British Manufacturing Industries: Pottery, Glass and Silicates, Furniture and Woodwork.Arnoux, Léon
History
British Manufacturing Industries: Pottery, Glass and Silicates, Furniture and Woodwork.
Arnoux, Léon
Manufacturing industries -- Great Britain
An ingenious method of inlaying thin veneers on flat surfaces of wood
by machinery has been patented by the same firm. Veneers or slices of
wood about the thickness of coarse brown paper are glued on a board,
e.g. a table top. A design punched out in zinc, of a thickness
somewhat greater than that of the veneer, is laid over it, and the
board is then placed under a heavy roller. The zinc is forced into the
surface of the board by the roller to about the thickness of the
veneer. A plane cleans off the rest of the veneer, leaving the portion
only that answers to the zinc pattern, thus forced into the surface of
the board. If soaked, the grain of the wood would push up the thin
veneer, no doubt, but this is no greater risk than that to which all
marquetry is exposed.
Neither of these inventions have as yet been carried beyond the
simplest disposition of arrangement. What can be done in either method
remains to be shown.
All the woodwork passed under review thus far in joinery and
cabinet-work, is of _hard_ woods. Much, however, of our modern
furniture is of a less valuable description, and is made of pine,
American birch, Hungarian and other ash. Pitch-pine, an exceedingly
hard wood, difficult to dry, and with a disagreeable propensity to
crack if not very well seasoned, is also used, and a beautiful
material it is. Some small quantity of bedroom furniture in beech,
oak, and ash is made in the workshops that I have been describing. As
a general rule, however, this manufacture of soft woods is a separate
branch of the trade. To see soft wood, such as pine, made up into
admirable bedroom furniture, and French polished till the grain of it
shows much of the delicacy and agreeableness of satin-wood, we should
pay a visit to the works of Messrs. Dyer and Watts, in Islington, and
to other houses that occupy their time exclusively in work of this
kind. It is clean, cheerful, and, by comparison, cheap; is ornamented
(in the works of Messrs. Dyer and Watts) with neat lines of red, grey,
and black, some of the lines imitative of inlaid wood. It is popular,
and if we proceed from the workshops of Messrs. Graham, Holland, and
others, to their showrooms and warehouses, we shall find this deal
furniture for sale, though they do not profess to make any of it. Less
costly pine-wood furniture is painted green, or white, or in imitation
of other woods.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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