I am pleased to announce that we have hired Megan Fitzpatrick as the editor at Lost Art Press. She is our company’s first employee, and I cannot think of anyone I’d rather have in that position.
I am not going anywhere. I will be the publisher. That means I’ll be deciding what titles we’ll print, what tools we will make and – most important to me – I’ll be writing many more books for Lost Art Press (my real love).
Why are we doing this? During the last few years our company has grown to the point where it cannot function with only me, John and a few part-time contractors. We now ship more than 60,000 books a year. And we make tools and apparel, too. We have dozens of supply chains and more than 50 books that have to be managed – plus another four or five new titles every year.
I have resisted hiring employees because I don’t want to manage people. And I don’t want to control anyone’s livelihood. Luckily, Megan does not have to be managed.
Megan and I have worked together for about 20 years now. I first met her when she was on the marketing team at F&W Media about 1998, and she had no problem bossing around my boss when he was late. I immediately liked her. I later hired her as my managing editor at Popular Woodworking Magazine, and she made quite an impression on her first day. When the IT guy (a former Marine) repeatedly failed to do his job, she quietly but fiercely (and correctly) explained his shortcomings to him and reduced him to tears.
Megan was a beginning woodworker when I hired her, and she quickly latched onto anyone on the magazine’s staff who would teach her things. Her skills advanced quickly. After I left the magazine in 2011, there was some shuffling about on the staff and she ended up as editor. And I was one of her freelance authors.
After so many years of working together in different roles, Megan and I can (mostly) read each other’s minds. We (mostly) don’t annoy one another. And we both agree 100 percent on how to make good woodworking books and how to treat our authors.
So not much will change here, except for the fact that I’ll have more time to write books and blog entries. And Megan will be in charge. She’ll continue to teach woodworking classes here and elsewhere. And I hope she will continue to write for Fine Woodworking as well.
Please congratulate Megan on her new job. And I hope we get to work together for another 20 years (and that she never has to make me cry).
— Christopher Schwarz
(Ed. note: I will never try to make authors, customers or Chris cry. The guy he’s talking about, though, absolutely deserved it.)
During the last 25 years, I’ve met dozens of professional woodworkers here in the Ohio River Valley. And – of course – I’ve met hundreds and hundreds of amateur woodworkers as well. And while there are many excellent woodworkers in this region, I honestly think Andy Brownell is at the top of my list.
Andy’s work is technically flawless. He has an innate command of grain patterns, color and line. And while that is impressive in and of itself, that’s not why I am attracted to his work. I see a lot of technically perfect pieces from people who have their Wegner piece, their Nakashima piece, their Maloof piece – all in a row in their portfolio.
Andy’s work has a language of its own. It has roots in mid-century modern. But every piece is also imbued with patterns, textures and geometry from the natural world. And what makes his work even more interesting is that Andy is fascinated by geology, fossils and microbiology.
I know a lot of woodworkers who are inspired by plants, flowers, trees and animals (and it’s clear that Andy is inspired by those at times). But Andy also manages to incorporate plate tectonics, the earth’s crust and issues of deep time into his pieces. And no it’s not weird.
“Yeah. I took a bunch of geology and biology classes,” Andy said. “My degree was evolutionary biology. But I’ve always loved that sort of thing as part of lifelong learning.”
Many of his pieces incorporate what he calls “amorphous holes” – sometimes hundreds of them – that are individually cut and shaped in a piece. The floor lamp shown here has about 50 hours of work just on the amorphous holes. What do they represent? I don’t know. But they remind me of bubbles in a test tube, the Brownian motion of cells or yeast bubbles in bread dough.
And they strongly challenge your perception of what you are seeing. Is the piece the wooden parts? Or is it the negative space in the piece?
Plus, when you see a collection of pieces you begin to wonder if Andy is a sculptor who also likes to build furniture, or if it’s the other way around.
On paper, furniture making is a side gig for Andy. In his day job he is global director of marketing and partnerships at OneSight, a nonprofit that is dedicated to providing eye exams and glasses to people all over the world who need them.
But his furniture-making output is as serious as many professionals. His woodworking training was from Jeff Miller in Chicago. Andy manages to land high-end commission work, which is no small thing in Cincinnati (we are known for our thrift). And he works in materials that most local makers wouldn’t dare use.
Thanks to his long-term relationships with local legend Frank David (who ran Midwest Woodworking in Norwood, Ohio) and now M. Bohlke Corp., Andy has access to extraordinary material. Exotics, yes. But also wood that is just insanely difficult to get and work.
This weekend, I visited his shop to pick through some of his scraps of bog oak. This 4,000-year-old material from Poland has been blackened by its years underground. Andy had enough to build a dining table for a client, a dining table for his family plus some scraps that I’ll use to make a chair. Up until this point in my life, the largest piece of bog oak I’d seen was the size of a loaf of bread.
Also impressive is that Andy’s shop is the size of a one-car garage. His machines are modest – most hobby shops I visit are better equipped. And getting materials in and out of his basement is a technical challenge – up the steps, through the kitchen and into the mudroom. Then to the garage.
