When I build too much stuff with straight lines, it starts to make me a little batty. So after finishing a blanket chest and a gaggle of sawbenches, I retreated into my quick, easy and curvy place.

No, it’s not a gentleman’s club, but it’s almost as stimulating. (Note to self: I must be getting old to write a line like that.) Today I spent a morning building a set of three Shaker oval boxes as a wedding gift. These boxes are an immersion course in curves, angles, steam-bending and nailing.

I first learned to build these boxes during a 2002 photo shoot with the undisputed master of the craft: John Wilson. After watching him make these boxes, I immediately built the bending forms and bought the copper tacks and some bending stock to make some boxes.

I’ve probably made 20 or so sets, and during the last five years or so I’ve altered some of Wilson’s techniques to suit my tools and way of working. And now I have it down to the point where I use hand tools for the entire process, save one little point when I fit the top and bottom slabs to their bent bands.

If you’ve never tried building these boxes, I highly recommend you give it a try. You can order all the materials directly from Wilson at ShakerOvalBox.com or buy a small kit from Lee Valley Tools. It’s so much fun, it might even keep you out of the strip clubs.

Here, in brief, is how I’ve altered Wilson’s tried-and-true procedures in my shop.

1. Feathering: All the oval bands have to be feathered in thickness at one end so the two ends meet in a smooth curve. Wilson uses a belt/disc sander for this operation. He presses about 1-1/4” of the end to the belt sander and tapers the end to almost nothing. I do this with a block plane. I mark a line about 1-1/4” from the end and plane a taper on the end. Takes but a minute.

2. Drilling: Wilson uses an electric drill with a 3/32” bit to make the holes for all the copper tacks and for the toothpicks that secure the top and bottom slabs to the bands. I use an eggbeater drill. I look for any excuse to use my Millers Falls No. 2, and this is a good excuse.

3. Surfacing: Instead of sanding all the parts, I surface them with a handplane or scraper plane. It works great with the straight-cut stuff that Wilson sells.

4. Cutting the tops and bottoms: Wilson uses a band saw. I use a bow saw. My way is much slower, but I like using my bow saw.

So which power tool will I not give up with these boxes? It’s the table saw. Once you cut out the top and bottom slabs, you need to put a little bevel on the edges so they will snuggle into the bands with a cork-like fit.

I have a disc-sander plate I put on my table saw for this operation. I tilt the arbor a couple degrees and sand away. Someday I’ll switch to a spokeshave for this operation I’m sure.

So how fast is this process? The photos here show what happens after an hour of work. I feather the ends of the bands, cut the “fingers” with a knife and boil the bands for 20 minutes. Then I remove the bands, wrap them around the forms and tack the bands. I put a couple plugs in each band to help them hold their shape and walk away for a day.

Tomorrow I’ll spend an hour fitting and attaching the top and bottom pieces. Then a little touch-up work and I’ll be ready to spray them with a little lacquer.

Because I like my day job, I’ll spray them here at home. Click here for the back-story on that.

— 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

Thanks to expert mousing and clicking of two readers, you can download free construction drawings of the 2008 version of the sawbench featured here last week.

Louis Bois, the draughtsman who prepared the construction drawings for the “Workbenches” book, and woodworker Mike Lingenfelter have both submitted electronic files that will allow you to easily build this sawbench. Plus, Louis’s file also has plans for a mate for the sawbench – I call it “Little Buddy” – that will nest under the “Skipper.”

Louis’s file is a pdf and can be printed out by a wide variety of free programs, most notably Adobe Reader. Mike’s version is a SketchUp drawing that is actually a 3D model, which allows you to take the sawbench apart and see how it goes together. SketchUp is a free program from Google and well worth the download.

SawBench2008.zip (11.85 KB)

2008-Sawbench.pdf (121.53 KB)

Today I put a couple coats of finish on the sawbench while I was finishing a blanket chest for the summer 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine. When I cannot spray lacquer (I use an HVLP and solvent-based lacquer), I like to finish projects with a custom mix that is difficult to mess up.

I don’t know where I got the recipe for this finish. Several years ago finishing expert Bob Flexner mentioned in one of his columns that he makes his own oil/varnish blends and his own wiping varnishes – instead of paying extra for some finishing company to do it.

I tried this finish years ago and is has yet to let me down. I wouldn’t use this on a piece of furniture that requires a lot of moisture protection (such as a bathroom cabinet), but it’s great for most things.

Here it is: One-third satin varnish (any brand, just don’t use polyurethane varnish), one-third boiled linseed oil and one-third low-odor mineral spirits. Just pour them all into a mason jar and you are ready to go.

