We’ve reprinted “Ingenious Mechanicks,” Christopher Schwarz’s tour de force on workbenches of yore, with a new cover – and this new printing is now in stock (we’ve been out of the previous one for a few weeks now). The cover’s new die stamp is shown above…but I’ll need you to imagine that image printed atop the brown cloth cover color shown below (which has a much smaller weave than shown in this close-up I pulled off the cover cloth manufacturer’s site).
“Ingenious Mechanicks” is about a journey into workbenches of the past (which deserve a place in the modern shop!) and takes the reader from Pompeii, which features the oldest image of a Western bench, to a Roman fort in Germany to inspect the oldest surviving workbench and finally to our shop in Kentucky, where Chris recreated three historical workbenches and dozens of early jigs.
These early benches have many advantages:
- They are less expensive to build
- They can be built in a couple days
- They require less material
- You can sit down to use them
- They take up less space than a modern bench and can even serve as seating in your house
- In some cases they perform better than modern vises or shavehorses.
Even if you have no plans to build an early workbench, “Ingenious Mechanicks” is filled with newly rediscovered ideas you can put to work on your modern bench. You can make an incredibly versatile shaving station for your bench using four small pieces of wood. You can create a hard-gripping face vise with a notch and some softwood wedges. You can make the best planing stop ever with a stick of oak and some rusty nails.
And here’s a little inside baseball to explain why I’m asking you to tap into your visual imagination:
Before we have an actual book in house of which to take nice photographs, we…by which I mean Chris…create a fancy mock-up of said new cover with the proper cloth color and texture, dropped behind a transparent .tiff of the cover’s die-stamp.
But Chris is out of town, and I am just too tired after three days of teaching (then thoroughly cleaning the shop after three days of teaching), to figure out how to turn the In Design die stamp file – that has a non-transparent .jpg image in it – into a transparent .tiff (no, the transparency tick box does not come up when I do a “save as” and try to rename my exported .tiff … which is to say please don’t offer me instruction in the comments as to how to do it; I’ve searched Google, tried my available-at-the-moment best, and given up. Did I mention I’m tired?)
We’ll get the image on the store site updated with the new cover as soon as possible.
– Fitz
You need a cat, and a nap.
always
For those who’s imagination is lacking: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10NF0UECa_r_pCdkfF2GIhbqbAEZFmCu9/view
Would love to know the inside baseball of actually doing it correctly to decide what you do on a print-run vs. the quick mockup I did for my own curiosity. Guessing y’all get a sample book of the bookcloth options or something, cause trying to judge how stuff looks from images like that sounds problematic. Cuddle a cat, generally a safe way to unwind.
Oh – we have sample books of everything – paper, cover cloth, head bands, foil stamp options of all sorts… We’d never make decisions without actually seeing the stuff! The mock-up is just a stop gap for images, and happens after the decisions have been made and the book is to the printer.
Lovely, there’s no better way to figure that sort of thing out than seeing it in person and to feel it with your own hands. I used to work selling interior/exterior paint and it never ceased to amaze me how many folks were willing to commit hundreds to thousands of dollars in product & tools and more than a few days of their lives without ever seeing what the colors would be like in their home.
I do nearly all of my woodworking on a low bench. I find it less tiring and a joy to use. I have made four of them for friends and family. This book is outstanding and a great resource for me. I especially appreciate the many ideas on work holding – all quite useful.
I forgot to mention that a low bench is the perfect height for young children to do sawing, glueing and assembly. Also, with a couple of work holding accessories (saw box, wedged post), it can be a wonderful place to work with a person in a wheelchair.
Have you tried adding rum? That usually works for me…
I suggest that you give up.