There was a mixup at the printing plant, and they ordered the wrong color paper for the cover of our special reprint of “The Joiner and Cabinet-Maker.” While we had ordered a dark green for the cover, the printing plant used a dark blue instead.
Our choice today was: Pulp the entire press run or use the blue cover.
While I would have rather had a green cover, I despise waste. And so we have decided to go with the blue cover. Apologies if you hate blue. If it is really and truly a problem, please contact help@lostartpress.com and we’ll cancel your order.
The book looks really good – even in blue. And the rest of the printing job is great as well.
I don’t have an update on when the book will ship to our warehouse, but I am guessing it will be a couple weeks. I’ll post an update as soon as I have it.
This is a digital mock-up of the cover. The real cover will have far more texture.
You can now place a pre-publication order for our historical reprint of “The Joiner & Cabinet-Maker,” which will ship out in late September.
The price is just $12 as a thank-you to everyone who has supported us during the last 12 years.
The book is a copy of the original text from the early 19th century, likely 1839. It tells the fictional story of young Thomas and his apprenticeship in a rural British joinery shop. Plus there’s the villain, Sam, and the love interest, Sally. What’s most interesting about the book is the descriptions of historical practice. The anonymous author was clearly someone who had grown up in a period workshop.
This historical reprint is being printed on high-bulk paper to feel like the original text. The signatures are sewn for durability, like the original. And the book is covered in a heavy textured paper with gold debossing. (The original had a paper cover with a thin cloth cover, but we couldn’t find a printer that could do this economically.)
It’s a small book (4-1/8” x 6-3/8”) and a quick read – just 120 pages. And produced and printed entirely in the USA.
After the reprint arrives in our warehouse in September, we will also offer it bundled with our 2009 version of “The Joiner & Cabinet Maker,” which features essays from Joel Moskowitz and additional construction information from me. For now, we’re taking pre-publication orders for people who want the reprint only. This will keep the shipping situation much simpler.
As always, we don’t ship internationally. But we will offer this book to our international retailers. It is up to them as to whether they will stock it.
One of our earliest and favorite books is “The Joiner & Cabinet-Maker,” a fictional early 19th-century account of young Thomas coming of age in a British furniture shop. The book was intended to introduce young people to what the woodworking trade was like (albeit a bit on the sweet side of reality).
When we published the book in 2009 it included sections from Joel Moskowitz about woodworking during that time period to give you some context for the book. Plus chapters from me detailing the three projects shown in the original text. You can still order this book (it’s in its third printing) and we have no plans to discontinue it.
We think it’s an important book that was written by an anonymous joiner or cabinetmaker. Many of the details in the book help explain period practice. Or they help enrich your understanding of the history of your hand tools.
To mark the 10th anniversary of the book, we decided to publish a separate reprint of the original text in its original compact size. And to do it at a special “thank you” price. The book is currently at the printer and will arrive here sometime in September. Here are the details:
To create the reprint, we started with one of the early and (likely) original editions in my personal library. These books are hard to come by, especially the early ones. After 200 years, the binding of this copy was a bit tattered, though the pages were holding together with thread.
So the book was easy to disassemble to do a high-quality scan (the book will be reassembled by a conservator friend).
The original book is small by modern standards – 4-1/8” wide and 6-3/8” tall. And it was printed modestly so that it could be purchased by normal people, not just the elite.
We sought to emulate the look and feel of the original. The binding will be sewn – like the original – in the hopes that our version will last 200 years. The paper is a #55 high-bulk paper that has a nice texture, like old paper (not super-coarse like a terry-cloth towel as some people imagine). The cover is a heavy and textured paper that is made in the USA with wind power (from Mohawk, one of our favorite mills).
And the cover will be debossed with a gold diestamp.
But Why? Since we first published “The Joiner & Cabinet Maker,” customers have asked if they could buy the original text alone – without the modern chapters. Some readers had no interest in what Joel and I had to say (fair). Or they couldn’t afford the $36 (also fair). But we couldn’t afford to do this sort of project when we were a young company. Now we can.
“The Joiner & Cabinet-Maker: Original Text” will cost about $12 when purchased by itself. And we will offer it at a special price when bundled with the modern book (likely $44 for the bundle).
You’ll be able to tuck this little book into your tool chest for whenever you need a period rush. Or you can give it to a young Thomas who might want to experience the period like an unfiltered Camel.
I don’t have many more details today, I’m afraid. As soon as we have a printing date, we’ll open up pre-publication orders.
Note: This edition will be limited to a short run. This is a special edition at a special price. Once it’s gone it will be gone forever.
After years of dovetailing, I noticed that two of my chisels were seeing almost all the action: the 1/4″-wide and a 3/4″-wide tools. I use the narrow one for removing waste between the tails and the larger one for removing waste between pins.
If you are like Thomas and have limited funds for high-quality tools, these two chisels would be my first purchases.
But what about the so-called dedicated dovetail chisels you see in catalogs? As a beginning dovetailer, I had a crappy set of plastic-handled chisels, a newspaperman’s salary and a copy of the Japan Woodworker catalog. All three things conspired to make me miserable.
I wanted to cut dovetails with bold angles, but my crappy chisels had side bevels that were as big as Cheddar Mountain at Bonanza. So every time I went to clean out the waste between my tails, the side bevels would wrench a bite out of my tails.
I wanted to buy a sweet dovetail chisel from Japan Woodworker that didn’t have side bevels. That would allow me to sneak into the corners with ease. But I had a newspaperman’s salary, which made me want to sell drugs to the local Junior Leaguers.
