Thread: A tale with a twist.

Originally Posted by prozac

I expected more reaction to the mdf suggestion.

prozac

If you'd been here when I first read your suggestion you would have heard my reaction and the profanity. My wife called from another room "What now!"

The next time anyone, anywhere, asks for a definition of "fine woodworking", please point them to this thread.

I never know whether to feel inspired or crushed by Woodwould's posts, but once my ego steps out of the way I just sit in amazement.

Lovely work in both pieces. I've never seen 'oysters' before. Was that a common method of veneering in the 18th century? Does the endgrain presentation give rise to cracking or other wood movement issues?

Love to see some progress pics of hand-cutting the steel screws. You're obviously a devoted purist: well done, and keep posting: I'm sure we can all learn a thing or two.

Thanks for the kind words.

Oyster veneered furniture was and is considered the zenith of seventeenth and early eighteenth century furniture - especially laburnum pieces. It's not all that common as a lot of examples have succumbed to the ravages of time. They are difficult and expensive pieces to restore.

The oysters do suffer problems with contraction and expansion, but a sound yet crackled appearance makes many a connoisseur go weak at the knees. The oysters are renowned for lifting off their groundwork and the use of modern glues exposes the fakes and also devalues many unsympathetically restored antiques.

I'm afraid I don't have any pictures of hand cutting screws, but it's not nearly as difficult as it sounds. It is time consuming though and is regarded as unnecessary by most people now, but with some restoration jobs it's imperative to hand cut them.

Originally Posted by Ron Dunn

The next time anyone, anywhere, asks for a definition of "fine woodworking", please point them to this thread.

I never know whether to feel inspired or crushed by Woodwould's posts, but once my ego steps out of the way I just sit in amazement.

In my dreams, one day I'll be able to produce work like that...

Originally Posted by Woodwould

One would expect a category to be judged by an individual or panel with a deep understanding of the topic.

I used to be a member of a camera club in the Mt Waverley area. Mostly, my entries were B+W prints, rarely colour and once slides.

One week the judge of the regular competition as an artist, I think the director of the local art gallery.

I'd recently been reading up in Ilford's then-new XP-400 film, a B+W C-41 (colour) film. One of its great advantages is it can be developed at the local minilab along with the regular batch of Kodak & Fuji colour films. Illford also claimed finer grain (but then every film has fine grain!), and a loss-promoted characterisic is that one can push two stops and process in E6 (colour slide - but not Kodachrome - chemistry).

I stuck a roll in the Canon and went for a stroll around Mt Waverley. I found a house, fairly typical of the area, that was different in that the front entrance was framed with a couple of white columns.

I had the camera on a tripoid, so I stood directly across the road, pointed the camera at the entrance, framed the pic so the columns were at the sides (vertical orientation) and shot it.

Oh, a characteristic of XP-400 film is that it's not actually B+W, prints on colour paper have a faint reddish tinge, and the slides I got back were distinctly green.

The judge was flummoxed. I don't think he'd seen a monochrome slide before, let alone a green one. He rattled on about the ugly house (which I didn't find ugly), how expertly I'd portrayed its deficiencies and awared me "Top Slide" or some such for the evening.

I regularly entered prints, but this is the entry I remember best, because I found the judging so funny!

To be fair, the green tint may have confounded a regular photographer too, but the judging would have been less memorable.