I built this bench in 2006 for my first book, “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use” (Popular Woodworking). It was the first English-style bench I’d ever built or used, so there was a bit of a learning curve, both with its construction and in learning to make the most of it while working on it.
On construction: The bench uses clever engineering to obtain its rigidity. But cleverness doesn’t always win the day. The benchtop started out as a single layer of 2x yellow pine. That proved to be too bouncy in use. So I ended up filling the underside of the benchtop with a second layer of 2x blocking between the “bearers” that support the benchtop.
On use: I had to learn to work with the wide front apron, which is a blessing and a curse.
This particular design is based on several historical benches that I studied, including the version in Peter Nicholson’s “Mechanic’s Companion,” which also provided key construction information. The angled legs and tail vise came from other examples.
This bench is backed against my French bench and I work on it regularly. What’s most surprising about the bench is how little I’ve modified it in 14 years. I added a commercial planing stop, a few holdfast holes and a bench light.
Kate Swann, the force behind the Florida School of Woodwork, first came to my notice via an Instagram post in 2018. Who is this person? I wondered. How have I never heard of her?
When we crossed paths briefly at FWW Live the following year, I wished I could sit down and pepper her with questions. I knew just three things about her: She was English, she had recently opened a woodworking school in Tampa, Fla., and she had partnered with Fine Woodworking to host a week of instruction with several renowned woodworkers in the coming February. Clearly this was someone with chutzpah and ambition. Little did I know that in addition to these qualities she has an honors degree in French, Russian and linguistics, is the mother of a grown son and spent several years as a professional shepherdess.
Kate, the younger of two daughters, was born in Aldershot, southwest of London, in 1965. Her parents had both been born shortly before WWII in London’s East End; both left school by the age of 15, as was typical among working-class families. Her father began his career as a milkman, an important job at a time when most families had bottles of dairy products delivered to their doorstep each morning before dawn. Her mother worked as a secretary.
In the early ‘60s Kate’s parents left London, where the cost of living had become unaffordable. Her dad had trained in foundry work at trade school; the family moved to Aldershot so he could take a foundry job there. In 1967, when Kate was 2, he took another job, this time in Reading, to London’s west. “Work was scarce and pay was based on work produced,” says Kate, “so the employees at the foundry would physically stage fights – yeah, like fist fights – to decide who would get the work.” When he learned about a job at British Airways, which paid him 22 pounds a week, reliably, he leapt at it (and worked there for 25 years). He drove a tug, one of those powerful, low-slung vehicles that push aircraft back from the terminal so they can taxi to the runway.
Mr. and Mrs. Swann on their wedding day
As anyone who worked for a major airline in the 1970s can attest, it was a golden age for travel, and one of Terry Swann’s job-related benefits was free flights anywhere in the world. “So we went everywhere,” says Kate matter-of-factly. “Of course, I was completely unappreciative at the time.” Singapore for spring break. Cypress for a weekend. “We’d eat sea urchins while staying in a caravan [a camper van] on the beach and the wild dogs would come around and we’d feed them. My mum would say ‘Don’t feed them, Terry! It’s dangerous!’”
“He never planned anything,” Kate continues. “So it was all very off the cuff. We’d arrive in Rome and my mum would go, ‘Where are was staying?’ He’d say, ‘We’ll find a place.’ People would come up to us and say, ‘Can we help you?’ and my dad would say, ‘Yes.’ So this lady comes up [she didn’t speak English, and the family didn’t speak Italian] and says, ‘Can I help you?’ and he says, ‘We’re looking for a place to stay. Can you suggest a hotel?’ We followed her through Rome and got to this apartment building, and she gestured for us to be really quiet. She led us up to about the fifth floor and asked for some money, and we stayed there. She asked us to be quiet the whole time, and we eventually figured out it wasn’t her apartment. She was the housekeeper! That [stuff] would happen all the time. It would drive my mother batty.”
After graduating from high school Kate took a gap year, then attended the University of Sussex in Brighton to take an honors degree in French, Russian and linguistics. “I really took the degree because I wanted to understand the language of birds. The songbird population of England and Europe was quite something, and I was interested in the dialectical differences between the birds of one country and another. Do French sparrows say something different from British sparrows?”
She was getting by on virtually no money. “I was living on potatoes and riding a 25-lb. cast iron bike seven miles to school every day. One time I was looking at myself and saw a line down the middle of my stomach; I didn’t realize that because I was so thin and climbing rocks and riding this bike I was starting to develop a six-pack. I don’t have that now!”
