I am happy to announce that our Crucible curved card scrapers and design curves are available for sale in the U.K. (and Europe) through Classic Hand Tools. You can order a scraper here and curves here.
Thanks to the crew at Classic Hand Tools for stocking these tools.
We get a lot of questions about when we’ll begin distributing our lump hammer outside the USA. We’re still fulfilling demand here in the States and are still ramping up production until we get to where we have a surplus. I hope we will be there by early 2020.
The Lost Art Press storefront will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, and we welcome your questions, gripes and general company.
The special 2 p.m. lecture on Saturday will be on my favorite stick chairs from all over the world. I’ll also have a couple of my recent chairs on display plus a real honest-to-goodness antique Welsh stick chair for you to inspect.
If you are looking for other fun activities in Cincinnati this weekend, we recommend BLINK, an amazing and free artistic light festival scattered all over downtown that will spill into Covington this year. We’ve been watching the preparations all week, and this evening Lucy and I saw a dress rehearsal on the Roebling Bridge. It should be pretty amazing.
The Lost Art Press storefront is located in the heart of Covington’s Main Strasse Historic District, steps away from great food, drink and entertainment. Our address is 837 Willard St., Covington, KY 41011.
Families, pets and grumpy spouses are always welcome, too!
When I first learned to saddle seats in 2003, it was with a gutter adze. I stood on the chair seat and swung the tool between my legs. I never developed a knack for the gutter adze, unlike the scorp (sometimes called an inshave), which has always felt at home in my hands.
After working with Chris Williams, however, I was determined to give the adze another chance. Chris learned to saddle seats from John Brown using a small adze. And instead of standing on the chair seat, JB propped it up in front of him at the workbench.
The first success I had was with a Dictum adze. After getting it razor sharp, I could hack out a seat fairly well, just like John Brown showed in “Welsh Stick Chairs.”
Then Chris told me about an adze made by one of John Brown’s sons, blacksmith and woodworker Matty Sears. It was based on an interesting African tool. The handle was hafted to the head in an ingenious manner. The more you used the adze, the tighter the handle became. But you could easily pop the handle off to make sharpening the interior bevel easier.
Matty had made the adze for his father, who used it on chairs he built after the publication of “Welsh Stick Chairs.”
A copy of the first adze Matty saw using this design. It belonged to a sculptor friend of JB (John Cleal) who had lived in Southern Africa. Matty borrowed it, made this one and then with encouragement and input from JB, worked it into the tool it is today. Photo courtesy of Matty Sears.
Chris had one, and after using his I decided it was a significant upgrade from my Dictum adze.
As with any striking tool (a hammer or a hatchet, for example), it’s not just about the quality of the steel or the comfort of the handle. It’s about the balance of the tool, which can make it easy to control or make it unwieldy. This is where Matty’s adze excels. The balance is exquisite. And after saddling only a couple chair seats, I found it incredibly easy to place my strikes right where I wanted them. Plus, the weight of the head removes a sizable chip of oak without a lot of upper body strength.
So, instead of swinging the adze with my arms, I merely lift it up and use my thumbs to steer the edge right where I want it, letting the tool’s weight do most of the work (you do have to put some umph behind it). I’ve now made four chairs with Matty’s adze, and I’m a convert.
The tool came beautifully sharpened, and the hand-forged head keeps a wicked edge. All you have to do is maintain that edge, which I do with fine sandpaper wrapped around a dowel, plus a strop. Separating the head from the handle is easy, and that indeed makes sharpening safer and easier. Its primary bevel is on the inside, but there is a shallow bevel on the outside as well. The edge geometry works well, and is easy to maintain.
It is, like the best axes I’ve used, an incredibly elegant tool, even though its job is coarse work.
One of Matty’s earlier adzes after making the blade curved. Photo courtesy of Matty Sears.
Like all handmade things, it costs more than mass-manufactured tools. The adze is $400 plus shipping. The bottom line is that, like all my favorite tools, I look forward to using it. Holding it. Wielding it. Even sharpening it. It is a thing of beauty and is also (as a bonus) a direct link to John Brown, one of my woodworking heroes.
The best way to contact Matty about making an adze for you is by sending him a message through his Instagram account, mattysearsworks. Note: You can send Instagram messages through a mobile device, not a desktop machine.
— Christopher Schwarz
Full disclosure: I paid full price for my adze. Matty also receives some royalties from Lost Art Press from sales of “Welsh Stick Chairs,” but that is the entirety of our business relationship.
Those of you who have read my peckings for a while know my deep interest in architecture. And if you’ve read any of George Walker and Jim Tolpin’s books on design, you know that (most) furniture design springs from architecture.
How can architecture help you in the workshop? That is what my latest column at Core77 is about. Walking around an old neighborhood with your eyes open can help you get a feel for design – good, bad, right and wrong. In many ways, a neighborhood walk can teach you more than a visit to a museum, where the furniture is mostly high-style and well-preserved.
I get pretty passionate about this stuff and am half-tempted to take my furniture students out on an evening walk through Covington’s many historical neighborhoods. But that would be weird, I think.
The column, “Your Design Homework is on the Sidewalk,” can be read here and is completely free.
Megan Fitzpatrick has finished up her edit of the expanded edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” and is now sitting 6’ away making her corrections to the book’s layout files.
Briony is working on the new images, and I have a few photos to take.
In the meantime, I’m pondering a new logo design for the cover of the book. I do like the marriage mark on the original version, and there’s a fair chance we’ll keep it for the expanded edition.
But I’m a tinkerer, especially with the books I’ve written. So I have tried out about five different new logos, including the rough sample you see above.
What is it? Like the marriage mark, it’s a cabinetmaking mark shown in A.J. Roubo’s “l’Art du menuisier.” Shown on Plate 5, our translation notes that the mark is used to designate where a crosscut should occur on a board. The common version of this mark doesn’t have the circle. The circle is added when there are several competing marks on the board. The circle indicates “this is definitely the place to cut.”
Also, I like that there are several letter “As” hidden in its structure.
The downsides? Megan says it looks like the symbol from “The Blair Witch Project” (the twanas). It also somewhat resembles a famous drawing in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions” that is about a rude part of the human body. You can read about it here.
So maybe we’ll stick with the marriage mark instead of a demonic sphincter (though some have likened my prose to just such an object…).