But most amazing – honestly – is that so few people know about Andy and his work. I hope this short piece begins to change that.
He is definitely worth following on Instagram. His website is also worth visiting, though the pieces he shows there are on the more conventional side.
One of the tools we use about 50 times a day is the “Super Woobie.” It’s basically a microfiber towel that has been absolutely saturated with oil. With it, I wipe down all my tools before putting them away, plus I use it as I work to keep pitch and dust from accumulating on tools.
We’ve experimented with a lot of different rags through the years. And yes, they all work fine. But our favorite – hands-down – are the Norton dry-tack cloths. They hold a lot of oil and dispense just enough when you wipe. You can buy these from a variety of woodworking suppliers.
We decided to ask our Super Woobies to do two jobs: prevent rust and remind us of the value of our work. So we have contracted with a local embroidery firm to stitch “Don’t Despair: Nothing Without Labour” onto one corner, plus the image of a friendly bee – the long-time symbol of woodworkers and other trades.
And we are packaging the woobie in a quality 3mil plastic bag with a zipper. The bag is ideal for the initial oil soaking of your woobie and for storing or transporting it. We don’t like to use plastic packaging, but this is one case where it is ideal.
The Super Woobie will ship dry and ready for the oil of your choice. You can use almost any oil. We like jojoba and camellia oil. Other people like 3-in-1 light machine oil or mineral oil. They all work fine, and yes you can mix them.
We hope to have these up for sale in a month. Right now, Megan and I are prepping the Norton towels for the embroidery shop. I don’t have a retail price yet.
I know this product will cause some eye-rolling in some corners of the internet. And if you’re the kind of person who uses your socks from your 6th-grade gym class to wipe your tools (using only oil harvested from your own body – to save money), then this isn’t for you. I wish you happy wiping.
But for those who like nice things – and nice things imbued with meaning – you might want one.
When you acquire a good tool, such as a block plane, and it really, really works, the tendency is to buy all its friends. After I bought my first No. 5 (about 1996-97), I fell in love with handplanes. To be precise, I loved all the handplanes. Every single handplane ever made or collected or drawn up in some patent document.
Most weekends I’d hit the antique markets with whatever dollars I could scrounge to buy handplanes. What kind of handplanes? All of them. At one time I owned at least 10 smoothing planes, five block planes, six shoulder planes and Justus-Traut-knows-how-many rabbet planes.
This was the start of a dangerous pattern you’ll see throughout this list, which is when I would try to buy my way into a new skill. I thought: If I bought a plow plane, I would be able to make frame-and-panel joints. But that’s not how the craft works.
If I could go back in time, I’d tell myself to buy one No. 5, one No. 3 and one block plane. Then buy additional planes only when I needed them – and after a lot of research.
Reading a Little About Finishing & Sharpening
When I started woodworking, I knew nothing about finishing or sharpening. And so I finished the pieces I made and sharpened the tools I owned in peace and satisfaction. But then one day I started to read about finishing and sharpening, and I realized I had been doing everything wrong.
So I did what the experts said to do, and I became miserable. I refused to put this finish over that finish (the book said it wouldn’t work). I bought some Japanese waterstones. And I entered a long and tortured phase where my finishes and my tools’ edges sucked. I was experimenting too much with this finishing/sharpening system or some other system. I was trying to obey a lot of gurus simultaneously.
To get out of this misery, I had to read a lot more about finishing and sharpening. And I came to the conclusion that I teach today: Learn one system. Stick with it for a long time. Refuse to change until you have mastered that system.
And always refuse to read articles that say “never” and “always.”
Five Planers; Six Table Saws
When it comes to machines and critical hand tools (dovetail saws, block planes, smoothing planes, layout tools), I spent entirely far too much money upgrading my equipment incrementally.
I started out with crap equipment – a plastic table saw and sheet-metal thickness planer, for example. And then I sold the used equipment (it wasn’t worth much) to upgrade to a slightly better table saw and planer. And so on until I ended up where I am today.
It was a dumb and expensive journey for someone who was planning on making furniture for a living all along. I should have just plunked down the $1,200 for a cabinet saw and $800 for a 15” planer in 1996. Instead, I’ve spent at least $7,000 on table saws and $8,000 on planers since then. And I’ve had the agony of buying, selling and setting up all this equipment.
Yes, there’s a chance that you’ll buy a nice $3,000 table saw and then be swayed by the Bare Bosom Goddess of Golf. But that $3,000 table saw can be sold for almost that same amount. Cheap tools, on the other hand, depreciate quickly and to nothing.
Using a Cutting List
Don’t trust someone else’s cutting list. Not from me, Norm Abram or even Jesus the carpenter. Even if the cutting list is accurate (and it’s probably not), you shouldn’t cut all the pieces out to the specified sizes and start building. Things change as you build a project. And the sizes of your parts will change slightly, too.
Make your own cutting list based on a construction drawing. And only cut pieces to final width and length when you absolutely have to.
Cutting lists are dirty liars.
