One of my most essential tools for joinery is one that I never talk about: my magnifier lamp.

This fluorescent, articulating light fixture allows me to see my layout lines, any undesirable tracks left by my handplanes and the bevel of whatever tool I’m sharpening at the moment. The light fixture drops into my dog holes so I can move it anywhere on my bench, though it rarely strays from the area of the benchtop that has my leg vise.

I’ve burned through three of these fixtures since I started woodworking – most of the ones you get at office supply stores are just junk. Their springs are weak and soon the lamp won’t stand upright. Plus they get damaged easily when you drop them.

About five years ago I bought a magnifier lamp that was built in the 1960s. It was “new old stock” (thanks Slav!), meaning it still had the sales tags on it when it came into my shop.

This sucker is bulletproof. And I don’t care what I paid for it (about $45) – I’d pay twice that in a heartbeat. You move it, and it stays put. It laughs off knocks and dings. And the switch didn’t break in the first week.

My magnifier lamp was made by Luxo Lamp Corp., which is still around – though I haven’t inspected the company’s modern merchandise. I really should take a look at the different lamps available (sounds like a tool test, eh?).

I can say this: I’ve never been happy with the student-grade stuff, so you might want to stay away from it. I’d check the stores that sell old office equipment. Buried among the manual typewriters, adding machines and metal shelving units just might be your next favorite woodworking tool.

— Christopher Schwarz

When I teach classes about handplanes, the climax is a contest where we see who can plane a 3/4” x 6” x 12” board to perfection – both to the try square and to the eye.

Last year at one of the classes, one of the young students in the front row took the contest to heart. When he brought his board up to me to evaluate he was out of breath and as wet as a Louisiana underarm.

I thought he had dunked his head in the toilet and was playing a joke on me. Or perhaps he was having a coronary event.

Neither turned out to be true. He was ragged out from planing. It’s a common complaint among readers: Planing is hard work. However, I can generally work all day in the shop without increasing my heart rate beyond what it is during a horror movie. You might think it’s my age (I’m 40), but I think it’s more than that. Over the years I’ve developed some habits that allow me to work steadily all day. Here are a few:

1. Make sure your bench is low enough. A high bench requires you to use the shorter muscles in your arms that tire rapidly. A lower bench allows you to use your legs and abdomen more. When I finally lowered my bench to 34" it made a huge difference in my work.

2. Step forward during your planing stroke. When planing a longer board (36" or more), I begin the stroke with one foot in the air and step forward. The act of dropping my foot begins the stroke. This puts gravity on your side. It looks funny (like a Monty Python Silly Walk). But boy does it work.

3. Traverse as much as possible. Planing across the grain allows you to remove more material with less effort. I'll traverse with my fore plane and my jointer plane. Then a few diagonal strokes with the jointer plane and I'm off to the smoother. The longer I can traverse, the longer I can work.

4. Plan your work around fatigue. One of the great things about hand-tool woodworking is that you can work in short bursts at different tasks and use different muscle groups. For example, I'm building web frames this week. I'll jointer plane the components. Then cut the tenons. Then the mortises. Then I might smooth plane them and assemble them. Then I'll move onto the next web frame.

5. Wax your tools. Paraffin wax on the sole of your tool (or a wipe with a non-drying vegetable oil such as jojoba oil) can do wonders. It reduces the effort to push the tool. And – if you apply it to your tools between each board you plane – you also get a short, breather.

6. Sharpen. I’m always amazed at how a sharp tool is easier to push than one that is approaching dull. Sharpening is also a break that can allow you to recover.

7. Pick different secondary woods. For the internal guts of your project, consider using Eastern white pine or basswood instead of using poplar or lower-grade boards of your project’s primary wood (i.e. don’t use rock maple for your drawer bottoms).

8. Don’t smooth plane the inside components. When I plane a carcase side or some internal components, I typically stop with the jointer plane. Sometimes I’ll stop with the fore plane (such as on the underside of a large tabletop). Only the surfaces that show will be smooth-planed. This can cut your planing time dramatically.

9. Always use the coarsest tool possible and take the thickest cut that does not cause tear-out. One 6-thou-thick shaving saves time and effort compared to 12 half-thou shavings. If your wood is mild, take a thick shaving.

So how about you? Any suggestions (besides indenturing an apprentice or buying crystal meth) for increasing your working time?

