This is an excerpt from “Euclid’s Door” by Geo. R Walker and Jim Toplin. The book teaches how to make the tools from “By Hand and Eye.” At this point in chapter 7, a miter square that has a 15° tip is being constructed. This fragile corner of the tool has to be taken into consideration when choosing its placement on the grain of the board.
Fig. 7.13 The triangle on the left with its thin 15° tip poses a unique layout challenge
Many geometric layouts begin with just a given line. This has real practical value. It means we can construct the layout from just a small piece of the overall picture. This construction is a little more complicated than what we’ve done so far, so I suggest you work through this sequence on paper to get an understanding of it.
Fig. 7.14 The blade we eventually end up with has a clipped corner so we can have a 45° reference edge.
Case in point is this second triangle from our multi square, Fig. 7.13. The sharp blade that juts out to the left begins life as a 30:60:90 triangle that gets altered to include a 45° reference on one end, Fig. 7.14.
But that leaves us with a fragile, narrow point. We must lay out our triangle so that the hypotenuse is aligned with the long grain on our blank, Fig. 7.15.
Fig. 7.15 This layout is a challenge because our right angle is located up in the middle of the blade material. The only line we can know for certain is our hypotenuse located on the bottom edge.
So we need to lay out our triangle, but all we have to start our construction is the line that will be our hypotenuse. Before we proceed, let’s step back and take a look at a different geometric layout to get an understanding of how we get there. Here’s the construction we’ll base this on, Fig. 7.16.
Fig. 7.16 We’re going to use a few bits and pieces from this construction to reach our destination.
Let’s break it down into smaller pieces. We begin with Euclid’s first proposition, which is how to construct an equilateral triangle from a given line. Start by using the ends of a line to set the compass span and, using the end of the line as anchor points, draw two identical overlapping circles. Connect the top intersection where the circles overlap. Take note that the lines that connect the intersections also happen to share the radius of both circles. You just created a triangle with all sides equal which means all three corners are 60°, Fig. 7.17.
Fig. 7.17 The internal angles of all triangles always add up to 180°, so if our sides are equal, each corner must be 60°.
If you bisect this triangle, you get a pair of back-to-back 30:60:90 triangles, Fig. 7.18. It helps to see what you are after by superimposing this construction over our blade stock to see how it might apply, Fig. 7.19.
Fig. 7.18 (left) Note the hypotenuses of these two new triangles are facing out. Fig. 7.19 (right) In practice though, we don’t execute the entire construction, just a piece of it. It’s not really practical to draw this entire layout because much of it is out in space beyond our blade blank.
This is quite common in layouts at the bench. We don’t need to scribe every line, just the important ones that get us our result. Let the bottom edge of your blank be the hypotenuse of our triangle. Set a compass to span the length of your hypotenuse and strike an upward arc from the lower edge. Leave the compass at the same setting and anchor it where the arc touches the bottom of the board then strike a second mark across the arc, Fig. 7.20.
Fig. 7.20 The first arc is a portion of one of those overlapping circles. That’s all we need to execute our layout. The second mark defines the second side of the equilateral triangle.
Strike a line connecting these points then bisect this chord on one end of the triangle. Now you’ve created our 30:60:90 with the correct grain orientation, Fig. 7.21.
Fig. 7.21 Go back and compare this with our first layout. Does it come together for you?
We’ll use this construction to create our second blade with the proper grain orientation.
The cabinet I made in pippy (also known as burly) white oak with shop-made walnut-and-maple beading and hardware in walnut, based on Gimson’s original 1919 design for a sideboard for Guy de Gruchy in “Ernest Gimson: Arts & Crafts Designer and Architect.”
Nancy Hiller’s “Shop Tails,” a companion book of essays to “Making Things Work.” “Shop Tails” is different from “Making Things Work” in that it is structured around the animals that came in and out of Nancy’s life, with each chapter focusing on a different one (or several different ones). The animal tales are sandwiched between some serious existential and biographical content provoked by her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and all of it is interwoven with true stories about non-human animals, in addition to reflections on how much they taught her about life, love, illness, expectations, parenting, and death.
