Dec. 13 is the last day place an order in our store and be reasonably assured that it will arrive before Christmas. We have almost everything in stock except for card scrapers. That is a Christmas Miracle after the last 20 months of uncertainty and shortages.
Now some unfortunate news: The price of steel has gone up twice since we introduced the Crucible Lump Hammers. And we are to the point where we either have to lower the quality (nope), discontinue the product (nope) or raise the price.
The price will increase on Jan. 1, 2022. I’m not sure how much it will go up because we are waiting on a quote for our custom-turned and drawknifed handles.
We don’t like to raise prices, but we also like staying in business. If you want to buy them at the current price, you have until Jan. 1.
I promised a short film that demonstrates how our new Crucible Sliding Bevel Functions. So here it is below.
Our machine shop in Kentucky has begun milling the parts for the first big production run for this tool. We still hope a batch will be ready for Christmas, but we can’t make any promises.
At the very least, you can stop by the store on Dec. 11 between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. and play with it yourself during our Open Day.
We just received our first fully finished sample of our new Crucible Planing Stops. The cast ductile iron stops are all poured and are about halfway through the grinding process. So it won’t be long now.
The stops will cost less than $50. And they are incredibly simple to install:
Drill a 5/8” hole in the wooden block for your planing stop
Pound the iron stop in
Uh, done.
Whenever we post photos of this planing stop or our holdfast, people remind us that cast iron is fragile. It’s a stupid material to use to make a holdfast or planing stop. You can’t hit it with a hammer – it will shatter. Heck, it will shatter when you drop it on the floor.
Even when we tell people it is ductile iron, they respond: Actually, you can’t make holdfasts from ducks, ducts or tile, either. Do the research!
Today, I beat our planing stop samples with a lump hammer more than 100 times each to see what would happen. As always, the answer is: nothing.
Bean and Wally are THRILLED about the upcoming gift guide.
We will kick off the Anarchist Gift Guide on Thursday, Oct. 21 (tomorrow!). That’s a little earlier than usual, but the world is off its axis, and we want to give you plenty of time to get your gifts sorted for the holidays. Plus, this will be our biggest gift guide yet.
If you aren’t familiar with the gift guide, it has been a yearly tradition here for about a decade. It’s mostly little things that we find useful in the shop. It’s not sponsored and not affiliated. It doesn’t plug or promote our products. We do it because we love you (even you, John Cashman).
Hey – That Feels… Almost Normal
It was a relief to receive Nancy R. Hiller’s “Shop Tails: The Animals Who Help Us Make Things Work” from the printing plant in Tennessee. It took only 10 weeks to get it printed. That turnaround time is not like the old days when five weeks was the norm. But it’s way better than some other recent titles. (“The Stick Chair Book” is coming up on 17 weeks in gestation.)
So if you are looking for Lost Art Press books as gifts, here are four quick updates.
“The Stick Chair Book” should be shipping the second week of November. Fingers crossed.
“The Handcrafted Life of Dick Proenneke” is also scheduled to ship about that same time.
We are running dangerously low on stock of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” The cotton cloth we need for the cover is in limbo. If you need this book for a gift, don’t hem. And don’t haw.
With publishing mostly on the ropes, Megan and I have been full-time furniture makers and tool designers during the last few months. We’ve been sending a lot of furniture out the door lately, but that doesn’t help you with Christmas (unless you ordered a chair or a tool chest from us).
The good news is that we should have Crucible Planing Stops in stock before Christmas. These ductile iron bench accessories should be less than $50 and will be super easy to install (drill a 5/8” hole in the movable block; drive the stop in; done).
We have also been working on two new tools that are now in the prototype stage. One is a sliding bevel that holds its setting better than any tool I’ve ever used. And the second is a handy waist apron that is great for woodworking (and will feature a cool vintage-y screen print). Both of these new tools will launch in early 2022.
And by then I hope things will get back to normal, and we’ll have some new titles to announce.
After we shipped out our first big batch of Crucible Type 2 Dividers, we realized that we made the tips a little too long, and they bent more easily than we liked. It’s an easy thing to fix with a piece of sandpaper. And the “fix” is also the way to sharpen the dividers after they become dull with use.
Note: The dividers that are shipping now have already been sharpened using these methods, or they have tips we have modified on the mill.
Sharpening these dividers (or any dividers) is part of routine maintenance and is much easier to do than sharpening an edge tool.
Materials Needed
Here in our shop, we use #220-grit sandpaper that we have stuck down to a piece of inexpensive 12” x 12” floor tile from the home center. We stick it down using a thin squirt of spray adhesive (also available at your home center).
You will find this setup ideal for truing the soles of your block and smoothing planes.
You also could use a medium-grit diamond plate (if that’s how you roll), oilstones or India stones (crystalon). I don’t like to use waterstones for this because they are so soft, and it’s easy to plow a ditch in your stone with dividers.
How To Do It
The video above shows how to do it. If you read our blog via email, click here, and you’ll be whisked to a page where you can watch the video. The desired result is two tapered tips that curve to fine points. The curve strengthens the tips and helps prevent them from bending.
If you have bent your tips, you can either bend them back with some needlenose pliers or (if they bend only slightly) remove the bend on the sandpaper.
We were going to make a $99 micrometer-powered jig that attaches to your angle grinder to do this operation, but this seemed the better solution.
