“If only there had been some simple guidebook to sharpening 30 years ago, I might have saved a whole lot of trouble and money,” wrote Stockinger.
“Sharpen This, by Christopher Schwarz (Lost Art Press), is exactly that: a guidebook to the confusing world of sharpening hand tools. In 114 informative pages, Sharpen This briskly manages to do what some books four times as long have not: explain in simple terms what a sharp edge is, and how to go about creating one.”
You can read Stockinger’s “Sharpen This” review in its entirety in Issue 292, available now at the WoodenBoat Store.
Christopher Schwarz might disagree, but I’d say this is the formative section of the collection: books on workbenches and tool chests – two things that are not only of importance in any shop, but of great importance to Chris’ woodworking history (and now mine – at least on the tool chests side of things).
I don’t know how many benches Chris has built over the years, but my guess is at least 150 when you add up all the articles for Popular Woodworking Magazine, the various “ancient” forms in “Ingenious Mechanics,” “The Anarchist’s Workbench,” the many bench-building classes he’s taught…. It’s a lot.
The first book in this section reflects everything Chris knew about bench building circa 2007, when “Workbenches: from Design & Theory to Construction & Use” (Popular Woodworking) was first published. It’s alongside a couple copies of the revised edition from 2015, to which PW added a couple appendices Chris wrote for the magazine after he’d left to concentrate on Lost Art Press full-time. It’s followed by “The Workbench Design Book: The Art & Philosophy of Building Better Benches” in which all the benches published in Popular Woodworking Magazine up until that time (2010) were collected, followed by a critique of each after it had seen some use. (“The Anarchist’s Workbench” is a distillation into one perfect-for-him bench of everything Chris learned in his many years of bench building…a time he claims has concluded. I don’t believe that.)
Tucked alongside those PW books are two bench-building magazine covers…the benches featured are in better shape than their builders, I fear. (The bench on the left is currently holding a pile of linden in the horse garage – parts for American Peasant pieces; the bench on the right is currently holding a pile of linden in my basement – parts for an upcoming tool chest class.)
Next up is a copy of “Roman Workbenches” that Lost Art Press published in 2017; it was a short run of letterpress books printed on an old Vandercook proofing press (the book was later incorporated into “Ingenious Mechanics”), and the May 1981 issue of The Magazine Antiques – a look at the cover (below) will tell you why.
We have several copies of Scott Landis’ “The Workbench Book” – early editions from Taunton (it was first published in 1987) as well as our 2020 hardcover edition. Those are followed by Lon Schleining’s “The Workbench” (Taunton, 2004) and Sam Allen’s “Making Workbenches” (Sterling, 1995). These were all purchased for research – before one writes on a subject, it’s good practice to read as much as one can about what’s already been written on it.
And that concludes the workbench section (though I suspect there are others lurking elsewhere on the shelves), and takes us to two copies of Jim Tolpin’s “The Toolbox Book” (Taunton, 1995) – a must-have introduction to the world of the many ways to contain one’s tools (it’s also, to the best of my knowledge, where the Dutch tool chest first shows up in contemporary literature…but not the last – stay tuned). (“The Toolbox Book” is also of course research for Chris’ “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”)
The OG DTC.
Finally, we have in this small sections two copies of Scott Landis’ “The Workshop Book” (Taunton, 1991) – another must-have, the most complete book about every woodworker’s favorite place: the workshop. It includes inspiring workshops, from garage to basement shops, from mobile to purpose-built shops. In fact, we think it’s important enough that we reprinted it in 2021.
– Fitz
This is the 11th post in the Covington Mechanical Library tour. To see the earlier ones, click on “Categories” on the right rail, and drop down to “Mechanical Library.” Or click here.
Derek Jones will be visiting from England and in our shop Aug. 2-4 to teach a class in building a cricket table. Tickets for this new class go on sale Monday, May 15, at 10 a.m., on our ticketing site.
Cricket tables range from the most basic stick variety to complex joined examples* that can only be resolved when you’ve broken free of 90° and square. In three days, Derek will help you break free as you use hand tools to create joints for tops and bottoms and all the pieces in between to build a version of this historic form.
