It is very difficult for a non-gentleman to behave like a gentleman in battle because non-gents do not have the same belief that all foreigners are bad shots.
— Douglas Sutherland, as quoted in Geoffrey Beard and Christopher Gilbert’s “Dictionary of English Furniture Makers 1660-1840”
With the Roubo workbench class and Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool event behind me, I have returned to the solitude of my own shop and laptop so I can get some Lost Art Press work done. At the top of the agenda: finishing the design of Matt Bickford’s “Mouldings in Practice” and building a portable Campaign-style bookcase.
“Mouldings in Practice” is coming along. The first two-thirds of it are designed and being copy-edited. Unless things go off the rails, the book should be on the street in June. No word yet on pricing.
The Campaign bookcase is a folding oak cabinet that is based on an 1845 example that was owned by the Rev. George Goring Cuthbert of Ireland, who lived in India until 1861. Cuthbert’s was made from teak; mine is made from quartered oak, another common wood for Campaign furniture.
I made some small alterations to the dimensions and shelf spacing so it will hold the maximum number of 6” x 9” Lost Art Press books possible when I travel to woodworking schools and shows. I might also add some extra brass brackets to the bookcase – I have quite a box of them now.
And while I’m pleased with my progress on the bookcase, I’m mostly thrilled to be working without the roar of machines or trying to talk to people while I’m sawing, planing or rasping. This morning I cut all the stopped dados for the bookcase. That meant using a sash saw to slice the walls of the dados, a chisel to remove the bulk of the waste and a router plane to flatten the bottom of the dado. The eight dados took about an hour, including the time it took to take photographs for my forthcoming book on Campaign furniture.
As I was working, however, I had a bad thought. Though the bookcase will carry a bunch of 6” x 9” books, it won’t hold all that many copies of “Mouldings in Practice,” which will be 7” x 10.”
— Christopher Schwarz
One of the biggest benefits of leaving my job at Popular Woodworking Magazine – the best job I’ve ever had – is that I don’t have a 45-minute commute each day to the office.
I have not squandered that dividend of time. I have spent almost every minute of free time during the last 44 weeks in my workshop, building stuff or trying stuff.
Since December, I’ve been focused on finishing this Campaign Secretary for an article in Popular Woodworking. Yes, I see the irony. But the truth is that I couldn’t get much woodworking done while sitting in traffic. So I welcome the trade-off. Heck, I embrace it.
As I shot this short video this evening I couldn’t feel the irony, the fatigue or the loss. All I could feel is gratitude. It sounds sappy, but without the support of the 4,000 Lost Art Press customers I’d be heating up cans of beans by the railroad track.
So to everyone who has bought one of our books since 2007, let me say thanks. You are the ones who have given me an extra 165 hours of time since June 2011. And your dollars have also gone to directly support the craftsmanship of Robert Wearing, Jennie Alexander and Peter Follansbee.
So this video is for you.
— Christopher Schwarz
Linda Rosengarten of Hock Tools recently interviewed me about Lost Art Press, why I left Popular Woodworking Magazine and what book projects I am working on. You can read the full interview here and wonder if there is such a thing as Verbal Immodium that I should be taking. Or you can read the following excerpt.
Thanks to Linda and Ron Hock for giving us some digital ink. It’s a real honor. My first decent handplane had a Hock blade in it – a story that I hear repeated all the time.
Linda: So, what’s all this talk about campaign furniture and how is the full-blown campaign secretary by March 15 going? I read about it in your blog post, Today, I Made a Stick. Please tell me all about it.
Chris: I’m working on two books right now. One is on campaign furniture, a much-neglected style that I think many woodworkers would fall in love with. My grandparents had several pieces of it, and my grandfather built several reproductions of campaign pieces. So I’ve always been crazy for it. And it’s not just furniture of war. Campaign furniture was called “patent furniture” in the day and was part of the fabric of life in England and Europe. It was the furniture you would take camping or traveling.
The other book is tentatively called “Furniture of Necessity,” and it is stupid, insane and entirely ill-advised. I’ve been working on it for a couple years now and it seeks to change woodworkers’ taste in furniture. It’s hubris to even think I can do this, and I expect to fail spectacularly. But if I don’t try, then I definitely will fail. This book is, at its heart, the end game for the workbench book. Sorry to sound cryptic; that’s not my intent. It’s just too wild to even really discuss without writing a whole book, I guess.
This morning I’m finishing up all the small drawers for the gallery in this campaign secretary. The dovetails are little buggers, and the mahogany drawer front material is really dark stuff.
So I stole some of my daughter’s sidewalk chalk.
Chalking your knife lines and gauge lines makes your lines really easy to see, even in walnut. I usually rub some chalk onto the board coarsely, knife in my lines and then rub the chalk into the lines. This removes it from the face of the board and leaves it in the crevices.
However, today I learned something new, thanks to the kinda-creepy mind-reading power of carpenter Jeff Burks. He sent me a nice little article from an 1869 edition of The Manufacturer and Builder on dovetails.
There are some interesting tidbits in there, and in the discussion of chalk it implied you could pencil over the chalk. As I am somewhat dense at times, this had never occurred to me. So this morning I chalked my pin boards, knifed in the pins and then penciled in the vertical lines on the inside face.
It worked great.
Thanks dead guys. You’re the best.
You can download and read the entire article here.
http://www.carpentryarchive.org/files/dove-tail_joints_1869.pdf
— Christopher Schwarz