I continued to run up against the crucial big-picture question that so many books and articles told me I had to answer: What was I living for? What gave me joy? I still had no satisfactory response. Looking back over my life while fitting doors and discussing next steps with my oncologist from the top of a ladder as I painted cubbies for sheet music and CDs, I realized that I had rarely been motivated by a vision or a dream. I could recall few well-defined goals or desires. Sure, I had a basic three-fold vision: Do good work, make a home, have a happy partnership. But this was just an outline that would take a lot of filling-in. Why was I so vague about what I wanted?
In part, I realized, it was because I was raised not to want, but to be grateful for what already was. I worked at being happy, whatever situation I faced, and went from one situation to another without any real plan. When my mother told 8-year-old me that wanting things would make me unhappy, she was probably not referring to the important stuff, but to the latest toys we saw advertised on TV. But you can’t really predict what a kid will do with the Buddha’s First and Second Noble Truths, which, in a nutshell, see all life as suffering, and suffering as a product of selfish desire. I don’t recall any discussion about the need to envision my future, let alone plan my studies around my need to earn a living. Sometimes I was happy. Sometimes I was miserable. But eventually something would change and things got better. Only in my 30s, when I was reading Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in graduate school, did it dawn on me that desire can be among the most powerful motivations for good; what matters are the nature of that desire and its goal.
In place of motivation by well-founded desire, I had spent my life in search of validation that I didn’t get at home. Growing up, it seemed my sister and I were constantly being urged to be other than we were: Hold in your stomach, don’t slouch, don’t whine, get off your backside and do your chores – much of it the typical, benign work of training Baby Boomers for adulthood. The critical messages far outweighed any expressions of approbation.
My sense of never doing or being enough was only worsened by the father figures introduced to our household in the aftermath of our parents’ split. When I was 14, our mother’s boyfriend, George, told me I had a naturally down-turned mouth and should make an effort to smile, lest my face put others off. He said I was getting fat (I wasn’t) and should go on a diet, so I ran with that and developed an eating disorder. He told me I knew nothing – true, relatively speaking, but how does angrily hurling “You know nothing!” at a teenager really help matters? (Answer: It doesn’t. There are more precise and effective ways to make the point about youthful over-confidence versus lack of life experience.) His general demeanor was that of a smug, entitled guy who had put his degree from Oxford to profitable use by getting a job in law or finance in London and resented the intrusion of his girlfriend’s teenage daughters on what would otherwise have been his uninterrupted “me time.” I recognized his bitterness as evidence of his own unhappiness, but his words had lasting effects.
So when this arrogant man who arrived at our doorstep a few times a week, only to be ushered into a comfortable chair and handed a drink to enjoy while he read the evening paper, promised me 5 pounds for every A I got in my O-Level exams, I happily stuck it to him. I’d already experienced the satisfaction of earning good grades in middle school and realized I had the power to view my teachers less as unreasonably demanding authority figures than as partners in my education; I would do my best for them, as well as myself, not least because at the slightest imposition of real discipline, most of my fellow students complained. It had to be tough, being a teacher.
