I’m teaching two courses in Munich this October at the new and expanded workshop for Dictum GmbH.
Today I visited the new workshop, and it is impressive. Located by the Munich Ostbanhof (east train station), the new facilities are flooded with natural light and have beautiful new German workbenches. And downstairs is Dictum’s Munich store and a huge array of choices for food, culture and lodging.
The classes are taught in English (with German expletives). If you are interested in handwork or getting started in chairmaking, here are the details:
Staked Furniture: 3-legged Stool Oct. 8-9, 2018
I taught this class for the first time this summer, and it is a fun couple of days. In the class I explain how to do compound-angle joinery without math or even numbers. Plus, all the chairmaking techniques I have compiled and refined during my time as a chairmaker. If you do flat work and right-angle projects, this class will open up a new world for you.
Build a Sawbench Oct. 10-12, 2018
This three-day class is great for new woodworkers. The pace is relaxed, and we get to explore all sorts of odd corners of the craft. The last time I taught this class, we also made winding sticks, straightedges and other useful workshop appliances.
Munich is a great city – very easy for international travelers to get to and navigate.
One area of the new Dictum workshop in Munich.
Some of you might be wondering if this new round of classes at Dictum indicates I might teach more in the coming months and years. And the answer is: kinda. I’ve resolved to keep a limited teaching schedule until my youngest daughter has graduated so that I can be a good father.
After her graduation in May 2019 I hope to teach about four weeks a year. (Teaching 18 classes in a year turned out to be a bad idea for my psyche.) I’ll probably teach a couple short courses at our storefront and maybe a week-long course somewhere else (if anyone will have me).
In our research for “Ingenious Mechanicks,” we translated parts of a codex from 1505 that was written and illustrated by Martin Löffelholz. In it, Löffelholz showed what are likely the first modern workbenches with a tail vise and face vise.
During the translation, we also encountered a recipe for what we thought was a love potion.
As “Ingenious Mechanicks” is a woodworking book, and I have no need for a love potion (I’m married), translator Görge Jonuschat and I skipped the love potion section.
Until now.
For my birthday, Görge set out to translate the section and perhaps concoct the potion. But what he found was the “love potion” wasn’t exactly about making someone fall in love with you. Here is his translated text from page 73 of the codex:
If someone fell in love (or else) with you Which comes unwanted or something else, Then from a ditch through which corpses are carried To their grave Take from it one stone, chip off a piece the size of a hazel; Where a crosspiece spans this creek or water, Cut a little splinter Then take moss from a wayside shrine. More accurately arrange a bit of everything, Then add consecrated salt, Place in a neat cloth, Dip into Holy Water, Hang it on that someone’s neck, And it will pass, which is certain. If you’re so inclined, pay heed to remain chaste – If that is your will, etc.
There are a number of ways to read this passage, and I leave that interpretation to you. However, it’s clear that this potion would not be the answer to your awkward high school dreams.
This morning about 4 a.m. I sat bolt upright in bed when the bells at the Niederaltaich Abbey began making an end-of-the-world clanging. Instead of cursing, however, I laid back and felt a small measure of solidarity with the noisemakers.
One of the things I love about teaching (or assisting a teacher) is listening to the students discuss how they accumulate woodworking knowledge. During the last few years of careful listening, I can see how I – as a communicator – am becoming obsolete.
This is not a complaint. I welcome my obsolescence and am happy to stare at it in the face over a beer.
For now, the world belongs to the YouTube woodworker. Advertisers – even car companies – are pouring money into the sector. More important, my students’ conversations revolve around the personalities, projects and exploits of the YouTubers.
This is not a complaint. Maintaining a YouTube channel is damn hard work. Finding an audience has always been the key to surviving in the media profession. And I’ve never chased advertising dollars.
Video is not for me. For me, the best way to learn woodworking is through print and in person. Video bores me to tears. (Yes, I’ve done it. I hated it. I did it to please people I like – not myself.) My brain sees video as inefficient. “Skipping to the good parts” never works. So I have concluded that I have a fundamental disconnect. I would rather read a book, draw on a sheet of paper or go to the dentist than watch someone on my phone build something.
It might have something to do with the way I view sports. I love to play. I hate to watch.
All this is to say that I can feel myself hunkering down for a long winter. Print is – for the most part – in decline. I refuse to give up on it. In fact, I have structured my life so that even if print is flushed down the toilet, processed at a waste treatment plant and then squirted out at some sausage plant in New Jersey, you can’t put me out of business.
My plan is to make woodworking books until I die. Our audience might defect to the short-shorts and man-bun dancing monkeys, but I’ve decided to let the people in 50 or 60 years decide if John and I are doing the right thing.
After you’re worm food and cannot rise to your own defense, that’s the true test.
