We have two projects to share with you today: a new poster and a giveaway related to the new expanded edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book.”
The Edwin Skull Chair Poster
Next week we will begin selling a limited-edition poster that is a reproduction of a 19th-century broadsheet showing the chairs made by the Edwin Skull chair manufactory in High Wycombe.
The color image features 141 of the chairs offered by the firm, including the “Skull’s Patent Plectaneum Chair,” a famous folding chair. The Skull firm traces its roots back to Charles Skull (1780–1851), who was a chair japanner in High Wycombe. Two of his sons, Edwin and Walter, started making chairs and became known for making high-quality goods. About 1865, the firm issued this broadsheet to show the wide range of chairs the company made and the awards it had received.
The firm survived into the 1930s but was acquired by rival Furniture Industries Ltd. in 1932. Furniture Industries is now called ercol and operates in the High Wycombe area. As a nod to its heritage, the chairmaking department at ercol is still referred to as “Skulls.”
The Skulls broadsheet has been published in a couple books by Ivan G. Sparkes, including “The English Country Chair” (Spurbooks), but the images were so small that it was difficult to study it in detail.
Where, I wondered, was the original? And could we obtain a copy of it?
Enter our researcher, Suzanne Ellison, who tracked down the original at the Wycombe Museum. After some negotiations, the museum agreed to produce a high-resolution image of the broadsheet that we could use for a limited-edition poster of 500 units.
In exchange for this, we helped pay for the new digital image and will donate a portion of the proceeds of poster sales directly to the Wycombe Museum.
Our Edwin Skulls poster is printed here in Cincinnati on heavy, #120 uncoated stock. The poster measures 13” x 19” and ships in a stiff cardboard tube. The price is $18, which includes domestic shipping. Look for it in our store next week. It also will be available through Classic Hand Tools in the U.K.
Giveaway: Original Letterpress Prints from ‘The Anarchist’s Design Book’
Today I sent the expanded edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” to the printer. The new edition is 200 pages longer than the original and features six new projects and additional chapters on chair design and other anarchist-y stuff.
We’ll offer the book up for pre-publication orders next week, and we will have instructions on how to download the new chapters if you purchased the first edition.
To create the expanded edition, Briony Morrow-Cribbs created six new plates for the book, which we have printed via letterpress on heavy #118 Flurry Cotton paper, which is made with wind and hydro power.
We considered selling these prints, but we thought about it for a few minutes and said: Nah, let’s just give them away.
If you would like to win a free set of the six letterpress prints of the new projects for “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” here’s how to throw your hat in the ring to get them.
Take a photo of one of the projects you have built from “The Anarchist’s Design Book” and send it to contest@lostartpress.com. Please read this next sentence carefully: You also need to send us your real name, your physical mailing address and a phone number. If your entry doesn’t have these things (including a photo), we’re going to discard it. We need this information to send you the prints if you are selected. You entry must be received by midnight Eastern time on Dec. 20, 2019.
We aren’t using your information for marketing or spam. It will be deleted when the contest is over.
I think we have eight sets of these prints to give away. The winners will be chosen at random. Everyone is eligible, even overseas. Here are the six prints in a set:
I know that people will gripe about having to send a photo. And they will gripe that they can’t simply buy them. Sorry. The point of the book was to encourage people to build stuff – not buy it. Entries will be accepted by email only. Complaints about the process will be discarded.
This independent bookstore is run by Gregory Kornbluh, and we are thrilled to work with him to make our books available to locals.
When we decided to cut back on the number of days the storefront will be open in 2020 (only June 13 and Dec. 14, 2020), we started looking for a local bookstore to carry our titles. Many times people come through town and ask us: Where can I buy your books?
The funny thing is that Greg found us. He had attended one of our open days at the Covington storefront and then approached me at a Built to Spill concert earlier this year. As he had good taste in music, we were eager to see if that carried over to books (it did).
Only Indies
People ask why we sell only through independent stores – and not Amazon. It’s simple: Amazon is not friendly to small publishers. It slashes prices to the bone so it has the lowest price on the planet (sometimes to where it loses money on the sale) and then it sucks up all the sales. And then you basically work for Amazon.
No thanks.
You actually can buy our books on Amazon through resellers who jack the prices up to crazy heights, looking for a sucker. “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” is currently listed there for $111. “Virtuoso” is there for just $599.50. We cannot stop this; it’s the caveat emptor part of a free market economy.
When I fixed up my first jack plane in the 1990s, I took the advice of every decent person around me: I replaced its old iron with a new Hock blade.
The replacement blade cost almost three times what I paid for the plane, but I didn’t think I had a choice. That’s just what I was told to do.
