General Cadwalader's suite of furniture also had hairy paw feet, but after inspecting several of those pieces in person, it's clear that the Randolf easy chair carver (Pollard) did a much better job. ![]() This project starts with the legs, and one of the coolest features on these legs compared to other early American chairs is that the legs aren't ball & claw.rather they have hairy paw feet. The net is, drawings are almost done and now it's on the the fun part. You're probably thinking "what a whiner," and you're right about that, but to even the scale a bit I must say that the combination of cad and digital photos for generating drawings on something as complicated as this chair is astounding, and for the price Deltacad does a pretty darn good job. Seems like an inordinate amount of time is spent nudging spline points to get nice curved surfaces. Anyone know of a Deltacad add-on or other solution to improve this. These things are a PIA compared to other Bezier curve drawing tools. However, the only way I know of the generate the intricate curved patterns in Deltacad is by using splines. I suppose there's some mathematical was to resolve this, but for now I get as close as possible in a 2D view and adjust on the real piece as needed.not necessarily fun, but it does work. One of the most difficult things is dealing with camera distortion on curved surfaces. Once the photo is scaled correctly, it's really pretty easy to draw straight lines and get all the dimension measured at the museum in place, but creating carving templates is another story. Sure would be nice to pin it to a layer and be able to edit it there. What a pain to have to move it back each I need to move or change magnification to get the scale correct. If I create a known-length reference line and then place the photo on a layer below it (so that the line is visible on top of the photo) every time I scale the photo it gets brought to the top of the viewing stack again. Here's where the first frustration comes in. The approach used is to bring a photo into deltacad and scale it. I have no doubt there's a better way, but haven't been able to find it yet. Mostly I use deltacad and it's done ok, but there's a couple of annoyances when it comes to generating carving templates from photos in this tool. Putting together drawings has been a minor pain. Anyway, a few years ago Chris Storb did a phenomenal job restoring it to it's original beauty. Also, somewhere back in the 1970s, a curator at PMA decided to coat the chair in a lovely shade of lacquer.you'll have to take my word for this not being pretty. Apparently that was hotly debated and would have made a large difference in price, but attribution was finally made to Randolf (probably because of the provenance). At auction time, there was some discussion that the chair may be English rather than American. Anyway, there are a couple of other tidbits that may be of interest. After this sale, newspapers wondered if the collecting public had gone bonkers.I'm second guessing my own sanity for trying to replicate it. Anyway, in 1929 Reifsynder's collection went to auction and this piece was purchased by the Philadelphia Museum of Arts (PMA) for a then-astounding $33,000. (If anyone knows the chronology between these two points, please let me know.having trouble finding it). The chair then passed down through the family of Randolf's 2nd wife and ultimately into the collection of Howard Reifsynder. ![]() There's discrepancy in the literature on exactly who did the carving, but in Beckerdite's 2007 edition of American Furniture, Andrew Brunk attributes the carving to John Pollard, and I tend to agree with his conclusion. It's claimed to have been built in the shop of Benjamin Randolf in Philadelphia circa 1770. But after a day at the museum pawing over some of the most incredible early American carving, I am convicted to build one of my own. Having never been big on upholstered furniture (except for the comfy one in front of the TV), I was reluctant at first to even consider building it. Might as well use the time between seasons to get cracking on the major project for 2011. Perhaps it explains the highest concentration of taverns per capita in the US. ![]() Here in the northwoods of Wisconsin XC ski trails are starting to get soft, the birkebeiner has concluded, roads are still too icy to bike, and our dictator (err governor) has managed to divide a pretty easy going population.
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