We will open the storefront to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, November 26. We will be selling our full line of books and tools, of course. But more importantly we are here to answer your questions and talk about woodworking. And to show you the clock if you ask (if you know, you know – but let’s just say you need to be 21 to see the clock, and it’s not naughty).
We will have a special, free, commemorative Lost Art Press…something…to give away – one to a visitor. It’s so special that we can’t yet reveal what is it. (And OK…we haven’t yet come up with it.) And we will also have a lot of blemished books to sell at 50 percent off. We might also have a few personal tools to sell – I need more room in my basement! Blemished books and tools are cash only. Our storefront is at 837 Willard St., Covington, Ky. 41011
While you are visiting, you might grab lunch at The Standard on Main Street. On Saturdays they make some excellent barbecue (try the brisket). Also recommended: Crafts & Vines serves lunch on Saturdays – it’s always something tasty and usually smoked. And we’re newly love with the Empanada’s Box, which recently opened a few blocks from the storefront.
I don’t spray finishes enough to feel confident doing it – that is especially true for “complicated” work such as stick chairs (not so complicated to make, but sort of complicated to paint, because there are many surfaces to be coated). I’ll bet I’m not the only one. So, I grabbed my camera as Christopher Schwarz got ready to spray the final coat on his most recent chair and shot the video below. It’s a bit of a dance, moving fluidly around the project… so apologies for the brief moments of Chris’ backside blocking the view.
The legs got good coverage on the first two coats (one coat with the chair flipped upside down, the next with it right-side up), which is why they’re skipped on this go-round. But the general order of operations is to spray all vertical surfaces (legs and sticks) with the fan pattern horizontal, then the horizontal surfaces with the spray pattern vertical.
A few additional notes:
• The paint is Tuscan Red General Finishes Milk Paint (which is actually an acrylic), thinned about 10 percent with water.
• The spray setup is the Apollo Sprayers HVLP ECO-5 5-Stage Turbine system.
• The picture above is the chair shown in the video, but with the addition of a coat of buffed Liberon Black Bison Wax in the color Dark Oak.
• Our spray booth is also the back patio/bier garden/barbecue area/catio. So, we don’t spray when it’s really humid, too hot, too cold, or raining/snowing. And we almost always bring the work inside immediately after spraying, so that it can dry in a controlled environment.
FIG. 1. AN INVALUABLE ITEM IN THE HOUSEHOLD. Main sizes are 24 ins. long, 14 ins. wide, and 16 ins. high. It will be seen that in addition to holding a good range of tools there is accommodation for nails, screws, small fittings, etc.
1) The Workshop, including the design and construction of workbenches, tool chests and wall cabinets. There’s also an entire section devoted to “appliances,”which are workshop accessories such as shooting boards.
2) Furniture & its Details, includes a discussion of all the important Western furniture styles, including their construction, mouldings and metal hardware. This section also includes the construction drawings for many important and famous pieces of furniture examined by Charles H. Hayward during his tenure at The Woodworker magazine.
3) Odds & Sods. In addition to offering its readers practical information for the shop, The Woodworker also asked it subscribers to think about the craft and its place in modern society. We have included many of our favorite philosophical pieces in this final section.
A stool container which will house your ordinary bench tools and act as a mitre sawing and shooting board is illustrated in Fig. 1. It can be easily carried around the house and placed near the exact spot where the actual work is in progress. For a household kit of tools it has many advantages over a small tool chest which has to be kept in a store room or garage. There is no key to lose, and no lid to lift. When not in actual use it can stand in the kitchen and be used as a step to gain access to the upper kitchen shelves.
The container is easily and inexpensively made. Much of the wood required may be taken from clean packing cases or from salvage timber. The ends are dowel glue-jointed and the joint line is arranged so that it does not come in the centre of the width of the end and thus foul the sawing kerf and the round handle. With regard to size there is no hard and fast rule, but suitable dimensions are 24 ins. long over-all by 14 ins. across the width of the end, and 16 ins. high.
FIG. 2. THE SHOOTING BOARD (A) TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
The thicknesses of the stool ends should be not less than 7/8 in.; the same thickness applies to the long wide sides. The drawer fronts and the longitudinal divisions between the drawers should be out of 5/8 in. or 3/4 in. wood; the drawer sides are cut from 1/2 in. or 3/8 in. wood. Drawer bottoms are of 1/4 in. plywood or alternatively cut out of clean margarine box timber which has been planed to a clean finish.
The long round rod which runs from end to end of the stool is made from a piece of 1-1/4 in. or 1-1/2 in. round blind roller rod, or alternatively an old piece of ash from a broken hay rake handle may be requisitioned. The method of shouldering, saw kerfing, and wedging this handle in position is given in Fig. 5a. Note that the saw kerf and wedge are placed diagonally so that when wedging up there will be no tendency to split the stool end in the direction of its grain.
