I’m calling this a book report rather than a review, because I don’t have the gumption right now to write a proper formal review. So please forgive the relatively casual nature of what follows.
I love this book, which was recently published by Routledge. (I’m linking to the sales page at Amazon because the publisher’s ordering system has proven problematic. I am still waiting for the copy I ordered pre-publication.) The historical overview of women in woodworking is fascinating, including consideration of women picking up where men left off in wartime, and a wonderfully insightful discussion of the role played by the D.I.Y. movement in drawing women in. Earlier sections of the history include lots of information gleaned from research by Suzanne Ellison right here at Lost Art Press, a wonderful tribute to Ellison herself and to the Lost Art Press blog for publishing it. The international dimension is also noteworthy, though the book is overwhelmingly grounded in North America.
My favorite aspect of the book is the intellectual perspective that Deirde Visser brings to the subject, which she treats with welcome nuance. Many pages of my copy are covered with laudatory notes. I greatly appreciate that Visser and her colleague in the project early on, Laura Mays, saw fit to include not just art and studio furniture makers, but builders of custom work who happily refer to their workspaces as shops, and builders of buildings (albeit to a lesser extent).
The book is refreshingly free from top-down, supercilious attitude. Rather, its embrace of a diverse cross section of makers and making reflects beautifully on Visser herself. Kudos in particular to her and to the legendary Wendy Maruyana for including such gems as, “With characteristically self-effacing humor, Maruyama opened our conversation stating, ‘I’m not a great woodworker.’ She is talking about technique: ‘Making a perfect joint doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s quite a struggle, actually. So I frustrate myself because you always measure yourself up with other woodworkers and think ‘Oh fuck.’ In fact, Maruyama is perfectly capable of exemplary technique.” If you really want to invite people into a field, this is one way to do it.
It takes a strong spine to admit to imperfection in furniture making, and this in its own right is a welcome bit of iconoclasm. Furniture is made to be used, not just admired. In most cases the perfection of joinery or the attention given to finishing the back of a dresser or the underside of a table has far more to do with the maker’s conceit, or playing into widespread expectations of “quality” in the luxury furniture market (barf), than with actual durability or ability to serve the purpose for which a piece is made, which also has a bearing on who will be able to afford it. This, too, is for the underdog to point out, and women in this field have traditionally been underdogs.
I can’t imagine having to choose which makers to feature in such a project and am honestly baffled and gobsmacked to have found myself included. It’s a real honor. The sheer diversity of featured makers is admirable. So many others deserve to be included in a work of this kind, but as someone who has edited essay collections and copy edited Marc Adams’s “The Difference Makers,” I understand the need to make really tough decisions. That said, if there is one person whose absence is conspicuous in the discussion of particular women who have championed the cause of inviting women in and giving those women already in woodworking the visibility they deserve, it’s Megan Fitzpatrick, in particular during the years she worked as editor at Popular Woodworking; Megan has gone out on many a fragile limb, risking her own livelihood and fielding many an indignant comment from people who still don’t see the need to shine a light on members of specific underrepresented groups. Fitzpatrick would have fit perfectly into the part of the book that discusses efforts others have made in giving women woodworkers the recognition they’re due.
While this is by no means a formal review, I hope it’s clearly an appreciation and a strong recommendation. Thank you Deirdre Visser, Laura Mays and Phoebe Kuo, for conceiving this work. Looking back over the years in which I have been aware of this project, and the conversations I had early on about publishers with Mays, I recognize the massive investment of time and energy this book represents. I love it. What a joy!
“Roubo on Furniture” is filled with insights into working wood and building furniture that are difficult or impossible to find in both old and modern woodworking books. Unlike many woodworking writers of the 18th century Roubo was a traditionally trained and practicing joiner. He interviewed fellow craftsmen from other trades to gain a deep and nuanced view of their practices. He learned to draw, so almost all of the illustrations in this book came from his hand.
