When my mom died last year we tried to throw nothing in the garbage. We gave away everything to neighbors, friends and the local shelters. She would have wanted it that way. But no one wanted this white plastic shower caddy.
So I took it, even though I don’t like plastic.
I turned it into our Assembly Caddy™, and I’m surprised how much I like it (Megan doesn’t care for it, but oh well).
The caddy holds almost all the tools we need for typical and odd glue-ups. So whenever I or a student are ready to assemble, I grab the caddy and go to work without much thought. Here is what is in it (and why).
Glue (liquid hide, yellow and cyanoacrylate)
Glue brushes to apply glue
Toothbrushes to remove glue
Palette knife, syringe and dental floss to sneak glue into tight/odd spots
Small paper cups to hold glue during application
Galvanized bucket for water to clean excess glue
Wax paper to prevent glue squeeze-out from sticking to the bench.
Important Tip: Speed is Everything
One aspect of gluing up panels that many beginners don’t know is that you should glue up your panel immediately after dressing the edges. It doesn’t matter whether you use a handplane or an electric jointer.
How fast? I shoot for about 5 minutes. If it has been 30 minutes since I jointed the edges, I’ll rejoint them.
Wood moves after it is cut. There can be tension in the board or a wettish interior. As soon as you expose that fresh edge, it will start to react with the air in your shop.
In an edge joint, surface area is everything. Even tiny amounts of movement can reduce the strength of the joint. I have seen this problem first-hand with woodworkers who joint all their edges one day and come back the next day to assemble them. The joints are rarely perfect (or even decent).
Our prototype (left) and an anodized sample that I have been abusing.
Tool designer Josh Cook and I are making good progress on snaking GoDrilla through the CNC birth canal. (What is GoDrilla? Read this.)
We got the aluminum tool bodies and steel nuts manufactured, and now we are working out the kinks. There are always kinks. I spent Friday morning trying out five different hex shafts to see which one we should choose to ship with the GoDrilla (different materials, hardness, manufacturers).
During the testing I managed to lock one of the steel nuts on the aluminum body of the tool. Nothing would break it loose. Josh ultimately suggested a soak in WD40, which did the trick. A close examination of the tool’s parts revealed that some of the black anodizing on the aluminum body had stripped off and jammed the threads.
So we will add a manganese phosphate coating to the nuts (which will both fight corrosion and add lubrication). And we will also apply lubricant to the threads during assembly so they don’t seize.
After I added a drop of machine oil to the threads, the tool stopped locking up, even when horrifically abused (see photo above). That was reassuring.
The other surprising kink we are working out is some weird runout we get when we first put the 12” hex shaft in the body of the tool. After a short break-in period, the runout disappears and the tool runs insanely smooth. We think we know what is causing this and have a potential fix so customers don’t have to “break in” the GoDrilla.
We hope to have this tool out by the end of the summer and have it cost less than $50.
Or we will run into a brick wall. Bringing new things into the world – tools, books, aprons, furniture – is like a trip through the Fire Swamp.
One of the more important books in the Covington Mechanical Library is an inexpensive paperback from the 1990s. Long out of print, derided and forgotten.
It’s “Building Classic Antique Furniture with Pine” by Blair Howard. And the reason I keep it on our shelves is because it makes me a better editor. Whenever I’m bleary eyed from too much editing. Or rechecking dimensions. Or comparing drawings to a cutting list, I pull down this book and simply open the front cover.
And there is the biggest errata sheet ever known in the history of woodworking publishing.
The errors were not the author’s fault. Howard is a really nice guy. Well-meaning. And he has a good eye for furniture design.
Instead, the errors in the book were the result of a breakdown in the publishing process. I wasn’t involved in this book, but I watched it happen. The editors and technical illustrators who worked on this book assumed that other people were doing their jobs. And they were all wrong.
The result is an errata sheet of 92 mistakes.
During my time at F+W Publications (then F+W Media, then F+W Community), the book became known as “The Blair Howard Project” (after “The Blair Witch Project” movie), and we would invoke it in meetings to frighten other editors and supervisors. (“If you fire another editor, we’re going to have a real Blair Howard Project on our hands…..”)
