Lost Art Press will be at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event at Popular Woodworking Magazine this weekend (April 17-18), with books, T-shirts and even some furniture to show.
We’ll be bringing the just-released “Chairmaker’s Notebook,” plus all the other titles in our catalog.
In addition, I’m bringing a finished three-legged backstool and trestle table from my forthcoming book “Furniture of Necessity.” So come take a look at these designs and sit in the chair to see if it’s stable or not (drunkards welcome). We’re also happy to sign any books while we’re there – even if we didn’t write them.
This year, we’re planning a meet-up for Friday night at one of the local breweries. We’ll have details at the show on Friday (we haven’t finalized them, yet, or I’d post them here).
As always, the Lie-Nielsen show at Popular Woodworking has a good stable of exhibitors:
And, of course, the staff of the magazine. They usually sell a whole bunch of books and DVDs at great prices at this show, so be sure to check that out.
For the last couple months, I’ve been working on a new T-shirt design that combines the skep – a traditional beehive – with the tools of the woodworking artisan.
For many years, the skep was the symbol of the industrious joiner or cabinet-maker, and it shows up in woodworking books and on documents throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. (Read more about that here.) After fleshing out the idea with some preliminary sketches, I sent my ideas to Ohio artist Joshua Minnich, who designed our most recent shirt.
Joshua produced the fantastic logo you see above. In the coming weeks, we will offer this logo printed on T-shirts in a full range of sizes (XS to 3XL) and colors (gray, blue, red, black and orange). These will be available worldwide at a very reasonable shipping cost.
We are using American Apparel shirts, which are made in California, and the shirts will be printed in California. These shirts run a little tight, so we strongly recommend you order one size larger than typical. (Doing this does not mean you are fat; it just means you aren’t a skinny hipster.)
We’ll start selling these shirts as soon as we have our final printed samples in hand for photography.
In preparation for a recent trade show in China, John Economaki of Bridge City Toolworks had a nutty idea for a gimmick in his booth: a planing jig for making chopsticks.
As it turned out, people lined up at the show for a chance to make perfectly planed chopsticks at the show.
“I hit on something very deep in the Chinese culture,” John says during a chat in his office. “I have never seen so much joy in my entire life.”
Kids, women and adults of all ages used his little tabletop jigs to make the perfect tapering sticks that end in a petite tapered octagon. Then they used one of the Bridge City Jointmaker Pros to saw a pyramid shape at the top.
What started as a fun idea – almost a bit of a joke – is headed into production. The Chopstick Master is, like all Bridge City tools, a cunning invention from Economaki’s restless mind. And after he told me about the jig over dinner last week, I knew I had to stop at his Portland, Ore., office on my way to the airport to make a pair of chopsticks.
The chopsticks start as a pair of straight, square-section sticks, padauk in this case. Then they are wedged into the jig to bend the wood on a diagonal into a shallow S-shape.
Why? Because of the block plane used in the jig. Thanks to the skewed, slightly bent chopstick you can use the entire width of the iron while planing the chopstick to its initial tapered shape. That reduces sharpening.
Also cool are the plane’s two depth skids that poke out from the side of the plane like a catamaran. The skids capture the plane on a track and control the cutting action. When the plane stops cutting, you are done with that operation.
It is very difficult to mess up the process. Here’s what it’s like:
You number each face of the stick one through four and wedge the stick in the jig with No. 1 facing up. Plane face No. 1 and then plane face No. 2 in the same manner.
Then you turn a knob on the side of the jig to change the pitch of its bed and plane sides No. 3 and 4. You have just created a perfect tapered stick.
Then you drop the stick into the V-shaped notch in the jig, which then shows the four corners of the chopstick to the plane. Then you plane away and create a tiny, perfect octagon on the last four inches or so of the chopstick.
You are done. Time elapsed (with instruction from the maker) about 5 minutes. I then cut a small pyramid shape on the top of each chopstick using the Jointmaker Pro and broke the edges with a small piece of fine sandpaper.
