Peter Follansbee, SAPFM New England Chapter May Meeting

Left to right, Peter Follansbee, Freddy Roman, and Phil Lowe.

Freddy Roman organized another excellent monthly meeting for the New England chapter of the Society of American Period Furniture Makers this past Saturday. Hosted by Phil Lowe at his Furniture Institute of Massachusetts, it featured Peter Follansbee demonstrating 17th century green oak joinery and carving. Videos of the day appear at the end of this post.

Peter has an excellent website and blog packed full of information. A joiner at the Plimoth Plantation living history museum in Plymouth, MA, for nearly 20 years, he's a protege of Jennie (formerly John) Alexander and Drew Langsner, doing green woodworking (woodworking using undried, recently felled wood); he also teaches at Drew's.

He has an article from the Spring 2009 issue of Woodwork Magazine in PDF form here, covering much of what he showed us. He also has a new instructional DVD available from Lie-Nielsen. He's an excellent presenter, so if you ever get a chance to see him in person or buy his DVD, I highly recommend it. He's used to working in front of inquisitive audiences at Plimoth Plantation.

He works almost exclusively in green oak, building carved and joined chests and stools in 17th century New England style. Many of these items came over from England at the time. His primary method (he might say only!) of joinery is drawbored mortise and tenon, often in frame and panel configuration, without glue. The fact that existing pieces have survived four centuries attests to the durability of this method.

One of Peter's reproduction chairs built using these techniques.

Peter's primary stock preparation planes: top, a smoother with iron ground to scrub profile; bottom, a shop-made jointer. I love the jointer, because it's literally made from a piece of firewood. Crude as it is, it still does great work.

His simple travel toolbox, in the style of Toshio Odate's book "Japanese Woodworking Tools". This kind of work requires only a small set of tools. He carries around the wooden plane that's resting on top to show the indentation on the side at the front from the user's thumb. How many years of use did it take to wear that into the dense beech wood?

For the morning, Peter demonstrated stock preparation and joinery. He had several pieces in various stages of readiness, including a turned stool leg ready to receive its rails. He actually works very quickly, but takes lots of time to explain details and answer questions.

Out in the parking lot, Peter shows his hewing hatchet with cranked handle as he prepares to take the twist out of the piece of riven oak in front of him.

Back in the shop, using the scrub plane for fast stock preparation. Where the hatchet was coarse, this is medium.

Fine: final flatness with the jointer.

One of the interesting things he showed us was how joiners didn't bother forming parts into perfectly rectangular cross-sections. They left the inner, hidden face truncated, in what Alexander dubbed a "truncadon" in this article. This allowed them to use narrower stock.

Illustrating the "truncadon" cross-section dressed out of a wedge-shaped billet, leaving one corner off the rectangle.

Chopping a mortise.

Cutting the tenon shoulder on a rail.

Boring a peg hole in a tenon. The hole is slightly offset from the matching hole in the mortise, so the peg draws it up tight when driven in. The resulting drawbored joint requires no glue.

Shaping a drawbore peg. He doesn't use a dowel plate, he just rives off small peg billets, then shaves them down with a large framing chisel.

With the pegs driven in and sawed off flush. That joint is tight and solid.

After lunch, Peter showed us a variety of carving patterns and techniques. The work is nailed to a backing board, which is secured to the bench with clamps or holdfasts. He moves around it to accomodate the grain and the line of the cut, rather than moving the piece. This is used to decorate rails and stiles, as in the photo above, or panels that may be nailed together into small boxes or joined into frames for larger chests.

Peter's modest collection of carving tools.

An example finished panel showing a symmetric S-curve pattern. He said this is about 45 minutes of carving.

One thing Peter emphasized repeatedly was postures for control. The following photos show a variety of grips and postures while making curved cuts, both with and without the mallet.

Left elbow in tight, legs spread fore and aft to lower the body, driving the V-tool with a mallet.

Forearm resting on the work, following the curve in one direction.

Coming at it in the other direction. The workpiece stays in place as he moves around to accomodate grain and carving line.

Pivoting with the feet and torso. Some of this is full-body carving, not just the hands. It's very dynamic.

Rear view of foot placement.

The resulting carving, with another example on the bench.

Once the initial V-tool work has been done, further refinement occurs with bevel up...

...and bevel down. Some of these are sweeping cuts to follow the curves. If a chip is not coming out, wiggle the tool, don't flip it up, because that can cause a bigger chip to tear out.

Nailing down another panel. Many period pieces show the nail holes, they weren't done in the waste.

Closeup of the crisp carving and one of the nails. The dressed panel has seasoned for a week before carving to just dry out the surface.

Layout is done with marking gauge, compass, and square.

Peter disassembles the panel he built for illustrating frame and panel construction when he first started at Plimoth Plantation. This shows the back side, where the panel has been raised with the hatchet and plane to fit in the grooved frame; that also deals with any variations in thickness, presenting a uniform flat face in front.

The front side of the panel is carved. The pegs are omitted from the left-hand mortise and tenon joints for easy disassembly.

