Lost Art Press will be offering signed copies of "Handplane Essentials" as soon as the book becomes available the first week in August.

The book, a 312-page hardback, is a compilation of all my writings on planes during the last decade from Popular Woodworking, Woodworking Magazine, The Fine Tool Journal, my blog at Woodworking Magazine, my blog here at Lost Art Press and the writing I have done for other web sites and the Lee Valley Tools newsletter.

Honestly, if you've kept up with all the publications and outlets above, you won't find much new in the book. In putting the text together I eliminated some redundancies, filled in some potholes and generally recast some of the articles so that everything made sense. I think it's a very good introduction to sharpening, bench planes and joinery planes. I didn't get into the moulding planes so much – I'm still not confident enough there to really write about it with any authority.

So I'm generally pleased with the result. The interior is going to feature sepia-toned photos like Woodworking Magazine (if you want a full-color version, we will sell you a box of crayons as well). The book's paper will be nice, as will the cloth-bound hardback cover and dust jacket. I'm also pleased to tell you that we negotiated hard to get this printed in the United States (in Ohio, actually).

Here's how the pricing and availability will work. Lost Art Press will lose some sales by telling you all this, but I'd rather just be honest with you.

Lost Art Press will be selling the book for the full retail price of $34.99 with free shipping. It will be signed by me (and by my daughter Katy as well if you please).

Right now my employer, F+W Media, is offering the book at a pre-sale discount until the end of July. It's $27.99 plus free shipping. Click here to get to their store.

Starting in August, F+W's price will return to $34.99 (plus free shipping) for six months. Lee Valley Tools will then be carrying it and will (almost certainly) sell it for less than full retail.

Amazon.com, Buy.com and other retail outlets will not be carrying the book until at least January 2010. Their websites might say they are going to carry it and discount it, but they are in error.

In any case, thanks for all your support. No matter where you buy the book it will help support the work we do and show there is a solid base of support for books on traditional tools.

As a way of saying thanks, you can download a copy of the introduction to the book, which will give you a flavor for its look.

HPE_FrontMatter.pdf (1.36 MB)

All the best,

— Christopher Schwarz

My city editor put down the phone, pursed her lips and looked at me, a scrawny and green 20-year-old newspaper intern.

"That was the Klan," she said. "They are pissed at you."

That summer I was an intern at my hometown paper, the Southwest Times Record, a small daily in Fort Smith, Ark. Most of that summer I wrote hard-hitting pieces about mutant chicken trading societies, Chamber of Commerce luncheons and the hot weather.

But all summer long I also worked on a series of articles about how the local public schools were still as segregated as they were in 1954. Still as segregated as they were when I went through the system. And so segregated that the local NAACP was considering a lawsuit.

After my stories ran, the Klan called the newsroom to ask about the New York Jew-boy reporter sent down by the ACLU to stir up the black population. And to tell me that I should watch my back.

I was terrified. And then I was furious. Those people didn't know me. I'd lived in that town since I was 5. I went to public elementary, junior high and high school there. I was a member of First Presbyterian Church. And I doubt the ACLU even knew my hometown existed.

This week I stumbled on the first woodworking chisel I ever bought. It's a Popular Mechanics 1/2" bevel-edge chisel I bought from Wal-Mart about four presidents ago. It was my only chisel for about eight years. But I took good care of it until I bought my first set of Marples.

I've forgotten how much I actually like that little chisel. Sure, the steel is as soft as the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and the handle is a lovely clear plastic. But that was the chisel I used to chop out my first dovetails. My first mortise. My first half-lap.

As I looked it over I noticed it was getting some rust on it. So I decided to bring it back to its former blue-light special glory. As I worked on the tool, my mind began to wander to the e-mail beatings I've been taking lately for some tool reviews I've written – reviews both positive and negative.

These whuppings come with the territory, but sometimes they do get to me. (Just like I'm sure my reviews occasionally annoy other people.)

As I honed the secondary bevel of the chisel this morning I held it up to the light and thought, "This is who I am."

I'm taking this chisel home tonight to give to my youngest daughter, Katy. It's not the best tool in the world, but it is a good place to start. And it does come with a lesson, one that I learned that summer day at the Southwest Times Record.

Despite my city editor's warnings that day, I walked out the front door of the paper to my car every day that summer instead of ducking out the door by the pressroom.

— Christopher Schwarz

This summer I'm building a few reproductions of pieces from the White Water Shaker Village that I will donate to the village's caretakers. I want these reproductions to be as faithful as possible, but I'm wondering just how far I can go on faith.

Take, for example, this 13'-long bench. It's all in walnut and nailed together with cut nails. The curves in the base are clearly cut with some sort of turning saw with a little rasp work behind. The notches for the aprons were sawn out.

So far, so good.

