used to be. I’ve never known the panels to expand once the job is out of the shop.
Of course, the case stands on the bench while drawers are being made and fitted. Inevitably, some joker comes along and knuckles the back panels as if knocking on a door. Looking approvingly at you, he exclaims, “rattling good fit,” like you never heard it a thousand times before.
The standard finish of shellac and beeswax is not applied to any face where there is contact between the case and the drawer. That is the inside of the case, the bearer rails, the outer face of the drawer sides as well as the top and bottom edges.
The long front and back rails are joined to the case sides with twin through and wedged mortice and tenons. The bearer rails are mortised and glued into the drawer front rails they are housed dry into the side of the case and attached dry to the drawer back rails with a tenon short of its mortise depth and a gapped shoulder. This allows the case to shrink and expand.
The thing about the drawer stop is being sure you chop the mortise in the front drawer rails before gluing up. The stop has to fit the mortise, clear the drawer bottom and initially stop the drawer less than an eighth pf an inch proud of its correct stop point. It’s glued in place and adjustments made to align the drawer front using a shoulder plane.
Whether the dovetail joint is hidden as in the “single lap” version on drawer fronts or exposed as in the “through” version at the corner of a case, the layout, the tail to pin relationship, is all important.
Here, my first attempt at the joint shows my enthusiasm for volume but more, it shows my immaturity. Would that I had had the acuity of layout as practiced by the London cabinet makers of earlier times.
In the through and single lap version of the dovetail joint the lay out of tails to pins is salient. I gave it attention in The Complete Dovetail.
The case stands on a simple stool base of four legs and four rails, made flush on the outside faces and joined by mortice and tenons. The base is made to be a quarter of an inch larger all round than the case, chamfered on the top edge to marry the two parts.
The legs are tapered and chamfered on the edges that meet the rails which are chamfered on the bottom edge. The front rail is curved. The other three are straight and scratch molded with a double reed. All of this is typical Arts and Craft detail, in the pursuit of elegance.
The base is attached to the case with buttons another example of a technique to allow solid wood furniture to shrink and expand.
The wide drawers have a muntin to accommodate the two solid wood drawer bottoms.
The back piece is made narrow so that the bottom panels will slide into place under it
Panels, with the grain going left to right, are attached to the sides by a tongue which goes into a groove in a drawer slip. Another example of design detail which accommodates the hygroscopic nature of wood.
A bonus bright spot
“Clean up and polish” was a specific term with a specific meaning in the workshop at the time I made this piece. It comes at the end of the making process. “Clean up” amounts to planning surfaces to remove making marks, accumulated pencil smudges and grime, as well as machine marks to leave the surface smooth flat and accurate. It’s done with a smoothing plane typically an 0:4 1/2 and preferably with no sanding.
“Polish” means to apply the finish, which was shellac and beeswax. A coat of clear shellac followed by bleached beeswax made with pure turpentine applied with a lot of elbow grease.
If I’d known then what I know now - the disturbance in the grain, the straight line that looks like a butt joint when I knew there was no butt joint, all the indications of traumatic growth the result of an injury to the tree. My ignorance was complete.
As I planed the surface of one end there came a teeny tiny spot that was shining.
“Really?! There’s no shiny spots in woodworking.”
Everyone gathered round to opine. Further planing establish the bright spot as its size went from tiny to visible. Eric Drake, the group tutor came to see what the fuss was about and with a glance explained that it was a piece of shot from 12 gauge shotgun.
My hope was that the animal went unscathed but full marks...he got the tree.