The single-point planing stop is one of my most useful bench workholding appliances (the other two are a holdfast and my leg vise). There are lots of commercial ones available, including those from Tools for Working Wood and Benchcrafted. I like blacksmith-made ones. Not because they function better (they don’t) but because I like the way they look.
Many woodworkers are terrified of cutting a huge mortise in their benchtop. Don’t be. It’s easy work and is worth the trouble. Here’s how I do it.
The wooden section of my planing stop is 3” x 3” x 12”, a historical size. So I lay out the location of the mortise with knife lines and blue tape. Then I chop the perimeter with a wide chisel to keep my opening crisp during the whole process.
I try to drill out as much waste as possible. Here I’m using a 3/4” WoodOwl bit. These chew through benchtops better than any bit I’ve used.
Then I use a jigsaw to remove the big chunks.
Then I nibble up to my chisel line all around the mortise. This is a key step. The saw kerfs break up the waste, allowing it to be easily pared away. And the kerfs serve as a guide to being 90°. When the kerfs disappear, the mortise wall is 90°.
Then I pare away the corduroy-like bits of wooden waste on the walls.
I don’t have any 3”-thick stock. So I glued up the planing stop from two pieces of 8/4 oak. Then I sawed and planed the blank until it was a tight fit in the mortise.
Fitting a blacksmith planing stop looks harder than it really is. The tapered shaft calls for a tapered hole (that is, if you cannot heat up the shaft in a forge and burn it into the block). Measure across the corners of the tapered shaft – that’s the largest dimension.
The biggest dimension is at the top of the planing stop. In my case it was 1”. So I first drilled a 1” hole that was about two-thirds the length of the shaft. Then I measured the shaft at the bottom, corner to corner. And I chose a bit that was about .01” smaller.
If you don’t have a bit that suits the shaft, grind down the corners to match an existing bit.
The goal is that the tapered shaft should wedge in the bottom of the hole. Yet it won’t split the wood. Too loose is better than too tight. That’s because “too loose” can be fixed with epoxy.
Hammer the planing stop into its hole. Then knock the whole thing into your benchtop.
If it gets loose over time, shim the mortise or planing stop with veneer. If it’s too tight, remove the stop (you might need a sledge) and plane it down. After a year or so, it will be tuned up and things won’t move too much.
Editor’s note: This is the third Chair Chat with Rudy and Klaus where today we discuss not one but three chairs.
Please note that we don’t have much background information on today’s three chairs. We don’t know their countries of origin nor when they were built. And we only have one picture for each chair.
We don’t authenticate chairs – we just talk about what we like and don’t like based on the photos. One more note: A few of you asked why the second chair chat was more tame than the first. Answer: We’re still finding our groove. As always, salty talk follows. Don’t read any further if watching “Animal Planet” makes you blush.
My oldest daughter, Madeline, has been hard at work in graduate school in Pittsburgh and hasn’t had much time for selling stickers and the like. But recently she really wanted a hooded sweatshirt with the Lost Art Press beehive logo to wear while winter ends.
She made some using American Apparel hoodies and they looked good. So she (with my permission) is now selling them in two colors (black and dark grey) through her etsy store. They’re $55 plus shipping. Printed in America.
Note these are American Apparel, so they run a little slim. Here’s a sizing chart.
If you’ve ever visited our storefront, you might have noticed that we wallpaper the men’s room with all manner of woodworking paraphernalia, from posters to old advertisements to poems.
I haven’t put anything up in the women’s room except a portrait of Juliette Caron. Every time I think to hang something in there, I ask Megan: “Is this too creepy for the women’s room?” And the look on her face says: Yes.
Case in point this vintage German newspaper I just purchased after a tip from Suzo “the Saucy Indexer” Ellison. Do I want this guy smiling at me when I do my business? Probably not, but it’s going in the men’s room anyway.
I hope (government mandates permitting) that you can come see the bathrooms for your own self. We still hope to open the doors to the public on June 13, 2020, for a special open day.
What’s going to be special? Blemished books. We are trucking 14 boxes of damaged and returned books to the storefront for the occasion. They will be 50 percent off of retail – cash only. (No, we cannot put them online. Sorry.) I don’t yet know what titles we’ll have. When I get them here I’ll post a list. But I do know we have a significant number of the now-discontinued “Book of Plates.”
We’ll also have our full line of new books and all the Crucible tools. We can take any form of payment for new books and tools – cash, check or credit.
So get healthy and hope for the best. If June doesn’t work, we’ll reschedule the open day for as soon as it is safe for everyone.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. What’s the image above about? Not sure. The blocks of text below it are from an unrelated article. The caption on the image is, according to a translation from Rudy Everts, basically, “When the cat’s away, the mice will play.” Even so, I’m not hanging this one above the Lost Art Press urinal.
Elements of this kitchen’s design. The subway tile is not definite yet but is among the elements Ben and Jenny have had in mind from the start.
The big picture
As with methods of building cabinetry, there may well be as many potential takes on designing the kitchen for a particular house as designers who might be hired for the job. My own starting points include the clients’ preferences and the architectural context.
This kitchen is for a 1959 ranch originally built for a middle-class family. While decidedly modest (not shouting Hey, I’m cool! Look at me!), it incorporates some classic mid-century modern features. There’s an asymmetrical façade and stepped roof with generous overhangs at front and back. Inside, the kitchen cabinets are set into bulkheads. There’s streamline casing on windows and doorways. The floors are a mix of plain- and rift-sawn oak. The layout is split-level, with public rooms (living room and kitchen) on the main/entry floor, a short flight of stairs going up to the three original bedrooms and a full set of stairs to the walk-out basement, which has a laundry room, bedroom (added several years ago) and storage.
