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Carpenterjoinercabinetmaker
Monday, 30th August 2010 21:41 PM
At a party this weekend mine host introduced me to various guests as Chris Tribe the carpenter. I have long ago given up trying to correct people on this, I prefer to be known as cabinet maker or furniture maker. Yes, you can call me a snob if you like, I admit it. I think of carpenters working on a larger scale, building roofs or timber framed buildings and perhaps not working to fine tolerances. Furniture and cabinet makers tend to be a bit more obsessive, working to about 0.5mm. However I have just looked up carpenter on the online Oxford dictionary and find that I am in fact a carpenter, it defines a carpenter as “ a person who makes and repairs wooden objects and structures”. Which I think is a fair description of what I do. There again I am also sometimes described as a joiner, my objections here are on firmer ground as the definition for joiner is “a person who constructs the wooden components of a building, such as stairs, doors, and door and window frames” that’s not me.
Having said that, yesterday I did some joinery on our house. When we move in I noticed that the barge board on the gable end and the facias to the front of the dormers had some rotten patches. So on Sunday I set about repairing them. I have to say that I did bring some furniture making sensibilities to the task. I jointed the new spliced in pieces using biscuits, a technique more common to cabinet making work. You will also see from the picture that the new pieces were glued and clamped in traditional furniture making fashion. However I’m afraid I have to admit that I did have to use nails in a couple of places and also, heaven forbid some FILLER!!! I think possibly a proper joiner would have done a proper job and replaced the whole board rather than patched it.
It was with some relief that I returned to my workshop today!
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