For many years I tried to design a shooting board (and bench hook) that would be worthy of publishing in Popular Woodworking Magazine. I tinkered with adjustable fences to dial in a perfect 90° cut, grippy working surfaces and fences with replaceable bits for zero-clearance cutting.
All of my designs were failures.
In the end, the crappiest shooting board that I ever built turned out to be the best shooting board I ever built because I did the following things:
1. Forget the adjustable fence. Just nail and glue the sucker down and adjust it to 90° with a shoulder plane after assembly. Adjustable fences (well, mine at least), go out of adjustment all the time. The non-adjustable fence on the shooting board I made five years still makes airtight 90° corners every time.
2. Forget sanding or finishes. I make my shooting boards out of 1/2” Baltic Birch. Unsanded. Unfinished. And I chop dovetails on them all the time. The result is a very grippy surface. My work doesn’t slide around like it does on shooting boards I have finished.
3. Forget fancy. Every add-on I have added to my shooting boards has been more trouble than it is worth. I could make a long list of mitering accessories, zero-clearance bits and UHMW tape.
The above is not a rant on commercial shooting boards from Tico Vogt and Rob Hanson. They have mastered many of the above problems and produce some sweet shooting boards.
Instead, I’m telling you that if you are like me and make your own shooting boards, keep it dirt simple. The more complexity you add, the less likely the shooting board will work.
The shooting board I use is made from 1/2” Baltic Birch plywood that is glued together. After the glue dries, I true up the fence for the shooting board with a shoulder plane until the appliance gives me 90° cuts every time. Then I use the shooting board until it is completely chewed up.
How does it get chewed up? I use the other side of the shooting board as a bench hook. And I chop dovetails on both sides. It’s a big shop coaster during parties in my shop. And etc.
You can download a SketchUp drawing of the appliance here.
Back before the invention of wood movement, joiners had much more flexibility in the way they designed furniture.
Without the fear of cross-grain self-destruction, furniture makers would build chests, cabinets and sideboards with the grain running in opposition – horizontal grain on the front and back; vertical grain on the sides. They could nail a tabletop to its base without worrying about the coefficient of expansion for radial and tangential grain. They could make ledged doors that were vertical boards clinched with horizontal and diagonal boards.
And they could make this stool, a common sight in Europe and at Old Salem Museums and Gardens in Winston-Salem, N.C.
This type of simple stool shows up a lot in the furniture record, and it is still in use today in kitchens, workshops and homes around the world. I’ve always been fascinated by these stools because they should have torn themselves apart, been thrown out for firewood and replaced by the Mammut.
But they survive, and they vex woodworkers, many of whom try to improve the joinery so the stool will survive. I don’t think you have to improve anything.
But first, why do I call this Moravian stool a “Windsor-style” stool? Well, for the lack of a better word, I’ve decided to use “Windsor” to describe constructions where a plank seat or platform is pierced by legs – like a Windsor chair, a Roubo bench or a Moravian stool.
The “problem” with the stool is that the seat is joined to battens with sliding dovetails. Nothing wrong with that, according to the wood-movement scientists. But then the joiners would pierce both the seat and the battens with the through-tenons for the legs.
The legs then prevent the top from expanding and contracting the way it wants to, and so the top splits. Game over, right? Nope. While the top splits, it doesn’t destroy the stool. The sliding dovetails keep everything together. If you like, you can drive a few nails through the top into the battens to keep things tighter – this was a common solution on originals.
So the question is: Why were these stools built this way in the first place? Without a Ouija board, we don’t know (wouldn’t that be a great session at Woodworking in America?). But after building one of these stools, I can make a few guesses.
The stool is very light. By using this sliding dovetail construction, the entire stool weighs only 3 lbs. 9 oz. in poplar. Had the seat been a solid plank of 1-1/4” poplar, it would have weighed a lot more.
It uses less material. The stool can be pieced together from thinner, narrower pieces of wood. I used scraps. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Moravians used scraps as well.
