You can now purchase our limited edition “marriage mark” hats in the online store. The hats are $27, and that price includes shipping in the United States (sorry these hats are not available to international customers).
You can purchase your hat via this link. You might want to hurry as there are only 100 available.
These are hats were embroidered and stamped by Texas Heritage Woodworks, so the work is crisp and perfect. These hats are made in China by Adams. But they are the best hat we could find before getting into the $100 baseball cap territory.
We’ve just posted a new video at Crucible Tool’s blog on how to create two additional (and useful) tip shapes for your dividers. One tip is designed specifically for scribing arcs. The other is for cutting inlay or recesses.
While we show these tips on our Improved Pattern Dividers, they can be created on any pair of dividers.
Also in the short video, Raney demonstrates a down-and-dirty way to harden and temper the tips with a torch.
Our printing plant is in the final stages of work on “Carving the Acanthus Leaf” by Mary May. And, as always, our books are a creative struggle to the end.
This week we’ve been working on the “diestamp,” the debossed image on the inside of the dust jacket. We take great pains with our diestamps because they will live on longer than our dustjackets. (If you want to see my favorite diestamp, check out the one for “Calvin Cobb – Radio Woodworker!” and see if you can figure out the Easter egg.)
Diestamps are old technology. And though many printing plants can produce amazing covers with holograms, laser cutouts and unusual leather finishes, getting a diestamp with fine detail is a struggle. Almost every time I send our diestamp to the nice people at our prepress service, I am sure they smack their collective foreheads.
Their response is usually: I don’t think we can hold that level of detail without the image blurring.
To their credit, they are willing to try different approaches. Lately, we’ve been using a stamp made from magnesium and some different foils to see if we can achieve the fine lines shown in the samples above. In this case, we found the correct combination of a magnesium die and a cream foil that gave us the effect we’re looking for.
With the diestamp complete, our job is over. It’s up to the printing plant to bring all the different parts – the book block, boards, endsheets, cover cloth and dustjacket – together to complete the book. We haven’t been told when the book will ship, but history suggests it will be in within the next three weeks.
We took a break from our chairmaking class this morning to visit Jennie Alexander in Baltimore, Md., and hear a bit about her progress on the third edition of “Make a Chair From a Tree.”
During Jennie’s presentation she showed us a curious mallet made from a local oak branch. It was turned like a froe club with the pith running through the dead center. This kind of mallet is, according to the normal rules of wood movement, not a good idea. Because wood moves more along the annular rings than across them, the mallet should split.
But this mallet was dry and perfect. No splits.
Jennie explained that she did this by turning the mallet while it was green, then she coated both ends of the mallet with a heavy layer of tallow. This, she said, forced the moisture to leave the mallet through the face grain of the mallet. (Usually the moisture prefers to leave through the end grain.) This, she said, is what prevented it from cracking.
This sort of conundrum has always fascinated me. And it’s a topic that I and a few other woodworkers will be covering in an upcoming podcast. (Yes, we’re starting a podcast, but it won’t be about the things we’re building in our shops, or tool reviews, or listener mail. Details to come.)
We’ve just received our shipment of the first printing of “From Truths to Tools” by Jim Tolpin and George Walker. We’ll start shipping out the people who placed pre-publication orders in the next seven days.
So this is the last call for people who would like to order the book and receive a free download of the book. Order by Oct. 30 so you can get the free pdf download with your printed copy of the book. After that date the pdf will cost extra.
