Sippican Cottage
Donate

The Fourteenth-Best Song About A Mortuary

June 11, 2012 8 Comments



I used to buy old Skinner auction pamphlets to look for furniture to copy. They had really nicely printed stuff back in the 70s and 80s. Back then, something resembling antique furniture was still being sold at auctions. The definition of what an antique is has morphed over time. It used to mean furniture that wasn’t made in a formal factory setting. Pre-Civil War, basically.

The problem was, it didn’t really exist out in the wild anymore. All of it was in collections or museums or being extinguished inexpertly by a fireman, and auction houses had nothing much to sell. So they changed the definition, informally, mind you, to anything 100 years old or so. The flea markets just soldiered on with “anything that looks vaguely old.” It’s still common for antique stores to leave all their furniture wares outside to get ruined so it looks older than it is. The patina on your antiques is probably as forced as any I make in a bucket in my workshop. And since I actually make furniture by hand, my brand-new stuff is closer to a real antique than most of what’s in an antiques store, which is mostly just humdrum homegoods from some dead, unmourned aunt’s ranch house.

But time does winnow. It’s slapdash, of course. Hard to say if Shakespeare was all that. Maybe he was the third best playwright in the greater Avon area, but the rest of the guys forgot to go to the Stratford Kinko’s and left the originals near an outhouse the day after the all-you-can-eat blood pudding special at the Pig&Pox Inn. But the sloped sides on the funnel of time do make some things more interesting, don’t they?

“St. Dennistoun Mortuary” is a coin-operated automaton, attributed to John Dennison, c. 1900. The mahogany cabinet and glazed viewing area displays a Greek Revival mortuary building with double doors and grieving mourners out front. When a coin is inserted, doors open and the room is lighted revealing four morticians and four poor souls on embalming tables. The morticians move as if busily at work on their grisly task and mourners standing outside bob their heads as if sobbing in grief. This automaton will be offered as Lot 207 at auction on June 2, 2012 at Skinner Auctioneers & Appraisers in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Estimate $4,000-6,000



And for all I know, that’s the fourteenth-best song about a mortuary. But I doubt it.

Old Posts People Are Reading For Some Unknown Reason, Part G, Subsection 23

April 29, 2012 6 Comments
Ad Hoc? I Invented It. Six Homemade Tools

I make furniture all day, but I still gots no money; that doesn’t explain my ad hoc infection, exactly. In construction and related disciplines, you’re always making props and jigs and what-have-yous for the situation at hand, and you adopt it for a way of life after a while. People from the delicate arts (that don’t want to admit they are) talk endlessly about duct tape because they think it makes them sound manly, but duct tape is more a symptom that you have no idea what to do than an indication you do, and are all manly and so forth. This stuff isn’t a patch.

Woodworking catalogs rely on people that don’t ultimately make much buying expensive things with which to not make those things more easily. Parse that sentence, college boy. Anyway, here’s a half-dozen examples of things I made that are better than things you can buy.

1. Clamping Jig – Clamps are really expensive. I’m awful if I ever see Norm making anything on that commendable show he had. Just ask my wife. “He’s making a four-dollar tabletop with four thousand dollars-worth of clamps!”  She just nods and smiles. This is why we don’t have cable. Here’s how I make glue-ups. Iron pipe with pony clamps and pads, with the whole shebang hung on the wall to save space and my back. The galvanized pipes on the right don’t leave marks on anything delicate like the black iron pipes on the left do. They should all be galvanized, but I’m cheap. BTW, that benchtop blank in the clamps will be on sale by Friday.

2. Stickers  – Stickers is an actual woodworking term, not an ad hoc one. The little bits of wood you place between boards to allow air to circulate all around them, and helps to keep wood from warping from having only one side exposed to the air, are called stickers. I make my own, hundreds of them, from little bits and pieces of off-cut wood. I use them for all sorts of things; Keeping things up off a surface when painting, props, jigs, etc. I have to test my branding iron on something before I use it on your furniture, so they all end up with one or forty SIPPICANs burned into them. The really old ones are all mellow with shellac overspray and smooth from a million hands.They’re all eleven inches long. I only measured the first one. (See item 6)

3. Featherboards – Here’s one of eleventy-jillion I’ve made. A piece of wood will go forward through a featherboard’s little wooden fingers, but will not back up. A safe way to hold wood against a fence and not have it thrown at you by the blade. I make them often, in different sizes for different setups. I suppose I could put the sacrificial wooden fence you see on the table saw on this list, too, but I’m lazy. One of the main bad ideas of most pre-made jigs you buy is too much metal near the blades, and for some reason, too much plastic everywhere else. I don’t want metal things hitting metal things. Then hitting me.This is woodworking, not the artillery.