Derek – an outstanding teacher – runs the Lowfat Roubo site, where he sells tools and offers courses in the U.K. He is currently working on a book on the cricket table form for Lost Art Press, due out late this year. He is former editor of Furniture & CabinetmakingMagazine.
* Derek is also teaching a week-long class in a complex, joined version Aug. 7-11, as well as a 2-day Focus on Handworks class Aug. 12-13, at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking in Franklin, Ind.
“The Anarchist’s Workbench” is – on the one hand – a detailed plan for a simple workbench that can be built using construction lumber and basic woodworking tools. But it’s also the story of Christopher Schwarz’s 20-year journey researching, building and refining historical workbenches until there was nothing left to improve.
Along the way, Schwarz quits his corporate job, builds a publishing company founded on the principles of mutualism and moves into an 1896 German barroom in a red-light district, where he now builds furniture, publishes books and tries to live as an aesthetic anarchist.
“The Anarchist’s Workbench” is the third and final book in the “anarchist” series, and it attempts to cut through the immense amount of misinformation about building a proper bench. It helps answer the questions that dog every woodworker: What sort of bench should I build? What wood should I use? What dimensions should it be? And what vises should I attach to it?
Building a timber-frame workbench isn’t like building a birdhouse. I have found there are a few tools outside of the furniture-makers’ kit that will help the process. Consider calling this appendix “The Anarchist’s Bench-building Addendum to ‘The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.’”
Snappy title, that.
Vintage iron clamps. To squeeze out gaps, invest in about 10 vintage iron clamps. You’ll use them for many other tricky glue-ups in the future.
Heavy Metal Clamps I mentioned this in the chapter on building the benchtop, but it bears repeating. A laminated benchtop will laugh at your lightweight aluminum and nylon clamps. If you want tight joints and you don’t want to glue up your benchtop one board at time, you need heavy iron or steel clamps. As far as I know, these aren’t available new. So you need to buy vintage. The good news is they are readily available and are usually pretty inexpensive when you buy them in person (shipping online can be a killer). The best clamps have these features:
A movable pad with a spring-loaded tooth that bites into notches in the clamp’s bar. The clamp head will not slip under pressure, unlike clamps that use a friction clutch.
A heavy Acme-thread screw. My clamps have a 5/8″-diameter screw with square threads. The clamps with the little triangle-shaped teeth are puny and worthless.
A handle that is an offset crank. A straight handle will not let you unlock the full force of the clamp. A cranked handle will.
Important features of iron clamps. The Acme-thread screw and crank handle allow you to apply punishing pressure. The notched bar ensures the sliding head won’t move under that pressure.
There are many brands of vintage clamps that have these same features in a slightly different configuration. Instead of a spring-loaded tooth, the clamp might have a removable pin. Instead of an L-shaped cranked handle, it might have a handle that is hinged so you can rotate it 90°. The screw might be 1/2″ or 3/4″ in diameter. Or metric. Bottom line: If the clamp won’t allow the pad to ever slip, if the thread is Acme and robust, and if the handle allows you to add force at 90° to the screw, buy the clamp. We have a dozen of them in the shop, and I wish we had a dozen more.
Tapered reamer. Designed for making joints in Windsor and stick chairs, the tapered reamer is helpful for easing the drawbored holes in your tenons.
Tapered Reamer For years I used drawbore pins to deform the hole through the tenon. The deformation allows the oak peg to bend (instead of explode) when it hits the tenon. Another option is to use a tapered reamer on the hole to create the same effect. You just ream the hole that passes through the tenon a little. Too much reaming, however, will weaken the tenon. There are lots of vintage reamers out there, especially in the plumbing trade. Or you can buy one made for chairmaking. Here’s how I use it. First I trace the shape of the hole through the leg (or benchtop) onto the tenon. Mark the offset and drill the hole through the tenon. Then ream the hole. There is no need to ream beyond the boundary you traced on the tenon. Ream the exit hole on the tenon a little, too. This method, I have found, lets me use a strong offset (1/8″ or 3/16″) with no failures.
Barr chisel. When cleaning up the mortises in this bench, a wide chisel is helpful. If you want the best, buy a Barr.
