The champion of chopping, the superlative of sawing, it’s Megan – teaching dovetailing today.
Megan is teaching a Dutch tool chest class during the next three days, so today is all about dovetails in the bench room. It’s also all about dovetails at our warehouse – we have just restocked with Crucible Dovetail Templates. They are ready to ship.
These handy little tools mark out 1:6, 1:8 and 90° – everything you need to lay out the shape of the joint. The templates are made in Kentucky and are milled out of one piece of steel to ensure the tool is perfectly 90°. (It’s not a wasteful process; all the excess steel is recycled.)
It’s a pretty little thing.
I am trying to figure out how to offer this tool with 1:4, which is the redneck slope I prefer. I’ll keep you posted on our progress.
We also continue to look hard for warehouse space in Covington. We have a couple good leads. One place used to be a grocery store. The other used to be an auto repair service and was built in the early part of the 20th century. Either way, I’ve got the right shirt.
For the last year I’ve been building chairs using slabs of bog oak that are 2,000 years old (according to a carbon dating test) and was harvested in Poland.
Furniture maker Andy Brownell is responsible for starting me down this path. He offered me some scraps of bog oak from one of his commission pieces. After experimenting with it and building a chair using the scraps, I was sold.
Together we bought a large chunk of a bog oak tree. It was the most I have ever spent on a single load of wood. However, don’t be freaked by that statement. Because I work almost entirely with common domestic woods that aren’t highly figured, my lumber bill has always been minimal.
This entry is about my experiences with the wood – good and bad. I’ve worked before with some older bog oak from Denmark, so I have a little perspective. But I am not an expert. Trees, like people, are individuals and are weird.
The hammer test I perform with chair parts.
Strength
My biggest concern with the bog oak was that it wasn’t strong enough to use for a chair. This is oak that has been in a peat bog for 2,000 years and is on its way to becoming petrified. After wallowing in an anaerobic environment filled with turtle poop, is it too weak?
The good news is that the tree we bought was fast-grown oak. Some of the annular rings are 3/8” apart. Fast-grown oak is typically stronger than slow-grown oak. Also, the grain was incredibly straight, except at the butt of the tree. I have never worked with wood that is this rod-straight.
I made some sample chair-sized parts – legs, stretchers, sticks and arms. Then I propped the test pieces up on 4×4 blocks and smacked them with our lump hammer. Hard. They all survived just fine. No cracking, though they dented a little more easily than modern European oak.
Because the parts passed the test, I made some chairs using the bog oak.
Working Properties
The bog oak feels a bit like plowing dirt at times, instead of slicing wood. The wood requires more effort to saw, chisel and shape than modern European oak (which I have a lot of experience with). I also feel like it is more difficult to get a finished surface, but it’s not because of tear-out. It’s because the stuff is dense and resists you.
It smells quite a bit when you cut it with electric machines. And the smell it makes is: bottomland. Mud, dirt and cod poo. But it’s not awful. The worst-smelling wood I ever used was mahogany that had been sunk in the Amazon for 200 years. When you cut it, it smelled like rotten, burning fish that had been injected right into your nose.
The smell goes away quickly. And the finished pieces have zero smell (just like normal wood).
A slab of bog oak that shows the color variation.
Color
Bog oak gets darker as it percolates in the bog. I’ve worked with 4,000-year-old stuff that is almost black. This 2,000-year-old stuff has lots of variation. The wood by the bark is nearly black. The majority of the heartwood is a chocolate brown. And some parts are tan or khaki. And you see that variation all in one board from one tree.
So you have to think about color the entire time, even though the wood comes from the same damn tree. A stick from the bark part of the tree can look radically different from a stick 3″ away.
Downsides and Defects
Wood that has been under ground/water for a long time can have some faults. I find far more structural faults with bog oak than standard European oak. Some of these splits and cracks look like the result of the wood being dried. Other cracks look much older (something killed this tree and sent it into the bog).
When ripping up the stuff, you absolutely have to pay close attention to the end grain and look for splits. Most of the splits I have found are near the pith of the tree, but I have also found some out by the bark.
I reject anything with a split for structural parts (basically all my chair parts). These pieces are fine for boxes or stuff that doesn’t support a human body, but shakes and chair parts don’t go together.
The other odd quality of the wood is that it’s not good for making wedges. I made many bog oak wedges to secure the legs and sticks of the chair. It was poor wedge material. When struck on its end grain, the bog oak was mushy and split easily. (Even though it was strong when struck 90° to the end grain – weird.)
Here you can see the color variation.
The Upside
The stuff is beautiful, even with simple finishes. I use linseed oil and beeswax, and the range of color is extraordinary, from coal black to an olive green. Plus, after five or six chairs, I have found ways to use this color shift to my advantage in the design.
All in all, the stuff is worth working with. The prices I fetch for bog oak chairs make it worth the effort. However, I wouldn’t want to work with it exclusively. It is recalcitrant. And I am always happy to start saddling a chair in modern red oak or white oak after working the boggy stuff for a couple weeks.
Where to get it? There are vendors who specialize in the stuff. I don’t have experience buying from them, so do your research. Andy and I bought our bog oak from M. Bohlke, a long-time local supplier of amazing woods.
This building, which is not for sale or lease, is similar to what we are looking for in Covington. The city has a proud industrial past, so we are hopeful.
After many months of study and research, John and I have decided to take a big and overdue step with Lost Art Press. We are now planning to bring fulfillment in-house and do it here in Covington, Kentucky.
