There are many pretenders to the Starrett C 604 RE. Accept no substitutes.
This 6” rule approaches perfection. I will stop everything I am doing in the shop until I can locate it. I bought my first one in 1996 at Aufdekamp’s Hardware in the then-scary Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati. It was about $20, which was a significant sum for me. But the experienced woodworkers with me that day insisted I wouldn’t regret the purchase.
And I haven’t.
What’s so dang perfect about this ruler? For me, it is the graduations etched into the steel and soft chrome background behind them. The soft chrome makes the rule easy to read and won’t reflect light like a mirror. If you buy a vintage rule, avoid the shiny chrome that Starrett used to use. It can be hard to read.
Many other rulers have graduations that are of too-similar lengths – the 16ths, 8ths and 4ths are too close in length, which makes the rule difficult to read. Starrett perfected the graduations, and I can take a measurement with one glance instead of four or five.
The graduations are finely milled into the steel and are filled with a durable black. Many other rules have graduations that are far too wide. And I am not talking about machinist precision here – many graduations on cheap rules are wide enough to interfere with handwork.
Finally, the little scale on the end is a nice feature. Very handy for measuring tenon shoulders, the depths of dados, etc.
It’s not perfect, however. If I could change one thing about the rule, it would be to remove the 64ths. I could probably work fine without the 32nds as well. When I need to get into 64ths and the like, I’m going to use a different tool.
But I cut the rule some slack on this point because it was made for machinists.
As always, I begin this annual gift guide with: The Listing of the Caveats.
In general, “gift guides” are marketing trash that try to trick your family members into buying a set of Silicone Domino Flashy Budgies with Bubble Level.
When a celebrity woodworker promotes a gift guide, it is usually just a list of trash given to them by a sponsor – usually a woodworking store. Sometimes the celebrity gets a kickback from each sale. It’s not illegal, but it’s slimy.
This gift guide is simple. It’s a list of tools I’ve bought during the last couple years that I’ve tested and really like. I paid full retail for these doo-dads. I am not an affiliate with any of these manufacturers (or any manufacturers at all). Also, I try to keep the price of the items in this gift guide low because it might be your kids who are buying this stuff for you.
If you don’t like this gift guide, please start a better one so I can take the Christmas season off for once.
Star-M F-type Bits
From the Japanese makers of the wonderful WoodOwl bits come these incredible little buggers. I was first alerted to these bits by Kyle Barton almost two years ago.
Their claim to fame is that they won’t splinter out the exit hole. You can drill straight through a board without a backing board. Also, the bits in general cut cleanly, aggressively and have a long center point (which allows you to angle the bit quite a bit).
While I’m sure they are sold elsewhere, I buy mine from Workshop Heaven in the U.K., which keeps a regular stock of them and ships them fairly reasonably. They are metric, but they are sold in such small increments that a U.S. workshop won’t notice.
The bits feature a hex shank, which allows them to fit in bit extenders and tools with a hex chuck. I definitely prefer the hex shank whenever possible; it prevents the bit from slipping in the chuck.
I bought an entire set as they aren’t terribly expensive – basically as much as a good Forstner bit. I use them extensively for chairmaking because they work really well at odd angles and I don’t need backing boards behind my work.
Here is the exit hole when I tried to force feed the bit through a piece of cherry to attempt to blow out the backside. Not bad. If you aren’t a Thundarr about it, you’ll get even cleaner exit holes.
If you make staked furniture, you’ll probably want to try the 16mm bit, which is close to 5/8”. I’ve beat the heck out of this particular bit and can report that it is still dang sharp after almost two years of use and maybe 30 chairs.
There’s got to be a downside, yes? Yes. Sometimes the bits seize up as they cut the exit hole and activate the clutch on your cordless drill. Turn the clutch off when you use these bits (or better yet, use a corded drill without a clutch). But that’s the only criticism I’ve got.
Star-M does it again.
— Christopher Schwarz
If you want to read some of the older gift guides, the 2013-2018 entries are here at Popular Woodworking. The guides from 2019 to the present are here.
After Popular Woodworking and its parent company were taken over by the second or third (I forget) venture capital firm, they hired some online marketing geniuses. This group of simpletons had one plan in their playbook: Have a special blowout sale for every holiday and national observance.
And so we got great marketing emails with headlines such as:
“You’ll Fall MADLY IN LOVE with our Valentine’s Day Sale!”
“Our St. Patrick’s Day Prices will Make you GREEN with Envy!”
“You’ll SAVE the DAYLIGHTS out of Woodworking Books During Our Daylights Savings Sale!”
The holiday that broke me, the one that made me call them and yell (I never yell) was:
“Don’t Let These Savings PASS you OVER – Our Big PASSOVER SALE!”
So as we enter the season for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Pan American Aviation Day, I’d like to run a fun little contest to create the absolute worst holiday sales pitch. Pick a holiday – any holiday. Here’s a good list. Then write a terrible, horrible, awful, funny sales pitch that takes advantage of that holiday.
Keep it clean. Children and Megan’s mom read this blog.
Post your sales pitch in the comments before noon Eastern on Friday, Nov. 20. The worst/best sales pitch (determined by me and my stupid sense of humor) will win a $100 Lost Art Press Gift Card. Don’t forget to enter your email in the commenting form so we can contact you if you win (your email will not appear in the message).
