The Lost Art Press storefront will be open this Saturday, Oct. 8, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. to sell books, holdfasts from Crucible Tool, T-shirts, posters and the like. The storefront is at 837 Willard St., Covington, Ky. 41011.
We have the new “Stanley Catalogue No. 34” in stock at the store, as well as the red edition of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” We also have a decent selection of blemished books for 50 percent off retail (blemished books are cash only). And a few slightly blemished letterpress tool chest posters.
While you are in Covington, be sure to stop by Covington Coffee on West 12th Street. They have fantastic coffee, Lil’s Bagels and make waffles on weekends. (This is not an advertisement.)
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. We’ve gotten a few curt notes stuffed in our mailbox from customers who have stopped by on a Saturday when the storefront isn’t open. Please note that we are open only the second Saturday of each month – not every Saturday.
During the last 20 years, most woodworkers have adopted 3/4″ as the standard size for holdfasts, bench dogs and other workbench accessories. So why the heck are we making holdfasts at Crucible Tool that have a 1″ shaft?
Simply put: The larger holdfast has more mass, it doesn’t ream out your bench’s holes as fast and we think it just works better.
During the last couple weeks, I’ve written a series of blog entries on the Crucible Tool website that explain our reasoning. Despite this, we continue to get a lot of questions, and so I’ve consolidated all the answers here.
(Side note: We are working on offering a way for you to subscribe to the Crucible Tool blog so you can get updates via email. In the meantime, if you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to it via this feedburner link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Crucibletool-CrucibleNews.)
Editor’s note: Last month we asked Kara Gebhart Uhl to help us with editorial tasks at Lost Art Press. During the last decade, John and I have taken on book projects that are more and more ambitious. And in the next 12 months we’ll be announcing several additional ambitious projects that will take lots of brainpower and red ink.
After months of agonizing over how to manage these projects and keep our sanity, I read a blog entry that struck me like an electric shock. One of my former editorial employees, Kara, was lamenting/celebrating the fact that her kids were all going to be in school during the day.
I sent her an immediate email. She knows woodworking. She knows our editing style. She can already read my mind. And no one – no one – is as organized and on time as Kara.
She agreed to help us out about 10 hours a week and has already started chewing up our backlog of editing – the next Charles Hayward volume is now two months ahead of schedule.
As you’ll see below, Kara is crazy overqualified to work with us, but we hope to treat her well and hang onto her for many years to come.
Fifteen years ago Chris Schwarz hired me as an assistant editor at Popular Woodworking Magazine. I had a magazine journalism degree, and I was hired for my writing and editing skills. My only woodworking skills at the time involved a turned lamp I made in junior high shop class.
Chris served as a mentor, helping me improve my writing and editing, while also teaching me the art of woodworking. I took classes, including a week-long class with Lonnie Bird to build a Shaker end table, and a chairmaking class with Don Weber. Several other pieces see daily use in my home, including a knockdown Arts & Crafts bookcase.
But I never truly fell in love with the physical aspects of woodworking. I did, however, fall in love with the idea of woodworking and, more importantly, the folks who did it. My absolute favorite pieces to write for Popular Woodworking Magazine was a series of articles called Great Woodshops. I’d spend a day in John Wilson’s The Home Shop or in Brian Boggs’s “laboratory,” and I’d simply look and listen, and then retell.
I served as associate and managing editor at Popular Woodworking Magazine, and helped launch Woodworking Magazine. But eventually my love of the craft of writing led me to Writer’s Digest magazine, which was two floors up in the same building.
My daughter, Sophie, was born in 2008. My twin boys were born in 2010. During this time, I quit my job at Writer’s Digest magazine, and went about the daily tasks of raising three young children. We moved into a foursquare built in 1901 in Fort Thomas, Ky., right across the river from Cincinnati.
I worked as a freelance writer and editor, doing the occasional final binder reads for both Popular Woodworking Magazine and Writer’s Digest. I maintained a column at Writer’s Digest, wrote ads, edited Writer’s Market books, and wrote profiles about interesting people for our small city’s blog, www.fortthomasmatters.com.
I also wrote about parenting on my personal blog, www.pleiadesbee.com, and my essays were picked up by TIME: Healthland, The New York Times Motherlode (now called Well Family) and The Huffington Post. It was in the comment sections of those blogs that I developed a thick skin.
I still maintain my freelance workload, all the while working toward my dream of publishing a picture book. I’m represented by Jordy Albert of The Booker Albert Agency and I currently have two out on submission. As Sylvia Plath once said, “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.”