I lived by my As and A-pluses, my 10s-out-of-10. With every one, I felt better about myself and hoped that my teachers felt better about themselves, too. I worked hard to get into the University of Cambridge, only to discover, once accepted, that I had no idea why I was really there, even though I loved the day-to-day life of a scholar. What mattered most to me, I’m embarrassed to say, is that I got in – and with an honorary scholarship. No one could ever again call me lame-brained, even though my stepfather would do his best to prove my intellectual inferiority to his own sophistication in argument and repeatedly called me “useless” to my face. The same went for university after I returned to the States. I was determined to graduate Phi Beta Kappa, as my mother had. And I did. But again, in grad school, I was struck by the realization that I really had no idea why I was there, beyond my awareness that I enjoyed learning, having my mind lit on fire by new perspectives, and proving my ability to excel. In the end I did not want the life of a professional academic. And the most oft-cited alternatives for those with a doctorate in ethics, which I had planned to pursue, were nothing I wanted, either; I had no interest in being an ethics advisor to some big corporation, a job that too often means circumventing profit-diminishing foundational moral stances through arguments on behalf of ethical exceptions. What I wanted, for 50 years, was to prove that people were wrong about me, to exceed their low expectations. When people mentally translated my work as a furniture maker to “She makes ‘furniture’ out of pallets or fruit crates and decorates her work with cut-outs of ducks and bunnies – you know, because that’s what women like,” I would show them my take on an Edwardian hallstand with a perfectly fitted door and drawer and a cornice of compound bevels. Anyone who assumed that, as a tradesperson, I would be less intellectually curious and articulate than someone who works in an office (any kind of office would do; this is a matter of longstanding prejudice against “manual” and “blue-collar” workers) would have to square that assumption with a growing body of published essays and books in which I brought my academic training in Classical languages, history and ethics to bear on the social and economic significance of commonplace things such as kitchen furnishings. I did my best to illustrate the ways in which a house, typically thought of as “property,” could fulfill many of the roles we usually associate with a human partner. In response to the critics who might deride my ways of putting cabinets together, I would point out that there really are as many ways to build a cabinet as there are cabinetmakers, not to mention that the cabinets I build, however simple their construction, are far stronger than most that are commercially made.
No ducks and bunnies. Edwardian Hallstand, circa 2002. Curly white oak with locally quarried limestone counters. (Photo: Spectrum Creative Group.)
Throughout all of this, I now saw, I had moved forward in reaction to others. I was dangerously dependent on outside forces, people who expressed their opposition, no less than their approval. It suddenly felt deeply exhausting. I let my awareness of that exhaustion sink in. Whatever might happen with the course of my cancer, I was not going back to my old ways of living.
To be fair, those other-influenced decisions always reflected something of me – a love of houses, gardens and animals; an intellectual fascination with the endless ways in which people make meaning out of the seemingly random circumstances into which we are born; a desire to make myself a home. But viewing the span of my working life as a whole, I was staggered by a deep, yet vague sense that I had always been running away. What was I running away from – the person I was not, but was too often taken to be?
Millions of PBS viewers first met Dick Proenneke through the program “Alone in the Wilderness,” which documents Dick’s 30-year adventure in the Alaskan wilderness. On the shores of Twin Lakes, Dick built his cabin and nearly all of the household objects he required to survive, from the ingenious wooden hinges on his front door to the metal ice creepers he strapped to his boots.
And now, “The Handcrafted Life of Dick Proenneke” examines this adventure through the lens of Dick’s tools and the objects he made. Written by Monroe Robinson – the caretaker of Dick’s cabin and his personal effects – the book weaves together vintage photos and entries from Dick’s journals plus new drawings and images to paint a portrait of a man fully engaged in life and the natural world around him. The italic text after Dick’s journal entries is commentary by Robinson.
June 28, 1968:
Today I would build some furniture. First a kitchen chair and then a bench three feet long. I had them both ready to glue by 11:30. Back on the job I augured the hole for my table legs and the bunk poles were ready. I could sort, cut and fit them in. I’m near the end of the job of building on the cabin until I get a plane, glue and polyethylene for the roof. By the time I had the scraps cleaned up and tools sharpened as I do every evening it was time to call it a day.
Three-foot bench. (Photo by Monroe Robinson)
In 1995, Dick wrote, “My chair still giving trouble. One back rest support broke off at the hole in the seat foundation. I would shorten it a bit and shape a new end to fit in the hole with the broken support end. Working like a beaver when here came a Cessna 180.”
My replicated chair without caribou pad. Note the black bear tooth punctures in the end of the seat. (Photo by Monroe Robinson)
In 2001, a black bear broke the chair when it climbed through Dick’s nine-pane window to pull the chair and its caribou fur pad outside. I repaired Dick’s chair only to have it break when someone leaned back too far. I replicated his chair, repaired this new break and sent Dick’s chair to the archives.
