Terry Lawrence dishes up a collection of doll’s house furniture there’s no cutting, shaping or drilling.
A & G SLEDGE (Miniatures), of Ware, Herts, offers a large range of 1:12 scale pieces. There are 67 items so far in the range with a piano and stool to follow shortly. Styles range from Queen Anne through Victorian to Edwardian, with the occasional extra delight such as a Duncan Phyfe dressing table, a Colonial Dresser, and a delicate rocking cradle.
These kits are imported from Australia and the designer, D Nguyen, has selected for them a timber previously unknown to me. It is called Phong Lan and is, I am told, a Vietnamese plantation grown timber (i.e., a sustainable tropical hardwood). It is fine-grained, rather like Castello boxwood (Gossypiospermum praecox), but in colour is exactly the shade of Anigre (Aningeria species). In artists’ terms, think of Naples yellow with a touch of gamboge.
In order of complexity, there is a wall shelf unit, a Colonial kitchen chair, a kitchen table with drawer, and finally a Welsh Dresser. With all these kits there is no cutting, shaping or drilling (except for the dresser door hinge pins); just careful assembly and finishing. The standard of the machining is very high, and considerable attention has been paid to the accuracy of the jigs, and the design of the miniature cutters.
The standard of the turning (which I assume is miniature copy turning) is first class, even down to the little door knobs which are only 3 mm (1/8 in) diameter.
Virtually no sanding is necessary, though if you do need to take off a few whiskers, you should use a fine abrasive (I used Vitex cloth of 400 grit).
Despite solid timber being used throughout - even for the thin (1 mm) panels, there is virtually no warp. Only two panels were slightly curved, and that was corrected in the assembly.
Each kit has a sheet with full-sized drawings of each part, and the quantity of each part where applicable, so you can check the contents easily. Each stage of assembly is illustrated by perspective line drawings, so you shouldn’t go wrong.
A final point concerns the largest units. In the case of the Welsh Dresser, there are five sub-assemblies. There are a considerable number of parts and in order to avoid confusion, each sub-assembly is packaged separately.
 Wall shelf components. |
This kit comprises six pieces and costs £6.45. You can’t get much simpler than this one. Just sand the edges lightly with 400 grit abrasive. For this, and all the other kits I used Speed-Bond glue by Deluxe. This is a high tack, fast grab PVA which dries transparent, and allows handling (gently!) of a piece after four minutes or so. I found that the best way of applying this adhesive was with a fine-pointed artists brush (No. 3 ox-ear hair for example). The point of this will get the glue into the slots where it is needed. One point I should make here (and this is mentioned by the company too) is that if you wish to stain the piece, it is best done by staining each part before assembly. Even if you wipe off any excess glue, there is still the risk that enough will remain in the grain to prevent stain taking evenly. Colour before glue. This piece took only four minutes to make. |
 Colonial kitchen chair components.  Kitchen chair seat with legs and spreaders assembled. | This is a little sweetie (14 pieces, cost £9.25), with beautifully turned components. I think you would have a little trouble if you wanted to make up a set from scratch, and few modellers can match the quality of these components. The shaped seat is 2.5 mm (3/32in) thick. The holes to accept the leg top ends are accurately drilled to half this and are angled to allow correct leg splay. The three spreader pieces are assembled first and the legs are glued to this assembly (all parts are pre-drilled). The legs are then glued into the underside of the seat. The fiddly bit is to adjust the splay of this assembly so that it is equal, with all feet touching the ground before the glue has set. The ends of the spindles are not fully round in cross-section and there is a tiny gap left when they are in place. No matter; you can easily rectify this. I used Cuprinol wood filler in natural shade, which matched the timber, and dried in a minute or so. This piece took me 25 minutes to make. |
 Table under-assembly and drawer, showing method of assembly.  Table, ready for final assembly. | This kit comprises 20 pieces and costs £11.95. Two strip dividers are glued into the slots milled in the under-assembly panels. I found that these dividers were minutely too long, and removed about 0.4 mm from one end of each. Otherwise, it was only necessary to sand them flat to achieve a perfect fit. The box-like under-assembly is best held together with a couple of rubber bands while the glue dries; I also used a rubber band to hold the four legs. The drawer assembly was simple and fitted its space perfectly. It is worth marking the front edge of the drawer base when you have identified its orientation; it’s not clear at first whether the shorter edges are sides or front. This was a straightforward piece, and took me 1 1/2 hours to build. |
 Dresser, base carcass with one door assembled and components of the second door laid out.  Dresser sub-assembly. Base cupboard, hutch and drawers | Take care and read the instructions thoroughly to identify all 52 parts and their orientation to each other. Follow the drawings exactly. When assembling the first side of the base cupboard for example, check by dry assembling first, that the top rail is flush with the tops of the vertical supports, so that the bases of those supports form feet below the bottom rail. You need to take care that the framing pieces which have two slots are properly orientated. I found that the only awkward part of the build was the gluing of the side and rear panels (all with support rails already glued to them), together with the base panel and front bottom rail. The difficulty was to get all alignments square, all panels 90¡ to the next. Here, it would have been preferable to have used a slower glue to give more time (ordinary white PVA). I certainly needed a square to check all the corners. I found that the pair of doors assembled measured 88 mm across, while the space in the cupboard base unit was 87 mm. It was best, I thought, to remove 0.5 mm from the outside (curved) frame uprights, in order not to affect the inner ones which carry the door knobs. The doors are held in place by using ordinary dressmaking pins, with the heads snipped off. You need to drill down (through the pre-drilled frame members) into the door frame. I used a 0.5 mm drill in my Proxxon miniature drill, but if you don’t have such equipment, you can just as easily use a hand operated miniature Archimedes drill. After inserting the lengths of pin, I pushed the metal below the surface, and secured them with a smear of epoxy glue, sanded smooth when dry. This is actually a straightforward kit to build, but you do need to pay attention to the instructions, and I think it is not the one to start with. My time to build was 2 hrs 45 min. The kit costs £15.80. |
 | Terry Lawrence began making toys for his two sets of twins more than 30 years ago. Terry’s toy ideas appear regularly in magazines. His book Turning Wooden Toys, published by GMC Publications, includes projects ranging from a simple set of colourmix tops to his version of Jules Verne’s submarine Nautilus, with an oval-turned hull. |
TOYMAKING, Issue 6, October 1997, p35-37.
Links to reviews: Edwardian Dressing Table | Davenport | Hallstand 1 | Kitchen Furniture | Hallstand 2 | Mackintosh Wardrobe | Teapoy | Side-by-Side | Rosella Frame
Links to Home Page | Order Form
Updated 26th April 2003