We delivered a big load of finished lump hammers to the warehouse this week and they are now available for purchase in our online store. The cost is $85 plus shipping.
These are machined, assembled and polished here in Kentucky using domestic materials.
We also will have a batch of these hammers here at the storefront for the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event on Sept. 20-21 at our Covington, Ky., storefront (in case you miss them online).
After six hard months of pure casework, I am back on making chairs every day in the shop. As such, I have a couple tools I’ve been meaning to write about but have put off because of the all-consuming nature of casework.
First is the Blue Spruce 4” Sliding Bevel Gauge. I bought one of the early prototypes that Dave Jeske had made and was impressed. It’s a great alternative for the woodworker who cannot afford a Chris Vesper 4” bevel or who needs one immediately (Vesper is currently out of stock on this tool). The Blue Spruce locks like crazy and is the perfect small size for chairmaking. Bevels with long blades can’t get as close to your drill bit as those with short blades.
You can, of course, make a bevel out of wood or cut down the blade of an old Stanley bevel. I’ve done both myself.
One of the nice things about the Blue Spruce version is that you get to pick out all the materials, colors and finishes for the tool. The bevel shown above is the one Dave made for me. If I were making one for myself it would be much more plain Jane – silver body, satin blade, stainless hardware.
The bevels start at $125 and are excellent. Highly recommended.
Also on the bench is the Bevel Monkey from FirstLightWorks in the U.K. This simple laser-engraved piece of laminate makes setting your sliding bevel a breeze. The cost is 28 pounds, which includes shipping to North America.
Both of these tools have earned a place in the till in my tool chest that is devoted to chairmaking tools.
Photo by Heather Birnie, http://www.heatherbirnie.com/
It’s no secret that I adore Chris Williams’s chairs, which have a direct and honest lineage to John Brown’s work. Chris worked with JB for more than a decade and made countless chairs under his eye.
In fact, I have to actively stop myself from imitating Chris’s work. It’s a struggle because I have one of his chairs sitting in front of me as I write this. I sit in it every day. It is a part of my family.
If you’ve ever wanted a chair that is tied directly to JB, read on. MARCH, a San Francisco store that specializes in handmade goods, has one of Chris’s chairs and is selling it for $5,000. It is an outstanding specimen of Chris’s work. Every detail is perfect – even to a chairmaker’s eye.
I know $5,000 is a lot of money, but I would buy it if I didn’t already own one.
In my Amercian Welsh Stick Chair classes, we start with home center dowels that have been selected for dead-straight grain for the chair’s back spindles and sticks. They work great (wood is wood), but there can be a lot of luck and driving around necessary to get enough sticks for a class of six to 12 students.
In fact, last year, I denuded the Kentucky/Ohio/Indiana Tristate area of straight-grain red oak dowels for my March 2019 class.
For my classes in the coming year, I decided to find a way to reduce my driving and gathering.
After trying many options (too many to list here without wanting to slap myself with a cold, dead mackerel), I settled on the Veritas Dowel Maker. I’ve used it before when making the sticks for Roorkee chairs.
The idea is simple: you spin square stock into the device. Two blades slice it down to size.
The only complication is that the device is a bit complicated to set up. After reading the instructions a few times, I went upstairs to see if the university had taken back my diploma. I simply wasn’t able to follow the instructions in a couple places. I needed a good video to understand what I’m missing here.
Sadly, there aren’t any really excellent videos out there on this tool. There are a lot of OK ones. After watching a few of them I was able to make the appropriate synapses and the device became crystal clear to operate.
With my stupidity set aside (for the time being), I made the blanks for my spindles. This was the joyous part. I could select the straightest, clearest stock to make spindles that were super strong.
After that, you spin the blanks into the device – a drill powers the operation. The surface finish on the dowels was pretty good. A single swipe with a scraper was enough to remove the annular rings. Another plus: I could fine-tune the dowels to come out at exactly the dimension I wanted.
After running 100 or so sticks, I decided to sharpen the blades and see if that improved the surface finish. So I stoned them both up to #8,000 grit on my waterstones (they sharpen just like a plane iron). The improvement in surface finish was minimal – I still need to scrape them.
All in all, I believe the Veritas Dowel Maker will pay for itself with my first class. It saves me a tank of gas, and I can make the sticks for a chair using $10 in wood instead of $24 to $36.
If I made only an occasional chair, I’d make the sticks the old-fashioned way with a spokeshave or block plane. But you need 50 perfect dowels with dead-straight grain, the tool is a nice thing to have.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Of course I paid full price for the Veritas Dowel Maker and the accessories. And the wood. And etc.
My daughter Madeline has a new set of Lost Art Press stickers up for sale in her etsy store. A set is $7. The stickers feature three new designs – two of them drawn by my daughter, Katherine.
Here are the details:
Lost Art Pets: Now that we’ve moved to our new place in Covington, Ky., the cats are frequent visitors to the bench room. Especially Bean, a three-legged cat who has become the WalMart greeter of our store. And also would like to smell your hair. Katherine drew Bean with dividers as a replacement leg.
Anarch-Bee: Katherine drew this new anarchist bee logo for a new wax product we are working on (more details soon). We love bees, which commonly symbolized woodworkers in pre-industrial illustrations. And we use beeswax all the time.
Carpal Tunnel Saw Company: The logo of one of our sponsors. Great saws – just remember to take your anti-inflammatories before using them.
The stickers are high quality – 100-percent vinyl and suitable for outdoor use. And the proceeds from the sticker sales help support Madeline as she embarks on getting her doctorate degree at the University of Pittsburgh.