It was during my last visit to Korea in 2016-17 that I fell in love with its traditional furniture. Prior to that, I can only say it was like. Over the years my wife and I had purchased a couple of antique Chinese pieces and had some other Asian reproductions in the house, but these were just nice looking items that fit with their surroundings. It was not until this in-country exposure, after having been sensitized by my new hobby of furniture-making, that I could actually see the craft in Korean design and construction and become infatuated. It hit me minutes after landing in Seoul as my family and I traipsed down an airport hallway along which there was a display of Korean chests. Were it not for prior infection with the woodworking bug it’s certain I would have passed this display in the weary, head down manner of my fellow 747 travelers. Instead I was energized - and still am.

The mission of the trip was to celebrate Christmas and New Years Day with my son, Andrew, who had just graduated from college and was spending a year teaching English in the city of Inchon, a 50 min train ride from Seoul. We had other family to visit in Korea and some interesting excursions planned that now included hunting for more furniture. It was a fabulous vacation! I’ll likely include this trip in future blog entries but, needing to get on with the title story, I will leave you with a scene from one memorable day poking around an antique shopping section of Seoul with my boys. I encourage a visit of your own!

While in Seoul I picked-up a neat little book called Making Traditional Wooden Furniture that explains (in Korean) the process of furniture-making, from wood choice to the use of traditional tools and techniques. It concludes with four instructional projects of increasing complexity: jewelry box; desk; bookcase; and stationery chest. The book is nicely illustrated such that, with the helpful translation of a phrase or two (thanks honey), one can pretty well understand what they’re getting at. Now, I try not to follow pre-existing plans in my work but all four of these items are worthy of construction following the methods described so as to experience wood joinery the “Korean way.” That was my goal when selecting the stationery chest as a project. And since it represents my first serious foray into mitered dovetail and swallowtail joints, not to mention proper drawers, it would be a prototype piece for our living room - NFS.

The piece itself is very simple in design, making the attention to wood choice and overall proportions critical. In their day, these chests were generally made using paulownia wood (odong namu, Kr). Paulownia is a fast growing, deciduous softwood tree prevalent in Korea and Japan that is remarkably sturdy, given it is only slightly more dense than balsa. It was commonly used to make smaller furnishings intended to be lifted and moved around often, and also, due to its reputed insect repellant properties, book storage chests. Paulownia is farmed as lumber stock in the Southern USA and I will certainly use it one day, but for this project I chose another light-colored wood, soft maple. I have a few 50+ year-old planks of soft maple handed down from my grandfather Otto that I had been saving for a meaningful project and this would be it. The proportions would turn out to be dealer’s choice. The aforementioned “plans” are actually a list of techniques and their sequence of use to make and assemble the joints (plus diagrams). They advise the builder to choose “width:depth” dimensions of between 4:1 and 6:1 … vague, but convenient. Since I intended to place the chest beneath a certain window in my living room, I chose 15 in. for the height, 9 in. for depth and 56 in. for width (6.2:1). It’s a long window.

Before I could tap into the plans I first needed to prepare my lumber. Since the wood had been stored in several barns over the years it carried a coat of surface grit that I wanted to remove before it could chip or dull my tool blades. A rub down with the belt sander did the trick (outdoors, of course). Removing the oxidized surface also gave me a first glimpse of the material which appeared to be a desirable variant of maple called curly, exhibiting rows of rippled grain that can be quite beautiful when finished properly. You have probably seen this type of wood used for the sides (aka ribs) of violins. Back to our wood … there are four different ways that lumber can warp after being cut into planks. During the seasoning process wood can remain stable or else it can cup, bow, crook or twist - depending on the affected dimension. In aeronautic terms I guess these would correspond to roll, pitch, yaw and death spiral. Anyway, the most insidious warp, and the most difficult to correct, is the twist. Otto’s maple was twisted. It should be noted that correcting warped wood is not like orthodontics. There is no amount of pressure-over-time that will straighten a bend in seasoned lumber. Instead a woodworker acts more like a butcher, imagining in three-dimensions where the choice cuts reside and then trimming away the surrounding, inedible parts. Seasoned, myself, by having corrected a twisted old barn plank for an earlier project, I reached for my trusty shop-made router plane sled. This useful sled allows a router to cut, in a level manner, over an underlying surface (e.g., the twisted plank) thereby creating a level top face. While reproducing the result of having used a hand plane, the operation is more akin to lawn mowing. It takes a while but it works well. Having achieved a flat top there are several ways to proceed. One could flip it over and have a go at the backside but nobody enjoys router planing that much. It would also be a straight-forward task to clamp the flat side to your workbench and flatten the other surface using a hand plane, but I chose to subject the plank to my thickness planer (flat side down) and after a few passes created a remarkably uniform board to begin cutting up.

