“Green Woodworking” by Drew Langsner is a passport to an enormous area of the craft that has been long-neglected in the literature. Using simple tools and materials from around your house, Drew shows you how to coax these materials into useful household objects that would be difficult or impossible to build with lumberyard wood.
The projects range from beautiful Cherokee and Cree containers made from bark and lashed with hickory, to a traditional hay rake and a firewood carrier.
But the projects are really only a small part of Drew’s book. He spends most of the time preparing you to work with the material, from felling a small tree to stripping the bark to making the basic tools. The core of the book is Drew’s explanation of the raw material. After you read his description of how wood works, I think you will look at the material in a whole new way.
Even though I have made many chairs and tables from green wood and willow, “Green Woodworking” filled in a lot of blanks in an easy-to-digest and encouraging style.
“Green Woodworking” has long been out of print, but now Drew has brought it back himself and sells it through his Country Workshops web site. You can order the book directly from Drew here for $35.
It’s an excellent book, well worth having in any woodworking library. And by purchasing it from Drew directly you will be supporting directly one of the pioneers of the green woodworking movement in the 20th century.
We’re starting to pack up for the Handworks event in Amana, Iowa, this weekend. If you are attending, here are some of the things we’re bringing to sell at the event (in addition to a selection of our books).
1. H.O. Studley T-shirts. The screen printing is complete (whew) and they look great. They are a light grey, 100-percent-cotton American Apparel shirt – made in the USA, of course. The front features a stylized image of the engraved nameplate that Studley attached to his tool chest. The back features the title of the forthcoming book from Don Williams.
We will bring sizes medium to XXL. Price: $20. We will offer these for sale in our online store after we return home from Handworks.
2. H.O. Studley Register Calipers. Inspired by the calipers in the Studley chest, these are machined from brass. Studley’s were steel with some sort of plating. We had 50 of these made for us. Price $45. These will be one to a customer and will be offered first-come, first-serve starting when the show opens on Friday.
We’ve had many readers urge us to make more and sell them in our store, but I’m afraid that is not going to happen. We have no desire to get into the tool-making business. This is a special one-time event. We hope that another toolmaker will produce this tool for sale to the general public.
We take Visa, MasterCard and cash.
Hope to see you there. Our livers are trembling in fear.
The discovery of an intact 18th-century joinery shop in Duxbury, Mass., set off a storm of interest last year in the small outbuilding behind a school.
Now, months after the discovery, preservationists and employees at Colonial Williamsburg have begun to piece together the interesting story of the site, to document every peg and nail and take the first steps toward stabilizing and preserving the building.
This week I took a tour of the site with Michael Burrey, the restoration carpenter who discovered the shop while working nearby, and Peter Follansbee, the joiner at Plimoth Plantation.
The working area of the shop is about the size of a single-car garage, yet almost every inch of the room is packed with clues about the work that was done in the shop, the tools that were in use and how they were stored. There is so much detail to see that after two hours of rooting around, my senses were overloaded and there was still much more to see.
As a workbench enthusiast, I was quite interested in poring over the benches that lined three walls of the shop, creating a U-shaped ring of working sufaces along the outer wall.
The benches were all fixed to the structure of the building. I haven’t written much about this style of bench. These fixed benches seem to first appear in the 15th century as best I can tell (see the evidence here). These fixed benches exist at the same time as the typically freestanding Roman-style workbench. Eventually the Roman benches disappear (though not entirely in Eastern Europe), and are replaced by the movable forms we are familiar with now.
The benches in the Sampson shop have seen so much use that the bench along the back wall had been recovered with a new benchtop – you can feel the old mortise for the planning stop by feeling under the benchtop. None of the benches had end vises or even dog holes. There are planning stops and a couple huge holes that may have been for some metalworking equipment, Burrey says. There was at least one leg vise.
Dendrochronolgy on one of the benches indicates the top was pitch pine from 1786, Burrey says. That lines up nicely with the 1789 date painted on a beam in the storage area outside the shop door.
