Electric Hand Planers

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Brian
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Re: Electric Hand Planers

Wed Sep 27, 2017 11:49 pm

Chris Pyle wrote:
Wed Sep 27, 2017 10:23 pm
Brian wrote:
Wed Sep 27, 2017 9:50 pm
Chris, I think that is a fair assessment. I feel similarly. That bit about red oak made me chuckle a bit as I've really had a dislike for red oak formed as a youth. It just seemed almost a depressing material to use...until I saw big panels of it quarter sawn and now I think....wow...red oak! Left without a finish other than by hand plane, and in quarter sawn orientation it is a gorgeous material. I've had the same experience with douglas fir, I always thought it to be junk as a kid. As a woodworker I don't think that way at all, I really enjoy it in its quarter sawn orientation.

Still, there is some call to the wild for me and live edge, but the state of it has worn on me a bit. Some of it I see done very very well with excellent proportions and an avoidance of gaudiness in the same way that Charlotte Perriand can make an otherwise dull looking skirted bench into a sex pot of design inspiration.
Brian, I had never heard of Charlotte before but I'm curious to know what you like about her designs. Not something I find very interesting at all. To my eye, her work vacillates between garish and somewhat dull. However, I do enjoy reading other's thoughts when it comes to design (either their own or their influences).

As to the slab tables: a family member has asked for a slab table and I'm in the process of trying to lead them down a different path. It's simply not something I'm interested in putting any effort towards. I don't despise them but there are plenty of people knocking them out because they are *hot* right now.
Add to her work the grouped efforts of those under the umbrella of Le Corbusier, she's partially credited for much of the furniture. It's my understand that she put forth more than partial effort.

I enjoy her work as a study in proportion. Her work which stands out to me are things such as the Tokyo Bench, which is incredibly simple and yet masterfully proportioned. I really would challenge anyone to attempt to better the proportions of that bench before writing her off.

If it doesn't have intricate joinery it likely will not pass 'go' with most of us and I accept that, but their is an architectural mastery to this work that reveals itself when we can step away from the detail of construction.

I can accomplish joinery technique without much pain but proportion is where I anguish, so I can greatly admire when someone gets it so perfectly right.
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Chris Pyle
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Re: Electric Hand Planers

Thu Sep 28, 2017 12:46 am

Brian wrote:
Wed Sep 27, 2017 11:49 pm
Chris Pyle wrote:
Wed Sep 27, 2017 10:23 pm
Brian wrote:
Wed Sep 27, 2017 9:50 pm
Chris, I think that is a fair assessment. I feel similarly. That bit about red oak made me chuckle a bit as I've really had a dislike for red oak formed as a youth. It just seemed almost a depressing material to use...until I saw big panels of it quarter sawn and now I think....wow...red oak! Left without a finish other than by hand plane, and in quarter sawn orientation it is a gorgeous material. I've had the same experience with douglas fir, I always thought it to be junk as a kid. As a woodworker I don't think that way at all, I really enjoy it in its quarter sawn orientation.

Still, there is some call to the wild for me and live edge, but the state of it has worn on me a bit. Some of it I see done very very well with excellent proportions and an avoidance of gaudiness in the same way that Charlotte Perriand can make an otherwise dull looking skirted bench into a sex pot of design inspiration.
Brian, I had never heard of Charlotte before but I'm curious to know what you like about her designs. Not something I find very interesting at all. To my eye, her work vacillates between garish and somewhat dull. However, I do enjoy reading other's thoughts when it comes to design (either their own or their influences).

As to the slab tables: a family member has asked for a slab table and I'm in the process of trying to lead them down a different path. It's simply not something I'm interested in putting any effort towards. I don't despise them but there are plenty of people knocking them out because they are *hot* right now.
Add to her work the grouped efforts of those under the umbrella of Le Corbusier, she's partially credited for much of the furniture. It's my understand that she put forth more than partial effort.

