Clear your calendar, save your pennies and make plans to attend the Handworks event May 24-25 in Amana, Iowa. Lost Art Press will be there with books, tool chests and T-shirts.
If you haven’t heard about the Handworks event, head directly to handworks.co and read up. It’s OK, I’ll wait right here while you do that.
…hmmm….
And hey, what do you think? Pretty cool. It’s an amazing list of hand-tool-only vendors. A great barn. No admission. And there is a brewery nearby. What more do you need?
Be certain to register that you will attend by sending an e-mail to register@handworks.co. There are directions and details on the Handworks site.
Most students in woodworking classes fall into three categories:
1. Diligent but slow learners. This is the biggest category, and I include myself as a proud member. Nothing about the craft comes easy to these people. Yet, if they spend enough time in their shops building things and refuse to give up, they improve inch by inch.
2. Golfers. This is a small group, but they exist. Every so often I want to take one of these students aside and suggest they take up golf. Usually this is because of an unholy combination of a lack of dexterity, a lack of gumption and (most confusing) a lack of interest in the work itself. I wonder if these students have been assigned to the class on work-release from prison.
3. The naturals. I hate these people (no, not really). Every so often there is a woodworker who is so at ease with the work that everything comes quickly to them — even if it is their first time picking up a chisel. They cut perfect dovetails their first time with a saw. Their mortises and tenons fit without any tweaking. Their breath is rosy even after a dinner of garlic chicken.
Sam Cappo, one of my recent students at Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking, falls entirely into category 3. By day he works in the petroleum industry. But with every other waking hour he’s working on his house in New Orleans or building furniture in his tiny shop.
His dexterity with the tools and the work was impressive. And while you could chalk that up to previous carpentry experience, I think that would be selling him short. The kid is a natural. While everyone else was wondering how they were going to get their tool chests assembled in time, Sam was playing around with different dovetailing techniques that would make his work require fewer hand motions.
To my delight, Sam has started a blog called planedetails.com. It is in its beginning stages, but I hope he will persevere and show us his shop and more details of the historic house he’s rebuilding.
Check out his site, and leave a comment to show more cat photos. It will make Megan Fitzpatrick so happy (Sam and his girlfriend make and sell cool cat furniture).
I’m not afraid to pull down my pants, turn my head and cough when it comes to discussing workshop practice. And after reading this very interesting bit on treating wounds with French polish, I decided to discuss some of the stuff I do – advisable or not.
When I cut myself in the shop and it’s not ER-able, the first thing I do is wash out the wound in the sink with running water and soap. Then I put some Neosporin or some such on the wound.
But how do I close the wound so that I can continue to work? That depends.
If it’s real minor, I use fabric bandages from the drugstore. Yawn, I know. But these bandages – no matter how much money I spend on them – are usually wrecked when I move my joints. Most woodworking wounds are on the hands, so most bandages don’t last long.
So if it’s a bleeder, I take some other steps that have worked well in my shop for 15 years without any problems. First, clean the wound. Clean it. Clean. It. Then:
1. Blue tape and a clean paper towel. Yup, make your own custom dressing with these two common shop products. Why do I do this? It’s a much more “adaptable” dressing. Even good fabric bandages don’t last the whole day in the shop. Blue tape sure does. And the tape resists dirt. Fabric bandages absorb it.
2. Cyanoacrylate with accelerator. This is my favorite wound-closer. After cleaning things out, I’ll press the wound together, apply some cyano over it and squirt it with accelerator. If it’s a wound on a joint, I’ll usually add a second coat of cyano to make a tough skin. I follow that up with the blue tape/paper towel as noted above to keep the dirt out, and I am good to go.
3. Recently, I’ve made some bandages from clean strips of cotton (old T-shirts) soaked with hide glue. You make the bandages beforehand so they look like light brown strips of dried bacon. But they work. You wrap them around the wound and they tack pretty quick. I still prefer cyano over all the other methods, but this is a good field solution.
I know that the doctors will likely cringe at my methods. But I have had far fewer problems with infection once I started actively closing the wounds with cyano and blue tape.
People regularly ask what my favorite woodworking books are. It’s a tough question because I really love writings about dead trees that are printed on dead trees.
Most of the books I like are ones that altered the way I look at the world. Charles Hayward made the tools a thing I could master. Robert Wearing connected the dots so I could build stuff entirely by hand.
But Peter Follansbee and Jennie Alexander changed the way I look at furniture.
Their book, “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree,” is not just a treatise on building a joint stool. It is not just an examination of 17th-century joinery techniques. And it is not just the personal journey of two impassioned woodworkers.
While being all those things above, it is also a code of ethical conduct for building furniture from the past.
When we build furniture from the past, the ethical path is to build it true to the materials and techniques of the time. Only that path will produce a true understanding of these furniture forms that make our hearts beat faster.
Highboys built with shapers leave me utterly cold. Block-front chests built with a dovetail jig make me confused. Six-board chests built with a router and a pneumatic nailer make me want to chop down my neighborhood power lines with an axe.
All of this came into focus as I was editing “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree.” I’ve read the entire text at least a dozen times, so its lessons, which I first encountered more than a year ago, have had time to seep deep into my sinew.
It seems at first to be like your typical project book, but it’s not. It should perhaps be retitled: Make a Joint Stool from a Tree Without Idiot Compromises that Will Cripple Your End Product. For Alexander and Follansbee, the tools, techniques and the end product are all equally important. Why? Because the end product will not look right unless you embrace the other two. A joint stool made with a table saw might as well have been extruded from plastic resin.
I know that some of you are reading this and thinking: Yo Schwarz, don’t you have a table saw?
Yup. I have some machines. And when it comes to building furniture from the 19th century to the present, basic machinery is required so the end product will look right. But when I build a joint stool – and I will build a joint stool soon – you can rest assured that it will be with a froe and hatchet. I might not even turn on the lights in the shop that week.
The medicine in “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” is strong stuff. It’s just a delayed-release drug. Once you read it, all sorts of crazy things become perfectly reasonable. Then they become obvious. Then them become imperative.
If you haven’t had a chance to read the book, borrow a copy from a woodworking friend or your local library. Yes, you can also buy “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” in our store.
