The Furniture

Quality Furniture Primer

 

The furniture of The Rose Rugged is exactly that, rugged and made from undiluted wood. Created in a slave-free, robot-free environment. The pieces are modern interpretations of simple furniture people may have owned hundreds of years ago, when metal fasteners were scarce and expensive. The joinery is designed to be as strong as the wood and is often mechanically reinforced using old fashioned techniques. Glue is hardly required, but it is added for redundant strength. The wood is respected for its inherent beauty, natural variations and “flaws" are invited into our work. We don’t strive for a machined look. The beauty of the human touch is part of the character that The Rose Rugged cherishes. We invite you to see and feel what we mean by the human touch.
 
We source the majority of our lumber from local sawyers. The sawyers range from large commercial operations to back yard hobbyists. The backyard hobbyists provide the finest, air dried lumber, which we buy freshly milled and air-dry ourselves. Air drying takes extra time, a year of drying time for every inch of thickness. The result is a richness of color and workability that is unmatched by kiln dried lumber. A secondary benefit of using the smaller sawyers is that they mill lumber that the commercial operations won't touch. There are an untold number of usable logs lost to waste every year because the commercial mills deem them less profitable. We source as much lumber as we can from the smaller mills.         
 
The Joinery: What Makes Quality Joinery Special? 
 
Wood joinery consists mostly of different variations of the mortise and tenon joint, mortises being the female component and the tenons being the male component. The image below is a through mortise and tenon joint, a joint that has been found in archeological digs still holding furniture together after hundreds/thousands of years. You can see how the chair components go together like a puzzle, creating ample strength for a century of heavy use.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The joint must fit snuggly together in order to bond well with glue. We start with precision for ideal glue bonding and then we like to make our joinery stronger with mechanical methods often used in timber framing. Draw-bore pins and wedges are the two main methods we use to mechanically improve joints.   
 
Wedges are used everywhere for their simplicity and strength. If we need to keep a heavy door opened we grab a wedge. The stronger the door's force against the wedge the harder the wedge pushes against the door. The same principle applies with wedges in wood joinery. Loose wedges/tusks are another type of wedge that is used in woodworking. The images below is an example of a loose wedged tenon. This is one of my favorite mechanical joinery techniques because it allows furniture to be readily assembled and disassembled without metal fasteners.    
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Draw-boring is a technique that uses wooden pins to pull the tenon into the mortise. This is accomplished by drilling holes in the component that houses the mortise, then using the drilled holes as a guide to mark offset holes that will be drilled in the tenon. This process creates a slight bend in the pin as it pushes through the tenon that will continuously force the tenon into the mortise, locking them together without the need for glue.   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
           

Production Furniture

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Production furniture is often under-engineered, made with resources sourced from ecologically devastating forestry practices, and made with slave/virtual-slave labor and robots. Pocket hole screws and other underperforming metal fasteners are used in production furniture. These metal fasteners are built to fail in a short period of time, likely, just past the warranty period (they have done the math). The benefit of metal fasteners is that machines and cheap, unskilled laborers can be utilized to create "furniture", if we can extend such a title to something which so quickly transitions to landfill. Production furniture is also built with timbers from underdeveloped countries with unprotected forests, capitalizing on cheaper lumber sourced by way of devastating forestry practices (at the time of writing this, China was destroying the forests of Africa's Congo Basin to supply Americans with low quality production furniture). The lumber is then shipped to factories where virtual-slaves are used to machine furniture that is designed to end up in landfills. While the cost of production furniture is more inviting than quality furniture, the furniture's lifespan is short, ultimately leading to further purchases or living with wobbly, uncomfortable, and unsafe furniture. Of course, aesthetics count as well and broken furniture will not fit your functional motif very well. You are now armed with enough information to help you avoid a poor quality furniture purchase, even if it is not purchased from The Rose Rugged.       

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More on Strength
 
The average piece of furniture is made for the average person’s height and weight. The inherent strength of my designs are perfect for those who may fall outside the average. The joinery and heavy stock that inspire my work is perfect for those of us that like a sturdier seat. 
 
Thoughts on Finishing
 
Holding to the philosophy that wood is naturally beautiful, wood should look and feel like wood. Our experience is that oil finishes are the best option for maintaining the natural look and feel of wood. Oil finishes are beautiful and easily repaired and renewed. Some believe coating their wood in a thick, protective coating of resin (plastic or otherwise) is best. There are benefits to those finishes, like protection from moisture, UV rays, and cleaning chemicals. It might be that the wood can be coated at a lower level of sanding and be spray finished faster, saving money, that is the driving force behind companies choosing these kinds of finishes. It is hard to say for sure. The downside to these kinds of finishes is that they can't be easily repaired and require a complete deconstruction of the original finish to apply a new finish, an expensive job that will require a professional. This often leaves furniture in disrepair or abandoned for newer furniture. Oil finish is the first and best choice, most of the time. 
 
Oil finish is not the only finish we believe in worthwhile. Some furniture requires heavier protection or higher clarity. Table tops will often benefit from a thicker finish. Highly figured wood will often look best under thin french polish. We strive to express the best attributes of the wood when choosing a finish to deliver the highest quality finish for the end use.