4. The Push Stick – All woodworkers on TV are liars. They say: the blade guard is removed so the camera can see the work. Lies. All lies. They’re in the trash. Guard or no, never, NEVER put your hand between the blade and the fence. Did I mention NEVER? I push everything through the blade with a push stick. It’s got a little hook in it to hold things down as well as shove them. Stuff gets thrown at you more than any other danger you’ll encounter on a tablesaw. This push stick is about eight years old, I think. It’s a testament to the veracity of my NEVER claim that I still have this one after all this time, despite living in two different states. It is ALWAYS on my fence, so I can NEVER.

5. Tapering Jig – They sell adjustable ones that are made from steel for a lot of money. You must have been dropped on your head as a baby to push a steel anything through a table saw right next to the blade. Upon reflection, you were probably dropped on your head as an adult, too. I have dozens of these jigs, each made special for a particular tapered leg. They’re very safe if handled correctly, and made from garbage. Like bacon!

6. Stop Block – It’s just a leftover from a table apron or something. You clamp it to a fence and cut the same thing over and over. Measure twice, cut once! says the TV. Measure once, set the stop block, and cut 145 times, I say. Measuring twice is for dilettantes.

So, there you go. I make all sorts of things with near nothing. You have near nothing, too, I suspect, or can lay your hands on it. Make something!

How To Rattle That Stick In The Swill Bucket

January 26, 2012 10 Comments





Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.
-John Wanamaker

I lived in Los Angeles back in the early eighties. I have a soft spot in my heart for Fred Rated. Fred Rated is semi-well known as Shadoe Stevens, a disc-jockey game show host voice-over dude. According to Wikipedia, he’s currently the announcer for Craig Ferguson’s late night show.

He’ll always be Fred Rated to me. LA TV and radio was fun just then. Cal Worthington and Elvira and Fred; The Plimsouls and Oingo Boingo and Wall of Voodoo. It was all cheesy garbage and I loved it. I loved the west-coast flavored The Gong Show just as I had adored the execrable east-coast Community Auditions because it was crap and didn’t pretend to be anything else, and you could just watch the fat majorettes drop their batons while jitterbugging to disco versions of Sousa marches and enjoy the hell out of it while nursing a hangover.

Fred Rated became a sorta star by making those commercials. If the purpose of advertising is to make the public aware of the product then Fred was a smash, if I’m anything to go by. It’s thirty years later and I remember him, and fondly. If the purpose of advertising is to get you to part with money, I make it a miserable failure, because I never set foot in a Federated store and never got the urge to, either.

Advertising has gotten very, very creepy. The Stasi crossed with a peeping tom keeps track of you, online and elsewhere, and mines it for all its worth. Funny that guys like Fred played a creep, and yet their appeal was simply to amuse while barking out the phone number.

This blog is advertising, I guess; I try to be charming, and let you know I exist. I know the charming part is thin on the ground now and then, but I try to exist as hard as I can. Maybe it’s the only half that matters, anyway.

Stuff And Junk I Built

December 22, 2011 7 Comments

A nice customer asked me to build them a game table.

I get asked all the time to build things I don’t build. I take it as a compliment. People see things I do make, and like them, but need something else. They figure they’d rather give me their money than someone else. I’m grateful for the offer, but 99 times out of 100 I pass. I took a run at this one because it’s a version of something I already make.

Because I make things, it doesn’t follow that it doesn’t matter what sort of thing I’m making. I can make most anything. I’ve built everything from birdhouses to football stadiums for money. But I’m not in those businesses right now. It’s a bad idea for a business to take on work they’re not set up to do properly, and do it simply because they want or need more money. Lots of businesses expand continually until they fail utterly. They cover the loss from the last ill-advised idea with the next ill-advised idea. All the while they’re touted as good businessmen because –well, they got bigger, didn’t they? Sure, until they got very small indeed. I’m a cottage furniture maker from Maine, working all alone for all intents and purposes. Who would you call a better businessman, me or the honcho of Maine Cottage Furniture, with their dozens of employees and millions in receipts and their factories and showrooms?