At some point in a project I like to add up the number of individual board pieces to be dimensioned and jot that down. This helps me keep track of things in the shop and allows me to account for all of the parts as they are fashioned. This simple chest is comprised of 37 parts: 13 maple; 24 poplar wood - the poplar components making up the drawer interiors. Cutting them all as intended and then putting them together in the right order is called “woodworking”. (Got the bug, yet?)

From here on, the story will focus on the chest’s frame, or “carcass”. The carcass is made of 9 maple pieces, and of these only 3 will attract attention of the casual admirer: the top and two sides. Some of the remaining frame members reveal a 1 in. thick edge while others, a back rail and backboard, can only be seen from behind. (The backboard was not present in the original “plan” but I added it during design for extra stability and as a means of keeping dust out of the drawers.) Anyway, better do those 3 pieces properly.

As it turns out, the 3 primary components plus the backboard could all be obtained from that one, formerly twisted 2+ in. x 10 in. x 8 ft. maple board. After the aforementioned thickness planing to obtain clean and flat surfaces, the plank was cut into two, more easily handled sections roughly approximating the table top (60 in.) and the sides (17 + 17 = 34 in.) and then jointed on one edge to create adjacent and perfectly “square” reference sides. These two were then sliced through the narrow dimension on the bandsaw in an operation called “re-sawing”. Re-sawing is a very useful method to convert thick wood pieces into thinner boards, but it requires a powerful bandsaw to do the job well. My 2 HP Grizzly with 17 inch wheels was made for this type of job and it performed well. In the end I obtained the top and side boards (planed to 1 in. thickness) plus a backboard (planed to 1/4 in.) and 34 inches of excess, thin curly maple stock for future clock-making use. Subsequent cuts created the remaining parts from additional, straight(!) boards, removed semi-circles from the leg boards and brought all pieces to their final dimension. Let’s get on to those Korean joints.

The top will be affixed to the sides through the very strong and versatile “dovetail” joint. This joint connects two distinctly fashioned boards (a so-called “pin” board and “tail” board) and is named for that portion that resembles a bird’s tail. There are jigs available that allow dovetails to be precisely constructed using power tools but I feel this ancient joint is best made by hand. Over the centuries a number of ‘religions’ have arisen concerning the hand-cutting of dovetails that differ primarily by which board (pin vs tail) is cut first. Woodworkers tend to remain devoted to their sect, as it takes a fair amount of practice to become skilled (and even more to convert). I had no such skills when I began this project. Some research, a few practice pieces and guidance from my skilled son, Andrew, got me off the mat but there is considerable room for improvement. It’s a matter of perfecting one’s handsaw and chisel techniques and then applying these without fault during a series of cuts. The pay-off is a very strong joint that becomes an attractive feature of the finished product. The particular variant of dovetail joint in this piece contains a mitered element (i.e., cut at 45 degrees to match another 45 degree piece). Mitered dovetails are not the favored beginner’s joint as they involve extra, and delicate, cuts on both the tail and pin boards, but these joints have the potential to look great and I enjoyed the challenge. I’ll skip the blow-by-blow description and grade my effort a B- overall. I did encounter one unanticipated challenge in cutting the dovetails on a 56 inch board: height. I solved this by building a 7 in. “booster” step that allowed me to saw the pins in the top piece at a more comfortable elevation. I also needed to make a platform bracket to substitute as the bench top for properly marking the lofted piece prior to cutting. These diversionary projects will no doubt come in handy over time.

The final joint required for assembly is referred to as a “swallowtail” joint and is named for that portion that resembles a bird’s tail … hey, wait a minute!? (Turns out the woodworking nomenclature is almost as confusing as organic chemistry’s. But that’s the topic of a future blog.) It appears that what Koreans depict as a “dovetail joint” they describe as a “fist joint” (I can see it). Their native joint, which has no real counterpart in the West, they call a “swallowtail”, and who am I to argue. In truth, this “swallowtail” is simply a mortise and tenon joint that is further registered in alignment by a decorative point at the junction of the two boards - that apparently resembles a bird’s tail, kinda. The main point is that there are 10 swallowtails contained in this carcass, and I got pretty good at cutting them toward the end.

The final step in construction is the “glue up” where for the first time all the pieces are fixed in their final resting place. While not the final step in production, as there are still planing, sanding and oiling steps remaining, the “glue up” is akin to Graduation Day. It signifies an arrival, of sorts, often accompanied by a few unrehearsed stumbles during the ceremony. This turned out to be a tricky assembly for, given the tightness of the dovetail joints, I opted to omit the customary “dry-fit” rehearsal. This would be a “one-and-done” operation that, with some spousal assistance and 6 ft. long pipe clamps, worked out pretty well. I have the cosmetic steps mentioned earlier to complete, and also those 4 drawers. However, I am taking a break on this piece to attend to the desires of paying customers and to study drawer construction some more. Pretty happy to leave it here for now. To be continued …