Like every woodworker, I have a short list of tools that I wish were still widely available today. Most of these are tools that have wound up in my shop and proved themselves useful.
About five years ago I got a cool mallet that was common in England but not so much here. It has a heavy brass head, wooden striking faces and a nice chamfered handle.
The whole thing weighs more than 3 pounds – my wife weighed herself with it on our digital scale. Then she weighed herself without the mallet. (That is what passes for both love and entertainment in the early 40s.)
This is not a tool you want to wield all day. In fact, mortising with it wears out my forearm after only a couple mortises.
However, it is great for assembly tasks. It knocks dovetails together with ease. I use it for driving drawbore pins – both through a dowel plate and into the holes. I use it for knocking together mortise-and-tenon joints. If you want to see it in action, check out this video on YouTube. Anytime I need force with finesse I reach for this tool.
Well, I used to.
About a year ago, the wooden striking faces dropped out of the brass head like two rotted teeth. They had shrunk out just enough – friction was the glue. I set the mallet aside on my bookshelves until a month ago. I decided to try to fix the thing.
I considered fabricating new wooden faces, but their shape is complex. So I decided to first try to get the pyramid-shaped faces back in their holes. The staff at the magazine suggested removing a little wood from the back of the faces and driving the faces back into the brass. The hope was that this would compress the wood, and friction would do its job again (lazy friction).
I tried it. It didn’t work. Another suggestion was to drill through the brass head and pin the faces with a metal rivet. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that kind of implant surgery.
So today I took a different tack: high-impact epoxy. I glued and clamped the faces in place this morning, and now I’m just waiting for the clock to make it around the horn again so I can take the thing for a test beat.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. I know that Australian toolmaker Chris Vesper has this tool on his drawing board. If you’re interested, you should drop him a line through his web site. To see a photo of his prototype mallets scroll to the bottom of this page.
Editor’s note: Here’s another great installment from hand-tool woodworker Dean Jansa. This one guides you through the process of moulding and assembling and ogree bracket foot.
The same chest that has the molding shown in “Sticking a Moulding” will have ogee bracket feet. Just like making a molding the first step is laying out the profile of the ogee on the edge of the stock.
Here’s a quick side-step: You’ll note the stock I’m using is made up of the primary wood laminated to a piece of pine. Not all period pieces used this laminated foot. If you choose to copy a piece without such a lamination, just ignore the pine in the photos.
The benefit of the lamination is the added strength it lends to the otherwise fragile “ankle” of the foot. That is, the area where the ogee sweeps inward. As you will see, without the lamination, this part of the foot can end up very thin after the ogee profile is cut with the hollows and rounds.
As with moulding, start with a single piece of stock long enough to cut all the feet for the chest. I’ll need six “foot parts” total. A pair will be mitered together for each front corner, and a single foot for the rear, for a total of six.
Lay out the desired profile on the end of the stock.
Remove as much waste as you can with a drawknife from the convex portion of the top of the foot. This is much faster than using a hollow to do all the work.
Clean up the profile with a hollow after removing the waste.
Next I create the concave portion of the ogee. I use a plow plane to remove waste from the concave portion of the stock, approximating the curve with a series of steps. The narrower the blade you use, the closer you can approximate the curve. But I find it is a balance, as too narrow a blade takes more time as you have many little steps to cut. Too wide and you are left with a lot of material to remove with the round plane. Your experience will be your guide. (Remember Riemann Sums from calculus days? Here’s a real world example!)
I work from the furthest point away from the bottom edge toward the bottom edge as my wooden plow has its depth stop on the left side of the groove it cuts. If you work with a metal plow you may want to work from the bottom edge toward the top of the foot as many metal plows have their depth stops on the right side of the groove they cut.
After the steps are cut, remove the edges of the steps with a chisel or gouge. In fact you can rough out the entire concave portion with gouges if you’d like. In maple I find it easier to use the plow to remove the bulk of the waste.
Here the majority of the concave portion is complete.
A little more round plane work gets you to the complete molding, ready to be cut into individual parts of the feet.
