Becoming proficient at handwork isn’t just about muscle memory and learning to sharpen. It’s also about building a handful of effective “appliances” (jigs, fixtures and the like) that assist your saws, planes and chisels for repeatable work.
One of the foremost experts on these appliances is Robert Wearing, who wrote extensively about them for Woodworker magazine and published a number of books on the topic. Earlier this year we approached Wearing about collecting the best of the appliances for handwork into one new book, and he agreed.
The result is “The Solution at Hand: Jigs & Fixtures to Make Benchwork Easier,” a 200-page hardbound book of our favorite jigs from Wearing’s career. The book covers a wide swath of material, from building workbench appliances for planing, to making handscrews (and many other ingenious clamps), some simple tools that you cannot buy anywhere else, to marking devices that make complex tasks easier.
You can now place a pre-publication order for this book, which will ship in October. It is $24. If you order before the book is released, you will receive a free pdf of the book at checkout.
In all, there are 157 jigs, all of which are illustrated with Wearing’s handmade drawings. The book is designed as more of a reference book than something you read straight through. Already after editing the book, I now find myself returning to it and thinking: I know Wearing had a solution for this problem. And he did.
“The Solution at Hand” is 200 pages long and is in a 6” x 9” format (like Wearing’s “The Essential Woodworker”). The pages are casebound, sewn for long-term durability and wrapped in hardback boards that are covered in cotton cloth. As always, our books are produced and printed entirely in the USA.
— Christopher Schwarz
The Big Book of Wearing Cheat Codes? Ok, I’ll bite.
UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A, START
(Still looking for the “B” button on the chisel though.)
His making jigs and fixtures book was one of the first books I ever bought back in the ’80’s when I was a kid. Awesome book.
Looking forward to it. The Essential Woodworker was the first woodworking book I bought when I wanted to learn more about hand tool work, and I found it incredibly useful. So I’m keen to read this book. Will it make it over to Classic Hand Tools in the UK around October too?
We hope so. It is up to them.
I’m in, but I’m a wee bit confused. This is not a reprint of a Wearing book, but a compilation of Wearing material that you put together?
It is not a reprint. It is a compilation of the hand tool related jigs and fixtures from his out-of-print books on jigs (some of which were power-tool related). So if you have his two books on fixtures, you don’t need this book. Hope this clears it up.
Thanks for clarifying. Robert Wearing’s Greatest Hits is well worth it, and I’m enjoying it already.
Does that mean there’s not much overlap with your 4 volume Woodworker set?
There is zero overlap between the books.
The 4 volume Woodworker books were from Charles Hayward. This volume is from Robert Wearing.
I ordered this book today….
I am reading the pdf this afternoon. It is really swell!
Cramps? A search & replace problem?
“Cramps” is the British spelling of “clamps” and is correct.
Whoops…never knew that.
We discuss the spelling differences in the book. The first time Americans read “G cramps” we assume they must really hurt.
Well, sure. Being launched to the Space Station always results in some high G cramps.
The hilarious part is that when I read through the excerpt I was in the last hour of my Wednesday morning dialysis session and was struggling with leg cramps (not clamps!), which is fairly typical. I had to read it through three times to confirm to my addled brain that it was actually (I thought misspelled) as cramps.
I consider myself a bit of an Anglophile and had not seen that use before…but I’m gonna start using it in my workshop as a word of defiance against my current medical status 🙂