— Christopher Schwarz

Editor’s note: Dean Jansa is a dyed-in-the-wool traditional hand-tool woodworker who helped ignite many of the ideas behind my book on workbenches. At our request, Jansa gracious agreed to let us post some of his hand-tool tutorials he prepared for a Google Group. This first tutorial coves some of the basic strokes when sticking a moulding by hand.

— Christopher Schwarz

I was making a simple molding for a chest I am working on and thought I'd document the process. If you want to watch someone who really knows what they are doing I recommend Don McConnell's DVD "Traditional Molding Techniques: The Basics."

I've followed the same steps he outlines in the DVD, but Don does a better job of describing the steps than I probably will.

The first step, after deciding on the profile, is to lay the profile out on the edge of the stock and cut a series of steps with a fillister that will later guide the hollows and rounds.  Note: It appears that I am cutting the steps on the edge of a large piece of stock. I'm not.  That rough board is just used as a makeshift fence to turn my entire benchtop into a long sticking board.



It is a good idea to build your bench as long as you can. My bench is just a bit longer than  8’, and I stick the molding on a piece as long as I can fit on my bench. When creating moldings by hand there will be natural variations in the profile along its length. If you stick the profile as one long piece you can then wrap the moulding around the entire case and have profile match at the corners. The profiles, over the short distance needed to cut the miter, will match. So build a long bench!



Here you can see the resulting steps left by the fillister. There’s no need to worry about a little tear-out, the hollows and rounds will remove more stock and they are pitched higher than my fillister, which reduces tearing).



Next I cut the concave portion with a round plane.



Then the convex portion with a hollow plane.



Finally, cut the last bit of profile on the top of the molding with a hollow. (I didn't take a photo, sorry.) Here is the resulting molding.



Finally, wrap the moulding around the case. First cut the front molding from the middle of the long board, then cut the sides from the pieces cut from the left and right of the front molding. Here it is on the case.

— Dean Jansa

Though my wife might disagree, I am definitely a leg man.

Whenever I'm going to great lengths in the shop, it's usually because I'm preparing a set of legs for a table or a chair. I will sort through hundreds of board feet of lumber to find the right thick planks that have the grain pattern I like.

I will gladly band saw boards at odd angles to create the bastard grain that will produce a leg that looks good from all sides. Today I spent a long time (too long, actually) finding stock that had the right curve to work with a double taper on a Stickley 802 sideboard I'm working on.

And when it comes to prepping my stock, I always do the legs (and any panels) separately from the rest of the carcase stock so I can focus on getting the legs dead square.

Like any red-blooded American woodworker, I also like a really nice top. And I go the extra mile to make a top that gets admiring glances. But I think tops are easier because ultimately they just have to look good. Accuracy can take a back seat – except at the edges.

Legs have to be accurate on certain faces, otherwise the whole assembly will be cock-eyed, have gappy joints or both.

I don't know any woodworkers who obsess about bottoms in furniture. Perhaps James Krenov? He puts a whole lot of effort into the base when he builds a chest-on-stand.

And don't get me started on those nutjob woodworkers who obsess about feet.

— Christopher Schwarz

Let’s play a game I call “Stupid or Ethical?”

The first time I interviewed Robin Lee, president of Lee Valley Tools, I asked him a few questions that readers had been asking me for years. Robin’s answers are paraphrased below, though I’ve heard him say them so many times in the last decade I could almost quote him verbatim.

Q: Why doesn’t Veritas come out with an inexpensive Bed Rock plane to compete with Lie-Nielsen?

A: That wouldn’t be fair to Tom Lie-Nielsen. We’d rather produce our own line of planes instead of copying his.

Q: Why doesn’t Veritas come out with a line of less expensive Stanley 750 chisels to compete with Lie-Nielsen?

A: That wouldn’t be fair. Besides, we have our own line of chisels already and might do something different in the future.

Q: Why doesn’t Veritas make an infill plane to compete with all these makers who charge thousands of dollars for a plane?

A: That’s their market. We’d rather build our own planes than copy someone else’s.

Q: Why doesn’t Veritas produce a less-expensive brass-back dovetail saw….

Well, you get the idea.

On the other side of that fence, Lie-Nielsen has stayed out of Veritas’s back yard on a number of occasions. During one visit to the Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, I saw a prototype of a bullnose plane. When Veritas came out with its bullnose shortly thereafter, Lie-Nielsen shelved its plans.

The question isn’t about the legality of copying tools. It’s much more important than that. Some might contend that this sort of behavior is stupid. Shouldn’t these companies be out to grab as much market share as possible? Or is it somehow ethical to steer clear of your competitors’ ideas and instead push your own ideas (assuming you have any) forward?

