Shadowing Practice: What on earth is a Buck Board Bench? - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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Hey, this is Furniture Forensics.
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Hey, this is Furniture Forensics.
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It's the series where we take old pieces of furniture
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and find out where they came from and who made them and we're ready to go except we don't have a piece.
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But don't worry, I know where to find one.
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This will just take a second second.
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This is perfect.
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And yeah, of course I have permission to borrow this.
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You know, my wife asked me that this morning.
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What do you people think of me?
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This is a buckboard bench.
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I found it on my neighbor's front porch.
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She was out having a glass of wine one night when I stopped by.
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She saw me admiring it and she said,
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oh, yeah, they would take the seats off of old horse-drawn wagons,
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add legs, and make them into household furniture.
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And right away, I was skeptical.
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I mean, I know a thing or two about old furniture.
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If people were making benches out of wagon parts,
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I would have heard about that.
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Or there's lots of things I don't know about, and I'm just wrong.
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Turns out there's hundreds of these all across the Midwest.
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Most of them are reproductions.
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They're new pieces of furniture made to look like they were created from wagon parts.
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But 70 or 80 years ago,
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this was a real trend in furniture making.
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People really did take parts from old wagons,
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mostly the benches, and turn them into real household furniture.
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Is that what we have here?
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Do we have one of the real, legit, old buckboard benches?
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Maybe.
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The seat of this bench looks worn and old.
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And yeah, you can fake that,
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but it's difficult to fake the splits,
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chips, gouges, scratches, and the general feeling of smoothness this has on all the surfaces that would have been used.
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That's the sort of thing you only get after decades of use.
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And this seat was definitely made by hand.
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There's no machine planer marks,
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no sanding scratches, but there are lots of spots where there's light tear-out.
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Just what you would expect if the whole thing was quickly planed up with a jack plane right before it was assembled.
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Then where these two boards come together there's obvious planing marks over here.
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This board must have stuck out a little bit
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so it was quickly planed flush with a jack plane after it was put together.
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Finally there's this broad flat chamfer all the way around the outside of the seat board.
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It looks nice and it would have helped any rain to drip off the edge of the seat.
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Now it's very well executed,
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very flat, but the top line of that chamfer has just a little bit of waviness that you would expect from handwork.
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This thing was definitely made with hand tools.
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The whole bench is made of sycamore,
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which you see a lot in Northern Ohio country furniture,
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and all the joinery is done with hardware.
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That's great news because hardware is easy to date.
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All the joints are done with screws,
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so this corner joint is made by screwing through the backboard into the sideboard.
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All the side boards are screwed down into the seat and the corners are reinforced with these corner brackets.
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If we look at these brackets it's obvious that they're not as crisp
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and nice as something you'd buy today but they're definitely not hand forged.
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This is early factory made hardware.
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Now a lot of the screws especially on these brackets are modern replacements
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but it's easy to tell which screws are the old original ones.
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One of those original screws was loose and I very carefully backed it out to take a closer look.
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And this is a Gimlet Point screw.
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This is the first generation of mass-produced affordable screws.
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Before this, screws were actually made one at a time,
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hand-filed by the blacksmith, and they were so rare and expensive,
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they were only used to hold hardware on fancy pieces of furniture for rich people.
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The gimlet screw was a huge leap forward because it made screws much more plentiful and much cheaper.
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The gimlet screw was invented in 1845,
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but you've got to give it a couple decades to spread across the country and get inexpensive.
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Nobody would have used new expensive hardware on a cheap country wagon.
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So looking at all the hardware and the timbers here,
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I think we can say that this bench was made somewhere between 1860 and 1890.
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Which is pretty exciting, because that means the seat for this bench is real,
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it's old, and it's local.
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The seat of this bench is cool all by itself,
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but somebody took that wagon seat and converted it into a real piece of household furniture.
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How did they do that?
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Did they do a good job?
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And personally, I also want to know when it happened,
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and maybe most importantly, who did the conversion?
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Now, I've got answers to all of these questions.
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Some of the answers are going to surprise you.
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Overall, the maker did a great job with this conversion.
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He started by screwing big battens to the underside of the seat.
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Screws are smart here because that allows for wood movement.
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Then, he sent the leg tenons all the way through the batten and the seat.
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This is called staked construction.
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And sending those tenons through the batten and the seat means they're going through a big,
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thick chunk of wood.
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that's going to be stable.
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The ends of the tenons are trimmed nice and level with the seat,
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and they're wedged with thick pieces of hardwood.
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These are all techniques that I used last year when I made my three Moravian stools.