2″ Heavy Chisel Your 3/4″ bevel-edge chisel is not going to like bashing out the mortises in the benchtop and the legs. A heavy 2″ chisel will make the job a joy. And you will love having that wide chisel for furniture work – especially defining tenon shoulders and removing waste material for bevels.
I rarely recommend brands, especially in a book. But the bench chisels from Barr Specialty Tools in McCall, Idaho, are the best I have found. Barr Quarton hand-forges each one. The 2″ bench chisel shown above takes and holds an incredible edge. For years I have used vintage wide chisels because new ones weren’t available from good manufacturers (such as Lie-Nielsen Toolworks) or they just plain sucked. But even the vintage ones were of spotty quality and didn’t hold an edge as well as I wanted.
WoodOwl auger bits. These bits are sharp, cut quickly and rarely clog.
WoodOwl Auger Bits Again, I dislike recommending brands. But again, here is an exception. WoodOwl auger bits are the best for bench building. They plow through thick and heavy stock without complaint. So they are ideal for boring holes for mortises freehand (don’t use them in a drill press) and drilling holdfast holes. The only downside is they are metric, so the U.S. Customary Units marked on the package are an approximation.
Look for the WoodOwls labeled “tri cut” or “ultra smooth.” Those are the ones that work best for bench building.
The following is excerpted from Peter Follansbee’s “Joiner’s Work.”
If you like green woodworking, “Joiner’s Work” is doctoral thesis on processing furniture-shaped chunks of lumber from the tree using and axe, froe, hatchet and brake. If you are into carving, Peter dives into deep detail on how he festoons his pieces with carvings that appear complex but are remarkably straightforward. And if you love casework, “Joiner’s Work” is a lesson on the topic that you won’t find in many places. Peter’s approach to the work, which is based on examining original pieces and endless shop experimentation, is a liberating and honest foil to the world of micrometers and precision routing.
The book features six projects, starting with a simple box with a hinged lid. Peter then shows how to add a drawer to the box, then a slanted lid for writing. He then plunges into the world of joined chests and their many variations, including those with a paneled lid and those with drawers below. And he finishes up with a fantastic little bookstand.
Construction of these projects is covered in exquisite detail in both the text and hundreds of step photos. Peter assumes you know almost nothing of 17th-century joinery, and so he walks you through the joints and carving as if it were your first day on the job. Plus he offers ideas for historical finishes.
The primary material for joiners’ work is oak (I use white oak [Quercus alba] and red oak [Quercus rubra] interchangeably) that has been riven, or split, from the log.
This results in boards whose face is the radial plane, the most dimensionally stable surface possible. The stock is initially worked fresh from the log, a state we call “green.” After initial planing, boards are selectively dried some, then re-worked – the decoration and joinery are cut once the surface is dry enough to take a good finish, yet the interior of the stock retains some of that moisture, making it easier to cut than air- or kiln-dried stock.
Fig. 1.1 Here an eighth-section of an oak log is ready to become some perfectly quartered boards. Opening the log is always one of my favorite moments, when each piece reveals its potential.
When studying period pieces, I see that case pieces – boxes, chests, cupboards and related items – often display a mixture of riven and sawn stock. Usually the mill-sawn stock is the secondary wood, and in New England pieces this is often Eastern white pine (Pinus strobus). Other softwoods might appear as well. I’ve noted Atlantic white cedar (Chamaecyparis thyoides) riven into chest bottoms and drawer bottoms. It also appears as applied mouldings.
Fig. 1.2 Long sections of Atlantic white cedar are ideally suited for making applied mouldings. I don’t often get this wood, so I try to use every last bit of it when I do.
I’ve seen yellow pine (probably Pinus rigida or Pinus resinosa) in furniture from Connecticut and western Massachusetts. You can make the whole piece from riven oak, and many period works are just that, but when making case pieces, I prefer to use white pine for at least the bottoms, and often the lids, too. This is just a way to save some oak for future joinery work.
Fig. 1.3 This chest with two drawers has a relatively broad range of woods. The carcase is red oak; the lid, floor, drawer bottoms and rear panels are white pine; the applied mouldings are Atlantic white cedar; and some panels and one drawer front have plaques of black walnut.
