A profile view of the jaws (with stripped screw holes) in the original pine jaw of this “carver’s vise” (this one is from StewMac, where it’s called a “Guitar Repair Vise.”)
Every chair class Chris teaches seems to develop its own gravitational pull. It’s inevitable – if you orbit within 50 feet of a class taught by Chris Schwarz you will get sucked in.
Now getting sucked into a class can mean many different things: Perhaps it means assisting students taper chair legs by hand until your shirt starts sticking to you; or remaking an arm in record time due to a irreparable and untimely break; or sometimes becoming the designated lunch fetcher of the day (this task can quickly make you popular among the students).
I of course am speaking from experience. I’ve completed all of these tasks at least once and am in no way complaining about it. I openly love the infectious energy of a class week – it’s chaotic and exhausting at times and I live for it. I love walking into work unsure of what the day will hold.
While the palpable energy from last week’s class was no different, one of the tasks I was given was new to me.
With how often we use our tools here, on top of student usage, shop maintenance is a constant. Planes and chisels need sharpening, floors need sweeping and carver’s vises need new jaws.
This is nothing against our beloved carver’s vises; we use them daily here. There is, however, one fault we’ve found with most of them – the softwood jaws that come standard on the vises have a tendency to lose their heartiness over time. (The newly recast Grizzly vise comes with hardwood jaws.)
Either the constant use causes the screw holes of the jaws to strip (which is what happened in this case) or the soft pine cracks. Or both (which is what happened in this case). When these things happen, either oak or hickory are what we typically use for new jaws.
After Chris gave me a quick lesson on how to replace the old jaws, I got to work.
Below is a visual step-by-step of how I made this repair.
First things first: Unscrew the old jaws from the vise.
New adhesive-baked urethane is pricey. So I sawed off the old urethane, leaving about 1/8″ of pine backing.
A close-up of the cut.
The thin layer of pine must be planed flat for good adhesion to the new hardwood jaws. How to plane a piece less than 1/4″ thick? I used double-sided tape.
The double-sided tape held the pieces firm to the bench as I planed.
I traced new hickory jaws from the pine ones and cut them out on the band saw then planed them flat to prepare for glue-up. (Notice the crack in the old pine jaw on the lower left.)
After clamping the urethane to the hickory (which was a chore – it was slippery!), I used a toothbrush to clean up excess glue then let them clamped-up jaws dry for an hour.
After tracing the screw holes on the backs of the new jaws, I drilled pilot holes, which made screwing the new jaws in place a snap.
The following is excerpted from Derek Jones’ new book “Cricket Tables.”
Simplicity, necessity and ingenuity are the three key principles for making cricket tables. This traditional three-legged table exists in a variety of forms and woods – no two are the same. So making them follows an organic process – your tools and materials dictate your approach and your cricket table’s final form. Jones introduces the form, then teaches you the simple skills to create a variety of everyday furniture with a few basic hand tools and easily sourced materials.
Most people think Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb; he didn’t. He came up with a version that burned longer and brighter than anyone else had achieved, making it appealing to consumers and thus commercially viable. You could argue that he just piggybacked his way to glory but the fact is, the last few steps in perfecting anything generally requires the most effort. And for that we must give Edison credit where it’s due. Edison experimented with hundreds of different materials before settling on carbonized bamboo for his filament. He never viewed experiments in terms of success or failure. Knowing that something doesn’t perform the way you intended is just as valuable as knowing that it does. Over the course of his working life, he carried out more than 50,000 experiments to invent the alkaline storage battery and 9,000 to perfect the lightbulb. On paper those statistics look scary – you might even find them intimidating – but reframing the data as tens of thousands of things you now know the answer to is creative gold. For the record, among those “failures” was the groundwork for inventing the carbon microphone that went on to be used in telephone handsets for more than a century. The phonograph, originally thought of as just a tool for office dictation, became mainstream in every continent not long after. Its legacy is still burning bright albeit through the ether and into our ears. In his book “The Imagination Muscle” (Constable), Albert Read refers to this kind of behavior as “imaginative risk.” And if that concept doesn’t get you fired up and running toward the workshop then maybe stop reading, we’re probably done. In the same way Edison didn’t equate lack of success with failing I find it hard to see anything other than valuable lessons from my current tally of tables. Hand on heart, there isn’t a stinker among them if you truly value the process of design without fixating on the outcome.
