Many of you have been asking about some of our newer titles, with specific questions about content and wondering if these books are right for you. So we have assembled pdf excerpts for each of these books, which you are welcome to download.
The pdf for “Ingenious Mechanicks” by Christopher Schwarz includes the table of contents, introduction and Chapter 1: Why Early Workbenches?.
The pdf for “Slöjd in Wood” by Jögge Sundqvist includes the table of contents, a six-page description of what slöjd means, “the kitchen as a workshop,” the benefits of working in slöjd, and a chapter that shows you how to make knobs and latches.
The pdf for “Cut & Dried” by Richard Jones includes a detailed table of contents (three pages, singled-spaced), foreword, acknowledgements, a guide to the abbreviations used in the book and Chapter 7: Coping with Wood Movement (25 pages on dimensional change, distortion, moisture cycling and stress release (kickback)).
The pdf for “Welsh Stick Chairs” by John Brown includes a poem, introduction, author’s foreword (there are two) and his chapter on Bending Wood for Chair Parts.
You can find more details and ordering information for each of these books here.
No trespassing. I like to go places that haven’t been interpreted by museum personnel or academics (nothing against these people, but I like to draw my own conclusions). This unrestored coastal artillery facility is nothing like the touristy one down the road.
Sometimes I wonder why I research old workbenches, build them and write about them. I know my critics and friends wonder the same thing.
The truth is, I have a gland – well, it feels like a gland – deep inside my torso. It’s located a bit above my tailbone and in front of the base of my spine. Ever since I was a boy, that area would tingle and throb when I ventured into places I wasn’t allowed.
(My critics would say the location of that gland – or whatever it is – is also where a lot of crap is produced in the human body.)
I was 6 or 7 the first time I felt it. My family attended First Presbyterian Church in Fort Smith, Ark., which is downtown and surrounded by empty buildings from the town’s 19th-century heyday. Next to the church was the derelict Goldman Hotel, a landmark six-story building built in 1910 that was the center of the town’s social scene until World War II.
The building was shut to the public at about the time my family moved to Fort Smith in 1973 (and demolished in the 1990s). But I spent every Sunday and Wednesday in its shadow and soon began sneaking out of Sunday school to explore the hotel through an opening on the building’s west side.
Though the Goldman was dilapidated – it had been an apartment building in its last days – there were remnants of its glory and its rich ornamentation throughout. Furniture. Light fixtures. Tiles. Mouldings.
That was the first time I ever felt that odd tingle. It was better than any high I have achieved with alcohol (or the banana peels I smoked in college). And I have chased after that feeling my entire life.
I have a thing for old and abandoned places. I love to explore overgrown concrete battlements that line harbors and rivers. Abandoned houses – we had a creepy overgrown one on our farm – are like a sip of bourbon. Multi-level factories filled with garbage, graffiti and old equipment are like a multi-day bender.
I knew I was wrong in the head (or the gland) in 2012 when I became halfcrazed about buying an old brewery in Covington, Ky. It had two flooded subbasements and a network of unexplored lagering tunnels that staggered off below the old city.
During a tour of that building, I encountered a deep pit in its basement. I threw a rock down the hole and didn’t hear it splash or hit bottom.
“Where does it go?” I asked the real estate agent.
Her reply: “We have no idea.”
I thought: “I have a flashlight and rope in my truck.” Behind me, I heard my wife, Lucy, call out: “Nope! We are done here!”
It probably was the right decision.
At other times, the gland acts up when I’m not in physical danger, but when I’m on the precipice of obsession. One week I flew to New York City and visited Joel Moskowitz of Tools for Working Wood. The highlight of that trip was paging through his 20th-century reprint of A.J. Roubo’s “l’Art du menuisier.” Like most woodworkers, I had seen the workbench illustrated in Plate 11 of Roubo’s multi-volume book many times before. But I hadn’t seen Roubo’s whole work – nearly 400 pages of plates. And many of the plates showed this simple bench in use for all manner of operations, from installing moulding in an apartment to sandshading veneer for marquetry.
While sitting on Joel’s couch with this giant tome on my lap, I became as intoxicated as the day I first ducked into a broken window at the Goldman Hotel. The feeling was so powerful that it verged on physical pain.
When I returned to Cincinnati, I felt physically compelled to build that workbench. I ripped up the editorial calendar for the 2005 issue of Woodworking Magazine and presented a new plan to the magazine’s staff to satisfy my personal lust: Build the 18th-century Roubo workbench using yellow pine (to make it less expensive).
I offered to do all the work – building, writing and illustrating – so no one objected. Or perhaps they were wary of crossing me because I looked a bit crazed. I had drafted my plan the night before and hadn’t slept much.
Building that first Roubo workbench and putting it to work was like mainlining the unknown for me – like exploring a forgotten Soviet missile silo or finding a passage to catacombs beneath my house.
Building that Roubo bench led to making the Holtzapffel workbench – a German/English hybrid. Then a Nicholson bench – the classic English workbench – and about a dozen variants of benches from Europe, the U.K. and North America.
It has been a 13-year obsession with no end in sight.
A toothed planing stop is an indispensible appliance for a low workbench. Yes, it marks your work, but many times this isn’t a problem if you consider carefully the order of operations on a board (i.e. crosscut the marks away at the end). Photo by Narayan Nayar.
The first time I saw the bench in Peter Nicholson’s “Mechanic’s Companion” (1831), I thought: That’s not right – the benchtop has only a planing stop. There are no holes for holdfasts, dogs or other workholding devices. While the front of the bench features a screw-driven face vise, I thought surely the illustrator forgot to draw in some details.
These early workbenches have little in way of workholding. Where’s the tail vise? Do you need one? (Peter Nicholson’s “Mechanic’s Companion” (1831)).
