Lost Art Press

Author: Lost Art Press

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

Heavy Metal Mallet

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Like every woodworker, I have a short list of tools that I wish were still widely available today. Most of these are tools that have wound up in my shop and proved themselves useful.

About five years ago I got a cool mallet that was common in England but not so much here. It has a heavy brass head, wooden striking faces and a nice chamfered handle.

The whole thing weighs more than 3 pounds – my wife weighed herself with it on our digital scale. Then she weighed herself without the mallet. (That is what passes for both love and entertainment in the early 40s.)

This is not a tool you want to wield all day. In fact, mortising with it wears out my forearm after only a couple mortises.

However, it is great for assembly tasks. It knocks dovetails together with ease. I use it for driving drawbore pins – both through a dowel plate and into the holes. I use it for knocking together mortise-and-tenon joints. If you want to see it in action, check out this video on YouTube. Anytime I need force with finesse I reach for this tool.

Well, I used to.

About a year ago, the wooden striking faces dropped out of the brass head like two rotted teeth. They had shrunk out just enough – friction was the glue. I set the mallet aside on my bookshelves until a month ago. I decided to try to fix the thing.

I considered fabricating new wooden faces, but their shape is complex. So I decided to first try to get the pyramid-shaped faces back in their holes. The staff at the magazine suggested removing a little wood from the back of the faces and driving the faces back into the brass. The hope was that this would compress the wood, and friction would do its job again (lazy friction).

I tried it. It didn’t work. Another suggestion was to drill through the brass head and pin the faces with a metal rivet. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that kind of implant surgery.

So today I took a different tack: high-impact epoxy. I glued and clamped the faces in place this morning, and now I’m just waiting for the clock to make it around the horn again so I can take the thing for a test beat.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. I know that Australian toolmaker Chris Vesper has this tool on his drawing board. If you’re interested, you should drop him a line through his web site. To see a photo of his prototype mallets scroll to the bottom of this page.

Guest Post: Make Ogee Feet By Hand

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Editor’s note: Here’s another great installment from hand-tool woodworker Dean Jansa. This one guides you through the process of moulding and assembling and ogree bracket foot.

The same chest that has the molding shown in “Sticking a Moulding” will have ogee bracket feet. Just like making a molding the first step is laying out the profile of the ogee on the edge of the stock.

Here’s a quick side-step: You’ll note the stock I’m using is made up of the primary wood laminated to a piece of pine. Not all period pieces used this laminated foot. If you choose to copy a piece without such a lamination, just ignore the pine in the photos.

The benefit of the lamination is the added strength it lends to the otherwise fragile “ankle” of the foot. That is, the area where the ogee sweeps inward. As you will see, without the lamination, this part of the foot can end up very thin after the ogee profile is cut with the hollows and rounds.

As with moulding, start with a single piece of stock long enough to cut all the feet for the chest. I’ll need six “foot parts” total. A pair will be mitered together for each front corner, and a single foot for the rear, for a total of six.

Lay out the desired profile on the end of the stock.

Remove as much waste as you can with a drawknife from the convex portion of the top of the foot. This is much faster than using a hollow to do all the work.

Clean up the profile with a hollow after removing the waste.

Next I create the concave portion of the ogee. I use a plow plane to remove waste from the concave portion of the stock, approximating the curve with a series of steps. The narrower the blade you use, the closer you can approximate the curve. But I find it is a balance, as too narrow a blade takes more time as you have many little steps to cut. Too wide and you are left with a lot of material to remove with the round plane. Your experience will be your guide. (Remember Riemann Sums from calculus days? Here’s a real world example!)

I work from the furthest point away from the bottom edge toward the bottom edge as my wooden plow has its depth stop on the left side of the groove it cuts. If you work with a metal plow you may want to work from the bottom edge toward the top of the foot as many metal plows have their depth stops on the right side of the groove they cut.

After the steps are cut, remove the edges of the steps with a chisel or gouge. In fact you can rough out the entire concave portion with gouges if you’d like. In maple I find it easier to use the plow to remove the bulk of the waste.

Here the majority of the concave portion is complete.

A little more round plane work gets you to the complete molding, ready to be cut into individual parts of the feet.

Mark the outline of the foot on the rear of the profiled stock and cut it with a turning saw.

