Do you have any sculptures in your home?
Well, even if you think you don't, you do, if you have furniture. Have you ever thought of that? Each piece of furniture in your home is actually a piece of sculpture. I may or may not be particularly artistic, but chances are you chose it because of it's design.
I want to touch on that subject with special attention to wood, and how wood affects the design of your "sculptures" such as chairs, sofas, tables, etc.
As you probably know, when trees grow, they grow annual rings in their trunks. You can actually tell the age of a tree by counting the number of rings in the trunk of a cut tree. When you saw a board from the log of a cut tree, the board will reflect those rings in sometimes striking and beautiful ways, depending on the angle of the saw-cut, the size of the original tree, and even the growth pattern that results from seasons of rain or dryness.
The ring patterns include darker small-celled growth, with lighter softer cells between them. As the wood dries out ("seasons"), it naturally shrinks, creating even more pattern shifts. Most of the shrinkage takes place in the first seasoning, before it is made into your sculptures you call furniture.
But each year, with changes in humidity and the passing of time, there can be more fluctuations in your wooden furniture. That's why you could have a wooden door or a dresser drawer that stick in damp weather, and does fine in dry weather. Or you may have a round wooden tabletop made up of several connected boards, and over a few years it shrinks in one direction and becomes more oval than round.
Experts can actually tell a lot about antiques from this type of examination. A slight oval of a circular top may prove age, all things being equal. Or one might actually with their hand feel a turned table or chair leg as being "out of round". Phony "antiques" are even faked by using heat to cause these aging symptoms.
A skilled furniture maker or cabinet maker takes these things into account when designing their "sculptures". By mixing different woods that season at different rates, or putting the grain in a particular direction, they can work with the normal shrinkage, instead of against it.
By:Ronald Allen
