If you are an accomplished finisher, stop reading right here. There’s nothing for you below. I hear there are some funny new movies of monkeys ironing linen shorts at YouTube.

This week I’m applying many thin coats of varnish to a chest of drawers that I’ve been building during nights and weekends at my shop at home. The finish recipe is my favorite for black cherry: First apply a coat of boiled linseed oil, let the project sit in the sun and allow the oil to cure in a warm room for a week or so.

Then wipe on thin coats of a satin varnish that has been thinned with low-odor paint thinner (also called mineral spirits). I like three parts varnish to one part paint thinner. Sand between each coat with a broken-in #180-grit sanding sponge. After about six coats, the result is a warm and durable finish. It takes time for each coat of finish to dry, but that gives me time to write, sharpen and tune up the machines for my next project.

This weekend I stumbled into two small details that make this finish easier. The first detail concerns the sanding sponge. When sanding each coat, the process creates a fine powder all over the project. With varnish, I have found it best to remove this powder before applying the following coat (it’s not as necessary as when you use shellac or lacquer because those finishes dissolve and bond to the coats below).

I like to use a tack rag to remove this dust, but I am tackless this weekend. So I started thinking about tacky things in my shop. I half-pondered even making my own tack rag. Then I looked at my 3M sanding sponge.

Hmmm. One side is abrasive. The other is a sponge. Duh, I wonder if the sponge side would pull up the powder? It does indeed, and quite well. And when the sponge becomes loaded you can wash it out and renew it. I can’t believe I’ve been using sanding sponges since “Silver Spoons” was on television and never thought of this.

Second detail: Gloves. Whenever I work with solvent, even paint thinner, I like to use gloves. It makes clean-up easier and I worry less about what danger is lurking on the solvent’s MSDS. Usually I use latex gloves from a big box store for mild solvents. I have always hated these gloves because they fall apart while I’m applying the finish and leave little bits of latex behind. I’m sure there are better-quality latex gloves out there, but not in my local stores.

A few weeks ago Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick gave me a bag of blue nitrile gloves, which are made using a synthetic polymer. These gloves were made by the same company that makes my latex gloves, so my expectations were low.

Boy was I wrong. The nitrile gloves are far more durable. I’ve applied four coats of finish using the same pair of gloves and they are still going strong without a single tear. Farewell latex.

— Christopher Schwarz

Today I taught my 8-year-old to sharpen. It took five minutes.

Instead of teaching her about abrasives and honing angles and all the other theory my head is filled with, I took a hands-off approach to this important hand skill.

I showed her how to secure the blade in a honing guide. I showed her the three waterstones (and the sheer delight of squirting water from the plant sprayer into your mouth. Then Katy decided to use the plant sprayer to pretend she was a boy… a story for another blog and perhaps Katy’s prom night.)

Then I gave her these instructions for sharpening: “Rub it back and forth until it is as shiny as you can get it. Then clean it and go to the next stone.”

I walked away and let her give it a whirl. In less than 10 minutes she showed me her edge. I could see myself in it. (In more ways than one, I suppose). Then I showed her how to back off the iron on the polishing stone.

We oiled the blade together and reassembled the block plane. Then she took the plane to work on pine and pulled up the same wispy shavings she always does. She didn’t have some sort of Zen-like koan-solving moment. The plane just worked like it should work. And sharpening it was no big deal.

Sometimes I think our heads are apt to stop our hands. We read too much, think too much and worry. Sometimes I think the best way to learn a task is to do it without reading anything about it. (Boy this sounds like a dumb argument from a magazine editor.) Just do the task – fail if you need to – but perform the task from beginning to end.

Then read like crazy to understand why the tools worked the way they did.

Last year we did a little experiment with a new employee, Drew Depenning. I told Senior Editor Glen Huey to have Drew cut dovetails during his first week at work. Drew had never cut a single joint by hand. He didn’t know to be afraid. So he cut his dovetails and they came out fine.

With that out of the way, Drew could get on with learning all the ins and outs of the craft.

This works great in woodworking. Probably not so well at a nuclear reactor.

— Christopher Schwarz

Lost Art Press will be offering signed copies of "Handplane Essentials" as soon as the book becomes available the first week in August.

