If you’d like to claim that space, call Paula at 317-535-4013 or register via the school’s web site: marcadams.com.
This is the only workbench class I’m teaching this year, and I don’t have any more scheduled for 2015 or 2016 as yet. We’ll be building French-style workbenches using some awesome 12/4 ash from Horizon Wood Products.
Your bench can be up to 8’ long and incorporate any vises that you wish to purchase. The bench design will accommodate almost any vise, from the Benchcrafted products to an iron quick-release vise. The French bench is truly “open architecture.”
Warning: These classes are physical. There is heavy lifting involved. Long days. Camaraderie and brown liquor (after class) are the usual by-products of this class. I highly recommend these classes as a way to get your “dream bench” completed. The heavy equipment (a 24”-wide planer!) helps get the job done so you can get on with the task/joy of building furniture.
Hope you can join us. If we don’t have a taker, I’ll build an extra bench and sell it so I can get an extra kidney and liver installed.
When I travel, I almost never add extra time to the trip for sightseeing. I always have work to do at the bench at home, plus a book to edit and family stuff to take care of.
But during this week in Anchorage, Ak., I had almost a whole day free, and several of the members of the Alaska Creative Woodworkers Association took it upon themselves to give me a crash course in life outside Anchorage.
We drove down to Seward with Jonathan Snyder (a biologist and the famous Alaska Woodworker) and Paul Rupple (a FedEx pilot and a member of the board of directors of the Alaska SeaLife Center) serving up a fascinating commentary on the wildlife, geography and history of the scenery unfolding out the windows of our minivan.
In Seward we toured the Alaska SeaLife Center, where I pet a sea anemone, got up close with an amazing array of shore birds and saw marine animals aplenty. Ever wonder what seal tastes like? Jonathan tried to describe it. I think it would be good in nugget format.
Lunch was a landmark for me: My first piece of fresh halibut. In high school I worked for three years in a fish store, band sawing frozen halibut. That is where I developed my love of the band saw and my dislike of cleaning a meat-cutting band saw. (Wood-cutting band saws are much easier to clean.)
Oh, fresh halibut is %$#&* amazing.
On the way back to Anchorage we stopped at the Byron glacier and climbed up to it. We climbed up to a glacier. A glacier. Dang.
Then we headed back to Anchorage so I could speak to the club about workbenches.
Alaska – at least the small part I saw – is intoxicatingly beautiful. I hope I can return before too long.
The teaching job I was looking forward to the most this year was in Anchorage, AK, with the Alaska Creative Woodworkers Association. I have wanted to visit Alaska since reading Jack London’s “White Fang” as a little boy (yes, I know it takes place in the Yukon Territory).
As it turns out, the state is even more beautiful than I’d imagined. Flying into Anchorage was more like landing in an alien country than an airport. I have simply never seen so much undeveloped wildness.
The woodworkers in Alaska are, of course, just like the woodworkers I have met everywhere else in the world. They are a close-knit and friendly bunch, easy to like and drink a beer with.
The club doesn’t have a dedicated facility, per se. But they hold their classes at the shop of member Don Fall, who has an enormous and fully equipped facility that can easily handle 14 woodworking benches. The shop is on the outskirts of Anchorage, so there is a lot of wildlife.
This morning, the members were smoking ribs for a barbecue, and the No. 1 concern was luring bears in from the woods. And after lunch a moose visited the school and stripped some bark off a birch tree to eat.
This was a small moose – only about a year old – but was bigger than any horse I’ve seen. (I know I sound like a tourist. But getting 10 feet away from a moose is both stupid and incredibly cool.)
For the last two days we have been building precision layout tools – straightedges, winding sticks and try squares – and working on the finer points of sawing, planing and chiseling. Tomorrow we start building Dutch tool chests and will focus on working our butts off.
Some of the fun parts of the class:
• We built Alaskan polissoirs. We made these from a whisk broom and hose clamps. Then we wrapped the whole thing in duct tape. They worked quite well. I only wish the duct tape were camo (so you couldn’t see it).
• Tony Strupulis of Raven’s Edge Toolworks transformed a worthless chisel/rasp into something useful: a bottle opener.