I think the top piece was milled on some sort of reciprocating saw. The marks on the underside are too regular to be pitsaw marks. They're not planer marks (like I've ever seen). And they are certainly not circular saw marks.

Is somehow reproducing these marks on the underside important? Or should I treat it like I would treat any non-show surface – fore plane it and call it done?

In other words, I want to use fairly authentic methods. I'm just not sure how far I should (or even can) take this.

We'll be publishing plans for four of these White Water pieces in Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine in the coming year. This bench is the simplest project. The other three projects should get your heart thumping pretty hard.

— Christopher Schwarz

Sometimes you read old accounts of workshop practice where there’s a pot of raw linseed oil by the bench. Andre Roubo’s bench had a little swing-out pot of oil underneath the bench. Likely it was used to oil the soles of the planes or the plates of the saws to make them slide more easily.

Today I found another good use for an oil pot on the bench.

I just finished raising three panels by hand that will be dust panels between the drawers of a chest. Each panel is a single board of 17”-wide Eastern white pine. Raising the first two panels was a piece of cake. But the third one had a nasty knot on the corner.

The knot was denser than any maple I’ve worked and so raising that corner was slow going, and the results looked pretty raggy, too.

To make it easier to push my plane I lubricated the sole a few times with camellia oil. It helped, but it was like spitting on a forest fire, it wasn’t nearly enough.

So without really thinking I squirted the knot a few times with the oil. That made quite a difference, and I finished up the panel with a few more squirts and a few more strokes. Not only was the knot easier to cut, but the result looked much better, too.

I better buy another bottle of the oil.

— Christopher Schwarz

A couple years ago there was a kid in Iowa who was trying to learn to use hand tools. He had no teachers, just a few books and limited access to the Internet.

But he had a phone. So he’d call me and ask me questions for 30 minutes at a time. (Note to self: Get a 900-line for this. “Hey, I’m wearing a shop apron – and nothing else.”)

This kid’s first major crisis: Planing the top of a dresser. His iron was sharp. His plane was set correctly. His work was held firmly. Yet he couldn’t even get the tool to cut.

Diagnosis: Maple.

He was using rock maple as the wood for his first hand-tool project. I like maple and can get along with it fine. But it wouldn’t be my first pick for a wood to learn hand tools on.

I used to recommend walnut and poplar as good choices for beginning planers and sawyers. Both of those woods cut fairly easily with hand tools and aren’t stringy or hard or ring-porous or infused with silicates. (Ask me some time about the mouth-breather who insisted on using purpleheart on her first project, a birdhouse.)

This year, however, I have become smitten with Eastern white pine. It’s not common in the Midwest, but we came into a stash of it and I have been using it for everything possible. Unlike the yellow and white pine we get here, Eastern white cuts beautifully, planes easily and doesn’t seem as easy to mangle as the local stuff. Plus, the Eastern white moves less in service and (I think) it looks better.

On the downside, it’s quite lightweight and not nearly as strong as yellow pine or even the weirdo Swedish pine the local Borg is pushing.

But that, I figure, is just an engineering equation.

So this morning I’m building a complex frame-and-panel back for a five-drawer dresser. The back has six through-tenons, two blind ones and four floating panels.

I did a dry assembly of the stiles and rails right after lunch and everything looked nice and tight. So I took it apart to start fitting the panels when I snapped one of the tenons off like a Butterfinger bar.

I was too stunned to even curse. I don’t think I’ve ever snapped a tenon (by accident). The good news was that it was quick work to fetch a new piece and cut new tenons and mortises to replace the broken stick.

Note to self: Eastern white prefers 5/16”-thick tenons. But other than that, I think it’s the most hand-tool-friendly wood I've used.

— Christopher Schwarz

Recently, a woodworking colleague suggested to me that saw teeth designed for crosscutting are an invention of modern marketing.

Early saws, he suggested, we’re probably filed for basically a rip cut. But because the teeth were hand filed, they probably had a little fleam, which made them cut more smoothly than a pure rip tooth with no fleam.

It’s an interesting argument that has no real answer – until we find the DNA of an 18th-century saw filer encased in some amber and decide to open a theme park on a deserted tropical island (sign me up).

Other woodworking authorities I trust have suggested that saw filing patterns were actually more complex in the 18th century than they are today. In other words, we are the primitives.

All I know is that they can take away my Zona Razor Saw from my cold, dead hands. Or they can take it when it’s kinked – whichever comes first.

The Zona Razor Saw is a marvel of modern manufacturing. Made in the USA for the price of 2.5 chai lattes, it’s a 24 tpi backsaw with a .01”-thick sawplate that cuts on the pull stroke. I use this $11 saw for almost everything. Rips. Crosscuts. Miters. Whatever.

The magic of the saw is not in the fact that it’s filed for a rip cut, but that it has 24 tpi. Once you get to teeth that small, it really doesn’t matter so much how they are filed. This saw leaves glass-smooth surfaces when it rips and crosscuts. It tracks beautifully. It is comfortable and balanced.

