The Kaseman Wriggling Plane: The World’s First Ripple Molding Machine (1630 by Tom Matthews • September, 2025
If you’ve ever looked at a Dutch ripple frame — those hypnotic, ebonized moldings that surround so many Golden Age masterpieces — and wondered how they were made four centuries ago, the answer starts with a nearly forgotten engraving from 1630 and a device so clever it’s hard to believe it predates the industrial revolution by over 150 years.
A Cologne Craftsman’s Pattern Book
Rütger Kasemann (also spelled Kaseman, Kaßmann, or Koßmann) was a Kunsttischler — an art joiner — as well as a sculptor, architect, and etcher, working in Cologne in the early 17th century. Not much is known about his personal life. What survives is his published work: a series of architectural pattern books beginning with Architectura Lehr-Seiulen Bochg in 1615, a collection of designs for columns, cornices, and ornamental architectural elements. Plates from this series are held today in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
But it’s a later work, his Architectura of 1630, that contains something far more significant than decorative designs: an engraving of a mechanical device for producing waveform moldings. It is the earliest known illustration of a machine built specifically to create the ripple patterns we now associate with Dutch Baroque picture frames.
How the “Wriggling Plane” Worked
The device Kasemann illustrated was essentially a modified molding plane riding inside an enclosed track — imagine a long miter box, but with a twist. On the inside walls of the track, undulating guide strips were mounted. A peg, inserted through a dado cut in the sole of the plane, projected slightly out of both sides and engaged these guide strips.
Here’s where it gets ingenious: as the craftsman pushed the plane down the length of the track, the peg riding along those undulating guides forced the entire plane to move side-to-side in a wave motion. With each pass, the plane’s blade cut the waveform into the stock piece clamped into the bottom of the track. The result was a Flammleiste — a flame molding, with its characteristic side-to-side ripple pattern.
The plane also incorporated a screw-operated mechanism that increased the depth of cut between passes. This allowed the craftsman to gradually deepen the wave profile in controlled increments, removing only thin shavings at a time — essential when working hard, dense woods like ebony.
A Quiet Revolution in Toolmaking
Conservation scholar Jonathan Thornton, who has studied waveform molding technology extensively and built working reproductions of several historical machines, noted something remarkable about the Kasemann device: it is almost certainly the first woodworking plane in history to incorporate a screw-based depth adjustment.
Screw adjustments on planes didn’t become common until the late 19th century — over 250 years later, when Stanley and other manufacturers began mass-producing metal-bodied planes with threaded depth mechanisms.
That a Cologne art joiner quietly invented screw-adjusted depth control for a specialized decorative technique in 1630, centuries before the idea became mainstream, tells you something about how innovation actually works. It doesn’t always arrive through grand announcements. Sometimes it shows up in a pattern book, in a trade that most people overlook.
What It Could (and Couldn’t) Do
The Kasemann device had an important limitation: it could only produce side-to-side waveforms — what the German tradition calls Flammleisten (flame moldings), where the ripple pattern undulates horizontally across the face of the molding. It could not produce the vertical up-and-down ripple — the Wellenleisten (wave moldings) — that we more commonly associate with classic Dutch ripple frames.
That capability would come later, with fundamentally different devices that moved the stock piece through a stationary cutter rather than moving a plane over fixed stock. Joseph Moxon described one such device — his “Waving Engine” — in Mechanick Exercises (1678–80), and by the second half of the 18th century, André-Jacob Roubo and the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert were documenting even more sophisticated crank-driven machines that could be operated by workers with far less skill.
But the Kasemann plane was the spark. It established the core principle that would drive every subsequent ripple molding machine: a pattern-and-follower system, where a guide template controls the movement of a cutting tool to reproduce a complex waveform in wood.
The German Roots of the “Dutch” Ripple
It’s worth pausing here to address a common misconception. Ripple frames are almost universally called “Dutch ripple” in the antiques trade and in framing shops, but the technology and many of the frames themselves were German in origin.
The technique of geflammtes Hobeln (flamed planing) is generally attributed to Johann Schwanhardt, a Kunstschreiner and gunstock maker from Rothenburg ob der Tauber, working around 1600. His son-in-law Jacob Hepner brought the technique to Nuremberg, which became a center for production of wave and flame moldings during the Baroque period.
The “Dutch” label stuck because ebonized ripple frames became so strongly associated with the austere aesthetic of Protestant Holland, where they were the preferred surround for the paintings of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, and their contemporaries. The dark, shimmering ripple surface looked spectacular against the whitewashed walls of Dutch interiors and let the paintings — not the frames — command attention.
But as frame scholars have pointed out, the most elaborate ripple frames were often made in the Catholic regions of Europe — southern Germany, Flanders, and Spain — where the Hapsburg connection and the trade routes of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) kept exotic ebony flowing into European workshops.
The Pattern-and-Follower Principle: A Deeper Lineage
Thornton places the Kasemann plane within a broader technological family tree. The pattern-and-follower concept — where a shaped template guides the movement of a tool — didn’t originate with woodworking. The earliest known application dates to around 1480, in screw-cutting lathes where a carved helical guide controlled the cutting of threads.
Jacques Besson, Da Vinci’s successor as engineer to the French Court, designed a complex ornamental lathe using pattern-and-follower systems in 1579. Even the connection to Schwanhardt is suggestive: he was, among other things, a gunstock maker, and the rifling of gun barrels uses exactly the same principle — a spiral guide rod pulled through a follower to impart a controlled rotational cut inside the barrel. Rifling dates to the late 15th century, and Thornton speculates that the crossover from gunsmithing to decorative woodwork may not be coincidental.
From screw-cutting lathes to ornamental turning to gun rifling to the Kasemann wriggling plane to Moxon’s Waving Engine to Diderot’s crank-driven factory machines — and eventually to Jacquard looms and early computing — the pattern-and-follower concept has been one of the most productive ideas in the entire history of manufacturing.
Why This Matters for Modern Frame Makers
If you make moldings today — by hand or by machine — you’re working with the same fundamental idea that Kasemann put on paper in 1630: a controlled pattern driving the movement of a cutter through wood. The intelligence has migrated over four centuries from the craftsman’s hands, to carved wooden templates, to mechanical crank systems, to digital cam profiles. But the underlying logic hasn’t changed.
The Kasemann plane is a reminder that our work has deeper roots than we usually think about. Every time you run a profile through a shaper, you’re participating in a conversation that started in the workshops of Cologne and Nuremberg over four hundred years ago — a conversation between the craftsman, the material, and the machine.
Sources
Jonathan Thornton, “The History and Technology of Waveform Moldings: Reproducing and Using Moxon’s ‘Waving Engine,’” WAG Postprints, 2002. Available as a free PDF at wag-aic.org.
Rütger Kasemann, Architectura, 1630. Plates held by the V&A, London, and the Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin. See also: Architectura lehr-seiulen Bochg (1615) and Seilen Bochg plates (1616).
“Flammleiste,” Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte (RDK), Vol. IX, columns 752–806. Available at rdklabor.de.
P.J.J. van Thiel and C.J. de Bruyn Kops, Framing in the Golden Age: Picture and Frame in 17th-Century Holland (Waanders, 1995).
Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises (1678–80).
German Archivportal-D biographical entry for Rutger Kasemann. See also: Wikimedia Commons — Rutger Kasemann.