The printing plant has finished its work on Peter Follansbee’s new book, “Joiner’s Work,” and it will be trucked to our Indiana warehouse on Monday. We’re not certain when it will start mailing out to people who placed pre-publication orders, but my best guess is it will be this week.
If you haven’t placed an order, this is the last opportunity to get a free pdf of the book with your order. Once the book starts shipping, the price of the book plus the pdf will be $61.25, up from $49.
Yesterday I received a sample from the printer and the book looks great. Oak is featured on 100 percent of its pages. You will not find an oakier tome.
I’ve seen a lot of slideshows of people’s incredible, breathtaking and life-changing work.
For the first 50 years of my life, I watched and was inspired. Graceful furniture forms. Astonishing craftsmanship. Shimmering finishes. All of it made me say: I want to go there. And in my heart, I thought I could.
But something happened in my 50th year. I lost my father, a good friend and some other people I cared about deeply. And the slideshows took a turn in my mind. Instead of seeing what was possible, I saw what was out of reach. Perhaps I started too late. Maybe I don’t have the natural gifts. Or some such.
If you’re a therapist or a kind soul you might disagree. But the rest of us know that there is a certain grinding of the gears – a metal calculus – that says, “This is a hill you cannot climb.” So we spin our wheels at lower elevations and try to find somewhere interesting to steer the bicycle.
On my way home from Fine Woodworking LIVE, I was invited to visit the home and shop of John Porritt, a chairmaker and restorer who works in a picturesque barn behind his home in Upstate New York. On the shop floor in front of his neatly piled stacks of old timber, John had arrayed a handful of original Welsh, American and English chairs he’s collected during his career.
We spent a couple delightful hours examining them and discussing their merits and demerits. As we were leaving the barn to look at some chairs in his house, John said that he might be willing to sell a chair or two.
I froze in my tracks and pointed to the chair pictured at the top of this entry.
“Would you sell that one?” I asked. We shook hands on the price.
The chair is remarkable for a number of reasons I’ll will discuss in a later blog entry. But what struck me was how similar the antique chair’s angles were to my chairs. They look distantly related.
The big difference between the two chairs is the hand that made them. My chair is rather uptight in its craftsmanship. John said as much about my chairs, “You have the angles right, but the older chairs are looser.” It was merely an observation, he wasn’t trying to convince me to change.
“If your chairs are selling,” he said, “Then you are doing something right.”
But I see this as an area where I can grow. I am uptight and obsessive about my chairs. Even if I start with riven stock and work by hand, I fuss over every facet until the chair has a silhouette that is sharp, for lack of a better word. Can I loosen up? Not sloppiness, but an acceptance of the way that work progresses when it is shaped by hand. To allow it to happen instead of bending it to my will.
This week I have a vernacular Irish chair on my workbench. I’m building it in anticipation of a research trip to Ireland this fall for a book. The chair isn’t for a customer so there’s no one standing over the project and expecting a certain result.
Except for me, of course.
This afternoon I’ll take up my block plane to shape the legs and we’ll see what happens.
Another massive load of Crucible Card Scrapers are available for immediate shipment from our warehouse. The price is (still) $20 plus shipping.
The scrapers come with a magnet attached, which absorbs heat while scraping. And they come in a paper wallet, which is ideal for protecting the tool when it’s not in use. I say these things so you don’t throw them away and then ask us to send them to you….
Lately, I’ve been thinking, “Why not grab some of this internet sponsorship cash?” And so we have taken on a sponsor – the Malodorous Rubber Mallet Co. I’ve agreed to use the company’s mallets in social media photos and will be impartially reviewing the mallet against all other mallets ever made in this dimension (and others) in the coming weeks.
All I can say at this point is that this mallet is so good that you can smell it coming. It offers the Perfume of Percussion. The Whiff of Whacking. The Bouquet of Beating.
This week I’ve thrown myself into production for Crucible Tool along with help from Megan Fitzpatrick and Brendan Gaffney. Today, Megan and I finished up 600 card scrapers and sent them to the warehouse. They should be for sale by the end of the week – so take this as fair warning.
We have a new jig for machining the scrapers in a CNC mill. This speeds the process and eliminates the abrasive polishing of the edges. That’s a win for everyone’s lungs (and fire suppression equipment). Abrading metal blows. And burns.
Speaking of abrasives, during the last month, we’ve redesigned the way we make hammer heads to reduce – and almost eliminate – the abrasive grinding processes to make the heads for our lump hammers.
I know that some of you simply want your hammers and don’t care about how they’re made. If that’s you, know that we should have a batch of hammers for sale next week. You can now go back to your cat videos.
For those interested in how your tools are made, here’s what we’ve been up to. When we started making the hammers we machined the heads and then had five abrasive processes to finish them. We used three grits on the flat faces and two on the striking faces.
With the magic of changing the tool paths, we’re down to one abrasive process. We’re hoping to eliminate that one as well and just have a little power buffing.
The heads won’t look different to the naked eye. All the facets are the same. The striking faces are the same dome shape. But the surfaces look a wee bit different under a loupe. I think they look better.
Note: After five minutes of hard use, all our hammers look about the same.
All these changes will make the heads easier to make. And it’s safer for the machine operators. So thanks for your patience (like you had a choice).
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Before you email John and Meghan: No, we’re not working on dividers. That tool has been suspended until it can be redesigned.
