Wardrobe No. 1

The latest project to leave the workshop and head into the house is this oak wardrobe.

It was purchased on auction site TradeMe for $80 in slightly scruffy condition. The knobs were missing, the lock was broken and there were a couple of pieces of damaged wood trim.

Carcase being cleaned

The wood trim was repaired with some American white oak we had left over from our skirting boards.  The match is not perfect, mainly because of the stain colour and grain differences. 

Broken moulding repaired

The half round moulding on the edge of the door was completely replaced and this was a better match to the original door frame.

Half-round moulding replaced and new knobs and lock installed

New hardware was sourced from Handle Solutions in Albany.  Over-sized Victorian cupboard knobs were chosen to hide the marks and holes left from previous hardware.

 

Drawer bottom replaced

The new drawer bottom was perhaps unnecessary but the existing CCA treated pine plywood one just looked awful, even if the only one who is going to see it is me.

We have since purchased another wardrobe of a similar style and in similar dilapidated condition for a mere $29.  It is going to need a thorough borer beetle treatment before I can begin though.  Look out for Wardrobe No. 2.

Armchair Restoration

This project has been simmering away since May last year when I started a furniture restoration course with Johan Van Westen at In Studio.

Completed Restoration

The chair was bought for a good price by Shirley some years ago.  The original springs had lost their temper though and the supporting webbing had broken through.  All the joints were loose and there were several cracks in the frame including a major one through a rear leg.

Upholstery removed, showing original horse hair and straw filling.

Johan took me through the process of breaking down the chair and splicing in new pieces of wood.

New mahogany spliced into back leg to reinforce a cracked mortice joint.

New mahogany in foot to reinforce a crack in the bottom of front leg

It was an excellent, hands-on course and I immediately enrolled in the next one to learn about reassembling the frame and applying French polish.  The frame was re-glued using traditional hot hide glue and then re-polished with shellac.

The cleaned frame prior to French polishing

I then passed the frame on to upholsterer James Backhouse (JBU Limited) who has done a lovely job with the upholstery.  New webbing and steel springs were fixed in place.  He used traditional coir (coconut fibre) filling to supplement the original straw and horsehair (horsehair being very difficult to obtain).  A calico liner was fixed in place before the upholstery fabric was secured.  Shirley had already obtained the fabric and James matched it with a gimp scroll around the edges.

Gimp edging to fabric.  Note the veneer repair to a rail (The rails are beech with a mahogany veneer).

The chair had lost its castors some time in the past.  They would have originally been either brass or ceramic.  I sourced new brass castors from Heico in the UK.  There were no New Zealand made castors in the right size (round ones for the front legs and square ones for the back legs).  The NZ ones that were available were about triple the price anyway so it paid to shop around.

Brass castor.

I briefly considered ageing the castors with ammonia fumes but it sounded like quite a toxic process, so nature will have to take its course.

Repair to back leg

The sign of a good furniture restorer is that he or she has not advertised their work so to speak.  There are a few things that my eye falls on.  The splice on the main leg is still visible, even after fitting and staining it under Johan's instruction, but overall I am reasonably happy with the finished project.  On to the next one!

Space-walking Over New Zealand

Cool photo of a space walk on the International Space Station as it passes over NZ.  Christchurch, Farewell Spit, Malborough Sounds and the lower North Island all visible.  Thanks to Twisted Sifter for putting this one up.  Image from NASA on Wikicommons.  It was taken back in 2006, so not exactly current.  Looking forward to seeing SpaceX Dragon etc making visits in the future if US/Russia relations continue to deteriorate.

Computers I Once Knew

When I was about twelve I got my first computer, a ZX81 made by Sinclair, in Scotland of all places.

Wikipedia

The purchase price was NZ$199 and you could do very basic programming (literally Basic programming, as in the language) to run simple games etc.

It came with a whopping 1kB of memory.  To put this in perspective, the computer that I am writing this blog on has eight million times the memory in RAM (8GB), with a further billion times as much memory on built-in hard disc storage (1TB) - all this on a fairly run-of-the-mill new business laptop.

In science and engineer we often refer to 'orders of magnitude'.  A widget maker that processes ten times as many widgets per hour as its predecessor is one order of magnitude faster - quite some achievement on a production line and sure to get the inventor a promotion.

This pales into insignificance when compared with changes in computer speeds (computer accelerations?).  My current laptop is nearly seven orders of magnitude faster at processing calculations as the old ZX81.  If my 1982 computer was a car, say a nippy Toyota Corolla hatchback with a top speed of 150km/h (down hill, with a following wind) that would mean the current 2014 model Corolla could do 1200000000km/h, which is just over the speed of light.

But of course the ZX81 wasn't quite that bad.  It could easily be expanded to a generous 16kB of RAM by plugging in a notoriously wobbly black box into the back of the all-in-one basic unit.  And if you didn't inadvertently wipe your laboriously typed code by knocking the RAM module you could save it.  On what you ask?  A standard screechy, hissy audio cassette tape of course!

Little wonder I never became a programmer.

Entertainment Unit Part 2

Here is the completed entertainment unit in place.

Completed unit

The simple plywood doors run in an aluminium channel routed into the base and top. 

Aluminium track and sliding door

The handles are pieces of solid oak, tapered to match the chamfer on the top.