This idea saturates me here at Niederaltaich Abbey, where I’m teaching woodworking for the next seven days. For the most part, the world has left the monks here behind. And they live a life that is entrenched in an older way.
Brown robes are not my thing (my color analyst says I’m a winter), but yeah, I feel it. Especially at 4 a.m.
We are fast closing in on the publication date of the classic book “Welsh Stick Chairs” by John Brown. This compact book has had a profound effect on woodworkers and designers all over the world. It is the story of a chair that no one had a good name for. And how that chair changed the life of John Brown.
It’s impossible to capture the essence of the book in one blog entry – it’s part history lesson, part autobiography and part practical manual. But the following passage is one of my favorites.
“Welsh Stick Chairs” is available for pre-publication order now in our store. It’s $29, which includes domestic shipping. Full details on our quality edition can be found here.
— Christopher Schwarz
One day I saw a chair in the window of an antique shop in Lampeter. It was like a vision. I had never seen anything that had made so instant an impression on me. To my eyes this chair was beautiful. I had never had any interest in furniture or chairs. Like most people they were just the things you lived with. Now here was this lovely chair. I couldn’t afford to buy it, but I could make one like it. Well, that is what I did. I made one. It took a long time. Chairs of simple form like the stick chair are surprisingly tricky to make. When you’re building them you have to work from points in the air, angles of sticks, angles of legs; there are so many variables. Anyway, I was quite proud when I finished my chair. It looked alright. Of course, I wasn’t able to put a century or two of patina on it. Now, twelve-years-old, it begins to look right. Family “treatment” and a few thousand hours of bum polishing have done the trick!
At this stage I was interested enough to look for books on the subject. There are quite a few, both American and English. I still hadn’t realised that what I had seen in that Lampeter shop was something quite rare and unique – a Welsh chair. Then it was just a Windsor chair. I went to museums. I visited High Wycombe where there is a museum devoted entirely to Windsor chairs. They have a very comprehensive selection of Wycombe factory chairs and English regional chairs. I don’t think there were any Welsh chairs. The English chairs did not have the same spontaneity the same verve as their Welsh counterparts.
I enjoyed my youth. After the valleys I thought England was wonderful. The war started and we could not live in London, and through a series of events of which I have no knowledge, we ended up with a small-holding in the wilds of Kent. (There were wilds in Kent in those days!) We had no electricity, gas or sanitation, we grew much of our own food and kept chickens and a pig. We didn’t realise it then, but we were living the ‘Good Life’. We made few demands on the world’s resources, and I was happy. So, as the Lampeter chair was one step towards my rehabilitation, the building of a tin shed in a field I bought, and a change to the simple life, completed my return. I live very happily without electricity or any other services. I have a workshop, a wood stove and good health. There’s a saying applied to yachts, which applies equally to life, “Add lightness – and simplify.”
A neighbour asked me to build him a chair like mine. I tried to – but it came out different. It was alright, but it wasn’t the same chair. My neighbour was pleased. He has the chair now, he keeps it in the bookshop he owns. It then occurred to me that the reason for the diversity of pattern in the old Welsh chairs was that the makers did other things as well. They were not chair-makers as such, they were wheelwrights, coffin-makers, carpenters, even farmers. When there was need for a chair, somebody in the village made it, or they made their own. They didn’t have patterns and jigs for continuous production. They had no consistent supply of uniform material. They used their eyes and their experience. It was like a sculptor doing his work, they ‘thought’ the chair, then they built their ‘think’. Some of these chairs are a disaster to sit on, most uncomfortable, but they all have a kind of primitive beauty.
This morning I freaked out a bit. Tomorrow I head to Dictum GmbH’s classroom at Niederaltaich Abbey, and I realized that I’ve forgotten my universal translator.
The universal translator has nothing to do with transforming my English to German (the class is taught in English with German curse words and American showtunes). Instead, the universal translator is a tape measure that has both U.S. Customary Units (inches) and metric.
This way I can translate my drawings and instruction into metric without asking (for the thousandth time): An inch is about 25mm, right?
So I stopped in a hardware store in Munich named Suckfüll. It was a small store, smaller than your neighborhood ACE or DoItBest, but it had a shockingly good selection of woodworking tools. As I was looking for tape measures, I stumbled on traditional beech try squares (where both the blade and handle are wood) in several sizes. And miter squares that were also 100 percent wood.
The last time I saw that in the U.S. was never.
A little farther down the aisle and there was a complete selection of Two Cherries bench chisels, more than I’ve ever seen in a Woodcraft. Next to that – a full selection of carving tools. I turned around – wooden jointer planes and smoothing planes. And a full line of wooden-handled screwdrivers.
Lest you think this was a woodworking specialty store, the rest of the place was filled with typical hardware store stuff. Light fixtures, extension cords and small appliances.
Sadly, the only thing they didn’t have that I really wanted was Suckfüll T-shirts.
