Category: Personal Favorites

When I started teaching woodworking about 10 years ago, it felt like I was spending more time flattening the sharpening stones than I was teaching.

It’s a common problem in hand-tool classes and shops: As soon as a woodworker finishes up an edge, he or she is so eager to get back to the bench that the stone is left hollow. A few years ago I started making this threat: “Leave my stones hollow and you will be fined one beer.”

That worked. Now I drink too much beer.

Turns out this was a solution in traditional shops as well. Here’s a great quote dug up by the always-digging Jeff Burks.

When the edge requires grinding and whetting, in the former of these operations, viz. the grinding, is performed on a flat rub-stone, similar to what carpenters sharpen their plane-irons on, with the application of water. This stone is about six inches broad, and eighteen long, and so careful are they to keep its surface flat, that it is a regulation in the work-shops, for every workman, after using the stone, to write his name upon it with a piece of coal; when, if his successor finds it left so uneven, that a halfpenny can be passed underneath the edge of an iron, straight-edged, laid upon it, the former workman is subjected to a fine for his carelessness.

— From “The Technical Repository: On the advantages of improving the qualities of Cutting Instruments, by Burnishing, and thereby condensing their Edges.” by Thomas Gill: Volume 8 – London, 1826

— Christopher Schwarz

I tend to view tools and machines as neutral things. To me, a handsaw, table saw and jigsaw are all tools of my personal liberty. With them, I can ditch the obligation to work on someone’s payroll. I don’t care if the tools plug in to the wall or pre-date the Rural Electrification Act.

We focus on handwork here at Lost Art Press because that is what is missing from the market. (The world does not need another book on router tables.) But we are not hostile to machines. To us, it all depends on how the tool is used – either to free yourself or to amass capital for others.

That said, history doesn’t always see technology this way. As I was using my iron miter box today to make some door frames, I remembered a fantastic passage from the “Report of the Industrial Commission of the Chicago Labor Disputes of 1900: The Disputes in the Building and Machinery Trades, Vol. VIII” (Government Printing Office, 1901). (Props to Jeff Burks for digging up the original testimony.)

It’s an interchange between a government official and union carpenter O. E. Woodbury.

Q. Did your union at any time forbid the use of the patent miter box, or the mortising machine, in a building?

A. I think they vetoed the use of the patent miter box; but I will tell you why they did it. In the first place, the carpenter that lugs a kit that he usually has to lug from job to job has got enough to carry without lugging an iron miter box; but not only that, they are a very expensive luxury, and the carpenter’s kit is a very expensive anyway, and he runs a great risk of losing it. A great many carpenters from time to time go home at night and leave the kit worth from $25 to $40 on the job, and go in the morning back to work and find that somebody has broken into the building or the lockup shed and stolen their tools, and they find themselves without a tool to work with; and if they haven’t got a bank account, and mighty few of them have, they will not have any money to put into new tools.

The iron miter box simply increases your kit, and adds more weight to it, and more expenses to it. We feel that it is a tool that if the bosses want you to have and want you to use, because it is perhaps more accurate than the average wooden miter box, they should provide the carpenters with them. We have never said to one of our members, You can not use it. But we forbid them – I believe at one time we forbade them to buy them and to carry them around with them, because the simple fact of the matter was that it would be but a short time before we should all have to carry them around and run the risk of losing them.

— Christopher Schwarz

The following are fines paid by cabinetmakers in Irish shops in 1839. Typically, the fines were paid in drink for fellow shopmates.

1. Entering a shop as an apprentice: 1 pound, 1 shilling.
2. Failure to keep the glue warm: 6 pence.
3. Forgetting to extinguish the fire or candles at night: 2 shillings, 6 pence.
4. When an apprentice “takes the apron” to do man’s work: 1 shilling.
5. When an apprenticeship expires, called “washing him out:” 10 shilling, 6 pence.
6. Getting married: 10 shilling.
7. Having a child: a quart of whisky.
8. Being taught any new task: 1 shilling.
9. Tool not put away: 3 pence.
10. Long beard or dirty shirt: 6 pence.
11. Obtaining a favored workbench near a window: quart of whisky.
12. Gluing someone’s pockets shut: 2 pence.
13. Leaving the rubstone hollow: 1 pence.

“It is wonderful that there are any sober men in the mechanic class at all, when such perpetual drinking tyranny dominates over them… . Boys at first are shy of taking drink, and seem to dislike it, but before they are half out of their time they generally acquire the usual relish for stimulation, and are eager to subject new comers to the same exercise which was so disagreeable to themselves. Thus cruelty and drunkenness are perpetuated, and the foundation of all evil habits laid in the very social constitution.”

Excerpted from “The Philosophy of Artificial and Compulsory Drinking Usage in Great Britain and Ireland: Containing the Characteristic, and Exclusively National, Convivial Laws of British Society” by John Dunlop – 6th Edition 1839.

— Christopher Schwarz

Thanks to Jeff Burks for pointing me to this book. Or perhaps it was an intervention?

Lately I’ve noticed that no matter how careful I am when chopping dovetails that the ends of the tools’ hornbeam handles will become slightly dimpled and dented after striking them with my mallet.

Even more disturbing is that the face of my mallet also becomes slightly dinged when I strike my tools with it.

To remedy this problem, I considered wrapping the handles and the mallet in electrical tape, but I was worried that the adhesive on the backside of the tape would damage the finish on both tools. I experimented with using rubber bands to affix small dollhouse pillows to the mallet, but the rubber bands kept snapping after a few joints.

And so I’ve asked my former shop assistant, Ty Black, to sew up some leather sleeves – condoms, actually – with some elastic openings to keep the leather in place on the tools during use.

I’ve asked him to use veg-tan leather – not chromium tanned – so as to ensure the leather covers will not tarnish my tools.

My hope is that this solution will work well enough that I can also implement it on all my wooden-bodied planes – I have noticed some dents on their wedges lately.

Another disturbing shop problem has been the fact that oil (and perhaps perspiration) from my hands appears to be working its way into the totes of my handplanes, discoloring them in an uneven and unsightly pattern.

I considered wrapping friction tape around them to protect them, but again, I am unsure about how the chemicals in the adhesive will interact with the alkyd varnish on the totes. And so I’ve purchased a pair of ventilated nitrile gloves – nitrile on the palm with a cotton weave on the back – to wear when I am planing.

I know that gloves in the workshop are a safety concern, so I will continue to look for a better solution.

— Christopher Schwarz