In addition to the translated text and images from the original, “With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture” also includes five contemporary essays on Roubo’s writing by craftsmen Christopher Schwarz, Don Williams, Michael Mascelli, Philippe Lafargue and Jonathan Thornton.
As far as the manner of joining panels, after they have been dressed or smoothed, according to whether they are more or less thick, you begin by trimming them and making them equal width, observing to eradicate all types of sapwood, knots and splits, after which you set them up according to the different widths that they should have. You should take precaution to put the planks of a similar color together, the narrowest (which we name alaises) in the center [of the panel], and the edges of the plank that are softer [wood closer to sapwood] should be used in the groove joints [in the frame]. After they have been thus set up, you begin making the joints by cutting the grooves, then you make the tongues. After having taken the precaution to position the plank where you have made the groove against where you wish to make the tongue, to see if both of them are truly straight, then you make the tongue. When the wood is thick, you trim the back of the tongue by chamfering [it] with the half-plane [ jack plane], so that the plane [the tongue plane] is easier to push. When the wood is rough and very thick, you need two workmen in order to push it, as I said in speaking of planes of two pieces, but the more it can be done by a single workman, so much the better for the work.
It is also necessary to take care that the joints be straight on the edges of the panels and that they fit equally on each side of the groove, even when the work is just a facing [a decorative panel, not structural]. Joints thus well brought together prevent the air from penetrating and, consequently, from warping the panels.
After having made the joints with all the precautions that I spoke about previously, you glue them together; and for this, you disassemble the boards from each other, after having numbered them, so as not to confuse the panels of one panel with those of another. After this, you heat the joints so that the heat opens the pores of the wood, preparing them better to take the glue and hold on to the joints. It is necessary, however, to pay attention that the wood not be too hot because it will dry the glue too promptly and prevent it from holding. As for the glue, it cannot be too hot [in other words, the hotter the glue, the better] because the heat makes all the glue components finer and delicate [less viscous] and consequently better to penetrate in all the pores of the wood.
The glue that Joiners use is called hard glue, which is of two types, namely that of England and that of Paris. These two types of glues are made with the sinew and feet of beef that you boil and melt into gelatin, after which you mold it into sheets of 8–9 feet in length by 5–6 in width and 2–3 lines thickness. When it is completely dry and it is of a good quality, it is both hard and also fragile as glass. That from England is the best, not only because it makes half again as much profit, but also because it holds better and its color being a clear yellow means that is does not appear in the joints when they are well done. You also have the glue of Paris that is not so strong, is black and muddy and it always shows in the joints, no matter how well made.
When you wish to melt the glue, you begin by breaking it in little pieces and you put it to soak in some water for 5–6 hours, after which you melt it on a fire in a copper cauldron.
You must observe not to put [in] too much water at first because it will remove some of its quality. You must also take care to stir it up with a wooden stick while it is melting, and when it is completely melted you let it boil on a low fire so as to make it re-heat. You should never leave the glue unattended once it begins to boil because at this time the force of the heat makes it froth and boil over out of the cauldron, which you prevent by adding a little fresh water when it is ready to boil over. The glue is easy to spoil and becomes tainted while you are melting it. That is why this task is best left to one individual man.
Dry glue is sold by the pound, and woodworkers who have a lot of work take care to provision it so that it always remains dry [unspoiled]. When you wish to melt it, you should take care not to melt too much at once, that is, you must not have melted more glue than you can use in eight days, especially in the summer because it molds and loses its quality. You heat it in a copper pot, which has three feet and an iron handle. The feet should be splayed to give it a stable position, but [they should] not [be] hooked and elevated at the ends because being thus configured [the cauldron] is subject to carrying some of the hot coals with it and to making [coals] fall in the wood shavings [when moving the cauldron around the shop], which is greatly to be feared. Cabinetmakers use a double-boiler pot, in the outer chamber they put the water and the glue in the inner one. This way of heating the glue is called a bain-marie [hot bath] and is very convenient because the water being very hot maintains the heat of the glue longer, while preventing the glue from burning at the edges of the pot, Figs. 12 & 13.