But before you think it also is going to mow your lawn, paint your house and raise your kids to be truthful and wise, it know that it has a fatal flaw. The sawplate is easily kinked. I’ve had one since 2006, and I have been using it on every project. The cherry-red-dyed handle has faded to pink, and the sawplate has a subtle wave to it.

It still tracks fairly straight – straight enough for most joinery. But this weekend I decided to try to fix the plate. I bent it this way and that with my fingers. I tapped it with a hammer on an anvil. I tweaked it with pliers. And eventually I buckled under and ordered another one from Lee Valley Tools.

If you haven’t tried the Zona Razor Saw, I highly recommend you get one for your tool kit.

By the way, the vast and insidious Zona model-making consortium did not pay for this blog entry. Just so you know.

— Christopher Schwarz

While cleaning out the shop a couple weeks ago we stumbled on a plastic-wrapped parcel of tools that were owned by the maintenance men from our old building. When they were "released on their own recognizance" by management, they gave us their old tools, including a lot of good Snap-On stuff and the gizmos wrapped in plastic that I fished from our rolling tool cabinet.

They were spring-loaded nailsets and centerpunches, like the ones made by Spring Tools. They look like a metal earthworm with an industrial Slinky for a body. These things are used to set nails. You place the tip of the tool on your nail's head, pull the spring back and let go. A small anvil in the spring strikes the head of the tool and drives the nail flush.

Senior Editor Robert W. Lang joked that using those tools was akin to showing up on a jobsite in a sundress.

Because I don't much care for televised sports, strip clubs or shooting animals, my manhood is already in trouble. Some might call me the Liberace of the Ozarks. So I quietly put the tools in my box. Until today.

I was setting a bunch of cut nails on a box I'm building and unwrapped the plastic parcel. I took out one of the spring-loaded tools and gave it a try. Well holy Laura Ashley, the tool leaped off the nail and put a huge divot in the wood (luckily it's on the bottom).

So I took a file out and shaped the steel head of the tool until it was flat and rectangular, like the heads of my cut nails. Then the tool worked much better. I'm not yet sure, however, if it's faster than the old hammer-powered method.

Perhaps it's like learning to walk in heels. Not that I know anything about that.

— Christopher Schwarz

John is back at the chair project.

Guess how I did this?  Hint: It wasn’t a hand tool. 

If the word “Stunod” was anywhere in your thoughts you win!  Yup, I was trying to cut time making the arms for my two chairs.  I wanted to clean up the rough surface left from the band saw.  I was smoothing the parts with a file and spoke shave which left an ok surface but was taking forever.  Also there was some difference between the left and right arm so I thought to myself, “try the router, yeah, that’s the thing”.  

I smoothed the patterns perfectly which were made from ½ inch ply.  I screwed them to the stuff and set about routing.  I was doing fine until I hit the damn end grain.  It’s always the end grain...  Anyway the stuff shot back hitting me in the labonza, causing me to verbally acknowledge my error.  It then continued its' trajectory hitting the wall at reduced speed. 

Well, I was back at it with hand tools when I had another idea!  I put down the file and rasp and grabbed my floats!  Yep, in front of me on the tool rack are four Lie-Neilsen floats.  They leave a great surface and can hog off material depending on the amount of downward pressure you use.  It is a great tool and easy to get the hang of.  I actually started to get fast at this task. 

Anyway, it was a router with a pattern cutting bit.  And yes, I had to remake the entire piece.

- John

Like every woodworker, I have a short list of tools that I wish were still widely available today. Most of these are tools that have wound up in my shop and proved themselves useful.

About five years ago I got a cool mallet that was common in England but not so much here. It has a heavy brass head, wooden striking faces and a nice chamfered handle.

The whole thing weighs more than 3 pounds – my wife weighed herself with it on our digital scale. Then she weighed herself without the mallet. (That is what passes for both love and entertainment in the early 40s.)

This is not a tool you want to wield all day. In fact, mortising with it wears out my forearm after only a couple mortises.

However, it is great for assembly tasks. It knocks dovetails together with ease. I use it for driving drawbore pins – both through a dowel plate and into the holes. I use it for knocking together mortise-and-tenon joints. If you want to see it in action, check out this video on YouTube. Anytime I need force with finesse I reach for this tool.

Well, I used to.

About a year ago, the wooden striking faces dropped out of the brass head like two rotted teeth. They had shrunk out just enough – friction was the glue. I set the mallet aside on my bookshelves until a month ago. I decided to try to fix the thing.

I considered fabricating new wooden faces, but their shape is complex. So I decided to first try to get the pyramid-shaped faces back in their holes. The staff at the magazine suggested removing a little wood from the back of the faces and driving the faces back into the brass. The hope was that this would compress the wood, and friction would do its job again (lazy friction).