Then I got a copy of André Félibien’s “Des Principes de L’Architecture” (1676-1690) and the workbenches shown there (below) are also stripped down. They feature a planing stop and some holes in the top and legs for a holdfast. As I worked my way backward through the visual record of workbenches in technical manuals and paintings, the message was clear: Early workbenches had simple workholding.
It would be easy to assume that early benches are simple because the screw vise hadn’t been invented. Yet, large scale screws show up in early Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Assyrian writings and drawings. And archaeologists have found evidence of screw-driven vises (likely for metalworking) at Augusta Raurica, a Roman site in Switzerland active from 44 B.C. to 260 C.E.
The workbench from André Félibien’s “Des Principes de L’Architecture” (1676-1690).
They knew about screws. Perhaps the screws were too much trouble to make for a woodworker’s workbench. Or they simply preferred to work without them.
So, I stopped using a tail vise and didn’t miss it one bit (I still don’t). I began to plane up panels with only a planing stop and became quite fast at processing stock. This small taste of success drove me to experiment with pegs, wedges, battens and notched sticks. Things that looked like they could never hold your work (such as a doe’s foot) worked brilliantly.
I am convinced there is a world of workholding out there that doesn’t require gizmos, but instead requires a little cleverness and some basic skills with the tools. The following account only scratches the surface of what’s out there. Every tradesperson, from the armorer to the shoemaker to the block builder, had simple ways of holding the work that don’t look like much to the modern eye. These are just a few of the devices that show up repeatedly in the historical record.
Planing Stop On early workbenches, the simple planing stop is the foundation for all the other bits of workholding for woodworking. In fact, some benches are equipped with only a planing stop. There’s a lot you can do with a planing stop and a little skill.
Most planing stops are comprised of a square piece of wood that is long enough to penetrate the benchtop and give the woodworker a lot of height for planing boards on edge – 3″ x 3″ x 12″ is a typical size.
Add a thin batten in front of your planing stop and you’ve made an effective planing stop for wide panels.
The stop is adjusted up and down with hammer blows so it needs to be a durable wood – oak is typical – and dry.
You might think that fitting the planing stop requires you to consider how wet the benchtop is and the current season. Will the stop and benchtop (or both) shrink as they dry? Or, if the stock is bone dry, will that component swell during the humid season? Most bench builders have a slab that is somewhat wet that might take years to acclimate to the shop, plus stock for a planing stock that is at equilibrium with their shop.
There are formulas and lots speculation for how tight or loose to make things. I ignore it.
When I fit a planing stop, I assume that I’m going to have to adjust it later on if it becomes too tight or make a new one if things get too loose. So, I focus on getting a good snug fit that day. I want the stop to move about 1/8″ with each heavy mallet blow.
After I get that fit, I simply pay attention to how it is working during the months ahead. If the stop becomes almost impossible to move, I remove it and plane it a tad. If it’s too loose you can glue some veneer onto the existing stop or make a new one. In time, the wood will settle down and your planing stop will do the same.
One of the curious frustrations in researching “Ingenious Mechanicks” was reading the reports from archaeologists who speculated on how woodworking tools were used or objects were made. It became obvious that some of these guys didn’t know the difference between a dovetail and a mortise. And hadn’t ever cut one.
Not all archeologists are like this.
Check out this fantastic article from the Archaeology.org site about the joinery in a 7,000-year-old well. Not only do they do normal stuff in the lab, but they try to remake the well with tools available at the time. And start with the tree.
“You have to handle things. By using stone tools ourselves, we can see what works and what doesn’t work,” says archaeologist Rengert Elburg. “Because from your writing desk you can’t say anything.”
I put it a bit more crudely in “Ingenious Mechanicks:”
“It’s not fair to our early ancestors to put words in their mouths. We don’t know how dry their wood was when they started to build their workbenches. Was it fresh from the tree? Dried for 20 years? Something in between?
“We can guess, which is what most people do. Or we can build a bunch of workbenches from woods in varying degrees of wetness and observe the results through several years. This second path is much more difficult than sitting naked in the dark at your computer keyboard – fingers covered in the dust of Cheetos – and pontificating online. But it’s the path I took.”
I’ve seen a blurry photograph of a detail of Chester Cornett’s chairmaking workbench and read Michael Owen Jones’s description of the bench in “The Craftsman of the Cumberlands.” At the time I thought: That sounds like a Roman-style workbench.
And yesterday I found out that I was correct.
Brendan Gaffney and I visited the storeroom of the Mathers Museum of World Culture in Bloomington, Ind., to view artifacts related to Cornett. And we got more than we bargained for. In addition to some of Cornett’s traditional chairs and rockers, the Mathers also had Cornett’s incredible “bookcase rocker” (more on that from Brendan in a future entry), a chair made by Cornett’s grandfather, Cornett’s worn-down Pexto drawknife, his worn-out dumbhead shavehorse and his workbench.
Located on the top rack in the storeroom, the workbench is a segment of a log with four staked legs. The workholding consists of three pegs that Chester could wedge his work between – exactly as described by M. Hulot in his 18th-century book on turning and chairmaking.
I’m pretty sure that Cornett didn’t read Hulot. So it is an amazing thing to see this low Roman-style workbench made by a 20th century woodworker who lived in the wilds of Eastern Kentucky. Did he come up with the idea for the bench himself? Was it something he learned from his family members who also were chairmakers?
The bench is 11” wide at the top and the benchtop is 10” from the ground. The log segment is 4” thick at its thickest point and about 62” long. The four legs are about 1” to 1-1/4” thick and wide x 8” long (minus their tenons).
So this is just another data point showing that low workbenches, as described in “Ingenious Mechanicks,” haven’t disappeared.
