A few weeks back I promised a panel glue-up primer… and today is the first time I’ve needed to glue up a panel since. The basic stock prep for the panel pieces is the same as the rest of the prep, until it comes to sticking the two (or more) pieces together. So that’s where I’ll pick up. And as always, it’s best if you can surface your lumber then do any glue-ups within a few hours. The less time the wood has to move, the better – even if you’ve properly acclimated it.
If I’m using yellow glue or liquid-hide glue (which is almost all the time), I rip both edges of pieces for a glue-up; I want those outside edges flat and level so the clamps have a good, parallel surface on which to close. If I’m using hot hide glue and doing a rub joint (which is almost never), there are no clamps involved, so the outside edges don’t matter.
Regardless of my approach, the first steps are the same. Lay out the panel and mark it with a cabinetmaker’s triangle.
After layout, mark a cabinetmaker’s triangle across the panel.
You want to joint the edges so that you cancel out any non-perfect-90° angle from your electric jointer or jointer-plane work. If you’re jointing by hand, match-plane the two while clamped together in your vise. This will cancel out any error in your angle. If using a electric jointer, mark one edge “I” (inside) and the other “O” (outside). I runs against the fence, O runs not against the fence. This cancels out any error in the jointer’s fence.
The letters tell me which way to orient the boards at the jointer.
I carefully joint each mating edge, fairly slowly, and at the same, steady speed. Then I immediately proceed to glue up.
Let’s dispense with the rub joint first. For a panel glue-up, the only glue I’d use for a rub joint is hot hide glue (though some sources will say other glues work, too). With the two mating edges freshly jointed, simply coat both edges – quickly – then rub those two edges together lengthwise until the glue starts to gel, doing your best to keep them aligned across the thickness. Then set them on end against a wall and give the glue time to completely dry. No clamp necessary. (The few times I’ve glued up panels this way, I’ve left them a little thick so that I can level the glue line after, and not end up with a too-thin panel. Typically, I use the tack-ability of hot hide glue only for glue blocks and veneer.)
I use liquid hide glue (preferably the the Old Brown stuff) for most things in woodworking, but for typical panel glue-ups, I reach for the yellow stuff. It sets up more quickly, so the clamps can come off after 30 minutes (which means I can get more glue-ups done more quickly – and every minute is precious when prepping stock for classes).
I have things set up and ready to go at my bench before I joint the workpiece’s edges.
I’ll have a glue-up station ready to go on my bench before I bring stock in from the machine room, usually with a piece of paper underneath an odd number of clamps, because I always want one in the center (and if my prep is good, I can dispense with putting every other clamp on top of the panel). Along with the glue bottle, I have a bucket of water (hot water if I’m using hide glue) and a rag.
First, I run a bead of glue down the center of one board.
Just under the spout is too much glue – I had to hold still while Chris snapped the picture – so look behind the nozzle for the approximate correct amount.e
Then I spread it evenly with my finger (which is fast) or with an old toothbrush (which is slower but less messy).
Guess where I stopped for that last picture…
I want enough glue that I can rub the wet edge on the dry edge and get enough glue on the mating board that its edge is also fully wetted. But no more than that.
Start in the middle.
Then I wipe the excess glue off my finger before tightening the center clamp. I keep a finger or two of my non-clamp hand on the seam so that I can feel if I need to exert downward pressure on either board for a perfect mate. (Usually, doing the glue-ups immediately after prep obviates this problem.) I don’t tighten all the way – just enough to hold the joint closed as I repeat at both ends. Then I snug them in the same order until the joint is fully closed and I see a line of glue beads down the seam. That tells me the joint is closed tightly enough, and that I used enough (actually, just a tiny bit too much!) glue.
Now the ends.
That spot with no bead is where I was feeling for level – otherwise, I’ve a continuous line of glue beads down the seam.
Next I reach for the bucket and rag, and with an almost-completely wrung-out rag, wipe off the excess glue with small circular motions along the seam. Rinse, re-wet and re-wring the rag often (you don’t want to simply spread thinned glue over the surface). And don’t forget to do the other side. You’ll have a little squeeze-out under the clamps, but it’s easy enough to knock off with a scraper, chisel or plane after the glue is completely dry. Note that none of us in this shop has ever had a problem with glue-size interfering with finishing. Any residual glue is planed away.
Scrub both sides. The glue is a lot easier to get off now than after it’s dry. And no, this won’t weaken the joint or interfere with finishing.
The last task is to check the clock and write the time on the edge of the panel. After 30 minutes, you can take the clamps off and move on to the next glue-up. With multiples, I usually stack them up to dry (another reason to remove the glue on the surface), and let them sit overnight before ripping to final size and squaring the ends.