It’s a trick question. You all answered Maine Cottage Furniture, but they went out of business. They were superior business people to me — right up until the time the bank padlocked their door. Sippican Cottage Furniture is going on eight years old now.

People picture me as an artisan. They do not picture my business as a business in the true sense of the word, but it is. It’s another kind of compliment, calling me an artisan — they mean I don’t strike them as a hack or rapacious — but being an artisan alone could get me into trouble. I’ve been avoiding looking for trouble lately. Enough trouble has showed up at my door already without me looking for it. It tried jiggling the knob when I got tired of answering the door, and it climbs in my windows when I’m asleep if I’m not careful.

A business like mine is a kind of bet. It’s a very big parley bet, actually. I’m making a lot of sequential bets, and all of them have to turn out perfectly, every time, or I’m dead on the spot. And there’s all this stuff that goes into the process that’s essentially invisible to the end user that looms like legions of Kongs over me all the time. I have to bet on a design and know how long it takes to make it and what kind of wood it will be made from and where I’ll get that wood and how much it will cost and how it needs to be stored and how much waste it will have and how hard it will be on the tools and what kind of finish it will have and what kind of ambient temperature and humidity and ventilation all that will require and what sort of hardware to use and where to get it and what sort of lead time it requires and how to package it when it’s done and how to ship it and how to display it online and how to find potential customers and collect their money and… 

I could go on, but you get the picture. I don’t cut down the trees. That’s about it. Most businessmen pay other people to cover large swathes of the business landscape for them, but I can’t. I have to cover every eventuality immediately out of my own exertions and remove food from my family’s mouths to cover any loss. It leads to a profound kind of caution that people with lots of resources behind them barely recognize. Businessmen read self-help books and then cobble together a PowerPoint about the hedgehog strategy they think they should try, but they disintegrate into a weepy puddle if there are no bagels in the breakroom one day or their BlackBerry has an outage. It’s a clinically obese hedgehog strategy they’re talking about. My hedgehog’s anorectic.

I had a good friend try to pay me another compliment a while back, telling me I was a bad businessman and should quit and be a writer. They meant it as a compliment about my writing, but I’ve turned it over in my mind a lot since it was offered. I at least consider what intelligent and pleasant people say to me. Sometimes I even take their advice or make the table they want. But there seems to be only one way the public measures business acumen now. Are you writing this essay from your yacht? No? Then you must suck at it, whatever “it” is. I take a different view. Who could do more, with less? It’s a great way to keep score. Context.

No, I’m not a bad businessman. In many ways, I’m a spectacular businessman. I place into evidence Exhibit A: I’m still in business.

(Update: The Sippican Game Table)

The Vice-President In Charge Of Trefoil

November 18, 2011 8 Comments

Still some wicked cool benches left over at Sippican Cottage Furniture’s Ready To Ship page. They’re all very nice, but none as nice as this one.

My little son is eight. He “helps” me in my workshop. He’s fond of earning a quarter by vacuuming the floor, for instance. He gets an equal amount of dust on himself and into the vacuum, but either way it’s not on the floor anymore.

An eight-year-old is prone to flights of fancy. He’s as likely to ask you if we could vacation on Jupiter as anything more mundane. The world is full of possibilities for him. There’s very little world in the rear-view mirror to discourage him in any way.

In a lull in the dust fighting, he looked at me in a way I’m  accustomed to seeing just before some sort of trouble. It’s usually followed by a request for us to make a ray gun with a paper towel tube and the hot glue gun. It wouldn’t be so bad except that he expects it to actually emit some sort of rays when we’re finished, or it’s a failure. He hears not now too often, as I work most all the time at one thing or another.

“Why don’t you put a shamrock or a heart on your benches, dad, like you do with your steppers? It would look nicer, and then you could sell them for more because they’re better and you could pay me for inventing it. Then I’d have lots of money and could buy a Bionicle.”

I began to disabuse him of this notion as a wild flight of childish fancy and impractical and daddy’s too busy to…

Then I stopped and realized it was a bona fide good idea, and made one. If you buy it, the kid gets 10 bucks, and I probably won’t get my floor vacuumed again for the forty weeks worth of quarters that represents.

Sippican Cottage’s Ready to Ship.

Tag: shameless commerce

Picture of sippicancottage

sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

Find Stuff:
Archives
Recent Comments
Recent Posts
Tags