Category: Personal Favorites

In a couple hundred years, if people use children’s books to understand our culture, I think they will conclude – after reading Dr. Seuss – that we smoked a lot of weed.

Or, if they read the Little Golden books, that we were boring blowhards.

Anyway, Jeff Burks turned up an interesting children’s book on the trades that is in both French and English called “Le Petit Musée Des Enfants – Les Métiers.” Or “The Children’s Little Museum – the Trades.”

The book is undated, but Jeff and I suspect it is a 20th-century example. There is lots of good stuff in here – including the opportunity to improve your French skills. After editing Roubo, I read the book’s section on the menuisier without really thinking about it being in French. C’est bon!

The joiner’s shop is a great image – probably the best one in the book. The bench is clearly German, and the planes are definitely later than the ones shown in Roubo. Plus, check out the ubiquitous clamps on an interesting lamination – looks like the ground for a table with a curved and veneered apron to me.

Anyway, download the book and read it to your kids. And hope they don’t want to become tinners. He’s a creepy-looking bugger.

Le Petit Musée Des Enfants – Les Métiers

— Christopher Schwarz

There are lots of ways to confirm that a carcase or sub-assembly is square, but my favorite method is to use so-called “pinch rods.”

Pinch rods are simply two pieces of wood that have pointy end bits. You put the pointy ends into two diagonal corners of your carcase. If that measurement matches the measurement of the other diagonal, your case is square.

There are lots of ways to hold these two sticks together, from splines to blue tape to a commercial product from Veritas. The best way, in my opinion, is to make a metal and wood assembly yourself. I first saw this sort of arrangement at Roy Underhill’s “The Woodwright’s School.” I was so enamored with them, that I decided to make some for myself and friends today while taking a break from an editing project.

I went to the home center and bought some 3/4” steel square tube (with 1/16”-thick walls) and some 1/4” x 20 thumbscrews. For about $12, I got enough metal supplies to build a dozen sets of these jigs.

Here’s how a friend and I made them:

Cut the steel tube to 7/8” lengths – you’ll need two of these bits to make a single jig. Deburr and dress all the raw edges. Drill a pilot hole in one of the pieces and tap it for 1/4 x 20 hardware (a very common tap size).

Mill up some wood. You’ll need something stable with straight grain. I used old heart pine flooring I had sitting in the racks. The interior dimension of the channel is 5/8” x 5/8”, so I milled up two sticks that were 5/16” x 5/8” x 30”. Two 30”-long sticks will handle most assemblies, but your mileage may vary.

Point the ends of the sticks and you are ready to assemble.

Some of the hardware I bought was covered in zinc, so I stripped that off with a citric acid solution. This greatly improves the appearance of the metal bits.

That’s about it. Sleeve the two metal bits onto the wood and engage the thumbscrew (make sure the screw is pressing into the face grain of one of the sticks instead of pressing into the seam between two sticks). You are done.

You can finish the sticks if you like, but heart pine makes its own resinous finish.

In my opinion, pinch rods trump all the other systems I’ve used for checking the squareness of an assembly, from measuring diagonally with a tape to using oversized try squares.

— Christopher Schwarz

I left my little block of wood that sets my honing angles for chisels and plane irons in Australia, so the first order of business on Sunday was to build a new one.

After a decade of messing around, I pretty much sharpen all my edge tools with a 35° secondary bevel. This is a good all-purpose angle. It’s robust. It works with all my tools. And it keeps life simple.

In theory, I should use a lot of different honing angles to adjust the cutting characteristics of my tools, lower angles for paring tools, higher for chopping tools. I’ve been down those rabbet holes, and I’ve concluded that “sharp fixes everything.”

What’s important for me is that I get sharp fast and without fuss or error. Having one honing angle makes my life simple.

So this little block reflects that idea. One face of the block sets 35° in my side-clamp honing guide for chisels and plane irons. The other face sets 35° for wacky tools – shoulder planes – in my Kell honing guide.

I made the guide out of mahogany (leftovers from the campaign furniture book) and used waterproof glue and nails to assemble things. These are important details if you use waterstones. The water will rot the wood and loosen the glue. Promise.

Now I can get back to work on this campaign chest. Wait, I have to edit three books? Crap.

— Christopher Schwarz