Here are a couple of chairs built by our host, Phil Lowe. These are deserving of a SAPFM meeting and blog post all their own, don't you think, Freddy? Hint, hint?

It was quite an inspiring day. I badly wanted to try this, and now I have the opportunity.

In central Massachusetts, there's always an oak down somewhere nearby. One had appeared just down the street from my house a few weeks ago. Since my wife had put her foot down about bringing stray logs home, I had resisted the temptation.

However, after seeing Peter, I just had to get some material to practice with, so I popped on over this evening after work to say hello. Of course, it had all been cut to convenient firewood length by the power company, but I figured there was still enough for some small carved panels and rails and stiles.

I found two marvelously straight-grained sections unsplit. One whack with the sledge on the wedges sent them clear through after they were set in a score line. Even the 1/16th splits came out beautifully. There are just a few minor defects in the wood.

Thanks, Jane, I'll make you a nice little box from some of this!

About 15 minutes of work with the tools shown (though I didn't actually need the froe for these splits; it's one I ordered from Drew Langsner 5 years ago). I didn't quite get the puzzle back together properly when I got it all home, but you get the idea.

Here are two videos of the day. Consider these the motivational programs; get Peter's DVD for the instructional program.

Supporting Coppice Agroforestry

Not as in the practice of, but as in the book project. CNN had a story today about Kickstarter, a website that allows you to help fund creative projects directly. I found this very interesting.

Poking around a bit on their list of current projects, I found this one: Dave and Mark write "Coppice Agroforestry". Dave Jacke and Mark Krawczyk are using Kickstarter to fund a book they'll be writing on the practice of coppicing. This is the management of woodland resources to harvest and regrow wood repeatedly on the same plant, sustainable over periods measured in decades. The wood produced this way is used for a variety of purposes.

Mark has a website dedicated to green woodworking, http://www.rivenwoodcrafts.com/. He has links to Drew Langsner, Don Weber, Jennie Alexander, and Mike Abbott, all people I'm familiar with. This falls right smack in my area of interest.

I don't know anything about these guys other than what I saw on Kickstarter and their websites, but I made a $50 pledge to help fund the project, for which I'll receive a signed copy of the book, for several reasons:

• I would love to see more books on the subject.
• I'd like to help support a fellow green woodworker.
• I like the Kickstarter concept, another way the Internet allows a larger community to support a shared interest. This is an interesting experiment for both the specific project and the general concept.

The way it works is you make a pledge toward the project's fundraising goal, not as an investor, but as a patron of the arts. If the total goal is met or exceeded by a stated deadline, all the people who made pledges are charged for their pledge amounts; if the goal is not met, all pledges are canceled.

Dave and Mark's goal of $5,000 has been exceeded at this point, but they actually expect to need about $18,000 total, which has not yet been met. They have a funding deadline of December 10, so if you'd like to participate as well, time is growing short.

And hopefully sometime next year, we'll all get to read the book. I could probably just wait and get a copy cheaper, but part of the Kickstarter concept is that if it's something that interests you, you get to help make it happen.

That's the thing. Without support up front, these projects might never happen, and something that you might enjoy seeing or reading might never come to be. You never know what these might grow into. This is opportunity creation. You might even want to try a project yourself.

Down The Garden Path

Do others know what led them to work with hand tools? This is what set me off:

Don Weber on the cover of the April, 2004 issue of Popular Woodworking.

It called to me like nothing had before. I'd been watching New Yankee Workshop for 15 years, and occasionally that crazy guy from North Carolina whose workshop was more disorganized than mine. I had lusted after every power tool and shiny jig made, and suddenly here was a bolt from the blue.

The figure on the cover seemed too bucolic to believe. But Don Weber's the real deal. He's a Welsh woodworker and blacksmith in Paint Lick, Kentucky, just outside the arts and crafts enclave of Berea (where my parents met in college, and just a hundred miles west of where I spent my last two years of high school after growing up in southeast Pennsylvania). His article "Entirely By Hand" described the construction of a small side table worked in green wood, riven straight from a log and built with hand tools. I wanted to do that. I really wanted to do that. But I wasn't ready yet.

Over the next 2 years, I started to accumulate new and used hand tools. I bought new Stanley 4, 5, and 6 planes and played with them a bit, but didn't really make any progress. That changed with two critical enabling events.

First, I found Chris Scwharz's article Sharpening Plane Irons and Chisels on the Popular Woodworking website. That finally allowed me to get my planes usable once I invested in a pair of DMT Duo-Sharp stones. It was the first step toward mastery of a gateway skill.

Second, I found Drew Langsner's website and ordered his book Green Woodworking: Handcrafting Wood from Log to Finished Product and a froe. I built the shaving horse from his plan, bought a drawknife, and started practicing on fallen wood I got from my coworkers (in New England, there's always a tree down at somebody's house somewhere).

The shaving horse I built from Drew's book.

