The wonderful secret I found in an old dresser

way back in 2015 a lifetime ago in internet years i made a two-part series about a shaker style chest of drawers that i purchased in an antique shop it was full of great shaker puns and a lot of good information but it was focused on whether it was an authentic historic shaker piece of furniture or just something made in the shaker style in the end i decided it was just shaker style but today i want to take another look and this time i want to focus on some of the fascinating secrets that i found locked away in that piece of furniture for the better part of two centuries the story it tells is going to have you taking a closer look at every old piece of furniture you come across in the future this chest of drawers or you might call it a dresser is made primarily from cherry it's 48 inches tall and 42 inches wide and you could fit a lot in these drawers particularly the top one which is nine inches deep but it looks even more massive than that i think it makes the whole thing look top heavy to the modern eye but this was built around the 1840s and in those days that large top drawer had a purpose it was called a bonnet drawer and as the name suggests it would be used to store bonnets and hats to keep them looking their best for sunday services you have to remember that this was built in an entirely different world from what we know today and that odd drawer arrangement is just the beginning note how each drawer also features a lock does your dresser have locks i bet it doesn't i don't have anything in my wardrobe that's worth locking up fancy furniture of the old days often did feature locks but those pieces were likely to be found in wealthy households and filled with expensive linens and other valuables this is not a rich family's dresser cherry is a beautiful material but it wasn't as prized in the 1840s as it may be today the upper classes demanded mahogany or walnut or beautifully figured maple their furniture featured fancy carvings and complex moldings and inlays a simple beefy rectangular chest of drawers like this one with very little ornamentation at all was country furniture it's not a pejorative before the civil war most americans lived in the country and they subsisted on farming you don't need a lock and key to secure your work overalls so it's curious that all four drawers on this working class dresser feature locks especially when you consider that these locks are not mass produced this is early rolled sheet steel you can tell the process wasn't perfect from the heavy grain in the metal it was probably overheated and the resulting low quality steel cracked when it was bent that had to be repaired early on you can also see a lot of irregular file marks on the lock's body the holes are irregularly spaced and the corners are not even close to 90 degrees this wasn't stamped or mass-produced at all it was hand-made through a great deal of labor each of these locks were secured to the dresser with two screws and two nails the tapered screw shaft and the consistent thread pattern indicates that they were mass produced on a lathe but the irregular off-center slots with their v-shaped bottoms appear hand cut one at a time the nails were entirely handmade with square shafts and hammer marks on the heads all of this laborious hand work added up to make these locks expensive luxuries on an otherwise plain piece of working class furniture what were they hiding in there we may never know that but the craftsman who built this piece left several secrets behind beginning in his drawers the bottom panel here is made from a wide pine board this one had a flaw in its center but that wasn't considered a problem at that time drawer bottoms were made from secondary wood and nobody cared much what they looked like all he did was plane it smooth so no splinters could snag the drawer's contents but if you flip it over it's as if we go back in time 180 years the maker's hand plane tracks are still visible where he beveled the panel's edges you can see how he wasn't concerned about the appearance of this underside we're probably among just a handful of folks who've even looked at it in all these years since his tool marks were made these bevels aren't for looks though they thin out the edges of the panel's perimeter so they'll fit within the grooves that hold it in place so he worked quickly and roughly and he just got the job done he paid little attention at all to the center of the panel in fact it still looks much like it did when it was originally cut at the mill these details take us further back in time yet a panel this wide came from a large tree in those days trees grew slowly in dense forests we call it old growth it's not unreasonable to suggest that this tree was 200 years old or more when it was cut down back in the early 1800s so this wood may have existed within the tree as far back as when jamestown was founded we don't know where it grew or who eventually cut it down but we do know something about what happened next in those days logs might have been suspended over a pit and sawn by hand one man stood on top pulling the saw upward while the other stood beneath and pulled it downward the guy on the bottom had gravity on his side so it made his job much easier than the guy who was wearing out his back up on top but he had to eat all that sawdust that came down in his face eventually someone figured out that you could attach the saw to a mechanism powered by a water wheel and the first sawmills appeared these were called up and down saws we know this board was cut with an up and down saw because the blade marks left behind are mostly parallel to each other if this would have been milled in a pit saw the lines would zigzag at inconsistent angles as the men worked tool marks like this are fascinating to me and this piece of furniture is like a time capsule if you know where to look have a peek at the back panels note how the top and bottom pieces are fixed in place they're pinned tenons on their ends but the large center panel is hand beveled just like the drawer bottoms were nowadays we may attach a single piece of plywood to the back and call it good but you can't do that with large solid wood panels