Lost Art Press

Category: The Anarchist’s Tool Chest

Day 4 of ‘The Anarchist’s Tool Chest’ Class

Posted on by Lost Art Press

Before we begin: My apologies for the terrible photos from my phone. The battery in my regular camera died and I am without a charger.

For someone who is now unemployed, I sure have been working a lot.

Saturday was the fourth day of teaching the class on building the chest from “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” and my sixth day of teaching at the Dictum workshop in Bavaria. I think I might be more tired than the students — and I am rationalizing that by telling myself that’s because I am building a chest along with the students, and teaching at the same time.

Or perhaps I’m drinking too much weiss beer.

Either way, I’m ready to curl into a refrigerator box beneath a highway overpass like a proper hobo.

Today we put the dovetailed skirts on the tool chest, which were a cakewalk for the students after they cut 44 dovetails for the carcase of the chest. Sunday — the final day — we’ll be making the lid and the dovetailed dust seal around it.

Then I ride to Munich Sunday night, catch a plane Monday morning and fly back to Kentucky.

Whenever I teach, I learn things. One of the most educational parts of teaching this course has been getting intimate with the wood we are using to build the chest. It’s Scots pine (pinius sylvestris). It’s a common species in Europe that is sometimes available for sale in the United States as a Christmas tree.

It is quite similar to our Southern yellow pine. It is heavy, resinous, tough and smells fantastic. The wood we are using doesn’t have the big differences in density between the earlywood and the latewood. It planes beautifully and is not terrible to dovetail.

As I was working with the wood this week I kept thinking that it would be an excellent material for making a workbench. So if you have Scots pine in your area and it is reasonably priced, I think it’s worth a look.

It’s time for dinner now. I still cannot read the menu at the restaurant at the monastery, but everything I’ve eaten has been great. As one friend put it about German food: By the end of the week I might have some blood in my porkstream.

— Christopher Schwarz

Building (and Buying) ‘The Anarchist’s Tool Chest’

Posted on by Lost Art Press

This week I’m in Germany teaching a class in how to build the tool chest featured in the book “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” For those of you who don’t read the Popular Woodworking Magazine blog, here are some convenient links so you can follow along as we build the chest.

• Back to Germany to See an Old Friend
• Video: ‘As Smooth as a Nun’s Stomach’
• Is There a Dominatrix in the House?

Also, for those of you who do not have access to the milk paint I used to paint the chest, there is a great little article on how to make your own from this copy of Popular Science magazine from 1940. It’s quite easy and is something I must try. Click here.

And lastly, the book “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” is making its way into the retail markets. If you live outside the United States or just hate purchasing things from Kentucky, here are some links to other people who sell our book.

• Lee Valley Tools
• Lie-Nielsen Toolworks
• Tools for Working Wood
• Dictum

We have been approached by a retailer in Great Britain about carrying the book and hope to make that work. The challenge is getting it across the Atlantic at a price that is reasonable for you in the end.

— Christopher Schwarz

A Very Useful Prize to Me

Posted on by Lost Art Press

“And it was after long searching that I found out the carpenter’s chest, which was, indeed, a very useful prize to me, and much more valuable than a shipload of gold would have been at that time. I got it down to my raft, whole as it was, without losing time to look into it, for I knew in general what it contained.”

— Daniel Defoe, from “The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un‐inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.”

Update On Your Order & Leather Editions

Posted on by Lost Art Press

We’ve shipped out more than 800 copies of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” from my basement during the last couple weeks, and we are just about caught up with all the orders.

There have been a couple hiccups, and that’s what this blog entry is about.

• If you ordered your book on May 23 and haven’t received it, send a note to john@lostartpress.com. For some reason, some of those orders didn’t get processed correctly.

• If you ordered a copy of our “Sawing Fundamentals” DVD and you haven’t received your order, it’s now on its way. We just received stock of that DVD this afternoon and fulfilled all those orders.

• If you aren’t in one of those other two categories and haven’t received your book, hang tight. We ship our books via “media mail,” which can be as fast as priority mail, or as slow as 10 business days. If you ordered your book before June 7 and it doesn’t show up by June 18, please let us know.

And finally, I have an update on the leather-bound edition of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” I dropped off the unfinished book blocks to the bindery today and they should be done within six weeks. The price will be a flat $185, which will include shipping and insurance in the United States.

If you ordered a leather-bound volume, you’ll get an update via e-mail before we ship your book.

Many customers have asked if we will do a second run of leather-bound volumes. The answer is: perhaps. We don’t have any more book blocks from the first edition. However, if we run a second printing, we’ll consider a leather-bound edition in a different color of leather.

For those of you who are printing nerds, the bindery designed a cover that uses a sans-serif font for the spine and cover board of the leather edition. It’s a little bolder than the font we used on “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” edition. I like it.

Thanks to everyone for your patience on shipping.

— Christopher Schwarz

The Tool and Not the Master

Posted on by Lost Art Press

“Broadly, the revival implies a rebellion against inutilities, a conviction that machinery must be relegated to its proper place as the tool and not the master of the workman, that the life of the producer is to the community a more vital consideration than the cheap production which ignores it, and that thus the human and ethical considerations that insist on the individuality of the workman are of the first importance.”

— C.R. Ashbee, “An Endeavour Towards the Teachings of John Ruskin and William Morris”