This week I had an unusual visitor in the office. Auctioneer Toot Ewalt loaned me the rare 18th-century dovetail saw that he brought to the Woodworking in America conference earlier this month. I had the saw sitting on my desk for 10 days along with all the other dovetail saws we own.

(If you haven’t heard the wild story about this circa 1770 saw made by John Kenyon, check out my blog entry at Woodworking Magazine.)

Between frantic bouts of editing manuscripts for the February 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking I picked up each saw over and over to get a feel for the differences in the handles. After 10 days I concluded that the Kenyon saw was as comfortable as the saw I’ve picked as my daily driver: the Lie-Nielsen Independence dovetail saw.

That’s good news because Mike Wenzloff at Wenzloff & Sons is building a reproduction of this saw. And if a reproduction isn’t good enough for you, then start watching the action catalogs. The saw’s owner says he’s investigating selling the original saw at auction.

If you haven’t noticed by now, saw and handplane handles are important to me. If the tool isn’t comfortable, it will be difficult to use. Now, as woodworkers, we have the tools to make our own handles. But have you ever tried?

I sure have. I’ve made several saw handles and plane totes during the last decade, and I’ve never been happy with my efforts. I’ve also taken a rasp to a few other handles with mixed results. My tendency is to make the curves too pronounced. And to reduce the handle’s width too much.

I’ve found that handles are much like the seat of a Windsor chair. When I make a seat that is really sculpted, it feels good when I first sit in it. But I quickly get tired of sitting in highly sculpted chairs. My most comfortable chairs have shallow saddles. (Correction: My most comfortable chairs have cushions.)

Same goes for handles. The overly sculptural ones aren’t comfortable after I cut a few joints. But dialing in the right amount of shaping has been a challenge for me. Hence, my obsession with finding saws with good stock handles.

However, if you want to try to make your own handle, then download this tracing supplied to Lost Art Press by woodworker William Duffield.

handle trace.jpg (122.72 KB)

Real Details
The other revelation about the Kenyon saw was its level of fit and finish. It wouldn’t pass muster in a modern shop. Heck, Mike Wenzloff would probably throw this handle on the burn pile. You can still see rasp marks all over the tote that look original (the saw shows no sign of being refinished). The slot for the blade is overcut – a no-no in modern work.

And yet this is the prettiest saw I have ever held. I even like the cringe-inducing hang hole.

My only regret during my 10-day affair with this saw is that I didn’t get to cut a dovetail with its 20 (or perhaps 21) ppi blade. The teeth are in poor shape, the blade has dropped, the handle is loose and the sawplate is significantly bent.

I guess I’m going to have to wait for Wenzloff to finish up his reproductions before I can experience the whole package. He promised that I can borrow one of his Kenyon saws (I thought about buying one, but I need another dovetail saw like I need another smoothing plane). When I get the Wenzloff saw in hand, I’ll file a full report.

— Christopher Schwarz

The waitress rushed up to me at the cash register with a desperate look in her eye. In defense, I held out a $6 tip, but she ignored it and fixed me in her gaze.

“Will you sign a placemat? Or a napkin?” she asked. “Do you have something you could sign?”

I shook my head and started walking to the exit.

“Sign anything,” she said. “The cooks will be so disappointed if you don’t.”

This was the final and odd scene of my four-day odyssey at the Woodworking in America show in Berea, Ky., where 350 hand-tool woodworkers got together during Nov. 14-16, to talk about tools, techniques and history.

The show itself was great fun, and I’ll be posting lots of photos and stories on my blog at Woodworking Magazine (one of the organizers of the show). But for the readers of the Lost Art Press blog, I saved this particular tale. It begins about an hour before getting rushed by the waitress.

After four days on my feet and 12 hours (total) of sleep during that period, I packed up our rented Ryder with all the workbenches, grinders and clamps we’d brought to the Woodworking in America show. Senior Editor Glen Huey climbed into the passenger seat of the truck and we drove north to get some lunch with some of the other magazine editors and John Hoffman, the other half of Lost Art Press.

We met at the Richmond, Ky., Steak 'n Shake, and our party of five snagged a window seat and started looking at the menus.

Our waitress took our drink order and when she returned, she asked: “Are you guys the Oakridge Boys?”

To which Hoffman immediately answers: “Yes.”

I start laughing and tell her that no, we’re not the country/gospel quartet. But she is undaunted.

“The cooks up there in the red ties say you are the Oakridge Boys,” she said, pointing to the rear corner of the store. I look back to see two young guys with enormous smiles on their faces looking right at me.

I point to Associate Editor Drew DePenning at the end of the table.

“He’s 23,” I explain. “He would have been a fetus when the Oakridge Boys were popular.”

She gives me a quizzical look but takes our food order. Glen Huey is chuckling so hard he’s having trouble ordering. Senior Editor Robert Lang is his typical placid and inscrutable self.

After the waitress walks away, I start singing the base vocal to “Elvira” and try to get Bob to join in. He smiles, but he won’t take the bait.

We eat. And as we try to leave, I’m ambushed by the waitress, who insists that I’m the band’s manager. “Don’t you have some posters or CDs you could sign for us?” She chases us to the door.

We all scurry to our cars. I fetch my laptop from Hoffman’s Honda and head back to the Ryder truck.

“Crap!” Hoffman says. “I locked my keys in my car.”

Hoffman calls a locksmith, who promises to be there in 10 minutes. We stand there for a minute and realize it is too cold to wait outside.

“I guess you gotta go back into the Steak 'n Shake,” I said.

“Oh no,” Hoffman said, shaking his head.

But then he turns and heads back into the arms of fame.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. After I got home, I looked up a photo of the Oakridge boys and busted out laughing. I can see it: John Hoffman is Joe Bonsall. Glen Huey is Duane Allen. Robert Lang is a better-coiffed William Lee Golden. And I’m Richard Sterban. And Drew? Just another 23-year-old gospel/country fetus, I guess.  

Years ago, we performed a year-long survey at Popular Woodworking to find out what sort of projects appealed to our readers. We were interested in what furniture styles they liked, but we were also interested in what furniture forms (tables, bookshelves etc.) that they most liked to build.

So in every issue we asked the readers to rate which projects they liked. After a year of data, we were shocked at some of the results.

Here was the wildest finding: Our readers really liked and needed plans for over-the-potty cabinets.

It’s easy to turn your nose up at this pedestrian form of furniture. Heck there’s never been a woodworking book titled “Best Dang Potty-Cabinet Plans” or a juried exhibition of studio furniture makers titled “Fine Cabinetry in the Can: Poetry and Motion.”

But maybe there should be.

One of the first projects I was ever really excited about personally was a potty cabinet. I thought it was a million-dollar idea when I came up with it. It’s a simple but fine-looking wall cabinet with delicate rails and stiles. The real cool thing about it is that the bottom of the cabinet dispenses washrags like a tissue box. And the interior guts of the cabinet are clever – the washrags never come spilling out when you open the door. And it has a cool handmade wooden hinge.

My co-workers still mock that cabinet (which is why it’s never been published), though my wife and kids use it every day. I know I still have the router pattern for the opening in the bottom of the cabinet (that took some doing to figure out). And now that I’m editor….

In any case, last week I finished up a new bathroom cabinet for our master bathroom. This was the last piece of built-in furniture I’d planned on building for our home’s addition, which was a project we started on seven years ago.

Because this project was for me, I was free to design it without worrying about co-workers or readers. So I could add details I liked, such as the divided lights in the door, which are just slightly recessed from the face of the door. And I could snitch details from other projects of mine without looking like a Johnny one-note – the top cap of the cabinet is stolen directly from my tool cabinet at work.

I built the cabinet using offcuts from the shop at work. The best part of the project was finding perfectly quartersawn stock lurking in the knottiest and nastiest board in the shop.

For my family, the best part of the project was that I designed it to hold six (six!) rolls of toilet paper, plus toiletries.

Here’s a TP design tip: Design your cabinet around the 5” dimension. A 5” x 5” x 5” space will do a good job of holding a decent-size roll (no promises on the super-jumbo-mondo rolls of paper).

If you’re interested in a simple construction drawing, you can download a pdf below.

Master_Bath_Cabinet.pdf (15.26 KB)

Maybe there is actually a book on this somewhere. Let me first see what Moxon says about potty cabinets….

— Christopher Schwarz