The following is a composite of letters I’ve received about my personal problem of clocking screws. Note that I don’t think you should clock your screws. in fact, I don’t think you should even think about clocking screws. Think instead about screws with slots at all random angles.
— Christopher Schwarz
Dear Mr. Swartz,
I just read your article about clocking screws and I don’t know where you get the idea that professional cabinetmakers ever clocked their screws. Clocking screws means the screws are either over-tightened or under-tightened, so it is a mark of a poor craftsman with a mental problem.
I bet you line up all your pencils on your desk. Or lick light switches.
Woodworkers wouldn’t have taken the time to clock screws anyway.
I’ll bet you got all your little Communist flags all lined up in your caviar bowls when you have your little anarchist friends over to talk about your anarchosyndicate communes. And you line up your pita crisps, too.
Oh, and good woodworkers never overcut their baselines when dovetailing, either. That – like clocking screws – is just sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.
God Bless America, you Red Overcutting Screw Clocker.
Today I received my advance copy of the standard edition of the book, and it is impressive. The paper is heavy and bright, making the text and plates really leap from the page. The binding, as per usual, is nice and tight. It is a substantial chunk of a book.
To order it with free shipping, click here. This is our final reminder – I’m off to Charleston, S.C., to see my dad and then Pittsboro, N.C., to teach. So I won’t be around to nag you.
I made a short video of the book so you can see what it looks like. I have spared you the banjo tunes this time and have used Bach’s “French Suite 4” as covered by Slayer (kidding about the Slayer part).
Late next week some time, the back-and-forth flow of edited manuscripts for “To Make As Perfectly As Possible: Roubo on Furniture Making,” or “R2” for short in our internal correspondence, will begin between me and Michele Pagan, eventually making their way to my external readers for contextual critiques, and finally to Philippe Lafargue for the ultimate smoothing of the 18th-century French-into-English.
The details of the working process are a little too “inside baseball” to recount here, but I trust the headaches we had with traffic-control on the first volume will be reduced for the second through a much more streamlined process (my directory holds almost a thousand documents for R1). It better be. “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Furniture Making” is almost exactly twice as large as “Roubo On Marquetry.” I can almost see Chris and John reflexively grabbing to protect the corporate wallet. The latter volume took us six-and-a-half years, we are hoping for the former to be complete and on Chris’ desk by this coming spring.
P.S. – Here’s a teaser. For the recent French Oak Roubo Project, Philippe and I worked intensely on the contents of Plate 11 so that I could print and present a polished manuscript on 85# parchment paper – the “owner’s manual” as Jameel Abraham called it – to each participant. I hope it is not unseemly that I believe the result was totally awesome. I hope Chris will bring his copy to WIA for you to see for yourself. My copy is somewhere in the multitude of boxes in The Barn.
Don Williams, the primary force of nature behind “To Make as Perfectly as Possible,” is a man of few vices but many vises.
He doesn’t drink, smoke, curse or even drink coffee. But the man will travel to the ends of the earth to examine pianomakers’ vises. This peculiar, beautiful and woefully undocumented form is featured prominently on H.O. Studley’s workbench. And so Don has spent weeks researching, restoring and examining original pianomaker’s vises.
He has been documenting his findings on his blog. Have you bookmarked it yet? You should.
A 17th-century map of the world drawn by Joseph Moxon.
With our second edition of Joseph Moxon’s “The Art of Joinery” at the printer, I’ve had several e-mails from readers wondering why they should buy a 17th-century woodworking book written by a printer, globe-maker and hydrographer to the king.
Note that “woodworker” is not on Moxon’s CV.
Moxon is probably best known for his treatise on printing, but he also made Bibles, globes, mathematical instruments and theorized that the Arctic was free of ice – encouraging explorers to sail further north to find an open sea and the Northwest Passage. Even Capt. James Cook adopted Moxon’s wrong-headed theory.
In the woodworking world, Moxon is known for publishing the first English-language book on woodworking titled “The Art of Joinery,” which began in 1677 or 1678. His 14 small books on joinery, bricklaying, carpentry, turning and blacksmithing were combined into the now-famous “Mechanick Exercises.”
The book was not intended for joiners. They would have seen the book as superficial – an outsider’s view of the craft told with little detail and subtlety. Yet, “The Art of Joinery” is important – very important – because it is a snapshot of the tools and techniques among English joiners in the 17th century. And we have very few other sources as detailed as Moxon.
In this book, you get an introduction to all the tools in a typical joiner’s kit, from the chisels to the hatchet. You get basic – and actually quite good – explanations of how to flatten a board from the rough, how to cut mortise-and-tenon joints and how to lay out and cut miters of all angles.
For me, it it always important to return to Moxon to understand what was important to the 17th-century joiner. Moxon spills tons of ink on the fore plane but says only a few lines about the smoothing plane. Moxon explains how joiners (and blacksmiths) would use coarse tools for as long as possible. He outlines a tool kit that is small and simple.
In other words, Moxon is the closest thing we have to a direct link to the joiners of the 17th century, where everything was made by hand.
For these reasons, we have chosen to republish “The Art of Joinery” in a format that makes it easy for you to digest, easy for you to understand and helps illustrate why what you are reading is important.
Our book is hardly a hagiography of Moxon. We challenge his observations and assumptions at every point. But we do acknowledge that Moxon is the real deal. His was a serious look at the handcrafts of Great Britain in the 17th century.
You can read all about our version of “The Art of Joinery” here in our store.
And to get a taste of what it is like to read, we’ve prepared a short excerpt that you can download. We are proud of every aspect of the book, from its manufacture to even the font we used for Moxon’s text.
You can order “The Art of Joinery” for $21 with free domestic shipping by visiting our store here. Note that this free-shipping offer expires on Nov. 4.
