Making a tin foot warmer.
Anyone who is a fan of old tools, barns, bridges and all things nostalgic must be a fan of books and art by the late Eric Sloane. I have a few of his books and have completely worn the cover and binding apart on my first copy of A Reverence for Wood. Another favorite is A Diary of An Early American Boy, Noah Blake 1805 (Oh to know whatever really happened to Sarah Trowbridge..). Mr. Sloanes books are filled with drawings of traditional tools and workspaces that have been a great source of inspiration to me, and many others I am sure.
To me the drawings offer a clear idea of the tool or object, with the distractions of photographic details. For example:
Image from "Diary of an Early American Boy, Noah Blake 1805". by Eric Sloane, copyright 2004, Dover Publications, ISBN 0486436667. All rights reserved.
This drawing of a tin footwarmer cleary shows what the object is and what it does. I have wanted to make one of these for a long time. You can find several designs in books and they seem to pop up in various forms in antique shops now and then.
Since I don’t have an antique of my own to measure for a pattern I had to work from drawings and photographs in books and online to get my dimensions. The design I ended up with is a little bigger than the average sizes listed. The actual tin box is about 7″ tall and deep. Here is my pattern set in progress.
The trickiest part for me to work out was the door opening and verticle corner connections. I don’t know how most of the antiques are joined, but I used a lock joint on two corners to connect the two halves. The only solder on the whole project is on the door hinges. My doors ended up a little crooked. It is becoming more and more apparent how close you have to stay to a line to keep things square.
I was going to try to make the wooden frame with all hand tools. But by the time I got two tin boxes finished my patience was pretty well shot. So I cheated a little on the yellow pine frames. Most of the original designs I looked at had mortice and tenon joints on the top and bottom frames. I did lap joints on the corners and nailed the inserts in place.
So here are the two finished foot warmers. Instead of making trays to hold hot coals we will be heating cut brick for the heat source. I feel safer with the heated brick than I do with the hot coals in a camp situation. We will actually use these on cool nights in camp and do not want anything that could give off carbon monoxide or start fires inside of our canvas tents.
Tramp Art Church update.
The proportions of this cupboard have been puzzling me for some time now. As it sits without any layers of applied wood, it looks kind of odd. I have convinced myself that the finished project that sits nebulously in my head will balance out as layers are added. Along the way I have tried some different ideas on the sides and back. This shot
shows a couple of ideas that I tried out for the space on the sides. The problem arises when the door is opened. Anything added to the sides cannot interfere with the full opening of the doors. In my vision of the project, the doors will be left open. In the end, both of these ideas were scrapped.
The bottom section is going well and is pretty straight forward. Here you can see that I have added the carved borders, notched the shelves and added the church door influenced center drawer front.
The majority of my time was spent working out the top section. I am working on combining punched and distressed metallic elements with the traditional tramp art carving. After I get all the individual parts cut out and notched, I will begin painting the background and etch the metal elements before final assembly. Here is where I left off:
My point and shoot digital camera had no idea what to do with this setup. I may set this aside for a while because I have had a couple new orders pop up. Also, there is another piece started that I want to post that involves sea critters and buttons.
As a little preview….
Tramp Art church cupboard finished at last.
In my previous post I talked about how I used tin and wood to make this church influenced tramp art cupboard. At that time I was satisfied with the way the tin accents worked with the tramp art carved cupboard, but did not like how shiny the whole piece looked. I wanted to feel the influence of the weathered roofs and walls of the churches and cathedrals of England and France, that feeling of both resistance and decay battling for command. What I had was what looked to me like an Erector Set project gone wierd.
It took several attempts to finish this cupboard. I couldn’t seem to come up with a combination of finishes or treatments to get the patina I wanted on the metal. I started out trying to get a nice rusty look using salt water and time. But that was taking way to long and not getting the level of rust that I wanted. So I switched to diluted ferric chloride and man did that take care of the problem. It ate the tin off of the base metal in swathes. It actually did more damage than I wanted and I ended up with a very dull brown box with tarnished tin. 
I have had several colors of bronzing powders in the paint cupboard since some time in the late 80′s. They give a really nice metallic finish and are easy to work with once you figure out how much binder you want to mix in to the powders.