In replicating the chair, I particularly focused on drilling the mortise holes for the legs and back rest at angles matching Dick’s. The chair’s stance, the splay and rake of the legs, along with the angle of the backrest support-post, make it a beautiful and comfortable chair. The back legs splay back a few degrees more than the front legs, and the back legs are slightly shorter. The chair looks simple but most handcrafted chairs at wilderness cabins are not crafted like this. Dick’s matter-of-fact approach did not mean a thrown together, uncomfortable chair. And constructing a handsome chair did not mean taking all day.
When a black bear, in 2015, managed to turn the handle of Dick’s door and pull out my replicated chair with a new caribou pad along with Dick’s four-legged stool with his original caribou pad, it was apparent the fur created an attracting odor. All fur was removed from Dick’s cabin.
A primitive chair finished with “Welsh Miserable.” Photo courtesy of Drew Langsner.
The following is excerpted from “Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown,” by Christopher Williams. It’s the first biography of one of the most influential chairmakers and writers of the 20th century: Welshman John Brown.
John Brown by his own admission wasn’t a fan of finishing. (See Good Woodworking issue 63.)
“American chairs are really polished. Typically, the finish is paint. Without exception all the American chairmakers I meet ask me how I get my finish. I fail to understand this because it is the least interesting part of my work. It’s an aggravating necessity, as far as I am concerned.”
Here are the finishes that John Brown regularly used. These were always applied before assembling the chair.
‘Welsh Miserable’ This term could be seen as a criticism of the Welsh and brown furniture. But I always took it in jest. During the ’80s and ’90s, brown was deemed to be the accepted colour of country furniture. Newly made furniture was also brown. JB secretly wanted to paint his chairs or leave them blonde. So “Welsh miserable” was his private joke.
JB’s recipe for this was a dark oak stain from a tin. Once it was dry, he applied a coat of sanding sealer. He would rub this back with fine sandpaper. He then applied two or three thin coats of shellac button polish and left the finish to dry overnight, if time allowed. He lastly applied a coat of dark oak wax polish with #0000 wire wool.
A Cardigan chair possibly finished with the “Spirit of Wales” finish.
The Spirit of Wales This finish was a favourite of his. It probably was the only finish he was enthused about as it brought out the artist in him! JB wrote, “The effect is not meant to reproduce an antique finish, but to try to capture the Spirit of Wales.”
JB would first apply a dark green water-based dye to the raw timber – always remembering to raise the grain a few times beforehand. When it was dry, he sanded it smooth and didn’t worry about sanding through the green. He then applied a dark brown stain over the green. When it was dry, he gave it a coat of sanding sealer. He sometimes added a coat of button polish before applying dark brown or black wax.
The finished chair had a greenish, brown/black appearance. In a certain light it’s spectacular.
Two primitive Welsh chairs with John Brown’s blonde finish.
Blonde JB described a natural-coloured chair as a “blonde chair.” He had two approaches to this.
If the natural colour of the grain was needed to be kept as bright as possible he used a white shellac polish. He would first apply a coat of sanding sealer. Then he gave it two or three coats of white shellac. In most cases he didn’t thin the polish; it was used direct from the bottle. Great care was needed as a high gloss could be attainted very quickly. This in turn gave the chair a glassy look. Finally, he applied a clear wax polish with #0000 wire wool.
He would sometimes (in his words) want to “kill the lightness.” By adding a few coats of shellac garnet polish over the sanding sealer this gave the chair a honey colour and a warm glow. He would finish up with a light, oak-coloured paste wax.
JB predominantly used the combination of oak and elm for the bulk of his chairs. Each species complemented the other colour-wise. If a steambent ash bow was added to the mix, it was coloured to blend in with the oak and elm. He achieved this by first making a strong pot of tea. The tea was applied to the ash arm before the sanding sealer and subsequent finish.
Oil I only saw JB use oil on occasion. The tenons on the legs, stretchers and sticks were covered in masking tape to prevent the oil from penetrating. The oil was applied and left to dry before he applied a coat of paste wax with #0000 wire wool.
To me it looked lacklustre compared to the shinier shellac finish.
