A couple readers have pointed out a problem with page 81 of "Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use" (Popular Woodworking Books).

The two columns of text on that page were transposed during the layout process, and I didn't catch the mistake before we went to the printer. All the text is there, and the story will make sense if you read the right column of text first and then the left.

Of course, that's not a good solution in my book (pun intended).

So I've prepared a corrected page that you can download, print out and stick in the book if you like. The page is in pdf format. If anyone else has any errors they have spotted, please e-mail them to me and I'll see that they are corrected in future editions (assuming that there are future editions).

NewPage81rev2.pdf (906.22 KB)

Sorry for the mistake.

— Christopher Schwarz

Most handplane geeks know that across the Pacific Ocean there is an entire culture of people who are even more obsessed with the mechanics of cutting wood with a plane than we are.

I’m speaking, of course, about the Japanese, who are prone to holding handplaning contests where participants compete to see who can make the longest and thinnest full-width shaving.

They measure the thickness of these champion shavings in microns. And the results are often affected by the weather. A wet day will swell the shavings by a few microns.

Sadly, Western woodworkers have become obsessed by creating ultra-thin shavings, which requires planes to be tuned to a very high note. What’s wrong with this philosophy is that it focuses on the garbage instead of the good stuff. The shavings get thrown away, remember? It’s the resulting work surface that we keep – unless we handplane that all away in some handplaning bliss-fest.

You want to be able to take the thickest shaving you can without tear-out, chatter or requiring you to bulk up like Thundarr the Barbarian. A thick shaving will get you done with fewer passes of the smoothing plane over your workpiece. Not only does this get the job done faster, but it also helps increase your accuracy.

Huh? Think about it. If you make 20 passes over a board with a smoothing plane, you are much more likely to plane that sucker out of true than if you used only four passes.

So how thick should your shaving be? Good question. Most people talk about getting shavings that are less than 2 thousandths of an inch thick. Or they talk about “sub-thou” shavings. Yes, it’s all very empirical, except for the fact that few woodworkers know how to really measure shaving thickness. Squeeze a dial caliper hard enough and you can make almost any shaving into a “sub-thou” shaving. Wood compresses. Metal bends.

So I go for visual cues instead.

If the wood is well-behaved, I go for an opaque shaving – that is, as long as the curvature of the cutting edge of my iron is significant enough to keep the corners of my iron from digging into my work. I’ve included a photo above of what this shaving looks like. This shaving gets the work done fast. If the surface has been flattened by a jointer plane, a shaving like this will get the work done in one or two passes.

If I get tear-out using a beefy shaving, I’ll retract the iron fully into the mouth of the handplane and extend it until the shaving looks like the photo above. Here you can see the shaving is thinner, but it is still intact except for one area.

That split in the shaving is probably caused by a small defect in the iron. The edge is probably getting dull and is ready for a touch-up. This shaving will clean up my surfaces in three of four passes. It usually eliminates tear-out more than the shaving above. But sometimes I need to get a little nuttier.

And that’s when I push my tool to get a shaving like the one above. This thing is about to fall apart. In fact, it sometimes will fall apart when you remove it from the mouth of the tool. Usually, this sort of shaving requires some persnickety set-up to achieve. I can’t get this shaving with an Anant, new Stanley or Groz plane. They are just too coarse to allow this type of shaving to pass. This is what you are paying your money for when you buy a premium tool. Premium tools will do this with little fettling. My vintage planes that I've fussed over will do this as well. A sharp iron always helps, as well.

The downside to this shaving is that you will be making a lot of them to remove the tear-out on the board. About 10 cycles or more is typical for some small tear-out. It is a lot like working.

Can you get nuttier? Sure. If all else fails, I can set my plane to remove something between a shaving and dust. These “shavings” don’t really look like much. How do you get them? That’s easy. When I get my thinnest smoothing plane shaving possible, I’ll rub some paraffin on the sole of the tool. This actually reduces the depth of cut just enough to get the furry, dusty stuff. Beware: Taking a shaving that small will force you into a lot of work. Lots of passes. Lots of sharpening.

But when you need it, you need it.

— Christopher Schwarz

The best sharpener of hand tools I know is – hands down – Harrelson Stanley of JapaneseTools.com.

The last time I worked a woodworking show with Stanley we were in Ontario, Calif., a few years ago as he was preparing to launch the U.S. line of Shapton GlassStones. As he was showing off the stones he stopped for a moment and looked me in the eye.

“Do you think,” he asked, “if sharpening could ever become a hobby unto itself. Like golf? Where people sharpened merely for the pleasure of getting a perfect edge?”

Stanley was serious, so I paused and gave it some thought.

No, I said, I don’t think it could be a hobby for more than a few people. For me, sharpening is like changing the oil in my cars. It’s messy and time-consuming, but you must do it regularly or disaster will befall you eventually.