Gold was the first color I used and I thought I had completely ruined the thing. I hated it. So I started throwing green and blue (yep, the old load the brush and fling it technique) at it and things started happening.
You can see here how the colors and layers worked over the punched designs in the tin and wood. The brown is actually a little darker that what you see. The green, blue and gold metals, along with the corroded tin and wood work well together.
Overall I am happy with the results. Somehow my wife’s first comment on seeing the end result was that it looked like a forest from a distance. ??? Oh, and it was her idea to put the ball feet on the box. That detail really lightened up the feel of the whole cupboard. Before that it seemed kind of flabby and bottom heavy.
This project helped me start learning some metal working techniques that are new for me, along with using the punchs to incise the wood. I can definitely see using these ideas in future projects. If you are interested in this piece it will be listed on my Etsy site.
Tramp art and tin church cupboard nearly finished.
I finally got a couple of evenings back in the shop to work on this little cupboard again. I got side tracked getting my antique blacksmith forges ready to use now that the weather is good enough to work outside. Hopefully in a few months I will have more to say about using the forges.
In the previous post on this project I added most of the tin except for the sides. Now for the sides I have added punched tin panels with raised beading along the edges. I used my bead roller for the first time on this project and it took a little tinkering to figure out how I wanted the corners to look. I know there is a better way, which I hope to learn when I take a tinsmithing class at Campbell Folk School this fall. After adding the half round beading to the cupboard I decided it was a bit smooth. So I took a small cross peen hammer and added creases along the length of the tin.
It is interesting how something as simple as a series of hammer dings can change the look of a project.
The final part to be added was the drawer pulls. In this case I heated off the shelf eye screws in my forge and reshaped them a little with a small hammer. They are mismatched and twisty and I think look pretty good against the crimped tin.
Between now and the next time I post on this project I will be working on adding a rusty patina to the tin.
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Building a tramp art and tin church box.
A couple of years ago I built a series of three small cupboards. Each cupboard was based around some salvaged wood drawers that I have used in a number of projects. As it usually happens, two sold right away at a gallery show at The Wheeling Artisan Center. The third languished. I tried repainting the piece and was nearly at the point of burning the whole thing. But I held off and stuck it away for future inspiration to strike.
In late 2009 my wife and I went on a trip to Paris, a place that oozes with inspiration, history, art, graffiti, flowers, crazy traffic and great crepes. One of our favorite things to do is to go to the weekend flea markets to shop. There was this one table that had two large folk art churches, one metal and the other some combination of toothpicks and other small wood items. At the time I did not give the metal church much thought, to much to see and do. But later on I got to thinking about combining tin with the stored away church box.
One of the many irons I have in the fire is to learn some tinsmithing. I have been aquiring and refurbishing tin tools and occasionally fiddling around with a little tin. I haven’t really made much of anything useful yet, but have been learning more about how the various tools can be used. So I tinkered around and started adding some kinked and curved metal accents to the church.
This went pretty well. I have plans to rust the metal later on. We decided that the look I am going for will be post nuclear appocolypse rusty church meets Chrysler Building. Time will tell.
As the metal went I kept rolling ideas around about what to do with the painted wood flat areas. I thought about fitting tin inserts, too hard, then gold leaf, too expensive, then settled on punching. Using my tin punch tools I started tooling the areas much like you would leather or tin punch panels.
This is really starting to look OK to me. I have raised tin panels cut for the sides that still need to be tin punched before being applied to the sides of the box. I know what I want to do for drawer pulls and will do them as soon as I get my forge ready to fire up for spring.
One of my many goals is to use less energy resources in my creations. This tramp art church is leaning more in that direction. All of the metal work is done by hand, no electricity. When I forge the drawer pulls I will be using renewable natural charcoal instead of coal. Granted, a lot of energy was used to produce and transport the tin plate and paints and that is something to work on. But I think it is progress over my older, all power tool method of producing rustic work. I hope that in the near future I will be adding more hand tool work and less power tool work to my creations.
Beginning Blacksmithing
Tinsmithing Class
Coopering Class
Lost Art Press
