Popular Woodworking 2007-11 № 165, страница 28
Period Details Use elements of antique furniture to evoke period style. Arts & Mysteries by adam cherubini The show is inside. I patterned the inside of my desk after mid- 18th century desks. I'll wrap up this series in next month's issue when I apply the finish and attach the hardware. I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to seeing this done! 've almost finished building my standing desk for my workshop. In this installment, I'll discuss the approach I used to outfit the interior of my desk. Design: When to Keep it Simple Thomas Chippendale illustrated a "plain and neat" design for an interior of a desk and bookcase (secretary) in his 1762 book, "Director." It featured a central gallery (of cubbyholes) over a row of three drawers flanked by banks of four drawers, one atop the other. The drawer fronts appear to be flat and otherwise free of adornment beyond Chippendale's characteristically sublime proportions. We often think of Chippendale as synonymous with that which would later be disparagingly called Rococo. His designs typically drip with carved ornamentation. Yet his desk interior appears uncharacteristically restrained. While American builders, steeped in good taste, toned down Chippendale's Rococo designs regularly, their desk interiors showed a fair amount of ornament. New England desk interiors often featured blockfront or moulded drawers, and doors with shell carvings. This sometimes mimicked the exterior of the piece, sometimes not. Philadelphia builders featured serpentine drawer fronts, arched doors and tiny columns. Some builders created a wraparound effect (they called it a "winged" desk) or staggered tiny drawers into a sort of terrace. Architectural influences are evident in most desk interiors. Columns, arched doorways and galleries make the desk into a tiny courtyard. Almost all of the finest pieces include a center door (called a "prospect") as a focal point. When present, these doors are often flanked by columns, or are curved, carved or made from figured wood. Lastly, secret compartments are typical. These may have been there simply to amuse the buyer, but it's possible they were included to safeguard valuables. Some secret compartments are fairly pedestrian, but others include tricky wooden spring locks or the like. I didn't make any secret compartments in my desk, but I can see how they would be great fun to build. Structure: A Box in a Box? Nineteenth-century desks used a carcase-inside-a-carcase approach. The fitted drawers and cubbies were contained in their own carcase, and slid in from the rear. Eighteenth-century desk interiors often didn't have sides and sometimes didn't have tops either. Individual components were attached to the desk carcase by way of shallow stopped dados and ever-present glue blocks. Due to space limitations, this is the method I am choosing, but if I had more space, I would have preferred to build a separate carcase for the interior. Preparing Thin Stock by Hand For this project, I needed stock considerably thinner than I typically use. The period pieces I examined used 1/2" stock and thinner. I chose to prepare all my main structural pieces at a 3/8" thickness because I have a good 3/8" dado plane. The drawer blades and the cubbyhole dividers in the galleries were on the full side of 3/16", again because that was the size of my smallest firming chisel. Joinery: Two Kinds of Dados The desk interiors I've seen were all assembled with dados and glued. Two sorts of dados are used seemingly universally: Stopped dados and stopped dados with a V-groove. Their use depends on how you want the intersection to look. When you can hold one piece back from another, the stopped dado is used. Where you need a flush intersection, the V-groove gives a mitered appearance. 26 ■ Popular Woodworking November 2007 PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR |
