We’ve added a new class: Build an 18th-century Southern Table with Jerome Bias – it’s Feb. 17-21, 2025, in our Covington, Kentucky, shop. You can read more about it (and register now) at our ticketing site – but if you’re interested, don’t dally. Space is limited!
– Fitz
This is an excerpt from “Euclid’s Door” by Geo. R Walker and Jim Toplin. The book teaches how to make the tools from “By Hand and Eye.” At this point in chapter 7, a meter square that has a 15-degree tip is being constructed. This fragile corner of the tool has to be taken into consideration when choosing its placement on the grain of the board.
Many geometric layouts begin with just a given line. This has real practical value. It means we can construct the layout from just a small piece of the overall picture. This construction is a little more complicated than what we’ve done so far, so I suggest you work through this sequence on paper to get an understanding of it.
Case in point is this second triangle from our multi square, Fig. 7.13. The sharp blade that juts out to the left begins life as a 30:60:90 triangle that gets altered to include a 45° reference on one end, Fig. 7.14.
But that leaves us with a fragile, narrow point. We must lay out our triangle so that the hypotenuse is aligned with the long grain on our blank, Fig. 7.15.
So we need to lay out our triangle, but all we have to start our construction is the line that will be our hypotenuse. Before we proceed, let’s step back and take a look at a different geometric layout to get an understanding of how we get there. Here’s the construction we’ll base this on, Fig. 7.16.
Let’s break it down into smaller pieces. We begin with Euclid’s first proposition, which is how to construct an equilateral triangle from a given line. Start by using the ends of a line to set the compass span and, using the end of the line as anchor points, draw two identical overlapping circles. Connect the top intersection where the circles overlap. Take note that the lines that connect the intersections also happen to share the radius of both circles. You just created a triangle with all sides equal which means all three corners are 60°, Fig. 7.17.
If you bisect this triangle, you get a pair of back-to-back 30:60:90 triangles, Fig. 7.18. It helps to see what you are after by superimposing this construction over our blade stock to see how it might apply, Fig. 7.19.
This is quite common in layouts at the bench. We don’t need to scribe every line, just the important ones that get us our result. Let the bottom edge of your blank be the hypotenuse of our triangle. Set a compass to span the length of your hypotenuse and strike an upward arc from the lower edge. Leave the compass at the same setting and anchor it where the arc touches the bottom of the board then strike a second mark across the arc, Fig. 7.20.
Strike a line connecting these points then bisect this chord on one end of the triangle. Now you’ve created our 30:60:90 with the correct grain orientation, Fig. 7.21.
We’ll use this construction to create our second blade with the proper grain orientation.
I cut dovetails pretty much the exact same way I did 20 years ago. Same layout, same sawing, same chiseling, same fitting. But when it comes to my chairmaking, things seem to change every day.
I’ve been building stick chairs since 2003 (and frame chairs since 1997). So it’s not like I am new to the chairmaking craft. But for some reason, I am constantly finding new and usually small ways to make things easier.
When I wrote “The Stick Chair Book,” I thought I was pretty much settled in how I make my chairs. But by the time we had to reorder the second printing, I decided to revise the book. Not in major ways, but in many little minor ways. And I added a lot of little shortcuts I had discovered.
Now, about a year after releasing the revised edition of “The Stick Chair Book,” I’d like to revise it again for the next printing. Again, nothing major, just small things here and there that make it easier to drill and assemble things.
Even today, I came up with a stupid little trick that really helped. Here it is. When drilling the mortises for the stretchers, tape a stick or skewer or chopstick to the centerline seam of your drill. It helps immeasurably in lining up the drill between the mortises in the legs and between the mortises in the side stretchers.
I’ve seen lots of tricks that use rubber bands or lasers. But none is as simple as taping a scrap to the drill.
As a chairmaker and author, I know I’m not alone in the way I feel about my past writings. Many other chairmakers are constantly finding new ways to make the process a little easier.
Why have we not created the “Unified Method of All Chairmaking?” Because there are at least 100 ways to make a chair. And 1,000 tricks that go with each method.
This is one of the things I love about woodworking – the constant discovery. But it can be frustrating both as an author and a reader.
— Christopher Schwarz
Last week I walked into work to a brand-new Veritas spokeshave sitting on my bench. Chris had ordered several for students and kindly ordered an extra for me. (I’m spoiled, I know.)
Grateful, I took a picture of my new tool and posted it to my social media account, not thinking much of it.
The following day I received a comment: “Would you mind posting a video of how you file the throat (if you follow Chris’s approach)?”
Huh? File a throat?? This was news to me, but according to Chris, this is common practice when breaking in a new spokeshave.
He explained that in chairmaking, sometimes cuts that are ranker than the spokeshave will allow are needed. The solution? File the throat, just a hair or two to allow a thicker shaving to pass through.
So as asked, we created a video demonstrating the process. Next week’s chairmaking class will be the first to break the new spokeshaves in.
Well, back to work for me. I have two more spokeshaves to file.
This summer, the U.S. Postal Service released 12 stamps featuring photographs by Michael Freeman from six different preserved Shaker communities, commemorating the 250th anniversary of the first Shakers arriving in America. Freeman, along with June Sprigg and David Larkin, published “Shaker: Life, Work, and Art,” in 1991.
The stamps were designed by Postal Service Art Director Derry Noyes. Unhappy with the first design, which featured more detailed, close-up shots, Noyes put the project on hold for four years. Revisiting, she redesigned the stamps with a broader perspective. You can read more about her process here.
The pane selvage (the area around the collection of stamps) features a photo of Brother Ricardo Belden (1868–1958), taken by Samuel Kravitt, in 1935. Belden joined a Shaker community in Enfield, Connecticut, when he was 4 years old. Initially, he worked on the farm. In 1926, he joined the Hancock Shaker Village in Hancock and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and spent much of his time repairing clocks with wooden works.
The stamp’s First Day of Issue was June 20, 2024, at Hancock Shaker Village. If you’d like to know more about each individual stamp, check out this article.
One stamp features the beloved staircases at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. Chris has visited and written about Shaker Village many times (including in 2006, which is this Saturday’s Earlywood post in American Peasant, free for anyone to read). His first visit was more than 30 years ago, and that experience sparked something new.
For John Wilson, it was Ejner Handberg’s “Shop Drawings of Shaker Furniture and Woodenware, Vol. 1.” In 1977, Wilson was offered a job to teach furniture making at Michigan’s Lansing Community College. He had two hours to prep for the class. He drove to the library, checked out Handberg’s book and taught his students how to make a dovetailed dining tray. Wilson, who died in 2023, built a life building Shaker oval boxes and producing copper tacks.
For Chris Becksvoort, it was a 1974 exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick gallery. “I went back to visit it five, six, seven times,” he says. Years later, Becksvoort would reproduce two of the gallery’s pieces in his shop.
For Jennie Alexender, it was several trips to Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community. There, she met Sister Mildred. Jennie wanted to see the chairs and remembers Sister Mildred quipping, “You know, it’s interesting. People think we’re chairs.” Several visits later, Jennie built her first Shaker one-slat dining chair.
Perhaps something as simple as these stamps will spark something for you, too.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl