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.
The following is excerpted from “Chairmaker’s Notebook,” by Peter Galbert, from the section on tools for seat carving.
Whether you are an aspiring professional chairmaker, an experienced green woodworker or a home woodworker curious about the craft, “Chairmaker’s Notebook” is an in-depth guide to building your first Windsor chair or an even-better 30th one. Using more than 500 hand-drawn illustrations, Peter Galbert walks you through the entire process, from selecting wood at the log yard, to the chairs’ robust joinery, to applying a hand-burnished finish.
And if you’ve never thought about building a chair, this book might convince you to try. Building a chair will open your eyes to ways of working wood that you might miss if you stay in the rectilinear world of boxes.
The adze is like a gouge, but rather than striking the end of the tool with a mallet, the force is supplied by swinging it like a hammer. I use an adze to hog out much of the waste material in the seat. When correctly shaped and weighted, the adze can cut with surprising control and leave a clean surface. The trouble is that most adzes were designed for some task other than carving seats, so a little extra awareness of the tool and its geometry will help when tuning them for this use.
The adze is often soft steel that could be abraded with a hard file, but I don’t recommend it. A finely honed adze will stay sharp longer and leave a much better surface. There are two configurations for adzes: one with the bevel on the outside (out-cannel) and one on the inside (in-cannel).
The adze process is called “hewing” and requires two steps. First, you make a series of consistent-depth cuts as shown at right in a pattern of rows resembling fish scales. When striking each row, the direction of the swing is toward the previous row. This leaves the chip unsupported and allows a weak layer to form at the depth of the cut. Then you clear the broken chips to the depth of the initial blows. When the geometry of the tool and the swing is correct, the adze follows a radius that will take and clear loose chips. This is a controllable method, and practice brings speed and certainty to the process.
By removing material in successive stages with this technique, the remaining shape and surface can be refined. Clean-up cuts that travel across the grain while skewing the adze “downhill” can leave a polished surface.
Fig. 18.4 Understanding the geometry and hang of an adze.
Body position is critical to using this tool effectively. I’ve seen long-handled adzes used while standing on the seat. I prefer a smaller hand adze in conjunction with the workpiece on a podium platform or clamped to the seat of my shavehorse.
The shape of the adze and its relationship to the handle is key to its function. An adze works best when the most comfortable and balanced point on the handle corresponds to the outer surface of the edge of the tool as shown above. This relationship is called the “hang.”
If your adze doesn’t do this, then you can regrind the edge to get the geometry to work better. If your adze is ground in-cannel and the hang doesn’t work well, you can either grind a bevel on the outer surface or make a new handle with a bend in it that will correct the issue.
Fig. 18.5 The height that the adze is held off the surface affects the cut.
When evaluating the geometry of an adze, I assess how easy it is to control where it cuts. An adze with the proper hang and good balance will hit where you want and where you expect. If this isn’t the case, you will have to exert excess energy to control the tool and it will become tiring to use.
I think of the adze head as moving around the circumference of a circle with my hand at the center point. If my hand is close to the work, the adze digs in for deep cuts and strikes like a hammer. If my hand is high off the work, I get a glancing blow for clearing chips. In each case, the center point shifts slightly in the direction that the tool is swinging as well.
Fig. 18.6 Preparing an adze for use on a seat.
Like any tool, the adze is going to perform best when it not only has proper geometry at the edge, but a high level of sharpness. Don’t let the brutal impression the tool gives keep you from experiencing it at its sharpest. Grinding and honing the adze is certainly different than chisels or plane blades that have lots of flat surface to reference, but a little focus and creativity can yield controlled and repeatable results.
If the handle or head shape gets in the way of buffing the inside curve, I use a drum sander in a drill or a dowel with sandpaper wrapped around it. A dowel charged with honing compound will polish it up. When choosing the angle for the bevel, consider the point on the handle where you are most comfortable gripping as well as the thickness of the edge for durability.
For consistent grinding, a means for holding the adze head in a jig can be helpful. Remember, the adze is just a gouge, so thinking of sharpening your turning or carving gouges can help when conceiving of the best way to go about it. The holding jigs shown at left might take some effort to make sure that the position and movement of the blade contacts the edge properly when the tool is rolled, but the results will most likely prove it worthwhile.
Fig. 18.7 Adze-grinding jigs.
The in-cannel adze is trickier to sharpen, and the location of the grip is dictated by the shape of the adze head, not the bevel angle. Polish the outer surface of the head and dub the edge a bit. Grind the bevel with a drum sander or grinding burrs in a drill or Dremel. I like to use diamond pastes of sequential grit to get my final polish. There are no rules about the grind – whatever works, be it in-cannel or out-cannel or a combination of the two. All are worth exploring.
We are all but out of chair badges. The very few left are for those letters/pictures/SASEs already on their way to us in the mail stream (and I’m fervently hoping we have enough for those…I’ll fulfill them on a first-come, first-served basis if I don’t have enough).
So I’m afraid that those of you currently building a stick chair, and those of you planning to build a stick chair, will have to be satisfied with the admiration of your friends and family for your chair feats of glory (pretty good recompense!). And/or, you can download your own badge pdf file below and take it to a maker space (such as the one at the fabulous Cincinnati public library) that has a machine to embroider your own badge/sticker/magnet/button.
Fisher was the first settled minister of the frontier town of Blue Hill, Maine. Harvard-educated and handy with an axe, Fisher spent his adult life building furniture for his community. Fortunately for us, Fisher recorded every aspect of his life as a woodworker and minister on the frontier.