When the glue is hot, you spread it on the joints with a brush made of wild boar hair, which should be more or less large according to different works. Look at Figs. 14 & 15. Then you drive the joints together with a mallet. When there are many joints [complex joinery with many joints being assembled simultaneously] and you fear ruining them with the mallet, you turn them over and hit them on the bench, lifting first one end of a panel and making it fall straight with force on the bench. Then you do the same at the other end, which you continue to do until the joints are perfectly in place. Then you put them flat on the bench where you stop them using a bar/straightedge of the full length of the panel [that is] secured with holdfast, and you tighten the whole panel with clamps or on edges with clamps and bars, which holds them all along their length and closes them. Bar clamps are iron tools which are made of a bar of iron where the end is curved in the form of a hook, which passes through another piece of iron which is called the foot of the clamp, which glides along the length of the bar according to how you judge appropriate. The end of this clamp is curved in the form of a hook, as is the other end of the bar, and is textured at the face like a rasp, so that it [will] not slip when you tighten it but it [instead] holds onto the wood.
The mortise or eye of the jaw should be as accurate as possible, especially on its width, and be made a bit slanted on the inside of the foot on the side of the hook, so that when the bar clamp is tightened, the foot will always be at a right angle to the shaft, as least as much as possible. The end of the shaft/bar is hammered back to create a ridge [is “mushroomed”] so the hook cannot get past or get lost. Like most of the regular clamps you cannot remove the moving foot, Fig. 16.
This tool serves to hold the joints for both panels and for assembled pieces. You close it by hitting on its movable foot with a mallet below the bar, and you loosen it by hitting the latter on top with the hammer, that is to say, in the opposite direction. [It operates in a manner conceptually identical to the holdfast.]
The length of the bar clamps varies from 18 thumbs up to 6 and even 8 feet in length. As for the width of the bar, it should be from 9 lines up to a thumb-and-a-half, according to the different lengths, and their thickness should be two-thirds of the width. The foot should exceed the upper part of the bar by 3–4 thumbs for the smallest, and from 6 thumbs for the largest. The iron of the bar clamp parts should be soft and without any type of welding, especially the foot, which should be forged with all the care possible.
It is good that joinery shops be well furnished with bar clamps, especially those shops with many workmen, which is very convenient for accelerating the work. There are shops where there are up to 20 lengths of bar clamps of all sorts. When the work is of such great width that one cannot close it with bar clamps, you use a marking rod of wood, which is called a notch for elongating sergeants [bar clamp extender], which is 3–4 thumbs in width by 8–9 feet in length and a thumb-and-a-half thickness at least. At one end is made a hook, made equal to the width of the wood, which serves to close the work. On the other side of its width, and in the opposite direction, are many notches placed at 12–15 thumbs from each other, in which you place the end of a bar clamp, which is tightened on the other edge of the work. You must pay attention that the notches are made at a sharp angle, so the bar clamp jaw stops there and does not come out, Fig. 17.
There is still another way to clamp panels, which is done with wooden tools called straighteners [ from the verb etreindre, or to close tightly]. They are composed of two of pieces of wood called twins of 4–5 feet in length by 4–5 thumbs in width and 2 thumbs thickness, in which [at] 6–8 thumbs from the ends is pierced a squared mortise of about a thumb-and-a-half, which is in the center of its width, and through which you pass a shaft of 8–9 thumbs in length.
In the upper part of straighteners are pierced two or three other mortises similar to the first ones through which you pass another shaft of the same shape and length as the first one, Fig. 18.
When you wish to make use of straighteners to clamp a panel, you begin by placing [the parts] between the two twins, resting the panel on the lower inserted shaft. You then press the twins together to hold the panel flat. You then insert the shaft through the mortises above and closest to the panel, and with a mallet drive in a wooden wedge between the panel and the shaft.
There must be two straighteners at least to clamp a panel, and when it is long enough, you really should make use of three. Besides, the use of these tools is excellent, because they clamp panels without damaging them, which happens sometimes with bar clamps. But still, they hold the panels very straight, and they leave you the liberty to view them from both sides, which you cannot do when the panels are laid flat on the workbench, Fig. 19.
Edit: These are once again sold out. I _think_ we’ll have more later this week. The warehouse has just entered into inventory 125 Crucible Dovetail Templates – which means most of the production and packaging processes have been worked out. Whew! (Hopefully, we’ll soon be more reliably able to keep these in stock.)
Before you can begin traversing with your jack plane, you should bevel off the far edge of the board with a few good strokes of your jack plane. This bevel reduces the “spelching” on that edge. (Spelching is the fun English word for “splintering.”)
The following is excerpted from “The Joiner & Cabinet Maker,” by Anonymous, Christopher Schwarz and Joel Moskowitz. The original short, book released in 1839, tells the fictional tale of Thomas, a lad of 13 or 14 who is apprenticed to a rural shop that builds everything from built-ins to more elaborate veneered casework. The book was written to guide young people who might be considering a life in the joinery or cabinetmaking trades, and every page is filled with surprises.
Unlike other woodworking books of the time, “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” focuses on how apprentices can obtain the basic skills needed to work in a hand-tool shop. It begins with Thomas tending the fire to keep the hide glue warm, and it details how he learns stock preparation, many forms of joinery and casework construction. It ends with Thomas building a veneered mahogany chest of drawers that is French polished. However, this is not a book for children. It is a book for anyone exploring hand-tool woodworking.
In our expanded version you’ll find the unabridged and unaltered original text; a historical snapshot of early 19th-century England; chapters on the construction of the three projects that show the operations in the book, explain details on construction and discuss the hand-tool methods that have arisen since this book was originally published; and complete construction drawings (you can download those files here).
With the glue dry, it’s time to flatten one face of all of your panels. Thomas begins with the jack plane then moves to the trying plane, yet the details of the operation are sketchy in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.”
Early workshop practice was to use the jack plane (sometimes called the fore plane) across the grain of a panel. This operation, which Joesph Moxon called “traversing” in his “Mechanick Exercises” of 1678, allows you to remove a good deal of deal without tearing the grain too deeply. Working the grain diagonally in both directions allows you to get the board fairly flat – Thomas checks the board with a straightedge as he works, which is always a good idea.
Before traversing a panel, check the panel using the edge of your plane, which is a fairly good straightedge. If the panel is cupped across its width (typically on the bark side of a board), then the work should be fairly easy to accomplish. If the board is crowned in the middle (typically on the heart side of a board), you need to watch what you are doing. Sometimes traversing and diagonal strokes aren’t enough to flatten a crowned surface.
Note: When you work at 45° to the grain of a panel, you will typically see more tearing in one direction than in the other. This is normal. Just make sure you finish your diagonal strokes in the direction that produces less tearing.
Traversing is a powerful hand-tool technique. You can remove a lot of material quickly and make the board flatter than when you began.
Determining when a board is flat can be a challenge. After some practice, you learn to tell by the way your planes respond when dressing the panel. The shavings become consistent in thickness, width and length all along the board. A straightedge can help. So can winding sticks, which aren’t mentioned in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.”
Diagonal strokes, as shown here, allow more of the plane’s sole to touch the panel. After some overlapping, you’ll find the panel is pretty flat once you can take a shaving from every point on the board.
Winding sticks are two identical sticks that are longer than the board is wide. They are placed at several points across the width of the board and compared by eye. When the panel is twisted, the sticks aren’t parallel. And because they are longer than the board is wide, they exaggerate any wind. The author of “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” has a novel solution: Compare your panel to a known flat panel. If your panel rocks on the flat one, it’s in wind. Of course, the trick is getting that first panel flat. It’s possible to create two panels that are in wind but don’t rock on one another – the high spots of one panel nest into the low spots of the other and result in a false reading.