So in July, 2006, when I saw the pile of logs at Boy Scout Camp Wanocksett at the base of Mt. Monadnock in Dublin, NH, I was ready. I was there as an Assistant Scoutmaster with my son's troop for a week of summer camp. They had cleared a spot for a new shower house, and felled a big oak that was crowding the Nature Den. The camp ranger was planning on cutting it all up for firewood. I asked him if I could use a couple for a project, then ran home to get my tools and shaving horse.

My timber processing tools. The orange paint keeps things from disappearing in the leaves.

Up to this point the biggest log I had split was 16" diameter 4' long oak. I decided to see if I could split the large oak lying by the Nature Den. They had left two 8' sections of it on the ground, so I didn't have to pull anything from the pile.

It took about 10 minutes to do the first split with wedges and sledge. Then another 10 minutes for each quarter split. I was quite surprised at how easy it was. I cut off some short sections and used the froe to rive off several pieces. I had intended to build Don Weber's table, but I hadn't been able to find my copy of the magazine, and I couldn't remember just what the legs were like. So I decided to model it on the shaving horse, a simple small slab top and tapered shaved legs.

During the day at Scout camp, the boys are all off at program time working on merit badges. The adults are free to use the camp areas: shoot skeet at the shotgun range, take a kayak or small sailboat out on the lake, climb on the climbing tower, go for a swim or a bike ride or a hike. Or just sit around the campsite all day drinking coffee, but where's the fun in that?

Every morning there's a short Scoutmaster meeting just to keep tabs on things. At the next meeting, I announced that I was going to split the other log, then would be up in the parking area making a small side table, and invited them to come see. So after the meeting I had an audience of eight middle-aged dads. The photos below are from the video that follows (courtesy of Doug Becker).

Starting the first wedge. The quartered first log is lying at the far end. That's the Nature Den behind it.

A second wedge to enlarge the crack.

Walking the wedges down the length of the log.

For furniture parts, it would be more practical to buck the log into shorter lengths first, but I wanted to see if I could split something this big, just for fun. Naturally, since there was an audience, this one didn't go as smoothly as the first one had. After 30 minutes, I still hadn't completed the first split.

Here's the problem: the log has a twist to it. That means thick, strong internal fibers holding the two halves together. The near end has two birch gluts inserted to hold it open. I finally got the halves far enough apart to get in with a hatchet and sever the fibers.

The video below is heavily edited for brevity. I've removed the original audio to spare you the gaggle of 12-year-old boys in the background as they worked on their ecology merit badge. Unfortunately, that means you don't get to hear the satisfying thock Thock THOCK! of the wedges seating, and the split popping and groaning under the strain.

The quarters of the first log. The halves of the second log lie at the upper left.

Three other Scoutmaster joined me off and on during merit badge time over the next three days. One was a builder from Cape Cod who had never used hand tools. Like Tom Sawyer, I let them try their hands at the shaving horse. Big grins as they pulled curls off the leg blanks with the drawknife.

The only work surface I had was the shaving horse and a couple of parallel clamps. Great for shaving, the horse makes a lousy planing bench. Plus, this was before I had heard of J. Alexander or Peter Follansbee. Peter's 17th-century hewing methods would have been a big help with the slab top. And since I hadn't yet seen Chris Schwarz's Coarse, Medium and Fine DVD, I didn't realize my jack plane could hog off big thick shavings.

So we spent a lot more effort than necessary. Every once in a while some other dad would wander by, rolling his eyes and saying he was glad he had his table saw.

But picture it. Perfect New Hampshire summer days at the foot of Mt. Monadnock, working in the shade of the maples lining the grassy assembly field. At the far side of the field, past the pines at water's edge, the lake glittering in the sunlight. What more beautiful workshop? Pure woodworking bliss.

The final side table. The splay on the legs is based on the shaving horse. It's too much for a small piece like this, but it'll do for rustic porch furniture. Look at that gorgeous ray flake!

I brought a couple of the oak rivings home. They've spent the last 4 years in my garage, so I don't think they can be considered green any more.

I may try some of Peter Follansbee's 17th-century techniques on these. I've been scouring his website recently.

For the next 2 years, a number of Schwarz's articles in Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine would form the basis for my skills, along with several books by other authors. Adam Cherubini's "Arts & Mysteries" column inspired me to use traditional techniques exclusively. I learned how to sharpen and use handsaws, braces, bits, and chisels. I learned how to make mortises, tenons, and dovetails. I still need lots of practice.

Two more things finally motivated me to real action. First was the the book The Joiner And Cabinet Maker. The original 19th-century text by an anonymous author and the 21st-century annotations and additions by Joel Moskowitz and Chris Schwarz provided valuable information and step-by-step skills.

Second was Tom Fidgen's old blog (converted to a new website). His use of wooden molding planes to reproduce a wooden door fascinated me, and his blog inspired me to start this one as I made the decision to finally build my workbench (and once again it was Chris Schwarz's work over 5 years that I was following).

So these days I'm well down the garden path. My uncle had started me on it when I was 8. For 40 years I followed the typical arc. I loved watching Norm every week. I can never say anything bad about him. But I no longer care about power tools. This is much more fun. And that crazy guy from North Carolina? I hang on his every word.

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