The book, a 312-page hardback, is a compilation of all my writings on planes during the last decade from Popular Woodworking, Woodworking Magazine, The Fine Tool Journal, my blog at Woodworking Magazine, my blog here at Lost Art Press and the writing I have done for other web sites and the Lee Valley Tools newsletter.

Honestly, if you've kept up with all the publications and outlets above, you won't find much new in the book. In putting the text together I eliminated some redundancies, filled in some potholes and generally recast some of the articles so that everything made sense. I think it's a very good introduction to sharpening, bench planes and joinery planes. I didn't get into the moulding planes so much – I'm still not confident enough there to really write about it with any authority.

So I'm generally pleased with the result. The interior is going to feature sepia-toned photos like Woodworking Magazine (if you want a full-color version, we will sell you a box of crayons as well). The book's paper will be nice, as will the cloth-bound hardback cover and dust jacket. I'm also pleased to tell you that we negotiated hard to get this printed in the United States (in Ohio, actually).

Here's how the pricing and availability will work. Lost Art Press will lose some sales by telling you all this, but I'd rather just be honest with you.

Lost Art Press will be selling the book for the full retail price of $34.99 with free shipping. It will be signed by me (and by my daughter Katy as well if you please).

Right now my employer, F+W Media, is offering the book at a pre-sale discount until the end of July. It's $27.99 plus free shipping. Click here to get to their store.

Starting in August, F+W's price will return to $34.99 (plus free shipping) for six months. Lee Valley Tools will then be carrying it and will (almost certainly) sell it for less than full retail.

Amazon.com, Buy.com and other retail outlets will not be carrying the book until at least January 2010. Their websites might say they are going to carry it and discount it, but they are in error.

In any case, thanks for all your support. No matter where you buy the book it will help support the work we do and show there is a solid base of support for books on traditional tools.

As a way of saying thanks, you can download a copy of the introduction to the book, which will give you a flavor for its look.

HPE_FrontMatter.pdf (1.36 MB)

All the best,

— Christopher Schwarz

My city editor put down the phone, pursed her lips and looked at me, a scrawny and green 20-year-old newspaper intern.

"That was the Klan," she said. "They are pissed at you."

That summer I was an intern at my hometown paper, the Southwest Times Record, a small daily in Fort Smith, Ark. Most of that summer I wrote hard-hitting pieces about mutant chicken trading societies, Chamber of Commerce luncheons and the hot weather.

But all summer long I also worked on a series of articles about how the local public schools were still as segregated as they were in 1954. Still as segregated as they were when I went through the system. And so segregated that the local NAACP was considering a lawsuit.

After my stories ran, the Klan called the newsroom to ask about the New York Jew-boy reporter sent down by the ACLU to stir up the black population. And to tell me that I should watch my back.

I was terrified. And then I was furious. Those people didn't know me. I'd lived in that town since I was 5. I went to public elementary, junior high and high school there. I was a member of First Presbyterian Church. And I doubt the ACLU even knew my hometown existed.

This week I stumbled on the first woodworking chisel I ever bought. It's a Popular Mechanics 1/2" bevel-edge chisel I bought from Wal-Mart about four presidents ago. It was my only chisel for about eight years. But I took good care of it until I bought my first set of Marples.

I've forgotten how much I actually like that little chisel. Sure, the steel is as soft as the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and the handle is a lovely clear plastic. But that was the chisel I used to chop out my first dovetails. My first mortise. My first half-lap.

As I looked it over I noticed it was getting some rust on it. So I decided to bring it back to its former blue-light special glory. As I worked on the tool, my mind began to wander to the e-mail beatings I've been taking lately for some tool reviews I've written – reviews both positive and negative.

These whuppings come with the territory, but sometimes they do get to me. (Just like I'm sure my reviews occasionally annoy other people.)

As I honed the secondary bevel of the chisel this morning I held it up to the light and thought, "This is who I am."

I'm taking this chisel home tonight to give to my youngest daughter, Katy. It's not the best tool in the world, but it is a good place to start. And it does come with a lesson, one that I learned that summer day at the Southwest Times Record.

Despite my city editor's warnings that day, I walked out the front door of the paper to my car every day that summer instead of ducking out the door by the pressroom.

— Christopher Schwarz

This summer I'm building a few reproductions of pieces from the White Water Shaker Village that I will donate to the village's caretakers. I want these reproductions to be as faithful as possible, but I'm wondering just how far I can go on faith.