Check the panel using the wooden straightedge. Look for light as you hold the tool diagonally one way, then the other. Work the remaining high spots using the jack plane until the panel is close to flat.
However, once you get one panel flat, the method explained in the book works well.
Then dress the panel using the trying plane (sometimes called a jointer). I use diagonal strokes first. Then I finish up with strokes that follow the grain of the panel.
The top panel is flat. By placing it on top of the panel I am working and trying to rock the panel at the corners, I can test for wind. You do have to be careful here. Sometimes you can miss a problem when you have one low corner but the three other corners are coplanar. Keep a sharp eye.
On Thursday, it was official: George Walker and Jim Tolpin handed over to Lost Art Press all the text and illustrations for their next book, “Euclid’s Door,” and I’ve just begun the initial edit. The book is about ancient layout tools, and what they can teach us…as George’s introduction below tells us. The book – which features illustrations by Barb Walker and Keith Mitchell – will be out later this year. – Fitz
Belly Hill is a hump in the sprawling wheat fields in southern Turkey. It kept its secrets hidden except in the spring when local farmers snagged their plows on blocks of limestone beneath the soil. Then in 1996 a group of German archeologists took a closer look. What they found turned human history on its head. They unearthed a temple complex known today as Gobekli Tepe, a massive 12,000-year-old building site sprawling across 22 acres, much of it still unexplored.
Scores of giant rectangular stone columns, some more than 20’ high arranged in circles, ovals and triangles. Much of the stonework is decorated with elaborate carvings of spiders, snakes and lions. Stuff that must have haunted the dreams of those early builders. Scholars debate who made those carvings and what they reveal about the builders. The most amazing thing is the early date. The complex goes back 12 millennia. Humans weren’t thought to have built things on this grand scale that far back. This was long before the invention of writing, before pottery, even before the invention of agriculture. It was built by a hunter-gatherer culture. That wasn’t supposed to happen. It was previously thought that nomadic hunters lived so close to the edge that they didn’t have resources to devote to architecture. So much for that theory.
When Jim Tolpin and I first read about the dig, we didn’t marvel at the elaborate carvings of snakes and spiders; we noted these builders had a working knowledge of artisan geometry. They understood plumb and level and were able to fabricate large stones with precise flat surfaces and right angles. They obviously possessed a skill-set and tool set that gave them tremendous creative power .
Over the last 10 years we’ve explored how artisans harnessed the truths of geometry throughout history. We began close to home, looking at early American furniture and quickly moved back in time to the Renaissance in Europe. From there, a clear path took us back to ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt, with a few side trips into Asia. Now we find the same thread ties back to prehistoric builders. Yet the structures on the Gobekli Tepe are so developed and refined, it implies that the knowledge about artisan geometry goes way back, deep back.
Tools of the Imagination Just what was their tool set? Given the scale and complexity of the work, it’s hard to imagine that these early builders spitballed this into existence without the aid of layout and design tools. Flint cutting tools and stone hammers survived, but any tools made of wood or fiber are long gone. No doubt they could have used strings to mark layouts and rough cuts on slabs of stone. A string with a weight attached could also gauge level and plumb. But those smooth flat surfaces and sharp right angles cry out for a sophisticated tool kit to tackle those problems. How did they make a stone (or board) flat and free from twist? How did they execute a corner so they could butt two stones (or boards) together and marry together perfectly?
