Now that shop class is as common in high schools as poodle skirts, lots of woodworkers worry about passing on our enthusiasm for the craft to the next generation. In my house, I’ve started treating my kids more like apprentices, and it seems to be working.

They help clean the shop. They assist me on projects at assembly time. They can work on their own projects on the side when I don’t need them. And – here’s the odd part – I pay them (a pittance) for their help and swear them to secrecy on the “arts and mysteries” of the craft.

This weekend has been a perfect example. I assembled a large run of shelving that I plan to install in the recipient’s home this week. There was a lot of tedious gluing, clamping and clean-up work involved, so I hired 7-year-old Katy to help.

First, I showed her the “secret” to making the lacquer finish perfectly smooth to the touch – a folded up brown paper bag. We rubbed all the surfaces vigorously, which knocked down any surface imperfections without cutting through the film finish. Katy did the shelves; I did the uprights.

“Cool,” she said. “It works!”

As we were bagging the lacquer, both of us noticed that there were some small dings and scratches in the color. This is was the result of the parts getting moved around more than I like. So I swore Katy to secrecy again and introduced her to the mystery of stain pens. In this case, the best match wasn’t one of my stain pens (which I keep hidden away), it was a black Sharpie marker.

In fact, Katy became incredulous when I took her picture at work with the marker.

“What if someone sees the picture and figures out our secret?” she asked. “Then they’ll know!”

Then we glued up the shelves. I applied the glue. Katy added the Dominos. We both applied the clamps and cleaned the glue squeeze-out. Assembly can be stressful for me, but Katy’s amazement at how the project came together kept my anxiety in check.

We did four major glue-ups this weekend, and by the fourth one, Katy dove into the work like she had been doing it all her life. I wonder if learning woodworking is like learning a foreign language – it might be easier when you are young.

As I added the kicks to the cabinet, Katy worked at the bench at her own project – she’s transforming my discarded shop jigs for this shelving project into a wooden alligator.

Then I paid her (about $1 an hour for the shop time) and I asked her if she’d come along on the installation next week. With hesitation, she said: “Yes! Hurray!”

Next step: Getting the apprentices to fetch the small beer for the master.

— Christopher Schwarz

It’s 5 p.m. on Sunday, and almost all of the students in my “Precision Handsawing” class are packing up their tools to head home after two punishing days of listening to my drivel while trying to perfect their handsawing.

But in one corner of this picturesque Kentucky classroom, Michael Rogen refuses to stop laying out his half-lap joints. He refuses to lay down his tools and quit. Michael above all refuses to lay down, give up and wait to die.

Things are geting worse for Michael. His degenerative disease – its name is unimportant – has claimed most of his mobility, nearly all of his natural dexterity but absolutely none of his stubborn will to be able to saw, plane and chisel furniture-quality joints by hand.

These tasks are hard enough for a grown man in good physical condition – most of my students from this weekend are probably still recovering from sore feet and forearms. But when you add on the fact that Michael can barely stand without two canes and has virtually no grip in one of his hands, it makes you ashamed to be so dammed healthy and lazy in comparison.

I’ve known Michael – a former actor – for a few years now. He started asking my advice on buying some tools and bit by bit has worked his way into my life and the lifes of other woodworkers, tool makers and woodworking instructors.

Despite the advice of his doctors, Michael traveled to Indianapolis last year to take my "Introduction to Hand Tools" class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. He was in better shape then, but by the end of the week I couldn’t believe that the guy was on his two feet and pounding out mortise after mortise with a mallet and chisel.

As we parted last May, Michael said, “I think this is it. I think this is my last class.”

Hardly.

Michael went on to take a class in building a blanket chest at Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking. Then he took a class in making moulding planes from Larry Williams and Don McConnell followed directly by my class in sawing.

For the class, Michael took the bench next to mine, and while he had to have a little assistance with knifing a couple notches, he stubbornly declined other offers of help. He insisted on cutting his stock to rough length on a sawbench (I don’t know how he kept his balance), and he plowed through the project at a steady and slow pace.

At the end of the first day of this sawing class, I held a contest. I asked each student to make the best tenon he or she could manage with handsaws and a chisel. The tenon had to be consistent in its thickness and have clean shoulders.

Then all the students wrote their birthdate on their tenons and tossed them on my workbench. I left them there overnight so I was certain to forget whose tenon belongs to whom. On Sunday morning before class, I sorted through the joints, marked up their good points and bad and decided on a winner.

To everyone’s surprise (and delight) it was Michael’s tenon. For a piece of hand-cut work, it was solid. The tenon varied in its thickness by only a thousandth of an inch (or maybe two). The shoulders weren’t dead-nuts perfect, but they could be cleaned up with a shoulder plane easily and they outclassed many of the other tenons on my bench.

