Look, I know y’all are here for the posts by Suzo “the Saucy Indexer” Ellison and Megan. But if you aren’t totally sick of me and my voice, there’s a new podcast out there that might amuse you.
The Why Make? guys interviewed me last year for their podcast with high-end makers and artists. I am definitely the outlier when it comes to their guests.
In the podcast, we delve into my early days as a business boy. My first woodworking business? Making jewelry from bark I found in my neighbor’s mulch. Then selling it to the younger kids in the neighborhood. I also had a brief spat trying to counterfeit $100 bills that didn’t end well.
Luckily, I got some ethics installed in my redneck brain.
Our new Workshop Waist Apron is made in the USA and built to last. I have destroyed so many aprons made of “ballistic cloth” and other high-tech fabrics. This cotton canvas one takes a real beating. Above is a quick video discussing its development and features.
If I ever write a book on finishing, I’ll probably call it “Farting Around With Finishes.”
One of the things I like to do on a Sunday afternoon is mess around with dumb ideas. About 100 percent of the time, my results are ugly or unremarkable. But every once in a while I discover something interesting that eludes the rounding error of “about 100 percent.”
One of the things I love about old vernacular pieces are the (rare) unrestored finishes. The best of them have a dark and mellow glow that verges on black. They have a low luster, but it’s nothing like dried linseed oil, which can look flat and starved.
After talking to experts on furniture and finishing, I’ve concluded that many of these finishes are the result of soot from the hearth (consider what coal soot did to the buildings of the U.K.). And the shine? Burnishing from use and the natural oils from the body of the sitter. There also could be waxes. Grease from food. Soil from clothing. Water damage. Children. And on and on.
(The original finish on these pieces could have been anything from nothing/nekkid, to an oil, a linseed-oil paint or a wax. These made-at-home pieces were unlikely to have a fancy film finish applied by the builder, though anything could have happened to the piece in the 20th century.)
Last fall I took a trip to Europe to travel around with Chair Chatters™ Klaus Skrudland and Rudy Everts. We drank a lot of Belgian ale and talked non-stop about chairs for about a week. Near the end of the trip as we were driving back to Munich, I wondered aloud if it would be possible to create a finish that would somewhat mimic old finishes on vernacular pieces (without dangerous chemicals or a 32-step process).
I had a dumb idea. Perhaps the finish could be based on a plant oil that is similar to sebum, the oil and waxes made by our sebaceous glands to keep our skin moisturized. As it turns out, jojoba oil is similar to sebum. (There is synthetic sebum out there, but the sources I have found are too expensive to use as a furniture finish.)
Jojoba is inexpensive, widely available and edible (but not digestible). Like linseed oil, jojoba is a drying oil. It is combustible, and there is a small risk of it auto-igniting if you foolishly bunch up your rags. So take the same precautions as with all drying oils and dispose of the rags as recommended on the oil’s Safety Data Sheet.
So jojoba is indeed a good candidate for a wood finish.
The next hurdle was how to get the hearth smoke into the finish. My first thought was to grind up lump charcoal or simply get some ashes from the fireplace and mix it into the jojoba. My experiments with those sources didn’t go well. The finish felt really gritty.
The solution was to switch to carbon black. Carbon black is essentially soot that is used as a pigment in inks and paints, and to color the rubber in your tires. It’s cheap, and you can get it as an extremely fine and consistent powder.
So what happens when you mix together jojoba oil and carbon black? I started with 1 ounce of jojoba oil and mixed in 1/2 teaspoon of carbon black. I stirred it with a popsicle stick and within a few seconds the carbon black was evenly distributed in the oil.
Then I ragged it on a scrap white oak chair arm that has been hanging around my shop for a year.
Immediately after application. Top: The jojoba oil/carbon black mixture. Bottom: Jojoba oil only, which has a nice color on oak.
Surprisingly, it looked pretty good. The oil gave the wood an orange color, and the carbon acted like a pigment stain – collecting in the wood’s pores and sitting on top of the wood. I let the finish dry for a couple hours then checked it again.
The downside is that the carbon black rubs off on your clothes a bit. After the oil dried to the touch, I rubbed it quite a bit with clean, dry rags. The finish on the wood didn’t get any lighter, but I continued to get some carbon black on the rags. (Though it was less and less the more I rubbed.)
So next, I’m going to reduce the amount of carbon black in the mixture and see what happens. And I’ll try adding a spit coat of shellac to the sample boards to see if it locks in the black color. Third option: cook up some soft wax with jojoba, beeswax and some carbon black.
All this might be a dead end, but I enjoy the process (and I hope that maybe Lucy will get me a lab coat for Christmas – ooooh, and a clipboard).
— Christopher Schwarz
Here you can see what I’m after. An orange glow plus a dark brown/black. Yes, that is my bare foot. It was Sunday. (I am fully clothed.)
Since we started this company 15 years ago, customers have asked us to start waiting lists for products, especially when they go out of stock.
Maintaining waiting lists is a lot of work, and we would rather plow our time into making new books, tools and workwear. But after much research we have added a function to our store that is the next best thing.
When a product goes out of stock, our store’s software now adds a button that says: Notify Me. Click on the button, enter your email and you are done. The minute that we restock that product, you will receive an email notification.
Some good things to know.
You will not get any follow-up, nagging emails. We hate that crap.
Your email will not go on a marketing list or be sold or given away. We hate that crap even more.
Your email will not even go into our database of customers. After the email is sent, your address is deleted. Gone.
This function is expensive for us to use. Let’s hope it makes everyone happy. Or at least not grumpy.
If we can make this function work financially, my hope is that we can use it to notify customers when a new book or tool comes out. Say we announce on the blog that “The Stick Chair Journal” has gone to press. We plan to set up a page with a “Notify Me” button. So as soon as the book is released, you will get an email about it.
That will, I hope, reduce the number of blog entries I write about restocking.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. We are working hard to get those chair templates back in stock. We can’t get 1/8” Baltic ply to save our lives. But we have a solution in the works.
Shop aprons that cover your torso are great, but they can be impractical during the summer, in heated shops or for people who do a lot of physical handwork. For years, we tried using tool belts for carpentry, but those are designed for a ridiculous amount of equipment and a 50’ tape measure.
The solution that we love is a waist apron. And we have designed ours from the ground up to be ideal for woodworkers. It is compact and breathes – it won’t leave a giant sweat stain behind like some shop aprons. And it is designed for the tools that most woodworkers need constantly – but not much more. A 12’ tape measure, a 6” combination square, 6” rules, pencils and maybe a knife or a small block plane.
All these fit nicely into the waist apron without feeling too bulky.
The Lost Art Press waist apron is made from 10-ounce cotton canvas, with reinforced pockets that will withstand heavy workshop use. The two main pockets are 6” deep and about 8” wide, with a side pocket on the right for a pencil or a 6” rule. You secure the apron to your waist using two canvas ties, which can be easily tied around an apron hook if you prefer. (The total length of the apron including the two ties is 67”, and the ties have a nice amount of elasticity.)
The front of the waist apron is printed with our favorite “Never Despair: Nothing Without Labour” woodcut in blue, just like an old fashioned nail apron you could buy at the hardware store. Unlike those cheap aprons, though, ours uses much tougher materials and is sewn to last.
The aprons were designed by Tom Bonamici, screen printed in Eugene, Oregon, and expertly sewn by Terry Shuck in Springfield, Oregon. The price is $48, which we think is remarkable for a garment of this quality and complexity.