When I arrived in Barnesville, Ga., on Sunday afternoon I found that all the preliminary heavy lifting had been done.
Jameel Abraham, Bo Childs, Ron Breese, Jon Fiant, Jeff Miller, Raney Nelson and Don Williams had finished ripping up the tops and legs with a sawmill and had everything stacked. The wood is beautiful. Huge. And wet – in the “high teens.” I’ve made many benches with wood at this stage in drying, and the Roubo design is well-suited for wood that is a little wet.
The leg vise hardware was artfully displayed. And Jameel was tweaking an enormous banner hanging in the middle of the shop that showed A.-J. Roubo’s plate 11 in all its detail.
All I had to do was unpack my tools, buy some fried chicken and set up to give a presentation tonight on the history of woodworking benches from Egypt to the 18th century.
I’m sure I’ll get to do my share of sweating during the next five days. My work station is in the corner with all the flies.
Artist Wendy Neathery-Wise is now selling her handmade bronze apron hooks in her etsy.com store.
I have been using the one she made for me for a couple weeks and really, really, really like it. Really!
It’s a great little gadget for those of us who aren’t good at tying apron strings behind our backs. I am terrible at this simple task, even though I have been doing it since my days as a fishmonger in high school.
The apron hook works with any string apron. All you do is tie one of the strings to the base of the hook – use a double knot and tie it tight. With the other apron string, tie it into a loop that is knotted at its base. Make this knot at the point where the apron is comfortable.
You are done.
Put the apron on and hook the hook into the loop. Now your apron fits the same way every time and it is easy to put on and take off.
Wendy has two designs – the one shown above that features dividers and the English layout square on the cover of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” The other one features a French workbench.
They are very cool old-school, handmade shop accessories. Check them out and buy one here and here.
When I built my first French workbench in 2005 from Southern yellow pine, I vowed to someday build one just like the version shown in A.-J. Roubo’s “L’Art du Menuisier.”
I’ve come close to filling that pledge a couple times, but that vow is now eight years old. If my vow were a hot dog, it would be almost inedible.
On Sunday I leave for Georgia to participate in the French Oak Roubo Project, which has been organized by the Benchcrafted Brothers. I’ll be helping the students build their benches from the massive and ancient French oak slabs that Benchcrafted and Bo Childs have gathered for the week-long workbench orgy.
But I will also get to build my own bench. (I am paying for all my materials. #eyeroll)
My bench will be designed to the print of plate 11 of “L’Art du menuisier.” It will have a grease pot. A drawer. The rack. And the exact pattern of holdfast holes shown in the well-known plate. And the hardware… well I’ll be blogging about that next week, I’m sure.
I will have a leg vise. But I’ll have the leg vise shown in plate 11, which doesn’t have a parallel guide. How does it work? Roubo explains that in his long discourse on shops and benches. To date, only a small bit of that text has been translated. But thanks to Don Williams, Michele Pietryka-Pagán and Philippe Lafargue, we now have an excellent and complete translation of the text relating to the bench and other shop practices.
With the leg vise, you use loose blocks of wood on the floor to pivot the jaw into your work. A parallel guide is shown in Roubo, but it is on his “German workbench,” which will be discussed in our translation coming out in August.
This bench will be a daily worker in my shop. I’m going to have to re-organize some things, but now that we are not a book warehouse, that should be do-able.
Next week I’ll be blogging daily about the class, as will many of the other participants. But I won’t be answering e-mail or my phone.
Megan Fitzpatrick, the editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine, has started a personal blog that documents her work and contains copious references to cats and their fecal matter.
Called Rude Mechanicals Press, its opening salvo of entries are about her attempts to sell her current house in order to purchase a house with a suitable workshop.
Personal note: I offered to help her convert her current dining room to a hand-tool shop. She demurred.
So if you like proper English and all that good grammar stuff – plus woodworking and cats – definitely bookmark her site. I have.
It took only six years, but you can now buy the deluxe edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” in the Lost Art Press store.
The book is made to the highest manufacturing standards. The content of this book took a worldwide team of dedicated people more than six years to complete. It is, in a nutshell, the first English translation of the most important 18th-century book on woodworking.
If you cannot afford the deluxe edition (which ships in August), we recommend selling your plasma. Or… we will be selling a nice trade edition this fall for about $60. But the deluxe edition will be printed only once. We are printing 600 copies. And more than 450 have already been sold. And I am sure you are lousy with plasma.
If you want one, you plasma-rich carbon-based lifeform, click here to read more about it.