Dimensions of a Swiss shaving horse. Legs are canted 12° lengthwise and 12° to the sides. Jaw overhang is 2″. The aft end of the work support overhang should be a few inches longer.
In 1978, Drew Langsner released his book “Country Woodcraft” to the world, and it sparked a movement – still expanding today – of hand-tool woodworkers who make things with mostly green wood.
The 304 pages of “Country Woodcraft” showed you how to split wood from the forest and shape into anything you might need, from a spoon to a bowl, from a hay rake fork to a milking stool, a pine whisk to a dining table.
After more than 40 years, Drew revisited this long-out-of-print and important book to revise and expand it to encompass what he has learned since “Country Woodcraft” was first released.
The result is “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now,” which has been expanded by nearly 100 pages and has been updated throughout to reflect what Drew has learned since 1978. Among many other additions, it includes greatly expanded sections on building shavehorses, carving spoons and making green-wood bowls.
The original book’s text is intact, and the old photos are in black and white. Throughout the book, Drew has added text, which we set in a slightly different font, to explain what he does differently now after 40 years of daily work on the North Carolina farm he shares with his wife, Louise.
In many ways, the book is a delightful conversation between the younger Drew, who is happy to chop down trees with a felling axe, and the older Drew, who now uses an electric chainsaw and band saw to break down stock to conserve energy (and likely aspirin). New illustrations and color photos throughout show how Drew works now.
During Country Workshops’ early years it seemed that we were always making shaving horses. We needed a herd for classes, and we offered courses in making them. These were mostly based on the design for Reudi Kohler’s shaving horse from the Swiss Alps. The Swiss-German name is a zug stuhl. In English, single-lever horses are sometimes called a dumb head.
At about that time, post-and-rung chairmaker Brian Boggs was experimenting with shaving horse possibilities derived from the British tradition where the mechanism consists of two pivoting levers that straddle the bench and work support. A cross-wise clamping bar connects the two levers at the upper working end. The foot pedal is another crosspiecethat holds the assembly together at the lower end. This type often has three legs – good for stability on a rough, uneven floor. The double-lever version is sometimes called a bodger’s horse. (I discuss the bodger myth in Chapter 12: A Spring-Pole Lathe.)
The distinctive feature of Brian’s shaving horse is a vertical ratchet system, for quickly adjusting the space between the work support and the jaw. The mechanism – sometimes called a wagon jack – was a breakthrough in shaving horse design. Brian also included a rotating jaw. This greatly improves clamping efficiency compared to the more common fixed cross-bar.
The immediately appreciated advantage of the ratchet is that it works quickly and easily. Less obvious is that the user now decides what height and angle is best for efficient tool use. The work support is lowered when working thicker stock. You select the height that your arms like, not the stock thickness. You always have optimal ergonomics. In contrast, with dumb-head shaving horses, the height of the jaw is adjusted for material thickness. With a thick chunk of wood you need to raise your arms to a position that often isn’t efficient body mechanics.
Also pre-Brian; the work support on twin-lever shaving horses usually pivots at the front of the bench. The work support is commonly adjusted with a wedge between the bench and lower surface of the work support. Consequently, the work support angle changes as the work support is adjusted for the stock thickness. With thin stock you need to pull upwards – uncomfortable and inefficient. And with thick stock you’re almost pulling the drawknife into your thighs.
A common disadvantage of traditional twin-lever horses is that the holes for the pivot bolt go through the bench – close to midpoint of the levers. The leverage ratio is inferior to the single-lever horses which have the pivot hole near the lever head. On dumb-head horses there is a further adjustment – additional bolt holes in the lever. On the bodger versions this adjustment is possible if the cross-bar can be moved up and down. When you do this, you need to adjust your arm height – possibly to an uncomfortable and inefficient working posture.
On most traditional bodger’s horses the cross-bar is fixed to the twin levers. The cross-bar doesn’t grab the work very well, due to a lack of bearing surface. Remember the poor leverage ratio caused by the low position of the pivot. This limitation can be overcome with a cross-bar that rotates. Now the cross-bar lies flat on the work.