Luckily, I met some clever people in my travels. Dovetailing demon Rob Cosman showed me his hot-rodded chisel on which he ground the side bevels down to nothing (and he shaped the chisel with a fishtail sweep). Woodworker Lonnie Bird showed me how he lopped the end off a plastic-handled chisel and reshaped it so that it was easy to strike.
And what did I bring to the equation? I figured out chisel geometry (like most woodworkers eventually do), which allowed me to make the tool take a beating like a rented mule.
Here’s What You Do So let’s say you have a nice four-figure salary and can spring for one of the nice $1 chisels at the flea market. Here’s how you can make it into a sweet worker in about 30 minutes.
Step one: File the side bevels. The side flats below the side bevels on cheap chisels are too big for dovetail work. You need to file the bevels so that there is absolutely zero flat area on the long sides of your chisel’s blade. When you are done, the chisel’s blade should look like a decapitated pyramid in cross-section.
You can do this with a grinder, a stationery belt sander or a disk sander. Or you can take the cheap (and safer) route and use a Multicut file. This style of file, which is generally used for shaping metal, can dress the side bevels of a typical chisel in about 10 minutes.
Secure the chisel in a vise and work the side bevels with the file. Hold the file with two hands: one on the tang and one at the tip. Cut only on the push stroke. And stroke the file so your hand is never (ever) right over the cutting edge of the chisel. One slip and you are (blood-soaked) toast.
After filing the side bevels so they extend to the flat face of the chisel, clean up your work with light strokes of the Multicut file. Then clean up your work (if you like) with a fine file or sandpaper.
Hacksawing the handle makes the tool less top-heavy and easier to balance. It also makes striking it easier than hitting the rounded surface provided by the factory.
Step two: Adjust the handle. If the striking end of the handle is rounded and plastic, it is likely too top-heavy to wield comfortably. The chisel should feel like a pencil, and the rounded end is probably difficult to strike without your mallet glancing off the end oddly.
Take a hacksaw and cut off the top 3/4″ of the handle. Try the balance. Still feel top-heavy? Lop off a bit more. Make sure you leave enough handle so you can grasp the handle in your hand to strike it without striking yourself.
Once you get the balance right, file the top of the handle flat and dress the sharp corners to remove any odd burrs.
Step three: Sharpen the edge correctly. Grind the primary bevel of the tool at 25°. Then grind a 35° secondary bevel on the tip. It will be a tiny secondary bevel, which is a good thing. The advantage of this steep bevel is that your tool will be durable through a lot of chopping. A steeper honing angle increases edge life. And the steep angle isn’t a detriment to chopping out waste – it scarcely feels different than a 25° chisel.
One leg of this scale has been cleaned with lanolin. The other has been wiped with wood bleach, which lightened the boxwood but didn’t affect the markings.
The two-foot rule was the standard measuring device for woodworking for hundreds of years. The steel tape was likely invented in the 19th century. Its invention is sometimes credited to Alvin J. Fellows of New Haven, Conn., who patented his device in 1868, though the patent states that several kinds of tape measures were already on the market.
Tape measures didn’t become ubiquitous, however, until the 1930s or so. The tool production of Stanley Works points this out nicely. The company had made folding rules almost since the company’s inception in 1843. The company’s production of tape measures appears to have cranked up in the late 1920s, according to John Walter’s book “Stanley Tools” (Tool Merchant).
The disadvantage of steel tapes is also their prime advantage: They are flexible. So they sag and can be wildly inaccurate thanks to the sliding tab at the end, which is easily bent out of calibration.
What’s worse, steel tapes don’t lay flat on your work. They curl across their width enough to function a bit like a gutter. So you’re always pressing the tape flat to the work to make an accurate mark.
Folding two-foot rules are ideal for most cabinet-scale work. They are stiff. They lay flat. They fold up to take up little space. When you place them on edge on your work you can make an accurate mark.
They do have disadvantages. You have to switch to a different tool after you get to lengths that exceed 24″, which is a common occurrence in woodworking. Or you have to switch techniques. When I lay out joinery on a 30″-long leg with a 24″-long rule I’ll tick off most of the dimensions by aligning the rule to the top of the leg. Then – if I have to – I’ll shift the rule to the bottom of the leg and align off that. This technique allows me to work with stock 48″ long – which covers about 95 percent of the work.
Other disadvantages: The good folding rules are vintage and typically need some restoration. When I fixed up my grandfather’s folding rule, two of the rule’s three joints were loose – they flopped around like when my youngest sister broke her arm. To fix this, I put the rule on my shop’s concrete floor and tapped the pins in the ruler’s hinges using a nail set and a hammer. About six taps peened the steel pins a bit, spreading them out to tighten up the hinge.
Another problem with vintage folding rules is that the scales have become grimy or dark after years of use. You can clean the rules with a lanolin-based cleaner such as Boraxo. This helps. Or you can go whole hog and lighten the boxwood using oxalic acid (a mild acidic solution sold as “wood bleach” at every hardware store).
Here I’m using a zig-zag rule and a carpenter’s pencil to lay out the cuts on the pine stock for the Packing Box. I dislike zig-zags for this work because they don’t lay flat. They have the precision of a hand grenade.
Vintage folding rules are so common that there is no reason to purchase a bad one. Look for a folding rule where the wooden scales are entirely bound in brass. These, I have found, are less likely to have warped. A common version of this vintage rule is the Stanley No. 62, which shows up on eBay just about every day and typically sells for $20 or less.
The folding rule was Thomas’s first tool purchase as soon as Mr. Jackson started paying him. I think that says a lot about how important these tools were to hand work.
