“Your book is next.” These welcome words greeted me a few days ago as I opened my email. Megan Fitzpatrick is my editor, Lost Art Press is my publisher, and my book may see the light of day sometime soon. Sure, there’s still lots of editing and formatting for Megan to do, but it’s begun in earnest now.
One of my favorite new techniques that I learned during the book-writing process was boiled joints. I’ve written about them before, but here’s a clip from my talk at the Working Wood in the 18th Century conference at Colonial Williamsburg a few weeks ago, showing how they’re done:
I just this week learned how to edit videos. This is my first, and I’m rather surprised at how simple and fun the process is. Maybe more will come.
Elia, congratulations on the book! Did you hit your goal of two dozen chairs over the equivalent of two weeks?
As I did more research, I realized that I couldn’t determine how fast Samuel Wing worked, so the book is more about how he built chairs than me trying to keep pace with him.
Very cool and great job on the video editing!
Congratulations, Elia! Very exciting. I remember you mentioning the book and the Jennie Alexander boiled joint in Eric’s shop in VT during the Greenwood course week a couple years ago (time flies). Great memories of the course. Looking forward to the book! All the best.
Greg Clemens
Loved your presentation at WB. Boiled joints is really interesting. Thanks for discovering this cool trick. Can’t wait to try out my new travisher from EB industries incorporated 🙂
Great post and presentation. The same tenon shows up in “Windsor Chair Making in America” by Evans on p123 and 125 where she lists as a ‘blind tenon’. Looking forward to reading your book.
What a great joinery technique. I can only imagine the poor repair shop person’s frustration, trying to get the hide glue to release to get a broken stretcher out or something.
Great stuff, very interesting!
It is my favourite joint too, since your initial blog post with the test joints, I am assembling mallets like that!
Oh and can’t wait for the book!
That’s a fun idea
Cool! It would be nice to see you explain in more detail how to apply this. Nice work on the editing. If you aren’t using it already, I’d suggest you take a look at DaVinci Resolve editing and color grading software. They offer a free version. And they have tutorials too. Cheers!
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=18637715491&gbraid=0AAAAADPHK_bLBSp-6CfJhaWnj9L20-Z1w&gclid=CjwKCAiAtLvMBhB_EiwA1u6_PqNjG–y0UhblYYc9Hzv0_E7sSwnm4Qn3zALMExfhYgONl1JyAApDBoCb_oQAvD_BwE
Thanks! I just started using kdenpro – an opensource editor that has a lot of color-grading stuff. I just need to learn how to use it. The colors look dull to you?
The book will have more about how to apply this technique, but basically you put the legs feet-first in a pot of boiling water and let them boil for 10 minutes or so. Windsor stretcher mortises get boiling water ladled into them for three minutes or so (or as long as you can stand). Then you assemble as usual, just without glue.
Color, as you know very well, is very subjective, but I think the color in this is fine. The scene has a lot of pastell colors in it. A big variable is the screen it’s being viewed on. Black levels in this look pretty good on my screen. As you become more familiar with this stuff you’ll get into HSL-hue/saturation/luminance. I expect you’ll really enjoy the process. Have fun!
Thanks! I’ll look into how to adjust HSL (I’m a little familiar with it from Lightroom).
Elia, if I understand you correctly the six joints under the seat can all be boiled & pounded together. What about the tapered top of the legs into the seat? Do you still taper & glue? Or do you add a pin? Anything new/unique there?
Sorry, correcting my email….
Correct. This boiled-joint technique shouldn’t affect the leg-to-seat joints, so you can do whatever you’re used to there. The book includes a new-to-me technique of overly-tapered tenons to allow for inaccuracies, but that’s too complicated to go into here (but maybe I’ll do another blog post on it).
Can’t wait for your book! Will you be adding more classes this year? Are you incorporating the boiled joints in your classes?
Yes, and yes. I’ll probably book more 18th Century Chairmaking classes for later this year (and will post any updates through this blog).
When you showed it to me last year it blew my brain up.
It’s pretty cool. Have you tried it?