One of the first questions people used to ask me at crafts show was “Can I put this outside?” My answer was always yes. Because, you can put your dining room table outside if you want to after all. The next questions were usually will it rot and will it get bugs. Again the answers were yes. This may have killed some sales, but was true. Then I would tell them that their dining room table would rot and get bugs outside also.

In my experience the maple and willow furniture that I made would get a little wobbly after two or three years in direct weather and would be in bad shape by five. However, under roof the furniture would last a long time. Just how long became apparent the other day when my wife and I tried to figure out how old the “Big Ass Beer Drinking Chair” that sits on the front porch was. I got to digging in the files and found that it was made in 1997 or 1998. Here is a pre-digital scan of the chair in 1998. Man did I need to get a better camera and learn how to use it.We used the chair around the yard and on the porch for several years. By 2005 it was showing some wear. We had been soaking it once or twice a year with a water sealer to preserve the chair. Here is the chair on the porch in 2005.

Well, by this time even water sealer was losing out to bugs and nature. The bark had held on longer than I thought it would, but was coming loose. We stuck the chair out in the yard on the bricks to let nature take her course with the chair. At some point we dry brushed some white paint on the chair, because as the glorious Dolly Parton says, “a good coat of paint makes any old barn look good”.

At some point we just painted the whole thing white and put it on the porch. I don’t know when that was, but there have been several coats of white. One leg is a little short now and I need to replace a piece in the back, but the chair is still functional and will hold you up while drinking a beer or whatever.

Why did I write this rather pointless post? Not sure. I guess I was just surprised that the chair has lasted this long.

Categories: Painted Folk Art, Rustic Furniture

Tagged: maple rustic chair, painted rustic furniture, rob gorrell, rustic furniture, rustic porch furniture, white painted chair

Repairing a tin lantern.

Rob Gorrell

Posted on October 22, 2012

I have been doing a lot of reading about coopering and tinware lately and trying to learn the techniques myself. One area that I have found very interesting is in the repair of tinware, buckets and other handmade items. I think sometimes it is easy to get caught up in the idea that every handmade item produced in the pre-industrial period was flawless, and that we should only present perfect reproductions. But not every tinsmith was an expert. There were people cranking out crap then just like today, the difference being that the crap wore out and some of the really good stuff survived.

And they fixed stuff. I don’t have the reference handy, but there are lots of documented repairs that have made it own to modern times. So in that spirit, here is how I repaired a tin lantern that I made.

Last winter I made two tin lanterns for us to use at reenactments and living history events. We used them a few times and they worked pretty well, until one of the rivets came loose and the handle fell off. Well actually I guess I should say that the lantern fell off the handle to be more accurate. You can see here where one of the rivets pulled through the hole. It turns out that I used the wrong rivets, which were also too long.

So I cut out a heavy piece of hot dipped tin plate and curved it to ft over a wood mandrel. I also punch a proper hole for a new rivet.

Next, I cut a small washer for the inside of the handle, then riveted the washer, handle, and curved plate together.

The final step was to solder the assembly back onto the lantern.

So the lantern is now good as new. Maybe not perfect, but fully functional.

Categories: Folk Art, Tinware

Tagged: candle lantern, colonial tinware, folk art, handmade, hot dipped tin, lantern repair, tin lantern, tin repair, tinsmithing, tinware

Making a large wood tankard.

Rob Gorrell

Posted on August 22, 2012

Each time I make something in my shop I try to improve on a technique that I am learning, and often try to add a new skill along the way. This time I decided to try my hand at making a wooden tankard. The tankard I made was based on an 1808 example that was found in Denmark.

Right off the bat I could see that adding the handle was going to be a challenge. In most examples I have seen the handle is an integral part of the body, with a stave and handle being made in one piece. If you are planning on using metal bands this creates a problem as there is not simple way to get the band installed because of the closed loop of the handle. In this image of the original tankard you can see that the handle is made in two sections which would make the banding much easier.I tried to get in touch with the person who originally posted this image but have not heard back yet. It would be great to find out more about the original. You can also see that the maker opted for wood banding. But I have not tackled that challenge yet.