On May 15-16, 2015, smack dab in the middle of Iowa farm country will be the woodworking event of the decade, if not the present century.
During those two days at the Amana Colonies, Handworks 2015 will take place – the largest gathering of hand-tool makers, practitioners and enthusiasts. The cost to attend is nothing. Handworks is a grassroots event organized by the good folks at Benchcrafted, and is about as far away from a high-pressure sale as Amana is from Wall Street.
A few minutes away, Don Williams of The Barn at White Run has arranged for a public exhibit of the H.O. Studley tool chest and workbench. This is the first time these objects have been on display since the chest left the Smithsonian (and it might very well be the last time they are on display for another lifetime). This exhibit is being arranged without any corporate or public sponsorship. Williams, who spent a life-long career at the Smithsonian, is personally arranging the exhibit. The cost to see the exhibit will be $25.
Lost Art Press will be at Handworks selling our full range of books, and many of our authors will be there to sign their books. Roy Underhill will be there to sign his new novel, “Calvin Cobb: Radio Woodworker!” and deliver the keynote address on Saturday morning. We also will have copies of Williams’ book on H.O. Studley. Chairmaker Peter Galbert and George Walker will also be there.
The list of hand-tool makers and woodworkers who will be at the Handworks event is like nothing I’ve ever seen since the first Woodworking in America in Berea, Ky. They are coming from all over the world. The following is a preliminary list and will likely change a bit during the next 12 months. Check the Handworks web site for the most current list.
Anderson Planes
Bad Axe Tools
Benchcrafted
Blue Spruce Toolworks
Blum Tool
Brese Plane
Claire Minihan
Czeck Edge
Daed Toolworks
David Barron
Elkhead Tools
Hamilton Tools
Hock Tools
Jeff Miller
Knew Concepts
Lie-Nielsen Toolworks
Lake Erie Toolworks
Lost Art Press & Friends
Eccentric Toolworks
Roy Underhill
George Walker
Lee and Lindsay Lee
M.S. Bickford
Old Street Tool
Plate 11 Bench Co.
Patrick Leach
Philly Planes
Peter Ross
Sauer and Steiner
Scott Meeks
Slav Jelesijevich
Tools for Working Wood
Veritas
Vesper Tools
Vogt Toolworks
This year, the Handworks event is expanding into a second barn and adding green woodworkers, blacksmiths and timber-framers into the mix. Here are some of the exhibitors there:
Jarrod Stone Dahl
Peter Ross
Claire Minihan
Lee and Lindsay Lee
Jim Sannerud
Peter Galbert
Tim Manney
Carl Swensson
Don Weber
Greg Pennington
Mike Siemsen
If you attended the first Handworks event in 2013, then you know that the 2015 gathering will be something special, if not extraordinary. Not only will you get to talk with fellow hand-tool enthusiasts and learn about the tools we use from the makers themselves, you’ll also get to wander around the beautiful and bucolic Amana Colonies.
During the last four months I’ve had some odd encounters with customers at shows, classes and the like.
Customer (holding a book): “I understand that you aren’t signing books anymore. But would you mind signing this one book for me?”
Me: “Huh? What? I’ll sign anything. Got a baby?”
I am happy to sign anything and with anyone’s name (I do a passable “Roy Underhill” and a crappy “Norm Abram”) on your books, DVDs, T-shirts and bare flesh when you see me. I’ve signed a man’s chest (and I have bad dreams still), and I’ve signed a dozen books in blood in Australia.
What I cannot do is personally sign every book we sell through the Lost Art Press web site. All of our inventory is two hours away, and it changes so rapidly that I would spend a significant amount of time driving, unpacking books and packing them again.
That is why I now sign books via a letterpress bookplate printed by Steamwhistle Press in Cincinnati, Ohio. These are printed on a treadle machine, one-by-one, on quality adhesive-backed paper. I have signed each one individually with an ink pen (non-treadle-powered).
These are not cheap. In fact, they cut into our profit significantly. But that’s OK because we like them.
So next time you see me, lift up your shirt and hand me a Sharpie.
Or, on second thought…. lift up your girlfriend’s shirt and…. Oh nevermind. I’m in so much trouble as it is.