The rear feet are easy, no miters. The layout above shows the side profile of the ogee, but I will not cut out that profile, rather I just cut the rear-facing portion of the foot square. A little rasp work, and a rear foot is ready for a pine brace and glue blocks.

The front feet are mitered. I choose to cut and fit the miters before I cut out the profile of the foot.

Fitting the miter first has its benefits and risks. The benefit: The foot profile will be full sized. If you cut the profile first you may have to remove some material when fitting the miter, making the feet slightly different sizes. The risk: You have to be careful not to damage the sharp edge left on the mitered edge while cutting out and shaping the foot profile. The benefit outweighs the risk for me, so I choose to fit the miters first and am vigilant while cutting and shaping the profiles.

There are options for cutting the profiles as well. Here I am cutting the profile with a turning saw.

But if you look the foot below you’ll see evidence of a different method. Note the saw kerfs along the profile, most evident in the pine backing. Cutting the bulk of the waste with a hand saw and removing the rest with chisels and or gouges leaves such marks.

Having fit the miters and cut out the profile all that is left is the glue up. There are several methods seen in period work. Most common is to glue the miter and reinforce the foot with glue block with their grain running vertical. Here is a pine mock-up of the feet I’m working on, with vertical glue blocks and no lamination.

Now you can see why one may want to laminate the foot stock. Note how thin the foot is where the ogee sweeps inward. Add to this the crossgrain of the glue blocks and the result is a cracked foot at the thin point.

One solution to the crossgrain issue is to stack glue blocks so the grain is running the same direction as the feet. In the photo of the period piece above you can see the stacked glue blocks on the rear foot. This was a common feature of the Williamsburg area from the Scott Shop. Here are the stacked glue blocks on the front feet for my chest:

I’ll add on last small glue block when I complete all the feet. The chest really is supported by the glue blocks. Again, refer to the period piece above, you can see the glue blocks extend slightly below the bottom of the feet.

And here you have it – an ogee bracket foot ready to attach to the case.

— Dean Jansa

Clinching Nails (Sometimes Teeth)

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I’ve been clinching a lot of nails these last few weeks while building some utilitarian boxes. So I’ve been digging into the literature to investigate the best way to do it.

Clinching (sometimes spelled “clenching”) is when you drive a nail that passes through both thicknesses of wood you are fastening. The tip of this nail sticks out about 1/4” and is bent over and driven into the wood.

Clinching adds remarkable strength to a joint. A 1948 study by the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory concluded that clinching can increase the holding power of a nail between 45 percent and 464 percent – depending on a variety of factors, including the species of wood and its moisture content. (For the complete super-geeky report, click here.)

Also interesting: The study concluded that bending the tip across the grain increased the holding power by 20 percent compared to a nail clinched along the grain.

But how do you best clinch a nail? There is more than one effective method.

Four Ways & A Trick
Here’s how the machines do it: They fire a nail in at an angle and there’s a steel plate waiting for the tip when it emerges. When the nail hits the steel it bends over into the wood – essentially it ricochets like a bullet or pool ball.

I’ve never tried this with a pneumatic nail gun, but it sounds like fun on a Friday afternoon.

For the hand clinchers, there are at least two common techniques. The first one is to drive the nail through the work. Rest a steel plate, anvil or a second heavy hammerhead on the nail’s head. Then tap the tip of the nail with your hammer. It will curl over. Then you can drive the drooping tip back into the wood.

The second technique is similar to the machine process. You drive the nail through the work and against a waiting “bucking iron,” which curls the tip and forces it back into the wood. (For a nice illustration of these two methods, click here.)There’s one more technique I’ll sometimes use when I’m being really, ahem, retentive. I’ll drive the nail through. Then I’ll use needlenose pliers to bend the tip to the angle I want. Then I’ll drive it into the work. This results in a tidy appearance. I admit it’s a bit much.

When I have a lot of clinching to do, I’ve found that a cast iron table saw wing can be your best friend with flat work – doors, lids and the like. Lay the cast wing on your bench and then you have a nice big area to support your work as you merrily clinch away. And no, the clinching does not mar, crack or otherwise defile the wing.

There is one disadvantage to clinching. It can alarm your children. After I finished a lid I showed the 30 or so clinched nails to my youngest.

“Ewww,” Katy said. “Dad, does this wood have termites?”

— Christopher Schwarz

The Light That Helps Make Things Tight

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One of my most essential tools for joinery is one that I never talk about: my magnifier lamp.

This fluorescent, articulating light fixture allows me to see my layout lines, any undesirable tracks left by my handplanes and the bevel of whatever tool I’m sharpening at the moment. The light fixture drops into my dog holes so I can move it anywhere on my bench, though it rarely strays from the area of the benchtop that has my leg vise.

I’ve burned through three of these fixtures since I started woodworking – most of the ones you get at office supply stores are just junk. Their springs are weak and soon the lamp won’t stand upright. Plus they get damaged easily when you drop them.

About five years ago I bought a magnifier lamp that was built in the 1960s. It was “new old stock” (thanks Slav!), meaning it still had the sales tags on it when it came into my shop.

This sucker is bulletproof. And I don’t care what I paid for it (about $45) – I’d pay twice that in a heartbeat. You move it, and it stays put. It laughs off knocks and dings. And the switch didn’t break in the first week.

My magnifier lamp was made by Luxo Lamp Corp., which is still around – though I haven’t inspected the company’s modern merchandise. I really should take a look at the different lamps available (sounds like a tool test, eh?).

I can say this: I’ve never been happy with the student-grade stuff, so you might want to stay away from it. I’d check the stores that sell old office equipment. Buried among the manual typewriters, adding machines and metal shelving units just might be your next favorite woodworking tool.

— Christopher Schwarz

9 Ways to Plane for Longer Periods

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When I teach classes about handplanes, the climax is a contest where we see who can plane a 3/4” x 6” x 12” board to perfection – both to the try square and to the eye.

Last year at one of the classes, one of the young students in the front row took the contest to heart. When he brought his board up to me to evaluate he was out of breath and as wet as a Louisiana underarm.

I thought he had dunked his head in the toilet and was playing a joke on me. Or perhaps he was having a coronary event.

Neither turned out to be true. He was ragged out from planing. It’s a common complaint among readers: Planing is hard work. However, I can generally work all day in the shop without increasing my heart rate beyond what it is during a horror movie. You might think it’s my age (I’m 40), but I think it’s more than that. Over the years I’ve developed some habits that allow me to work steadily all day. Here are a few:

1. Make sure your bench is low enough. A high bench requires you to use the shorter muscles in your arms that tire rapidly. A lower bench allows you to use your legs and abdomen more. When I finally lowered my bench to 34″ it made a huge difference in my work.

2. Step forward during your planing stroke. When planing a longer board (36″ or more), I begin the stroke with one foot in the air and step forward. The act of dropping my foot begins the stroke. This puts gravity on your side. It looks funny (like a Monty Python Silly Walk). But boy does it work.

3. Traverse as much as possible. Planing across the grain allows you to remove more material with less effort. I’ll traverse with my fore plane and my jointer plane. Then a few diagonal strokes with the jointer plane and I’m off to the smoother. The longer I can traverse, the longer I can work.

4. Plan your work around fatigue. One of the great things about hand-tool woodworking is that you can work in short bursts at different tasks and use different muscle groups. For example, I’m building web frames this week. I’ll jointer plane the components. Then cut the tenons. Then the mortises. Then I might smooth plane them and assemble them. Then I’ll move onto the next web frame.

5. Wax your tools. Paraffin wax on the sole of your tool (or a wipe with a non-drying vegetable oil such as jojoba oil) can do wonders. It reduces the effort to push the tool. And – if you apply it to your tools between each board you plane – you also get a short, breather.

6. Sharpen. I’m always amazed at how a sharp tool is easier to push than one that is approaching dull. Sharpening is also a break that can allow you to recover.

7. Pick different secondary woods. For the internal guts of your project, consider using Eastern white pine or basswood instead of using poplar or lower-grade boards of your project’s primary wood (i.e. don’t use rock maple for your drawer bottoms).

8. Don’t smooth plane the inside components. When I plane a carcase side or some internal components, I typically stop with the jointer plane. Sometimes I’ll stop with the fore plane (such as on the underside of a large tabletop). Only the surfaces that show will be smooth-planed. This can cut your planing time dramatically.

9. Always use the coarsest tool possible and take the thickest cut that does not cause tear-out. One 6-thou-thick shaving saves time and effort compared to 12 half-thou shavings. If your wood is mild, take a thick shaving.

So how about you? Any suggestions (besides indenturing an apprentice or buying crystal meth) for increasing your working time?

— Christopher Schwarz