I am skipping past splitting and roughing in the staves to show what happens if you read your angle gauge wrong. When I use this gauge I have to remember that the 10 reading equates to a 10″ radius, not a 10″ diameter, which is what I wanted. I think I will make a new gauge that is layout in diameter numbering so that I don’t make this mistake as often.

After re-jointing all of my staves to the proper angle I was ready to raised the vessel. After raising the sides and making some fine adjustments to the angles I made it to this point. You might notice the adjustable pipe clamps. I end up using these when I don’t yet have a proper band the right size handy. Not something you would do a living history event, but works well when no one is looking. Once all the joints looked good it was time to trim the top and bottoms to get the body of the tankard ready to croze.There was a good bit of scorp and spokeshave work to be done to get the body nice and round and ready for the croze and bottom. A good cooper would be much closer to a finished shape at this point, but once again it is apparent that I am not a good cooper yet. It is important that the inside of the bottom be very close to round or the bottom will not fit correctly.

The next photo is of my crozing tool that I made at Tiller’s International, and the croze (bottom groove) that was made with the tool.

Up to this point this project moved along reasonably well. Making the handle and lid was, well, interesting. Maybe in a later post I will do another and show more details. The high point was that I got to use my newly acquired Stanley 45 to make the groove for the locking mechanism to ride in. The 45 takes some tinkering to get set up and ready, but it sure is fun to use.

From here there was much filing and sanding to get the lid and handle finished. Numerous “opportunities for future improvements” were found during this project. I ended up with a functional lid, but is not graceful by any means.

But in the end I ended up with a tankard that is fully functional and will be useful at our living history events this fall. There will definitely be a Tankard 2.0 to build on the results of this project. But, as Jethro Bodine is famous for saying, “All great artists must suffer”. Except for him that meant skipping breakfast.

The finished tankard.

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: cedar, cedar bucket, coopering, croze, folk art, green, hand tools, handmade, rob gorrell, Tankard, traditional woodworking, wooden bucket

Variations on a Parisian street sign.

Rob Gorrell

Posted on August 20, 2012

The Carnavalet Museum in Paris has a fantastic exhibit of trade signs made up of original metal signs saved as many sites in Paris were being torn down to make way for new streets and buildings. One of my favorite signs was this all metal sign of a trumpeting angel. I have no information about the actual original use for the sign. To me she is a kick-ass messenger trumpeting some important message to passers-by. I feel like the branches she carries might be some sort of olive branch, symbolizing the possibility of peace and joy.

I thought about this sign many times after we got home and eventually decided I wanted to make a folk art carved sign inspired by this street sign. I wanted to combine some different materials such as copper, steel and wood to create my own version of this great antique sign.

I started out with a basswood blank and cut out the blanks for the wings and body of the angel. I’m not much of a carver, so the carving is pretty basic. I was going for some sort of loose quilted look. You can see where I planned to attach the wings and cape later on.

After I carved and sanded the wood parts, and put the parts together, it was time to base coat the angel. I started with a sort of light mustardy color. I did not want this piece to end up all dark right off the bat, so I did not antique the paint layers very much. This photo was taken early on in the painting process. And yes, I know the head looks a little Cro-Magnon at this point. Shelley helped me get it looking a bit more human before the sign was finished.

And yes, that is an awesome post vise.

I created a sort of flowing cape from some salvaged copper next and fastened it to the body behind the wings. The original sign had another apron of sorts in the front but I decided that I did not like the way it looked. So I left if off.

It was at this point that I ran into a problem, the hair. In my mind I wanted to sign to have hair inspired by the way some girls wear their hair in big loose style like this (as a guy I guess I really don’t know what the style is called, but this model is very pretty).

My technique was to curl sections of wire and glue a number of them into the head of the angel. Well……..it did not exactly come out as I imagined. It looked more like a victim of a bizarre accident with an extension cord. We worked on it later on in the project and got the “hair” under control. It isn’t what I envisioned, but at least it is not demonic anymore. The foliage on the original sign was flat and cut out of the metal sheet with the rest of the sign. I wanted to give the sign work shape and movement with a copper garland. It took a while to cut out all of the leaves, shape them on the mandrel and solder them to the twisted copper wire stems. I am happy with the way it came out in the end. In fact, after seeing how the foliage came out I decided that I wanted to leave out the hanging sign that the angel was holding in the antique sign. The trumpet is also copper as was pretty simple to work out.

