When I first became intrigued by hand-tool woodworking, I kept encountering people who said things such as: “Yes, but Moxon says jointer planes should have their cutters sharpened straight across – not curved.”

“Moxon says you should cut mortises this way.”

“Moxon says you should test a handsaw by bending it.”

As Jan Brady of “The Brady Bunch” might say: Moxon. Moxon. Moxon!

At the time, I figured I should really try to take a woodworking class with Joseph Moxon. He seemed to have the ear of the entire woodworking hand-tool community. As I soon found out, however, Moxon has been dead since 1691. Not even the long arm of Marc Adams would be able to get that guy to teach a class. Nor would Marc want to. Moxon was a printer and globe-maker by trade. Not a woodworker.

What Moxon did, however, was remarkable. He published the first ever English-language account of woodworking shop practice. He covered tools, techniques and general shop practice in a series of pamphlets titled “The Art of Joinery,” which were later combined with accounts he wrote about other trades into the seminal “Mechanick Exercises.”

So I snagged a reprinted copy of “Mechanick Exercises” and read it several times. It was slow-going. The English language of the 17th century transposed the letter “f” for the letter “s.” So the sentence “…so shall the bounds of your mortise be struck” reads as “fo fhall the bounds of your Mortefs be ftruck.” Plus the sentence structure of the time can be a maze for the modern mind.

Fourteen months ago, I began to update the text of the chapters that comprise “The Art of Joinery.” I cleaned up the transpositions, shortened the run-on sentences without changing the meanings, and I added notes in the text to help the reader. I split up Moxon’s plates so the drawing of the paring chisel is with the text about the paring chisel.

Then I added my own plain-spoken explanation of Moxon’s original text, which can be bedeviling at times. I tried to explain what was going on in each section of “The Art of Joinery,” and I illustrated Moxon’s techniques with more than 40 photos.

It’s not an academic book by any means – I’ll leave that to the people with more college degrees. The text I added is from the perspective of a modern woodworker seeking to understand historical shop practice and find techniques to make life easier. And I did indeed find some good stuff in Moxon, from using a fore plane properly to using spit to sharpen.

I’ve put it all in a 96-page book that is now at the printer in Maryland. This will be a hardbound 6” x 9” book with a linen cover and embossed letters. The interior pages will be Smythe sewn – meaning the pages will be sewn together instead of simply glued. The entire book will be in old-fashioned black and white.

The book will be $17 and will be available here at Lost Art Press and through a select few woodworking retailers. It will not be available through mass-market channels. All copies sold through the Lost Art Press web site will be signed, of course.

As soon as the book arrives in house later this fall, we’ll update the site.

— Christopher Schwarz

During the last 12 months I've taken on a lot of extra freelance work. The money probably should be going into my children's college fund, but instead I decided to spend a chunk of it on a traditional beech plow plane from D.L. Barrett & Sons in Barrie, Ontario.

Dan Barrett is a 25-year veteran of the trades and has been teaching woodworking and making handplanes for a long time. His sons, Kyle and Jeremy, are both involved in the business. Kyle has been building planes while Jeremy has been doing some machining.

I first stumbled on this family business while judging the toolmaking contest run by WoodCentral and sponsored by Lee Valley Tools. Kyle, who was 18 at the time, built a Mathieson bridle plow plane to enter in the contest. In my opinion, the plane stole the show.

Not only was it stunning to look at, it worked extraordinarily well. Some tools have a break-in period where the user and the tool circle each other like sharks. The results are inconsistent. The adjustments are difficult. The tool feels out of place in your hands.

Not so with this plane. When I picked it up during the contest, it was like I had owned it my entire life. With two taps of a mallet I set the iron and began making a beautiful groove in a maple board in the Lee Valley boardroom where we were judging the contest.

We awarded the plane first place in the craftsmanship division, but in my comments I declared the plane to be the "first among equals."

After the contest I was stunned to learn that the maker was just 18 years old. I sent him an e-mail and asked him to make me a bridle plow. I didn't ask the price because I didn't really care.

A couple weeks ago the Barrett family dropped the finished plane off at my office while they were on their way down to Florida for a vacation. The plane they delivered – my plane – is somehow even better than the one in the contest.

Here you can see the iron, skate and depth stop of the plow plane.

