Larissa Huff, one of the instructors of online classes for A Workshop of Our Own.
Most readers of this blog will be familiar with A Workshop of Our Own (WOO), the Baltimore teaching and workspace established in 2017 by furniture maker Sarah Marriage with funding from the prestigious John D. Mineck Furniture Fellowship.
A desk by Sarah Marriage.
Along with other schools and ventures of all kinds that rely on in-person gatherings, WOO has faced serious challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sarah, WOO board members and other allies have come up with a response to keep the classes and camaraderie coming: a broadened reach of offerings online with “From WOO to You.” In the coming months, WOO will host a range of classes that are not only packed with information about tools and materials, and easy-to-follow instruction in skills, but taught by local and national instructors who are a lot of fun. There are basics such as “Understanding Wood” and classes to improve your precision and efficiency including “JIGS: Tools to Make Things Easy.” Inspired by Sarah’s recent experiments with carving in a different medium – pumpkins – there will also be seasonal offerings, such as “Fancy Pumpkin Carving.” (And if you think that fancy pumpkin carving sounds like fluff, think again. Sarah’s technique and designs are mind-blowing in their ingenuity – not that that should come as a surprise to anyone who knows her.)
One of Sarah’s carved pumpkins.
At $29 a pop for non-members of WOO and $25 for members, the classes are far more affordable than many online classes. One (or more) of the classes would also make an excellent gift for any woman and/or gender non-conforming woodworker/aspiring woodworker. (For those unfamiliar with WOO, it is a non-profit safe space for training underrepresented genders; enrollment is limited to women and gender non-conforming folks over the age of 18.) Each class is taught live but viewable for 30 days afterward.
You have Robin Lee of Lee Valley to thank for this. He reached out to us and made a special order of these books in an effort to get them in the hands of woodworkers who would appreciate them.
So if you’re in Canada, this is a great way to get this book shipped to you.
The SawStop sliding crosscut fence (on a SawStop table saw), with the fence extended to full length.
The most labor-intensive part of preparing for classes is, by far, the stock prep – especially for the tool chest classes I teach. For those classes, I crosscut pairs of ends, and pairs of fronts/backs, together so that they’re the same length. That was difficult with our old shop-made crosscut sled. When crosscutting the front/backs, more than half the length of them clamped together was unsupported, so I had to hold them both tight to the sled’s fence and down at the same time. (The only good thing about that was the upper-body workout.)
So Chris – exceedingly kind man that he is – bought (me) a sliding crosscut fence. We looked at a few other brands, but after talking to people who already owned one, we decided on the SawStop slider.
Right after the box arrived we shut down classes for 2020…so there will be no massive amounts of stock prep until there’s a COVID-19 vaccine. But in the meantime, we’ve had time to put the new slider through its paces.
The MDF sled above is the one we formerly used to crosscut wide materials – you can easily see the additional support offered by the slider, not to mention the adjustable flip stops.
Chris has set up five or six different sliding tables over the years, and he says this one was by far the easiest; he had it up and running in about an hour (my only contribution was helping to adjust the leveling feet – it’s really a one-person job). There’s the option to bolt the slider to the table saw’s wing, or to remove the wing and bolt it directly to the main table. But either way, you almost certainly have to cut the rip fence’s rail. I believe the instructions said to do that with a metal-cutting band saw. But Chris used a recip saw with a home-center carbide blade (you could also use a metal-cutting jigsaw blade), then he filed the cut edges; the cut took less than 5 seconds.
In all honestly, we don’t have the fence perfectly set above the table’s height; it rides up the bevel on the front edge of the table by maybe 1/32″ every time we push it forward. Not a big deal – it works fine, and you can’t hear the fence hitting that edge over the noise of the saw and dust collection anyway (and you get used to the feel of it after a cut or three).
You can see in this photo how the fence just barely grazes the bevel on the table edge as it’s pushed forward.
Among the nice things about this sliding table is that it can be pulled back far enough to allow us to stand in front of it for most rip cuts – which means we don’t have to take it out of square to get it out of the way for most rips.
The sliding fence pulled all the way back – plenty of room in front of it for a person, and for most rip cuts.
Getting this one back to square is a lot easier than on my JessEm Mast-R-Slide at home, which requires Allen wrenches to adjust the setting blocks. This slider locks in place not against a block, but in the T-track. So all you need is a framing square to set it square to the blade. Still, once you have it square, why move it unless you have to?
To adjust the fence, just loosen/tighten the knurled knob.
I’ve heard a few complaints about the flip stops on the fence slipping or bending, but I was taught to always gently push my stock again a stop, so I haven’t had any trouble with the stops losing their settings so far. I also had one person mention that if you have a substantial angle set, the end of the fence is far away from the blade. Ninety-nine percent of our cuts are at 90°, so we’ve not yet had to tackle that issue. I imagine that whomever has to make that first 45° cut will make an auxiliary fence that fits in the fence’s T-track.
One of the two flip stops.
