Many of you told us that “blue” was not a manly enough color. And so we now offer our hats in battleship gray with black thread.
These hats are – like everything in the Lost Art Press store – made in the United States. The soft and unstructured hat is made by Bayside and embroidered in Indiana. The hat’s size is adjustable by a steel clasp and headband. It fits everyone except Sean Thomas.
They are in stock and available for immediate shipment. The cost is $17.
My Dutch tool chest isn’t big enough to hold full-size handsaws, so I’ve been on a long search for the right panel saws that fit the chest and suit the work I do on the road.
After searching three tool-swap meets without success, I grew tired of the hunt and asked Matt Cianci at the SawWright.com to find some panel saws for me and fix them up so they were good to go.
I’d met Cianci in person for the first time last year at a meeting of the Early American Industries Association (no good panel saws there, either). There I watched him sharpen a few saws and tried out several of the saws he had sharpened or made. The guy is dead serious about saws, and his filework is both crisp and precise.
The panel saws arrived this week, and I’ve been breaking them in. For those who are curious about the configurations of my saws, here are the details of what I like in toolbox saws.
Crosscut Panel Saw: Matt found a 22” Disston D8 that he restored for me. The saw is taper-ground (.035” at the toothline; .025” at the spine). Matt filed it as an 8-point with 15° of rake and 25° of fleam. That is a good general filing configuration for a crosscut saw – a filing I also have on my full-size handsaw.
The saw was made during the early years of the 20th century – check out the Disstonian Institute to learn a crazy amount of information on dating Disston saws.
Rip Panel Saw: Spear & Jackson No. 88, also with a 22” blade. Matt estimates it’s circa 1930. This saw is also taper-ground, though not as much as the Disston. Matt refiled this one with 7 points, 0° rake and 0° fleam. That is a fairly standard filing for someone who is comfortable with rip saws. If you are a new sawyer, you might like 3° to 5° of rake to make the saw easier to manage.
I file my own saws and am good at it. But Matt is embarrassingly better. If you have some old saws that need to be refiled or restored, I highly recommend you drop Matt a line. I am a satisfied customer. Matt’s filing job will be an excellent foundation for me as I file these saws in the future.
Thanks Matt – not only for digging up these saws for me, but for making sure the “art manual” of saw filing isn’t lost. After Tom Law died, I was worried. Now, not so much.
The late Frank David at Midwest Woodworking in Norwood, Ohio, was quite particular about who could use the machines in his shop. It took several visits before Frank would let me operate his massive radial-arm saw, jointer and planer.
To say he was deeply concerned about my safety isn’t quite right. It was more accurate to say that he didn’t want to get my blood on his machinery.
“Once a machine gets a taste of blood, it’s useless,” he’d say. “I have to get rid of it.”
During Frank’s long life as a woodworker and employer, he observed that certain machines were cursed. Once they were involved in an accident, more accidents would follow on that machine.
A scientific mind could formulate several theories as to why this might be true:
1. The machine was inherently unsafe. Accidents were bound to happen over and over on a machine with an ill-fitted guard or a poor design for a cutterhead.
2. After an accident, workers would be psychologically affected when using a machine that had been involved in an accident. Their lack of confidence would lead to another accident.
3. Machines that were involved in an accident might become neglected. And that neglect could lead to a machine that was “bitey.”
4. Hemoglobin-loving fairies start growing in the dust-collection chute and offgas a neurotoxin that makes you think about giving a foot massage to Uma Thurman when you should be watching the cutterhead and fence.
To be honest, I think a little superstition and ritualistic behavior is a good thing in a woodworking shop. Think of baseball players who perform odd luck-inducing activities before going to bat (wearing a special piece of underwear, picking their noses in a special way). They repeat an activity exactly as they did once before (licking that lightswitch six times) so the result (home run!) is the same.
In the shop, I have many activities that I perform as ritual. The way I sharpen, chisel, fit dovetails and rip on a table saw are practically scripture. They might look odd – I always grip my honing guide with my left hand. My left thumb presses the plane iron in place as my right hand uses a screwdriver to tighten the guide’s screw. But the rituals remove as many variables as possible from an equation that has one incredible wild card: the wood itself.
Now if you will please excuse me, I have to do six jumping jacks while humming Prince’s “Batdance.” I have tenons to cut.
This week I will install a leg vise on my Holtzapffel workbench in our sunroom, which is my shop on the first floor. I’ve had a twin-screw vise on Holtzapffel since I built it six years ago; when I’m done with this leg vise, I’ll be able to switch between leg vise and twin-screw with ease.
I’ve wanted to add a leg vise to the Holtzapffel for a long time, but I waited for one single reason: I wanted to use a Benchcrafted Classic metal screw on the bench. Jameel and Father John Abraham have been developing this vise for a long time, and I finally received my hardware while I was away in either Alaska or Maryland.
I’m going to install the Classic screw in tandem with Benchcrafted’s Crisscross Retro, a piece of hardware I’ve been sitting on impatiently for many months now.
My hope is this will be the most highly evolved form of metallic leg vise yet.
This morning I pulled out all the bits and pieces of the vise so I could plan out the maple vise chop. Handling Benchcrafted hardware is like holding jewelry, and the Classic is equal parts “space age” and “bad-ass.” The screw has a double-lead acme thread, which moves smoothly and quickly (1/2” per rotation). That’s very fast (check out the video on the Benchcrafted site). The machining on the screw and nut are fantastically smooth.
On the other hand, the hub, Tommy bar and flange are “Parkerized” like a firearm, which protects the surface from rust and is way cooler than paint.
The Tommy bar is also thoughtfully designed. The metal ends unscrew. And the way the Tommy bar interacts with the hub is quite cool. There is a detent in the Tommy bar that intersects with a spring-loaded plunger in the hub. This allows you to lock the Tommy bar in the middle of its length for coarse adjustments. Or you can let it swing free for maximum leverage.
It’s almost like magic.
I haven’t been this excited about vise hardware in a long time. If you are considering adding a leg vise or are building a new bench this year, I recommend you take a hard look at the Benchcrafted Classic and Crisscross combination.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. I know commenters are going to ask me to compare this to a wooden screw. Save your breath. It’s an aesthetic choice more than a functional one in my opinion. Wooden screws like those from Lake Erie are on par with the quality of the Benchcrafted stuff. So it’s like handplane bodies. Which do you prefer: metallic or wooden? They both work great.
Students David, Rebecka and Pete showing off the results of their work.
When it comes to the issue of transporting a fully constructed Anarchist’s Tool Chest home, not every woodworker owns a truck. And even though the finished dimensions of the chest are easy to calculate, some people’s eyes are bigger than their Impalas.
I have had to do some wacky things to chests to get them into cars. On a few of the weirder ones, I am sworn to secrecy. Among the less weird:
• Shrink-wrapping it to the top of a Honda, “Beverly Hillbillies” style.
• Building it completely without glue so it can be flat-packed like Ikea stuff.
• Abandoning it at the school!
This week student David Eads pulled another common trick: Taking the car door off the hinges to get just enough space to sneak the chest into the back seat of a sedan. The whole process took 10 minutes. Tips: Have a box below the door and helpers so you can remove the door gently without destroying the wiring or dropping the door on the ground (this has happened.)
I head home on Sunday with this tool chest on my mind. We are getting the electronic files ready for our sixth printing of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” Love it or hate it, this is the book that let me quit my job. So thank you for buying it.
