Popular Woodworking 2000-12 № 119, страница 54
ralmear TS You need just one router bit to build a rock-solid post that shows the ray flake in quartersawn oak on all four sides. Woodworkers who build Arts & Crafts furniture look for wood that is loaded with ray flake — the silvery stripes that show up in quartersawn oak. But unfortunately, Mother Nature decided that ray flake can only appear on the quartersawn faces of a board, not the edges. So when woodworkers build a piece of furniture using thick posts (such as a Morris chair or the hall tree featured in this article) they have three choices: One: learn to live with ray flake on only two sides. Two: Apply quartersawn veneer to the plain sides. Or three: learn quadralinear post construction. The quadralinear post was used in Arts & Crafts furniture by Leopold Stickley (brother of Gustav), and it allows you to use four 3/4" or thinner quartersawn pieces to form a post with each face showing the ray flake. While simply mitering the long edges of the pieces to form the post would work, it's difficult to align the miters and keep them tight during glue-up. You could cut a spline in the four mitered edges, but quadralinear post construction has a couple advantages over splines. First, it's a historically accurate way of building the posts. Also, if you put a small block of wood in the cavity in the middle, you can use the end of the post as an attractive exposed tenon through a chair arm, for example. The most difficult part of making the quadralinear post is setting up the bit for the first cut. But first, the bit. We used a Baby Lock Miter bit from CMT. It's a bit expensive ($99, item #855.504.11, 888-CMT-BITS, www.cmtusa.com). This bit can be used on material from 3/s" to 3/4" thick, so you'll find other uses for it in your shop. To show how simple this procedure is, we built this Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired hall tree using quadralinear posts. After the posts are built, most of the project is just nailing pieces to other pieces. by David Thiel |
