There's one thing I love about wood that's always missing from Canadian Home Workshop. It's something best experienced up close, in the workshop. What's missing from these pages is the smell of wood. Nothing, in my mind, beats the clean resinous scent of newly cut pine. Or the warm, slightly spicy smell of cedar. And the wood for this project has a smell like no other.
A hundred years ago, a redwood tree in California was logged and milled, and some of its wood was made into a giant vat. For decades after, this vat stored and aged California red wine. When the vat was no longer usable, its boards were carefully removed and the wood reclaimed. I saw some for sale at Timeless Materials, an architectural salvage company in Heidelberg, Ont. When I smelled this wood—and the wine that was steeped into it—I knew I had to use it for something special.
So I designed an outdoor lantern, inspired by the Prairie Style of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Prairie Style is a close cousin of Mission Style, with the same clean lines, rectilinear forms and solid construction. But Prairie Style-inspired furniture is lighter and more delicate than Mission, and the biggest difference is in what their designers wanted the world to see. Mission furniture uses construction details—such as through tenons, protruding pegs and massive support brackets—as visible design elements. Prairie designers kept the construction method, especially the joints, subtly hidden from view.
Wright was a stubborn perfectionist, and always used the best materials, so he would probably appreciate that I used such special wood for a project he inspired. Of course, there's not much of this wonderfully fragrant wood to be had, so for everyone else I recommend cedar.
Download the illustrated plans for the Prairie lantern here!
Start by dressing all stock to 1" thickness. The wood I used began as 1 1/8"- to 1 1/4"-thick material, perfect for planing down for the frame and panel parts I needed—though I did have to glue several pieces to make stock for the legs and the peak block.
Start with the sides
While the laminations are drying, prepare the rails, stiles, and mullions. The plans show how the centre rails and mullions need dados for the half-lap joints that connect them. Scribe lines on the mullion using the sides of the centre rail as a guide, then make a series of crosscuts between these lines and halfway through the mullions using a dovetail saw. Clean out the waste with a sharp 1" chisel, then repeat the process to mark and prepare dados in the centre rails. You could make the dados with repeated passes across your table saw, but I find this method faster to set up, plus it gives me the chance to use hand tools in my woodworking.
Image at left:Pinch dogs always work in a pinch if you run out of clamps. Here they work to secure a joint after the clamp has been removed
After cutting all the rails, stiles and mullions to length, dry-fit each side frame on a flat surface before gluing. Polyurethane glue requires moisture to cure properly, so have a small spray bottle of water on hand to dampen mating surfaces. To glue up all four sides at the same time, you'll need 12 clamps capable of spanning the width of each panel. My clamp supply came up short (there are never enough), so I enlisted the help of pinch dogs. The picture above shows a dog keeping the curing joint secure after the clamp has been removed. I also used small squares of plywood to keep each assembly square. Holes in the plywood allow clamps to pull everything into alignment. All of the perimeter joints are just butt joints at this stage. For strength, biscuits will be plunged into the assembled joints later, after the glue has cured.
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