Mark the outline of the foot on the rear of the profiled stock and cut it with a turning saw.
The rear feet are easy, no miters. The layout above shows the side profile of the ogee, but I will not cut out that profile, rather I just cut the rear-facing portion of the foot square. A little rasp work, and a rear foot is ready for a pine brace and glue blocks.
The front feet are mitered. I choose to cut and fit the miters before I cut out the profile of the foot.
Fitting the miter first has its benefits and risks. The benefit: The foot profile will be full sized. If you cut the profile first you may have to remove some material when fitting the miter, making the feet slightly different sizes. The risk: You have to be careful not to damage the sharp edge left on the mitered edge while cutting out and shaping the foot profile. The benefit outweighs the risk for me, so I choose to fit the miters first and am vigilant while cutting and shaping the profiles.
There are options for cutting the profiles as well. Here I am cutting the profile with a turning saw.
But if you look the foot below you’ll see evidence of a different method. Note the saw kerfs along the profile, most evident in the pine backing. Cutting the bulk of the waste with a hand saw and removing the rest with chisels and or gouges leaves such marks.
Having fit the miters and cut out the profile all that is left is the glue up. There are several methods seen in period work. Most common is to glue the miter and reinforce the foot with glue block with their grain running vertical. Here is a pine mock-up of the feet I’m working on, with vertical glue blocks and no lamination.
Now you can see why one may want to laminate the foot stock. Note how thin the foot is where the ogee sweeps inward. Add to this the crossgrain of the glue blocks and the result is a cracked foot at the thin point.
One solution to the crossgrain issue is to stack glue blocks so the grain is running the same direction as the feet. In the photo of the period piece above you can see the stacked glue blocks on the rear foot. This was a common feature of the Williamsburg area from the Scott Shop. Here are the stacked glue blocks on the front feet for my chest:
I’ll add on last small glue block when I complete all the feet. The chest really is supported by the glue blocks. Again, refer to the period piece above, you can see the glue blocks extend slightly below the bottom of the feet.
And here you have it – an ogee bracket foot ready to attach to the case.
The T-shirt slogan contest was great fun. I eventually had to stop checking the entries while I was at work, however, because I was worried that human resources was going to nail me for some of the stuff scrolling across my screen.
The three winning slogans are:
“Trying Stuff Since 1678” from Mike Siemsen. Lucy, my spouse and a writer, called out this one as the most clever of all the entries.
“We Nail, We Screw, We Bolt” from Ben Davis. When I insisted on this one, Lucy rolled her eyes as if to say “You wish.”
I let Lucy pick the third winner, which turned out to be quite disturbing on a personal level.
“Inch-prickt Since 1678” by Dave Fisher.
Ben and Dave: Drop me a line at christopher.schwarz@fuse.net. My blog software ate your e-mail addresses.
The winners will all receive the Pin-Eez sawnut tool and one of the T-shirts with the current slogan. As soon as we sell out of those, we’ll use one of these new ones.
The waitress rushed up to me at the cash register with a desperate look in her eye. In defense, I held out a $6 tip, but she ignored it and fixed me in her gaze.
“Will you sign a placemat? Or a napkin?” she asked. “Do you have something you could sign?”
I shook my head and started walking to the exit.
“Sign anything,” she said. “The cooks will be so disappointed if you don’t.”
This was the final and odd scene of my four-day odyssey at the Woodworking in America show in Berea, Ky., where 350 hand-tool woodworkers got together during Nov. 14-16, to talk about tools, techniques and history.
The show itself was great fun, and I’ll be posting lots of photos and stories on my blog at Woodworking Magazine (one of the organizers of the show). But for the readers of the Lost Art Press blog, I saved this particular tale. It begins about an hour before getting rushed by the waitress.
After four days on my feet and 12 hours (total) of sleep during that period, I packed up our rented Ryder with all the workbenches, grinders and clamps we’d brought to the Woodworking in America show. Senior Editor Glen Huey climbed into the passenger seat of the truck and we drove north to get some lunch with some of the other magazine editors and John Hoffman, the other half of Lost Art Press.