It appeals to the Germanic mind. I’m mostly German. I teach in Germany and deal with many German woodworkers. I don’t have a better explanation, but I see this sort of interlocking joinery in vernacular Bavarian joinery. I know this point is weak, but I think it’s true.
But why would a joiner of any skill or sense build a stool with this kind of cross-grain construction?
The answer, for me, was to change my definition of wood movement.
As woodworkers we try to tame the wood so that it stays in some sort of pristine form – flat tabletops, unwarped doors, tight seams all around. We allow and accommodate for wood movement in tabletops, benchtops and panels. That wood movement is allowable and OK.
Pitting on the back of the blade. Not going to come out.
A couple of years back, as a big flea market was winding down in a village near where we lived in the Poitou region, I stumbled across my dealer.
“Keep walking,” I ordered myself. “You donʼt want to go there; youʼve kicked the habit. Besides, you have to save for your daughtersʼ education. No, you cannot free up the cash by selling one of your angelic daughters to the gypsies. Yes, it’s true that you made money on the last deal when the Gypsy King came, on his knees, weeping, gnashing his teeth and rending his hair, begging to pay you to take her back after two hours. But they are unlikely to make the same mistake again. After all, the last time she rode by the camp on her bike, they upped and moved to a swampy malarial sand spit in the Camargue. Be reasonable. Keep walking. Look, there is a late medieval torso of St. Sebastian in local stone that suffered greatly, again, during the Revolution, on sale for a kingʼs ransom. Your loving wife will be so pleased.”
So I stopped.
The tool dealer, a mangy, scrofulous, grumpy old bear of a man, glanced up, flashed an evil, avaricious grin, and immediately got on the phone to his real estate agent and put in a bid on a 10,000-square-foot mansion in the chi-chiest part of Paris.
I couldnʼt help myself. There it was: a strange tool, one that I had never seen before. It was a flat bar, maybe a yard long, with a steel handle sticking out from the middle. There was a big chisel at one end, and a mortise chisel at the other. Wow.
As I picked it up, my dealer was saying something like, “Sure, Iʼll buy it, but only if they throw in the Picassos… OK, they need to toss in the Titian altarpiece housing a relic of the True Cross, too… Yes, heʼs back again.”
Then he hung up the phone. “How can I be of service to you today?”
“Whatʼs this tool called?”
“Besaigue,” he said.
Ever solicitous, I offered him a Kleenex.
“No, my sagacious friend, it is a besaigue. The emblematic tool of French Charpentiers. The one end is a big ciseau that they use to sharpen their pencils and their reparté, and the other is a bedane, which they use to chop mortises. No collector of your brilliant acuity could possibly be without one.”
Walking shirtless to the hotel he had found for me on his new 5G iPhone (he was also kind enough to call my wife to inform her of our change of domicile), I was a happy man. It was only 20 kilometers after all, but I had my beautiful besaigue. After all you could build a house, and an ox cart, with a besaigue. All you had to do was sharpen it!
OK…
Actually, the tool dealer was a knowledgeable man, and the price of the besaigue reflected the fact that it had sat, rusting, in a damp barn for donkeyʼs years, and it was really suited only for decoration. But these tools are not easy to find, and they are expensive when you do find them.
Today I wondered if, despite the pitting on the flat of the blade, it might be possible to tune it up and make it work again. So I went out to the shop and took it down from its place on a rafter.
The besaigue.Cross-peen hammer marks from the forging process, and pitting on the tempered blade. I expected to find a laid blade, with a carbon steel cutting edge, and a mild steel or iron shaft. But there was no weld – the whole thing is tool steel, so it’s not all that old.Filing the flat back of the blade to get the worst of the crap off.Here one might be tempted to find a coarser file, a cheap one, that turns out to be not at all flat and so gouge a valley in middle of the blade that takes a long time to work out. Bad idea.Reworking the bevelThis is as good as it is going to get, I guess, short of grinding blade down and welding on a wedge of tool steel. The pits are too deep to file out without taking more material off the relatively thin blade than I would like to.The mortise chisel end was in much better shape, and the back could be filed more aggressively to get rid of the pits and still remain plenty strong.Shaping a peg. It worked just fine. Some illustrations show people working with the bar over the shoulder, but I found the tool difficult to control when used that way.Author and illustrator, Maurice Pommier shapes a peg in a photo he sent me.