I enjoy her work as a study in proportion. Her work which stands out to me are things such as the Tokyo Bench, which is incredibly simple and yet masterfully proportioned. I really would challenge anyone to attempt to better the proportions of that bench before writing her off.

If it doesn't have intricate joinery it likely will not pass 'go' with most of us and I accept that, but their is an architectural mastery to this work that reveals itself when we can step away from the detail of construction.

I can accomplish joinery technique without much pain but proportion is where I anguish, so I can greatly admire when someone gets it so perfectly right.
Thanks Brian,

I appreciate the reply (and for taking my honest questions charitably). Just to be certain we are talking about the same thing, you mean this, correct?:
Image

Image

I suppose this is a time to chalk it up to different strokes and all that. I see nothing very interesting or worthy of further consideration but I suppose many do given the prices for some of her work.

I do appreciate form and proportion studies but beside it not looking clunky, I don't really see much else. It doesn't scream for attention which is nice but these images are sort of ho-hum to me. I've never studied interior design/famous designers so TIFWIW. Appreciate the discussion despite our different proclivities.
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Re: Electric Hand Planers

Thu Sep 28, 2017 6:56 am

Daruma wrote:
Wed Sep 27, 2017 11:15 pm
Chris H.


I can`t say I disagree with your overall assesment but I also think it has to do a bit with an axe you are grinding. For example, I haven`t had a TV since 2001, and I have never purchased an Iphone because I slightly abhore technology and feel it distracts people from their reality but it would be hard for me to fully assert they are useless even if they are to me.

To work hard and fastidious at using grain properly, and thinking about structural integrity over the course of time and then to see what the majority of the public thinks is great design and craftsmanship is disheartening for me as well. If someone puts a burly slab of figured wood on a shitty base we may think it sucks but lots of people think its a great example of craftsmanship. Even more frustrating is the amount of money people will pay for such pieces. https://www.1stdibs.com/furniture/table ... f_5842303/

But I can`t dismiss out of hand the whole world of slabs because I love the uniqueness and intricacies of many kinds of wood. I will concede that using them properly adds work to an already challenging and moderately sisyphean profession though and many rules and long periods of waiting are involved. That being said I have seen many beautiful slab and bookmatched flat or rift sawn pieces here in Japan that are over 50 years old that you couldn`t find an area you could slide the corner of a sheet of paper into. With that experience and the advice of the most skilled craftsmen I know, I believe they can be made into pieces of structural integrity made for the long haul and will continue to use them when desired in my work.
Perhaps I do grind an axe over this topic. I'm not sure quite why it exercises me so much, but it does. Wood is a challenging material to work with, and I respect anyone who engages in the wrestling match as opposed to taking the easy out with sheet good, composites, etc.. i think that choosing to work with a slab does tend to array factors against oneself, in terms of wood movement.

You mention having seen 50 year old slab pieces which are in good shape in Japan. I don't doubt that, but you may also wish to consider that very few homes in Japan have central heating and cooling and maintain relatively low humidity conditions year 'round. That is not the case here in North America, especially among the homes of people wealthy enough to buy fine furniture.

The vastly lower humidity conditions strongly mitigate against air dried material and against forms of construction which have wood oriented so that it can move a lot. Approaches which you can get away with in Japan or China, do not work always well here.

Case in point is a furniture store in Vancouver BC which I visited (not sure it is still around) which specialized in importing Chinese furniture. All of their furniture had issues with drastic shrinkage, miters yarning open, panels with huge gaps, etc., as the conditions in which they now sat were vastly drier than where they were made. And Vancouver is hardly what one would call a place with low humidity, at least not most of the year.

