Experienced woodworkers know that one of the keys to a successful project is to have the hardware that will be used on-hand before the planning stage is complete and building begins. While having a thorough (and accurate) understanding of the hardware is one reason to explore what is available, I also study hardware for inspiration. The wide variety of hardware available today exhibits so many textures, lines and shapes. Here are some of the pieces of hardware from the Lee Valley Tools Ltd. catalog that inspire me.
Sometimes I think about what the piece of furniture I might build would look like to go with a particular piece of hardware.
Other times, I visualize a certain element of the hardware incorporated into a design.
Or I may imagine the pull or knob scaled up as a piece of furniture.
The Eastside Culture Crawl is an annual event where artists of various mediums open their studios to the public. This pair of antique nickel pulls with a decidedly organic design are from exhibitor Big Bang Boom. Both are the same size and shape, but not quite identical.
These pulls are the type of hardware around which I could design something. This page of my sketchbook shows some of the possible orientations for the pulls.
While sketching I focus on drawing as many possibilities as I can, regardless of whether I think they are good ideas or not. I feel that the two pulls should be located close together to visually tie them together. That suggests they would be used as door pulls rather than drawer pulls which are typically mounted in the middle of the drawer to prevent binding when opening.
Or is there a way to have them as drawer pulls close together and not have the drawer bind?
If you used high quality drawer slides, they probably wouldn’t bind even if pulled off center ?
I wondered about that too. The Blum Tandem slides are able to be pulled out from an edge without binding. However, I feel they are too large for the scale of drawer appropriate for the pulls. I’ll have to see if there are any non-binding slides for small-scale work.
Chris
Chris non binding is not difficult, it only takes a nicer center guide from QS oak. 28″ wide drawers pull and push from the sides. Asa doing shaker showed me the method.
Morgan,
Thanks for the insight. I will do some research and experimentation.
Chris
Wow, all of them are amazing!! I can understand them more with your sketch. Thank you for sharing :) Keep carry on your masterpieces.