Lost Art Press

Author: Lost Art Press

Publisher of woodworking books and videos specializing in hand tool techniques.

‘The Woodwright’s Shop’ — the Unused Script

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PHOTO: Mike Oniffrey

When I embark on a writing project I try to begin with a ridiculous premise.  During the revisions and the re-writes, the absurdity begins to mellow or even drain out of the manuscript altogether.

Take “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” for example. When I began writing the book, the nutty, never-happen-but-it-would-be-cool premise was to sell most of my tools, write a book, then quit my cushy corporate job… aw crap.

When Roy Underhill asked me to be a guest on a couple episodes of “The Woodwright’s Shop” for the upcoming season we decided to do a show on planes and a show about the English Layout Square that graces the cover of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”

So I began thinking about new ways to talk about handplanes. Stupid and perhaps insensitive ways to talk about handplanes. Stuff that would generate angry letters.

Here’s the set-up: What if smoothing plane use were an addiction? And there were support groups?

The following unedited script was completely discarded. We probably used only one line on the show. And yes, I know that addiction is a serious problem – ask me about my family’s struggles with it over a beer sometimes.

— Christopher Schwarz

Smoothing Plane Recovery Program

Chris: My name is Chris Schwarz, and I am a recovering smoothing plane addict.

Roy: An addict? Really? Strong words. Well let’s see … there are basically six steps to recovering from some sort of addiction. Let’s check the list:

“Step one: Admitting that one cannot control one’s addiction or compulsion.”

Chris: At one time I had more than a dozen smoothing planes. I was trying out all the angles, all the mouth apertures, infills, vintage, new, bevel-up, bevel down, woodies, different sizes, you name it.

shows different planes

I had a micrometer to measure whether I was making shavings that were .0005″ thick. I was watching Japanese planing contests – where they measure the shaving thickness in MICRONS.

shows wispy shavings

My wife even caught me down in the shop making shavings… and I wasn’t even building anything. Just… smoothing.

Roy: That is serious stuff. What made you finally quit?

Chris: The good book.

Roy: You mean…

Chris holds up and opens book

Chris: Yup. Joseph Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises; or the Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Arts of Smithing, Joinery, Carpentry, Turning, Bricklaying.”  The first English-language book on woodworking.

Roy: That’s the second step – recognizing a higher power can give you strength. So you found strength through a 17th-century printer and hygrometer to the king?

Chris:  Yes I did. Moxon showed me the error of my ways.

Roy: How’s that?

Chris: When I first read Mechanick Exercises I was struck – nay – blown away by how much Moxon wrote about the “fore plane” and how little he wrote about the “smoothing plane.” It was incredible. More than 1,800 words on the fore plane. And on the smoothing plane: just 33.

shows fore plane.

Roy: Dang. Well I hope they were strong words about the smoothing plane – about how it is the end-all plane, end of story.

Chris:  Hardly. Here’s all he said:

“S. 6.  The Ufe of the Smoothing-Plane.
The Smoothing-plane marked B 4. muft have its Iron fet very fine, becaufe its Office is to fmoothen the work from thofe Irregularities the Fore-plane made.”

Roy: That’s it? Nothing about finding your power animal or opening your heart chakra or adjusting your aura with sub-thou shavings?

Chris: Nope. That’s it. So I started diving deep into Moxon’s text on fore planes and I found that this plane (holds up plane) is the most powerful bench plane in the world.

Roy: You don’t say.

Chris: With this plane I could correct all the things I was doing wrong with my smoothing plane, and that’s ….

Roy: …the third step.

Chris: Indeed. The secret is inside the mouth of the tool. The iron (shows iron)  is a convex arc – this one is an 8″ radius. And this radius can give you superpowers.

(reinstalls iron)

Roy: Like making paper-thin shavings?

Chris: Like making shavings the thickness of an old Groat! (makes massive pass with plane, pulls off thick shaving). This is what gets the work done, not the mamby-pamby lacy doily shavings where each one is unique like a snowflake!

This is what flattens boards (continues to work).  Every shaving from a fore plane equals 10 from a smoother. You can do 10-times less work.

Roy: But won’t thick shavings tear up the work?

Chris: Ahhhh. That’s where Moxon helps us again. He tells us to traverse.

Roy: Traverse?

Chris: Yes. Don’t push your plane with the grain (shows) or against the grain (shows). Instead go ACROSS the grain.

Roy: Won’t you go to a dark and very warm place for doing that?

Chris: Hardly (demonstrates). By going across the grain we can take a much thicker chip with much less effort. And because we aren’t levering up the wood fibers, the tearing is minimal. This also allows us to get boards really flat – something a puny smoothing plane can’t do.