While I am quite content using oak for most any piece of furniture, you might want some variety in your work. Black walnut (Juglans nigra) and ash (various Fraxinus species) are perhaps the most commonly found non-oak timbers I have seen in period joinery. I have used them and some other woods, too. I’ve seen Spanish cedar (Cedrela odorata) in some 17th-century joiners’ work from Boston, and other timbers besides. And recently, I’ve been using some Alaska yellow cedar (Cupressus nootkatensis) for carved boxes. Try what you have. I’d say the single-most important feature is straight grain. If nothing else, keep that in mind. Recently a friend gave me several sections of riven black walnut. They were short lengths, but just right for a joined stool. My previous experiences with walnut were a mixed bag. I often joke about being a personal monoculture; I have used oak so much for so long that I had no reference point for most other timbers. But it wasn’t until I used the riven walnut that I could truly appreciate this wood.
I used to think “it’s not for me” – but that was because I came at it the wrong way. I knew that for oak, riven green wood was the ideal. Why I thought it would be different for walnut is just one of those mental blunders that hit us all from time to time. I was judging this wood based on cuts that I would never deal with in oak. My first walnut project was a wainscot chair, made from kiln-dried wood, complete with grain run-out and all manner of un-straight fibers. Next up was a board chest, this time in air-dried wide boards. Nice, but expensive. It worked so much better than the previous project, but the chest had few details, and I really didn’t get much out of it.
Fig. 1.4 Straight-grained riven walnut was a revelation for me. This joint stool is the second non-oak example I’ve ever made. I’d do it again if the wood came my way.
Then it all clicked perfectly with the riven green wood. A nice straight-grained walnut log is a dream to work, easy to plane and to chisel – and the axe work in walnut makes you feel like Superman. Turning it is especially satisfying. When it came to carving, I had to lighten up my mallet blows. When I used my usual approach, I blasted the walnut to smithereens. Less mallet work, more hand-work and it cut fine. Live and learn. Now I have to take back all the horrible things I’ve said about walnut. Riven, straight-grained, green, free – that’s the way I like my walnut.
Around southern New England where I live, the ash tree most commonly found is white ash (Fraxinus americana). I have used this wood for furniture almost from my very first projects. When I made ladderback and Windsor chairs, ash was a favorite riving wood for parts. It is lightweight, strong and splits well – an all-around great hardwood. It has a short shelf-life in the log, though; it can go bad pretty quickly if you don’t get to it. Seventeenth-century turned chairs were often ash, but some joined work was, too. You work it just as you would oak. I have found it’s somewhat stringy, and when very fresh it can tear out badly under the plane. But if you work it green then let it sit a while, it will work very well afterward. The color is pretty bland, and there’s no figure on the radial face as in oak. So carve it up then paint it, and no one’s the wiser. Nice wood.
The Way I Work Some woodworkers keep a stockpile of lumber on hand, and draw from their stacks as they begin a new project. Others buy enough lumber (with some extra) for each piece they are planning to build, often working from a list that includes all the pieces in a given project and their rough dimensions. I work in a different way. I start with a log and split out almost every piece of oak that I use at the bench. Starting with the log is a lot of work, but it’s fun. This approach usually results in me starting several projects at once, then I leapfrog back and forth among them. Sometimes I have quite a few pieces underway, usually limited by shop space. As I write this, I have a joined chest, a chest with drawers, a chest of drawers, two wainscot chairs, a long table and several joint stools in progress. I just finished a carved box in the midst of all these.
It’s not an attention-span problem. It’s what happens when I open the log. I have an idea of what I want from a given log, but the tree has ideas of its own. I might be preparing stock for a joined and carved chest, but end up with more narrow framing parts than I need. These get shuffled over to the next project. Panels in a chest range from 7″-12″ wide, usually only about 14″-16″ long. Some logs offer wide panels that are longer than that, but are still too short to get two lengths out of them. These are ideal for carved boxes whose long front and back boards are usually around 20″-24″ long. It goes on and on.
Fig 1.5 This bedstead is now more than 15 years old. When it was new, the color difference between the various woods was obvious. Now they have blended rather well. There are white oak muntins, red oak panels, and the long rails and stiles are white ash. The finish is linseed oil.
