A New Bench

When I found a huge slab of Ash this January, and began to think about building a new bench, I thought a good deal about the Dominy family of woodworkers. The Dominys, beginning with Nathaniel, worked on Long Island from around 1716 until the early 19th century and, by happenstance, their workshop survived intact, tools and all, until it was purchased by Winterthur museum during the 1940s. Their main workbench is a massive oak slab 16 feet long, with legs tenoned into it like the posts of a house. They built clock cases and tea tables, planed unthinkable miles of boards on it. At one end of the bench, a massive vise is wide enough to acomodate the seats of the windsor chairs they made. The bench looks exactly as if it had been beaten with a century of continuous work.

Nathaniel Dominy's bench is essentially utilitarian. Every moment spent to build it was stolen from the completion of orders and the making of a living. The same thoughts crossed my mind as I built my own new bench this Winter. Still, though, it was hard not to polish something that seemed so lasting and monumental. I found myself planing out the last of the saw marks, striking a bead onto the stretchers.

And so, this week, I was shaping the underside of a table top. This is axe-work - hewing the wide bevels that define the thin edge of the top. Half-way through, the blade glanced outward and straight into the bench. I winced, but that's how you get to be like the Dominy bench.

On the Tracks

We finally had an afternoon sunny enough to take pictures of the new table, so we carted it to the old rail yard. I'm not sure if this is trespassing, but its my new favorite place to shoot furniture. 

It was a huge relief to see this piece come together. Making it successfully meant getting the hang of the the tapered-tenon construction used in Windsor chairs - basically the top of the leg is shaped to match a tapering hole in the top, then locked in place with a wedge. This required a new tool - a reamer.

With a description written by the great chair-maker John Alexander, this was fairly straightforward to make. Basically, the tool is a wooden shaft with a cone turned at one end with a pitch  identical to tapered ends of the legs you turn. A blade fitted to a slot in the cone scrapes a matching hole as you slooooowly twist, clear shavings, and twist some more. The body is ash, and the blade is filed from the crooked end of a saw I found in our garage when we moved in. It took a few hours of tweaking and testing to get the thing working right but it eventually did. There is a particular thrill in getting such fine, precise results from such a dead-nuts simple tool. 

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An Unanticipated Development

So, I have actually found myself flipping back through a variety of blogs for some instruction on the point of how to begin. Most launch immediately into discussion as though,  some afternoon,  an idea dawned so fascinating that it demanded a blog. This will be a more gradual unfolding, and I should begin with introductions.  

I am, of late, a professional woodworker. I work with hand tools, and mostly old tools. I make things with saws and chisels and planes. This is a small way of introducing something that is, in small ways, astonishing. 

Billy Collins writes about splitting wood:

"the darkness inside the tree they shared

now instantly exposed to the blunt

light of this clear November day,

all the inner twisting of the grain

that held them blindly

in their augmentation and contortion

now rushed into this brightness

as if by a shutter

that, once opened, can never be closed."    

And so, today, I thought of the pine planks in the lumberyard, each torn from the wet darkness of the tree, and with a fragment of that exact darkness inside of them.