When we published “The Book of Plates” years ago, we received many questions from customers as to why they should buy a book filled with pictures of dinner plates.
“Plate” is, of course, an old word for “engraving.” And the pictures in the book were not of dinner plates, but of the drawings in A.J. Roubo’s “l’Art de Menuisier.”
But today we’re going to talk about a delftware dinner plate from 1769 that shows an interior of a nice woodworking shop with lots of tools, a workbench and (perhaps) a zombie attack.
The plate appeared on the cover of The Magazine Antiques’ May 1981 issue and was in the collection of James C. Sorber, a well-known Pennsylvania collector. I learned about this plate from Dan, a woodworking comrade in Texas, and so I bought an old back issue to examine it.
Delftware has its origins in the Netherlands, and so it didn’t surprise me to see a Dutch saw hanging on the back wall of the shop. The other tools on the back wall are typical for the time, including the chisels with the fishtail blades, the braces, the nail pincers and the dividers.
The workbench is interesting (of course). It gives me a Dutch vibe as well. It bears some resemblance to the one shown in the altarpiece at St. John’s Church in Gouda (circa 1565). The Gouda bench has six legs, with the front three pierced with many holes for pegs or holdfasts. No vises.
My drawing of the Gouda workbench from “The Anarchist’s Workbench.”
The 1769 bench also features three “legs” pierced with many legs for holdfasts or pegs. No vises. But two of the legs are drawn more like sliding board jacks (aka deadmen). Though a bench with two sliding board jacks is unusual – this is the first one I’ve seen.
I’m not sure what tool the woodworker is using on the bench. It looks like a scorp or travisher to me. But I have chairs on the brain.
Also, we have to keep in mind that the purpose of this plate was not designed to educate, but to immobilize some gravy or restrain some pudding.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the guy to the right. At first I thought he was destroying the picture frames leaning against the wall. Then I looked at his feet, and it appears he is standing on a board. It looks like he’s holding an axe, but it could be an adze. In either case, he really should look where he is cutting, or the artist will have to add some red glaze to the plate.
In fact, I think he looks poised for a 18th-century zombie attack on the workshop. If this plate were indeed made in the Netherlands, then they are probably Spanish zombies.
And now I am going to end this blog entry before it gets too ridiculous.
Last week we made a short (14 seconds!) promotional video about “The Anarchist’s Workbench” for Facebook and Instagram. In the video we mentioned the bench required only about $430 in construction lumber.
When we posted the video this morning, the first comment out of the gate was about how our price was wrong because the price of lumber has skyrocketed.
No, the $430 price is correct – using Home Depot prices from May 2021.
The bench requires:
Nine 2 x 12 x 8’s for the benchtop. Each 2×12 is $25.12. That’s $226.08
For the undercarriage, you need three 2 x 12 x 12’s and three 2 x 10 x 10’s. The 2 x 12s are $41.45 each ($124.35). The 2 x 10s are $19.13 each ($57.39).
Add up the subtotals, and you get $407.82. I then threw in another $20 for good measure.
Yes, lumber prices have gone up. Those 2 x 12 x 8’s were $8.81 each when I built the bench in 2020. But the bench is still a bargain to build, especially when you compare yellow pine to maple.
And the book itself is still a bargain. The pdf is still 100 percent free. Go here, and you’ll find a link to download the pdf. You don’t have to register, give up your email or anything. Just click and download.
The snarky comment on the video didn’t ruin my day. It had already been ruined by the bird that crapped on my shoulder when I went outside to fetch the morning paper.
Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from “The Anarchist’s Workbench,” which you can download for free here. This excerpt discusses one way to choose wood for your workbench: its cost per pound.
Yellow pine, Hot Springs, Ark. After years of working with yellow pine on our Arkansas farm, I convinced myself it was an ideal wood for a workbench.
Let’s Talk About Weight When you compare the weights of species, you need to make sure the comparisons are all at the same moisture content (12 percent is the typical comparison unit). You can compare the density of a species by comparing its “specific gravity,” which is a method that compares the weight to a cubic meter of water. Or you can look at the average dried weight of a cubic foot of the wood (also at 12 percent moisture content).
These are useful, but I think you can also make some important comparisons by factoring in the local price of a species. It’s like buying meat at the butcher. Is rib eye ritzier than hamburger? The price per pound helps us answer that question (and yes, it is).