Another case in point is a place where I have done much work, namely the Boston Children's Museum, which houses a fully furnished Machi-ya from Kyoto. The ambient humidity in the Museum in the building is low, clearly lower than Kyoto. Many of the 125 year-old timbers have shrunk and checked as a result, and last year I had an opportunity to rebuild a couple of the tansu from the building. Besides being cheaply made, with really odd decisions about construction relative to wood movement, a lot of shrunk and cracked boards were in evidence, large gaps had opened up, nails were popped everywhere, etc.. Having looked at and repaired other tansu (when I lived in Japan), the construction ideas I saw in those pieces, like drawers with the grain running front to back, like panelling on the back of a long horizontal cabinet arranged vertically (ditto for ceiling and floor panelling) were much the norm for tansu. Those ideas do not work well here. Clearly the wood was not dry enough upon initial construction of those tansu to handle indoor environmental conditions in North America, and obviously houses must not be nearly so consistently dry in Japan as they are here.

So when you start recommending methods and approaches that work in Japan to others here who do not live in Japan, who live in houses with central heating, etc., I am going to push back against those ideas as a bit unwise. Because that is what I have seen, over and over again. I think you need to take that into account, since your woodworking experience appears to be limited to Japan only. There's a difference between wood which inhabits and environment which is only low humidity for a portion of the year as opposed to wood which spends its time in conditions of relentlessly consistent low humidity.

When I talk about slabs I am primarily referring to the use of 2~3" thick wide slices, usually live edge, cut from the middle portion of large logs and turned into table tops. I have grown to hate those things. However, I've also had experiences with far smaller and thinner pieces of solid wood 'slabs' which I have sought to employ in furniture builds. I feel lucky to have caught problems with wood movement in those components before the pieces were shipped out, and changed out those solid slab shelves for frame and panel versions, etc.. I want to pass on what I have learned to others.

When you start recommending approaches I have seen fail repeatedly, I have to say something. It's fine if it works for you there, and if it works for other Japanese craftsmen there. You may also wish to consider that how trees are cultivated, how trees are selected and cut, how green logs are stored, how logs are cut - - all of these things are done much more fussily and carefully in Japan than in North America. Shinkiba in Tokyo, where hundreds of thousands of logs are deliberately sunk underwater for extended periods of time before being sawn: there's nothing like that here, and if you mentioned the very idea of sinking logs to condition them to sawyers they would look at you like you were mentally ill. Who's gonna pay for that? And the prices you pay in Japan for such carefully cultivated and produced wood is commensurate with what has gone into that material. The idea of a lumber yard holding onto wood for 10, 15 or more years would be, in most cases here, viewed as a recipe for business failure due to a lack of stock turnover, and fabricators, by and large, aren't going to pay a premium for the practice.

And circling back to the beginning of this entry, it strikes me that describing my passion and conviction about frame and panel construction, and my criticisms of the use of slabs, most of which you appear to agree with, as me "having an axe to grind" is, at best, somewhat uncharitable a characterization. Would prefer discussions not verge towards personal attacks, no matter how vehemently you might disagree with another.
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Re: Electric Hand Planers

Thu Sep 28, 2017 7:01 am

Brian wrote:
Wed Sep 27, 2017 11:49 pm

Add to her work the grouped efforts of those under the umbrella of Le Corbusier, she's partially credited for much of the furniture. It's my understand that she put forth more than partial effort.
Brian,

I reserve special enmity for Le Corbusier, and the very mention of him here sets me right on edge. I could almost start a rant here. I ask you not to bring up that fucker again.

Okay, a small rant: Hah! his Villa Savoye, a white box on stilts where the owner was forced to move out as the house's interior conditions, endlessly leaking roof, etc. made it uninhabitable - - -this is celebrated by architects as some sort of masterwork. Grr. Don't get me started :evil:
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Re: Electric Hand Planers

Thu Sep 28, 2017 9:09 am

Chris Pyle wrote:
Thu Sep 28, 2017 12:46 am

I appreciate the reply (and for taking my honest questions charitably). Just to be certain we are talking about the same thing, you mean this, correct?:
Image

Image

I suppose this is a time to chalk it up to different strokes and all that. I see nothing very interesting or worthy of further consideration but I suppose many do given the prices for some of her work.