And besides, if sharpening alone were a hobby that would seriously downsize my job responsibilities (half of my time is showing people how to make their tools sharp; the other half is showing people how to make them dull). Dulling the tools is more fun than sharpening them.

So I’m not a sharpening fascist. I’m a good sharpener, but I don’t take more than five to 10 minutes to renew a micro-bevel (grinding a new primary bevel adds another 10 to 15 minutes to the process). But I firmly believe that a sharp iron is the second best way to reduce tear-out when handplaning a board.

This belief guides me when I sharpen my tools and regulates the attention I pay to each tool’s edge. Here is what my typical sharpening chores look like in my shop at work and home.

For me, sharpening begins at the end of a project.

With the piece of furniture complete and the deadline pressure off, I take a few hours to sharpen my tools. I always sharpen the iron of my jointer, smoothing and block planes. Then I move through any chisels that I used during the project. If I used them for more than a quick pare, I hone them as well. Then I move through the rest of the tool box. Any joinery planes (such as router, shoulder, fillister, plow and dado planes) and moulding planes that I used get sharpened. I’ll also take a look at my marking knives, jack plane, auger bits and marking gauges. If they’re dull, I’ll touch them up.

I do this at the end of the project so that when I start a new piece of furniture, everything is set up and ready to go. Anal-retentive? Perhaps. But as I build the next project I don’t sharpen my tools as I’m working unless one of two things happen: I damage a tool by dropping it or hitting a nail, or my smoothing plane leaves tear-out.

If the other tools give me tear-out, I can usually wait it out. But tear-out at the smoothing stage of a project is one of the most frustrating battles to fight. You can try a bunch of different strategies to eliminate the tear-out, but the first one should be to hone up your smoothing plane’s iron and try again.

About half the time, this break in the action fixes the problem. If it doesn’t help, it’s time to try strategy No. 3 (next week’s topic).

— Christopher Schwarz

Whenever I’m working a booth at a woodworking show, there’s a fair chance that some power-tool-only woodworkers will come down from the mountain to give me some grief. Usually it starts with a few taunts during my handplaning demonstration (“Hey buddy where do you plug that thing in?”).

But I always relish the moments when they start to ask real questions. Here is my favorite question (slightly edited to make it saucier):

“So Mr. Handplane guy,” they’d say. “Let’s say you have a hickory board that’s 8’ long from a tree that grew on a hill. The board’s in wind, and it’s got a good crook in it as well. How would you deal with that board with your hand tools?”

“Oh that’s easy,” I’d reply. “I’d start with my broad axe.”

“Axe?” they’d say, confusion spreading across their brow.

“Yup, I’d chop the board into 12” lengths and feed them into the wood-burning stove.”

I know that all this sounds like Southern hyperbole (to which I am prone), but I am serious when I say that the best way to reduce your tear-out problems (with both hand and machine tools) is through careful stock selection.

About seven years ago I had the privilege of working with Sam Sherrill and Michael Romano on a project to encourage woodworkers to use lumber in their projects that woodworkers harvested from downed or doomed urban trees.

The two guys got the attention of The New Yankee Workshop, and Norm Abram came to town to see (and film) the projects these two University of Cincinnati professors had built using reclaimed lumber.
 
One of these projects I was quite familiar with. It was a large dining table that Sherrill had built for a family using a large pin oak on the family’s property. The table was fairly nice, but the story behind it was not.

The lumber for the table had come from the enormous, Jurassic-scale branches of the pin oak. The boards were wide (like those from a bole) but they were still reaction wood. Branch wood. Junk wood.

When Sherrill and Romano went to dry the wood and surface it, the wood self-destructed. It warped, split, you name it. They told these wild tales of how it would explode (yes, explode) in the planer. They lost about 90 percent of what they had cut, according to Sherrill.

That story sticks with me to this day. When I pick my boards for any project, I stay completely tuned to the grain of the boards at hand. If the grain reverses on itself through the plank a good deal, then I am going to skip the board (to the fire with you!) or saw it into short lengths, which might not give me as much trouble.

That sounds wasteful in this day and age. But the most precious commodity in woodworking is not the wood, but the time we spend working (or butchering) it. You can make your work faster and easier just by being a lot more choosy with your wood selection.

Coming next week: The second best way to reduce tear-out.

— Christopher Schwarz

If you've read my book, my blog or my magazine, it's easy to get the impression that I hate benches that have a lot of storage beneath the benchtop. I don't know how many times I've written about how a bench that looks like a kitchen cabinet works about as well as a kitchen cabinet when you need to clamp something to its top.

But that's not the whole story. I think that you can add some significant storage to a bench and still make it just as useful as a stripped-down Roubo workbench (the hulking French bench on the cover of the book).

