1. Setting up Shop

There are few occupations for pleasure or profit, as satisfying as working in wood. And this satis­faction is nowhere more fully realized than in shap­ing wood into things of beauty and utility that add charm and comfort to the home.

The material itself is pleasant to handle and easy to work; it is clean and tractable, and almost any­one with the slightest mechanical aptitude can acquire, without too much difficulty, the necessary skill. Such is the appeal of cabinet making, and the reason why so many take to furniture con­struction as a hobby or even turn it into a business.

It is unfortunate that many amateur cabinet makers, in their haste to finish jobs they have started, lose sight of the basic essentials of good

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workmanship—patience and care. They need to learn that the fullest satisfaction comes only to the conscientious craftsman to whom good workman­ship is a prime essential. To the amateur who make that his ideal the rest will be easy. The beginner does not need skill so much as a capacity for taking pains. If he learns to exercise care, skill will come soon enough.

Equally important is a capacity to appreciate good design. After he has examined and studied and made himself familiar with really good furni­ture, the serious craftsman is seldom interested in the simple knick-knacks or the ugly and rubbishy gewgaws that tempt so many enthusiastic but mis­guided and impatient beginners. The serious worker knows that these elementary exercises are a waste of time that could better be devoted to producing furniture pieces that are not only useful but well-designed and in good taste.

The beginner needs to realize that the difference between an amateur-looking and a professional job, though important, is very small. Often it is merely a matter of a piece of moulding or a corner brace, or a little extra sanding of the end grain.

In making a simple bedside lampstand and book­case, for example, the tyro probably would be con­tent with finishing everything off flush, and running the sides down to form feet. The professional, on the other hand, would give the top a slight over­hang and form a simple thumb moulding on three edges. He would certainly enclose the space below the bottom shelf, and perhaps cut the skirt into a decorative shape. This base would have the effect of giving four feet to the cabinet, and allow it to stand more firmly on the floor.

The difference between the two jobs therefore would not be one of extra skill on the part of the professional, but of a practical application of a knowledge of design and the way these things are usually done for the best results. The closed-in base, as can readily be seen, is better from every stand­point. It shuts off a space that would collect dust yet be too low to permit of its being swept out. Thus for very little extra expenditure of labor and material a much more impressive and expensive-looking job results.

This principle can be extended to all kinds of furniture and cabinet-making jobs, including the selection of tools and the care they receive after they have been acquired. The professional gets the best tools he can afford, and buys at the same time ail the equipment necessary to keep them in first-class working condition. There is no reason why any beginner, amateur or hobbyist, cannot do the same. All that is required is that high standards be set in the beginning—and adhered to throughout.

It is for these serious-minded amateurs that this book is written, and they will find that it is just as easy, and far more rewarding, to make good fur­niture and accessories as it is to waste valuable time and material on junk. Of course, to the man starting his shop as a business, quality will be the first consideration anyway; it is the best means he can use to meet competition.

Insofar as built-in pieces are concerned—and their consideration occupies a considerable portion of this volume—there is always a temptation to skimp in detail on parts that are not seen—perhaps on the theory that the walls of the house will keep it from falling apart. But this is not good practice, for either the furniture or its maker; sloppy habits once ac­quired are hard to break. Where cabinet-making and carpentering practices are combined—as in the case of built-ins—the tendency should always be toward the more careful work.

The man who constructs built-in pieces in his home should consider first and last that a job well designed and well done will add to the cash value of his house and make it more salable, as well as give him added pride in his home. Poor workman­ship and design can have just the opposite effect.

The amount of space available for the workshop and the quality and quantity of tools that can be acquired will determine to a large extent the type and size, and perhaps intricacy, of the pieces that can be turned out—but limiting factors should not influence quality.

The first thing to aim for is excellence of work­manship through painstaking effort. In this, the tools play a large part. Good tools last longer and help in doing good work—provided they are kept in good shape. If the worker purchases good tools he will be more likely to take proper care of them than if he buys cheap ones. The beginner should buy the best tools he can afford.

If it is necessary to deal with large pieces of wood, room will be required to work on them from either end. Sometimes a small room with strategic­ally placed doors or windows—through which to poke the free end of a long piece—will serve just as well as a bigger room. But it is much better not to have to rely on such borrowed space, especially in bad weather.

If there are one or more power tools, it is well to have them movable so that large pieces can be fed to them from either side. This means a suffi­ciently long electric cord (or alternative outlets) and a solid base for the tool that does not need to be fastened to the floor. Usually, the tool that benefits most from this arrangement is the bench saw. In any case, before installing either bench- or floor-type tools and equipment, it is wise to make a scale plan of the room (of at least half an inch to the foot), and cut out pieces of cardboard to the same scale to represent the tools, etc. Then by shifting the pieces around they can be located efficiently. The locations of doors and windows should be con­sidered.

Other prime requisites of working space are plenty of light and comfortable working tempera­ture in all seasons. The space needed will be gov­erned to some extent to the kind of work to be done and the size of the pieces to be handled. If the purpose is to confine attention to small gadgets such as wall boxes and hanging bookshelves, very little elbow room beyond the bench surface will be needed—provided there are no power tools to take up floor space.