I rag it on and then wipe off the excess. Thin coats work best. If I want to make the surface really tactile, I apply it with a 3M gray pad. Either way, it takes only three or four coats to create a nice warm-colored finish that has a nice sheen. The linseed oil helps bring out the figure in the wood. The varnish gives the wood a little protection. And the mineral spirits makes it easy to apply with a rag.

I sand the finish between the second and third coats with lubricated sandpaper or a sanding sponge – something around #300 grit. Sure, it takes longer than lacquer. But in February, it sure is faster than waiting for a warm, sunny day in Northern Kentucky.

Speaking of warm days, next weekend I’ll be at the Lie-Nielsen Toolworks show in Oakland, Calif. If you want to stop by, I’ll be there only on Saturday (my flight leaves Sunday morning). I’ll be selling books and will give a lecture at 2 p.m. Saturday on workbench design.

As a bonus, you can meet my wife, Lucy, who will be helping me at the booth and offering counseling to any members of the “Wives Against Schwarz” who happen to attend the free (repeat free) event.

— Christopher Schwarz

I end up giving away all of the sawbenches I build to woodworkers who give me those wet, doe-eye looks that say, “I don’t think I can build one.” That’s ridiculous, of course, because these things are as easy to make as a box of brownies. But I’m soft, I suppose, like the resulting brownies (always undercooked, natch).

The downside to my sawbench charity is that sometimes I end up without any sawbenches in my shops, which makes me nuttier than squirrel poo. The upside, is that I get to make more sawbenches, and each generation gets a little better.

This weekend I built the sawbench that me and my students will be building during my handsawing classes in 2008. This example can be built from one 2 x 8 x 10’, and it took me about four hours to do – I machined all the stock flat and cut all the joints by hand.

This sawbench is a little different than the others because it’s designed to be a hand-sawing exercise. All the joints are entirely saw-cut. No boring. No mortising. No chopping.

Now if you’ve gotten to this point in the blog entry and are wondering “What in Moxon’s name is a sawbench?” then check out this old entry on my blog at Woodworking Magazine. Sawbenches are magical devices that make full-size handsaws really work (handsaws stink at bench-height, except for overhand ripping). Plus, I assemble carcases on them, use them as stepstools, plane table bases against the sawbench’s bird’s mouth, and eat my lunch while sitting on one.

I don’t have construction drawings drafted for this bench yet, but you don’t really need them. Here are the basics: Make the bench about knee-high. This one is 19-3/4” high. The legs are angled 10° off 90°. The legs are notched at the top at 10° to fit into mating notches in the top. All the stretchers are attached to the legs with half-lap joints. Glue and screws keep everything together.

Here’s my materials list:

1 Top        1-1/4” x 6-3/4” x 32”
4 Legs        1-1/4” x 2-1/2” x 21”
2 Long Stretchers    1-1/4” x 2-1/2” x 26”
2 Short stretchers    1-1/4” x 2-1/2” x 12”

The only slightly tricky thing is cutting the feet so the sawbench sits flat on the floor. This is great fun to do once you know the trick. First put the sawbench on a flat and level surface. Then take small wooden shims and shim under all the feet until the sawbench is level on both its length and width.

Then take a small block of wood and cut an 11° bevel on one edge. Place this on your known flat surface and use the block to mark all around the legs of the sawbench (the beveled end allows you to make the outside angle of the legs).
 
Then clamp the sucker to your bench and saw the feet to your lines. This might seem hard. It’s not.

As always, I plan on keeping this sawbench until I retire. But that’s not likely to happen. Plus, I need to build another version that uses lapped-dovetails for one of the advanced classes I’m teaching in July.

— Christopher Schwarz

One of my early workbenches was more than 30" wide. At first, I was thrilled with this width as it allowed me more places to pile junk as I worked on a project.

Then one day I was working on a toy box for a nephew and I wanted to level the finger joints. After fussing and flailing around like a rooster in an empty henhouse I conspired to sleeve the carcase over the end of the bench.

Denied. The bench was too wide. Zut alors!

Lucky for me, however, the bench was a big solid-core door (it had once been the door to our building's cafeteria). So after 10 minutes on the table saw, my benchtop was 24" wide and the carcase fit perfectly over the end.

I like narrow benches for a lot of reasons. I can reach the tools on the wall. They allow me to clamp all around typical carcases right to the benchtop. But I really like a narrow bench when I have to level dovetail joints on a carcase or cabinet.

That is when the Roubo really shines. Today I was leveling some finger joints on a blanket chest and just slapped the thing onto the bench as shown in the above photo and went to work. In the photo I'm knocking down the end grain with a Shinto-rasp (it saves me sharpening time on my block plane when I start with the coarse tool).