While attending university, she also lived a parallel life as a shepherdess, an avocation since the age of about 14. Picture Kate going out with her crook and her staff, tramping across the hills, tending to her flock — sometimes with a dog, sometimes on a horse. This work took her to the South of France, where she was employed as a farm laborer with a small flock of sheep and picked peaches in the Camargue.
A real-life shepherdess
Kate’s interest in rock climbing led her to apply for a spot with Operation Raleigh, a non-profit organization that combined adventurous opportunities for young people with scientific research and philanthropic work intended to benefit local communities. Those selected were sent on a three-month stint as the expedition worked its way around the world. The project was run by Sir John Blashford-Snell. “The last of the British Empire,” Kate quips. She recalled, “he literally showed up at my portion of the expedition in a pith helmet and putty boots. ‘What ho!’,” she laughs—”very upper crust. The epitome of the British in India.”
Kate was selected for the section of the expedition that would visit Chile. She was in her second year of college at the time. Thanks to her father’s job and their shared love of adventure, she’d already traveled extensively. All of which should explain why she wasn’t the least bit daunted by the prospect of being posted in a desolate region at an elevation of 10,000 feet, where the soil has been compared to that on Mars. “The Atacama Desert is a very interesting place,” she comments, “one of the driest deserts in the world, with salt plains and flamingos. That was the science thing, to study the flamingos.” There were volcanoes, as well. “We were going to climb them.” Thanks to her climbing experience, she was going to lead.
But the whole thing crumbled under the weight of reality. The scientists on the expedition couldn’t use her group because they lacked adequate transportation. The local community didn’t need (or want) their help. So they spent their time exploring. A couple of local policemen had horses, so Kate went riding in the desert.
The expedition was supported in part by military troops from each country they visited, as well as troops from other parts of the world — in this case, the United States and New Zealand. “It was a complete boondoggle for them,” Kate confides. While there, she met and fell in love with an American Green Beret. He invited her to visit him in Massachusetts for Halloween. After she returned to university in Brighton, the two wrote letters and talked briefly by phone once a week because of the cost. (This was still before the internet.) Because her father worked for British Airways, she could fly round-trip to Boston for 50 pounds, so she visited her Green Beret over every break. It was a transatlantic love affair.
Kate finished her degree when she was 21. She was so excited about moving on to her new life that she skipped the graduation, a decision she regrets. “My mum and dad had skimped and saved for me to go to university. I didn’t realize how important that experience of the graduation process was.”
She flew to the States and was married.
By 1989 her husband had left the military and the couple moved to Portland, Oregon. They bought a house built around 1919.
“It was a money pit. Every weekend it was, ‘What’s the project this week? Well, let’s fix the broken toilet. The tank was cracked; it had to be replaced. Then we found it had been leaking. The leak had ruined the floorboards. When we pulled those up, we found the joists were damaged.” The work on her home is what turned her interest to wood and tools.
Chris Williams during his January 2020 visit to the Lost Art Press shop.
If you’ve met Chris Williams, then you know “soothing” is not the most likely adjective to describe him – typically I’d choose “hilarious,” “enthusiastic,” “skilled” … something that gets across his larger-than-life personality and absolute love for and mastery as a maker of the Welsh stick chair form.
But as I was working away alone in my basement shop, I was listening to Chris chat with Kyle Barton and Sean Wisniewski on the Modern Woodworkers Association podcast (episode #290), and it was just so nice to hear his voice again (and OK – his lilting Welsh accent), that I felt as if he was in the room with me … though he’d no doubt be appalled at the state of my basement shop – it is, as Chris would say, SHOCKING! And it was soothing too, for that hour and 15 minutes or so, to not feel quite so alone. (But don’t worry – I’m fine.)
Chris was on the podcast to talk about his new book, “Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown,” about Welsh stick chairs in general, and how his own view of chairmaking is very much determined by his place in the world (that is, a small, rural village in Wales). He expands (expounds?) on some of the information in the book, sharing more about his own woodworking background, and more on how John Brown changed the trajectory of his life. Chris also offers his thoughts on what makes a “good” Welsh stick chair, and how his own have evolved – along with my favorite quotation from John Brown on the subject: they are “a smidgen off ugly.” He also talks a bit about a new book he wants to write.