Buying Lumber Sight Unseen
Every time I have bought lumber before laying eyes on it, I have been swindled. The first time this happened was when I ordered 100 board feet of cherry from a reputable supplier to make a bookcase that needed about 40 board feet.
I picked the wood up, and it was so sappy and twisted that I barely squeezed the bookcase out of the 100 board feet. Yes, I complained to the supplier. They laughed in my face and said that sap and twisting was not a defect, and that the lumber met grade. I didn’t buy from them for five years after that – not until they hired a new customer rep.
Reading Tool Catalogs on Friday Night
After I finish work on Friday, I like to drink a beer and relax for a bit before making supper. Sometimes I have two beers. And sometimes I read tool catalogs with that beer in hand. And sometimes I order stupid tools that I don’t need but look pretty cool and now I read nonfiction on Friday evenings.
Don’t drink and shop for tools. That is the only explanation I have for owning an Incra Rule.
Believing the Jig Lie
This is a corollary to the above rule. Tool catalogs are great at explaining how jigs can solve your joinery problems. Can’t cut perfect miters/dovetails/spline joints? This jig does it with ease. You will be a master in no time. Promise.
Here’s what I learned: Cutting miters is a skill. Learning to set up, use and then remember again how to use a jig to cut miters is also a skill. Both skills take about the same amount of time to learn.
Yes, there are some jigs that can speed you along if you need to do something 134 times in a week (such as making a dovetailed drawer). But those jigs are rare and are usually needed only by production or industrial shops.
Most woodworking skills are mastered after a few tries, and then you will forget about owning the jig.
Buying Sets of Tools
Sets of chisels, router bits, carving tools, templates and so on are usually a waste of money. Buying a set seems like a good idea – and you sometimes save a little money compared to buying all the tools separately. But it’s usually a lie.
I use three chisels for 99 percent of my work. Six router bits. Three moulding planes. One sawblade. So buy one good chisel/gouge/router bit/moulding plane – one that you really need. Then, when you absolutely positively can’t work without an additional bit or blade, buy another. Reluctantly. And buy the best you can afford.
Buying the Hardware at the End
I can’t tell you how many times I made this mistake. I built a project and afterward bought the hardware for it. Then had to remake the drawers or doors to suit the hardware.
The hardware typically makes fundamental changes to your cutting lists and drawings. Buy the hardware before you cut the wood.
Being Poly-Guru-ous
When I was learning woodworking, I had four teachers, plus the books and magazines I was reading. So I got pulled in a lot of directions. All of the teachers produced good work, but they all had strong ideas about how to go about it.
And so most days I felt like I was a Muslim-Buddhist-Pentcostal-Atheist. There was no consistent instruction in my life. And so it took me a lot of error and error to sort things out. In time, I gained the confidence to go my own way. But it took a lot longer because I had so many masters whispering (or yelling) in my ear.
Pick one person to teach you joinery. Or sharpening. Or finishing. Stick with that person until you have mastered the basics and can start exploring joinery, sharpening and finishing on your own.
Oh, and if you own that little Powermatic 12-1/2” lunchbox planer I sold off in 1998, I’m sorry. I hope you now use it for something it is powerful enough to handle – such as slicing deli meats.
There are so many things that I admire about my spouse, Lucy, that I could easily double the size of this blog by starting a list of them. We’ve been married 29 years, have raised two fiercely intelligent women and I still love spending every waking moment with her.
One of the thousand bonds that we share has been our dedication to front-line work. Neither of us ever wanted to move into management and have remained front-line writers throughout our careers.
Lucy has been a professional journalist at several daily newspapers, a weekly business newspaper and – most recently – as a TV reporter at WCPO-TV here in Cincinnati. While many journalists burn out after about a decade of covering this miserable world, Lucy has been on the front lines for more than 31 years, covering everything from the Kentucky Legislature to crime to difficult issues of homelessness and race.
And this month, Lucy starts a new job as the host of “Cincinnati Edition” on WVXU-FM, our local National Public Radio affiliate in Cincinnati. It’s the perfect job for her. She has been an NPR nerd as long as I’ve known her, and has been a huge booster for WVXU ever since we moved to the Cincinnati area in 1996.
This new position keeps her on the front lines – she’ll have a show five times a week that focuses on local news. And yet it will allow her to use her vast perspective on the city to help listeners make sense of the news. Lucy was born here, grew up here and has long been a fiercely independent journalist. She can get almost any Democrat, Republican or Charterite on the phone for an interview with ease because she has a reputation for fairness, thoughtfulness and (this is odd for a journalist) kindness.
I can’t wait to see what she is going to do.
Why am I telling you this? Because if it weren’t for this woman, we wouldn’t have Lost Art Press. John and I call her “madame president” – and mean it. She packed boxes, sold books and – most of all – said “quit your job” when I wanted to leave Popular Woodworking Magazine and do this stupidness.
So today this blog is for Lucy, who has made the lives of thousands of people – including me – better.
Your biggest fan,
Christopher Schwarz
P.S. You can read the “official” story of Lucy’s new job here.
P.P.S. Don’t bother leaving a nasty comment about journalists or NPR. No one will see it.
