George Walker, one of the authors of “By Hand & Eye,” handed me a small box of tools yesterday as the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event in Cincinnati was winding down.
The tools were intended for the students at my Hand Tool Immersion class this fall at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. While some of the students have their own tools, many will need some of the basics to complete the tool chest we’re building.
I picked through the box of well-cared-for, user-grade tools and thanked George.
He picked up a Brown & Sharpe 12” combination square from the top of the pile that looked like it had seen a lot of years. It had a well-patinated standard head, plus the protractor and center-finding heads.
“When I was an apprentice, this was my square,” he said, smiling a bit.
I know that my face screwed up a bit when I replied: “You’re giving away your first combination square? You sure you want to do that?”
“Sure,” he said. “During the last several years I found I have a lot less need for rulers in my work.”
Touche, George. This fall some lucky beginning woodworker is going to end up with a sweet tool with an even better story behind it.
Whether you realize it or not, we pour a significant amount of the money you send us into our research library. While it might not be as impressive as the mechanic’s library at Winterthur or the American College of the Building Arts, we want to be grounded in the past as we write and edit books.
We use local libraries when we must, but it’s unwise to do research at the University of Cincinnati at 5:30 a.m. in your underwear. And that’s exactly what I was doing this morning as I was trying to shake off some jet lag from my trip to the Northwest. Something led my hand to Jan van Vliet’s “Book of Crafts & Trades” (Early American Industries Association, 1981).
This reprint includes a reappraisal of van Vliet as an artist after many years of academic dismissal or scorn. However, all I could think about this morning were the tables, stools and benches shown in the plates.
Of course, they were practically all staked construction, with the kind of detail only the Dutch can muster. Finding this small cache of amazingly detailed drawings was just what I needed for a couple of the projects in “Furniture of Necessity.”
And so to celebrate, I bought a reprint of a related book from 1568. So, if you wouldn’t mind buying a few extra Lost Art Press T-shirts this week….
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.