Heck, even the 16" overhang on the end of the bench contributes to my bliss. Most carcases are stable with that amount of support, and the legs below the top help brace the work as I flail away on the end grain.

When the carcase is a bit small, like this blanket chest, I have to switch to an outrigger platform (shown below) to work the ends. But I'm still working against the entire benchtop – the top, the right leg and the stretchers. Having them all in the same plane reduces the amount of clamping I have to do to secure my work.

— Christopher Schwarz

There is something deeply and dangerously engrained in our culture about the expression “going with the grain.”

Not to get philosophical, but I consider that expression to be the embodiment of our civil culture. That is, if we cooperate with the other people around us, then everything will be OK (taxes get paid, kids go to school, wooden boards get smooth). And If you go “against the grain,” then bad things happen (cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria, tear-out).

Here's why this thinking is dangerous: It assumes there are only two ways to accomplish things - either you work with the grain or against it. That's ridiculous.

Some of a handplane's most awesome powers can be unlocked by working across the grain of the board. Working across the grain - what Joesph Moxon calls “traversing” - allows you to easily remove the cup out of a board. Think about that for a second. If you take a cupped cabinet side and plane it “with the grain” all across the board then you will end up with a nicely planed cabinet side that is still cupped.

Working across the grain has another amazing and distinct power: It eliminates tear-out. Working cross-grained means that your cutting edge is not going to lift up the grain, lever it upwards and tear the wood fibers ahead of your cutting edge (that's the long-winded description of how tear-out occurs). Instead, working across the grain simply severs the fibers. They don't get lifted.

Now, the resulting surface isn't ready to finish. It looks wooly and dull. But it isn't torn out. And your board will be flat.

That's an ideal place to be when you are working difficult woods. To understand why, let's look at how I worked the slightly cupped front of a curly maple blanket chest this week. First, let's plane this board “with the grain.”

Working with the grain: First take your jack or fore plane and work the high edges down so the panel is fairly flat. Working with the grain on curly maple will produce some tear-out. Then work the panel with the jointer plane to remove the rough surface left behind by the fore plane. Working with the grain will continue to leave tear-out behind over the entire surface of the board. Then take your smoothing plane and remove the tear-out and tool marks left by the jointer plane. If the tear-out is deep, you will typically need to make 10 to 15 passes over the panel to get most of the tear-out removed. Deep patches will have to be scraped or sanded.

Working across the grain: Flatten the panel with cross-grain strokes of your fore plane. No tear-out will be left behind. Now follow up with cross-grain strokes with your jointer plane. Begin to work diagonally across the grain, but take care not to work at an angle where tear-out appears. Again, done correctly, you will have no tear-out. Then follow up with your smoothing plane and plane “with the grain.” Because there is no tear-out to remove, you only have to remove the hollows and high spots left behind by the jointer plane. With my tools, that typically will be four or five passes over the board.

Working across the grain reduces the amount of work I have to do on a board and it reduces the amount of sharpening I have to do on my smoothing plane. Both are good things.

Now, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the two disadvantages of working across the grain. First, you will splinter the far edge of your board or panel. To remedy this, you can plane a small 45° bevel on the far edge, or leave your board over-wide and rip it to final width after planing. The other disadvantage is that working cross-grain tends to dull your tools faster. But this isn't as big a deal because you are dulling the fore plane and the jointer plane, which don't have to be hair-splitting sharp anyway.
 
In addition to working across the grain, here's the other weapon you should consider: a small high-angled smoothing plane. Tear-out can be localized on a panel. If that occurs, you have several choices: Plane the entire panel some more to remove the tear-out (laborious), scrape or sand the torn-out area (then you'll have to sand the entire panel to make the panel look right), or plane out that small area by working localized.

Short and narrow smoothing planes allow you to sneak into these areas without a lot of extra work. I like to use my little Wayne Anderson high-angle smoothing plane for this job (it's about as big as a block plane). You don't have to invest in a beautiful plane like this one to do the job, however. Any low-angle block plane that has been sharpened with a high angle and a curved cutting edge will work wonders.

— Christopher Schwarz

This week I’m deep into reading Joseph Moxon’s “Mechnick Exercises” – the first English-language treatise on the craft of joinery. Published in 1678, the “Exercises” cataloged the tools and practices of the blacksmith, joiner, house carpenter, turner, bricklayer and those who make sundials.