My bias is obvious. My work gets ripped off everyday. People copy my articles, put them on CDs and sell them on eBay. They post them for free download on Russian sites. They place my copyrighted text whole cloth on their foreign web sites and claim it for their own.

Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s right.

For me, copying tools is a simple issue. Ask yourself one question: Will the copy confuse the reasonable consumer? If the copy looks so much like a competitor’s that it is going to confuse buyers, then it’s dishonest.

I’m not saying you can’t do it. Or that you’re violating laws. I’m just saying that I won’t support you with my dollars.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. For those who haven't been reading WoodNet and the debates on copied tools, try this link. Or (if you have four hours of your life to spare) this.

We call them "tool pushers" in the collecting world. People who find out what sort of stuff you are interested in and feed you a steady stream of it until your wallet is dry.

One of the worst tool pushers is Slav Jelesijevich, a Chicago area tool collector, cabinetmaker and cat-loving wild man. Get to know Slav just a bit and you'll receive photos of his cats (some of them in attack mode) and you'll get leads on old tools that are new in the box. That's his specialty. I bought a 1970s-era Rockwell band saw from him. In the box. A Work-Mate (in the box). Hammers with 1970s-era Super Bowl tags on them. And too many rasps and files to mention (I guess I just did mention them).

At Woodworking in America, Slav sold a lot of stuff. And a lot of it went home with the other toolmakers on the selling floor with him.

While I was yakking with someone (Harrelson Stanley?) Slav walked by and dropped something in my pocket. Then he disappeared. I knew that whatever it was, it was going to cost me.

It turned out to be something I've always wanted: A never-used Millers Falls bench stop. It is the height of gizmo-cool. Sure a simple block of wood can be your planing stop – you Philistine. Or you can get this remarkably sophisticated spring-loaded, quadra-sided piece of tool engineering awesomeness.

Here's how you install it: Drill two holes in your bench – a 1" hole inside a 2" hole. Screw the stop in. You're done.

Here's how it works: Loosen the screw and the stop goes loosey and bouncy on a spring. Rotate the head until you have the type of stop you want. There's a flat stop, a V-shaped slot, one with four big teeth and one with 10 little teeth.

Set the stop at the height you want – anything up to 1-1/8" and then turn the screw to lock it. Done.

I've seen these in old catalogs, but I've never seen one in person. And now I own one that's never been used. But that last part is going to change.

— Christopher Schwarz

The T-shirt slogan contest was great fun. I eventually had to stop checking the entries while I was at work, however, because I was worried that human resources was going to nail me for some of the stuff scrolling across my screen.

The three winning slogans are:

“Trying Stuff Since 1678” from Mike Siemsen. Lucy, my spouse and a writer, called out this one as the most clever of all the entries.

“We Nail, We Screw, We Bolt” from Ben Davis. When I insisted on this one, Lucy rolled her eyes as if to say “You wish.”

I let Lucy pick the third winner, which turned out to be quite disturbing on a personal level.

“Inch-prickt Since 1678” by Dave Fisher.

Ben and Dave: Drop me a line at christopher.schwarz@fuse.net. My blog software ate your e-mail addresses.

The winners will all receive the Pin-Eez sawnut tool and one of the T-shirts with the current slogan. As soon as we sell out of those, we’ll use one of these new ones.

Thanks to everyone who entered.

— Christopher Schwarz

When I was in high school, my father gave me a great gift: a leather vest.

I wore the snot out of that thing. I wore it when I dated my future wife in college. I wore it when Steve Shanesy interviewed me for my job here at Popular Woodworking. I have – quite literally – worn the buttons off the thing.

Last year, I realized that my beloved cow covering was a catastrophe. Frayed. A bit smelly. Unusually soiled.

So after 20 years of faithful service, I retired that vest and decided to buy myself a new one. My new vest is well made, but it’s shiny and stiff. I am neither.

So I sought out some way to age the finish on the vest. I found a lot of advice out there: Drag it behind my car. Put it in the clothes dryer with some rocks. Sand it. Wad it up, stuff it under the bed and sleep on it over and over.

As I considered all this advice I noticed something about the givers. None of these advisers had actually done this to their precious skin-based garments. They were just repeating things they had heard or were making up things that “should work.”