For example, a cubic foot of hard maple consists of 12 board feet of maple. If maple is $4.73 a board foot, then a cubic foot of maple costs $56.76. That cubic foot weighs 44 lbs. Or $1.29/pound.
Longleaf pine (a yellow pine) is 78 cents a board foot (for No. 1 grade), so a cubic foot costs $9.40. That cubic foot weighs 41 lbs. Or a remarkably cheap 23 cents per pound.
Because I live to poke fun at Ipe, let’s run those numbers. Ipe costs $17 a board foot, so a cubic foot costs $204. That cubic foot weighs 69 lbs. So Ipe is $2.96/pound. Not a great deal at the wood butcher’s.
The chart compares some of the common U.S. hardwoods and softwoods using typical Midwestern retail prices circa 2020 (this is not wholesale or trade pricing). This cost-per-pound calculation is simple to do yourself using your local prices.
Here’s how: Take your cost per board foot (use 8/4 prices) and multiply that by 12. That’s the cost for a cubic foot. Now divide that number by the weight of a cubic foot of that species (a statistic that is easily found in books and online). The result is the cost per pound.
$175 workbench after 20 years of use, 2020 The yellow pine in this workbench is now about as hard as maple and moves little with the seasons.
Do the Math From the chart, ash looks like a good choice among the hardwoods. The problem with that assessment is that by the time you are reading this book, white ash might be almost extinct. The emerald ash borer has devastated the ash forests in the United States. So, you might not be able to buy it at any price. And if you do find it, you want to ensure it hasn’t rotted. We have been plagued by punky ash for the last few years as the sawyers have milled up trees that have been standing dead.
Aside from ash, poplar and the maples are a great bang for the buck. Both are easy to work, readily available and fairly cheap by the pound. I’ve made workbenches using all three species and think they’re fine. Neither is considered a noble species for a workbench, like European beech. But as long as you aren’t out to impress anyone, go for it. You’ll have no problem finding those species at almost any lumberyard in America.
But if you want to go full redneck, read on.
Softwoods that are used for structural members in home construction – the yellow pines, Douglas fir, hemlock and some spruces – are an outstanding value. They are heavy, cheap and readily available at any lumberyard. After working with them most of my life in residential construction and workbench building, they remain my No. 1 choice for workbenches.
Here’s why: Anyone can buy it. You don’t have to search out a specialty lumberyard or set up a commercial account. Just go to the home center if you want (though I always prefer family lumberyards). They have plenty.
Also important: They have plenty. A typical home center or family lumberyard will have hundreds of planks of 2x material in the racks on any given day – everything from 2x6s to 2x12s – with lengths from 8′ to 16′. At a home center, you can spend hours sifting through the racks to find the best boards – the employees don’t care. At a family lumberyard it pays to ask permission (they will sometimes be happy to help you). Either way, just be sure to restack the lumber nicer than you found it.
Here’s another buying tip: Some lumberyard chains carry No. 2 yellow pine, others carry No. 1. The price difference is minimal, but the quality isn’t. No. 1 is worth the extra nickels. If you find a yard that deals in No. 1, you might be able to buy all the wood for your bench in one swoop. If you buy No. 2, you might have to hit all the yards in your town, county or region.
Yellow pine is easy to work. I’ve built yellow pine workbenches using only hand tools, and using a full-on machine shop. It’s friendly stuff. Yes, there can be some knots, but if you pick your boards with care, you’ll have almost none of those to deal with.
So there must be disadvantages. Yes, but they are slight. Construction lumber is sold in a wetter state than hardwood lumber.
While hardwoods are typically sold at about 12 percent moisture content (or at equilibrium with some environment) that is not the case with construction lumber. It is wetter.
How wet? In the Midwest it might be 15-20 percent moisture content. On the West Coast, it might be even wetter (as in wet enough to ooze and squirt water). So, you need to gather up what you need to build your bench, cut it to rough length, stack it and wait a bit.
It might also be “case hardened” because it was kiln dried too quickly. When lumber is rushed through a kiln it can develop tension that is released when you cut it. It’s particularly obvious when you rip a board. Sometimes the wood will pinch so hard on a blade it will stop a 3-horsepower table saw like pinching out a candle.