I don’t have access to pictures of the original kitchen, but in this case the missing information is immaterial. The clients didn’t want to recreate the kind of retro kitchen typical of local mid-century modest ranches.
A mid-century classic. Most of this cabinetry is original to this kitchen, whose owners hired me several years ago to help with a few repairs and missing details. The original counters had been replaced; these red laminate counters with period-authentic metal edgings were fabricated by Laminated Tops. (General contractor: Golden Hands Construction)
Instead, as I’ve described in previous posts (here and here), they hoped to integrate the kitchen at least somewhat with the living room, as well as make it feel warmer and lighter. Replacing the hard, cold tile floor with oak run continuously from the living room will make a huge difference in perceived warmth. Skylights will bring in more natural light, and replacing the barely functional dark cabinets with clear-finished white oak will further enhance the warming and lightening effect.
I give clients all the pros and cons I can think of concerning every detail, from hinges to toekicks, and then I give my own opinion, assuring them that the decisions are ultimately theirs to make. I also think it’s important at least to broach the subject of resale appeal in kitchen design discussions. (Whether or not you have this discussion, you can be sure your clients’ family or friends will bring it up; at least if you’ve already run them through it, they will be better able to stand their ground in the face of know-it-all second-guessers.) Real estate agents and other pros have reams of advice, but I find the overwhelming majority of it useless (not to mention boring; who wants to live with a room designed for the lowest common denominator?). You can’t read the minds of future buyers. The fact is, an awful lot of people — perhaps the majority, these days — are determined to redo the kitchen when they buy a place, even if the existing kitchen was recently done; it’s a way of making their own statement. So if you’re jonesing for a kitchen based on the original cabinets of your 1915 bungalow, or your heart is set on a vision of teal, aquamarine and green…well, you can probably tell where this is going.
Kitchen in a 1915 bungalow, Indianapolis. Newly built cabinets based on a surviving original built-in, reclaimed heart pine counters, a reproduction sink and faucets and refinished original maple floor. The leaded glass windows are also original. (No cries of complaint about the beer bottle, please! It was not mine, but the client’s from the night before.)My business did this kitchen for Carol and Roger Parks in 2006. Daniel O’Grady and Jerry Nees worked on the job with me. Carol chose the color scheme, which includes emerald-green glass cabinet knobs, in response to the original glass wall tiles; she had the floor painted with a quilt-inspired pattern. The base cabinets are cherry, the uppers finished with milk paint sealed with oil-based polyurethane. Regarding the durability of the finish, when I had the kitchen photographed in 2018, thanks to gracious permission from the current homeowners, the cabinets and floor of this hard-working, well-used room were in excellent condition. (General contractor: Golden Hands Construction Photo: Spectrum Creative Group)
Cabinet design
Jenny and Ben have three children and really use their kitchen, so when considering materials, I put durability at the forefront. White oak faces would be fairly bullet-proof, and the grain’s a champ at distracting the eye from scratches, dents and other signs of wear. I suggested straightforward lines for the cabinets in the main preparation area. But wanting to distinguish the cabinets from the ubiquitous take on mid-century style produced by the more commercial shops in our area, I suggested a few tweaks: Instead of fully recessed kicks, we’d have a more “carpentery” design, with stiles going to the floor to accentuate the cabinets’ structure. Using adjustable European hinges and drawer slides, I could fit the cabinets with inset doors and drawer faces while staying within the budget. For optimal durability, I’ll have the cabinets sprayed with conversion varnish by my finishing subcontractor.
When it came to designing the shallow cabinets for the opposite wall, which forms the transition between entry area and living room to kitchen, I couldn’t bring myself to repeat the same design. I wanted these cabinets to be less “workerly,” more appropriate to this liminal space. I have a vivid memory of a stacking set of small, circular wooden boxes my parents had in the early 1960s; they may have been Japanese. I was mesmerized by their form and finish — enamel paint in mid-century versions of yellow, red and green, each with a rounded black rim. This built-in — part kitchen, part entry area — seemed an ideal place to incorporate such an aesthetic.
Milk paint
I suggested milk-paint for this cabinet because it lends itself to so many textural finishes. For the carcases, blocks of different colors will be framed by narrow solid lippings painted black. Full-overlay doors and drawer faces will have black edges. The kick will be fully recessed and painted black. The clients will choose a mix of colors and finish effects — perhaps single-color, perhaps layered — and I will have the whole thing sprayed with topcoats of conversion varnish for durability.
A few of the possible colors, all from Real Milk Paint: Beachglass, Boardwalk, French Gray and Granny Smith green.Another possible color combinationThe textured two-layer treatment in the red/gold sample recalls similar effects in this painting by Paul Klee. What does a 1922 painting have to do with mid-century design, you wonder? I was born in the year my current clients’ house was built. In the early 1960s our parents had a print of “Senecio” in the living room. Many expressions of “high culture” in the pre-internet 20th century (such as works by artists and architects) did not become widely known and influential on popular style until decades after their original production. This is another aspect of kitchen design that gets a workout in the section of my book on period kitchens. (Image: Phaidon)
Cabinet hardware and counters
The door and drawer pulls (in the picture at the top of the post) are from Schoolhouse. Hanging open shelves over the sink area will retain the openness between the kitchen and living room while adding extra space for storage and decorative objects. The counters will likely be a dark gray soapstone.