A potential disadvantage of this feature is that the twin-lever unit isn’t as sturdy as it is with a fixed cross-bar. However, that can be overcome by stiffening the twin-lever unit at the lower foot end. With a rotating cross-bar, you gain so much holding friction that the poor location of the pivot becomes irrelevant.
Now we’ll look at design details with the single-lever dumb-head shaving horses. Because of the need to shave wood of various thickness there is no perfect shape for the lower bearing surface of the jaw. (This is the same problem as the fixed cross-bar in twin-lever horses.) This can be partly overcome by inserting something under the jaw or on top of the work support that increases grabbing strength. Reudi Kohler would use a piece of sandpaper, folded in half with the abrasive surfaces exposed.
A significant advantage found on most dumb-head shaving horses is the lateral foot treadle, rather than the foot cross-bar on bodger’s horses. The treadle eliminates the need to extend your legs nearly as far as with the cross-bar. Tall, leggy people don’t seem to understand this. I think the treadle is required.
One winter Carl Swensson decided to study shaving horses. (He wanted to design, make and use the best shaving horse possible.) Carl worked with the single-lever version, which is somewhat better for cooperage, which is what he was doing at the time.
I had always assumed that a shaving horse works because the head/ jaw comes down onto the workpiece, pinching it in place. Carl found that pinching doesn’t work very well. This is particularly true with dumb-head horses where there’s a compromise shape on the bottom of the jaw – it doesn’t lay flat on the workpiece.
Carl found that either type of shaving horse works much better when the jaw opening is adjusted so that there’s very little downward movement. The jaw moves in an arc, from about 12 o’clock to somewhere between 1 and 3 o’clock. When the jaw is adjusted to connect high in the arc, it’s moving at a low angle. Now it’s jamming, not pinching. You can’t pull the work loose, even with slight pressure at the foot treadle. It’s grabbing more like a wedge, not a connector like a clamp pad. An additional benefit of the close jaw opening is that there’s no need to press very far at the treadle, making life considerably easier. And work goes a bit quicker. The concept works equally well with dumb-head and bodger’s horses. It’s particularly effective when the bodger’s horse has a pivoting crosspiece. To increase friction with his dumb-head horse, Carl added a piece of semi-hard rubber on the bottom of the jaw.
Twin-lever horses win the efficiency contest because they can utilize a rotating crosspiece. On the dumb-head version the shape of the jaw is fixed, and is therefore never quite right.
An improvement that can be made with any dumb-head horse is to add more pivot bolt holes for adjusting the height of the jaw. The bolt holes should be spaced as close as possible. You can then adjust the height so that the jaw closes near the top of the arc, when it’s at a jamming angle.
This is Tom Donahey’s version of the ratchet work support. Further refinements are the extended aft work support, and the rectangular section pivoting cross-bar– with an off-center through-assembly bolt – for more adjustability. Tom substituted an extended treadle for the conventional foot cross bar, a major improvement.
One year, chairmaker Tom Donahey asked if I would be interested in selling shaving horses through our Country Workshops Store. “Sure” was the quick answer.
Tom’s version of a twin-lever horse utilizes the ratchet work support. His bench design and other details are considerably different than Brian’s version. In early discussions I promoted a lateral foot treadle, rather than the foot cross-bar found on most bodger’s horses.
As with Brian’s shaving horse, Tom decided to drop the traditional flat bench – with four legs – in favor of a stiff frame consisting of twin 2” rails on edge, and three legs. The space between the rails conveniently locates the single front leg, the vertical ratchet part of the work support, and the wooden flipper device that engages the ratchet teeth.
We also wanted a wide, comfortable seat. But where and how should the seat be attached to the frame? We decided to experiment with adjustable seat positions. A small keel was attached to the underside of the seat for the prototype horse. The keel fits neatly between the bench rails. It turns out that there’s no need to secure the seat in place. You are you! The seat doesn’t want to move when you advance the treadle. The seat with keel remains – and now Tom’s shaving horse seats are upholstered.
Over time, other refinements were incorporated into the design. The bolt holes for the crosspiece were moved from the center of the levers to a location close to the aft edge. Moving the cross-bar aft helps when you need to work close to the mechanism, as with short stock, like a spoon blank.