How do you deal with this? It’s not difficult.
Plan to cut things a bit over-wide. And have some wooden wedges handy to keep the kerf open when you rip the wood. After that first rip, a case-hardened board will usually lose all of its fight.
Make your rip cut to a shallow depth at first – less than half the thickness of the board. Then raise the blade, flip the board end-over-end and finish the rip.
The final disadvantage: Softwoods are uber-redneck. No one is going to “ooh and ahh” over your choice of yellow pine. It’s the mullet of the forest.
The True Cost of Yellow Pine per Pound I’m not a trusting soul. After I calculated the cost of yellow pine per pound (23 cents) based on published statistics, I decided to see if that worked in the real world. So, I weighed several 2x12x8s and came up with an average weight of 30.4 pounds each.
These were boards I’d had in my shop for months, so they had likely lost some of their water weight (as all softwoods do). Plus, the boards in this particular pile were fairly average – not full of sap or with lots of heavy summerwood. In other words, they were a bit on the lightweight side.
Each of these boards cost $8.81 each, so that’s 29 cents per pound – about 6 cents per pound more expensive than the published weight tables indicate. But still a great deal.
I wondered, how did that work out after surfacing the boards and gluing them up? What was the cost per pound of “finished” yellow pine?
Here’s how I calculated that. The benchtop for the workbench at the end of this book is made from nine 2x12s, ripped in half, glued up and planed so the top is 5″ thick. Nine 2×12 x 8s cost $79.29. After gluing up the top, I managed to weigh it on a heavy-duty scale we use for shipping crates. The top weighed 240 pounds. That’s 33 cents per pound. Still a bargain (if you ask me).
“The Anarchist’s Workbench” is covered under a Creative Commons license that allows you to use the information any way you wish for non-commercial purposes.
I am thrilled to see people take advantage of this license. Here are two (no, three) good examples that also help the woodworking community at large.
‘The Anarchist’s Workbench’ Audiobook
Ray Deftereos of the Hand Tool Book Review podcast did a remarkable thing. He recorded an audiobook of the entire work. Every chapter. You can download and listen to them for free here at SoundCloud.
I am most appreciative of Ray’s work because this helps reach people who don’t learn as well via the written word, or those who have imparied eyesight, or parents are so busy with their families that reading a book takes a back seat to diapers and homework.
Ray does a great job in general in reviewing books on handwork. And he’s not all afraid to cut a book to ribbons when it deserves it. Check out his podcast and subscribe here.
3D Model of the Workbench
Jeremiah Dillashaw of Sojourner Works has made a great 3D model of the bench you can download. It’s a .3dm file he made in Rhino, which will open in Fusion and other programs. You can read more about the file here and download it (for free, of course).
If you know of other resources that use the book and might help others, please let us know. Oh, I almost forgot. The most Banjo-tastic Mattias Hallin is documenting the bench’s construction process on his blog here. He’s doing it all by hand, so it should be fun.
At long last, “The Anarchist’s Workbench” is back in stock and shipping from our warehouse. The price for the USA-made hardcover is still $27. The price for the pdf is still free. You can download the free pdf easily here.
The second printing features a couple changes we made after the first edition refused to pass through the birth canal without using its claws and teeth. We made slight changes to the paper to avoid some weird inking problems on the web press. I also changed the diestamp on the cover and spine.
The diestamp for the first printing was supposed to be the image above of my bench’s planing stop (which was made by Tom Latane). But, true to form with this book, I couldn’t get it to look right after many attempts. So I used dividers instead as the diestamp.
We also experimented with a blind deboss. And, of course, we couldn’t get the stamping machine to make it as deep as we wanted.
For this new printing, I decided on a whim to draw the diestamp one more time. I grabbed a Sharpie and nailed it on the first try. To avoid the problems of the blind deboss, we used a white ink for the deboss.
Sorry for all the manufacturing details, I should have just said: It’s back!
With this printing, everything went smoothly, and I am pleased with the result.
Other Book News
In the next couple weeks we will begin taking pre-publication orders for “The Workbench Book” by Scott Landis. This classic text has been out of print for a while. And we worked with Scott to make a beautiful hardcover edition with manufacturing details that this great book deserves. More details on this technically difficult (but fun) project in the days ahead.