The shop was known in the area as a shingle shop, but it’s likely that a lot of other things went on there. One of the benches has been converted to a lathe, with a large metal wheel above it. The original owner of the shop, Luther Sampson, was (among other things) a planemaker, Burrey says.
Sampson was one of the founders of the Kents Hill School in Maine. And the school has some of his tools and the name stamp he used to mark his planes. Burrey also indicates that they have found shelves in the shop that were likely scarred by moulding planes set there.
Other tool marks suggest some other operations. Along the back wall, Burrey suspects that bench was used for crosscutting. The area is under a window. Right above the bench the wall is pierced with hundreds of jab marks from a marking awl. Above that is an unusual rack that would hold try squares. And the back wall looks like it has been hit by the tip of a backsaw repeatedly.
In fact, every square inch of surface seems to hold some message. There are bits of old newspaper pasted in places. The shapes of sailing ships are scratched into the walls with a nail or awl. A hatted figure is painted on one of the shop doors. And inside that painting is a series of concentric scratches made by a compass.
Empty tool racks are everywhere, many of them elegantly chamfered.
Burrey and Follansbee are cautious about making any firm declarations about how the shop was used.
“We’re just looking at ghosts here,” Follansbee says.
Follansbee is correct. The place is haunted. Like many unrestored old places you can still feel the heavy presence of the work that went on inside the walls. And now the really heavy work begins for the people who are not ghosts: Figuring out how to stabilize and preserve the building.
I don’t have any insight into the status of that end of the project. If I hear of any news, I’ll report it here.
“By Hand & Eye” will ship from our printer on Tuesday, May 21. So if you would like to order the book with free domestic shipping, you should place your order before midnight Tuesday. After Tuesday, domestic shipping will be $7.
“By Hand & Eye” by George R. Walker and Jim Tolpin is $34 and can be ordered here.
We never discount our books, nor do our retailers. So this is the only special offer we will make on this title.
The book will be carried by Lee Valley Tools, Lie-Nielsen Toolworks and Tools for Working Wood. If other retailers agree to carry to title, we will announce it here.
As I mentioned earlier, we will offer 26 copies of “By Hand & Eye” bound in leather for $185 each. We will have details on those copies in June. We also will offer the book in ePub and Kindle format.
I’m sure you’ve heard this: What separates a good woodworker from a great one is his or her ability to hide mistakes.
Which is complete and utter crap in my opinion.
The really fantastic woodworkers I have worked with don’t make many mistakes at all. What they do encounter – like all of us – are times when the material fails. A weak spot in the grain breaks off or a tool encounters something unexpected in the wood.
These problems do require repair, and that is a good skill to have.
While there have been books and articles written about repairing woodwork, I’ve found them lacking. Usually the “mistake” was created by the person writing the article. So it usually requires a simple and straightforward fix.
And that is rare in the world of woodworking.
So here is a real-world repair I had to make last night on the campaign chest I’m building. After about 160 dovetails in the case and drawers, I was assembling the final joint when a corner of one of the tails disintegrated.
The joint was perfect enough. The wood was unexpectedly weak because of a resin pocket in the pine.
The bad news was that the part that crumbled went missing into the shavings. The good news is that I wouldn’t have wanted to use it anyway.
Step. 1. Stabilize the existing wood. I cut away anything that seemed loose or could be crumbled away with my thumb.
Step 2. Make a surface for joinery. Using a chisel, I cut the wounded wood until it was a regular rabbet. I measured the width of the rabbet at both its wide and narrow ends.
Step 3. Make a patch. Using the drawer’s pin board as a template, I drew in the shape of the patch I needed on a piece of scrap pine. Then I sawed out the patch and smoothed the part with a block plane.
Step 4. I glued up the drawer without the patch. Then I glued the patched in place, driving it in with a mallet. Finally I sawed and planed the patch flush. Right before I finish the piece I’ll draw in some grain lines to imitate the pitch – probably with a sharp permanent marker (orange ink).
“Green Woodworking” by Drew Langsner is a passport to an enormous area of the craft that has been long-neglected in the literature. Using simple tools and materials from around your house, Drew shows you how to coax these materials into useful household objects that would be difficult or impossible to build with lumberyard wood.
