Graphic designer and woodworker Tom Buhl reproduced an illustration of “Grandpa’s Workshop” for the Santa Barbara I Madonnari Italian Street Painting Festival, and it is quite cool.
You can see more photos of the painting being made here. See more of Tom’s work here.
— Christopher Schwarz
“Green Woodworking” by Drew Langsner is a passport to an enormous area of the craft that has been long-neglected in the literature. Using simple tools and materials from around your house, Drew shows you how to coax these materials into useful household objects that would be difficult or impossible to build with lumberyard wood.
The projects range from beautiful Cherokee and Cree containers made from bark and lashed with hickory, to a traditional hay rake and a firewood carrier.
But the projects are really only a small part of Drew’s book. He spends most of the time preparing you to work with the material, from felling a small tree to stripping the bark to making the basic tools. The core of the book is Drew’s explanation of the raw material. After you read his description of how wood works, I think you will look at the material in a whole new way.
Even though I have made many chairs and tables from green wood and willow, “Green Woodworking” filled in a lot of blanks in an easy-to-digest and encouraging style.
“Green Woodworking” has long been out of print, but now Drew has brought it back himself and sells it through his Country Workshops web site. You can order the book directly from Drew here for $35.
It’s an excellent book, well worth having in any woodworking library. And by purchasing it from Drew directly you will be supporting directly one of the pioneers of the green woodworking movement in the 20th century.
— Christopher Schwarz
The discovery of an intact 18th-century joinery shop in Duxbury, Mass., set off a storm of interest last year in the small outbuilding behind a school.
Now, months after the discovery, preservationists and employees at Colonial Williamsburg have begun to piece together the interesting story of the site, to document every peg and nail and take the first steps toward stabilizing and preserving the building.
This week I took a tour of the site with Michael Burrey, the restoration carpenter who discovered the shop while working nearby, and Peter Follansbee, the joiner at Plimoth Plantation.
The working area of the shop is about the size of a single-car garage, yet almost every inch of the room is packed with clues about the work that was done in the shop, the tools that were in use and how they were stored. There is so much detail to see that after two hours of rooting around, my senses were overloaded and there was still much more to see.
As a workbench enthusiast, I was quite interested in poring over the benches that lined three walls of the shop, creating a U-shaped ring of working sufaces along the outer wall.
The benches were all fixed to the structure of the building. I haven’t written much about this style of bench. These fixed benches seem to first appear in the 15th century as best I can tell (see the evidence here). These fixed benches exist at the same time as the typically freestanding Roman-style workbench. Eventually the Roman benches disappear (though not entirely in Eastern Europe), and are replaced by the movable forms we are familiar with now.
The benches in the Sampson shop have seen so much use that the bench along the back wall had been recovered with a new benchtop – you can feel the old mortise for the planning stop by feeling under the benchtop. None of the benches had end vises or even dog holes. There are planning stops and a couple huge holes that may have been for some metalworking equipment, Burrey says. There was at least one leg vise.
Dendrochronolgy on one of the benches indicates the top was pitch pine from 1786, Burrey says. That lines up nicely with the 1789 date painted on a beam in the storage area outside the shop door.
The shop was known in the area as a shingle shop, but it’s likely that a lot of other things went on there. One of the benches has been converted to a lathe, with a large metal wheel above it. The original owner of the shop, Luther Sampson, was (among other things) a planemaker, Burrey says.
Sampson was one of the founders of the Kents Hill School in Maine. And the school has some of his tools and the name stamp he used to mark his planes. Burrey also indicates that they have found shelves in the shop that were likely scarred by moulding planes set there.
Other tool marks suggest some other operations. Along the back wall, Burrey suspects that bench was used for crosscutting. The area is under a window. Right above the bench the wall is pierced with hundreds of jab marks from a marking awl. Above that is an unusual rack that would hold try squares. And the back wall looks like it has been hit by the tip of a backsaw repeatedly.
In fact, every square inch of surface seems to hold some message. There are bits of old newspaper pasted in places. The shapes of sailing ships are scratched into the walls with a nail or awl. A hatted figure is painted on one of the shop doors. And inside that painting is a series of concentric scratches made by a compass.
Empty tool racks are everywhere, many of them elegantly chamfered.
Burrey and Follansbee are cautious about making any firm declarations about how the shop was used.
“We’re just looking at ghosts here,” Follansbee says.
Follansbee is correct. The place is haunted. Like many unrestored old places you can still feel the heavy presence of the work that went on inside the walls. And now the really heavy work begins for the people who are not ghosts: Figuring out how to stabilize and preserve the building.
I don’t have any insight into the status of that end of the project. If I hear of any news, I’ll report it here.
— Christopher Schwarz
Two big changes are afoot at Lost Art Press that are worth note.
1. Ty Black, my shop assistant, is moving to Jacksonville, Fla., with his wife and kids. They’ll be setting up shop down there is due time, and I hope that Ty will still be able to contribute to what we do here in the Midwest.
Ty’s been working in my shop three days a week since August and has made himself quite valuable. He volunteered to work here unpaid and could come and go as he pleased. As I never – ever – want to manage any employees, that’s the only arrangement I could bear.
However, I did hire him as a freelancer to work on several Lost Art Press projects. The biggest one – the one I cannot talk about – took him months of scanning and coding. When we announce that project (soon!), you will fully appreciate his skills and his time served here.
2. John Hoffman, my business partner at Lost Art Press, is leaving his day job with the government at the end of May to work full time for Lost Art Press.
I could not be more excited about this.
Though I am frequently the face and the name that goes with Lost Art Press, John is an equal partner in this business. Without his behind-the-scenes work on the business, Lost Art Press would still be puny. As it stands, we are growing fast enough to support our families and continue to publish four titles (or more) a year.
While I am sad to see Ty move (who will eat at Eli’s with me?), I cannot overstate how important it is that John is going to be working on Lost Art Press all day, every day.
So stay tuned.
— Christopher Schwarz
Years ago I had a shop apron made by CanvasGoods, a small company run by David McMullen. It was my favorite apron, and I wore it all the time and during my first videos with Lie-Nielsen Toolworks.
The problem was that McMullen closed down CanvasGoods shortly after that. I was getting so many questions about that apron that I had to stop wearing it – I was tired of answering questions about the apron and explain how you couldn’t buy one.
Then some reader sweet-talked me into borrowing my apron so he could make one like it for himself. That was four years ago. I’m still waiting….
If you ever wanted one of these aprons, the original maker has dug out about 50 or so that were in storage and put them up for sale on eBay for $39.95. If you cannot afford an apron from Artifact Bag Co., these are an outstanding choice.
Act quickly. Once they are gone, they are gone.
Click here.
— Christopher Schwarz