Category: The Joiner and Cabinet Maker

This is an excerpt from “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” by Anon, Christopher Schwarz and and Joel Moskowitz. 

For those of you who chisel out your waste when dovetailing, this section is not for you. Move along. There’s nothing to see here.

OK, now that we’re alone: Have you ever been confused about which frame saw you should use to remove the waste between your pins and tails? I have. For years I used a coping saw and was blissfully happy.

Then I took an advanced dovetail class with maestro Rob Cosman and he made a strong case that a fret saw was superior because you could remove the waste in one fell swoop (instead of two). So, like any good monkey, I bought a fret saw and did it that way for many years.

But fret saws aren’t perfect. Almost all of them require tuning. You need to file some serrations in the pads that clamp the blade, otherwise it’s all stroke, stroke, sproing. Oh, and the blades tend to break. Or kink.

And fret saws are slow. I use 11.5 teeth per inch (tpi) scrollsaw blades, and it takes about 30 strokes to get through the waste between my typical tails in hardwood.

If you want to see a good video on how to tune up a fretsaw, check out Rob Cosman’s site. He shows you how to hot-rod the handle and bend the blade for the best performance.

About Coping Saws

What I like about coping saws is that they cut faster. I use an 18 tpi blade from Tools for Working Wood. (I think they’re made by Olson.) The blades cut wicked fast thanks to their deeper gullets and longer length. It takes me 12 to 14 strokes to remove the waste between my typical tails.

The other thing I like about the coping saw is that its throat is deeper (5″ vs. 2-3/4″ on my fret saw), which allows me to handle wider drawers without turning the blade. Also, the blades of a coping saw are far more robust and almost never come loose. I’m partial to the German-made Olson coping saw. It’s about $12 and beats the pants off the stuff at the home centers.

The major downside to the coping saw is that you have to remove the waste in two passes instead of one. Because the coping saw’s blade is thick, it sometimes won’t drop down into the bottom of the kerf left by your dovetail saw. So you get around this by making two swooping passes to clear the waste.

One last thing: Some of you might be wondering why I didn’t discuss wooden bowsaws, another fantastic frame saw. At the time I was writing this book, my bowsaw was busted. First, one of the arms cracked after someone (no names) over-tensioned it. I fixed that. Then the twine busted and I didn’t have any on hand.

Since building the Chest of Drawers, I got my bowsaw back on its feet (bowsaws do not have feet, by the way) and it is giving my coping saw a run for its money. The fret saw still hangs dusty and lonely on the wall.

— MB

An excerpt from “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” by Anon, Christopher Schwarz and Joel Moskowitz. 

England, 1839. Victoria has just become Queen of England (1837) and was about to marry Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The Industrial Revolution had begun changing the lifeblood of England. New ways of manufacturing iron and steel arose, changing everything. Factories and mass production began replacing the small craft shop. The woodworking industries were also beginning to change, and “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” was first published.

In 1839, the craft trades were highly differentiated. Specialization allowed speed – which was critical for commercial success. It’s a mistake to assume that the factories of the early 19th century produced low-cost goods because of mechanization. While that was partially true, the real cost savings came from division of labor and specialization. Most crafts people did highly specialized work. A razor grinder in Sheffield, for example, needed considerable skill to freehand-grind straight razors so that they were thin and flexible, without drawing the steel’s temper (softening the steel through excess heat). But that’s all the razor grinder did. Someone else, equally skilled, would forge the blanks; someone else would make the handles. In these factory-like situations, craftspeople were paid by piecework. In many cases, complicated documents were written that specified exactly what each sub-craft did and how much was paid for the work. In the case of furniture, the chairmaking industry in England was centered in High Wycombe, where they made nothing but chairs in a factory system of highly divided skills and a complicated piecework formula. In 1872, the High Wycombe chairmakers had a printed list of prices detailing charges for more than 250 different processes (of which only one was a process using machines for assistance) divided over about nine or 10 distinct trades. It would have been difficult for a local craftsperson to compete on a lower-priced chair for an occasional customer when a group of specialists did nothing but make cheap chairs by hand, all day, every day.

The job of the joiner varied depending on where he lived. In urban areas, joiners were carpenters who specialized in finish carpentry, built-in furniture, windows, doors and any other trim that was made on-site. Ideally, joiners did their preparation work in a workshop but then moved the parts to the job site for installation and finishing. Even within the basic job description of “joiner,” some would specialize in making windows, some on doors, and others focused on mouldings and trim. Stair making was the most complex area of joinery, and these specialists were used for all except the simplest of staircases.

A cabinet maker was a person who made free-standing furniture, usually of a fancy, custom nature. The cabinet maker would do only the joinery and casework. Turnings, carvings, inlay and other details were done by other specialists. In rural regions, small cities and towns (where it is implied that Thomas, the hero of the book, does his apprenticeship), there wouldn’t have been a work demand to sustain completely separate trades. There, a joiner would be called on to do a range of work, from finish carpentry to rough furniture to fine work – anything that required working in wood. But in large cities such as London, everyone specialized.

In “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker,” Thomas is called on to make everything from a rough shipping box to a fine dresser. But it should be realized that Thomas really doesn’t learn how to do the finest work, with lots of inlay or carving, because typically there would not have been the demand for that in rural areas. If someone wealthy in the hamlet wanted to commission such a piece, he or she would go to a shop in a major city where they had the specialists. By the same token, an average middle-class person in his area, say a farmer, would have been happy to hire Thomas’s shop to fit out a barn or make a door, but would have purchased mundane items such as chairs by buying them mass-produced and ready-made, in the latest style, shipped via railroad or one of the canals that covered the country, from the great chairmaking city of High Wycombe. There is no mention of a lathe in the shop in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker,” and in the few places where turned work is mentioned, the text implies that the work would have been either bought finished as a stock item or jobbed out to a local turner.

— MB

Our second book at Lost Art Press was “The Joiner & Cabinet Maker,” a rare and early 19th-century fictional account of an apprenticeship in a rural England shop.

It’s a fantastic little book, written by someone who obviously served an apprenticeship in the 18th century.

In addition to us reprinting the original, Joel Moskowitz (who found the book) wrote an excellent account of what woodworking was like in early 19th-century England. And I contributed several chapters on constructing the three projects that young Thomas made – a packing box, a schoolbox and a nice chest of drawers.

All in all, it’s an interesting introduction to hand-tool woodworking from an historical perspective. (And this might be the only book where I keep my sometimes-troubling tongue in check.)

We sometimes get asked if we have SketchUp drawings of the three projects in the book. And while the construction drawings in the book are all you really need, we make these files available free here.

Using the below link you can download a compressed folder with the three files in them.

JandCM sketchup files

While I work every day in SketchUp, I’m no expert on the compatibility of all the different versions out there. You should be able to open them with any version of SketchUp, but I can’t guarantee it.

— Christopher Schwarz