Author name: Enthusiast

We’ve some “kits” left over from May – collections of items on like subjects offered together at an attractive price (and we typically put together only 50 to 100 of each collection…so get ’em while you can)! First up, the “Mid-Century Furniture Collection,” with the book “Mid-Century Modern Furniture: Shop Drawings & Techniques for Making 29 Projects,” and the DVDs “Step-by-Step Mid-Century Modern Coffee Table” and “Building Techniques for Mid-Century […]

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A friend called me the other day with a question. He was matching a crackle-lacquer finish from the 1980s and wanted to know how this finish is made and how to apply it. Crackle lacquer is lacquer with so much solid material, usually silica, added that there isn’t enough binder (lacquer) remaining to glue all the solid particles together. The result is that the lacquer cracks when it dries and […]

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Perhaps the most important characteristic of wood is its grain. And grain orientation is undoubtedly the most critical consideration for charting a plan for cutting, milling and shaping wood. Therefore, reading the grain is paramount for good woodworking. When possible, we should always strive for planing, chiseling, rasping and gouging with the grain and not against it. Due to the critical importance of this guideline, the inverse, “going against the […]

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A lot of Danish Modern dressers are taller than your typical campaign chest because the designers added a drawer or two. But some of them look like the pieces shown here. After staring at the 25 campaign chests from part 1 of this series I hope you can see the connection. We have an unadorned dresser that is square and perched on a plinth. Just like a campaign chest, the […]

The post Design Brief No. 3: The Danish Campaign Chest appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

So after looking at the 25 campaign chests in the previous post, did you spot any patterns? What I see with these chests is that most of them are a square shape that is perched on some sort of plinth. After measuring a bunch of them, the typical size is 36” long x 40” high x 15” to 18” deep. The square shape of the carcase is 36” x 36”. […]

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While there are a dozen good ways to design a piece of furniture, I can write intelligently only about my own methods. I designed my first piece of furniture in 1993 and have – surprisingly – stuck with the same basic technique for the last 23 years. It doesn’t involve formulas or ratios (though I believe those also work). Instead it relies on what I was trained to do as […]

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