We will start selling Crucible Lump Hammers at noon Eastern on Wednesday. You can read all the details here. If you have questions or need assistance with Crucible, please use the help@crucibletool.com address. Sending questions to Lost Art Press will only delay the response.
— Christopher Schwarz
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.”
You can download the chapter via this link:
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.
— Christopher Schwarz
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 Business it good – as it should be because Auriou rasps are the best – but the company’s equipment is outdated.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.
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.
Let the games begin.
— Christopher Schwarz
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