It’s a useable tool, though it obviously needs some major surgery to make it work as it should.
The funny thing about the restoration was that the same morning, I’d gone into the dark, cobwebby corner of my barn and dragged out a stone grinding wheel. It is a good wheel, with a relatively fine white stone that just needs a bit of dressing. But it’s just the wheel and the crank, the frame is long gone. I considered finally getting around to building a bench/frame and water trough for the beast and use it to rough out the besaigue.
“Naw,” I thought, “that’ll take too long. Just use the files and stones.”
Might easily have been quicker…
— Brian Anderson
Editor’s Note: Brian is the translator of “Grandpa’s Workshop,” the forthcoming book from Lost Art Press.
Anytime a woodworker starts tossing gossamer handplane shavings into the air that float around like some visible fairy flatulence, we both know what will happen next.
Some grumpy wag will say something like: “Bah, who cares about the shavings? All I care about is the board. You are playing with your garbage!”
I am always quick to correct these killjoys. Shavings of all sizes are extremely useful to the handplane user – and not just as compost.
When I handplane a case side sitting on my workbench, one of the most common difficulties is being unable to plane the very center area of a panel. Even with a short plane, I sometimes cannot get the last little bit of wood planed in the center.
So instead of planing the entire panel for another hour, I lift up the panel and toss a couple gossamer shavings on the bench right where the problem area is. I press the panel against the bench, secure it between dogs and resume planing. Eighty-six times out of 100, this fixes the problem instantly. Sure, it temporarily bows the panel out a bit, but that’s no big deal – the dovetails, back and shelves will help pull it flat.
Second example: I use a lot of wide boards, so I end up processing a lot of stock by hand in my shop. When I begin jacking one face of the board, I usually have to shim under the board so it doesn’t flex under pressure from the plane. This shimming is either in the middle of the board or at the edges, depending on whether I am working on the bark or heart side of the board.
Shavings to the rescue. I first learned to shim my boards using pine construction shims. But after a few near-vasectomies, I switched to using shavings – usually the shavings from a jack plane. These are thick and fill up gaps quickly.
These two suggestions are old tricks that I’ve picked up from books. They work great – saving you time and injury to your privates.
For woodworkers in Canada or those who shop at Lee Valley Tools, good news. The Ottawa-based catalog company will carry “Grandpa’s Workshop” by Maurice Pommier.
The company typically adds Lost Art Press books to its web site about a week after the title is released – so I hope you can hold it until early October.
If you are in the United States, you can order the book with free shipping until its release date here.
After dinner last night, my daughters each read “Grandpa’s Workshop” and we talked a little about the story. Below is the review from Katy, age 11.
— Christopher Schwarz
My review of the book was great. I think that my favorite part of the book was the broken hammer story. Although the book is short, it is fascinating. After reading this book, it actually made me think that tools are alive and have stories about themselves. It seems like I always like the parts in books that have the most drama.
I recommend this book to people 8 and up…mostly because of the vocabulary that I even had trouble with! I’m glad I read this book because it can teach you a lot of lessons! Like…never trusts dragons, don’t strangle your brothers, respect hammers, because you know what?! They have feelings too! This book can also teach you about the respect of other people’s property.
My dad recommended this book to me… and that was a great idea, dad! Great job! Point for you! I think he recommended this book to me because he knew that I would like the killing parts (I’m a lot like my dad!) ,and he thought it was a good story so he knew I would like it since we have the same taste!
