Category: Cut and Dried

Our chore coats have arrived from the factory (except for nine medium-sized coats). John is packaging them up personally and they will ship out next week.

Just in time for summer!

They look fantastic and are extremely well-made. I think you will find them worth the wait. I plan to crank up the air conditioner in the shop and wear mine for a bit.

If your are one of the final nine people to order a size medium, we’ll be in touch to update you on the shipping delay. We hope it won’t be long.

‘Cut & Dried’ is Almost Here
Speaking of delays, our printing plant was swamped with work in April and May, so “Cut & Dried: A Woodworker’s Guide to Timber Technology” by Richard Jones was delayed at the plant. It is supposed to ship to us next week.

As a result of this delay, there is still time or order the book and receive the pdf of the book for free. As soon as we receive the shipment of books in our warehouse, then the pdf will cost about $15 more.

— Christopher Schwarz

During the last few months we have released a lot of material, including two books, a chore coat and the return of five T-shirt designs. We never intended all these new products to come out at once (with more in the wings).

This happened because we don’t operate like a typical publishing business that releases books timed with the seasons of the year. Instead, we release books when there is nothing more we can do to them to make them better. As a result, we have both dry spells and this current deluge of excellent material, including our latest book.

We have just sent off “Cut & Dried: A Woodworker’s Guide to Timber Technology” by Richard Jones to the printer, and it is scheduled to ship in mid to late May. This book was a massive undertaking by Richard, who sought to explain everything a serious woodworker needs to know about wood in language and terms intended for the artisan.

There are, of course, lots of excellent scientific papers and tomes available that explain wood as a construction material. Most of these resources are written for wood scientists. Others are written for project managers at large construction firms. Still others are aimed at the large cabinetshop that deals with sheet goods almost exclusively.

“Cut & Dried” is not like that. Richard has spent his entire adult life as a professional woodworker in the U.K. and the U.S., and has worked at the highest levels of craftsmanship. His goal with “Cut & Dried” was to explain an extremely complex and technical topic – wood technology – in terms that any serious woodworker could easily grasp. And he skipped the stuff for making buildings, bridges and plywood boxes.

This book is massive – 9″ x 12″, hardbound, with 336 pages on heavy coated stock. The entire book is in full color with a full-color dust jacket. As a result, this book is $65, a price that includes domestic shipping.

If you order during this pre-publication period, you will receive an instant pdf download of the book, which is searchable and (of course) portable. After the book is released, the pdf will cost $32.50.

“Cut & Dried” is intended to become a reference for any shop that deals with solid wood. It is carefully organized so you can find the answers to problems at the bench, or questions at the drafting table.

Here is the detailed Table of Contents, which makes that point better than any blog entry from me:

Cut_and_Dried_TOC

As always, all our books are produced entirely in the U.S., using the highest-quality materials. Our books’ signatures are sewn for longevity – we don’t offer glued-together pages spit out by a print-on-demand copier. We work with printing plants that care deeply about the survival of the printed word in this age of cheap information.

One more point: We keep our books in print as long as authors are willing to do so. Every standard book we’ve released in the last 11 years is still in print. So even if you can’t afford “Cut & Dried” today, it will be here in 18 months (unlike a traditional publisher) for you to purchase at that time.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Numerous retailers, including Lee Valley Tools and Classic Hand Tools in the U.K. have expressed interest in selling this title. So look to those retailers if you are in Canada or the U.K.

Richard Jones’s opus on wood technology – “Cut & Dried: A Woodworker’s Guide to Timber Technology” – is almost ready to go to the printer. There are just a few last-minute freak-outs to tend to today. And wrapping up the cover, which turned into a craft project this week.

“Cut & Dried” will be one of the largest books we’ve published (at about 400 pages) and covers every aspect of our beloved material, from how it grows, all the way to how it behaves when it’s in a finished piece of furniture. In between, Jones covers every aspect of the material, from fungi and pests to sawmills and kilns.

And, most importantly, the book is told from the perspective of a woodworker. Jones is a lifelong professional woodworker and instructor. While there are many other fine books on wood technology out there, Jones thought they were aimed more at a scientific audience than at furniture makers. And we agreed.

So Jones spent many years researching, writing, photographing and drawing this book to develop what we think is the most complete and understandable guide to wood.

We’ll be talking more about Jones’s exhaustive treatment of the topic in the coming days. But first, a look at how we developed the cover. It also involved woodworking.

