nothingugly

  I can’t go on enough about how useful  my plotter is to me. I bought a used hp 430 plotter  in 2000 for about $1500. I can’t draw to save my life, so I use the plotter to print life size (1:1) furniture designs. I then use spray adhesive (photo mount sucks for this kind of thing, I use super-77) to stick it to a hunk of wood. Then I can just cut on the dotted line. Or, in the case of a curve, use a circular plane to plane down the the line, if I’m looking for real precision.

  I’ve been spending most of this week building models. Since I’ve been thinking about using containers for my house design, I figured I’d make some out of card stock. As usual, I got carried away, and printed up some container patterns on the plotter, complete with actual photo images of containers mapped onto the pattern. I stuck these to card stock, and then went nuts with double sided sticky tape and x-acto blades. The results aren’t half bad; I’ll post pictures soon. The sad part of all of this is that my plotter main drive belt shredded. I think it was old; the plotter doesn’t have a lot of miles on it. I replaced the belt, but now it flashes error codes at me, so I toted it off to the shop. No mean feat, these suckers are heavy, and too large to go UPS.

  Which brings me to my next point.I looked at replacement cost, in case the repair was egregious.  I’d upgraded the 430 to a 450c (I added color functionality). I did a quick ebay scan, and it looks like the value on these guys max out at about $500. And $70 shipping, if you’re lucky. But these are perfectly functional plotters, if low-res. And they’re built for commercial work, which means they’re meant for continuous, batch printing, and they’re meant to be repairable. So why not invest in one? I also use it for glass patterns. More on that, and the model project, later.

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I started making furniture by mistake. I really wanted a motorcycle shop. I’d purchased a disreputable looking honda motorcycle which had come my way at a good price. While I was learning how to ride, I decided that I’d try my hand at tuning it up. After about a week’s sweating, I managed to destroy the engine (I stripped a head bolt. Don’t do that. It sucks). I trucked the mess down to a friend’s garage, and we put it back together, better than new. It was the most fun I’d had in ages - and a totally legitamite way to get really filthy. So, I wanted a motorcycle shop.

Somewhere in the process of building the cycle shop, a table saw snuck in. I think that my logic was that I needed a table saw to make the benches and built-ins. Besides, I knew that I wanted to build a house someday, so I’d need a portable table saw, right? A contractor’s saw, that’s gotta be portable. I learned later that it’s portable in the sense of “If you have two guys and a pickup truck” and you’re willing to take it apart. No matter. I bought the saw, and then I started looking for books. I knew I wanted to build cabinets to store my stuff, and had no clue how to start. During my searching I stumbled across Krenov’s “The impractical cabinetmaker“. I bought it instantly, just because of the title. And was introduced to one of the modern descendants of the arts and crafts philosophy:

…what I leaned about cabinetmaking from Carl Malmsten and Georg Bolinwas, in a sense, fairly traditional - time-tried skills and rechniques, a solid and and even sensitive relationship to wood and tools, and a response to fine, I’m tempted to say refined, lines and well-balanced proportions. … The things we picked up at school stayed with some of us. They went far back, to Gimson, the Barnsleys, and other quiet craftsmen. And they are timeless.

I love his work, but I also find that it has a fairly limited vocabulary. He makes many variants of the “cabinets on stilts”. Lots of gentle curves, inverted curves, and woods which are easily worked by hand. He rightly despises working with exotics that resist hand work. They tear, they split, and just generally misbehave. Some have so much silica in them that they cost more in worn tooling than in the actual wood. But lord, they’re beautiful. Anyhow, I wanted to see more of both the philosophy, and some of the inspirations for Krenov’s works. A hint dropped in an article about his school up in the College of the Redwoods (I wish I could remember where I read it) led me to a particular pamphlet about Edward Barnsley.

I won’t attempt a biography of Barnsley. His studio has survived, and there’s a wonderful book about his life and work. However, that book is awfully stingy with pictures. In fact, the only place I know of to find photos of his work, besides that book (and a very few on the shop’s site) is in the pamphlet- “Edward Barnsley, sixty years of furniture design and cabinet making”. It’s referenced in the book list from the College of the Redwoods, but it took me a year to track down a copy of my own. As of this writing, It’s not even listed on abebooks. So, to make a short story really long, I’ve reproduced it here. There’s no copyright listed, but I did contact the foundation, who haven’t written me back. So, enjoy!

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