Today we regard pared-down simplicity as a relatively modern concept. We know it as minimalism. As an expressive genre, the idea came about in the early 19th century as a somewhat idealistic view that enlightenment could be gained by adopting a less cluttered lifestyle both in possessions and thinking. In Western culture the idea already had traction before then through several religious ideals, the Shakers being the most well-known among woodworkers. In the Chinese religious philosophy Daoism, which incidentally has its roots somewhere back in the 4th Century B.C.E., there are three main virtues – non-action, naturalness and simplicity. These are obviously open to interpretation but the similarity between that train of thought and those practiced elsewhere throughout history suggest a natural desire among all life to eventually seek a simpler existence. Further guidance on upholding the virtues is offered by what is known as the Three Jewels: compassion, frugality and humility. Sound familiar? Arts & Crafts, Bauhaus, Zen and Feng shui all have similar influences because of a common thread. By asking us to turn away from the path we’re on in search of something different implies choice. Cricket tables, mostly, and vernacular furniture in general have different DNA. When necessity is in the driving seat, you end up with good, honest no-frills solutions.
Old or New? The first cricket table I made wasn’t so much a tour de force but a war of attrition. When I brought it into the house my partner approved, likening it to something that could have come from IKEA. And in a funny way she was right, that’s exactly what it looked like. Smooth lines, geometric form, pale “Scandi” color. After all isn’t that what IKEA does so well? I wonder what her reaction would have been to a period example, all wonky and encrusted with hundreds of years of grit and grime. There’s always something to be learned from an expert, but nobody speaks the truth like a complete novice. Factory-made furniture must appeal to the widest audience possible. It mustn’t offend. And like any good, backhanded compliment it should be taken in context. It’s important to understand that the relationship you have with the pieces you make will be very different to the one everyone else has. From that moment on I’ve not been able to look at cricket tables in any way other than contemporary and timeless. The few that I have made and attempted to create a period look through the finish feel slightly wrong.
The tables chosen for this section all have qualities from Daoism, Arts & Crafts, Bauhaus and minimalism either in form, process or intent. I appreciate that does sound a bit grandiose but it’s not that hard. Just picking up some tools and making something gets you 99 percent of the way there. They are good honest pieces, stepping stones toward making the perfect table. In case you’re wondering, I’m a long way off and hope I never will, but I do know the next one is a step closer.
The venue for the 2024 London IWF: London Design & Engineering UTC, 15 University Way, Royal Docks, London E16 2RD.
There are just a couple of weeks to go before the 2024 London International Woodworking Festival (LIWF), so Chris I are are busy working on our presentations for the LIWF Bazaar on Friday, Nov. 1 and Saturday, Nov. 2. (Now just where on my computer did I stash those pictures of furniture from Union Village….)
We’re looking forward to catching up with old friends – and making some new ones/finally meeting Instagram buddies in person – and seeing what the still-growing list of vendors has to offer. So far, we know that on hand will be Classic Hand Tools; Lie-Nielsen with John Parkinson and Robin Nolan; Lee Valley Tools with Richard Wile and Ryan Saunders; David Barron; Ian Parker; Richard Arnold; Michel Auriou; Oscar Rush; Phil Edwards; Windsor Workshop with James Mursell; The Quiet Workshop; Nigel Melfi; Sean Hellman; Odie’s Oil; Sawsharp with Mark Harrell; Southern Fellowship of Woodworkers; Rubio Monocoat; London School of Furniture with Helen Welch; Skelton Saws; Israel Martin; International Boatbuilding Training College; Surrey Veneers; Kevin Gooch; G-Sharp Tools; Lamello; The Furniture Maker’s Company; Chris and me; and Derek Jones of Lowfat Roubo, who is one of the organizers.
