Editor’s note: As promised, Megan Fitzpatrick and I are writing a series of blog entries that explain how we have improved the construction process for “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” during the last nine years (and several hundred chests).
First, let’s get this out of the way: When I wrote “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” I didn’t think many people would build the damn thing. The chest was intended more as an idea. I love using floor chests, but I thought they would be a hard sell with readers. I was wrong.
When I started teaching classes on building the chest – the first class was in Germany before the book even came out – I struggled to get the students with a finished chest and lid after five days (never mind the interior tills and trays).
That forced me (and later Megan Fitzpatrick, who now teaches the tool chest classes) to rethink the process and see if we could make a chest in five days without using the “punishment whip” on the students. The first change I made (which saved a whole day of work) was to change the dovetails.
In the book, I used 13 dovetails at each corner – that’s 52 dovetails for the basic shell. And it is overkill. Nowadays we use seven dovetails at each corner. The chest is – in my opinion – just as strong. And most students assemble the shell by the end of the second day.
The second change was to eliminate the shallow rabbet I cut on the ends of the tail boards. The shallow rabbet assists in transferring the tail shape to the pinboards. In the book I show how to cut the rabbet on a table saw and with a rabbet plane.
When I started teaching this method, I found that most students had never used a rabbet plane. And so all their rabbets sloped down. Horribly. Chaos and gappy joints ensued.
Now I have the students temporarily tack a yardstick to the baseline of the tailboard (I call this the “Other Ruler Trick”). This helps everyone make the transfer with ease. No sloping rabbets. And no one locks themselves in the bathroom sobbing (not even me!).
The historical record is pretty clear. When it comes to chair joinery in vernacular furniture, most of the tenons and mortises are cylindrical. The most likely reason for this is you need only simple tools: a brace and bit to make the mortise, and a handplane to make the tenon. (You could also use a hollow auger, a lathe or several other methods to make the tenon. But using a plane is the simplest approach.)
To make a tapered joint, you need a reamer to enlarge the mortise to the correct shape. The tenon can be made simply with a plane. (Or you can speed up the process with a specialty tenon cutter, a lathe or other gizmos.)
Reamers show up in the historical record as a shop-made tool or something manufactured by a blacksmith or other metalworker. But they aren’t terribly common.
When I first started making chairs about 2003, I didn’t own a reamer. So I made all my tenons cylindrical. It’s fast. And when done properly, the joint is strong.
Chris Williams and I have long debated the merits of tapered joints vs. cylindrical ones. In the end, the reason I used the tapered joint in “The Anarchist’s Design Book” (and teach the method) is because it is more forgiving.
When you bore a cylindrical mortise, there is no way to fix an error in your angle. You are stuck with the result, like it or not.
When you ream a mortise, you can adjust a mortise that’s even 10° off (I’ve done it). That is reason enough to ream for me. And the extra expense of the reamer is more than justified.
We could spill endless pixels comparing cylindrical or tapered joints, pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses. But in the end, I ream for forgiveness.
“Oscar Onken and The Shop of the Crafters at Cincinnati” (Turn of the Century Editions) by M.J. McCracken and W. Michael McCracken is a delight to both read and examine in detail. The advertisements, the research, the solid footnoting.
All those details appeal to the part of my brain that collects the facts that form my understanding of how Arts & Crafts furniture was marketed and sold. But at the back of the book is the best part. It is for another part of the brain.
The authors included a facsimile of the first issue of The Lantern, a short-lived publication published by The Shop of the Crafters that I had heard of but had never been able to find. It is filled with advertisements (of course), but also a number of delightful essays (some almost polemics) that discuss furniture making and the utopian ideals of the American Arts & Crafts movement.
These essays are different than the writings of the Roycrofters or Gustav Stickley. Even though Cincinnati was surrounded by utopian communities, Oscar Onken was not buying it. Below is one of the essays. If you like this one, the book has many more.
— Christopher Schwarz
Shop Talk With Red Pepper In It
Every morning at ten the whistle blows at the Shop of the Crafters.
We don’t all quit work and listen to the talk of some long haired genius who can make anything but a living.
The way to produce art is to work at it – not talk about it.
But as we said before, every morning at ten the whistle blows
The men don’t quit work, go out and beer up.
Some shops down in the blue law districts blow the whistle and have the morning prayers.
We don’t. We have morning kicks.
When the whistle blows all the department heads of The Shop of the Crafters meet together in a room and kick.
In every large concern there is a lot of politics – not the rednosed, unupholstered stomach and watch chain kind, but politics within the business.
In most large concerns everybody hates everybody else; they divide into factions and each discuss the other behind their backs.
These ten o’clock meetings in our shop gives everybody a chance to kick at everybody else and to their face.
All air their feelings and opinions – it has the effect of figuratively sending their feelings to the carpet beaters every morning at ten. The feelings come out sweet and clean for the remainder of the day.
Good feeling makes good work.