If I need the clamps for other panels, I can take them off this panel at 12:20. If I don’t need the clamps, I typically leave the panel in clamps longer (not because I have to, but because I forget about it).
I know there are all kinds of charts, studies and special clamping doodads to help you achieve ideal clamp pressure. I’m sure those are useful. For someone. Me? This simple approach has served me well for more than a decade.
James Krenov and several students mill lumber in the backyard of the Krenovs’ home in Fort Bragg. Milling lumber from logs with the Alaskan chainsaw mill, as Robert Sperber had done with Krenov a decade earlier, became a part of the school’s curriculum and is still taught each year. Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.
After these experiences at the other schools, it seems [James] Krenov’s relocation to California remained his central focus. When Krenov returned to Mendocino in 1980 for his longest engagement yet, he brought Britta, having already considered the area as a possible place to resettle and start a new life. The couple stayed in a renovated water tower in Mendocino, and used their time in the area to look for a new home. They found it just north of Fort Bragg on Forest Lane. Tina remembers her mother being thrilled at the palm tree in the front yard, an enticing embodiment of the exotic locale, far away from her native Sweden where she had lived up to that point. The Krenovs were also taken with the coastal environment – Krenov had always lived in cities and towns with an active maritime culture, and the presence of working boats in the Noyo harbor was a comfortable familiarity. During their first visits, the Krenovs began a practice of walking along the steep headlands along the coast, one they continued on a daily basis for the next 30 years.
Creighton Hoke, after returning to Richmond, Va., to pack up his tools and quit his cabinetmaking job, had moved back to Mendocino in hopes of attending the school that fall. He arrived just a few weeks after attending the workshop and was dismayed to find what he perceived to be little progress in the establishment of the school. Initially, Hoke took on a foreman position at Brian Lee’s millwork shop, hoping to use the skills he had developed as the lead in a cabinet shop in Richmond. This employment quickly fell through – Hoke was living on Lee’s land, in a tree house that had been built by Crispin Hollinshead on the rural property a few years earlier. And the workshop was, in his recollection, literally knee deep in shavings from the machines. Hoke left his position in Lee’s shop, and was looking for another opportunity, still driven by the hope that in a year’s time, he might be enrolled in the still-unrealized woodworking school under Krenov.
Under Lee’s organization and efforts, several craftspeople from the workshops and the community gathered to make a formal pitch to the College of the Redwoods administration in the fall of 1980. The administration was, by all accounts, enthusiastic about the proposition. The establishment of a woodworking school meant a boost in income for the community college system, which was paid based on student hours; a six-day intensive over nine months constituted a sizable number of credit hours. With Krenov at the helm, it would also bring national exposure to the otherwise locally focused school system. The pitch that the group made also noted that the program would be exceptionally rewarding for the local community’s craftspeople, as well. For that community, tying the program to the community college network would also drastically reduce the tuition for students – for California residents, the program would only cost $100 for the nine months.
A plan of the school, redrawn by David Welter in 1997. Image courtesy of the Krenov School.
After this proposal to the board in Fort Bragg, a second meeting was held on the main campus of the College of the Redwoods, 150 miles north in Eureka. At this second meeting, Hoke and Hollinshead, who had been central in the initial meetings, were joined by Bob Winn and Judy Brooks, members of the College of the Redwoods staff in Fort Bragg who had been on the board that heard their initial proposal. Winn and Brooks were early champions of the proposed program and central members of the community in Fort Bragg.
“The fact is that many of us were disconnected from the larger community, and had no real profile among our neighbors aside from breaking down in our pickup trucks downtown,” Hoke remembers. Winn, Michael Burns’s close friend, was an English and history teacher at the Fort Bragg campus and a persuasive voice from the school system and community in support of the school, a role he continued to play in subsequent years. Brooks, who would become a trustee in the College of the Redwoods school system, also lent her voice in support of the program, and developed a strong relationship with the woodworking program. Both advocated for the promise of the woodworking program, and all were excited to find that the administration at the college was already on board with the plan.
After this positive meeting with the administration in Eureka, the program was approved, and a part-time position to prepare and execute the plans for the school was created. Where Brian Lee had been instrumental in bringing the group together and providing the enthusiasm for the organization, the Guild took a back seat to some of the newcomers, especially Hoke and Burns, who were more driven in their specific hopes of working with Krenov. Lee would continue on as a driving force among the Guild and woodworking community, but a falling out with Krenov and disagreements with some of the newcomers led him to pull away from the school.