The ends of the stool are skew nailed to the long sides. This will prevent distortion and open joints owing to the racking which is bound to take place when the stool is subject to rough usage. The nails should be of the cut variety because they hold in the fibres of the wood much better than the round polished wire nail. The interior of the well of the stool should be glue blocked at the ends as suggested in Fig. 5. Glue blocks should also be used around the bottom of the well. The long rail between the drawers and long bottom rail need not be more than 1-3/4 ins. in width. They are stub-tenoned for 5/8 of an inch into the ends. Small runners should be kept as narrow as is convenient because they have little weight to carry and the object is to keep the stool as light as possible for carrying about.
The long drawers, 1-3/4 ins. deep, accommodate chisels and gouges, oilstone, joiner’s bevel, dovetail saw, and similar small tools, such as bits, etc. Twist bits should be kept in a partitioned green baize bag. The four smaller drawers are divided into suitable compartments to contain panel pins, tacks, screws, etc.
FIG. 3. THE SHOOTING BOARD IN POSITION READY FOR USE.
At the near end of the stool provision is made for mitre cutting. The well or hollow box portion will take the jack and the smoothing planes, ratchet brace, pliers and pincers, screwdrivers, and the household axe. The tenon saw is suitably fixed at the rear outside end of the stool, which is large enough to take this 12 in. tenon saw and the ordinary bench hammer. It will be noticed that suitable provision is also made for the handsaw and a 6 in. try-square in the handiest positions. Fig. 2 shows the method of dealing with long stock when it is required to cut off the waste end (S). Of course the worker would have his left knee on top of the board. In the same sketch is shown the auxiliary shooting board (A) when turned upside down. It becomes a step for the workman to increase his height.
As an adjunct to the stool we show in Fig. 3 an auxiliary shooting and mitre board. It is made as a separate unit, and fits on top of the stool as shown. It will be observed that in Fig. 1 the side of the stool is cut away to receive the mitre block and the squaring rail. Thus it can be reversed as previously mentioned when it is not required. When fitting the mitre block (B) on to the shooting board it can be positioned by placing three ordinary pins on to the board (C). Put the block (B) in the position it will occupy and give to the top of the block a smart tap with the hammer. This will give to both B and C suitable indentations which will tally with each other. At these points the worker bores 3/8 in. holes with his twist bit and duly inserts his dowels. The dowels are glued into block (B) only. This allows the mitre block to be levered out of its position with the screw driver when not required. For instance when jointing the long edges of boards the block (B) would of course be in the way of the plane, and therefore it is made removable.
There is no need to go to the trouble of dovetailing the drawers. A quite good drawer can be made as shown in Fig. 6, lapped joints being used. The bottom edge of the drawer front is rebated to agree with the bottom.
Do not paint the tool stool; it makes it heavy to carry about. If you must attempt some type of finish give the job a coat of brush shellac or spirit varnish and when dry rub it down with No. 1-1/2 grade glasspaper. Then apply a second coat of shellac varnish, or a coat of clear Varnene. This will prevent the job from holding dirt.
“This Is Not A Chair,” a sculpture exhibit by Drew Langsner, will be display September 30-October 2 at the studio/workshop of Jim Dillon, in Avodale Estates Georgia (just east of Atlanta).
“The 1999 Project”
Before becoming renowned for his country woodcraft, chairmaking and teaching, Langsner (author of “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now,” among other books), earned an MFA in sculpture. Recently, now that retirement from teaching has allowed him more time, Langsner has been sculpting with material ranging from twigs to entire lightning-struck trees. In 2020, he noticed intriguing shapes in wooden chairs – shapes that have nothing to do with the chairs’ function – and began liberating those shapes from old, damaged chairs, combining them into new forms. The result is the work on display in “This Is Not a Chair.”
“Embraceable You”
The exhibit is open Friday, Sep 30. from 5-8 p.m., Saturday, Oct 1. from 10 a.m.- 6 p.m. and Sunday, Oct 2 from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. The studio/shop is located at 2895 Washington St, Avondale Estates, Georgia.
Almost 2,000 years ago, Hero described how large wooden screws were cut in Greece. The same saw-and-chisel technique was demonstrated by Louis E. Bergeron (pseudonym for L.G. Salivet) in this detail from his Manual du Tourneur (Paris, 1792).
The following is excerpted from “The Workshop Book,” by Scott Landis. First published in 1991, it remains the most complete book about every woodworker’s favorite place: the workshop.
“The Workshop Book” is a richly illustrated guided tour of some of the world’s most inspiring workshops — from garage to basement shops, from mobile to purpose-built shops.
The author traveled all over North America to discover the workshops featured in this book. The result is an intriguing and illuminating look at multiple successful approaches to shop layout.
Without threaded wood or metal screws, the modern woodworking vise wouldn’t exist. Richard Starr, a woodworking teacher and writer in Vermont, has long been fascinated by wooden threads. Here he examines their history and how they’re made.
The first person to make a screw probably did it by hand the way the Eskimos did. Historical photographs suggest the Eskimo’s technique: holding a piece of antler, bone or wood in one hand, they’d twist it past a knife grasped in the other. With the blade at an angle to the shaft, the knife would scribe a helical mark (a spiral) on the material, resulting usually in a left-hand thread because most people are right-handed (try it!). Then, whittling toward the incision, they produced a buttress-shaped thread that could hold a spear tip to its shaft.