Give it a listen; it’s worth your while. The link here is to the Google podcast player, but the episode (Modern Woodworkers Association #290) is available just about anywhere you find your podcasts.
About a year after I built The $175 Workbench, I built The Power Tool Workbench for the August 2002 issue of Popular Woodworking magazine. The issue featuring The $175 Workbench had done particularly well on the newsstands (the bench had been on the cover), and so my fellow editors were willing to let me stick my neck out again.
This bench’s structure is similar to The $175 Workbench, but it has a bank of drawers below (not a fan of that) and it is sized to fit behind a table saw. Also, it features a Veritas Twin-screw Vise on one end.
All of my benches have had a hard life, but this one especially. I gave it to my father. He had it in his garage in Charleston, S.C., where it weathered a couple hurricanes and storm surges. After the last storm surge, my dad found it floating in about 6’ of water.
It survived quite well. The only repair I had to make was to lubricate the drawer slides to get them unstuck from rust.
The benchtop is a little small for handwork, but I’m not going to ever let it go. After my father died in 2018, it was one of the few things I took with me from his house.
That doesn’t mean it’s a perfect bench – far from it. The video explains it.
In-progress stocks for Vesper Tools sliding bevels…as photographed for Instagram.
Kara Gebhart-Uhl, Christopher Schwarz and I have selected a few of our favorites from “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years” – some have already been posted; there are some still to come. Chris wrote about the project that “these columns during the Hayward years are like nothing we’ve ever read in a woodworking magazine. They are filled with poetry, historical characters and observations on nature. And yet they all speak to our work at the bench, providing us a place and a reason to exist in modern society.”
Our hope is that the columns – selected by Kara from among Hayward’s 30 years of “Chips from the Chisel” editor’s notes – will not only entertain you with the storied editor’s deep insight and stellar writing, but make you think about woodworking, your own shop practices and why we are driven to make. When Australian toolmaker Chris Vesper (vespertools.com) read “A Kind of Order” it prompted him to write a few responses, one of which we give you below.
— Fitz
Everything in its Place
Hands and mind work as one to create when a maker is in the zone – be it woodwork, making furniture, fixing the lawnmower, working on an old car, or machining some gizmo in the sanctity of space that is your workshop on a lathe and milling machine.
When working on a project or even just tinkering the excitement can be palpable, especially when the finish is in sight among the setbacks (and occasional oopsies). The bench is a mess, with tools everywhere, things lost under piles of wood shavings and no cares given. And we all know this one: “That 10mm socket has got to be somewhere,” then many minutes later: “HOW the heck did it get there??!” Clearly too much fun is being had! Time lost equals the inverse of size be it chisels, sockets or even spanners. Big ones are easy to find – but small ones?
In our education as makers we refer to glossy mags or online tutorials that show impeccable workshops with perfect lighting. You may even feel some shame at your own space, so you set personal goals; you dream of what could be. But you can’t see that great pile of crud just out of their camera shots.
As for some professional work, with undersides of tabletops and backs of drawers sanded and polished to within an inch of their lives (not to mention the bits you actually see): this way of work is not for everyone, be it from lack of desire or a skill set not quite up to it. We see this perfection and perhaps gaze over our own work, and wonder at our own pleasing sanctuary of shavings piled up knee-high from attacking tear-out in a board. Perhaps we observe the results of a slightly wonky glue up. We see tools not stored properly and perhaps deteriorating from rust or being banged about – all that work to get those tools shiny the first time is lost.
In the intensity of enjoyable work, things will inevitably slip and chaos creep in. In machining work, the tool cart empties as the bench and floor fill with tools, grease and some strange black goop that gets on everything one touches. In woodworking, the tool cabinet and workbench are similarly affected (minus the black goop, hopefully). After a good, all-absorbing session of work I find it therapeutic to tidy and clean as I think back over the job, the tools used and why, the mistakes and the triumphs. Be it a daily ritual or an end-of-job ritual it’s a nice one to have.
The plier drawer – after my tidying ritual.
Everything in its place.
But always keep this in mind: When I take a photo for social media you don’t know about the unsightly pile of freaky colored rags or glue encrusted ice-cream containers I just flicked out of the way to make the shot a little better.
In-progress stocks for Vesper Tools sliding bevels on the bench…with rags, glue bottles and Shibee the Shiba Inu pushed out of the close-up.
