This June I’m returning to Germany to teach two classes at Dick GmbH, which runs a beautiful woodworking school in Bavaria outside Metten. My short course on sawing is fully booked, but there are still three two spaces left to build the tool chest from my forthcoming book “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”
The class runs from June 22-26 and costs only 480 Euros, a bargain for a week-long class. The Dick facility is first-rate and very hand-tool oriented. All of the benches are massive, and each student is allotted a box of tools during the course, which are of excellent quality and sharp.
And the region itself is gorgeous. I stayed in the town of Deggendorf, a quaint river city with lots of nice little restaurants and far too much great gelato. Last year I went out to dinner with the students almost every night, a pattern I hope to repeat again this year. I learned a lot about European-style woodworking, weiss beer and venison.
For more details on this class, visit the Dick web site here.
Applying the finish to my projects is either super-simple (clear finish on the bare wood) or agonizing.
Because tool chests are supposed to be painted, I knew I was in for a dose of self-induced agony. The first question with a painted piece is: what color? Tool chests run the gamut, from dark brown to dark green, pea (pee?) green to baby-poo green. And there’s blue.
I already own a blue tool chest at work, and I don’t need another. So my first instinct was to paint it red, which would make it look good in pictures. But when it comes to painted furniture, my favorite finish is black milk paint over red milk paint, which is what I use on many chairs. To do this you paint the chair red, then you paint it black and then you let nature run its course. The black paint gets rubbed through, and the red emerges in the areas that see the most wear.
This looks great.
So I decided to paint the tool chest red and see how it looked. If worst came to worst, I could always, in the words of the Rolling Stones, paint it black.
So I applied three coats of red milk paint. I love milk paint. It’s like a mix between a paint and a stain. It doesn’t have a lot of body, so it allows the wood’s texture to show through. That’s a good thing. Unless you left too much texture behind during the construction process.
As this chest was completed by hand, I left a number of tool marks behind. In truth, I didn’t think I’d had left a lot of tool marks, but the first coat of milk paint revealed some plane tracks and saw marks on the edges of the lid’s dust seal.
A couple coats of oil and varnish over the red didn’t improve things, so I prodded my wife, Lucy, to offer her opinion. If you have been married for at least a spell (18 years in this case) then you know how this conversation works.
“It looks great,” she said of the chest.
“It sucks,” I replied, wondering how many time I had put this poor woman through this. “I can see these tool marks and it makes me nuts.”
Lucy looked at the chest for an appropriate amount of time so that one would term it a “thoughtful” gaze. Then she looked me square in the eyes.
“I guess you should figure out how perfect an anarchist would want it,” she said.
With industry there is no coping. More and more it is establishing its own claims, which we are forced to recognize.
But men who have fighting souls will keep intact their freedom to do and be, and there is no better way than the craftsman’s for safeguarding those things.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, (1900-1944) French writer, aviator, (The quote is attributed to Saint-Exupéry; however it appears in only one distinct American translation of “Citadelle.”)