Advance tickets are available now on the website (£5.50 for noon-5 p.m. Friday; £10.50 for 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday, or £15.50 for both. At the door, the price per day will be £15).
As Derek puts it, ”Speak to everybody on the list above and every insight, light-bulb moment and piece of advice will have cost you less than £0.30, €0.36 or $0.39. Attend one of our free seminars and well, you do the maths. And as for the fun, excitement and complete nerdery, you can’t put a price on that now, can you!”
Happy students following Chris’s chair class at the 2024 LIWF.
We’ve added a new class: Build an 18th-century Southern Table with Jerome Bias – it’s Feb. 17-21, 2025, in our Covington, Kentucky, shop. You can read more about it (and register now) at our ticketing site – but if you’re interested, don’t dally. Space is limited!
This is an excerpt from “Euclid’s Door” by Geo. R Walker and Jim Toplin. The book teaches how to make the tools from “By Hand and Eye.” At this point in chapter 7, a miter square that has a 15° tip is being constructed. This fragile corner of the tool has to be taken into consideration when choosing its placement on the grain of the board.
Fig. 7.13 The triangle on the left with its thin 15° tip poses a unique layout challenge
Many geometric layouts begin with just a given line. This has real practical value. It means we can construct the layout from just a small piece of the overall picture. This construction is a little more complicated than what we’ve done so far, so I suggest you work through this sequence on paper to get an understanding of it.
Fig. 7.14 The blade we eventually end up with has a clipped corner so we can have a 45° reference edge.
Case in point is this second triangle from our multi square, Fig. 7.13. The sharp blade that juts out to the left begins life as a 30:60:90 triangle that gets altered to include a 45° reference on one end, Fig. 7.14.
But that leaves us with a fragile, narrow point. We must lay out our triangle so that the hypotenuse is aligned with the long grain on our blank, Fig. 7.15.
Fig. 7.15 This layout is a challenge because our right angle is located up in the middle of the blade material. The only line we can know for certain is our hypotenuse located on the bottom edge.
So we need to lay out our triangle, but all we have to start our construction is the line that will be our hypotenuse. Before we proceed, let’s step back and take a look at a different geometric layout to get an understanding of how we get there. Here’s the construction we’ll base this on, Fig. 7.16.
Fig. 7.16 We’re going to use a few bits and pieces from this construction to reach our destination.
Let’s break it down into smaller pieces. We begin with Euclid’s first proposition, which is how to construct an equilateral triangle from a given line. Start by using the ends of a line to set the compass span and, using the end of the line as anchor points, draw two identical overlapping circles. Connect the top intersection where the circles overlap. Take note that the lines that connect the intersections also happen to share the radius of both circles. You just created a triangle with all sides equal which means all three corners are 60°, Fig. 7.17.
Fig. 7.17 The internal angles of all triangles always add up to 180°, so if our sides are equal, each corner must be 60°.
If you bisect this triangle, you get a pair of back-to-back 30:60:90 triangles, Fig. 7.18. It helps to see what you are after by superimposing this construction over our blade stock to see how it might apply, Fig. 7.19.
Fig. 7.18 (left) Note the hypotenuses of these two new triangles are facing out. Fig. 7.19 (right) In practice though, we don’t execute the entire construction, just a piece of it. It’s not really practical to draw this entire layout because much of it is out in space beyond our blade blank.
This is quite common in layouts at the bench. We don’t need to scribe every line, just the important ones that get us our result. Let the bottom edge of your blank be the hypotenuse of our triangle. Set a compass to span the length of your hypotenuse and strike an upward arc from the lower edge. Leave the compass at the same setting and anchor it where the arc touches the bottom of the board then strike a second mark across the arc, Fig. 7.20.
Fig. 7.20 The first arc is a portion of one of those overlapping circles. That’s all we need to execute our layout. The second mark defines the second side of the equilateral triangle.
Strike a line connecting these points then bisect this chord on one end of the triangle. Now you’ve created our 30:60:90 with the correct grain orientation, Fig. 7.21.
Fig. 7.21 Go back and compare this with our first layout. Does it come together for you?
We’ll use this construction to create our second blade with the proper grain orientation.