Don’t get it into your head that the Shop of the Crafters is in the business for “the joy of the work.”
Don’t get it into your head that we wear neck ties like a front door badge of sorrow.
We’re just as money mean as some, yet not as mean as others.
We have a time clock in our factory, a cost card system and all the other little devices and conveniences common to dollar chasing manufacturers.
In some respects, though, we get at the result in a little different way, but the original money spirit is there.
We make a grade of furniture who want the real thing at a moderate price.
Not rich people nor poor people, but prosperous people.
We make good furniture, and good dollars are a bi product – on the principle that the reward comes from honestly supplying the wants of the patron – the dollars are incidental, but large and certain just the same.
We have been many years collecting the class of men to make our line of furniture. They work in agreeable surroundings, there is every safeguard to life and limb and we pay good wages – we would pay less if we could, but we must pay well in order to keep some other concern from hiring them away.
We have been for years perfecting the system to make The Crafter line. It’s no problem to make good furniture, but to make good furniture within the financial reach of prosperous people – that’s the question.
If we wanted to make furniture for the masses – make all dollars rather than furniture, we would go down in the country, build several acres of sheds out of hoop poles and sheet iron, buy all the wormy, sap-soaked lumber we could, hire every son of the soil that stuck his head over a clod, arm them with hammer and nails and, and after we’d sawed so many of their fingers off that they couldn’t play a cornet in a country band, why – we’d hire some more.
Money is easily made if you want to make it some ways.
We now have “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” back in stock in our Indiana warehouse. This is the 12th printing of this little 6” x 9” book, which allowed me to quit my corporate job and has helped fund all of the books in our roster in some way.
I owe thanks to all the readers who have bought copies – for themselves, friends and relatives. I’m told that the book has helped people quit their jobs, renewed their love of woodworking and shown them a path in the craft that doesn’t require a warehouse full of machinery.
And I also tip my hat to the critics, many of whom never read the book, but were so turned off by the book’s title that they foamed at the mouth. Your rabies made other people curious.
The Bad Idea Earlier this year I went to Chicago to visit my friend Narayan Nayar, who took some of the beautiful photos in the book, and we went out for tacos (one of five meals we ate that day). As the snow fell outside of the Oak Park taco joint, I laid out some of the book ideas that had been brewing in my head for the last 12 months.
Narayan is a good listener and lets me wind it all out without interrupting. Some (OK, many) of my book ideas are daft. And when I pitch ideas to other people they come in with the long knives before I can explain myself.
One of the book ideas was a 10th anniversary edition of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” The front of the book would get some mild updates. The back of the book – on building the chest – would be completely redone. I’ve built so many of these chests that I’ve come up with many simpler ways to do some of the operations. I’ve made small changes to the skirts and lid. The chest is now easier to build and looks better.
Plus, the new edition would also contain plans for the Dutch tool chest. It was my original goal when writing the book to have two tool chest plans. Just like I had two workbench plans in “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use.” But “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” got so lengthy after building one tool chest that I decided to omit it.
I published the Dutch tool chest in Popular Woodworking Magazine in a short article. And lots of other people have built it – it might be my most successful project. But I’ve never gotten to fully explain the design (there was no room in the magazine article), its origin and its many variants.
After I pitched all this to Narayan, he asked me a question. That question made something click in my head. Narayan joked that he actually could hear the click from across the table.
The anniversary edition will have to wait – maybe for the 15th or 20th anniversary. Narayan’s question set me off on another book idea that has consumed all my evenings since.
Ever since buying my first Morris chair in 1991, I’ve had a deep interest in The Shop of the Crafters, an unusual Arts & Crafts furniture factory in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Nothing is left of the factory – I drive over its bones every time I drive north on Interstate 75. But the furniture survives at the Cincinnati Art Museum, in my living room and through a remarkable book from Turn of the Century Editions.
In 2017, the publishing company released a new book on The Shop of the Crafters that I missed. Titled “Oscar Onken and The Shop of the Crafters at Cincinnati” by M.J. McCracken and W. Michael McCracken, this book contains new catalogs, photos of extant pieces and delves deeper into the history of Onken and the designers who created the furniture.
Even better, the book contains the entire first issue of The Lantern, a short-lived publication that promoted the company’s furniture and the founder’s philosophy (more on that tomorrow).
I devoured the entire book today. If you have any interest in Arts & Crafts furniture, this book is essential. (Thanks to Ray Schwanenberger for alerting me to it.)
I still own the No. 413 Morris chair. I built a copy of it and it was featured on the cover of the June 2000 issue of Popular Woodworking magazine. After that article appeared I built many more copies for locals who wanted a piece of Cincinnati history in their living rooms. Also, I was working way too cheap at the time. I think I sold the chairs for $500 (with no cushions).
Today I was transfixed by a bunch of pieces from The Shop of the Crafters that I’d never seen before. There were several pieces in there that really wanted to be built.
The Bad Idea
