Since June, I’ve been working on a book-publishing project that has ripped up my insides. I can’t talk about it yet – maybe in the next week or so – but the fallout has been odd. Each day, after 10 to 12 hours of editing, processing photos and designing book pages, I have been coming home to write like a madman until I fall asleep on the couch.
As a result, I’ve finished two chapters for the expansion of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” and have just three more to go. Today I finished designing the pages for the short chapter on the Staked High Stool and now offer it up for a free download for people who already own the “The Anarchist’s Design Book.”
At this stage, I’m operating on the honor system. If you own the book, please download the chapter. If you don’t own the book, know that I have instructed a hedgehog with Comic-Con breath to gnaw your danglies at some point in the future.
You can order the book via this link and save yourself an embarrassing trip to the ER.
Note that this chapter is not polished. There are typos. The construction drawing is not the crazy beautiful copperplate etching from Briony Morrow-Cribbs. It’s just my working drawing. But the information is there. I hope you like it.
I get asked to promote crowdfunding efforts all the time. I almost never say yes because most of the campaigns are ridiculous, ill-planned or just bad ideas. But this one is different.
Auriou (Forge De Saint Juery) is fighting for its future after 162 years of operation. Business it good – as it should be because Auriou rasps are the best – but the company’s equipment is outdated. They need new equipment and training to survive.
You can read all about it here. The page is in both English and French.
I know it’s not a sexy cause – like a gun that shoots salt at housefies – but it is an investment in the future of our craft. A set of good rasps is essential to curved work – I discuss them in “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”
If you love Auriou rasps, please consider making a contribution to help this fantastic company. I am making my contribution today.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. For those of you who are experts on running light industrial factories in France, you might want to hold off on your critiques unless you know the whole history of the company, the labor challenges it has faced during the last decade and its financial book. For those of you who are *not* experts on French manufacturing, you *definitely* should keep your trap shut.
Instead of reveling in my dotage, today I assembled this staked stool.
Maybe I’m just a crappy writer, or people read yesterday’s blog entry while half in the bag. Either way, I was surprised by many people’s reaction to my leaving Popular Woodworking Magazine. That was not an obituary. Or a retirement notice.
I am in no way slowing down my writing, research, building, traveling or publishing. I will continue to blog here almost every day. All the material I once generated for my blog at Popular Woodworking will be posted here instead. The Anarchist’s Gift Guide will continue here every November.
I write about 1,000 to 2,000 words a day – it’s a force of habit. And that stuff – whether you consider it BS or fertilizer – has to go somewhere.
The only difference going forward is that I plan to take on woodworking topics that I avoided in the past to avoid offending or embarrassing my corporate employer and its advertisers. I have little regard for the sneaky way we are manipulated to buy woodworking stuff on social media. Advertising is one thing. Sponsored content is fine as long as it’s disclosed according to the law (and there is a law; here’s a common-sense guide). But for the most part, thousands of dollars are spread around every day to attract you to shiny objects without you being told the relationship between the corporate sponsor and the social media star.
I’ll be honest: Among the problems facing our world today, this social media legerdemain is small potatoes. And it’s certainly not my lone crusade. I’m far more interested in getting people to pick up the tools and build stuff. But when I see this sort of chicanery in the future, I’m gonna mention it.
For example, we have all been choking on the coverage of the latest Craftsman tools event, which was a junket designed to get editors and writers to ooh and ahh over some unproven tools. (I hope they provided all the attendees with Craftsman-brand kneepads.) Craftsman has a lot of bridges to mend with me and other woodworkers. So I recommend you check out the tools in person before buying them. Or better yet, let some other early adopters take the bullet for you.
For me, woodworking tourism is the best kind of tourism, though I resist dragging my family along when I go to lumberyards, museum exhibits or auctions. I want them to remember me fondly when I’m dead.
Luckily, these days I have Brendan Gaffney working alongside me in the shop, and he’s always up for a ridiculous day trip. This week we went to Amish country in north-central Ohio to visit a tool store, some lumberyards and – most importantly – Keim Lumber.
Keim is about a three-hour drive from Cincinnati, so it’s a bit of a stretch to shop there regularly. But I’ve heard so much about the place during my life here that I had to visit it. What is Keim? It’s a lumberyard and home center that caters to the furniture maker and high-end carpenter.