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. The 2020 Anarchist’s Gift Guide starts on Wednesday.
By the 18th century, there were lots of people throughout Europe who were writing about the material world and how it worked. Thanks to people in the French Academy of Sciences in general and individuals such as Denis Diderot, A.J. Roubo and Henri-Louis Duhamel, people began documenting mechanical practices, such as woodworking.
And so we have a wealth of information on how woodworking was practiced from the 1700s to the present. As we look further back in time, however, there are fewer and fewer sources.
So when researcher Suzanne Ellison and I began looking for images of workbenches from the 1400s, there weren’t a lot of sources. There is no “Big Book of Woodworking During the Hundred Years War.” Though I wish there were.
I don’t know how, but Suzanne got the idea we should be looking at misericords. These small wooden seats in European cathedrals were many times intended for choir members to rest themselves. And they were sometimes carved with different scenes. Because the carvers were woodworkers, sometimes those scenes were of woodworking. And so we began searching the image files of every church’s website we could find.
Suzanne hit gold with a misericord in the Chapel of St. Lucien de Beauvais in northern France that was carved circa 1492-1500 of a woodworker planing on a thigh-high workbench. Take a look at the photo above.
It is built with square legs that are vertical to the top (it’s not a staked bench with legs that rake and splay). The legs are pierced with holes for pegs or holdfasts. There is a planing stop. But what else is going on in this image?
Does the bench have stretchers? I think it’s difficult to say with any certainty. There is a big timber below the bench. Is that a stretcher that is joined to stretchers that we cannot see between the front legs and back legs? Or is it just a big board underneath the bench? It sticks out at the front of the bench quite a bit, but not much at the back. My guess is it’s a board that is unattached to the workbench.
What about the structure that is between the front leg and the benchtop that is angled at 45°? Does that prevent the bench from racking? Or is it a part of the carving left to strengthen the carving itself against damage?
My guess is this is a bench much like what is shown in the famous Stent Panel. No stretchers. But I could be wrong. In any case, stretchers for workbenches are definitely on the way. Soon.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. This blog entry is an expansion of my work in “The Anarchist’s Workbench.” You can download it for free here. We don’t have any physical copies of the book in stock as of now.
The circa 1580 bench by Hieronymus Wierix (1553-1619). It’s important, but it’s not the earliest example of this form.
Each of my books about workbenches has been about missing links in the history of workbenches.
“Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use” (Penguin Random House) was about the benches that preceded the dominant style of bench in the 19th and 20th centuries: the Euro-Scandinavian-German-Ulmia-style bench.
“Ingenious Mechanicks” was about the first recorded workbenches in Italy up until the 15th century when modern vises began to appear.
“The Workbench Design Book” (Popular Woodworking Books) was about another kind of missing link. My boss at Popular Woodworking said our unit needed to come up with $30,000 to $40,000 in revenue to avert a layoff or two. Could I write a follow-up book on workbenches?
So what’s “The Anarchist’s Workbench” about? On the surface, it’s about the workbench form that I have come to prefer after more than 20 years of building benches. But for me, it’s also about an important change in the way workbenches were constructed between the end of the 15th century and the end of the 16th century.
During this period, workbenches went from being built like a chair – staked furniture with splayed legs – to being built like a rectilinear timber frame with square mortise-and-tenon joints and stretchers connecting the legs. This is a time period that researcher Suzanne Ellison and I have visited before, but for “The Anarchist’s Workbench” we dug deeper to try to discover evidence of the evolution.
I think we found it.
As always, I have to thank Jesus Christ for His help with this book. Not so much for being the Son of God, but for being the son of a carpenter. Because of the connection to woodworking, tools and workbenches show up in religious paintings and drawings in every century.
When I started the book, the best evidence we had of this evolutionary change was a circa 1580 drawing by Hieronymus Wierix (1553-1619) of Antwerp. He was the son of a cabinetmaker and produced an influential folio of drawings about the early life of Jesus. These drawings are a gold mine of woodworking information from the period.
The Wierix drawings and their proliferation across Europe could be the subject of a book in and of itself. Wierix and his brother, also an artist, were colorful characters. And Wierix spent time in prison for murder.
Have a look.
This carpentry drawing is my favorite in the series. It shows a low bench but it looks like it is built with square joints. And it might have a stretcher. There’s a holdfast and all manner of tools to ogle. I also love the ladder and its square through-tenons.
In the drawing of the infant Jesus sawing, we get so one of the “batwing” squares I’m so fond of. Plus dividers, a hammer, a mallet and some helpful angels.
The third drawing of a workshop is also awash in tools. Check out the marking gauge on the bench and all the tools on the back wall. Also fun: stacking lumber in the corner until it becomes hazardous is an ancient practice that hasn’t changed.
But after more digging, Suzane and I found that Wierix was not the earliest illustrator of this important bench. But that bench wasn’t far away.
— Christopher Schwarz
You can download a pdf of “The Anarchist’s Workbench” for free here. We are currently sold out of hardbound copies of the book, but we expect to restock as early as next week.
A copy of Wierix’s drawing from the Netherlands, 1617.
Another copy of Wierix. This one from Paris and dated 1646.