For lighting, nothing can beat daylight—and if that can't be arranged for, or if the shop must be used before and after daylight hours, the best sub­stitute undoubtedly is the fluorescent light. It may cost more than an ordinary fixture but it will soon save the cost through smaller electricity bills. How­ever, just any kind of fluorescent lamps will not do —especially in shop concerned with colors and fin­ishing. The lamps must give the closest approach to daylight that can be had. This can be checked by looking at paint color cards, first in daylight then by the light of the lamps.   The so-called "white" tube usually is much too pink, and the "daylight" tube much too blue. A combination of the two will give much better results—or at least the colors ap­plied under such a light will look more natural in daylight.

To get good fluorescent distribution requires large lamps with long tubes (and two tubes to a fixture— which, incidentally, reduces flicker), or two fixtures to a tool so that there is no shadow on one side. The 40-watt tubes, four feet long, are ideal in many cases, but sufficient of them must be used to give adequate lighting over all working spaces and ma­chines, without shadows. For a power drill or jig­saw a supplementary spotlight will be called for, focused on the work and usually attached to the machine itself. These can be the ordinary type of light bulb, but they should have a shade so that the light is concentrated on the work and does not get in the operator's eyes.

Equally as important as unhampered vision is bodily comfort—for which the first requisite is proper working temperature. Frozen fingers are no aid to good work, and neither is perspiration in the eyes. It is essential also to have a comfortable floor to stand on. Concrete may be cool and clean, but it is also tiring. Usually, something a little more re­silient is called for—a wooden boarded floor is perhaps best. It has the necessary "give" and has insulating value against heat and cold.

If there is a concrete floor, the best thing to do is to make a few platforms to stand on in the most-used working spaces. These should be as low as they can be without eliminating the "spring", and have a solid base all around so that one will not be tripped by catching his toes under overhanging edges. If the space can be afforded to bevel off the edges into miniature ramps, so much the better. Safety is of paramount importance in any shop, large or small, and it may often depend on such apparently unimportant details. A solid-topped platform is better than a duckboard because tools and other things dropped are more readily noticed and recovered if there are no spaces for them to fall through.

Accidents will occasionally happen in the best-regulated shops. Even expert users of edged tools occasionally gash their fingers, so it does not pay to ignore the humble Bandaid. A box of simple first-aid equipment should be kept handy—adhesive tape, scissors to cut it, and three sizes of roller bandages(½, 1½, and 2-in.), an assortment of band-aids, a small package of absorbent cotton, and a half-ounce bottle of iodine. Learn how and when to apply these—then let everyone do his best to avoid having to use any of them, by keeping his mind on what he is doing and by taking his time.

In setting up the first shop, cost may often be a prime consideration to the beginner. Fortunately here are many operations that can be done by hand almost as well as they can by machine—provided the worker has the requisite time and patience. Actually it is good training for both the hand and eye to do things with hand tools. Furthermore, in making re­productions of old-time pieces of furniture it is pos­sible to give them a much more authentic look and feel if at least the final operations are done without the aid of power tools. Lines can be too straight, and edges too unswerving, while certain slight and natural imperfections may give the piece charm just because they recall the days before the machine was king. Even some modern designs would benefit from evidences of hand work, so it is better not to be too anxious to mechanize the shop in the be­ginning. A good range of high-quality tools will provide a sounder introduction to this ancient and honorable craft.

On the other hand, when a shop is being oper­ated for profit, power tools are indispensable. If the operator is to make a living from his work, time is certainly money, and only power equipment will enable him to cash in on that fact. Even with hand-finished work, the initial cutting out and shaping can usually be done by machine with no noticeable effect on the final product insofar as appearance is concerned.

Therefore, in setting up shop, the logical pro­cedure is first to estimate the cost of the essentials, then balance that against the available funds. This will reveal how much there is on hand for power equipment and other labor-saving devices. These points are dealt with in detail in Chapter II. The final decisions on shop equipment will depend largely on the type of work it is proposed to do, whether it is for fun or for profit, and, if the latter, the kind of market it is intended to seek. In either case there are a number of things that it is possible to have done outside—if there is no objection to paying the price.

Wood can be got in the rough and cut up and planed in the shop, or the mill will plane it and cut it to size. This is often a consideration where the operator of a small shop uses thin wood—say half-inch or less. A planer is a costly machine, and few small shops can afford one or provide enough work to justify its purchase. In such cases it pays to have the material supplied in the finished dimensions. This might also happen when a large number of pieces of lumber of the same dimensions are needed. These are all things to consider in embarking on any serious shop project.

The beginner bent on making more ambitious furniture such as upholstered pieces—stools, chairs, love-seats, etc., should remember that upholstering is a business in itself, and few one-man woodwork­ing shops can afford to embark upon it. This should be borne in mind when planning projects.

All in all, the physical problems of equipping and operating a small shop are few and simple—unless it is to be established on a strictly business basis, whereupon a certain amount of business acumen and selling ability need to be added to skill with tools and an appreciation of good design. That phase of the subject, however, is outside the prov­ince of this book. Here we are concerned simply with showing the reader how to make good furni­ture, either portable or built-in, that he will be proud to own and find easy to sell.

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