The company that embroiders our hats made a mistake this week and delivered the wrong type of hat.
Rather than let those go to waste (quite literally), we purchased them at a significant discount and are passing that on to you – these hats are $10 plus $3 shipping. That’s a savings of $7 compared to our regular hat.
What’s different? The details. These are still U.S.-made hats made by the same company (Bayside) and in the same color. The embroidery is the same. These less-expensive hats are adjusted with a Velcro strap instead of a steel keeper. And these less-expensive hats lack the white piping on the brim.
We have 80 of them in stock. When they are gone they are gone.
For those of us with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge about traditional American tools and furniture, there is one name that makes us all tip our hats: Charles F. Hummel of Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library.
Hummel’s impressive career as a champion for American decorative arts – as a scholar, lecturer and author – are the shoulders that many furniture-makers, researchers and historians have stood upon for the last five decades.
You can read a brief synopsis of Hummel’s achievements here at Winterthur’s web site.
For hand-tool woodworkers, Hummel was one of the first to eschew romantic prose about craftsmanship and rely on scholarship as he documented the history of the Dominy workshop in his groundbreaking book “With Hammer in Hand.”
This book, more than any other before it, sketched a portrait of an early American hand-tool shop as a business and not as a quaint and faded painting of days gone by. Hummel pored over the ledgers of the Dominy family and had access to the entire shop (it was moved to Winterthur and is now on display) plus many Dominy pieces, which are also on display at Winterthur. (Psst, go visit Winterthur.)
So I was delighted and simultaneously terrified to see that Mr. Hummel had written a review of “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” by Jennie Alexander and Peter Follansbee for the latest edition of “American Furniture,” the annual publication of the Chipstone Foundation that is edited by Luke Beckerdite.
In his review, Hummel praised “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” throughout the long-form review: “To this reviewer, Alexander and Follansbee’s collaboration results in one of the best ‘how-to-do-it’ books of the last and present century.”
Hummel goes on to state that the book is ideal for woodworkers and that: “The authors also do a great service to collectors of furniture, historians of material culture and of technology, and furniture scholars…. Their book deserves to be on the shelves of everyone interested in nonmachine-made woodwork.”
I could not agree more. “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” is a true labor of love that required decades of work, the construction of innumerable joint stools and trips all over the world to complete. We were honored to publish this book and are gratified by Mr Hummel’s review.
The first edition of “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” is available in our store and from the other fine retailers who stock our books.
I finished painting my downsized Dutch chest last night (yes, this one fits in my car thanks for asking), filled it up with tools and started work with it today.
As you can see I made some small changes to the interior. And I have one more thing I might add, if I can hold my nose hard enough. More on that in a moment.
Some changes:
1. Low-profile iron chest lifts instead of mahogany handles. The mahogany handles (and casters) are what got me in trouble in the first place. These iron lifts are new old stock (NOS) iron handles off eBay – $5 each. They are bolted through the case to make them stronger.
2. Leather accessories. My shop assistant, Ty Black, sewed up some pockets for my block plane and marking tools. These were made from scraps from our Roorkhee chair adventure. (If you would like to hire Ty to make you anything except bondage apparel, send him an e-mail at ty.black@gmail.com.)
3. Slightly different dividers for the handplanes, and a smaller holder thingy for the backsaws.
4. A more capacious (Megan word) tool rack. The 1/2”-diameter holes are now on 1-1/8” centers instead of 1-1/2” centers. It makes a huge difference.
The biggest change is there is only one compartment behind the removable front. Surprisingly, I can get the same amount of tools in this smaller chest thanks to some nip and tuck action.
Finally, I left just enough space at the top of this lower compartment to put… a … (gags a bit) drawer.
Or, as I like to call it, a shallow sliding tray. This will be to hold all the flipping drill bits I have to travel with to build benches and furniture. I really dislike drawers on principle because I tend to fill them with random junk so I can hide it away. But several original Dutch chests feature a drawer in this position and so I am (probably) going to try one.
Anyway, if you want to see this chest and the miniature bench I just finished, be sure to stop by Highland Hardware in Atlanta next weekend. I’ll be there for the free Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event and then teaching a class next Sunday on building wooden layout tools.
During the last year I’ve heard a lot of smack talk about the traditional French-style workbench, which many people simply call a “Roubo” because it is featured in “L’Art du Menuisier.”
In fact, my first drubbing came in 2005 when I built my first French bench. A prominent woodworking writer delivered this salvo: “That bench in Roubo was intended for joiners, people who did house carpentry. Not for cabinetwork. You have chosen the wrong bench to build.”
This is bullcrap.
Not just because I call it bullcrap, but because the archaeological record and the written record say it’s crap.
Roubo’s five-volume work isn’t just about house carpentry and house joinery. It’s also about carriage making, fine furniture, marquetry, parquetry, veneering, finishing and garden furniture. While Roubo certainly knew about other benches (he illustrates a “German” one in one volume), he chose to illustrate the classic French bench in almost every instance throughout all his books.
So yup (sarcasm fully engaged), this bench is good only for heavy work like this.
Or coarse work like this.
You’d only make sash or wainscot on it, like this.
No fine cabinetry would be built on it, especially nothing dovetailed.
The beauty of the French form of bench is it’s a blank sheet of paper. You can easily adapt it for any work – heavy, light or in-between. It is easy to build – you need to know only one joint, really. Beginners don’t need to learn to dovetail a skirt around the top or install complex vises. Heck, I worked for a year on the French bench without anything you would call a vise – just a crochet and holdfasts.
If you process stock by hand, it’s heavy enough for fore-planing. If you’re a router wizard, it’s an expansive deck of places to clamp things to – completely unobstructed.
If you are somewhere in-between these extremes, you will be fully satisfied.
The French bench has downsides. It requires more wood than some other designs. The pieces can be too heavy for some woodworker who work alone. You might have to glue up a lot of boards to make the top or search for a thick slab (which really are not hard to find).
But the bench works like crazy, I prefer it over every form I’ve worked on or built.
I understand that some woodworkers see benches like a hemline. This one is in fashion. Now that one. Ooh, no one builds benches like Ian Kirby’s anymore. And that’s fine. You can run down the design because it’s so ubiquitous. Or because I like it.
But don’t look like a fool and say the bench is for crude work only. The ghost of A.J. Roubo is likely to pay you a visit one dark night.
And while you are there, check out his gallery of chairs and casework. That gun cabinet he built for a client was all hand mortised. In oak. Ouch. But nice.
For those of us with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge about traditional American tools and furniture, there is one name that makes us all tip our hats: Charles F. Hummel of Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library.