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These are traditional, dependable techniques for taking a board and turning it into a piece of seating.
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But what kind of woodworker was this?
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What sorts of tools did he use?
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Well, mostly machine tools.
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There's a great angled bevel on the end of each of these battens,
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and it's got the super precise look that you really only get with a table saw.
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It's the same thing with the tenons on the ends of these legs.
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They are ultra perfect, so it looks like they were done with a lathe.
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And on top of that,
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there's clear marks left from lathe dead centers on the ends of the legs.
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These were definitely done on a pretty early electric lathe.
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And on top of that,
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there's planer marks on these battens,
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so they were run through a planer or an early jointer.
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It's tough to say, but they definitely weren't hand planed.
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Now, what's interesting is these legs are beveled on the sides to make them into an octagon,
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and those bevels are very irregular.
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They were either done with a jack plane and done pretty quickly,
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or maybe with a draw knife or a spokeshave.
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So this guy was using a combination of hand tools and machine tools.
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He was a hybrid woodworker.
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Or maybe at the time that he did it, everybody was hybrid.
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They just called it woodworking.
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Now even with those details,
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it's still hard to put a date on this conversion,
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and we're going to have to look at some smaller details,
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like the screws that hold the battens to the seat.
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If you just look at these quickly,
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they look just like the same slot head gimlet point screws we find on the top of the seat,
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but there are some key differences.
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They're bigger, they have a cleaner appearance,
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and they've got a shiny silver surface.
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These are galvanized screws that were dipped in zinc to keep them from rusting.
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And galvanized screws didn't come in until the early 1900s,
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and they wouldn't have become cheap and popular for a little while after that.
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This kind of hardware pushes the restoration into probably the 1920s,
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maybe the 1930s, but there are some other important details we have to look at.
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Around the base of each of these tenons,
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there is clear squeeze out of yellow glue.
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And believe me, I know exactly how that happens when you're making a staked piece of furniture like this.
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You put glue on those tenons,
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you pound them into the mortises,
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and then you immediately flip the thing over so you can wedge the other side before that glue sets up.
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With this style of construction,
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having some glue drip down those tenons is unavoidable.
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Believe me, I've been here,
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and this is very clear evidence of yellow glue.
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It looks exactly like modern stuff.
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Yellow wood glue didn't come in until 1951 when the Titebond Corporation introduced it.
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Yep, same people we're still giving our money to today.
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That glue didn't exist until the early 50s,
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which means this conversion couldn't have been done until the early 1950s.
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Now we know when and how this was done,
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but I want to know who.
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Who was the woodworker who made this buckboard into a piece of furniture?
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And we can figure that out,
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but to do it, we have to stop looking at the things he did well and examine his mistakes.
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Because he made a couple, and they're pretty big.
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The craftsman used screws to connect the battens to the seat,
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but he didn't use enough of them.
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He used three screws in a simple diagonal line,
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but he should have used more.
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You can see that over on the corner here where there is no screw,
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the seat is pulling away from the batten,
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and the same thing is happening here on the opposite corner.
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What he should have done is used two screws on either end and one screw in the middle.
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That would have given him a tighter connection.
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I can actually flex this batten just with my hands,
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and it would have held the seat much flatter.
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When I made my simple Moravian stool last year,
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I used that two-two-one screw pattern,
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and it was super solid.
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I didn't make this up.
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I saw it on traditional furniture.
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The other big problem is with these leg joints.
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The tenons are great.
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They've been turned perfectly.
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The issue is the transition from the tenon back to the fat part of the leg.
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This detail here, woodturners would call this a pommel,
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and it looks really nice,
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but it's much too abrupt of a transition.
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There's even a clearly defined shoulder between the tenon and the pommel,
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and that's a big problem.
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In construction like this, you really need this part of the leg to be a smooth taper.
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So as you apply pressure to the seat,
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that tapered section can get forced deeper into that hole and tighten that connection.
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When you have a shoulder,
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that actually gives you a leverage point.
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The leg can work back and forth and over time it's guaranteed to loosen.
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And look, I'm not trying to pick on this guy,
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but he made some other strange choices.
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Like the legs are made out of really lightweight construction lumber,
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probably western red cedar.
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It's what they frame all the houses around here with.
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These are just 2x4s that have been ripped in half,
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and he even left some giant flaws and knots in them.
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This leg has a knot the size of a quarter.
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I can't believe it hasn't snapped yet.
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And I know, I know,
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you're thinking, Rex, you're obviously just nitpicking this guy.
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If the construction was so bad, it would've loosened up.
