An almost-done stick chair in elm. And an LAP Waist Apron that could use a visit to the laundry.
I’m afraid you’re on your own this weekend for woodworking questions. Chris has set aside his apron for a few days, and is busy for the next few days shooting pictures for Matt Cianci‘s forthcoming book on saw sharpening. And depending on when you read this, I’m either showing Elia Bizzarri around our shop and the new building (Elia is busy working on his Windsor chair book) , or driving Derek Jones up to Marc Adams where he’s teaching next week, after sending six new cricket table makers into the world from our Covington shop (Derek’s cricket table book is thisclosetobeingdone!).
We have a small batch of Warrington-pattern hammers in stock and ready to ship. The heads are made in Nicholasville, Kentucky by Craig Jackson’s crew at Machine Time. The oiled hickory handles are made in Tennessee. The hammers are hand assembled, wedged and glued.
They are $97 each. You can read all about the hammer in our store, including what the hammer’s cross-peen is used for.
Spend a weekend in October cutting dovetails with me (Megan Fitzpatrick) in gorgeous central Kentucky at the Woodworking School at Pine Croft (with luck, the trees surrounding the school will be a riot of fall color by then!).
It’s a two-day class – Oct. 14 & 15 – in making a classic Shaker silverware tray, with gently arced ends, handholds and, of course, dovetails. And speaking of Shakers – if you’re in the area, why not also plan a day at Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill.
In the class, you’ll learn:
Dovetail layout with dividers
How to cut the joints, aiming to “fit off the saw”
How to wield a coping or fret saw
How to pare and chop to a line with a chisel
Strategies for transferring the tails to the pin board
Techniques for fitting the joint
How to lay out then cut and fair the handles (both the hand holds and the curved top edge)
How to smooth-plane your surfaces
How to use cut nails (to secure the bottom board…if you wish – but there’s an argument for leaving it loose)
And of course, how to put it all together (and why I recommend liquid hide glue).
– Fitz
These make great handmade gifts – above is a stack of last-minute gifts I made in 2022 from pieces in our scrap bin.
The following short excerpt is from Christopher Schwarz’s “Sharpen This” – a 120-page pocket book on how to get great edges, regardless of the sharpening system you choose. It is about what is important: Creating a sharp edge quickly with a minimum amount of equipment.
Simple side-clamp honing guides are a godsend for quick and repeatable work when it comes to chisels and plane irons. I do sharpen freehand a lot of unusually shaped tools, but when it comes to plane blades and straight chisels, I am happy to let the honing guide do the work.
Side-clamp honing guides can be had for a song – inexpensive ones cost less than $20.2 And I have found no valid downside to using them.
Critics of honing guides deride them as “training wheels” or as a crutch that slows you down. I have regularly challenged these people to sharpening contests for speed and fineness of edge – the winner determined by a judge who doesn’t know whose blade is whose. I have never lost – not because I’m a great sharpener but because the honing guide is an enormous asset.
While I do love my honing guide, my love has limits. I don’t use the endless attachments that allow honing guides to be used for oddball tools or skewed tools or short tools or extra thick tools. For those tools, the honing guide and its accessories slow me down. So I stick with the base model, which works well for chisels and plane blades.
So if you stick with the base-model honing guide, you are five minutes away from being a speedy sharpener. All you need is a simple block of wood that sets the blade at the proper angle in the guide so the steel at the tip of the blade immediately touches the sharpening media perfectly. Which brings us to a discussion of sharpening angles.
The plastic block sets the blade’s location in the jig.
Honing Angles – the Argument for Fewer (or One) Most sharpening experts steer you toward using a wide variety of angles for different jobs in the workshop. Lower angles for paring tools. Higher angles for chopping tools. And soon you are engraving all the sharpening angles on all your tools and doing more sharpening than woodworking.3
In my experience, the sharpness of the edge is more important than the angle (within reason). A 25° paring chisel and a 35° paring chisel will both do a fine job when really sharp.
When I realized this, I decided to see if I could hone and polish all my tools at 35° and be happy. That was about 10 years ago, and I remain committed to this simple approach. I am sure there are tools out there on the fringes that won’t work with a 35° hone and polish, but I have yet to encounter them.
Setting the tool is simple. Slap it in the guide, press the guide against the block and press the blade to the stop. Tighten the guide. Done.
So I have a block of wood with a stop on it. I put the tool in my honing guide, I press the guide and blade against the stop block, then I tighten the guide. I am ready to sharpen. (Making a setting block is simple. Use a school protractor to set the blade to the correct angle in your honing guide. Then screw a stop to a block of wood that matches that projection.)
Our new Warrington Pattern Hammers – I’m picking up the first batch today.
Just a reminder that we’ll be throwing the doors open (metaphorically – it’s too hot to actually do that) on Saturday, July 29, from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. for our 2023 Summer Open House. We’ll be selling our complete line of products, signing books and – most of all – talking about woodworking.
And exciting news: We’ll have a double handful of the new Warrington Pattern Hammers here for sale – assuming I don’t get hammer-jacked on the way back from Nicholasville, Ky. today. (We’ll also be putting most of the batch for sale in our online store as soon as we can; they’ll be $97).
Plus, Chris will lead tours of the Anthe building – the 1890s-era factory we are restoring to become our new headquarters. Those tours will leave from Willard Street (our current building) at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.