The Hock blade worked brilliantly, and it’s still at work in a jack plane in Florida. But now I know a little better. Replacement irons and chipbreakers are best for planes that are regularly pushed to the absolute limits of their performance – mostly smoothing planes and block planes.
The jack plane, on the other hand, works just fine with a stock blade – as long as the blade hasn’t been abused too badly by rust or softened by aggressive grinding. Stanley Works (and its competitors) knew how to make good steel. So an old iron that hasn’t been mistreated will take a fine edge and keep it for a good long while.
Even if you do intend to replace the blade in your jack plane to help support modern toolmakers (and I salute you), I encourage you to practice the grinding and lapping steps on your old iron. You’ll learn a lot, you won’t trash your new blade and you’ll have a backup blade for a rainy day.
Dressing the Flat Back Based on the archaeological evidence, most of our ancestors didn’t care much about flattening and polishing the flat back of the blade. Many old tools show little or no attention to the back of the blade.
Despite this strong evidence, I still flatten the back. But I don’t go nuts. For the most part, I am trying to get rid of the grime, surface corrosion and small rust pits that are common on garage-dwelling planes.
I do this operation with the same setup I use to dress the sole of my planes: a 36” section of granite threshold with some #80-grit belt sander paper stuck to it. Dress the back of the blade until you see clean metal up at the cutting edge. Keep the blade flat against the paper (attaching a magnetic base to the iron is a good idea) and clean the metal filings off the paper after every 30 seconds of work.
This process shouldn’t take long. The goal is to get the blade clean enough and flat enough so that you can polish a small back bevel on the flat face (for this I will use David Charlesworth’s “Ruler Trick” and will cover the technique later in this entry).
After you clean the back with #80 grit, repeat the process with #100, #120 or whatever you have. Just try to make it flat, clean and a little more polished than it was during your earlier steps. I usually end this work on a coarse diamond plate. Some people end it on a #1,000 waterstone. It’s your call.
Shape the Bevel The cutting edge of a jack plane should be curved across its width. This is a historical approach that goes back to the very first English-language writing on woodworking in the 17th century. And it’s an approach that holds up today.
How much curve? Of course, it depends. I like a curve that is somewhere between an 8” and 10” radius. The 8” radius is more aggressive, but can be tricky to sharpen in some honing guides (if you use a honing guide as I do).
The 10” radius is easy to do and works with most honing guides. If you want to play it safe, use 10”. If you want to take a small gamble (which is easily undone) then use 8”. Either way, take a scrap of plywood or scrap wood and rip it to 2”, which is the typical width of a jack plane’s blade.
Use your compass to strike an 8” or 10” arc across the end of the wooden bit. Saw, rasp, sand or otherwise shape the end to that line. Then use your template to mark the arc on the end of your plane iron. Use a fine fine fine Sharpie to make this mark. And make it as close as you can to the tip of the iron. Now it’s time to grind it.
Grind the Bevel Grinding is not hard. The idea of grinding is what’s hard. Get a grinder – fast speed, slow speed, hand-cranked, whatever (I have a fast electric one). Put a coarse wheel on it, like an #80 wheel. I use Norton 3X wheels because they seem to cut cool and fast. But I’ve worked on wheels of all colors. Coarse wheels that are friable (meaning they break down easily) are way better than dense wheels that don’t break down.
You can do a lot of research on grinding wheels. Or you can skip all that and just work with what came on your grinder and adjust from there. One important detail, however, is to dress the wheel so it has a slight convex camber. This camber makes it easy to maneuver the tool you are grinding.
So here’s what actually is important: the tool rest. Not the type of tool rest – whatever you got is fine – but how it’s set. Set it so it’s 90° to the grinding wheel. Yup, the goal is to grind the tip of your blade at 90°. Grinding the blade this way gets the curve to shape quickly, doesn’t heat up the blade much and gives you some flats at the tip of your blade to gauge your progress when grinding the bevel.
So grind the tip of the blade flat at 90° and down to your Sharpie line. The blade shouldn’t heat up much during this operation. But let’s talk about heat and steel.
Keep it Cool When I grind steel, I pause after 5-10 seconds of hard grinding and check the temperature of the blade by pinching it with my fingers. If my fingers involuntarily recoil, the blade needs to be cooled before grinding it more. Dunk it in a cup of water until it cools. Note: This is not quenching (quenching is something else). This simply cools the blade.
If, however, you can grasp the tip of the work and continue on, then continue on. (Side note: If you do overheat the blade and it turns a little blue, it’s not the end of the world. Try using the blade anyway and see if you even notice that the edge degrades too quickly. Grinding away that blued area is usually an invitation to make the problem worse.)