Oak sliding door handle

The cables run in a 100mm wide gallery at the back of the unit.  Here is a photo with the top slid out slightly.

Power points, aerial and phone sockets in the gallery behind the plywood back prior to cable installation.

The next step is to make the bookshelves which will sit on top of the unit and be attached to the wall.  After this, access to the cables will be through holes in the back of the unit.

Another Beautiful Misty Autumn Morning

Taken from the same spot as the previous blog, outside our bedroom window.  We are very lucky to live where we do.

View From The Bedroom This Morning

Entertainment Unit Part 1

This is a project that I have been working on sporadically for the last few months.  It's a built-in entertainment unit for our living area.  This is the first piece of furniture of any significant size that I have worked on - over 2.4m (8 feet) long.  My other projects have been small tables, chopping boards and a wall cabinet (blogged about previously here).  

Front Elevation

It is intended as a multifunctional piece of cabinetry with the following features:

• Central open shelves for the Freeview box, DVD player or whatever piece of technology replaces them.  The shelves are open to allow the infra-red remote controls to work.
• Storage for DVDs and CDs on the left behind a sliding door.
• Storage for our small stereo on the right, also behind a sliding door.
• A false back to hide the cables, with access to the power points, phone jack and aerial sockets in the wall behind.
• Bookshelves above, random sizes to fit our books and other objects.
• A wide enough lower unit to sit a flat screen TV on, with space each side for guests to sit/perch on during parties.

End Elevation and Sections

The main part of the work is in the lower unit, which is made from oak veneered onto MDF (main carcase), solid oak (trim around the edges) and meranti plywood for the back and doors.

These are not necessarily the ideal materials to use.  It's more a case of what is available and also what is appropriate.  Because the unit is going to be 'built-in' like kitchen cupboards and also because of its significant size the carcase needed to be stable.  Hence oak veneered MDF was used - not my favourite material to work with but it allowed the bottom, sides and back to be fully glued together for strength.

Gluing up the ends to the base

The back and doors are made from inexpensive plywood, which is a little bit splintery as I have discovered, but hopefully will be ok with a few coats of shellac and some wax.

Gluing the partitions, shelves and pre-stained backs in place

The rest of the unit is finished in Danish oil.

First coat of Danish oil applied

Once the second coat of oil has been applied I will bring it inside to see how well it fits against the wall.  Hopefully I've got my measurements correct for the positions of the power points etc, directly behind the central section.  Fingers crossed!

Roofs 101

The roof on your house performs a few different tasks, the main one being to shed rainwater effectively (at least in New Zealand, where it can rain a lot). Given a simple rectangular floor plan, there are two basic roof forms, the hip and the gable, both of which are present at our place:

Hipped roof on our house

Gable on the end of our garage

Other less common roof forms are the gablet, the gambrel, the Dutch gable and the mansard amongst others.  Unfortunately, there are so many different opinions about the definition of each of these that it is difficult do decipher what is 'correct' and what is just common usage (abusage?).

The New Zealand Period House (Arden & Bowman, Random House, 2004) describes a gambrel roof the way a gablet roof is defined in the UK and elsewhere.  I prefer the more descriptive 'hip and gable' which is used in Asia to denote a temple style roof, although the term Dutch gable is often used here, despite it looking nothing like the gable on a Dutch house.

Gablet or is that Gambrel? Or Dutch Gable? Photo: Bill Bradley

A gambrel roof in the US (think hay barn) would be described as a mansard roof in NZ, and possibly the UK, although mansard applies more correctly to a hipped or four sided version, not the one below:

Gambrel or is it Mansard? Photo: Steel Frame Concepts

Back to my copy of The New Zealand Period House, they describe a Dutch gable roof the way a half hip or Dutch hip is described elsewhere:

Half Hip or is it Dutch Hip? Or Dutch Gable? From Houseplans24.com

So you can see that there are very clearly defined definitions for the various basic roof styles.

Well, I'm glad I cleared that one up!  And this is just a roof on a rectangular box.  Introduce a non-rectangular floor plan with bays, lean-to's, valleys, clerestoreys etc, perhaps a flat or skillion roof, then we can look at framed roofs versus the trussed variety, purlins, battens, chords and webs, rafters, stringers, barges, soffits.... 

Public Transport Eh?

I work from home, but my wife has just started back at work in the city, which means a drive and two buses; a drive, a bus and a train; or just driving all the way.  At the moment, as in the past, she is using one of the public transport options but today's experience may be enough to put her off for good.

I will spare you the details, but lets just say the bus broke down on the motorway, the replacement bus didn't stop in time, the replacement replacement bus was going to the wrong place and... ok, you get the picture.  

It got me thinking about the last time I broke down on the motorway in a car.  It was when I was a student and I was driving a rusty old 1970 Holden Kingswood.  Cars now are reliable.  They rarely break down and are vastly improved on my set of student wheels.  One the other hand, I quite frequently see a broken down bus on the side of the road, with the familiar heavy duty tow truck in attendance.  Given that they make up only a small proportion of vehicles this would be somewhat of a concern.  Why is this?  The buses themselves seem relatively new.  Is it that much harder to make a bus reliable, compared with, say, a modern truck?