Two Traditions in Furniture Making
Believe it or not, I have not made a full box with lid since secondary school. Although this seems unlikely for a furniture maker, it is not.
I think of woodworking traditions in two forms: by stick and by panel. The first only requires two square surfaces, the second only requires two parallel surfaces.
When building with sticks (or framing) the jointing portion will normally relate three axes (x, y, z). This requires all sticks to be planed with two faces at 90 degrees to each other. In truth, the sticks don’t even need to be true or flat except for show faces, and in a pinch, sticks can be split with axe rather than saw. The ability of mortise/tenons (my specialisation) to resist compression on its relatively small surface area of its shoulders make it the ideal joint for this method of construction. Framing is the primary way we build chair/table frames and large structures like houses with wood.
It is possible to frame wide surfaces by inserting panels within frames, and this is what you see when many traditional Asian furnitures, whereby panels are floating in grooves to allow wood movement. Cabinets can also be made this way.
Joiners who frame with sticks only require 1 right angle. Cabinetmakers who construct with panels only require wide faces to be parallel.
The second method of building by panel (cabinetmaking) is historically associated with continental furniture making (as early as ~15th century). You will see wide panel to panel connections using dovetails at the corner edges. This construction is similar to what you might see in the box I made. It is arguably faster for building cabinets and boxes. The jointing areas only relates two axes, but for corners to connect cleanly, wood must be prepped for the wide face of the panel to be flat and parallel. The edges don’t necessarily need to be square.
So two methods of wood preparation demands two different joineries, which demands two different toolsets, shop layouts, and humans.
Although some may place cabinetmaking as an “evolution” in planing and wood drying preparations, John/Jenny Alexander suggests these two contemporaneous but distinct crafts practices were not guided by technological evolution of tools, but by the nature of timber species used.
Medieval/renaissance English furnitures were typically built with oak which can be riven along its rays, splitting easily into sticks just by axe strike. Split wood does not produce wide boards because logs are riven like pizza shapes. This leads to stick frame constructions that could accommodate working with wet wood.
Continental timbers like walnut and maple did not split as evenly/easily as oak, and so had to be sawn rather than split. Sawing enabled wider boards to be harvested from logs. And so, a separate cabinetmaking practice using wider sawn stock propagated.
So we find timbers defines toolsets, which defines human practices. So it wasn’t on my own volition that I hadn’t made a box for so long. Everything is defined by the historical material conditions available to me.
Well… everything except for when I decided to make this box. 👹
