Popular Woodworking Magazine: In the November issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine, you’ll find my 6-Board Chest article. The opening photo (shown below) shows three chests – mine (the blue one), Tim Henricksen’s (the yellow one) and Ty Black’s (the green one). My chest (the one I teach you how to build in the article) has an ogee on both ends.
3 comments:
So, honestly, I clicked on this because I was just dying to know what an "ogee" was. It just sounds like such a fun word and I had never heard or seen it before. However, now that I know what it is, I am less impressed with the article. I mean all you really need to do to lay out an ogee is to know how to draft and to do it on wood. Granted I have never seen someone draft on wood in order to cut it properly, but it still seems kind of funny for someone to have an article about something so simple, and seemingly pretty basic. It kind of just seems like something a woodworker put online because he was looking for something to do besides work with wood, but it seems like he could at least take some time to talk about different types and shapes of ogees or maybe where they are used or even an article on how to the entire chest shown in the picture. It just seems like a was of an article to have so little information in it.
April expects a lot of Mr. Shwarz, and why not. By putting himself out there as an expert he invites the criticism of his readers. She also makes an interesting point, that "all you need to do... is to know how to draft and to do it on wood." The transformation between what happens in scale on paper and what happens in full scale in the shop is a study in metaphysics to me, and one with which I have a perhaps not entirely healthy fascination. When we draft an object on paper we are dealing in abstraction. We see things in a way which we cannot see in the world. Occluded edges become visible, orthogonal lines which should diminish instead betray perspective to maintain their proportions, and the bloody edge of a section reveals the inner space of an object. Computer modeling compounds the mystery, populating a limitless virtual void with objects devoid of scale, inviting us to inspect them to levels of detail inscrutable to the human eye. Given this, I am happily reminded by Mr. Shwarz and by April that sometimes "all you need to do... is to know how to draft... on wood."
One of my earliest carpentry teachers counseled me to "build by inspection" wherever possible. One of the ways which we encounter this most often is when materials deviate from their nominal dimensions, as almost all do. We don't even realize it half the time, but to an outsider, the language we use to describe the materials we work with would be literally insane. 1x4 is nothing of the sort, and even 3/4 ply turns out to be more like 0.7188 inches thick, give or take a few 10 thousandths. I worked for a year in a shop that had no tape measures. Length was a tick mark on a story stick, thickness captured by compass or caliper or divider, and everything, even 38' long objects, was drawn full scale. The level of precision practiced by the carpenters in that shop (myself excluded of course) was higher than any I have seen in a modern shop. It may be that the alchemy of drafting and the ciphers we use to translate that codified world of scale into our own invite more errors than they avoid.
I, like April, only clicked on this article because I really wanted to know what an ogee was. I found that it was actually pretty interesting to see someone draft straight on to the wood with guidelines but no real plan for the style of the detail. I admire that sort of talent and skill. It is also really cool that there is so many ways to draw that one simple detail and in turn change the entire theme of the chest.
Post a Comment