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.