In addition to the extra support and ball-bearing sliding action, what I like most is the flip stops. It used to be I would crosscut one end of all my stock, then clamp a stop to the sled to cut it to final length. I save a lot of time now by simply flipping the stop up to square one end, then flipping my stock, and putting the stop down to cut the second end. Heaven. I’m very much looking forward to finding out – hopefully in the near future – how much easier this new setup will make cutting stock for seven tool chests at a time!
My biggest stumbling block in getting started on my forthcoming Dutch tool chest book was (and remains) the camera. At Popular Woodworking Magazine, we had a fancy camera (we took our own step photos), but I always used it on the fully automatic mode. And I haven’t taken a photo with anything other than my phone since 2017.
Neither fully automatic mode nor phone snaps will fly for a book. I had to learn how to use at least a few of the bells and whistles on Christopher Schwarz’s Canon 5D, make friends with his ARRI LED light setup and, perhaps most important for me, learn how to zoom in on a particular spot to set the focus in live view (I have bad astigmatism and need new glasses).
It’s all so fancy (to me).
Chris was kind enough to give me a crash course and answer many inane (and repeat) questions as I got started. A week later and I’m having fun playing around with depth of field, shadows and blithely switching between a 2-second delay and a 10-second delay as needed. And yesterday, I learned how to hook up and use the remote shutter release! (I realize that doesn’t sound at all impressive, but the last time I used a remote shutter release it was a threaded shutter release cable for my father’s circa-1960 Asahi Pentax SLR that I used in college. And it was about three decades old by then.)
But I think I have it under control. With all but the lid finished on chest No. 1, I’ve managed to reduce the number of not-quite-right shots and the time to get a good one. On day 1, it took me at least 15 minutes to get the “right” image. I’m now down to about 5 minutes per. But at 5 minutes per, it sure takes a lot longer to build things than simply, well, building (a fact I’d managed to forget in my three years since PWM).
My plan is to discuss every reasonable approach to building these chests (and in the offing teach many techniques applicable to all kinds of builds), so no matter a reader’s tool kit, skill set or penchant for pre- or post-industrial woodworking, there will be a technique that appeals. That means I’ll be building quite a few chests (both large and small)…or at least parts of chests for close-up photography.
So I hope to get faster still with the photos – and better at deciding what to shoot and what not to (right now, I’m shooting almost every step). Otherwise, I’ll be done before the book is.
Chest on chest. The top one has fewer dovetails and more woodworking lessons.
“Ingenious Mechanicks” is my least successful book – commercially – but it probably the one I’m most proud of. The research the Suzanne Ellison and I performed for the book involved sorting through thousands of fine art paintings. I had to travel to Germany and Italy to see examples of low workbenches first-hand. And the reconstructive archaeology was challenging. Writing the book forced me to appreciate what can be done with few tools and no vises – just stops, gravity and wedges. This approach infiltrated my everyday work at the bench, and I am faster and better for it.
— Christopher Schwarz
It’s not fair to our early ancestors to put words in their mouths. We don’t know how dry their wood was when they started to build their workbenches. Was it fresh from the tree? Dried for 20 years? Something in between?
We can guess, which is what most people do. Or we can build a bunch of workbenches from woods in varying degrees of wetness and observe the results through several years. This second path is much more difficult than sitting naked in the dark at your computer keyboard – fingers covered in the dust of Cheetos – and pontificating online. But it’s the path I took.
Here’s what I’ve found: Dry wood is the best. But because you are unlikely to find big slabs of wood that are totally dry, then dry-ish wood is great, too. What I mean by dry-ish is somewhere about 20 percent moisture content (MC) or less. When you use dry-ish wood there are rarely any unhappy endings that involve splitting or warping. The wood will settle down quickly – within a year or so – and the benchtop won’t require more than a couple flattenings.
My next choice is wood that I call “moist.” This is stock that is somewhere between 20 percent and 50 percent MC. This sort of stock is what I usually look for when building massive oak workbenches for customers. It’s stuff that is about 6″ thick and has been drying for a decade.
This wood has some drying to do after you turn it into a workbench. Expect some shrinkage and checking on the end grain. It will calm down after a few years and four or five flattenings of the benchtop. My only other caution with moist stock is to not rely on glue for the joinery. Because of the wetness of the wood, water-based glues (yellow, white and hide) won’t be effective. I recommend you rely on drawboring and wedging.
Finally, there is fresh wood, stuff that was a living tree less than a year prior. This stock is fairly easy to find and fairly cheap, but it can be tricky. Water-based glues aren’t a good idea. And you can experience significant warping and checking as the wood dries. My first precaution is to use a species that is easy to dry, such as red oak. Look for a slab where the grain runs fairly straight through the face and the edges. Orient the slab so the heart side is your benchtop (with the bark side facing the floor). And paint the end grain of your completed benchtop with a latex paint to slow the drying, especially if your bench will be in a climate-controlled shop.
All these precautions will reduce the risk that your benchtop will warp horribly. But there is no guarantee.