After eight years of being home with my children, working during naps, nights and weekends, my days have changed. In August all three of my children went back to school, full day. What once were a few precious hours here and there has turned into six solid hours at home. Chris, aware of this life change, emailed me, asking if I was interested in helping out.
And so, in many ways, I feel like I’ve come back full circle. I’m once again working with my former mentor, and serving a community of craftspeople who I’ve grown to admire greatly over the years, people who believe in the beauty of working with one’s hands, building objects designed to last longer than themselves. I’m happy to be here.
When we launched the Lost Art Press forum last fall we decided to make it a one-year experiment. This week, John and I are touring a printing plant that we use for Lost Art Press and we had a frank discussion about the forum during the four-hour drive.
The bottom line: We’re shutting it down.
While we’ve been generally happy with the forum in terms of its civility, it has also been a time suck for me, John and Meghan. And when we ran the equation through the goose, we decided that monitoring the forum was a lot of effort that we’d rather spend on publishing books and writing blog entries.
So if you have a question about a book that stumps you, you can always send a message to help@lostartpress.com. Or you can leave a note on the blog. We will still do everything to help you, just like we have since we started this company since 2007.
Thanks to everyone who has participated in the forum in a civil manner – it was greatly appreciated by all of us.
Many woodworkers avoid chairmaking for the joinery, the angles, the special tools required or the materials (green, rived stock?). And when it comes to designing a chair, even experienced woodworkers are hesitant to give it a shot because they are afraid they will produce a buttocks-torture device instead of a comfortable chair.
Producing a comfortable chair is the combination of many factors, but all of them are easily controllable. In my short 13 years as an amateur chairmaker and designer, here are some of the design details that I think are overlooked.
The Saddle Many first-time chairmakers carve the seat so deep you could bake a Bundt cake in it. I’ve seen saddles that are 1” deep and so dramatically shaped that they would look at home on a Klingon battle cruiser.
A little saddling (3/8” or so) is nice and it makes the seat appear to flow. But you can get away with little or no saddling and make a perfectly comfortable chair.
The trick – in my experience – is to design the chair so the front edge of the seat doesn’t bite into the sitter’s thighs. You can do this several ways.
No. 1: Shorten the legs a bit so the sitter’s feet rest flat on the floor and their thighs are just slightly above the front edge of the seat. Many shorter people hate factory chairs because the front edge of the seat restricts the blood flow after a few minutes.
Just like with a table, it’s easy to make it too high. But making it a little lower than typical has zero downsides.
No. 2: Take a jack plane and round off the front edge of the seat. You can also do this with a spokeshave – hollowing out two areas for the thighs. This five-minute operation creates the illusion of a saddle and increases the comfort.
The Back Legs The least comfortable chairs I’ve sat in had a seat that was parallel to the floor. It makes the sitter feel like she is being pitched forward.
I like to have the seat drop 1” (at least) from the front edge of the seat to the back edge. I achieve this by cutting the back legs shorter. Cutting the back legs also has the benefit of angling the back of the chair backward, increasing the comfort.
Don’t over-do it. After removing 1-1/2”, it will start to feel weird. A good way to experiment with this is to prop up the front legs on a 1”-thick scrap and sit in the chair.
The Angle & Height of the Back The backrest doesn’t have to be bored at a reclining angle. You can bore the backrest at 90° and use the fact that the back legs are shorter to make the chair comfortable. However, I do like to recline the back a few degrees back (once you get into chairmaking you’ll find that all the angles are as easy as 90°).
What I have found to be quite critical is the height of the crest rail or backrest. In general, lower seems to be better. Once you put something above the shoulder blades, the lumbar seems to suffer.
You can design a chair that has a high backrest, but I think it’s best to also have something below as well for the lumbar (think Jennie Alexander’s chair).
About the Chair Above Roy Underhill made the chair in the photo at the top of this entry. It’s a reproduction of a chair we both saw at Stratford-upon-Avon last summer. To the eye, it looks uncomfortable. The seat is flat. The arms and seat height are lower than a typical modern chair. And the area created by the arms seems like a tight fit (it is for large people).
But the chair is remarkably comfortable. And, if you watch the current season of “The Woodwright’s Shop,” you’ll see how it’s dirt simple to build.
When we launched the Lost Art Press forum last fall we decided to make it a one-year experiment. This week, John and I are touring a printing plant that we use for Lost Art Press and we had a frank discussion about the forum during the four-hour drive.