I do appreciate form and proportion studies but beside it not looking clunky, I don't really see much else. It doesn't scream for attention which is nice but these images are sort of ho-hum to me. I've never studied interior design/famous designers so TIFWIW. Appreciate the discussion despite our different proclivities.
I'm so glad we're having a design discussion, this is the rarest form of woodworking discussion online....and a good one at that!

In school for architecture we were taught to first look at structure in and of itself and without consideration for it's function. I look at that bench and see a work in which someone was able to completely restrain themselves away from anything beyond the simple form. She placed the legs well, the legs are similarly setback from the front and back edges proportionately. She provided a simple 1-1-1-1 space for the slats, and positioned the supporting cross members with consideration, they're above the legs and splitting the distance between the legs.

I'm prototyping a chair currently and have really put myself through some torture to get the proportions on the right track, I'll be re-making this same chair multiple times in order to get the design right. I've done that before having manipulated work multiple times to get the proportions to where I wanted them and so I can appreciate work for proportion alone.

I don't lust after it, but I can appreciate it as a study in design proportion.

Let's however not confuse study and understanding for admiration. I mention LC (I will spare you Chris, hahaha) as well, and I'll comment all the same in that it's not for admiration but understanding of early modernism and his position in that. Sometimes it is not the figure which matters but the fall-out and the reaction from. From reading Mira's book it was apparent that Nakashima greatly admired the work of Perriand and LC, yet his work can stand alone as he obviously did not feel the world should be made entirely from concrete but that it could be used to great effect in building a structure. I think the Conoid studio shows that, it's a wonderful building to be in.

I can admire Nakashima I feel, I've gone round and round with this in my head, but enough study of WWII and its effects has created a certain admiration and understanding for Nakashima. Consider that the man was successful in his career as an architect only to have his world crushed by internment. He required sponsorship to leave the camps and found himself working as a chicken farmer in New Hope after being a successful architect. Rather than giving up he pursues a career in furniture design and succeeds once again. There are not many willful enough to recover from that and persevere in an environment which followed.

Without Nakashima I would not have stumbled upon the beautiful work of his grandson as a teenager and likely would not be a woodworker. So while some parts of that I find frustrating, there is a great appreciation for it as well.

My study of this topic has taken me past the modernists toward the master builders of yesteryear and that is where the bulk of my admiration falls. I admire the simple Japanese house which lacks nothing in design or construction. I admire Ming furniture for the same reason, it considers everything. These man who did not write books or become known the world around have built truly incredible work that continues to reveal the depth of its consideration as we study it. By contrast, when we really boil down modernism I think one starts to realize that they just took what was already there and applied modern materials and mass manufacturing to it. Sometimes to good effect and others to complete failure. I think it is something to appreciate and something to detest all at the same time.
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Chris Pyle
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Re: Electric Hand Planers

Thu Sep 28, 2017 9:24 am

Chris Hall wrote:
Thu Sep 28, 2017 7:01 am
Brian wrote:
Wed Sep 27, 2017 11:49 pm

Add to her work the grouped efforts of those under the umbrella of Le Corbusier, she's partially credited for much of the furniture. It's my understand that she put forth more than partial effort.
Brian,

I reserve special enmity for Le Corbusier, and the very mention of him here sets me right on edge. I could almost start a rant here. I ask you not to bring up that fucker again.

Okay, a small rant: Hah! his Villa Savoy, a white box on stilts where the owner was forced to move out as the house's interior conditions, endlessly leaking roof, etc. made it uninhabitable - - -this is celebrated by architects as some sort of masterwork. Grr. Don't get me started :evil:
Chris, I'd like to hear more if you are willing to divulge. I hope you are willing to discuss designers, even if their design philosophies were repugnant. I do like Brian's idea of trying to study form/proportion even if I don't necessarily agree with his example. I'll respect your decision of censored topics if you are adamant that certain designers aren't to be discussed here.

This is your board and I'll abide by the rules.