“Cut & Dried” delves deep into the structure of trees and how that affects your work at the bench. And so I wanted a cover that displayed the structure without being too technical about it – this book is not written for wood scientists.

During my experiments with shou sugi ban, I became fascinated with how a torch can burn away the earlywood in some softwoods, leaving the hard latewood and exposing the pores that transmit fluid in the tree. I wondered if this could result in a woodblock-like print for the cover. After searching around, I became inspired by the work of Shona Branigan who does this sort of thing but takes it to a sublime artistic level.

This week, Megan Fitzpatrick, Brendan Gaffney and I spent a day messing around with different trees to make a block for the cover. In the end, Megan snitched an offcut of a neighbor’s Christmas tree – a Scot’s pine – that we cut, burned, brushed and inked. It took us about 25 tries to get the look we wanted.

If all goes to plan we’ll be offering this book for pre-publication ordering next week. When it’s released, we’ll have details on pricing and the ship date.

— Christopher Schwarz

Editor’s Note: Richard Jones, the author of an upcoming book on timber technology, takes us back to the 1970s when he learned a valuable lesson in sharpening while in training.

A perennial subject in woodworking magazines and forums is that of sharpening techniques. No other furniture-making topic seems to generate so much tedious verbose nit-picking and circular bickering in woodworking forums, along with the publication of innumerable “sure-fire” and “infallible” methods in blogs, YouTube videos and magazine articles. For somer reason, most of these espoused methods for achieving a sharp edge on a tool seem to take an inordinate amount of time and require a large array of bits and bobs to do the job. I sometimes wonder if the process of sharpening is the main objective of the exercise for the people who describe them rather than the means to working wood effectively.

Naturally, the subject is of interest because blunt tools aren’t much use. Preamble to many of these articles often causes a wry smile for they bring back memories of my initiation into the “dark” art. Many authors make points about those who struggle at it and possess a workshop full of dull tools. Conversely, it is sometimes said that those who can do the job tend to be fanatical about grits, slurries and bevel angles.

My experience is that there are really only two types of people when it comes to sharpening:

• Those who can’t.

• Those who can.

In the first group, those who can’t, you’ll sometimes see every sharpening system known to man arrayed around their workshop gathering dust. They have fancy grinders, oilstones, water stones, ceramic stones, diamond stones, guides, pieces of sandpaper, jigs, etc. And yet, just about every edge tool they own is chipped, dull and mostly useless.

In the second group, those who can, I haven’t observed much fanaticism about slurries, grits and bevel angles. In all the workshops I’ve worked in the only concern is to get the job done. It’s a case of, “Plane’s blunt – better sharpen it.” Dig out the stone, sharpen the blade, shove it back in the plane and use it. The equipment is minimal: a grinder, a stone of some sort and lubricant, a few slips for gouges and the like, and, perhaps, a piece of oiled leather charged with a bit of fine-powered abrasive for final stropping.

Going back to the 1970s, when I trained, learning how to sharpen tools was undertaken within the first few days. I don’t now recall precisely the order of my instruction, but it went something like this: I was handed a plane by the cabinetmaker I was assigned to and told, “Get that piece o’ wood square.” I’d done a bit of woodworking at school so I had a vague idea of what to do. I fooled around with that lump of wood for 20 or so minutes and got it something like square – all this under the watchful eye of the crusty old guy and his ever-present roll-up hanging out of the corner of his mouth.

“OK, I’ve done that,” I said. “Now what do you want me to do?”

I was told to hang about for a minute whilst he picked up his square and straightedge and proceeded to scrutinise my handiwork. This was followed by a non-committal grunt and some desultory foot sweeping of the plentiful shavings on the floor – the wood was probably only about 90 percent or so of its original volume.

“Now sonny, let’s do the next job,” he announced. “Pull that jack plane ye’ve bin usin’ apairt and let’s have a look at the iron.”

I did.

“Hold the iron up so’s ye can see the cuttin’ edge,” he instructed. (He was a Scot.) Again, I did as I was told.

“Now, can ye see it? Can ye see the line-o’-light at the shairp end there?” He wheezed as he tapped a line of ash onto the floor and stood on it. He was referring to the shiny reflection visible when cutting edges are dull.

“Aye,” I said, after a little eye squinting and other pretence of intelligence.

“How shairp does it look to you boy?” he enquired.