Michael (who lives in New York) was naturally suspicious that I had rigged the contest.

No so, my friend. You beat us all. Not only on that day, but in many other ways that have nothing to do with cheeks and shoulders, or tools and joinery.

— Christopher Schwarz

No matter how long you have been working at the craft, you sometimes flirt with the idea that you can buy your way to better craftsmanship.

I first picked up a crosscut saw at age 8, so I should know better than to fall for this false hope. But occasionally as I page through a catalog or look over someone’s tool collection I think: If I only had that Felder/Lie-Nielsen/Ultimatum thingy. Then it would be easy to be fast/skilled/way sexy to other British brace collectors.

And so now you think I’m going to lecture you on how “it’s not the arrows; it’s the Indian,” or that skill is something independent of our personal pile of brass, rosewood and high-carbon steel.

Actually, I’m not.

I’d like to share with you the tool that has improved my craftsmanship every day I’ve owned it for the last nine years. And I expect it to continue doing this astounding feat for another 30 years.

The tool is a maker’s stamp that my wife purchased for me for my 30th birthday from Mazzaglia Tools in Salem, N.H. It’s a simple piece of steel that’s 3/16” thick, 1-1/4” wide and 2-1/2” long. And cut into reverse on one end is “C. SCHWARZ.”

This is always the last tool to touch my work – if it touches it at all. You see, this stamp is the tool that determines if my work is up to snuff. If I won’t sign the piece with this permanent stamp, then I probably need to throw the project on the burn pile (which I’ve done – right after a satisfying hatchet session). Or perhaps I need to go back and remake some assembly or part of the project, try to bring the finish up to a higher level or find some better hardware.

As an added bonus, the project has to be sturdy enough to receive the beating necessary to leave my name in crisp letters. That beating is necessary because the name stamp has the letters incised in the steel block. As a result, you have to hit the stamp very hard with a hammer into the end grain of your project to make it work.

When done correctly, the letters stand proud of a recessed background that is surrounded by a decorative border. Very nice.

I usually pick someplace inconspicuous to apply the stamp, such as the lower edge of a door stile or the bottom of a leg. Then I place the project on the concrete floor of my shop and pinch the stamp between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. I rest my hammer head on the end of the stamp (which is now mushroomed over from the beatings from my 16 oz. hammer).

I pause for a few moments to make sure I am ready to bring the hammer down in one fell stroke. You get only one change to do it right. It's just like building a piece of furniture for someone else; there are no do-overs.

I’m just about ready to sign the blanket chest I finished for the next issue of Woodworking Magazine’s summer 2009 issue. But there’s just one little bit of roughness on the chest's lid. Maybe it needs a little wetsanding first.

If you’d like more information about the stamps from Mazzaglia Tools, write for a brochure: 12 Palmer St., Salem, NH 03079. There are several other companies out there that make fancier stamps as well, such as Engraving Arts and Microstamp.

And if you don’t have the coin for a stamp, you can always use a Sharpie marker to do the same job.

— Christopher Schwarz

If the trees or the squirrels ever get their act together, I’m certain that I will be one of the first people on the planet to wake up with a horse’s head in my bed – courtesy of the maple mafia.

Not only do I work for a magazine that encourages 220,000 other people to slaughter spruces, but I personally have a lot of sap on my hands. Since we moved into our house 11 years ago, I have ordered the killing of three trees (a fourth died at the hands of a wind storm, I swear). And I’ve also taught a few trees “a lesson” by having a few branches here and there snapped by arborists-for-hire.

Last week, I ordered the ash tree in our front yard be taken out. This was a hard call to make. For the tulip poplar in the back yard that I had dismembered seven years ago, I had no love. That deciduous demon chucked a branch through the windshield of my beloved Honda Civic.

But the ash tree was a loyal shade-giver that had gone bad. Recently, it started chucking loose limbs – first at dogs that soiled its trunk, later on at neighborhood kids walking up the sidewalk. So I made a call (actually, I had Lucy do it). I had them do the job while I was at work.

After the body was removed, I volunteered to clean up the piles of sawdust with a rake and shovel. It was no small task, and I scurried around the stump scratching furiously at the dirt and weeds.

After a few minutes I started laughing. Not because I was dancing around like a ground squirrel on Bugger Sugar, but because I wouldn’t (or couldn’t) step on the stump itself as I worked.

There’s a lesson in here, somewhere, really.

Here it is: Senior Editor Glen Huey and I were talking this week about all the stupid things we’d done when learning woodworking. We agreed that the single-most idiotic thing we had both done was avoiding making cabriole legs for years and years too long.

Cabriole legs – the Queen Anne equivalent of a hitchhiking cartoon fox sticking out her shapely leg to stop a car – seem hard. They are, however, quite simple to make. And once you make one, your reaction is: Huh, that’s it? That’s what I was afraid of all those years?

