# interesting scalloped joint



## andrewscevich (Dec 17, 2011)

Howdy all...
this is my around my third post ever, so pardon if i'm not very good at it. Anyways, i was examing this older little table in the coat room of my church and looked at the drawer and saw some rather odd jointery. It's not a very large table, and i will include a picture of it too. it's rather old, as far as i can tell, as everyone says it's been in the church forever (however, it's one of those things that nobody ever notices so no one honestly knows where it came from), it has an old-style porcelain knob and solid wood construction. The drawer has odd scalloped-side drawer fronts with some type of dowelling (which doesn't appear to line up with the drawer front)... anyone seen this type of joint before, know anything about it, or know who was doing it?


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## Kenbo (Sep 16, 2008)

It's called a Knapp joint.
I cut and pasted this from an antiques website.............I have seen this type of joinery before and it is gorgeous. This is what another website says about it.




*The perfect Knapp joint looks like this, an obviously machine-made feature that looks nothing like drawer joinery before or since.*
Several inventors were hard at work on the problem in the 1860s, and most concentrated on trying to duplicate the handmade dovetail using a machine—that is until Mr. Charles B. Knapp of Waterloo, Wis., applied himself to the task. He did some creative thinking and solved the problem not by duplicating the dovetail joint but by inventing another type of joint entirely that was at least as good as the dovetail and could be made by machinery.
The joint he came up with has several colloquial names—scallop and dowel, pin and scallop, half-moon—and all describe the new joint, which looks like a peg in a half-circle on the side of a drawer. If you look at much old furniture, you undoubtedly have seen this unusual-looking arrangement and wondered what the heck it was. Now you know—it is a Knapp joint.








*In real life, the Knapp joint is often obscured by wear and dirt on the drawer sides.*​And knowing that, you also get some very valuable information about the age of the piece on which you saw the joint. Mr. Knapp patented his first joint-making machine in 1867. In 1870, he sold the rights to an improved version of the patented machine to a group of investors who formed the Knapp Dovetailing Co. in Northampton, Mass. The investors proceeded to make further refinements in the machine and actually put it into production in a factory in 1871 where it proved to be a technological miracle. Where a skilled cabinetmaker could turn out 15 or 20 complete drawers a day—on a really good day—the machine, on any day, could turn out 200 or more and work more than one shift if required. The drawer department had finally caught up with the rest of the factory.
By the mid-1870s, the great factories were in full swing turning out late-Victorian creations consisting mostly of Renaissance Revival and Eastlake furniture. While not all the great factories used the Knapp machine, particularly those of Grand Rapids, Mich., most of the Eastern factories and other mid-Western areas were faithful customers of the Knapp company. Over time, maintenance on the machines became a chore, but they were still a better alternative to handwork.






*In the late 1800s, the Knapp joint was commonly found in the less-expensive version of the Renaissance Revival style called “Cottage Renaissance.” These pieces were made of inexpensive lumber and were cheaply decorated and finished.*
At the very height of its greatest popularity and use, the death knell of the Knapp joint was being sounded by a new movement afoot in the furniture-design industry, and it had nothing to do with the soundness or the economy of the joint. Like so many things, its demise turned on sentiment.
That sentiment was the beginning of the Colonial Revival—the resurrection of things in style during the era of the founding of our country. And a round, technical-looking, obviously machine-made drawer joint just did not fit that image. At about the same time, machinery that did simulate the handmade dovetail was perfected, and by 1900, the Knapp joint had almost completely disappeared from the American furniture scene.
So now you know that a piece of antique furniture with those odd little drawer joints was made between 1871 and around 1905 without a doubt.


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## jschaben (Apr 1, 2010)

andrewscevich said:


> Howdy all...
> this is my around my third post ever, so pardon if i'm not very good at it. Anyways, i was examing this older little table in the coat room of my church and looked at the drawer and saw some rather odd jointery. It's not a very large table, and i will include a picture of it too. it's rather old, as far as i can tell, as everyone says it's been in the church forever (however, it's one of those things that nobody ever notices so no one honestly knows where it came from), it has an old-style porcelain knob and solid wood construction. The drawer has odd scalloped-side drawer fronts with some type of dowelling (which doesn't appear to line up with the drawer front)... anyone seen this type of joint before, know anything about it, or know who was doing it?


Well, Kenbo gave you the history, here's the hardware if you'd like to try to duplicate it.
http://www.woodline.com/p-2253-pin-and-crescent-templates.aspx
Template works with Woodline's Route-r-Joint system. :yes:


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## andrewscevich (Dec 17, 2011)

*tnx for info.*

Wow... cool.
this little table is pretty nice, looks like cherry, so probably not a later piece... neat... i'll make sure that if the church redecorates i'll dumpster dive for it.


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