The other interesting thing about this table was the finish. The table had been sent out to be spray lacquered. We don't have a spray shop here and we have had mixed success with using a local spray finisher. The finish on this table was particularly unhappy. Not that there was anything wrong with it, it was just unhappy. Now I get very touchy about finishing because it is so very important from the client's point of view. For, when one experiences a piece of furniture for the first time, it is usually through those top two or three microns of surface coating. The touch of the finger tip corroborates what the eye beholds. If the eye tells you wood and the touch tells you plastic then something is wrong somewhere and this table felt like plastic. But then so much of contemporary furniture these days feels like plastic. It wasn't really anything I could be certain about. However, now we have remade that table top and re—finished it in a different way I am much more certain about what had, until now, been an instinctive feeling. When we got the exhibition table back and decided to refinish the top entirely I had the problem of finding four more Burr Walnut veneers. Luckily Crispins of Curtain Road in London, my main veneer supplier, still had four leaves from the same bundle that I had purchased the original set from. This was very lucky and one of the two strokes of luck we had on the whole job. The task of recovering this piece from disaster fell to David Woodward who promptly rented time on a thicknessing sander owned in another workshop locally and sanded the original veneers off. He then replaced it with beautifully quartered Burr Black Walnut veneers and then routed in new lippings to frame the burrs. As this was going on we decided to inlay a wide Applewood string around the circumference of the table as that seemed to frame the burrs most satisfactorily. The colour of the Apple also blended very beautifully with the lighter tones of the Burr Black Walnut. Then we came to refinishing. The pedestal and the underside of the table were rubbed down. The lacquer was carefully cut back and a burnished finish applied. This was adequate for secondary surfaces but the primary surface of the table top had to be treated very differently. Now I know there is a view that French polish is old fashioned, is not tough enough for everyday use and is not relevant to contemporary furniture. After the experience of working on this table I would say that this is absolute rot. French polish involves the use of a material called Shellac. This, in traditional form, is a treacly brown colour and lends a definite antique air to what you are polishing. For contemporary furniture this would be inappropriate. What was needed here was a clear transparent finish and it is possible to achieve that with transparent Shellac. Now I have used transparent Shellac for many jobs in the past. It has lent itself admirably to the finishing of chairs, cabinets and desks — pieces where a very sensitive finish is required have been well served by Shellac polish. But I have always shied away from using it on tables, perhaps feeling that a table should be capable of taking a certain amount of abuse. There is certainly a good argument that in certain situations Shellac would not be an adequately strong finish but in this case we had a fine table with a Burr Walnut surface which should be treated with a certain amount of care and respect in general use. So we went for a Shellac finish. What amazed me as the finish grew was the colour. The lacquered table, using the same veneers, had been slightly disappointing in colour. The browns had a grey tinge to them and the richness of the burr did not seem to properly come out. It was exciting, it was beautiful, but somehow it didn't seem to be all there. With the Shellac the colour was all there and more. There was a depth now present in the Shellac finished table top that was not present when the same table had been lacquered. I doubt if I would ever have been quite so aware of this had we not gone through this disaster. Here we had the same table, with the veneers from the same bundle, finished in two totally different ways. The only conclusion I can draw is that the two pack AC lacquer that was used on the first table was something that I will not use again on dark timber if I want to bring out the full colour of the wood.The final bit of luck we had on this job was while we were refinishing this table. We have in the workshop a gentleman called Tim Hodgkinson. Tim is doing a one year cabinetmaking course with me and paying a princely sum for the pleasure of doing it. He is an immensely gifted young man who in the first six months of his course has made more high quality pieces of furniture than any student we have had here before. At times Tim's speed and intelligence is quite breath—taking and I am sure that with a couple of years experience he will become a very fine craftsman. The thing about Tim is that he came to us with experience of a polishing shop so he was very well placed to help us improve our spiriting—out technique that is so necessary on a fine Shellac finish. You may think it is a rum thing that a chap like Tim should pay an arm and a leg to come here for a year and then teach us a thing or two but then I am perfectly happy to admit that we don't know everything. The furniture making craft is so wide and it covers so many disciplines that it is impossible to have in—depth knowledge of all these disciplines all the time. Polishing is a good example. In the so called "good old days", when the furniture making craft was centred on Shoreditch, there would have been a polisher down the road. His name would probably have been "Shiney" or "Stainey" and he would have had an apron that was so stiff with Shellac that it stood up on its own. Nowadays we are so scattered about the country that it is very unlikely that any of us would have a "Stainey" just around the corner who could be relied upon to put up a first class polish. So polishing becomes yet another thing that the furniture maker has to know how to do. It is a horrifying thought because a good well trained polisher would have served a seven year apprenticeship and we contemporary furniture makers cannot pretend to get near that knowledge a professional polisher would have. However, we should have knowledge of certain techniques that are appropriate to the kind of furniture we make. This workshop is very good at oiling furniture. I love oil finish. It allows the texture and the feel of the wood to come through. But oil is only suitable for some pieces. We have been very good at burnished Shellac finish and we can now add a brighter spirited—off Shellac finish to enhance our fine pieces of blonde furniture. Sadly, there will always be a customer who will want a bomb proof surface. They don't deserve fine furniture but, of course, when asked to do this I will say "of course, as you wish, sir". I will then hang up the telephone swear loudly and search out those long unused tins of AC lacquer

Craft of Cabinetmaking Article 8

by David Savage

First published in Woodworker magazine

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