Selecting the Timber If you are going to split your stock, it starts with the log. Finding the right log isn’t half the battle, but it’s a good chunk of it. Ideally, you’ll work with an oak that grew dead-straight, is clear, or free of knots, bumps and branches, and is large enough in diameter to yield wide boards along its radial plane. With all those criteria met, you can get even more demanding and look for an oak log that meets all these demands and is also slow-growing. In some places, you can find this timber at sawmills and log merchants, and sometimes even firewood suppliers will have short sections that fit the profile.
If you’re skipping the log-splitting aspect of this work, you can come close to this material if you look for straight-grained quartersawn boards. When using sawn stock, I prefer air-dried to kiln-dried. To me, the kiln-dried stuff seems stiffer and less cooperative. Air-dried is harder to find, but it’s out there. Flat-sawn boards can be used in joinery; they certainly are prevalent in surviving English work of the 17th century. They require some careful planning and much more effort in working, but you can make joined work with flatsawn stock – it just won’t be as much fun as working with riven stuff. When using riven stuff, you’ll be working the wood green, or unseasoned. If you have flat-sawn stock, it needs to be seasoned. The general rule of thumb is one year of air drying per inch of thickness. When I use sawn oak, I like to air dry it outside, then bring it in the shop for a few months before breaking it down to rough-size pieces.
Oak Most of the oaks are ring-porous hardwoods, meaning their growth rings are comprised of two different types of cells. The material that grows in the spring is generally more porous than that from summer growth. This results in a distinct division between the spring or “earlywood” and the summer or “latewood.” Also visible on the end-grain view are the ends of the medullary rays. These are cells that radiate outward from the log’s center, or pith, toward the bark. Ring-porous hardwoods, with only a couple of exceptions, split predictably both in line with the growth rings and perpendicular to them, along the medullary rays.
Fig. 1.6 This section of end grain is strictly firewood, but the structure of the oak shows clearly. Just inside the bark is a narrow band of greyish-white sapwood, then the bulk of the material is the darker-colored heartwood. Radiating out from the center are the ends of the medullary rays, showing up as almost silvery bright lines. Concentric growth rings encircle the very center, or pith of the tree, in this case rotten and bug-eaten. This one has almost everything that can go wrong with a log; the pith is off-center, the log is out-of-round, the medullary rays are twisted and bent and there’s insect damage. There’s also cracking along the growth rings and injury to the tree at a couple of points in its life. Burn it.
The end grain of a large oak shows two distinct colors in the wood. The outer inch or so (just below the bark) is the sapwood. This material is the part of the tree that conducts the sap. It is more prone to decay and infestation, and is considered weaker than the darker-colored “heartwood.” In oaks, the greater proportion of the tree’s diameter is taken up with the heartwood. A young sapling is all sapwood, but over time as the tree grows, there is a transition in which the inner layers of sapwood undergo a chemical change into heartwood. For our purposes, the principal difference between sapwood and heartwood is the greater resistance to decay that heartwood exhibits. In woods such as ash or maple, most of the usable stock is sapwood. In the oaks, the sapwood is generally discarded, and the heartwood is the stuff of choice.
When splitting out oak stock for furniture work, the radial face is the best one to use for a number of reasons. The primary benefit is the dimensional stability of boards oriented this way. In a straight-grained example, there is little shrinkage across this radial face, thus little to no distortion, either. Another feature of this radial plane is the ease of working it – the wood cuts more easily on this face than on the adjacent tangential face. So the carved work is always done on the radial face. Mouldings are often cut in this plane, also. When using riven oak, the stock is usually oriented so the radial faces compose the front of the piece.
The material nearest the center of the log is called juvenile wood. Formed when the tree was a small sapling, this wood is often very fibrous and can include twisted grain. There is no clear distinction between where the juvenile wood leaves off and the workable heartwood picks up. Each log is different. If the innermost fibers appear straight-grained, you can try to keep as much of that stock as possible. One place where you might push your luck with the juvenile wood is when you are trying to split out the widest panel stock you can get. (I’ll cover that in detail when we get to splitting and working panels.)