“Almost everyone – maybe everyone, in fact – would have gone right on doing whatever it was they were already doing, had it not been for the original, organizing energy of Brian Lee,” Hoke remembers. “There wouldn’t have been a Guild, or the workshops with Krenov. No ad in Fine Woodworking for me to see and respond to.”
Hoke took the part-time job with the college to set up the program, eager to find meaningful employment after his mismatch with Lee’s commercial business, and moved into an office at the Fort Bragg campus of the College of the Redwoods. A small piece of property was purchased at the eastern edge of town, behind the local school district’s bus barn, and construction of the facilities was underway by the end of 1980. During the next several months, Hoke worked with the school’s construction supervisors to design the school’s workshop, a daunting task that included everything from ordering materials, specifying the layout of the windows for the best natural light and ordering the machinery.
One of dozens of pages of invoices, requests and budgets that Creighton Hoke composed for the opening of the school in 1980. Image courtesy of the Krenov School.
Gary Church, a member of the Guild, was contracted to build the tool cabinets, made in the same manner as Krenov’s own tool cabinet in the workshop in Bromma. One of Krenov’s students from his first stint at RIT, Hunter Kariher, was contracted to build the 22 workbenches; it’s interesting to note that Kariher also built the workbenches for Wendell Castle’s workshop school a few years earlier. The benches were built in the same European style that Krenov himself used and were shipped from Kariher’s Rochester workshop to Fort Bragg that summer.
By his own account, Hoke was driven by the dream of attending the school, but the task laid before him was far from simple. Krenov, over the phone, was a demanding presence, and threatened Hoke that he may not make the planned resettlement if the school wasn’t properly equipped. Krenov’s demands were informed by the ill-fated arrangements he had encountered at his prior engagements with RIT and BU, where he had found the facilities inadequate or the demands on him as a teacher either unfair or ill-informed. His exacting requirements were likely motivated by a hope that this last engagement would be a good fit.
That Christmas, Hoke and Burns worked together to lay out the building plan on graph paper on the kitchen table of Burns’s family’s home. Burns, whose experience in the trades and homebuilding, complemented Hoke’s now-nuanced understanding of Krenov’s expectations, and in the course of a day, the layout was finalized. Hoke worked closely with Larry Kavanaugh, the school’s director, to put these plans into place, and the two of them ordered the machinery and supplies for the program, specifying everything from window shades to lumber racks to the particular style of fluted dowel Krenov preferred. Kavanaugh, who became a close friend and advocate of Krenov’s in subsequent years, worked closely with Hoke through the process, and the purchase lists for equipment and materials show that the school was sparing little expense in equipping the workshop.
Hoke was also tasked with outlining a curriculum for the program – while the basic understanding among those involved was to simply follow Krenov’s lead, the administration required a detailed plan for the 1,728 credit hours that constituted the nine-month program. Here again, Hoke interpolated from Krenov’s books, and consulted with their author over the phone form a structured plan for the year.
One of the last, if not the last, photos of Krenov in his basement shop in Bromma. Two of his cabinets are visible on his bench in the background of the photo, and his “Writing Table of Italian Walnut” is in the foreground. The photo illustrates Krenov’s preferred surface treatment for such a piece; the luster of the waxed tabletop illustrates his preference for satin surfaces. Many of the wall cabinets he made earlier in the 1970s and late 1960s were left completely untreated. Photo by Rolf Salomonsson.
This process was a daunting one for Hoke, and over the course of the year a tradition developed that continued into the school’s weekly rituals. Michael Burns, who was helping Hoke develop the program and work with Krenov to build out the home he had bought the prior summer, arrived at his office to pull him away for therapeutic drinks outside a local liquor store. The beverage of choice was Carlsberg Elephants, a malt-liquor from the Danish brewery, and the “Elephants” meetings continued as a ritual on Friday evenings. The meetings began as a small group of the school’s community, who circled up their cars outside the Sprouse-Reitz variety store downtown. In later years, the meetings moved to the “North O’ Town” industrial park, where a small satellite shop was set up by the school’s faculty and students, and by the late 1980s, it finally relocated to the school, becoming a weekly get-together for the students and the extended community of alumni, supporters and family members growing in the area. After its informal beginnings in the parking lot, Krenov began attending the gatherings with Britta, and it was especially Britta’s constant presence that students remember. During the next several decades, Britta would only miss a handful of “Elephants.”
My mom’s place on Willard Street, one block from our storefront and home. She kept the place perfect.
On Friday, Lucy and I walked to get some dinner at a Mexican restaurant after a typical and trying week of work. As we were finishing up, my mom sat down with one of her friends, Sandi, at a table next to us.
