During the last five years, I’ve made considerable changes to the innards of the tool chests I build for customers. Most of these changes are details, really, but they are informed by the fact that I work out of a tool chest every day.
The most significant of the changes is in the runners for the three tills. On the original chest, the runners for the lower till didn’t extend all the way from front to back. They stopped at the saw till (see above).
The reason for this was to imitate several historical chests that also had a door to the lower parts of the chest. After building the chest with the door, I found it silly. So I removed it. But I was stuck with the runners.
Now when I build a chest, I make all three runners run from the front to the back.
The other change to the runners is that I now bead the top edge of each runner. It looks nice, and the rounded edge prevents the runners from splintering in service.
This is quick work with a 3/16” beading plane.
Next up: The sawtill. It’s smaller and has less room for your weed stash.
After a good deal of wrangling and evaluating a lot of brands, we are happy to announce that five different designs of Lost Art Press T-Shirts are available again in our store.
The good news is that we have found a good supplier of shirts. The quality and the price is excellent. As a result, we have lowered the price of the shirts to $25 (and that price includes free domestic shipping). Also good news: This 100-percent ring-spun cotton shirt is available in a range of sizes from small to 3X.
These shirts ship to the U.S. and Canada. Shipping to the U.S. is free. Canadians pay an extra $8. (Sorry: We earlier thought we could ship these to Europe but were mistaken.)
Here’s the not-so-good news. We couldn’t find a domestic shirt supplier we were happy with. So these Gildan shirts are made in Nicaragua and printed in the United States. Also, this shirt is available only in two colors: navy blue and black.
Here are the five designs currently available:
Lost Art Press logo shirt: This shirt features our current logo (the one at the top of the screen) that was hand-drawn by designer Tom Lane.
Lost Art Press “Badge” logo shirt: This shirt features a hand-drawn logo by Joshua Minnich with our dividers shown in a badge.
Lost Art Press Beehive logo shirt: One of our favorite logos (also from Joshua Minnich), this logo features a skep and bees.
Lost Art Press Bandito shirt: Dovetail saws and skulls. Need we say more? Drawn by Shelby Kelley.
Anarchist’s Design Book logo shirt: Featuring the “marriage mark” from the cover of the book. Whenever I wear this shirt I get lots of questions about it.
Before you order, please check this size chart so you don’t end up looking like an overstuffed bratwurst or a jawa.
Chest sizes:
S 34-36
M 38-40
L 42-44
XL 46-48
2XL 48-50
3XL 52-54
Please note that all apparel is made to order and is not returnable unless defective.
Finally, we know there will be complaint and calls for different designs, different colors, long sleeves, pockets and shirts with the nipples cut out with fur around the holes. Please know that this is the best we can do right now.
The book that became “Chairmaker’s Notebook” began as a chat with chairmakers Peter Galbert and Curtis Buchanan. We made a plan to produce a video of Curtis building a chair that would be accompanied by a pamphlet from Peter illustrating the construction details.
But that’s not why I remember that meeting with Peter and Curtis. Instead, I am continuously struck by something Curtis said to me in that cabin in Berea, Ky. Curtis began talking about teaching woodworking.
“We’re all not as good as people think we are,” he said. “We’re all frauds.”
This was Curtis Expletive Deleted Buchanan. A guy who has more skill than 10 magazine-grade woodworkers. And he was sitting before me explaining that – like all human beings – he has insecurities about his work.
If I ever get a tattoo, it’s going to be that quote from Curtis.
So this blog entry is a public service announcement. No matter how facile you think another woodworker operates, know that he or she spends a significant amount of time in personal freak-out mode.
This week was my week for this. I have a magazine article due on Monday about a simple chair with tricky geometry. I spent the entire week ruining $200 worth of perfectly good pieces of maple. And on Friday afternoon, I built the chair for the fifth time, and it actually worked.
I am a fraud. The craft of woodworking kicks me down the stairs and steals my lunch money on an almost daily basis. The only thing I have going for me – my only superpower, I suppose – is that I get right back up. I take a short walk to calm my mind. And I build the damn chair for the fifth time.
Richard Jones’s opus on wood technology – “Cut & Dried: A Woodworker’s Guide to Timber Technology” – is almost ready to go to the printer. There are just a few last-minute freak-outs to tend to today. And wrapping up the cover, which turned into a craft project this week.
“Cut & Dried” will be one of the largest books we’ve published (at about 400 pages) and covers every aspect of our beloved material, from how it grows, all the way to how it behaves when it’s in a finished piece of furniture. In between, Jones covers every aspect of the material, from fungi and pests to sawmills and kilns.
And, most importantly, the book is told from the perspective of a woodworker. Jones is a lifelong professional woodworker and instructor. While there are many other fine books on wood technology out there, Jones thought they were aimed more at a scientific audience than at furniture makers. And we agreed.
So Jones spent many years researching, writing, photographing and drawing this book to develop what we think is the most complete and understandable guide to wood.
We’ll be talking more about Jones’s exhaustive treatment of the topic in the coming days. But first, a look at how we developed the cover. It also involved woodworking.
“Cut & Dried” delves deep into the structure of trees and how that affects your work at the bench. And so I wanted a cover that displayed the structure without being too technical about it – this book is not written for wood scientists.
During my experiments with shou sugi ban, I became fascinated with how a torch can burn away the earlywood in some softwoods, leaving the hard latewood and exposing the pores that transmit fluid in the tree. I wondered if this could result in a woodblock-like print for the cover. After searching around, I became inspired by the work of Shona Branigan who does this sort of thing but takes it to a sublime artistic level.
This week, Megan Fitzpatrick, Brendan Gaffney and I spent a day messing around with different trees to make a block for the cover. In the end, Megan snitched an offcut of a neighbor’s Christmas tree – a Scot’s pine – that we cut, burned, brushed and inked. It took us about 25 tries to get the look we wanted.
If all goes to plan we’ll be offering this book for pre-publication ordering next week. When it’s released, we’ll have details on pricing and the ship date.
Getting the lid, the dust seal, the carcase and the top skirt of the tool chest all working in tandem requires some care. Small errors compound quickly.
In the end, the lid should overhang the carcase by about 1/16” on its front and ends before you attach the dust seal. Sometimes you have to trim the lid. Sometimes you have to trim the carcase.
Trimming the lid is straightforward. Mark what you want to remove and plane it away.
Trimming the carcase can be trickier. On one carcase on my bench today, the lid was out of square by less than 1/16” over its 24” width. The best solution was to trim the carcase. But the wood that needed to be removed was a thin taper that started at less than 1/16” at one end and diminished to nothing at the other end.
To mark this out I use blue tape.
I first used a knife to mark where the taper should begin. Then I laid the tape down on the edge of the carcase. I put a shoulder plane on the carcase. Because of the tape, I can easily see the wood I need to remove (even with 49-year-old eyes). If I get any blue tape in the mouth of the plane, I know I’ve gone too far.
The Dust Seal The dust seal is dovetailed at the two front corners and wraps around three edges of the lid. With these two particular chests, the dust seal is 1-3/8” wide. The problem here is the slope of the dovetails.
Usually I use a 1:4 slope for dovetails (about 14°). The problem is that the slope is a little extreme for a piece of wood 1-3/8” wide. So I use a less-radical slope, 1:8 or about 7°. This slope makes the base of the dovetail a good deal beefier.
While I’ve gotten away with a 1:4 slope on the dust seal, it looks like a pencil-necked chicken.
