My latest DVD with Popular Woodworking, “Build a Hand-Crafted Bookcase“ is expected to ship this week. It’s a 126-minute exploration of building the bookcase from “The Anarchist’s Design Book” entirely by hand using surfaced home-center pine.
The DVD begins by throwing out the modern idea of using adjustable shelves and discusses how the design was created and can be modified. From there we explore a bunch of different skills in detail suitable for the dead-nuts beginner (there’s way more detail than in the book).
Topics include:
- Surfacing boards with handplanes.
- Cutting through-dados with saws, chisel and a router plane.
- Making stopped grooves with a chisel and router plane.
- Making a tongue-and-groove back.
- All about cut nails, forged nails and wire nails.
- Why furniture makers should use hide glue.
- On using milk paint and why you shouldn’t use the instructions to mix it.
It was a fun DVD to make and we ended up with another bookcase for the house, allowing me to unbox some more woodworking books stored in the basement. The video is available as a DVD or as a download.
— Christopher Schwarz
I bought the download version last week and it is indeed an excellent bit of instruction. And my 6 year old daughter though it was hilarious when you made your plane bark like a dog.
Thanks. Just ordered the DVD. Mike O’Brien
Sent from my iPhone 5s
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I remember the ‘Adjustable Shelf’ idea from my apprenticeship. Here it is called the 32mm system because the holes are 32mm apart. Not only that but the machines are set up to do everything in multiples of 32mm.
So now, instead of measuring a space and making furniture to fit, we were supposed to measure a space and then make a piece of furniture to the nearest multiple of 32mm. Of course this didn’t fit as well but we could always fill the gaps with chipboard blanks.
Whet no-one else seemed to notice, was that this trained us to use a machine that worked mostly by computer and which could be operated by anyone with a weeks practice, so we were being expensively trained to replace ourselves…
I’m pretty sure recordings on optical discs “drop” these days…
“…and we ended up with another bookcase for the house…”
Just one? There usually is an off camera stunt double ‘just in case’; I’m impressed.
Chris – I haven’t gotten this one yet – likely will since I get most of the others – but do you think this would be a good project to use to teach first time woodworkers (12-17 year old boys)? I am looking for some good projects that can be used to teach some scouts woodworking merit badge and the projects need to be something that we can complete in a couple of 4 hours sessions.
That is a bit ambitious because there is a lot of surface area to clean up.
You might consider the staked sawbench/footstool. It can be done entirely by hand or with an electric drill. Totally do-able in 8 hours for a beginner.
Thanks! Will do, and I can pull both right out of my new ADB. Do you think the staked backstool would be too much? If so, I assume just switch to a round seat and drop the back?
Meanmna,
First, you don’t sound very mean 🙂
Second, I used Chris’s 6-Board Chest with great success in a high school class last month. To simplify the process, we scalled everything down to eliminate the need for rip cuts. All 11 students were able to crosscut, shoot, drill, glue, and nail their own chests. Note: in addition to the in-depth chapter on the 6-boards in ADB, Chris also wrote a 3-pg article with plans for Pop Wood a few years back. I used the article – mostly because I was already asking these students to read too much 🙂
Thanks Brian.
BTW – Meanmna is Scottish Gaelic meaning courage, bravery or boldness. On the Forum I am James Russ, but I go by Derrick. Gotta love internet ID and profile sync issues 😉