Before I could even say hello, my mom’s table was swarmed with people from the neighborhood who stopped by to chat. I stood up, and we talked for a few minutes. As I left, I kissed her on the head and said, “Love you, mom.”
Affection is completely out of character for me in a public setting. And as I walked away, I wondered what had gotten into me. On Monday, I found out.
My mom, Jean Terry West, died unexpectedly overnight. As I’m sure most of you know, losing your parents can feel like the rug has been pulled out from under you. One of the ways I deal with grief is writing and building. And my coming days are going to be filled with that and taking care of the arrangements and my family.
In the meantime, I’d like to repost this essay I wrote last year about her and her importance to Lost Art Press and my life as a woodworker and writer.
I miss her already.
— Christopher Schwarz
At Popular Woodworking, we begged readers to send us submissions for the magazine’s last-page essay called “End Grain.” The problem was that almost all the essays we received had the same theme. It was such a problem that the theme became its own compound adjective.
Me: So what’s the essay about?
Fellow editor: It’s another grandpa-was-a-woodworker-so-now-I-am-too piece.
To be fair, my grandfather on my mother’s side truly was an accomplished woodworker. He taught me quite a bit about the craft and inspired me to be a woodworker. So I am in the sizable cohort that I appear to be mocking (though I am not).
Instead, I want to call attention to a fact we sometimes forget. Here it is: We are not clones.
When I write about the woodworking I did as a kid, it’s easy to focus on – duh – the woodworking parts. My grandfather was an enthusiastic woodworker, and I spent many hours in his Connecticut shop making things. My father was also a woodworker and a carpenter and a mason and a talented photographer (and 100 other things). And it’s easy to explain my interest in the craft through those two people.
But that’s just shorthand. And it’s incomplete.
As my father got older, his patience for work in the craft grew veneer thin. When he was younger, he would spend months laying hundreds of bricks by himself (sometimes with the help of my mother) as he started beautifying our first home in Arkansas. After he designed the two houses for our farm, he spent most weekends there (dragging us along whenever possible). These houses took more than a decade to construct. But despite the overwhelming task, he moved forward every week, joist by stud.
Once in his 60s, however, he confessed to me that he’d lost the drive to take on big projects. He was still interested in making things. But he wanted things to be quick. He wanted to learn to turn. And to carve small objects. Up until the end, his hand skills and his mental acuity never wavered. When he did pick up the tools, it was humbling to watch. But it was more difficult for him to ignite that spark. And to keep it going.
I think about that a lot. I have now entered my 50s, and I still want nothing more than to build things day in and day out. For years I worried that I would turn into my father and lose the ember that’s necessary to tackle difficult furniture pieces.
Luckily, I am not a clone. I am also the product of my mother.
My mother, now in her 70s, is as active and entrepreneurial as she was in her 20s or 30s. As a kid, I watched her teach natural childbirth in our traditional (some might say backwards) Arkansas town. She started a restaurant there, and then she worked at restaurants and catering businesses all over the country (Dallas, Santa Fe, Connecticut, Little Rock). Today, she still runs a catering business from her house and cooks every week as a volunteer at our local shelter. And she still embraces new technology (we’re both exploring the world of cooking with sous vide and an Instant Pot these days) and new ways of working.
She has had a more tumultuous life than my father, especially after they broke up. But she doesn’t give up. And she always finds a way to make things work, whether that’s throwing together a great meal with scraps or starting her life over in a new city.
So while it might look like Lost Art Press and my love for woodworking is the direct result of my time in the workshop with my grandfather and father, that’s not quite right. It’s my mother’s influence that gave me the strength to give the finger to my corporate job. And in the 1990s when I failed at my first publishing business, it was my mother’s genes that gave me the strength to say: Hell yes, let’s do this again and start Lost Art Press with my business partner, John.
And it’s also her genes that likely will keep me going.
As I get older, my patience for woodworking has only increased. I am still interested in learning new (and sometimes very old) techniques. And John and I have a business – publishing high-quality woodworking books – that is as ridiculous on paper as running a restaurant or a catering business. But we make it work.
So while grandfather might have been a woodworker, it’s important to also remember this: Mama was an entrepreneur.
The following is excerpted from “Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley,” by Donald C. Williams, Photographs by Narayan Nayar. Note: In the book, this chapter includes many more images of the astounding details in this storied tool cabinet.
My late colleague and dear friend Melvin J. Wachowiak, Jr. once remarked that anything made more elegantly than necessary for its usefulness was Art. By that assessment, with which I agree, the Studley tool cabinet is unrestrained Art. There are a multitude of visual and physical moments in the cabinet that did not need to be there. Their presence is either to aesthetically enhance the whole, or to demonstrate the maker’s virtuosity at his craft and his delight in it.
The scale and density of the decorative details in the Studley cabinet limited each element, especially the inlays, to about a quarter the size of a postage stamp.
The Inlays To a modern woodworker the tool cabinet might seem opulent, even garish, but in the late-Victorian world of organ and piano building, the exuberance made sense. The material vocabulary is what you would expect for a palette of inlays on a piano-maker’s toolbox: ivory, ebony and mother-of-pearl. The inlay techniques Studley used on the cabinet were straightforward and exacting. For the round, button-like inlays he likely used a drill bit to excavate the pockets. The inlays vary in size, but most are in the range of 1/4″ in diameter plus or minus, with a few in the 1/8″-diameter range.
Almost all of the 136 ivory inlays are buttons or roundels.
On the right side of the cabinet, where Studley located sets of graduated drill bits, he marked the sets not only with engraved flat ivory roundels but also with half-spherical ivory buttons.
The 217 mother-of-pearl inlays are more evenly divided between buttons and roundels, and pieces of other shapes (alas, I did not conduct a count on that distribution). The shaped pieces were “made to fit,” but there is no way to identify which came first, the void or the infill.
Typically intarsia (a technique by which pieces are literally “inset” into a background) is accomplished by first creating the decorative element, then creating a void to fit that element by scribing the outline of the element on the background and excavating a void. My microscopic examination of the inlays was cursory and inconclusive, but
I did not see any tool marks on the background surfaces.
Regardless of their material or shape, on all but a few of the inlays there are no irregularities until extreme magnification is employed.
The opulence of using ivory buttons, inscribed with inked numbers to mark the progression of tool sizes (for example, the graduations of the drill bits) is awe-inspiring.
There is place for every drill bit in the graduated set, and an engraved ivory button for each drill bit. Also take note of the subtle but elegant treatment of the bottoms of the spacers between each Gothic arch; the curved double-chamfer is found in numerous locations throughout the cabinet, almost never glaringly obvious.
Concurrently, the mother-of-pearl elements used as mere decoration impart an intense luminescence to the cabinet, especially as the light or the viewing position changes.
The Sculpted Details The strictly sculptural elements of the cabinet, by which I mean those that are rendered and presented to the viewer in three dimensions, number literally in the hundreds. Because it is not possible to rank them in importance or even prominence, I will cluster them into four major areas.
First are the roundels, turned button-like elements scattered throughout the cabinet, never haphazard and always enhancing adjacent elements. There are many different sizes of roundels, ranging from about 3/8″ to 1-1/2″ in diameter. Most, but not all, of the roundels are festooned with round mother-of-pearl inlays at their tips, about which I will speak more in a bit. Each of the roughly two dozen roundels is turned from solid ebony.
Closely related to the roundels are the drawer pulls and stopper buttons at the ends of the metal tubes containing tools. I include these 17 examples here because, like the roundels, they are small, turned ebony elements.
The technical and artistic complexity of this one element is astonishing. The turned ebony plugs for the nickel-plated tube (there is one at each end) are adjacent to a series of ebony and mother-of-pearl roundels mounted on sculpted ebony backplates. To carry the power of the accomplishment even further, the swinging tab that restrains the tube in its shaped wire fitting is a spectacular carved ebony “L” with tapered chamfers on both sides of the two curves.
Second are the shaped decorative elements, which are further subdivided into those that are 1) functionally similar to the roundels in that they are applied to the background, or 2) movable tabs or catches used to restrain tools. Most of these from either category are further enhanced by mother-of-pearl inlays and reflect the element outline as a whole.
Of the first group, numbering roughly 90, many serve to frame a space but others are demarcations between tools belonging to a graduated set, such as the chisels and drill bits. The second group consists of about 50 ebony tabs.
The third type of sculptural enhancements are carved elements serving as stand-alone sculptures in their own right. The most prominent of these is the drop pendant that tops the arch above the niche containing the Stanley No. 1 plane. The detail on this element is breathtaking, all the more so when you consider its scale; it is roughly the size of a dime. There are only a dozen or so of these examples in the case, but they are spectacular and attention-grabbing.
The carved ebony capitol from the Masonic vignette is approximately the size of a nickel.
The final widespread instance of sculptural exercises in the cabinet includes the arches and their buttresses, most notably around the set of four awls above the Masonic symbol, along with those around the chisels and the two sets of drill bits, which are in the upper right portion of the cabinet on the second and third layers. The arch-and-buttress vignette framing the awls takes its place proudly among the most beautifully designed and crafted artworks I have ever seen.
Quantifying precisely the inventory of these decorative details is nearly impossible (is it a series of a dozen arches, or is it a single element of an ascending set of arches?) and frankly not especially useful. But because you asked, I number the total of individual decorative elements to be in excess of 500.
I make no apologies for being captivated by this compartment in the Studley cabinet. The composition and execution are flawless and, like many of the details in the cabinet, can only be fully appreciated when the tools are removed.
Perhaps the most gifted craftsman I know recently replicated a single inlaid mother-of-pearl and ebony element from Studley’s cabinet and found it to be a vexing and time-consuming effort. If we fixate on the Herculean labors of Studley we might become obsessed with the mechanistic minutiae of envisioning and fabricating hundreds of stylistic touches, each consuming some quantity of a superb craftsman’s time.
Instead I ask you to think of them – and the case itself – as a unified cornucopia in which the whole is infinitely more affecting than a summation of the magnificent individual components.
Before you can begin traversing with your jack plane, you should bevel off the far edge of the board with a few good strokes of your jack plane. This bevel reduces the “spelching” on that edge. (Spelching is the fun English word for “splintering.”)
The following is excerpted from “The Joiner & Cabinetmaker,” by Anonymous, Christopher Schwarz and Joel Moskowitz (this section is by Schwarz). J&C is a short book written in 1839 by an anonymous tradesman; it tells the fictional tale of Thomas, a lad of 13 or 14 who is apprenticed to a rural shop that builds everything from built-ins to more elaborate veneered casework. It was written to guide young people who might be considering a life in the joinery or cabinetmaking trades, focusing on how apprentices could obtain the basic skills needed to work in a hand-tool shop. However, this is not a book for children. It is a book for anyone exploring hand-tool woodworking. In it, Thomas builds three projects during the course of his journey in the book, and there is enough detail in the text and illustrations to re-create these three projects just as they were built in 1839.
In addition to the complete original text, you’ll find an historical snapshot of early 19th-century England by Moskowitz, chapters on the hand-tool construction of the three projects (a Packing Box, a dovetailed Schoolbox and a Chest of Drawers) by Schwarz and complete construction drawings.
Plus, there’s an audiobook available of the original 1839 text, read by none other than Roy Underhill!
Before traversing a panel, check the panel using the edge of your plane, which is a fairly good straightedge. If the panel is cupped across its width (typically on the bark side of a board), then the work should be fairly easy to accomplish. If the board is crowned in the middle (typically on the heart side of a board), you need to watch what you are doing. Sometimes traversing and diagonal strokes aren’t enough to flatten a crowned surface.
Flattening Panels With Planes With the glue dry, it’s time to flatten one face of all of your panels. Thomas begins with the jack plane then moves to the trying plane, yet the details of the operation are sketchy in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.”
Early workshop practice was to use the jack plane (sometimes called the fore plane) across the grain of a panel. This operation, which Joesph Moxon called “traversing” in his “Mechanick Exercises” of 1678, allows you to remove a good deal of deal without tearing the grain too deeply. Working the grain diagonally in both directions allows you to get the board fairly flat – Thomas checks the board with a straightedge as he works, which is always a good idea.
Traversing is a powerful hand-tool technique. You can remove a lot of material quickly and make the board flatter than when you began.
Diagonal strokes, as shown here, allow more of the plane’s sole to touch the panel. After some overlapping, you’ll find the panel is pretty flat once you can take a shaving from every point on the board.
Note: When you work at 45° to the grain of a panel, you will typically see more tearing in one direction than in the other. This is normal. Just make sure you finish your diagonal strokes in the direction that produces less tearing. Determining when a board is flat can be a challenge. After some practice, you learn to tell by the way your planes respond when dressing the panel. The shavings become consistent in thickness, width and length all along the board. A straightedge can help. So can winding sticks, which aren’t mentioned in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.”
Check the panel using the wooden straightedge. Look for light as you hold the tool diagonally one way, then the other. Work the remaining high spots using the jack plane until the panel is close to flat.
Winding sticks are two identical sticks that are longer than the board is wide. They are placed at several points across the width of the board and compared by eye. When the panel is twisted, the sticks aren’t parallel. And because they are longer than the board is wide, they exaggerate any wind.
Then dress the panel using the trying plane (sometimes called a jointer). I use diagonal strokes first. Then I finish up with strokes that follow the grain of the panel.
The author of “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” has a novel solution: Compare your panel to a known flat panel. If your panel rocks on the flat one, it’s in wind. Of course, the trick is getting that first panel flat. It’s possible to create two panels that are in wind but don’t rock on one another – the high spots of one panel nest into the low spots of the other and result in a false reading.
The top panel is flat. By placing it on top of the panel I am working and trying to rock the panel at the corners, I can test for wind. You do have to be careful here. Sometimes you can miss a problem when you have one low corner but the three other corners are coplanar. Keep a sharp eye.
However, once you get one panel flat, the method explained in the book works well.
Dressing Panels to Identical Thickness With all six panels flat on one face, it’s time to dress the mates to the same thickness. The exact dimension isn’t important (3/4″, 13/16″ etc.). What you seek is to get all the parts you are going to dovetail together (the sides and ends) to the same thickness. Then you want to get the bottom in the neighborhood of 1/2″ thick. And with the top you want to get it flat and clean. Then stop.
With your marking gauge set to the thinnest area on your sides and ends, scribe this finished thickness on all four edges of all four boards.
Any other work past this point isn’t necessary and will wear you out. Remember: Few people experience furniture through their dial calipers. If it looks good, it is good.
Gather up your sides and ends and look for the thinnest area on these four boards. Set your marking gauge to that thickness and scribe that thickness on all four edges of all four boards. Then use your jack plane (first plane across the grain then work diagonally) to work that second face almost to that scribed line. Then use your trying plane to finish the job.
To thickness the top and bottom pieces, simply find the thinnest area on each and scribe that thickness all around. This should be quick work because you don’t have to get four boards to agree.
Squaring Panels by Hand There are a number of ways to get your sides and ends to the correct length. They all involve sawing them close to the finished length then shooting them to their final length with a plane.
Rip teeth (at the bottom of the photo) are filed straight across and are fairly upright. The crosscut teeth at top have their front cutting surfaces filed at an angle (this is called “fleam”) and the teeth lean back a little bit (this means the rake has been relaxed).
When Thomas built the Packing Box, he used a handsaw to cut the boards to length and a smoothing plane to dress the ends square enough for a rough box. However, here Thomas uses a large backsaw to make the crosscut and guides his plane with a shooting board, one of the essential jigs in a hand-tool shop.
Let’s talk about these tools and jigs. Thomas employs a sash saw to cut the sides and ends to length. Despite the name, sash saws weren’t used only by woodworkers who made windows. The sash saw, as described by Charles Holtzapffel, has a sawplate that is 14″ to 16″ long and has 11 points per inch.
Of course, a modern woodworker with some knowledge of saws would ask: So is it a rip saw or a crosscut saw? The answer isn’t simple. Woodworking books of the early 19th century don’t make distinctions between saws with ripping teeth (zero rake and zero fleam) and those with crosscutting teeth (15° rake and 20° fleam is typical).
In one corner are woodworking historians who say that if fleam isn’t mentioned, it didn’t exist. So they sharpen all their saws for ripping and have to jump through a few hoops to make clean crosscuts.
In the other corner are woodworkers who say that fleam likely existed. In my mind, the evidence of this is found in the shop. If you work only with rip saws, you end up preparing the line you intend to cut by adding a trough made with a chisel. This trench prevents tearing. However, preparing the work with a chisel isn’t mentioned routinely in the early texts. So either they had some other unmentioned way of dealing with spelching created by a rip tooth, or they were smart enough to add a little fleam to their saws to make them cut more smoothly. Or perhaps they just planed away the torn-out areas, which is what Thomas does in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.”
Or perhaps the hand-filing created a little fleam that made the saws cut a little cleaner. No matter how hard I try, I can’t file a saw with zero fleam – it always gets a little fleam as a result of hand sharpening.
For this book, I worked with both sorts of saws. I have a sash saw that is filed rip and one that is filed crosscut. Both are hand-filed. So the rip-tooth sash saw actually has a little fleam and the crosscut tooth has a little more fleam.
This British-made sash saw has 11 points and is filed for crosscutting. It does a superb job that requires little clean-up on a shooting board with a plane.
In truth, if I had to have only one sash saw I would be hard-pressed to choose its configuration. When it came to crosscutting parts to size, the crosscut sash saw really shined. The cuts were clean and required almost no clean-up. The rip sash, however, was much easier to use when cutting tenons (a joint that comes up in the final project). The rip sash tracked better in a rip cut, and it was faster.
Here is the result from using my crosscut sash saw. I worked only to a pencil line (you can see it faintly on the top of the board). This cut will require only one or two strokes with a plane to true it up and there is almost no raggedness left behind. One last detail: Part of this is skill, so if your cuts don’t look like this from the get-go don’t blame the saw. A steady hand and a smooth stroke contribute a lot to the result.