Personally, the book transformed me into a holy terror with a red pen. For many years I edited under the flag of the Russian proverb “Doveryai, no proveryai” (Доверяй, но проверяй). Trust, but verify. After watching this book unfold and disintegrate, I just assume everything in a book, construction drawing or cutting list is wrong. And then I have to prove to myself it’s not.
Errors still get through our process because humans are fallible.
But Blair Howard helps keep me honest.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Maybe someday we’ll visit the Unintentional Fiction section of the Covington Mechanical Library. Here’s one book in that collection. There are others.
Several people have asked how to make their own apron hooks out of common hardware-store S-hooks. There are a few ways to do it, including some methods that are insanely better than what is here. (They will be posted in the comments shortly, I’m sure.)
Get a cheap S-hook at the hardware store. This package of two cost less than $3. Then hammer one of the hooks closed to make a piece of hardware that has a hook and a loop.
With one string of the apron, tie a loop as shown.
Hold the apron to your body and figure out where the hook should be secured on the other apron string. Then make it a little tighter than you think it should be. Once you load up the apron with stuff, you will want it tighter.
You are done. Now you can hook the apron on and off your body with one quick hand motion. And you have a couple hooks that make it easy to hang the apron on a nail in the wall at the end of the work day.
After a long dry spell – the last book we sent to press was in December – we now have four books on press. (Actually, we have five books if you count the somewhat-cursed edition of Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises” that has been on press for six months. More on that below.)
Today we finished our work on two books and won’t see them again until a semi backs up to the warehouse in 11 weeks. You can sign up to be notified when any of these books arrive in the warehouse on this page.
“The Belligerent Finisher” by John Porritt. This is our first book devoted to finishing, and it is a doozie. Porritt, a furniture restorer and chairmaker, shows many of the tricks he uses to add subtle (and beautiful) wear and age to a new piece. Porritt is not attempting to show you how to make fakes. He is trying to show you something deeper – how to add color and texture to a piece so its form matches its finish. Most of his processes use simple and common tools (a chainmail pot scrubber, a deer antler, a handheld propane torch, washing powder). The book walks you through all the steps for two backstools. Then there’s a gallery that shows how you can mix and match these techniques on other pieces. The book should arrive in our warehouse in September.
“Sharpen This” by Christopher Schwarz. I think of this book as a piece of historical fiction. What if someone wrote a book about how to sharpen, and that person wasn’t making sharpening equipment. And the internet didn’t exist. This is a pocket-book-sized treatise that boils down everything I know about sharpening media, steel and technique to give the reader a clear understanding of sharpening. The book embraces all the sharpening systems. But it focuses on how to work with a minimum amount of expensive gear. And how to work fast. This is a book I never wanted to write. But after teaching so many beginners who were so horribly confused, I decided to just lay it all out there. The book should arrive in our warehouse in September.
“Euclid’s Door” by George Walker and Jim Tolpin. Geometry lovers rejoice. Jim and George are back with a new book about how to make your own insanely accurate woodworking layout tools using simple hand tools and geometry that blew our minds. Honestly, both Megan and I had to step into the shop to confirm some of the geometric constructions really worked (they do). If you have been resisting geometry and whole-number ratios, this book will show you how to apply it directly to tools that you will use for the rest of your life. Really good stuff – and the book is entirely hand-illustrated by Barb Walker and Keith Mitchell. The book should arrive in our warehouse in late August.
The Stick Chair Journal No. 1. A crazy experiment. Can we make a beautiful journal about vernacular chairs and have it be slightly more successful than our money-losing posters? The first issue has techniques you can use, a tool review, folklore about a cursed chair and complete plans for a new vernacular chair design, which you are free to build and sell if you like. When you buy the journal you will also receive a download of the full-size patterns for the chair. The Journal should arrive in our warehouse in late August.
You can sign up to be notified when these books arrive in our store. It’s a simple process, and it is 100 percent not marketing. We are not trying to trick you into signing up for ads or some worthless newsletter. It’s a notification service that costs a lot of money to use. But we encourage you to please use it to make your life easier.
Oh, and about that cursed edition of Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises.” That has been at the printer since December. Then the plant shut down because of COVID. Then it shut down because of ransomware. Then they printed one of the signatures with a missing page and had to redo the signature. The whole situation is almost laughable.
The plant told me they would ship those books on June 24. I’m not holding my breath.