We met at the Richmond, Ky., Steak ‘n Shake, and our party of five snagged a window seat and started looking at the menus.
Our waitress took our drink order and when she returned, she asked: “Are you guys the Oakridge Boys?”
To which Hoffman immediately answers: “Yes.”
I start laughing and tell her that no, we’re not the country/gospel quartet. But she is undaunted.
“The cooks up there in the red ties say you are the Oakridge Boys,” she said, pointing to the rear corner of the store. I look back to see two young guys with enormous smiles on their faces looking right at me.
I point to Associate Editor Drew DePenning at the end of the table.
“He’s 23,” I explain. “He would have been a fetus when the Oakridge Boys were popular.”
She gives me a quizzical look but takes our food order. Glen Huey is chuckling so hard he’s having trouble ordering. Senior Editor Robert Lang is his typical placid and inscrutable self.
After the waitress walks away, I start singing the base vocal to “Elvira” and try to get Bob to join in. He smiles, but he won’t take the bait.
We eat. And as we try to leave, I’m ambushed by the waitress, who insists that I’m the band’s manager. “Don’t you have some posters or CDs you could sign for us?” She chases us to the door.
We all scurry to our cars. I fetch my laptop from Hoffman’s Honda and head back to the Ryder truck.
“Crap!” Hoffman says. “I locked my keys in my car.”
Hoffman calls a locksmith, who promises to be there in 10 minutes. We stand there for a minute and realize it is too cold to wait outside.
“I guess you gotta go back into the Steak ‘n Shake,” I said.
“Oh no,” Hoffman said, shaking his head.
But then he turns and heads back into the arms of fame.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. After I got home, I looked up a photo of the Oakridge boys and busted out laughing. I can see it: John Hoffman is Joe Bonsall. Glen Huey is Duane Allen. Robert Lang is a better-coiffed William Lee Golden. And I’m Richard Sterban. And Drew? Just another 23-year-old gospel/country fetus, I guess.
Now that shop class is as common in high schools as poodle skirts, lots of woodworkers worry about passing on our enthusiasm for the craft to the next generation. In my house, I’ve started treating my kids more like apprentices, and it seems to be working.
They help clean the shop. They assist me on projects at assembly time. They can work on their own projects on the side when I don’t need them. And – here’s the odd part – I pay them (a pittance) for their help and swear them to secrecy on the “arts and mysteries” of the craft.
This weekend has been a perfect example. I assembled a large run of shelving that I plan to install in the recipient’s home this week. There was a lot of tedious gluing, clamping and clean-up work involved, so I hired 7-year-old Katy to help.
First, I showed her the “secret” to making the lacquer finish perfectly smooth to the touch – a folded up brown paper bag. We rubbed all the surfaces vigorously, which knocked down any surface imperfections without cutting through the film finish. Katy did the shelves; I did the uprights.
“Cool,” she said. “It works!”
As we were bagging the lacquer, both of us noticed that there were some small dings and scratches in the color. This is was the result of the parts getting moved around more than I like. So I swore Katy to secrecy again and introduced her to the mystery of stain pens. In this case, the best match wasn’t one of my stain pens (which I keep hidden away), it was a black Sharpie marker.
In fact, Katy became incredulous when I took her picture at work with the marker.
“What if someone sees the picture and figures out our secret?” she asked. “Then they’ll know!”
Then we glued up the shelves. I applied the glue. Katy added the Dominos. We both applied the clamps and cleaned the glue squeeze-out. Assembly can be stressful for me, but Katy’s amazement at how the project came together kept my anxiety in check.
We did four major glue-ups this weekend, and by the fourth one, Katy dove into the work like she had been doing it all her life. I wonder if learning woodworking is like learning a foreign language – it might be easier when you are young.
As I added the kicks to the cabinet, Katy worked at the bench at her own project – she’s transforming my discarded shop jigs for this shelving project into a wooden alligator.
Then I paid her (about $1 an hour for the shop time) and I asked her if she’d come along on the installation next week. With hesitation, she said: “Yes! Hurray!”
Next step: Getting the apprentices to fetch the small beer for the master.