We decided to call Tom’s version a shaving mule since it combines elements from so many earlier breeds of shaving horses, plus our innovations. Tom has made well over 200, and the mules were used at Country Workshops classes for many years. We also produced a set of detailed plans for DIY makers. I don’t know how many plans we sold, but some years ago we decided to put a free pdf download file on the Country Workshops website. This is currently available in the CW Archive section of my website, DrewLangsner.com.
Tom Donahey’s Shaving Mule.
The Story Continues … During the Country Workshops years (1978 through 2017) I organized a series of international craft tours to Scandinavia, the U.K., Switzerland and Japan. In Japan I met Masashi Kutsuwa, a woodworker who teaches at Gifu Academy of Forest Science and Culture.
Masashi asked if I would be interested in teaching a post-and-rung chairmaking course. It would be run by the Japan Green Woodwork Association and take place at his school. Starting a chairmaking course isn’t easy. We would need tools and equipment, including 15 shaving horses. Masashi designed an easy-to-make twin-lever horse that can be quickly folded into a compact shape for storage. I loved teaching the class. But I didn’t like those shaving horses! (I won’t bother to discuss the problems with the design – trust me.) Something better would be needed for future classes. I promoted adopting Tom’s mules. Masashi countered that the design was too difficult for many woodworkers to construct. Also, he had to consider storage and transport – the Japan Green Woodworker group meets at different locations. But the real challenge with the Mule is making the precision ratchet mechanism. Tom’s design for attaching the rear legs also requires a compound-angled saw cut. It’s clever and works fine…if you can do it.
One day I received a booklet in the mail “Green Wood Work,” a Japanese primer for getting started with green woodworking. I could only understand the pictures – color photos and nice drawings. On page 25 my jaw dropped when I saw a new version of Masashi’s folding shaving horse. The significant innovation was that the work support was now two boards and two hinges that pivoted at opposite ends. The bench and work support make a “Z” configuration. The lower diagonal board raises and lowers the work support. The upper board’s hinge allows adjustments with the work support angle. Masashi’s new version also collapses into a compact bundle for storage and transport.
Masashi Kutsuwa’s Z work support shaving horse collapses and sets up in less than 30 seconds.
Here’s a way to easily set the work support at any height and at any angle. To keep things simple, the adjustments are made with loose wood blocks that act as wedges. I was also happy to see that the new folding horse used a lateral foot treadle, and a non-attached seat. The design still folds into a compact bundle for storage. My Japanese friends call it the Origami Horse.
I decided to make a Z-Mule that combines elements from Tom’s and Masashi’s versions, plus other elements. In this version, the diagonal of the Z is adjusted with a pivoting cam that stays in place better than a loose wedge. The holes in the cam look cool, but they’re really there to give you something to grab when adjusting the rotation. The diagonal and work support boards are attached with standard door hinges.
This is my Z-Mule. The frame and lever assembly borrow elements from all over the place.
Masashi also came up with a clever way to attach the foot treadle; it simply lifts from the lever assembly when you want to knock the mule down for storage. I’ve kept Tom’s sliding seat. In this variant the rear legs are rotated 90° and are secured to the bench rails by nesting into channels cut into the sides of the rails. Easy to do and sturdy. I’ve also incorporated a rotating cross-bar. One further refinement is that the cross-bar is rectangular in section, not square. This provides another potential adjustment in the spacing between the cross-bar and work support.
Masashi’s quick-detach foot treadle and the underside of Tom’s upholstered seat. Both on the Z-Mule.
I decided to incorporate a few style touches. The Z-Mule is not purely a form-follows-function design. It needs to look good. The front leg tapers narrower toward the floor, while the rear legs taper larger. This may seem odd, but I believe that it looks right. Also, I thickness-planed the diagonal and work-support boards to 1-1/4″. An odd dimension, but another visual tweak.
Of course you can design and make your own version of a shaving horse. Please borrow freely from what I’ve shared about these wonderful, fun workshop critters.