If you have a lovely French model in your shop, add a shelf inside the bottom rails. Then add three drawers below that shelf, just as Andre Roubo shows in his illustration of a German workbench. Adding these drawers is on my to-do list, as is making the sliding leg vise shown in the same engraving.

If you have the English bench (or are thinking of building one), here are a couple suggestions. Audel's Carpenter's Guide suggests making a bench with a top board that can be removed so you can stow the tools in the cavity below.

That's OK, but that middle board might jump around when you are planning panels. (Carpenters don't plane as many panels as cabinetmakers. Heck, they don't plane anything these days.) So I'd consider making only one half of that board removable. Pick the end of the bench where you don't handplane panels.

Another option is to build a drawer into the front apron, as the ingenious airplane makers did in this shot from the Filton shop in England. That is how I would add storage to an English bench – plus I'd add drawers at the bottom below the apron as well, as shown in a drawing in George Ellis's "Modern Practical Joinery."

None of these solutions will change the way the bench functions, but they sure will give you a place to store your bench chisels and layout tools.

— 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.

One of my favorite old tools to fix up and use are small patternmaker’s router planes. Each one of these little tools is unique, usually inexpensive and easy to get functioning.

They also can be gorgeous examples of craftsmanship, or as ugly as an Allan wrench jammed into a plate of rusted steel.

The tools are fairly common because they were made by pattermakers for their own use, according to tool collectors I’ve talked to. Sometimes the patternmaker would use a common Stanley tool as the pattern for the craftsman-made tool. And that’s why you sometimes see router planes that look like slightly shrunken Stanley router planes in bronze.

The coolest one I’ve ever seen is owned by Carl Bilderback, a retired carpenter and tool collector who lives outside Chicago. He writes for Popular Woodworking on occasion and whenever I’m up there to take photos of his work I always catch myself looking at his router plane with lustful thoughts.

It’s fancy. It has a bronze base, a beautifully knurled adjustment mechanism and tiny little turned handles. You’ll be able to see a photo of it in our February 2008 issue. Carl is using it during an article on repairing mistakes.

The router shown here is a more typical example. I bought it for $15 at a tool swap. It was sitting on a blanket with a bunch of other little bits of rusted metal.

Fixing one up is easy. I started working on this one at 4:10 p.m. and was trimming tenons before 4:30 p.m. rolled around. The irons on these are almost always soft steel, which means they are easy to hone up, but that you’ll be sharpening them often.

I polished the flat face of the tool on my waterstones during two songs on the radio (man how I love Little Steven’s Underground Garage). Then I trued up the bevel on a diamond stone and honed a micro-bevel on the waterstones. You can’t use honing guides to sharpen the L-shaped iron, but it’s easy work by hand.

The only other thing to do is to clean up the sole a bit. The oxidation on the broze base will leave nasty marks on your work at first. I clean up the base on some sandpaper stuck to a piece of granite.

If you’d like one of these tools for yourself, the best way is to join Mid-West Tool Collector’s Association and attend one of their local or national meets. You will have 20 or 30 to choose from. I’ve found a few on eBay using this search, but I like buying them in person because you can make sure that the iron can be tightened up well. There’s nothing worse than an iron that shifts around in use.

— Christopher Schwarz

Reader Robert Monetti writes: Loved your presentation on workbenches, and now I am inspired to design and build my own. I know you can't believe this, but the only information that is missing is: What are the best shapes for dog holes, round or square? I think square would be better for offering more friction but are direction limited when using clamping dogs.

If round, what diameter? If square or rectangular, what length and width? It would also be helpful as to there location and the orientation of rectangular holes.

Give me answers to these questions and I am on my way local mill house.

— Robert Monetti

Robert: Your questions will fetch a variety of valid answers. After working with both round and square dogs, I have my preferences. But both systems – round and square – work and work quite well. That said, here’s my argument.

I like 3/4”-diameter round dog holes. They are simpler to install during construction of your bench and even after construction. Round dog holes handle a wide variety of modern workbench accessories: hold downs, holdfasts, Wonder Dogs and the like. And you can turn the dogs 360° to clamp odd-shaped pieces.

The downside to round dogs is that they are usually brass or other metal, which can be dangerous to your tools. You can make wooden round dogs (use a tough wood), but I have used metal round dogs for more than a decade with only one minor incident to report.

Place the Dog Holes
So where do you put your dog holes? In general, I like to bore as few as possible. I have a couple dog holes in my benches that I never use. They are, after many years of disuse, like an unfortunate tattoo. They seemed like a good idea at the time. And why they don’t hurt much, they don’t add anything and are a reminder of an evening of wild boring (if that oxymoron is possible).