Totally brilliant.
If you are interested in being notified about the development of the Chopstick Master, go to ChopstickMaster.com. Economaki is working out the details of manufacturing and pricing – but I think you are going to be amazed at the price (including the plane). I’ll get one –to have it at my next dinner party and try to hook a few people into woodworking.
Making polissoirs (a wood polishing tool) from local materials during a woodworking class is always fun, though it isn’t always easy. Getting the broom corn for the core of the tool is usually a snap. Hose clamps we can usually scare up. But then we need wax and something to wrap everything up tightly.
This week at the Guild of Oregon Woodworkers we made Roubo-style try squares and then made a couple polissoirs to finish them.
I conned a student to drive me to a local grocery store where we found a whisk broom and an assortment of hose clamps. The store didn’t have beeswax, however, so we had to buy paraffin. And to wrap it all up I grabbed some black 3M duct tape.
After cinching the broom corn tight with the hose clamps I mummified the thing with the duct tape, which was shockingly shiny. And when paired with the silvery metallic hose clamps, it had sort of dominatrix look (not that I know what that really looks like, Lucy).
Then we had to melt the wax to charge the polissoir. But there wasn’t a working microwave (or so we thought). So we did what any self-respecting group of nutjobs would do. We tried to melt the wax in a Coke can we perched on a Subaru’s engine block.
The Subi’s engine was surprisingly efficient, however, and the wax remained solid after 20 minutes. Another student found a sort-of-working microwave, and so he started nuking the paraffin. In the meantime, a third student remembered he had a gas camping stove in his car and brought it into the shop.
We fired it up and within two minutes we had all the hot liquid wax we could desire.
Melted paraffin migrates readily into the broom corn of a polissoir, but it doesn’t create the same sort of tool as when you use beeswax. I need to do some more experiments and reading to explain myself. But the bottom line is that it worked fine. It was just a different experience.
As always, we gave away the polissoirs to the students after everyone polished up their squares. By the way, Oregon oak (Quercus garryana) takes very well to the burnishing from a polissoir.
When I got the privilege to measure an antique Japanese toolbox in 2013, I knew I had to build a reproduction. I just didn’t know it was going to take me two years to get around to making this simple but beguiling box.
The first problem was the hardware. I spent entirely too much time searching all over the world for manufactured dome-head nails to secure the toolbox’s finger joints. I came very close to finding the right nails in France and then again somewhere out in the desert. But there was always something fouling the works – the size of the head, the length of the shaft or the raw material (silver is probably a poor choice).
So I conned John Switzer at Black Bear Forge to make the nails and pulls. Note to self: Start with a blacksmith next time.
The wood was the next hurdle. Logically, I should build the toolbox using pine or cypress – a lightweight and strong wood that is easy to get. But I want the venti experience, so I started looking for Port Orford cedar. A fair amount of this stuff is exported to Japan for woodworking and building temples, so that would be a nice wood to use.
As I’m in the Pacific Northwest this week, I decided to spend a morning hunting up some Chamaecyparis lawsoniana in the Portland, Ore., area. After about 10 phone calls, I found a yard that had some. When I got there, I found they had three short boards. Three short boards that were split, warped and pecked with loose knots. I call this stuff: firewood.
Luckily, the yard had some gorgeous, dry-as-a-popcorn-fart vertical-grain Douglas fir. So I purchased an 16’-long clear stick of this wood as a backup plan. The antique toolbox I measured was quite possibly made from Douglas fir, according to the people who studied the box along with me.
The employees at the lumberyard were nice enough to cut the stock up into manageable chunks for my rental car so I could ship it back to Kentucky.
Mission accomplished. Or perhaps not. More on this story on Monday.
Lost Art Press will be at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event at Popular Woodworking Magazine this weekend (April 17-18), with books, T-shirts and even some furniture to show.