they simply would just split apart as the frame of the dresser around it restricted its natural wood movement that wide center panel would move a lot so it was left unglued within its slots so it could float in place and move as it pleased this is a clear indication that the maker was not just a simple farmer he was a trained professional who understood wood movement the sides are not made from single boards either here we have more fixed rails with floating center panels the bevels are hidden on the back side and if you could look inside the carcass you'd also notice that while most of the visible parts of this dresser are made from cherry the center side panels are made from poplar which has been skillfully stained to look like cherry now why would he do that why not just use cherry for all the visible parts well perhaps this tells us a bit about what he was dealing with in his shop at the time it may have been that he didn't have enough cherry on hand at least not wide enough pieces for the two side panels the widest piece of cherry on the whole dresser is the 9 inch tall top drawer face that's a 9 inch wide board the side panels required 14 inch wide boards now he could have glued up a couple narrower boards to make wider panels after all that's what he did on the top but up there the edge gluing was done out of necessity to manage potential cupping of such a wide flat panel that wouldn't be contained within a frame the side panels on the other hand would be kept flat within the frames around them and in such a visible place he may have thought a single board would look better than two boards edge glued together and while he may not have had wide cherry for that purpose we know he had wide poplar boards in his shop that rear center panel is an amazing 22 inches wide another tree that may have witnessed as many as four or 500 years of history when the tree was sacrificed to make this piece of furniture it had to be skillfully disguised as cherry in the early 1800s the shakers were using their own recipe for a red brown stain that made poplar blend well with cherry evidently this craftsman who built this dresser was experienced enough with these or similar techniques so that he could skillfully finish this piece as if it were made from a single species further evidence of a skill is found in the joinery the drawer fronts are attached with half-blind dovetail joints even today very thin pins like this are considered to be a sign of true craftsmanship it's harder than it looks i love how the scratch lines from his marking gauge are still visible after nearly two centuries and note how the width of the tails are not all exactly the same he didn't carefully lay out and measure his joint he just did it by eye with the confidence of someone who has probably cut a great many dovetails in his lifetime because the fit is nearly perfect the gaps at the ends of the tails and below the pins are the type that open up over time as the drawer front slightly cupped so i suspect that these were flawless when they were first cut of course he didn't have unlimited time on his hands either so when it came to attaching the drawer backs he used durable through dovetails rather than nails and rabbets but he worried less about their appearance here because they'd be hidden inside the drawer he never envisioned a time like today when woodworkers obsess over every dovetail inside the carcass the lines from his marking knife look like they were made just yesterday the drawer runners have been replaced with strips of pine but the original cherry rails behind them are attached with dovetail joints of their own at this point it's almost like he was showing off dovetails here add a tremendous amount of strength to the frame but they also add a lot of expensive labor that the average person just wouldn't appreciate as i said the drawer slides are replacements i know this not just because they're of a different material but because they bear curved circular saw blade marks as opposed to the straight up and down saw marks that we saw in other parts you can judge by the deep grooves in the cherry face frame that the drawers were used regularly for many generations you may also have noted that the bottoms of the drawer sides were completely worn away as well and have since been built back up again all of this is part of the rich history of this dresser and when you piece it all together i think it may reveal one final secret the relatively common materials in the simple country design with little ornamentation identifies this in my mind as more of a utilitarian piece for a regular household than a showpiece in a wealthy home yet it includes four expensive handmade locks and it was made by an obviously skilled hand who understood joinery and wood movement and who went the extra mile even in hidden places to ensure that his work would last this is something that would not be very profitable if he were making a utilitarian piece on a commission so i think the person who made this chest of drawers was also its owner i think a skilled cabinet maker built this for his own home or at least for someone very close to him i think that explains why so much care and effort went into it and perhaps why it was so well cared for despite 180 years of obvious regular use i wish it would have signed it because i would have liked to track down the family and returned it to them let me know what you think in the comments below and i'll see you next time mywoodcutters.com is the sort of small business i like to support stefan is a great guy and he can find you knives and cutters for almost any joiner planer shaper or molding machine and his are the best prices if you're planning to upgrade to a helical carbide cutter head please use the link below this video to check with him before you buy somewhere else some small businesses are just worth supporting

Channel: Stumpy Nubs

Views: 220,754

Keywords: woodworking, stumpy nubs, tips, workbench, table saw, scroll saw, drill press, quick tip, band saw, bandsaw, lumber, hack, hand plane, sharpening, tormek, worksharp, diamond stone, water stone, wood turning, bowls, lathe

Id: lpxCJy_l3u4

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 25 2022