So I dug deeper until I found the stagehands. According to these people, they used denatured alcohol to age leather costumes for plays about pirates, bikers and S&M-loving citizens. Their instructions were specific and consistent: Put alcohol in a spray bottle. Spray a large surface and then wipe it down. Instant age.

It sounded like wood finishing advice, so I was instantly skeptical. So I decided to do what any wary woodworker would do: I tried it on a hidden area of a non-essential garment.

It worked. So I went to town on my new vest with a squirt bottle and a rag.

Now I have a vest I’m more comfortable in, and a new appreciation for how-to information. You see, whenever I write something about woodworking, I strive never to repeat things as gospel that I haven’t tried. If my name is on it, I’ve done it. Or I’m quoting someone I trust.

This isn’t always the case in any journalism (including knitting journalism and ferret-training journalism). I have read enough garbage in my lifetime to know that some people just repeat other people’s garbage because it has been repeated enough times that it has to be true.

This is the long way of saying that we should do what Virgil (70 B.C. - 19 B.C.) recommended: “Believe one who has tried it.”

— Christopher Schwarz

If you write hilarious T-shirt slogans and have some hand saws with loose nuts (and who doesn't) then read on.

We're giving away three custom split-nut drivers made using the Pin-Eez tool. (If it doesn't sound like I'm typing English here, read this blog entry and it will all make sense.) The manufacturer of the Pin-Eez gave me these three tools last week to thank me for my blog entry.

So what do you have to do to win this fabulous split-nut driver? Be hilarious. We're trolling around for the next slogan to put on the back of our Lost Art Press T-shirts. We sold out of the ones that read "Rude Mechanicks Since 1678." Our latest T-shirt features the slogan "Boring Since 1678." Click here to see that shirt.

The slogan has to be short – six words or less. And it has to relate (obviously) to woodworking, hand tools, beer drinking, Joseph Moxon, Andre Roubo – or preferably all of those at once.

Here is how you enter: Simply post your slogan as a comment at the end of this blog entry before midnight, Friday, Feb. 6. Be sure to include an e-mail address so we can contact you. (This isn't a scam to collect your e-mail addresses; we're not that sophisticated.)

We'll pick our three favorite slogans and announce the three winners on Feb. 7. Each winner will receive a split-nut driver and a T-shirt with the current slogan.  

— Christopher Schwarz

As mentioned in my last post, I set my tools at the proper angle in my honing guides by sighting the tools against a little block of wood that is marked with the various angles I use.

As I prepared to sharpen my smoothing plane iron this morning, I took some photos so you could see how I do this quickly, accurately and without getting sliced open like a hog's jugular.

First, a word about honing guides. In addition to the small Kell honing guide I use for chisels, I use an Eclipse 36 guide for plane irons. The Eclipse 36 was the DNA for the $10 to $15 Taiwanese honing guides in every catalog today. But like a photocopy, the Taiwanese versions aren't as sharp as the original.

In general, the paint on the Taiwanese guides is too thick and pools where you don't want it to (especially in the dovetailed ways that are designed to hold chisels). Plus, the copies don't hold tools as firmly because things just don't line up like they do on the Eclipse.

As I've seen hundreds of honing guides in my 13 years at Popular Woodworking; and my opinion on this is as firm as my love for Belgian ales.

Here's the part where you hate me. It appears the Eclipse 36 is no longer made. (If I'm wrong here, give me a shout.) I bought mine from Highland Hardware, but that catalog no longer carries it. All my other searches for a U.S. supplier have turned up naught.

If you're a little cracked (like me), then I recommend you search eBay's United Kingdom site. They turn up there frequently, even guides that are new in the box.

Setting the Tool in the Guide
The first step is to position your little block of wood perfectly flush to the end of your bench. Use your fingertips – this will get you within a thousandth of an inch.

Now secure the tool in the guide but clamp its jaws loosely on the tool. You want to be able to shift the guide forward and back on the tool with finger pressure. But you don't want the guide to fall off.

Place the guide on your benchtop and roll the edge up to the end of your bench. Place the fingers of your right hand on top of the tool and press down. Move the edge of the tool to the end of the benchtop as shown in the photo. I have never cut myself through three (now four) presidential administrations.

With your left hand, push the honing guide forward (or back) until the tool lines up with the angled line on your block. For plane irons, I grind the bevel at 25° and sharpen a 35° secondary bevel. So I'm lining up the tool with the 35° line.

Now take your left hand and tighten the guide enough to lock your setting. Then use a screwdriver to really lock the sucker down. Then get to sharpening.

— Christopher Schwarz