For the modern reader, the book can be a horrible slog. The printed English word of the 17th century seems convoluted. Sentences run on for far longer than we are accustomed to, and the sentences are interrupted by asides that wander a bit. Then they’ll insert a reminder of the original point of the sentence and swoop in on the end of the phrase.

Truth be told, you get used to it after a few pages. Then the hardest thing becomes the occasional unfamiliar word – for example, “dawks” means “hollows” – and the odd tool. My favorite example: the pricker. The pricker is a marking tool that perhaps resembles a square-shanked awl. But in Moxon’s glossary he says the vulgar term is “awl” and instead the proper word is “pricker.”

So as of today, the filthy word “awl” has been banished from our shop in favor of the much more polite “pricker.”

Every time I read Moxon I learn something interesting and useful. But what is most fascinating is how little has changed in 330 years. The tools and the methods are familiar – once you strip away the “shall yets.” Except for one important difference.

What strikes me during this reading of Moxon is his affection for the fore plane – a tool that is typically 16” long, which is shorter than jointer plane and longer than a jack plane. The fore plane has a blade with an obvious curve and is used to quickly remove material.

Moxon spills more ink on the fore plane and its use than he does on any other single plane. He discusses how it is used with its iron set both rank and fine. How it is moved across the board. How it trues faces and edges. The jointer plane gets some discussion, but not nearly as much as the fore.

And then there’s the discussion of the smoothing plane. Here is the entire entry on the smoothing plane (cleaned up a tad):

“The smoothing plane marked B 4. must have its iron set very fine, because its office is to smooth the work from those irregularities the fore plane made.”

That’s really about it. There’s no protracted discussion of the smoother and wispy shavings or strategies to reduce tear-out (though Moxon suggests that high planing angles are important in one part of the book).

Our obsession with smoothing planes might be thoroughly modern. Or perhaps there’s another way to look at this (bear with me, I know this is getting long).

Recently we had Matt Grisley from Leigh Industries in our shop to demonstrate his company’s new dovetail jigs. During our day together, he made an astute observation about hand work. I wrote it down after he said it. And it went something like this:

“What’s interesting to me is how woodworkers who love hand tools also love the heavy machinery – the big planers, jointers and table saws. And they don’t seem to have much affection for the power hand tools, like the router and biscuit joiner.”

And he’s right. I am deeply indebted to my planer and jointer. I would get rid of five of my smoothing planes before I got rid of my jointer and planer (don’t worry I’d still have at least five smoothers left).

I am obsessed with my heavy machinery like Moxon’s workmen were attached to their fore planes. For these are the tools that get the brute work done, that make woodworking possible. The finesse work stands on the shoulders of the fore plane and machinery. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to the shop to fiddle with my square, saw and pricker.

— 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 I was designing (i.e. ripping off the plans from a deceased German tool merchant) my Holtzapffel Workbench, my intention was to have the screws of the face vise in perfect alignment with the holdfast hole in the bench’s right leg.

My plan was thus: I could put a huge George Nakashima-style plank in the twin-screw vise and it would come to rest on the shaft of a holdfast stuck in the right leg.

I bet Charles Holtzapffel wished he’d thought of that, I muttered as I drafted this up.

Months passed; I built the bench. And I really mucked that detail up. As built, the holdfast hole in the right leg isn’t lined up with the top edge of the vise screws. Far from it. That hole is about 2” from being in the same plane.

When I first realized the error, I beat myself up pretty badly (no bag of oranges was harmed during the self-flagellation). But before I started going all “prairie dog” on the bench and drilling holes everywhere, I decided to take my own bitter advice: Try it before you burn it.

Here is the huge surprise about twin-screw vises (you ready?). They are monsters, with almost unlimited clamping power. Several months ago, as we were preparing to film a short video about the bench, I bragged that I could clamp an 8’-long board on edge in the twin-screw vise and plane its edge and it would be rock solid.

Eyebrows were raised. Uncomfortable coughs were emitted. Senior Editor Bob Lang, I think, pantomimed that I had been drinking alcohol.

So I went to the wood rack to get me a 1 x 12 x 8’ hunk of something. We didn’t have any 8-footers. The only 1 x 12 stock we had was 10’ long. Yikes. Suddenly I wished I’d had been drinking in order to increase my courage/foolhardiness. A 10’-long board is 4’ longer than the bench itself.

But you know what? The twin-screw vise held it without complaint. So the support in the right leg isn’t really needed. But if you do want to modify your plans to match my original plans, shift all the dog holes in the right leg up 2”. That will do the trick.

Photo credit: Katy, my 6-year-old daughter, took these photos today while I was working on a cursed Chinese plywood bookcase. As you can clearly see from this photo, I still don't have a butt.

— Christopher Schwarz