That this isolated aboriginal society had threads is a glitch in the history of technology, since most researchers believe every screw on earth had direct ancestors in ancient Greece. Though helices appear in nature and in decorative arts worldwide, we know of no practical application of the shape until the first century B.C. in the land of Plato and Aristotle. The pyramid building Egyptians never thought of it; Chinese machinery did without screws until the 17th century. So if the Eskimos did come up with the idea on their own, they share the pride of invention with a rather sophisticated culture.
By the first century A.D., screws of wood and metal were common in Hellenistic technology. A press for flattening cloth has survived at Herculaneum (covered by Mount Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 A.D. ), its wooden screw in fine condition. At the surgeon’s house in neighboring Pompeii were found dilating instruments (specula) operated by metal screws, as are modern ones. A twin-screw press appears in a wall painting in that doomed city.
How were screws manufactured in antiquity? Fortunately, we had a reporter on the scene: Hero of Alexandria, who lived during the first century A.D. He created several tools of fundamental value, including a basic surveying instrument, but he is best remembered for his simple steam turbine, which was only a toy. An early engineer who wrote broadly about the mechanical technology of his time, Hero described the evolutionary improvement of screw presses used to produce olive oil. Machines identical to the ones he knew survived into the 19th century. He also explained how screws were made in both wood and metal.
Until quite recently, historically speaking, large wooden screws, up to 12 in. or more in diameter, were cut the way Hero described. After laying out a helix on the surface of the cylinder (he used a metal template) you would saw a notch along the mark to the depth of the threads. Then you’d chisel the V shape into the sawkerf. I’ve tried this; it’s easy.
Making the nut was a problem. The earliest method was to use a bare hole with one or more dowels intruding into it to engage the threads. This worked, but lacked strength. Another method was to carve the nut in two halves, then fasten the halves together. This was stronger than the dowel method, but its strength was limited by the integrity of the fastenings, which might have been glue, rivets or bindings of some sort. Besides, fitting the female thread to the male was incredibly tedious. Despite these shortcomings, the practice survives today, as shown in the photo [below].
To carve the female threads, the ancient Greeks commonly cut the nut in half. Robert Yorgey, a Pennsylvania farmer, makes screws for his vises the same way. Yorgey fits the threads by using lampblack on the crests, the way a dentist locates a raised filling with carbon paper. Photo by Richard Starr.
Finally, Hero described (and possibly invented) a mechanical tap that etched a thread in a hole, working a little like a modern machine lathe. This gadget, shown in the drawing below, remained in use for almost 2,000 years until hydraulic presses made the wooden machinery obsolete.
In Hero’s time, if you needed a small-diameter metal screw, you’d probably cut it with a file and use the dowel-in-the hole method for the nut. It was also possible to cast a nut around an accurately filed screw. The worm drive, where a male screw engages a gear rather than a nut, is said to have been developed by Archimedes in the third century B.C.
Blacksmiths had a technique where inside and outside threads were made at the same time. First the smith would forge a ribbon of iron, square in section, and fold it back on itself, then he would wrap the doubled strip around a metal rod. Sliding the rod out, he’d separate the pair of helices, then solder one to the rod, the other inside a hole. Large screws for presses or vises were made this way and jewelers could use the method on tiny work.
Threading taps for metal and wood, similar to the design common today, were described by da Vinci in the 16th century and probably were in use much earlier. Usually these amounted to notches filed on the corners of a square rod, very simple to make but capable of cutting a decent thread.
Note: Hero described this thread-cutting screw box in the first century A.D. Male screw threads are hand-cut on one end of a shaft. These run in a temporary nut, above left, formed by pointed dowels inserted in drilled holes. At the other end of the shaft, above right, an iron cutter is wedged in a slot. The cutter is propelled forward when the screw in the temporary nut is turned.
Dies, the female-threaded devices designed to cut male screws, are probably as old as the metal-cutting tap needed to make one. Screw boxes, the wood-cutting equivalents of the die, used a V-gouge cutter positioned against a nut. I imagine this tool to be very old, although I doubt they existed in antiquity or Hero would have described them. Da Vinci sketched a tool that may or may not be a screw box; if it is, it’s the earliest representation I’ve been able to find. The 18th-century screw box and tap are almost identical to those available today. Several devices are now available that use a router to cut screws in wood very neatly.
After Hero’s wood-threading tap it was probably twelve or fourteen hundred years before people resumed the search for new methods of cutting screws quickly and accurately. Most methods were adaptions of the lathe, a tool that had been in worldwide use for thousands of years. The challenge of threading and, later, of turning screw-like ornamental shapes, stretched mankind’s ingenuity and eventually evolved into the machine-tool industry upon which our modern technology is based. As woodworkers we owe a nod to the early inventors who made possible our labor-saving machinery. And when we cut a screw in wood for a child’s toy or a workbench vise we are a lot closer to our roots than we may think.