If I had to make a recommendation on what sort of saw to buy, I’d buy a rip sash saw with about 10 or 11 points. And I’d buy a 6″ double extra-slim-taper saw file and a Stanley 42X saw set. Then use the saw for both crosscutting and ripping and get to know it. Then try sharpening it with a little more fleam and relax the rake until it does a fair job for the work you do. This saw might not be optimized for ripping or crosscutting, but it will allow you to use only one saw.
By the way, this is a common compromise in the realm of the power saw – the carbide teeth of combination blades are ground to handle both crosscuts and rips and do a passable job. There’s no reason you cannot find this same middle ground with a hand-powered saw.
On the Shooting Board Shooting boards mystify beginning woodworkers. These workshop appliances are much like a bench hook for sawing. They have a fence that you brace the work against. They have a bed for supporting the work. They usually have a hook on the front edge of the appliance that hooks over the front edge of your workbench. And they usually have a track that your handplane runs in.
The bench hook and the shooting board are so similar that I sometimes use my shooting board for sawing. There is one primary disadvantage to this approach – you can see a little more tearing on the underside of your board when sawing – but this is minor.
The fence of a basic shooting board needs to be at a right angle to the track that the plane rides in. Also, I think it’s best to have the fence about 1″ thick; that way you’ll be able to dress 1″ stock without tearing out the far edge. Finally, the fence should not be slick. At the least, don’t apply any finish to the fence. At best, cover the fence with some sticky-back sandpaper (the specific grit is irrelevant). You will be surprised by how this makes the shooting board easier to use.
The bed of a shooting board should be wide enough to handle the stock you typically deal with (and then some). My bed has about 14″ of working surface. This allows me to deal with 12″-wide stock and have some room to start my handplane on the track without it tipping. I don’t apply finish to my shooting boards (except to the track), but it won’t hurt to apply a coat of boiled linseed oil to the bed if you please.
The shooting board’s hook is fastened below the bed. It doesn’t have any special characteristics. Usually I just use some of the same size stock I used for the fence.
The track, however, needs special attention. It needs to be wide enough for the sidewall of the handplane you plan to use for shooting – my track is about 4″ wide. The track trips up a lot of first-time users because they don’t understand how the plane won’t eat up the edge of the adjacent bed.
A typical bench plane for a shooting board (which is a jack or a try) has some metal by the side of the mouth aperture that’s usually about 1/8″ to 3/16″ wide. It’s this little land of metal that prevents the plane from chewing up your shooting board into oblivion. The first time you use the shooting board, your plane will rabbet away a little bit of the bed, then you’ll never cut the bed again (unless you increase the cut of the plane).
I think it goes without saying that you should never use a rabbeting plane or shoulder plane on a shooting board. Those will indeed eat your bed for breakfast.
I apply a little paste wax to the track to keep the planes running smoothly. It’s the only maintenance required – except for occasionally confirming that the fence is true.
Using a Shooting Board Before you trim up your panels for the Schoolbox, I recommend a little practice on some scrap pine first. Shooting boards require a little skill to use. Here is how I do it to get good results. First realize that the far end of your cut is going to get a little spelched. That just happens. You have three ways of getting around this: You can chisel a little 45° bevel on the far corner to prevent the spelching. You can plane that far corner first with a few short strokes on the shooting board to relieve that area. Or you can plan for the spelching – leave a little extra width so you can remove the spelching with a couple long-grain passes on that far edge when you are done.
A shooting board and a sharp plane result in a square, ready-to-finish end-grain surface. Plus, you can adjust the length of your boards in .001″ increments. Try that with a chop saw.
Position your board so that the knife or pencil line is right on the edge of the bed and allow the waste to hang over the track. Press the work against your fence with your off-hand. Then grasp the plane’s sidewall with your dominant hand. This hand has three jobs: Hold the plane against the track, push the plane forward and keep the plane in the cut.
This is where the skill comes in. You need to find the right combination of down, forward and inward forces to create a straight edge. The hardest part is figuring out how much pressure you need to apply to hold the plane in the cut. Too much force and your work will slide away on the fence. Too little and the plane will skitter across the end grain without cutting.
That’s why I like a plane with a sharp iron and lots of mass for shooting. Those two characteristics make it easier to keep the handplane in the cut.
Keep moving the plane forward and back until it stops cutting. Check your work. If you hit your line, you’re done. Otherwise, move the board a bit and shoot some more.
What is interesting about the description of shooting in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” is that Thomas starts shooting with a jack plane to remove the roughness of the saw. Then he follows up by shooting with his trying plane.
I have two theories here: Either Thomas has a rip sash saw that has torn out the grain, or Thomas isn’t all that good a sawyer yet. If the latter is true, Thomas had better start making some more practice joints because the next section has a good deal of sawing in it.