Take, for example, this 13'-long bench. It's all in walnut and nailed together with cut nails. The curves in the base are clearly cut with some sort of turning saw with a little rasp work behind. The notches for the aprons were sawn out.

So far, so good.

I think the top piece was milled on some sort of reciprocating saw. The marks on the underside are too regular to be pitsaw marks. They're not planer marks (like I've ever seen). And they are certainly not circular saw marks.

Is somehow reproducing these marks on the underside important? Or should I treat it like I would treat any non-show surface – fore plane it and call it done?

In other words, I want to use fairly authentic methods. I'm just not sure how far I should (or even can) take this.

We'll be publishing plans for four of these White Water pieces in Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine in the coming year. This bench is the simplest project. The other three projects should get your heart thumping pretty hard.

— Christopher Schwarz

Sometimes you read old accounts of workshop practice where there’s a pot of raw linseed oil by the bench. Andre Roubo’s bench had a little swing-out pot of oil underneath the bench. Likely it was used to oil the soles of the planes or the plates of the saws to make them slide more easily.

Today I found another good use for an oil pot on the bench.

I just finished raising three panels by hand that will be dust panels between the drawers of a chest. Each panel is a single board of 17”-wide Eastern white pine. Raising the first two panels was a piece of cake. But the third one had a nasty knot on the corner.

The knot was denser than any maple I’ve worked and so raising that corner was slow going, and the results looked pretty raggy, too.

To make it easier to push my plane I lubricated the sole a few times with camellia oil. It helped, but it was like spitting on a forest fire, it wasn’t nearly enough.

So without really thinking I squirted the knot a few times with the oil. That made quite a difference, and I finished up the panel with a few more squirts and a few more strokes. Not only was the knot easier to cut, but the result looked much better, too.

I better buy another bottle of the oil.

— Christopher Schwarz

A couple years ago there was a kid in Iowa who was trying to learn to use hand tools. He had no teachers, just a few books and limited access to the Internet.

But he had a phone. So he’d call me and ask me questions for 30 minutes at a time. (Note to self: Get a 900-line for this. “Hey, I’m wearing a shop apron – and nothing else.”)

This kid’s first major crisis: Planing the top of a dresser. His iron was sharp. His plane was set correctly. His work was held firmly. Yet he couldn’t even get the tool to cut.

Diagnosis: Maple.

He was using rock maple as the wood for his first hand-tool project. I like maple and can get along with it fine. But it wouldn’t be my first pick for a wood to learn hand tools on.

I used to recommend walnut and poplar as good choices for beginning planers and sawyers. Both of those woods cut fairly easily with hand tools and aren’t stringy or hard or ring-porous or infused with silicates. (Ask me some time about the mouth-breather who insisted on using purpleheart on her first project, a birdhouse.)

This year, however, I have become smitten with Eastern white pine. It’s not common in the Midwest, but we came into a stash of it and I have been using it for everything possible. Unlike the yellow and white pine we get here, Eastern white cuts beautifully, planes easily and doesn’t seem as easy to mangle as the local stuff. Plus, the Eastern white moves less in service and (I think) it looks better.

On the downside, it’s quite lightweight and not nearly as strong as yellow pine or even the weirdo Swedish pine the local Borg is pushing.

But that, I figure, is just an engineering equation.

So this morning I’m building a complex frame-and-panel back for a five-drawer dresser. The back has six through-tenons, two blind ones and four floating panels.

I did a dry assembly of the stiles and rails right after lunch and everything looked nice and tight. So I took it apart to start fitting the panels when I snapped one of the tenons off like a Butterfinger bar.

I was too stunned to even curse. I don’t think I’ve ever snapped a tenon (by accident). The good news was that it was quick work to fetch a new piece and cut new tenons and mortises to replace the broken stick.

Note to self: Eastern white prefers 5/16”-thick tenons. But other than that, I think it’s the most hand-tool-friendly wood I've used.

— Christopher Schwarz

Recently, a woodworking colleague suggested to me that saw teeth designed for crosscutting are an invention of modern marketing.

Early saws, he suggested, we’re probably filed for basically a rip cut. But because the teeth were hand filed, they probably had a little fleam, which made them cut more smoothly than a pure rip tooth with no fleam.

It’s an interesting argument that has no real answer – until we find the DNA of an 18th-century saw filer encased in some amber and decide to open a theme park on a deserted tropical island (sign me up).