The remainder of the project involved the wavy metal banner that supports the angel. Rather than try to figure out some way to hide the bars that attach the angel to the banner, I decided to make them a prominent part of the design. Since it was a nice day when I was working on this part I used my smaller outdoor forge. This required some creative fire management to get the large banner supported during the several heats needed to work up the banner and straps. The hanging bars are attached to the banner with hand hammered copper rivets.

So at the end of it all we ended with the angel sign shown below. I think it still needs a little work here and there to really finish off the project. The next project in this grain will be a scrolled metal wall bracket to support the sign outward from a wall.

Categories: Folk Art, Painted Folk Art, Traditional woodworking, Whittling

Tagged: folk art, French antique sign, hand carved, hand made, painted folk art, rob gorrell, traditional woodworking, trumpeting angel, wooden folk art

Making a small keg.

Rob Gorrell

Posted on May 17, 2012

One weekend a while back I got the idea to try to make a small keg for drinks or other liquid storage. This would be a straight sided, “white cooper” container. I am learning white coopering which covers many straight sided containers such as buckets, piggens, tubs, churns, etc. Making the curved staved barrels is a whole different skill set, which I do not have.

Making something with two ends in it turned out to be trickier than I thought. To fit the end into a bucket you leave the top band in place and loosen or remove the bottom band. This loosens the staves so that the bottom will slip into the crozed groove near the bottom. Doing this from above allows the bottom disc to spread the staves enough to snap into the groove (hopefully). Once the bottom is in place and fits correctly, the bottom band is replaced. But with a vessel with two bottoms I had to insert the second end from the outside, which was as simple, but I finally got it in place.

For the handle I fired up my forge and made a simple iron handle held in place with eye screws. The whole thing was then painted with red milk paint.

After taking this photo I added a small wooden tap in one end.

Categories: Coopering, Traditional woodworking

Tagged: coopering, hand made, hand tools, red milk paint, rob gorrell, traditional woodworking, wood keg

Coopering Tools class at Tillers International.

Rob Gorrell

Posted on May 15, 2012

Last weekend I attended the Coopering Tools class at Tillers International in Scotts Michigan. It was my second class at Tillers and was a very good experience. The goal of the class is to make a croze, inshave, curved draw knife, a set of bands and some gauges. It was a large order for a two-day class.

Coopering tools made at Tillers International

This class covered a lot of ground in a hurry. The purpose of the class was not to make us expert tool makers. The goal was to have tools to make buckets. Most of the class would be staying two more days after this class to make a piggen using their new tools. I had taken the piggen class before and would not be staying.

The class was taught by Chuck Andrews and Peter Cooper (yep, that’s really his last name), assisted by the staff and volunteers at Tillers. Chuck and Peter also teach buckets, butter churns and barrel making at Tillers.

The first morning we started out with an informal meet and greet information session at the guest house. The house has been undergoing a spruce up and is really looking good. Generally, day one was woodworking and day two was metal working. The class started out making the croze. The croze is used to cut the groove in the bottom of the staves to hold the bottom. It is a critical tool to good coopering and it hard to find a good usable antique version. Chuck brought some nice cherry to work with, along with tool steel blanks for the cutters. The woodworking part of the croze was pretty straight forward. Making the saw tooth cutter was another matter. I really struggled with getting the angled teeth filed correctly with hand files. I came home with an extra blank in case the one from class will not cut. I think most everyone else in the class ended up with good cutters. Along with the croze we cut out some gauges that are used to check the angles and curve of different sized staves. Some students also worked on making a set of dividers that are also used for checking the stave angles. I had already made these items at home and skipped over this section.