The plane comes with a full set of eight A2 irons (1/8" up to 5/8") and they are gorgeous pieces of work in and of themselves. Perfectly tapered. The faces are all flat.

The plane's stock is a single hunk of quartersawn beech with an exquisitely shaped tote. The fence is also beech with a piece of boxwood attached via a sliding dovetail. The fence slides on two ebony stems and locks down with the metal bridle. This bridle mechanism is, in my opinion, superior to a screw-arm plow. With screw-arm plows it's difficult to get the fence parallel to the skate.

This week I finally got an opportunity to sharpen up the irons and start using the plane. And once again, it's like I've owned this tool forever.

I'll be writing about this plane (and its maker) for the next issue of The Fine Tool Journal, so I don't want to spoil all the surprises. But if you're looking for another maker of fine traditional hand planes, I definitely recommend you consider D.L. Barrett & Sons.

— Christopher Schwarz

When you design a piece of furniture to build, there are three well-worn paths (some might call them ruts) to follow.

The first path is to design a piece in a wholly original style. This actually happens about once or twice a century, and its rarity is why we don’t have furniture styles such as “Early Bill,” “Middle Chuck” or the “Late Butch Period.” Few people alive can claim they have successfully launched a style, but don’t let that stop you from trying.

The second approach is to build replicas, either spot-on or with mild alterations, such as an additional drawer, or substituting a square ovolo moulding for a bead. This is a good way to learn the vocabulary of different styles, though it is time-consuming to learn everything by the doing. Some woodworkers (even professionals) might build only six pieces in a year.

The third approach is to design a new piece with vintage parts, like rebuilding an old car. With this approach, you expose yourself to hundreds of images of the form. You could look at tables, cabriole legs or Arts & Crafts desks, for example. Then you select your piece’s dominant element from the library – say a leg, a door or a bonnet – and design your piece around that. (However, you can’t easily mix parts from different genres. It might seem like a good idea to put a Honda push rod in a Chevy, until you hit that metric barrier.)

When asked the secret to good design, Steve Hamilton, a builder at Mack S. Headley & Sons (headleyandsons.com), boiled it down to two words: “Picture books,” he said. “Get a bunch. Look them over.”

Design on the Run
Designing a suitable early American wall cupboard for Woodworking Magazine began with a day in our collection of books and images. You don’t need to spend a lot of money to build a book collection, most of the resources you need are at the public library and on the Internet.

My first stop was Wallace Nutting’s “A Furniture Treasury.” This book is available in many different forms, and it’s common to find copies for about $25. The book is as-advertised. It’s hundreds of pages of images of early American stuff that has been organized into categories such as “chests” and “Windsor chairs.”

The second source was auction catalogs from Christie’s (christies.com) and Sotheby’s (sothebys.com) auction houses. The catalogs these houses publish for their Americana auctions are outstanding. Good images. Good overall dimensions. And good history lessons as well. These catalogs can be pricey at $50 or more, but you can usually browse the catalogs on the Internet for free, though sometimes you have to register with the auction house (registration is free).

The third source was an old favorite of mine from my grandparents’ library: “Fine Points of Furniture: Early American” (Crown) by Albert Sack. This common book can be had for about $10 – the new revised edition is much more expensive and rare. Sack’s book compares different kinds of pieces and ranks them as “good,” “better” or “best.” This book helps hone your tastes in mouldings, proportion and turnings.

After a day of reading, I chose a fetching tombstone door from Nutting’s book and found many tall and skinny shapes for wall cupboards that looked like pieces I had seen at Winterthur, the DuPont’s Delaware estate and museum.

My design firmed up when my doctor got too busy for me one Wednesday. After showing up for my appointment, I was told there would be an hour delay. So I sat in my car and sketched about 10 wall cabinets. I didn’t worry about dimensions or joinery, just the overall look and feel of the piece. Each sketch took about five minutes and tried out variations on the door (one or two?), the drawer (one, two or none?) and the width of the stiles and rails (chunky or light?).

After those sketches, I chose the best two designs, sketched them again and showed them around to woodworkers and friends. It sounds like a lot of work, but I have found that good design is like making stir fry: You first chop vegetables and mix sauces for a long time. The active cooking time is real short – if you’ve done your prep work.

— Christopher Schwarz

No matter how much (or little) money you have, if you are clever enough you can score an exquisite chisel for about $1.