For the first six years of Lost Art Press, our families fulfilled every order placed by individuals or bookstores. We stored inventory under beds, in closets and in my sunroom. By 2013, we were out of room, and our order volume was still increasing. So for the last 10 years we’ve been using fulfillment centers (this industry is called 3PL) to ship out your orders.
Our current 3PL company does a great job. But we are well past the point where we should be doing this ourselves. Why? It will be cheaper and give us much more flexibility.
Because all the 3PL services are a la carte, doing things such as offering signed editions, including stickers, fliers or extra personal touches in orders is not possible. Well, it’s possible, but it’s not a good idea financially. Everything costs money. Dropping a sticker in a box? Cha-ching. Pulling inventory to sign it? Several big cha-chings. Experimenting with different boxes and packaging? So many cha-chings. Writing short notes to customers we know personally? Impossible.
We have hired an experienced fulfillment manager, who should start in June. And we are looking for a building in Covington. We want it to be big enough to accommodate other future dreams of ours, such as having a dedicated retail storefront with regular hours. Able to store a lot more wood. To have enough room for Naked Woodworking Yoga (just kidding).
We aren’t abandoning our offices on Willard Street. This building belongs to me and will remain the center of our editorial and research efforts. And where Megan and I will offer classes.
Bringing fulfillment in-house is going to be expensive and difficult. But we have good people who know how to set up a warehouse, a friendly city government that is helping us with our property search and good relations with our bank and creditors.
In the coming weeks and months, there might even be some opportunities for y’all to lend a hand (any tuckpointers out there?). So stay tuned.
If I lived and worked alone, music would play almost 24 hours a day. (In fact, on the rare occasion when Lucy leaves town, that is exactly what happens.)
Many times it’s the radio (WMOT-FM is a favorite). Or an album or playlist based on my mood.
We play music in the bench room during classes, and several students have asked if I had a playlist I could share. So here is one that I have put on Spotify. (I’m not a fan of the way Spotify pays artists, FYI. I prefer Bandcamp. But this is the best way for me to share this. I buy all my music, and I hope others support the artists they listen to.)
This is my Mid-tempo-so-I-hope-you’ll-like-me Playlist. It’s mostly melodic Americana from the last 30 years with an emphasis on acoustic and electric guitar. Right now it’s 378 songs – more than 24 hours of music. But I’ll add some more songs to it, I’m sure.
I hope you find some new artists here. But in the end, you get what you pay for with free playlists.
Oh, one more thing: This playlist isn’t sequenced (that would take weeks for me to do). So just put the dang thing on shuffle for best results.
Because People Ask
I have other musical moods. At times I go into long periods of listening to the earliest recordings of American hillbilly music. I love it, and it helps me interpret and understand the music I listen to today. I also have an aggressive mood, which is where I play a lot of Husker Du/Bob Mould, Superchunk, Pixies and other post-punk and punk bands. And I have a Growing Up Music mood, where I listen to the bands that were formative of my taste today: R.E.M., the Replacements, Velvet Underground, Violent Femmes, The Police and others (some embarrassing).
Also good to know: I’m not an audiophile. My sound system is nothing special: Some Apple HopePods (you Hope they’ll actually work), plus a stereo with a Thorens turntable and Schitt pre-amp and amp. Mid-range Klipsch speakers.
I’ve always owned vinyl, CDs, cassettes and digital. I’m no purist searching for some religious sonic experience. I like vinyl because of its glorious artwork and lyrics sheets. I like digital because I can take everything anywhere.
Yes, I clamp my joints as I drive the drawbore pegs. I’m a chicken, OK?
On Friday, I knocked together a cupboard inspired by Romanian peasant furniture for my next book, “The American Peasant.” The piece was made entirely by hand, but using Western tools instead of Eastern European ones.
All the joints are drawbored and glued (with gelatin glue I made here in the shop). When I went to make the drawbore pegs, I decided to first look at what is in the Jennie Pipe in the machine room. Jennie Pipe? Read on.
After Jennie Alexander died, the family asked us to take any of the spare tools and bits of wood that other woodworkers didn’t want. I took a hacking knife and some scratch stocks. But somehow I also ended up with a piece of 6″ PVC pipe (sealed at one end) that is filled with Jennie’s dowel stock.
I usually split out my own drawbore pegs, but there was a 5/16”-diameter white oak dowel in the pipe that had grain that was as straight as if it were split. I thought: Why not?
I used the dowel and found that I had exactly enough to drawbore the 16 mortise-and-tenon joints, plus make the hinges for the doors, which rotate on dowels.
In the end, I had about 1/16″ extra, which is painted red. I took it as a sign that I had made the correct choice.
It’s funny how I can’t throw away some things (which is totally not like me). I still have my father’s stationery from his medical practice (printed in the 1980s) and his Rolodex. These things take up space I don’t have to spare, but I can’t part with them. Perhaps I’m destined to mail a letter to someone in the Rolodex.
I also have a sizable chunk of bright orange Plexiglas that Jennie used for making go/no-go gauges and other dingus (dingi?).
I can’t wait to see the cabinet I’m destined to build using that….
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. What’s The American Peasant? It’s my substack. It’s a somewhat foul-mouthed open wire of my progress on my next book. There’s practical information (how to sharpen and use a timber scribe) and “thoughts on craft” that would make David Pye roll his eyes – and then over in his grave. You can subscribe for free (about one-third of the posts are free). And there’s a trial subscription that lets you sample everything for free for seven days. I enjoy the heck out of writing it.