I thought about this for a moment or two, seeking the right response to my tormentor – for I hadn’t really got a clue what he was talking about. I finally replied rather hopefully and a bit brightly: “Pretty shairp, I’d say.”

He laughed out loud, and hacked a bit. “Dinnae be the daft bloody laddie wi’ me son. If ye can see it, it’s blunt. I could ride that bloody iron yer holdin’ bare-arsed to London and back and no cut ma’sel’. Get o’er here an’ I’ll show ye something.”

You can probably guess. Out came the oilstone from his toolbox and quick as a flash the iron was whisking up and down the stone, flipped over, the wire edge removed, and finally it was stropped backwards and forwards on the calloused palm of his hand. You could shave with it. I know, because he demonstrated how sharp it was by slicing a few hairs off his forearm. On went the cap iron and the assembly was dropped back in the plane. This was followed by a bit of squinting along the sole from the front whilst the lever and knob were fiddled with and that was it. He took a few shavings off a piece of wood and it went back in his toolbox. It took, oh, a few minutes.

“Now son, that’s a shairp plane. It’s nae bloody use to me blunt. Ye may as well sling a soddin’ blunt yin in the bucket fer all the use it is to me,” he explained with great refinement. “I’ve plenty mair o’ them in that box, an’ they’re all blunt. Ah’ve bin savin’ ’em for ye. There’s a bunch a chisels, too. Let’s get ye started.”

For what felt like forever I sharpened his tools for the one and only time I was allowed to under his rheumy-eyed and critical stare, and things gradually got better. After a while he stopped telling me what a “completely daft stupit wee bastud” I was, and a bit later he started offering grudging approval. I had to sharpen some tools more than once because he kept on using and dulling them. When I’d done the lot we stopped and surveyed the day’s work.

“Aye, nae too bad fer a daft laddie’s fust effort,” he commented darkly, sucking hard on his smoke. “I think ye’ve goat whit it takes. Time’ll tell, sonnie. Remember, ye’ll never be a bloody cabinetmaker if ye cannae even shairpen yer frickin’ tools. Lesson over. Dinnae ferget it.”

I haven’t.

— Richard Jones

Editor’s Note: As Richard states below, his tome on timber technology is, indeed, nearing the finish line.

For some people it appears it’s easy to release a book. Publishers occasionally give the impression of falling over themselves to offer improbably favourable deals to those such as C-list celebrities for their as-yet-non-existent but soon-to-be-ghost-written vacuous blathering.

I don’t fit that category, but by 2014 my behemoth was near completion – nearly 180,000 words and more than 400 figures.

How to publish it?

Self-publish? Nope. I lacked the skills. It had to be a real publisher.

I didn’t expect finding a publisher would be especially challenging. My optimism, perhaps, came from earlier publishing experience. My woodworking articles had appeared in magazines since the 1990s. A first submission sold quickly at first attempt and success continued. All but one or two articles sold easily, sometimes twice – once in the U.K. and again in the U.S.

How hard could it be to sell a book? I was about to find out. There were possibly 10 unsuccessful attempts to find a publisher, a frustratingly slow process. It’s perhaps unwritten, but I’m convinced there is an ‘unofficial’ code of conduct between an aspiring author and a publisher. You send sample text to one and they sit on it for months, then they reject it. You move to the next publisher and do it all again. Try sending your manuscript to multiple publishers simultaneously – remember the ‘code of conduct’ – and word seems to get around the small world of craft publishers swiftly, and you’re blackballed by them all.

Eventually, a publisher bought the publishing rights, paid the advance and then … dissembled and prevaricated. A year later they changed their mind and relinquished the publishing rights. I was back on the dispiriting merry-go-round of publisher hunting and rejections somewhat softened by comments such as, “Great manuscript, but, er, not for us.”

Finally, a stroke of luck, or perhaps destiny – I don’t know. A couple or so years ago I asked Lost Art Press to review my manuscript. They expressed interest, but at that time were overwhelmed with ongoing projects. They felt it would be unfair to me to hold my manuscript for probably years until they could turn their attention to it, so they said I should try other publishers. Come spring of 2017, I’d unsuccessfully tried more publishers, and then contacted Lost Art Press again, explained the situation and, well, what was the worst that could happen? Another rejection maybe? I was taken aback: Their response was rapid and positive. And here we are, barely six months later, seemingly very near print ready.

— Richard Jones