Custom Carpentry Reproduces Historic Details
Custom carpentry may seem like a luxury, but it is often the only way to recreate an historic detail. Students from the North Bennet Street School in Boston recreated a mantle molding from the 1700s for Home Again's Season 13 "Modern Colonial" project house.
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Preservation Carpentry students from the North Bennet Street School work with hand tools on site to recreate 18th century-style molding for the Home Again's Season 13 "Modern Colonial" project house.

Since 1885 the North Bennet Street School has been training people in the art of architectural craft. These craftspeople were once commonplace in America, the carpenters, locksmiths, furniture makers and repairers of the day. Today, these crafts have been elevated to artisanship through the dedication and persistence of those who keep the hand and tool work alive.

Students from the North Bennet Street School hand planed the fireplace molding at the Centerville home. The molding profile was based on a similar fireplace surround found at a nearby historical property. The carpentry students from NBSS were charged with developing the profile and creating it on site. A variety of hand planes were required to create this 18th century bolection molding.

"We hand plane a bolection molding," instructor Robert Adam explains. "It's a large, profiled molding that's higher in the middle than on the edges, and runs around the fireplace, instead of an architrave and entablature to support a mantle shelf." Since it is unique, the design must first be drawn on the wood, in the field. Once the profile is set, hand planning can begin.
The Need for Custom Carpentry
A large molding like the bolection profile used around Home Again's Season 13 "Modern Colonial" project house's fireplace requires a number of different planes and knives to cut and shape the wood.
Custom carpentry may seem like a luxury, but it is often the most efficient way to reproduce a historic detail. A molding like this would be prohibitively expensive if ordered from a mill. Since it is a specialty molding, it would require its own run. Since it is so large," Adam says of the bolection molding profile, "the machinery would be extremely expensive. This job would need about 20 different setups," Adam says. There are few shops that would have the knives, profiles, and time in their schedules to pull off a specialty order like this.
Hand carpentry distinguishes itself from millwork in its clean and accurate cuts. "There's a quality to handwork that is crisp and clean off the knife rather than having the defects of machine work," Adam says. Unlike a machine that tends to leave circular marks in the face of the wood, hand-planed wood is relatively defect free. "When you put a finish on machined wood, there's chatter or ripple marks," Adam explains. "A machined surface always has this slightly scalloped pattern." The faster the mill rate, the more defects found in the surface. That is why fine finish work is more costly—a slower run costs the company and the consumer more.
A large molding like the bolection profile used around Home Again's Season 13 "Modern Colonial" project house's fireplace requires a number of different planes and knives to cut and shape the wood.
Once the depths and varying thicknesses of the wood have been established, a profile is drawn and hand-tooling can begin.

Training Fine Carpenters
The students at NBSS are trained in preservation carpentry, which means they can leave the program to work under preservation contractors, for historic properties, doing fine shopwork like detailing and repairs, or as fine carpenters in their own right. Quite often the students in the program come from a career in building or architecture. Specialization in preservation carpentry as taught at NBSS enhances their knowledge and expertise in the field. Students of the program learn in small, intensive workshops at the school and on site. They work in an apprentice-style setting to complete their degrees before leaving to ply their trades.
"We have serious learners here who are taking a very in-depth approach to trade skills that we think of today as being more like artisanship," Adam says. While NBSS was originally established to teach practical skills to a growing immigrant population, its long history now places it and its students in the highest circles of carpentry and handcraft. For homeowners looking to replicate sash, trim, and moldings, or create a treasured detail for their home, a trained preservation carpenter may be the best solution in a world that has grown too busy for the fine work involved in architectural woodworking.
 

 

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10 February, 2003

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