(discussion and demonstration of flattening a board by traversing bark side, then heart side. showing the different sounds and how to determine flat – just wink!)

Roy: That’s pretty remarkable, but the tool seems rather coarse; aren’t you going to make a lot of clean-up work for the other tools?

Chris: Hardly. Moxon says we can reduce the cut of the fore plane and clean up our dawks before moving on. (demonstrates; discussion of dawks ensues).

Roy: It seems like you really got true religion here. As I understand it, you are supposed to “make amends for your errors” in cases like this. Did you. Did you really?

Chris: I did. I sold almost all of my smoothing planes or gave them away to friends. I’m now down to – two smoothing planes, which is probably still one too many. And I’m trying to live my life with a new code of behavior – working as much with a coarse tool before I switch to a fine tool. That’s the core message in Moxon.

Use a hatchet more than a fine file. Use a rough plane more than a fine one. Chop. Don’t pare. Pit saw. Not coping saw.

Roy: And then there’s the last step, right? Helping others who suffer from an addiction to smoothing planes?

Chris: Yup. Wherever there is a woodworker using a Norris A13, I want to be there. A Holtey No. 98? I’m there to take your hands off the $5,000 tool. I’ll be there to trade you a moldy Scioto Works fore plane and show you the way: Across the grain, to get thick shavings, to actually accomplish something.

A Day on the Set of ‘The Woodwright’s Shop’

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The tape is about to start rolling on Sunday morning for an episode of “The Woodwright’s Shop” with Roy Underhill. I’m so nervous about being a guest on the show that I can feel my morning coffee surging in my throat — about to pulse forward like a brown Trevi fountain.

Roy pulls on his hat, which his mother gave him about 35 years ago, over his thicket of hair and picks up a foam tube. I think: That’s… weird. It looks like one of those foam insulators that you wrap around your pipes to keep them from freezing.

He walks over to one of the cameramen and whacks him mercilessly with the foam sword, and the cameraman submits meekly to the mock beating. Then Roy walks over to the next camera operator and administers another stage whuppin’.

But when Roy approaches Mike Oniffrey, a cameraman and set photographer, Oniffrey resists and parries Roy’s attack using a long metal pole (where did a cameraman get a metal pole?). The two men re-enact a scene from “Star Wars” and suddenly the show has begun and I’m babbling.

Today we shot two episodes of “The Woodwright’s Shop” for its forthcoming season. One show is about the importance of the fore plane and the impotence of the smoothing plane. The other show is about how to build the English Layout Square that graces the cover of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”

I have appeared on a fair number of television programs in the last 20 years, but those were nothing like “The Woodwright’s Shop.” The crew of “The Woodwright’s Shop” is tiny and close-knit. The entire program is shot in one take – there is no series of cuts that are spliced together. You either get it right the first time or you do the whole dang show over again.

And then there are the beatings…. Aw, who am I kidding? Most TV sets have people who beat you.

The first show on Sunday we did was about the English Layout Square. I was happy with my performance because I made only three embarrassing errors.

1. I cut myself. Yup. Just as the cameras started rolling I nicked my left index finger with my panel saw. I don’t know if you’ll be able to see the wound, but I’m trying to stop the bleeding for the first five minutes.

2. I threw Roy’s mallet off the bench during the show. I meant to just put it down, but the thing went flying off the end of the workbench. Lucky for me I had a second mallet on the bench and I just pretended that nothing happened.

3. I grabbed the wrong piece of wood when I demonstrated how to cut a bead on the square. I was supposed to put it on one of the legs of the square, but I grabbed the horizontal brace instead. Roy helpfully pointed out the error.

Despite all this stupidity, the cameras kept rolling and somehow didn’t record me wetting myself, which is what I wanted to do.

And this first taping of the day was the tame one. The second show was like “Pretty Woman” meets “Fight Club.” More later.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Roy wanted me to tell you that his show is free to all PBS stations. So call your local station and demand they run “The Woodwright’s Shop.” And don’t let them tell you that they can’t afford it. No more “Teletubbies” — we want the Woodwright!

Report from Mount Roubo

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Lately I have been getting inquiries, some in hushed tones (whether reverential or consoling I cannot tell), to the effect of, “So, how’s it going with Roubo?” Or, “Are you still working on the French book thing?” And just last week, “I guess Roubo must be dead. Weren’t up to it, huh?” Perhaps Chris has been getting the same communiqués.

Generally I am bewildered by these comments for a minute, mostly because it takes me that minute to realize that these folks are (thankfully) not inside my head, where Monsieur Roubo is never far from the front of the line. Even though I do not blog about it much, fact is I spend a portion of virtually every day working on this mountain peak of a project, which from my perspective is moving along swimmingly. It is not necessarily glamorous at this stage, and it can be brutal work from time to time, but it is moving towards its successful conclusion.

