CHAPTER 2, LESSON 3
GOAL: Learn to use "blinds," which are quick shop-made aids that can help you lay out and harvest portions of a board with similar or desirable grain patterns and direction.
Even though sections of a given board may contain knots, stains, short grain or other undesirable defects, you still might be able to harvest smaller usable workpieces from it. A "blind" can help you visualize the grain patterns and direction of an area contained within a larger board by framing in only as much material as you need to harvest and helping you visually exclude what you don't.
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| The flatsawn center with its pronounced cathedral figure has small discolored shakes all the way through it as well as the large shakes clearly visible at the ends. However, sound riftsawn pieces may be harvested from each side. |
When harvesting parts, your aim is to select each piece for its color, figure and stability while keeping an eye on the economic use of the material. The careful selection of material is a major element of handmade furniture, and one that most distinguishes it from production furniture.
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| The shakes and the wild grain make it hard to see that this board is worth anything but firewood. Using blinds will help you separate good from bad. |
The abiding beauty and durability of a piece of furniture depends upon its overall sense of rightness - and rightness has everything to do with the selection of the parts. Why is this so? Here's one explanation: your workpiece selection will look that way forever, and the look of each part should support the architecture of the whole. A badly chosen piece "sticks out like a sore thumb" as they say, and you are constantly apologizing for it.
Choosing good material also makes building the piece easier. For example, a flat, stable piece of wood is more easily worked than a piece of distorted or short-grain material that could compromise the strength of the piece.
Not infrequently, you will come across a board or even a pile of boards which at first glance appear to be so riddled with defects as to be useless. A technique that helps separate sound stuff from scrap wood is the use of blinds.
To make a blind, saw up some scrap 1/4" plywood into 2" strips. Hot-melt glue the strips together to make a rectangle whose opening matches the dimension of parts that you will need for the job. Or use a jigsaw to cut out the opening in a larger piece of scrap to accomplish the same purpose. By hiding a relatively narrow band of material under the blind as you move it over the board, you can easily align the grain and find the good pieces amongst the defects and blemishes.
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