The lumber section, for example, is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Keim stocks both domestic and exotic species that you’d be hard-pressed to find, such as Tree of Heaven, Osage Orange, Butternut, Sassafras and a couple dozen others. On the exotic side, the stock was equally amazing. I’m not into exotics, however, so I didn’t retain a lot of the species names (you can browse the inventory here).
What is equally impressive is how the lumber is presented. Every board is beautifully planed with no tear-out and then drum-sanded. Yup, drum sanded.
The tool section is equally impressive, though it is geared to professional furniture makers with production equipment. Keim carries several lines of machines, such as SawStop, Jet and Rikon. But where the store really shines is in all the shop supplies and accessories. They have every sawblade imaginable, an entire aisle of sanding supplies and deep inventory on handheld electric tools. Plus they do repairs.
There’s an impressive section of hardware, though most of it is geared to the production woodworker (though they had Acorn strap hinges). Plus a huge section for finishing (5-gallon buckets of boiled linseed oil).
And there were entire sections of the store we didn’t explore, such as the custom millwork area.
Oh, and the prices were considerably lower than in the city.
If you are ever passing near Charm, Ohio, I highly recommend a visit to Keim. We’re already planning a return trip to the area to visit some additional lumberyards in the area.
— Christopher Schwarz
The employee parking lot. As many of the employees are Amish, there are more bikes out back than cars.
After 22 years, I am ending my relationship with Popular Woodworking Magazine. My contract runs out at the end of November 2018, and I have informed them I will not renew. Working at Popular Woodworking was the best job I ever had. So it was a difficult decision that took months of thought.
The internet being what it is, I decided to write this blog entry so that when the rumors begin, there is also this blog entry. Let’s structure it as a FAQ.
Why are you leaving? There are several reasons. No. 1 is Lost Art Press. John and I have grown this business to the point where it is difficult to manage Lost Art Press in addition to writing six feature articles a year and (at minimum) 104 blog entries a year for Popular Woodworking.
No. 2 is that the magazine is changing. All magazines change; they have to in order to survive. Many of the changes I’ve observed are dismantling the things I fought for during my tenure there. It feels weird to be part of that, honestly. So I thought it best to step aside.
My leaving is not a condemnation of their work. I’m not asking you to cancel your subscription or write hate mail to the editor. Please don’t. Evaluate the magazine on its own merits and whether the articles are helpful to you – not whether or not my name is in the masthead.
Were you fired or pressured to leave? No and no. The management there has only been supportive of my work at every turn. My contract comes up for renewal at the end of every calendar year. They asked me if I was going to renew, and I said no.
Did they try to tell you what to write? Never. That’s why I’ve stayed with them for so long. My leaving is not the result of editorial pressure. Period.
Will you write for other magazines? Maybe someday. After 22 years with a magazine that I adore, it would feel treasonous (or at least tacky) to jump in bed with another magazine. This change in my life has nothing to do with moving to another publication. My hope is to take a few years off before thinking about this topic.
What will you do instead? I’ve bought a CNC machine, opened a YouTube channel and have secured sponsorships from a dozen makers of tools and fashionable workwear (no, I haven’t done any of these things). Instead, I plan to teach a few more classes per year at our storefront. And work on reducing my backlog of furniture commissions, which is at 12 months right now.
Won’t this hurt your career or reduce your exposure? Probably. But that’s the price for reducing my workload.
Does this have anything to do with Megan Fitzpatrick or Brendan Gaffney? To be certain, I wasn’t happy that they fired Megan and treated Brendan poorly. They’re good friends. But it wasn’t the primary or secondary reason (see the first question above).
What will happen to my blog at Popular Woodworking? I don’t know. It’s their property. They can fold it into their main blog, delete it or hire another simian-looking guy named Christopher Schwarz to continue it. All that content (since 2005 for gosh sake) belongs to them and is theirs to use.
One last question. This one is for you: Could you do me a favor and not trash the magazine in the comments below? I personally hate reading those threads, no matter whose magazine is getting trashed. Otherwise, I’ll try to answer any non-ridiculous questions.
Since June, I’ve been working on a book-publishing project that has ripped up my insides. I can’t talk about it yet – maybe in the next week or so – but the fallout has been odd. Each day, after 10 to 12 hours of editing, processing photos and designing book pages, I have been coming home to write like a madman until I fall asleep on the couch.