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The thing is, it did.
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This leg is super loose.
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And so is this leg.
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And so are the other two.
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Nobody sits on this bench anymore, because they can't.
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We're all afraid it'll break.
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And when you add it all up,
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I finally know who did this.
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It was a home gamer,
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a hobbyist, somebody like us.
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Somebody who had access to maybe not the best wood and a mixture of tools,
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one or two fancy electric tools and a couple of old hand tools,
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maybe passed down from his dad or his grandfather.
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And this was probably done in the 1950s.
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Everything about it says 50s.
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And man, what an exciting time that must have been to be a woodworker.
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World War II in the rearview mirror,
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time for leisure and fun.
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And finally, there were affordable woodworking machines,
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things that you could just plug into the wall and you could buy on a working man's salary.
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Stuff like a modest size electric lathe or a little table saw.
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They even had crazy combo machines like a table saw with a built-in jointer.
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Those things probably weren't a good idea or we'd still be doing them.
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They probably weren't very safe.
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But there must have been a great sense of possibility.
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You know, even if you didn't train as a furniture maker,
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even if you were just a little bit handy,
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you could buy a couple of machines,
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you could read popular mechanics,
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and you could make stuff in your own basement.
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I mean, I'm a hand tool guy,
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and I go for stuff that was made longer ago in a different tradition,
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but I still think back on that suburban person working in their basement
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or their garage back in the 50s
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and i think yeah it was the same spirit the same idea it must have been incredibly fun
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and even
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if this piece has some flaws it looks great consistent color
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nice angles on the legs a real unity it doesn't look like two things just jammed together
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and yeah it's a little rickety i'm not going to sit on it
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but I think this thing was converted into a bench 70 years ago
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and it's still being used as a little rustic coffee table you gotta call
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that a win you gotta call the whole piece a win
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and it's been extremely fun to look at pieces like this
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videos like this are why I love my patrons this is
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a weird woodworking video the algorithm doesn't like stuff like this it's not gonna get a million views,
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nobody would ever want to sponsor a video like this,
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but my patrons like this sort of thing.
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In fact, this is the most requested video from my patrons because they're interested in the details.
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They want to get into the weeds and know about the little stuff,
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and they let me make these sorts of historical kind of academic videos
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that I would never get to make otherwise and i'm incredibly grateful for
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that i try to show my gratitude by doing a ton
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of things for my patrons free plans discussion forum we're doing
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a build along series where i give them a tiny little
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bit of a table build every week we're building a little
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shaker table together like five minutes at a time it's a lot of fun
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and if you'd like to get in on that fun patreon.com rex kruger
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if you'd like to build a moravian stool or a number of other pieces of traditional furniture,
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check out rexkruger.com slash shop where we've got all of our plans.
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You can build a workbench,
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a shave horse, all sorts of stuff.
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Anyway, thanks for coming along on this trip with me.
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It's been incredibly fun.
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I can't wait to do it again.
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I'll see you soon.
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About This Lesson
In this lesson, you will explore the fascinating history of a unique piece of furniture known as the "buckboard bench." As you watch the video, you'll practice your English listening skills and improve your pronunciation by focusing on specific vocabulary related to furniture-making and craftsmanship. This lesson will also provide you with insights into how furniture has been created from old materials, enhancing your cultural knowledge along with your language skills. By engaging with this content, you can improve English pronunciation and gain confidence in discussing historical topics.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Buckboard bench: A type of bench made from parts of old horse-drawn wagons.
- Craftsmanship: The quality of design and work shown in something made by hand.
- Reproduction: A newly made piece of furniture designed to resemble an older item.
- Joinery: The method of joining pieces of wood together.
- Sycamore: A type of wood commonly used in northern Ohio furniture.
- Hand tools: Tools that are manually operated, not powered by electricity.
- Planing: The process of smoothing wood with a tool called a planer.
Practice Tips
To maximize your learning from this video, consider using the shadowing technique while you watch. This method involves listening to the speaker and repeating their words in real-time, allowing you to focus on pronunciation, intonation, and pacing. Since the speaker maintains a moderate speed, it is an excellent opportunity for you to practice effective IELTS speaking practice. Start by listening to a short segment of the video, then pause it and repeat what you've heard. Pay attention to the curves of the speaker's voice and try to mimic them. If you struggle to keep up, you can adjust the playback speed to a slower setting. Engage in this practice regularly, and you'll find yourself able to learn English with YouTube stories with more fluency. Remember, consistency is key with any learning method, so make shadowing a part of your daily English practice routine.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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