Most woodworkers are curious about tool marks left behind. It might be the slashes left by an axe on timbers in an old barn or the stray cuts left from a backsaw. We can’t help ourselves. We pull out drawers and look closely at dovetails or crawl under a table to feel the wavy surface left by a scrub plane. Cutting tools leave their distinctive footprints, and another family of tools in the builders’ kit leave their marks hidden in plain sight. An axe or gouge leaves a texture we can see and feel, but some tools leave behind their shadows hidden in plain sight, evidence of artisan geometry at work. Boards that are flat and free of twist with square edges so they can be joined together are a different sort of signature. They are the ghosts artisan geometry left behind and they hint at the tools that created those ghosts. Some of these tools create layout lines that are later erased by a handplane or covered when joinery is knocked together tight and solid. We don’t often think of these ghosts as tool marks, but they speak to us about a set of tools used from ancient times.
In fact, you could divide tool marks and their tools into two categories. One group is for shaping and forming. They leave the marks we can feel with our fingertips. A second group are tools of the imagination that we use to help us with design and layout. They leave a picture of artisan geometry at play. Both sets of tools have something in common. They both flow from the wellspring of artisan geometry, a deep understanding of points, lines and simple shapes. For as long as humans have been building, they have used tools to connect with the universal truths of Geometry. Tools not only help us to cut, smooth and manipulate wood and stone, they help us to harness geometry to create order from chaos. Tools were not just an extension of our hands, they were the means to extend the truths of geometry into the built world.
Illustration by Barb Walker
Ex Nihilo We can guess about how early humans made technological leaps. It’s not a stretch to think that fires ignited by lightning gave our ancestors a familiarity with fire and the possibilities it offered. A round stone rolling down a hill may have led to the idea of the wheel. Yet how would early humans have stumbled onto the mysteries and possibilities offered by straight lines and right angles? It even seems a larger leap to fabricate tools that could harness these mysteries. Perhaps an account of this will never be understood, but the evidence left by these early builders leaves no doubt that they understood artisan geometry.
These tools that harness the power of geometry generate and prove a handful of geometric truths or axioms, i.e. a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Yet, long before humans wrote these truths down, they harnessed the power of straight lines, parallel lines, right angles and a number of common angles, such as 45° miters. The one common thing about all these geometric truths is that they are all self-proving. A straight edge can prove itself, a try square or a miter square can prove itself. Just to be clear, every project in this book has a section where we prove the tool. This differs from the geometry you learned in junior high where proofs were expressed as theorems you had to memorize. Although all of the proofs we use could be expressed with theorems, that’s not what we are after. Every proof we use is a physical confirmation we can see or feel. Forget about numbers, they just get in the way. This self-proving property of geometric truths allows them to be created ex nihilo (out of nothing) and this is what we harness in this book to create our elegant set of design and layout tools.
Like the discovery of fire, some inquisitive ancestor of ours may have fussed about with a couple of straight sticks, trying to get them to fit tightly together. Slowly the realization came that the pair of sticks could be used to correct each other. Shave a tiny bit of material from one and it points out the imperfection in the other. Finally they reach an almost magical level of perfect straightness. Then these sticks could become tools that could be used to impart straightness (and flat surfaces) to stones and logs. Our ancestors could have become familiar with these tools of geometry because like the lightning generating fire, the truths of geometry were right at their fingertips. They just needed to become familiar with them, then begin to harness them.
Even though this knowledge goes back into the depths of time, the truths of geometry are still valid, and mastery of geometry is still powerful and brimming with possibilities. In this book we are going to walk in the footsteps of our ancestors both distant and near. We’ll be exploring artisan geometry with sharp tools. Plenty of knife lines and saw cuts. You’ll see the truths of geometry in three dimensions on your workbench – a much better way to grasp these secrets of our craft. We walk through the building of a set of layout tools found in a typical cabinetmaker’s tool chest. Tools that were frequently user made. Jim and I began making these tools ourselves out of curiosity. We came to realize that the process of making these tools results in much more than the tools themselves (which are in fact quite amazing). Today we think of these tools as teachers that take us on a journey into the secrets of artisan geometry. They develop skills important to the craft. These builds equip both the imagination and the hands.