Brian,

I'm not a great fan of modern architecture so that's probably why we don't agree on the allure of your referenced seat. As an aside, I had to look up the definition of sexpot and it appears to reference a sexually attractive woman. I suppose it's meant to be referencing an "attractive, fertile ground for exploration"?

Many lauded modern designers seem to me more like a grand circle-jerk of the highest minds. As the chasm between designer and builder grew wider, the products became sterile to my eyes and appear to be designed in a vacuum without much temporal consideration . I simply haven't much interest in anything produced from the Art Deco period onward (and perhaps even before that). I do like rectilinear design in furniture but I can also appreciate organic forms. David Fisher's bowls representing something I find very refined and organic while showing the controlled hand/eye of it's maker.

Perhaps we should create a new thread for discussing design/forms/etc. That would be a good place for ongoing discussion on the topic. I'll wait for Chris to respond before moving in that direction.

**I had my reply open for quite a while before submitting, in the interim Brian responded above. This post doesn't take his reply into account.
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Re: Electric Hand Planers

Thu Sep 28, 2017 10:12 am

Chris P,

I thought I'd written about that on my blog before, but it seems not. No shortage of reads on the topic however:

In general:

http://misfitsarchitecture.com/2011/05/ ... la-savoye/

More specifically here:

http://misfitsarchitecture.com/2011/09/ ... la-savoye/

I can't remember where i first read about the problems with the building, but it is likely in one of my architecture books, maybe Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn, which I can't lay my hand on at the moment...
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Chris Pyle
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Re: Electric Hand Planers

Thu Sep 28, 2017 10:47 am

Chris Hall wrote:
Thu Sep 28, 2017 10:12 am
Chris P,

I thought I'd written about that on my blog before, but it seems not. No shortage of reads on the topic however:

In general:

http://misfitsarchitecture.com/2011/05/ ... la-savoye/

More specifically here:

http://misfitsarchitecture.com/2011/09/ ... la-savoye/

I can't remember where i first read about the problems with the building, but it is likely in one of my architecture books, maybe Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn, which I can't lay my hand on at the moment...
Fantastic reads, thanks for the links. I firmly believe this is what happens when form is divorced from function. Unhinged from it's anchor, it spirals into chaos. It seemed like the next logical step in architecture/modernity to untether the form from it's function so there might be no barriers or restrictions on design. We were approaching, in our own minds, demigod-like power in our ability to force nature to bend the knee. But it turns out our ancestors understood there are always restrictions and it's how you work within those restrictions that ultimately produces a functional form.

If we fail to honor our ancestors and the work they put in, we are spinning out into the ether. It is the same reason I find people who claim carte blanche in their lives to likely be battling their own internal demons. Same reason I have a hard time accepting tabula rasa, I don't think each of us is born as the same blank slate. We have different parents, different cultures, different genetic predispositions and IQs. Look at behavioral genetics and see what links we carry with us. When we want to divorce ourselves from our lineage or those who came before us, we are almost guaranteed misery and failure.

So it is in nature, so it is with us.

**Also, just to be clear, I'm not making an argument for innate talent. Most successful people are work incredible hours at something to become good. Just want to make that clear.
Last edited by Chris Pyle on Thu Sep 28, 2017 11:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Electric Hand Planers

Thu Sep 28, 2017 10:57 am

This is what a modernist building from 1928~29 (Villa Savoye) looks like after less than a century in the weather:
098627953f253aa8889a3c4e1b2b192d.jpg
098627953f253aa8889a3c4e1b2b192d.jpg (96.21 KiB) Viewed 7384 times
When there is no eave, the walls take a lot of punishment from the weather.

Another pic:
IMG_3679.jpg
IMG_3679.jpg (91.53 KiB) Viewed 7384 times
A 'Machine for Living' he called it...
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Brian
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Re: Electric Hand Planers

Thu Sep 28, 2017 11:06 am

Sure, but it is also good to know where to put the legs on a table... in theory and practice :).

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