I was reminded this week when I picked up some items on eBay and had to take a few extra unwanted items in the lot, including three plastic-handled chisels. Two of them were Craftsman chisels that were dead ringers for my grandfather’s 1970s-era tools.

The third was a Stanley 1-1/4”-wide 720 chisel with a translucent yellow handle and steel striking button on its end. Normally chisels like this wouldn’t warrant a second look in a flea market box. But if you take a close look at these 720s, you could end up with an excellent worker.

The trick is to know what’s important and what’s not. Here’s my short list of the key features:

1. The handle has to be comfortable for paring or chopping. The 720 passes this test with flying colors. Its vague Coke-bottle-shaped grip falls right into your fingers in both positions. In fact, when gripping it for chopping, the chisel is comfortable only when your index finger is out of the way of the striking button. The only disadvantage of the 720's handle is that it gets a little slippery when your hands get sweaty.

2. The chisel has to be balanced when you grip the tip of the blade like a pencil (this is the grip for holding the tool for positioning it for light chopping). The 720 is a tad top-heavy for this operation. It’s not unusable, but it's not perfect.

3. The steel should be easy to sharpen and keep a decent edge. Chisels that are too hard take too long to hone. The 720s are good steel. I bought a couple of these early on in the craft and have also sharpened those belonging to students. They’re good steel.

4. The long edges should be narrow. Very narrow. This is where most mid-priced chisels fail. The narrow side-bevels allow you to sneak into the acute corners of the tail portion of dovetail joints. The 720s are generally very good about this. The one I just bough has side bevels smaller than 1/16”. Nice.

Oh, and there’s one more important characteristic: The chisel has to be fairly rust-free (especially on the unbeveled face side). This particular example is a miserable failure as it probably spent a few years in the bottom of a chum bucket. I cleaned the scaling off with a Klingspor Sandflex block and took a look. Craters everywhere.

Oh well, what do you want for $1?

— Christopher Schwarz

As a kid, probably the first furniture style that I ever became aware of was the Prairie style, the strongly rectilinear forms that most people associate with Frank Lloyd Wright.

My dad had lots of books about architecture lying around the house that he used to help him design the two houses for our farm outside Hackett, Ark. I used these books to help me design model houses that I built using Legos and wooden blocks.

Lucky for me, Prairie-style houses and furniture are easily built with rectilinear Legos. And Wright's system of proportioning favored 2:1 ratios – that's the ratio my wooden block set used.

The last piece of the puzzle was the cape that my mom made for me when I was 5 so I could be Superman at Halloween. After seeing photos of Wright wearing a cape, I also took to wearing my cape when I'd build houses and furniture in my room.

I know what you are thinking: It's amazing that I ever married.

In any case, I've always been drawn to Wright's aesthetic. I've visited houses of his in many cities, I've been through his furniture and papers at the Prairie Archive at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and one of the highlights of my young life was sitting in one of his original barrel chairs.

So I'm quite excited to get started on a new project for an upcoming issue of Woodworking Magazine – an end table designed in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright. I didn't want to slavishly copy one of his designs, and so I'm hoping to build a piece that is inspired by a table at the Dana House (one of my favorite tours), and uses geometric forms found at the May House in Grand Rapids, Mich.

I've drawn a bunch of sketches, but I decided that this piece really calls out for a full-size prototype in wood. Luckily, we have some thick ash lying around the shop that's left over from a co-worker's bench-building project, so there was only a little bit of machine work required to get the parts in shape.

My favorite tool for building prototypes is my Kreg pocket-hole jig. This sucker allows me to assemble and disassemble projects quickly. I screw them together, shake my head at the stupid design choices I've made, unscrew the parts, trim them down and then start the process over.

This weekend I got the basic form real close after about three hours of work. My top started out entirely too thick. It was 2" thick and now it's more like 1-5/8". Now I just need to fuss around with the inside guts to get the geometrical designs inside looking good. My No. 1 concern is where I place the large suspended square. Because end tables are typically viewed from a standing position, I need to get it close to the floor.

I'm also a bit worried that things will look too busy inside the table if I put two of these squares in the base. Perhaps I need to go home tonight, put on my old cape (yup, I still got it) and page through some more picture books on Wright.

— Christopher Schwarz