In this book, author Joshua A. Klein, the founder of Mortise & Tenon Magazine, examines what might be the most complete record of the life of an early 19th-century American craftsman. Using Fisher’s papers, his tools and the surviving furniture, Klein paints a picture of a man of remarkable mechanical genius, seemingly boundless energy and the deepest devotion. It is a portrait that is at times both familiar and completely alien to a modern reader – and one that will likely change your view of furniture making in the early days of the United States.
Chapter 7 of the book is a catalog of Fisher’s tools and furniture; these pieces are included therein.
Round-top Stand
Made by Jonathan Fisher
Dimensions: W: cross-grain 16-3/8″, with grain 16-5/8″ top 3/4″ thick; legs 1″ thick; bottom of pedestal 3″; cleat width 6″ H: 28″
Wood(s): cherry
Inscriptions/stamps: n/a
From the collection of: Jonathan Fisher Memorial
Construction: The round top is screwed to a cleat. The pedestal is tenoned into the cleat. There is a turned shelf at the top of the dovetails and there is a circular thin metal plate in place of a spider nailed to the underside with three nails. The tops of the legs are rounded rather than coming to a point as in other stands.
Tool Marks: There is minor tear-out on the top’s underside. There is traversing tear-out on the underside. The cleat demonstrates a double chip in the plane iron’s marks. There is plane chatter on the cleat. There are layout lines for the tenon on the cleat. The underside of the legs have turning saw, spokeshave, chisel and rasp marks.
Condition: There is a large gouge in two areas of the pedestal but otherwise stable.
Inscriptions/stamps: underside of lid: sawmill tally marks, three large chalk mark swirls; small pencil “x” on back
Accession Number: Collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; Museum Purchase, 1965.1465.11
Construction: The chest is rabbeted and nailed (with T-headed nails). The bottom is in dados and a groove (sides and back) and in a rabbet in front. There are three nails through each end securing the bottom and one in front but no nails through the back. The ogee-moulded lid has cleats that are tapered and fastened with nails clinched up through the top. The lid is attached with cotterpin hinges. The chest has a lock.
Tool Marks: Only the front, sides and top of the lid were smooth planed – all other surfaces have fore plane marks. The underside of the bottom is rough with lots of tear-out from a heavily cambered plane, and there is large tear-out on underside of PL cleat. There are saw marks under the profile of the feet with a considerable chamfer on the inside. The till’s layout lines are visible.
Condition: There are minor repairs to the moulding. Two clinched cleat nails have pulled through the lid. (They were clinched parallel to the grain.)
Over the last 18 months, I’ve taken two different classes at the LAP storefront— Chris’ stick chair class and Megan’s Dutch tool chest class. As a repeat customer, I had a much better sense of what to expect from my second class than my first, and Megan encouraged me to share some of it with prospective students. So here it is:
What you see (here on the website) is what you get. If you harbor any suspicions that Lost Art Press is a big business masquerading as a tiny storefront to boost sales, relax. It’ll be Megan or Chris that unlocks the door in the morning and fixes the coffee machine. That unfamiliar lady walking through the shop is not the assistant manager of digital marketing. It’s Lucy, Chris’ wife. So the vibe of the blog posts and the books is the vibe of class. Ample historical asides and double entendre. No liability wavers or in-class marketing.
Class will be consuming. Class hours are generally 9 a.m. -5:30 p.m., with slack on both ends to accommodate people who need a bit more time. Don’t count on significant breaks besides lunch. And unless you’re made of bouncier stuff than me, don’t be ambitious about squeezing in work emails and calls after class; you’ll be tired, and, more important, you don’t want to miss the chance to go out for drinks and/or dinner with classmates and the teachers.
When in doubt, wait to buy tools. You’ll get a tool list ahead of class that will list a few things you really do need to bring and a lot of things that you can bring or borrow. While it’s tempting to splurge on new tools ahead of class, consider that you’ll know a lot more about those tools after your class. You’ll have tried tools owned by Chris, Megan and your fellow students, and you’ll develop some opinions. (For example, Megan is partial to her No. 3 smoother, but one swipe with it told me it’s too small for my hands.)
Covington is kind of great. You’re headed to Covington for a woodworking class, but Covington is a lot of fun too. Unless you’re a local, get an Airbnb, Vrbo or nearby hotel. You can walk everywhere. Megan and Chris will give you good advice on lunch and dinner, and you won’t go wrong if you follow it. The pickings are more slim for breakfast. Coppin’s in the Hotel Covington opens at 7am. Nice but a little on the fancy side. The Bean Haus opens at 7am too, and is cheaper, but the food (eggs, breakfast sandwiches) is only so-so. Spoon opens at 8 and serves decent premade breakfast burritos and sandwiches ’til the kitchen opens at 9.
Come for the learning, not the project. If you’re like me, you’ll want to fuss over mistakes during class and try to get your tenons/dovetails/chamfers/surfaces perfect before moving on. Don’t. You can be a perfectionist at home, and you can make another chair/chest/whatever later. The class project just a MacGuffin for the lessons, so while you’re in class, be a learner—watch what other folks are doing, try different ways of doing things (even if you suck at them), and eavesdrop when the teacher is advising others or showing them how to fix a mistake. Working for several days straight on a project in the company of other learners is a very rare treat. Don’t waste it obsessing about some tearout.
– Sambhav N. “Sam” Sankar
Editor’s Note: You can read up on some of things we love about Covington and Cincinnati in this post, that we do our best to keep up to date. (I added a few new favorites last Sunday.)