It’s not just cabriole legs that woodworkers fear, it almost everything new. We recoil at anything with curves, inlay or angles other than 90°. (Ever wonder why Art & Crafts and Shaker are the two most popular furniture styles in woodworking magazines?)

With this thought, I dropped the rake. I stepped up on the stump. I looked around.

The neighborhood looked different from that slightly elevated point. In fact, I almost could see the trees forming a lynch mob at the end of my street.

— Christopher Schwarz

When the first copy of “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction and Use” arrived on my desk from China via airmail, I couldn’t stand to even look at it. I stuck it in my satchel (which my wife fondly calls the “manpurse”) and took it home.

Before dinner that evening, I took the book out and showed it to the kids. Maddy, 11, took the book and started paging through it.

“Wow. This is great dad,” she said. “Will you autograph it?”

My heart swelled a bit. I had impressed my daughter that I was an author. But something didn’t quite seem right in her tone of voice.

“Why do you want me to sign it?” I asked.

“So I can sell it on eBay,” she said. “Someone might pay me extra if you sign it.”

Ah, Maddy, my little bourgeois capitalist. Since then a few other people have weighed in on the new book. A few people have said the book is a bit of a rehash of principles I’ve discussed on my blog and in print. That’s fair to a degree. My blog has been a place where I explore ideas in rough-draft form. The book is the summation of more than a decade of ideas and experiences, polished and complete. Well, that was the plan.

This week I got my first review on Amazon, which sells the book at a very competitive price, I might add. I don’t know the reviewer personally, but he read the entire book and grasped the message I was trying to transmit. Below is that review in its entirety, reprinted with the permission of the author.

By the way, we now have plenty of the books in stock (after struggling to keep up with demand). If you’d like to order one that is signed and comes with a deluxe CD, you can visit our store.

— Christopher Schwarz

5.0 out of 5 stars 
A truly remarkable woodworking book
November 17, 2007
By Landscape W. Shipwreck (Island J, Brigstocke Township, N. Ontario)

As an avid reader of Christopher Schwarz's various articles and columns in woodworking magazines, I've been awaiting the publication of this book with anticipation. Now that I've read it I have to say that it's better than I expected, and my expectations were very high.

I've read a number of books and articles on workbenches (notably the ones by Lon Schleining and Scott Landis, which are valuable for what they are: surveys of various styles of workbenches, with info on how to build a few of them). This book is different. Not just a little different. Radically different.

Schwarz is not just a good writer. He is an extremely good writer, vastly better than the majority of writers about woodworking; better than most writers, period. He is not merely capable of explaining things clearly, or of organizing his text coherently. His writing is actually enjoyable to read. He has the ability to combine highly technical information with a kind of narrative structure, within which personal experience, historical research and theoretical conceptualization come together almost seamlessly. One could describe the book as almost an essay in the classical, Montaignesque sense: a personal, spiraling account of a particular subject, whose compelling structure takes the reader along on a wide-ranging voyage of discovery, and makes the reader a companion of the author as he works out his own thinking. However, this should not be understood as saying that the book is in any way vague, for it isn't. I mean to underline its powerfully engaging quality. I believe somebody who wasn't a woodworker, who had no plans whatsoever to construct a workbench, would enjoy reading it.

Schwarz is also a gifted scholar and theoretician, a trait not typical of woodworkers, of writers about woodworking. The evidence of his thorough research and profound thought on his subject abounds in the book. His conceptualization of the workbench as a tool for holding lumber so that its 3 different surfaces (edges, faces, and ends) can be worked is a recognition that you won't find anywhere else, and one that animates the entire book. It may sound simple, even obvious, but so does the second law of thermodynamics.

The book provides designs and construction overviews of 2 very different benches, which may seem a paltry number of options. It is not. Schwarz has distilled years of research and bench-building into these 2 designs, and offers plenty of options along the way as to how one might alter them to suit one's own purposes. The illustrations are abundant, clear and useful. Numerous sidebars provide detailed and helpful insight into a variety of sub- or side-topics (eg. Find a source for yellow pine; Pattern-maker's vises: friend or foe?; The Stanley No. 203 - better than a peg). The index is extensive.

Anybody familiar with Schwarz from his hand-tool courses and DVDs knows that he is a formidable woodworker and teacher. Those qualities resound through this book, as does his engaging ability to be personal, as does his earnestness, as does his good humor. I've always learned easily from him, and this book continues that trend.

The first bench I ever built was from an article of Schwarz's called "The $175 Workbench," published in Popular Woodworking in 2000. I still have it, and use it every day. I will be building another one soon, using an adaptation of one of the designs outlined in this book; this book which will accompany me along the way, like a friend. Perhaps this sounds a bit loopy, but read the book and tell me you don't share the feeling.