Late in the day we moved over to the blacksmith shop to get a jump on the metalworking. We were provided with annealed tool steel blanks that were already cut out in the rough shape of the inshave and the hollowing knife (curved drawknife), but were still flat. We used a variety of bench grinders and sanders to get the cutting edge roughed into shape, along with cleaning up the other rough edges. A few of us stayed late to get this step done before morning.

The next morning we jumped back into grinding the edges and getting ready to start forging. This is where it started getting intense. There were 10 of us, 20 tools to make and one gas forge. Once things got really going there were several in-progress tools in the forge at once and two jigs in constant use. People teamed up to get the red-hot metal into the jigs and hammered into shape. It was amazing how quick you had to get the blank into the form, clamps in place and the next bend made before it was too cold and had to be put back into the forge. At this point in the class sweat was flying, stress levels went up and some moderate swearing was heard. But there was also a lot of laughing, so all was well.

Fortunately there were some people in the class with blacksmithing experience. They were able to help Chuck and Peter keep things moving along at a good clip.

After forging the blanks into shape for the inshave and hollowing knife we had a crash course in normalizing, hardening, oil quenching and tempering the cutting edge. As Chuck told us, each of these steps can be studied for years, but he was great at giving us the bare essentials to get the projects finished and I think with a lot of help and encouragement we all came out with decent results. Wooden handles were drilled and fitted to the two tools and expoxied in place. Unfortunately one student’s hollowing knife cracked and broke in the final stages of the class. It was a terrible moment. I think the Tillers folks were working something out to make sure she had a tool to take home anyway.

By this time I needed to get on the road back to old West Virginia, so I held off on any of the final grinding and polishing until I got home. The other students were still banging and grinding away as I left.

Tillers is a great organization with an important mission. By taking classes at Tillers one both learns a useful traditional skill, and helps finance the work going on through Tillers International. I have thoroughly enjoyed the two classes that I have attended and hope to take several more in the future. I really encourage anyone who wants to learn about traditional coopering with hand tools to take classes at coopers. They are working very hard to learn, teach and spread the use of these and several other techniques and trades.

Categories: Coopering, Folk Art, Traditional woodworking

Tagged: cedar bucket, chuck andrews, coopering, croze, drawknife, hand made, hand tools, inshave, rob gorrell, scorp, Tillers International

Makeing a quench tub for my forge.

Rob Gorrell

Posted on May 11, 2012

My most recent coopering project was a quench tub for my forge. Like the other coopering projects I have posted before, this tub is made from western red cedar with a pine bottom. The process for cutting the staves is the same as for a smaller bucket, there are just a lot more of them to keep track of. And when the bands fall off during raising, the pile of staves on the floor is larger. I split out the staves for the tub and after some fitting and adjusting had the basic shape raised with temporary bands.

It is important at this stage to write numbers on the ends of the staves. That way you know what order to put them back in if you have to take a stave out for trimming, or if the whole thing falls apart into a pile on the bench again. This situation looks like this:

I did not get any photos of cutting the croze or fitting the bottom this time. This next photo shows the tub during the final shaping of the outsides of the staves and fitting the final bands to the tub and trimming the rim.

I am still learning to get all of the joints tight and there are a few in this tub that are a little wonky. I am going to a class at Tillers International soon to make some coooper’s tools that I hope will help me make better looking projects in the future. When the tub was finished and tested, it held water pretty good, only minor seepage. The tub found a home in my shop as a quench tub for my forge.

Categories: Coopering, Traditional woodworking

Tagged: cedar bucket, cedar tub, coopered tub, coopering, large cooopered tub, quench tub, rob gorrell, traditional woodworking

History of the Big A$$ Beer Drinking Chair.

Rob Gorrell

Posted on November 4, 2012

Repairing a tin lantern.

Rob Gorrell

Posted on October 22, 2012

Making a large wood tankard.

Rob Gorrell

Posted on August 22, 2012

The finished tankard.

Variations on a Parisian street sign.

Rob Gorrell

Posted on August 20, 2012

Making a small keg.

Rob Gorrell

Posted on May 17, 2012

Coopering Tools class at Tillers International.

Rob Gorrell

Posted on May 15, 2012

Makeing a quench tub for my forge.

Rob Gorrell

Posted on May 11, 2012