I use two lines of dog holes. One is for an end vise and one is for holdfasts. If you have an end vise (such as a tail vise), then bore a long line of dog holes near the front edge of your benchtop. Typically, this line of holes is located between 2” and 6” from the front edge. I like 4” – which allows me to clamp a 8”-wide board in the center. I have an 8” power jointer, so this makes sense for me.

I place these holes on 3” centers or so. Closer together is better for this line of dog holes because closely spaced dog holes will prevent you from screwing and unscrewing your tail vise as much.

The rear line of dog holes is different. It is mostly for holdfasts, and their spacing is determined by how far the pad of the holdfast is from the shaft. If this distance is 8”, than placing your holes every 16” (maybe a little less) allows you full coverage along the rear of your bench.

This line of holes should be located about 6” or so from the rear edge of your bench. That will allow you to rotate your holdfasts for a variety of holding situations. That should get you started.

— Christopher Schwarz

Whenever a beginning bench-builder bends my ear, the No. 1 question they have is usually about what species of wood they should use to build their workbench.

They’re almost always vapor-locked on the issue and unable to proceed on their design until they pick the perfect species.

In my experience, there is a far better way to ask this question: What woods shouldn’t you use to build a bench? That list is far shorter.

Depending on your workbench’s design, the list of verboten species could be entirely empty. You can make a fantastic workbench out of the cheapest white pine 2 x 12s at the home center – just make the top 5” thick and the legs 5” x 5”. It’ll be awesome.

But people don’t want to use white pine I guess, because that’s for stud walls and skateboard ramps. Or it’s too cheap. Or it dents too easily. So I know that I can’t talk anyone into making a white pine bench, no matter how hard I try.

So here’s are the important characteristics of an ideal workbench wood that won’t get you laughed out of your local woodworking guild.

1. It should be stiff. A stiff species will allow you to cross long spans with the top unsupported by aprons or braces, which can get in the way of your clamps. To determine how stiff a species is, check out the chart I’ve included here that I lifted from my book, “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use.” (It’s fun to violate my own copyright.)

2. It should be heavy. Heavy benches are superior to lightweight benches, which you chase around your shop. A heavy bench moves only when you want it to. Check the wood’s specific gravity – its weight compared to water. That’s the measuring stick for this characteristic.

3. It should be inexpensive. You don’t have to buy steamed European beech to make a great bench. Until recently, European beech was expensive in this country (prices are falling). European cabinetmakers chose beech for their benches because it was stiff, heavy and cheap.

4. It should be readily available. Workbenches are great. The only thing greater than a workbench is all the great stuff you get to build on it. Don’t delay building a bench because you’re having trouble finding the wood.

5. It should resist denting. This is a bit of a minor point because I’ve worked on benches that dent easily. And it’s no big deal when they get dented because it won’t affect the quality of your finished work and you eventually work the dents out when flattening the top. To determine how dent-resistant a species is, check out its Janka scale rating.

6. It should be light in color. I wouldn’t enjoy working on an ebony bench. It would be really hard to see what I was working on. You’re often sighting things against your bench, such as when you peer down your plane’s sole to see if the iron is centered in the mouth. A light-colored bench makes this easy. Plus, the benchtop reflects light, making the shop appear lighter.

7. It should be easy to work and glue. Purpleheart and hickory get used to build masochist workbenches. You’re going to have to flatten the top of your bench some day, so make it easy on yourself, long-term.

So what woods excel in many of these categories? Plenty. In my neck of the woods, yellow pine, ash, white oak and red maple would all be outstanding low-dollar benches. (Especially ash. Thanks to the emerald as borer, ash is about as cheap as yellow pine these days.) Oh, and don’t be afraid to mix species. If you’re short on cash, make your base from a junk species and spend the money on the top. You can always replace the base.

Here are some other choices. A little pricer but still solid: white oak, white maple, birch and beech.

OK, but not my first choice: poplar, red oak, hickory (too hard to work).

Probably not, except in a pinch: walnut, cherry (too dark and a little soft), basswood (too soft), sycamore (too hard to work the quartersawn faces), and almost all the exotics (too expensive and sometimes difficult to glue).

So if the question about wood species is a red herring for bench builders, what do I think is the most important question about bench design? Here it is: How soon can you start building?

— Christopher Schwarz

We received our first load of books this week and are shipping them out with the Deluxe CDs (plus any DVDs you ordered). So if you ordered a book from us, watch your mailbox.

The books are autographed, of course. Two readers will receive “special” deluxe editions. Meaning, my kids asked if they could add a discreet smiley face to the title page (hope that’s OK).

One important thing I want to add to our Canadian and international customers is that we are still working out the shipping options to make them fair to everyone. Until then, if you are outside the continental United States just drop John Hoffman a line at John@lostartpress.com. He’ll take care of you.

Also, we’ll be posting some new classes and seminars on the site in the coming weeks. So do check back if you are interested in classes.

— Christopher Schwarz