Other woodworking authorities I trust have suggested that saw filing patterns were actually more complex in the 18th century than they are today. In other words, we are the primitives.

All I know is that they can take away my Zona Razor Saw from my cold, dead hands. Or they can take it when it’s kinked – whichever comes first.

The Zona Razor Saw is a marvel of modern manufacturing. Made in the USA for the price of 2.5 chai lattes, it’s a 24 tpi backsaw with a .01”-thick sawplate that cuts on the pull stroke. I use this $11 saw for almost everything. Rips. Crosscuts. Miters. Whatever.

The magic of the saw is not in the fact that it’s filed for a rip cut, but that it has 24 tpi. Once you get to teeth that small, it really doesn’t matter so much how they are filed. This saw leaves glass-smooth surfaces when it rips and crosscuts. It tracks beautifully. It is comfortable and balanced.

But before you think it also is going to mow your lawn, paint your house and raise your kids to be truthful and wise, it know that it has a fatal flaw. The sawplate is easily kinked. I’ve had one since 2006, and I have been using it on every project. The cherry-red-dyed handle has faded to pink, and the sawplate has a subtle wave to it.

It still tracks fairly straight – straight enough for most joinery. But this weekend I decided to try to fix the plate. I bent it this way and that with my fingers. I tapped it with a hammer on an anvil. I tweaked it with pliers. And eventually I buckled under and ordered another one from Lee Valley Tools.

If you haven’t tried the Zona Razor Saw, I highly recommend you get one for your tool kit.

By the way, the vast and insidious Zona model-making consortium did not pay for this blog entry. Just so you know.

— Christopher Schwarz

While cleaning out the shop a couple weeks ago we stumbled on a plastic-wrapped parcel of tools that were owned by the maintenance men from our old building. When they were "released on their own recognizance" by management, they gave us their old tools, including a lot of good Snap-On stuff and the gizmos wrapped in plastic that I fished from our rolling tool cabinet.

They were spring-loaded nailsets and centerpunches, like the ones made by Spring Tools. They look like a metal earthworm with an industrial Slinky for a body. These things are used to set nails. You place the tip of the tool on your nail's head, pull the spring back and let go. A small anvil in the spring strikes the head of the tool and drives the nail flush.

Senior Editor Robert W. Lang joked that using those tools was akin to showing up on a jobsite in a sundress.

Because I don't much care for televised sports, strip clubs or shooting animals, my manhood is already in trouble. Some might call me the Liberace of the Ozarks. So I quietly put the tools in my box. Until today.

I was setting a bunch of cut nails on a box I'm building and unwrapped the plastic parcel. I took out one of the spring-loaded tools and gave it a try. Well holy Laura Ashley, the tool leaped off the nail and put a huge divot in the wood (luckily it's on the bottom).

So I took a file out and shaped the steel head of the tool until it was flat and rectangular, like the heads of my cut nails. Then the tool worked much better. I'm not yet sure, however, if it's faster than the old hammer-powered method.

Perhaps it's like learning to walk in heels. Not that I know anything about that.

— Christopher Schwarz

John is back at the chair project.

Guess how I did this?  Hint: It wasn’t a hand tool. 

If the word “Stunod” was anywhere in your thoughts you win!  Yup, I was trying to cut time making the arms for my two chairs.  I wanted to clean up the rough surface left from the band saw.  I was smoothing the parts with a file and spoke shave which left an ok surface but was taking forever.  Also there was some difference between the left and right arm so I thought to myself, “try the router, yeah, that’s the thing”.  

I smoothed the patterns perfectly which were made from ½ inch ply.  I screwed them to the stuff and set about routing.  I was doing fine until I hit the damn end grain.  It’s always the end grain...  Anyway the stuff shot back hitting me in the labonza, causing me to verbally acknowledge my error.  It then continued its' trajectory hitting the wall at reduced speed. 

Well, I was back at it with hand tools when I had another idea!  I put down the file and rasp and grabbed my floats!  Yep, in front of me on the tool rack are four Lie-Neilsen floats.  They leave a great surface and can hog off material depending on the amount of downward pressure you use.  It is a great tool and easy to get the hang of.  I actually started to get fast at this task. 

Anyway, it was a router with a pattern cutting bit.  And yes, I had to remake the entire piece.

- John