The Anarchist’s Gift Guide begins tomorrow (Nov. 1) on my blog at Popular Woodworking Magazine. The entries will appear every three days through the month of November.
Anarchist’s Gift Guide is a yearly thing I do that recommends mostly small, inexpensive and useful shop items (the least expensive item in this year’s guide is .89 cents). These blog entries are great to email to family members who are asking you what Uncle or Auntie Woodworker wants for Christmas.
Here are the rules: Nothing is sponsored. I purchase all the items myself with my own lunch money. Any manufacturer who asks to be included in the gift guide is automatically disqualified from being in the gift guide. (This disclaimer should give you some ideas about how other “gift guides” are constructed.)
After the gift guide entries, I have four more entries planned for that blog, and then it will end on Dec. 31. Next year’s gift guide will be posted here instead. (Are you saying “huh?” at this point? Read this.)
Hope the Gift Guide is useful, fun or something that makes you yell at your phone.
The armbow of this design has a radical curve – two bends that are more than 90°. The original chair used curved branches to create the armbow. I haven’t been able to find a suitable curvy branch for this design, so I was faced with using flat planks with curvy grain.
I sawed out the arm parts from some oak that curved around a knot. But it wasn’t curvy enough to make me happy. There was too much short grain in the assembly to give me the confidence to use the arm.
So I ordered some cold-bend hardwood (sometimes called “comp wood”). I’ve worked this stuff for more than a decade and know what it’s capable of. My rationale here was to use what I had in order to avoid short grain – that’s is what the Welsh chairmakers did. They used curved branches to avoid short grain. I have comp wood.
My box arrived today and I knew immediately something was wrong. The wood felt dry and warm – usually it feels cool because of the moisture in it the wood. There was a small hole in the bag, which might have occurred during transit and dried out the stick.
I decided to give it a try anyway. The wood wouldn’t bend around the form while it was cold, so I put it in the steambox for more than an hour. That made it more pliable, but then it split open along the grain as I pulled it around the form.
I was about to go for a walk in the woods to look for some curved branches. But Brendan Gaffney talked me into using a bent lamination. Working together, we sawed up some dry oak into strips about 0.10” thick and then glued them up using hide glue.
Brendan also showed me how to use multiple strips of Masonite as a flexible clamping caul along the outside of the bend. I’ve never done that before (my fly is still open at this point, by the way), I’ve always used a metal strap covered in duct tape as my caul. The Masonite cauls worked quite well.
We needed 24 laminations for one arm, and it went together without a fracture.
So tomorrow I’ll do the second armbow and try not to expose myself to everyone during the process.
Katherine the Wax Princess has finished a new batch of soft wax that is now for sale in her etsy store. For those of you who missed her last batch, there have been a lot of changes to the way Katherine makes, packages and ships her soft wax. Read this entry for details.
The short story is that she switched to glass jars with metal lids (which are coated on the inside to inhibit rust). We switched to a waterless production process. And you get more than twice the volume of wax in a jar. Oh, and we have special packaging for the glass jars.
The new glass jars are sweet. The screw-top lid keeps moisture out and feels more secure than the friction-fit tin lid we used before. And the waterless production process ensures every bit of the soft wax is usable.
This might be Katherine’s last batch for 2018. She’s deep into applying for colleges, working on her paintings and pottery and continuing to become a budding movie critic.
I am pleased (very nearly thrilled) to announce that the next round of our Chore Coats will be made by Sew Valley, a small Cincinnati company that seeks to bring manufacturing (and its skills) back to the Midwest.
We found Sew Valley in a funny way. My wife, Lucy May, wrote a story about them for WCPO-TV in May 2018 and told me all about her visit there. At the time I was interested because Sew Valley was co-founded by Rosie Kovacs, who also founded the Brush Factory, a design/build furniture shop in Cincinnati. I’ve been a big fan of her work for some time.
Then our manufacturing facility for Chore Coats flaked on us this summer. So Tom Bonamici and I began searching for a new facility to make our coats. I found one in Tennessee. Then Tom called me and said: “Have you ever heard of Rosie Kovacs?”
Within a week I toured Sew Valley’s facility on Cincinnati’s West End, which is on the ground floor of the National Flag Co. It’s an old facility. The huge Sew Valley space is filled with restored vintage sewing machinery. And I got to meet Rosie in person for the first time.
I think it’s a perfect fit. Sew Valley is dedicated to reviving nearly lost production sewing skills. They do excellent work. And Rosie is a force of nature here in Cincinnati.
Right now we’re moving all our patterns, materials and buttons (how is it we own thousands of buttons?) to Sew Valley this week so they can begin production within the next couple weeks. If all goes well, we should open pre-production ordering in a week or so. And – I saved the best part for last – I think we are going to be able to keep the price the same as on our previous runs of chore coats.
When production cranks up, we’ll shoot some photos and video. In the meantime, here’s an Instagram post of them working on our chore coat sample.
Instead of reveling in my dotage, today I assembled this staked stool.
I’ll be doing a demonstration of staked joinery at 3 p.m. this Saturday at the DesignBuildCincy show at Music Hall. So if you’d like to see me build a stool in an hour (or less) please stop by.
The DesignBuildCincy show is an interesting affair, bringing together furniture makers, home remodelers, architects, artists and suppliers in a show for customers who appreciate craftsmanship and good design. (Here’s a list of vendors.)
I was asked to exhibit my work at the show, but I simply don’t have enough furniture in stock to manage a booth. So instead, they asked if I would give a short talk.
The show is located in the beautiful and newly restored Music Hall in Over the Rhine. I have been aching to see the completed work, which sought to restore many of the details of the hall when it was constructed in 1878. Plus, if you know anything about Over the Rhine, it’s a great place to get a meal or just stroll around the historic buildings.
Hope to see you there. Hope to see someone there – there’s nothing sadder than making a stool for an audience of none.