With the exception of the final chapter of our “Volume I, To Make As Perfectly As Possible: Roubo On Marquetry,” Chris has the transliterated-edited-retranslated-redited-reviewed-redited manuscript in hand. Philippe is still grinding his way through the nearly 100-page long chapter on boullework marquetry, and I am putting the finishing touches on some annotations and augmentations to the translated and edited manuscript.

I’m also wrapping up several photo essays wherein I demonstrate some of the processes and tools that Roubo describes, sometimes with less thoroughness than a modern reader might want.

Michele has been the greyhound of our troop, racing ahead with translation on our second volume. She keeps sending me pages and pages of raw transliterations that I simply cannot allow myself to digest because that won’t help us finish our first volume. I’d estimate that at this point she is almost three-quarters through with her initial pass. To avoid reading it in detail right now is truly a feat of self control.

I still hope for the project to enter the publisher/production phase in a couple of months, but I will not be bound by any arbitrary deadline. Excellence is the goal, not urgency. Our dream is to make “To Make as Perfectly As Possible,” well, as perfectly as possible. We have only one chance to get the first iteration right, and we will take whatever time is necessary. We view this as a legacy for the ages, and a few days one way or the other won’t enhance that gift to the future. After this much effort we deserve a product we can be proud of, a product you will find compelling, and a product Roubo would thank us for.

That said, we are still within shooting distance of the schedule we drafted when we started down this path four years ago(!). I will be happy to regale you with developments at the Second Meeting of the Roubo Society at Woodworking in America this coming September and October, and Chris has invited me to join him and John Hoffman at the Lost Art Press booth at that event. There you can browse through my working manuscripts, which will be at the booth.

I do welcome your interest in our project, and invite you to send any questions and encouragements to Lost Art Press, and they will wind their way to me. And if you are at WIA in Cincinnati please stop by to say “Hi.”

By the way, we will be talking about our next Lost Art Press project there. Stay tuned.

– Don Williams

On the Matter of a Hand-tool Magazine

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I’ve received this question about 20 times since June 15 – including from my wife – so I suppose I should deal with it head-on instead of simply demurring.

Is Lost Art Press going to start a hand-tool magazine, whether printed or digital?

The answer? Not right now, at least.

The primary reason I left Popular Woodworking Magazine was because I had so many projects piling up here at Lost Art Press that I estimated it would take me five years of working nights and weekends to tackle them. And that’s just too long a gestation period for books that I consider to be essential to the growth of handwork in the 21st century.

I’m not just talking about the Roubo translation. That itself is a mountain of a publishing project, but that’s only one mountain in an entire range of monumental peaks.

Why have I been quiet on these? Because we are still inking contracts. But you can expect that we will have at least three new products before the end of the year – a DVD I’ll announce next week and two or three books that are unlike anything in print today.

The DVD is from me (sorry!) and is part of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” The other titles are from other authors, people who should have written books long ago.

As we get these projects underway, you’ll hear more about them here. Promise.

Now about that hand-tool magazine: I’ve been in media – and media alone – since 8th grade. I’ve worked in almost every department except advertising, which I would stink at, and circulation, which is a tricky business.

I’ve launched two start-ups in my career – The Kentucky Gazette newspaper and Woodworking Magazine. Both of which are now shuttered. Those failures taught me a lot about what it takes to make a magazine that makes money and makes me want to read it.

1. All your waking hours.
2. A lot of money. And a willingness to lose money for a few years as you pull the magazine onto its feet.
3. A willingness to deal with unethical distribution schemes.
4. A willingness to throw away about 60 to 70 percent of your newsstand copies that don’t sell.
5. A certain level of optimism mixed with stupidity — I call it stupidimism. This trait helps overcome Nos. 2-4.

At this point in my life, I want to spend all my hours producing a hand-tool canon of high-quality books — a foundation that I or others can build upon. I want to get us beyond sharpening, basic plane use and hand joinery.

What’s beyond that? An entire world.

So I guess I’m asking for some patience. After I get this corpus of work complete and the technology catches up with my ideas, I think I’ll be ready to dive into the world of periodicals again. Or there’s always that llama farm.

— Christopher Schwarz

Turning Out the Junk

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“But whenever we clutter up our houses with things we could quite well do without, buying them only because they please a passing fancy, or because our neighbours have them, or because they have become customary, then junk they are.

“For although the industrial world has by this time acquired some rudimentary ideas as to the fittingness of things, its output is continually increasing and its sales propaganda is increasingly directed towards representing non-essentials as necessary to our comfort and well-being.

“And these things can destroy beauty in its very essence by destroying the simplicity of our surroundings.”

— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker, January 1939