I tried it. It didn’t work. Another suggestion was to drill through the brass head and pin the faces with a metal rivet. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that kind of implant surgery.

So today I took a different tack: high-impact epoxy. I glued and clamped the faces in place this morning, and now I’m just waiting for the clock to make it around the horn again so I can take the thing for a test beat.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. I know that Australian toolmaker Chris Vesper has this tool on his drawing board. If you’re interested, you should drop him a line through his web site. To see a photo of his prototype mallets scroll to the bottom of this page.

Editor’s note: Here’s another great installment from hand-tool woodworker Dean Jansa. This one guides you through the process of moulding and assembling and ogree bracket foot.

The same chest that has the molding shown in “Sticking a Moulding” will have ogee bracket feet. Just like making a molding the first step is laying out the profile of the ogee on the edge of the stock.

Here’s a quick side-step: You'll note the stock I'm using is made up of the primary wood laminated to a piece of pine. Not all period pieces used this laminated foot. If you choose to copy a piece without such a lamination, just ignore the pine in the photos.

The benefit of the lamination is the added strength it lends to the otherwise fragile "ankle" of the foot. That is, the area where the ogee sweeps inward. As you will see, without the lamination, this part of the foot can end up very thin after the ogee profile is cut with the hollows and rounds.

As with moulding, start with a single piece of stock long enough to cut all the feet for the chest. I'll need six "foot parts" total. A pair will be mitered together for each front corner, and a single foot for the rear, for a total of six.

Lay out the desired profile on the end of the stock.

Remove as much waste as you can with a drawknife from the convex portion of the top of the foot. This is much faster than using a hollow to do all the work.

Clean up the profile with a hollow after removing the waste.

Next I create the concave portion of the ogee. I use a plow plane to remove waste from the concave portion of the stock, approximating the curve with a series of steps. The narrower the blade you use, the closer you can approximate the curve. But I find it is a balance, as too narrow a blade takes more time as you have many little steps to cut. Too wide and you are left with a lot of material to remove with the round plane. Your experience will be your guide. (Remember Riemann Sums from calculus days? Here’s a real world example!)

I work from the furthest point away from the bottom edge toward the bottom edge as my wooden plow has its depth stop on the left side of the groove it cuts. If you work with a metal plow you may want to work from the bottom edge toward the top of the foot as many metal plows have their depth stops on the right side of the groove they cut.

After the steps are cut, remove the edges of the steps with a chisel or gouge. In fact you can rough out the entire concave portion with gouges if you'd like. In maple I find it easier to use the plow to remove the bulk of the waste.

Here the majority of the concave portion is complete.

A little more round plane work gets you to the complete molding, ready to be cut into individual parts of the feet.

Mark the outline of the foot on the rear of the profiled stock and cut it with a turning saw.

The rear feet are easy, no miters. The layout above shows the side profile of the ogee, but I will not cut out that profile, rather I just cut the rear-facing portion of the foot square. A little rasp work, and a rear foot is ready for a pine brace and glue blocks.

The front feet are mitered. I choose to cut and fit the miters before I cut out the profile of the foot.

Fitting the miter first has its benefits and risks. The benefit: The foot profile will be full sized. If you cut the profile first you may have to remove some material when fitting the miter, making the feet slightly different sizes. The risk: You have to be careful not to damage the sharp edge left on the mitered edge while cutting out and shaping the foot profile. The benefit outweighs the risk for me, so I choose to fit the miters first and am vigilant while cutting and shaping the profiles.

There are options for cutting the profiles as well. Here I am cutting the profile with a turning saw.

But if you look the foot below you'll see evidence of a different method. Note the saw kerfs along the profile, most evident in the pine backing. Cutting the bulk of the waste with a hand saw and removing the rest with chisels and or gouges leaves such marks.

Having fit the miters and cut out the profile all that is left is the glue up. There are several methods seen in period work. Most common is to glue the miter and reinforce the foot with glue block with their grain running vertical. Here is a pine mock-up of the feet I'm working on, with vertical glue blocks and no lamination.

Now you can see why one may want to laminate the foot stock. Note how thin the foot is where the ogee sweeps inward. Add to this the crossgrain of the glue blocks and the result is a cracked foot at the thin point.

One solution to the crossgrain issue is to stack glue blocks so the grain is running the same direction as the feet. In the photo of the period piece above you can see the stacked glue blocks on the rear foot. This was a common feature of the Williamsburg area from the Scott Shop. Here are the stacked glue blocks on the front feet for my chest:

I'll add on last small glue block when I complete all the feet. The chest really is supported by the glue blocks. Again, refer to the period piece above, you can see the glue blocks extend slightly below the bottom of the feet.

And here you have it – an ogee bracket foot ready to attach to the case.

— Dean Jansa