When you get to your Sharpie line, pause to examine the flats on the tip of the blade. They should be the same on either side of the apex of the blade. Fix them if they aren’t equal – tiny equal flats is the first goal.
Grind the Bevel Set the tool rest so it grinds at 25°. There are lots of gizmos that will do this. I use a popsicle stick with 25° cut on the end. When I grind the bevel on a jack plane, my first goal is to create a smooth 25° arc on the bevel that acts like a path I can then follow to complete the grinding.
I create this “path” by first touching the center of the iron to the wheel lightly. Then I move the iron right while increasing the pressure against the wheel. I repeat this operation while moving the iron left. I do this a couple times and look at the results. When the arc across the bevel looks even, I can work on removing lots of metal.
This is the part that is “the grind.” It can take a bit of time depending on how messed up the iron is.
During this operation, the motion is like the windshield wipers in your car. Touch the iron lightly to the wheel and shift it left and right – adding some forward pressure at the corners. Do this a couple times and pause to check the temperature of the iron and to see if the tiny flats at the corners are disappearing at the same rate.
If they are, congrats. Carry on. If not, you’ll need to add more pressure on the corner that needs to play catch-up.
Cool the iron in the water when it gets too hot.
When the flats become tiny – about the width of a hair – you are ready to hone the iron. Try not to remove the flats on the grinder if you can. After the flats are gone, the tip of the iron will heat up rapidly.
Honing Hone the iron using the same media you use for your chisels and plane irons. I use a honing guide, which makes the process a snap. Secure the iron in the jaws of the guide and set it for 30° or 35°. I use 35°. This is where you might encounter problems with an 8” radius. On some guides you won’t be able to hone the corners of the iron because the body of the honing guide will hit the stone, denying you access to the corners of the blade. Switch to a 10” radius or sharpen the iron freehand.
Start on your coarse-grit stone (I use a #1,000-grit waterstone). Rock the iron left and right as you roll up and down the stone. Proceed until the flats are gone and you have created a burr on the backside of the iron. Then proceed up the polishing grits (I use #5,000 and then #8,000) to finish the bevel.
Remove the burr and polish the backside of the iron. I prop up the iron on a thin steel ruler (thanks David Charlesworth) so I only have to polish a tiny bit of metal at the tip. The first time you do this on an iron, it might take a minute or so, but that beats the heck out of the hours it would take if you had to polish the entire backside.
The Chipbreaker (aka Cap Iron) Luckily the chipbreaker isn’t as critical to a jack plane as it is to a smoothing plane. It’s primary job in a jack plane is to attach the iron to the blade-adjustment mechanism in the frog. Plus, the hump of the chipbreaker helps deflect shavings up and out.
Still, you need to make sure that you don’t create a “shavings trap.” That happens when there’s a gap between the iron and breaker that is big enough for shavings to get into. Stone or file the underside of the breaker until you get a good light-tight fit between the breaker and iron.
One of the most common problems with old breakers is that they have flattened out a bit during the last 100 years and you need to restore their “spring.” To do this, clamp one-third of one end of the breaker in a vise and press gently but firmly against the un-clamped portion. You only need a tiny tiny bit of bend to fix the problem. It’s easy to over-do it. It’s also easy to undo it.
If you can’t get the breaker working no matter what you do, consider buying an aftermarket one from Hock Tools or Lee Valley. That will fix your wagon.
Now you can assemble the whole plane and make some shavings. Attach the chipbreaker so it is behind the curve of the iron, but don’t position it too far back – that can give you troubles. You can make it so that you cannot retract the iron into the mouth of the tool. Tighten the breaker snugly. Check the frog screws again to make sure they aren’t loose (I’ve done this).
And assemble the plane. Yay.
In the next entry, I’ll show you how to make a board flat with a jack plane.
A wire-drawing plate, a standard stick (top) and a compressed one (below).
Like chairmakers John Brown and Jennie Alexander, I feel the same pull. Not toward death, necessarily, though that does begin to weigh on my mind during every long project.
Instead, I feel the pull toward making my chair components lighter and lighter. As I look back at my chairs during the last 19 years (going back to my Arts & Crafts frame chairs), it’s obvious. My seats have been getting slimmer, as have my sticks and legs.
It’s been a slight change here and there. But I feel like I’m trying to make the chair disappear as much as possible.
The other side of this coin is that I know I need to cut or rive my material so the grain is perfectly straight for legs and sticks. And the joinery has to be as close to perfect as I can manage.
One example of how I achieve this: During the last year I have changed how I fit my sticks. I don’t teach it this way – it’s just too nuts. (I have a different way to get the fit I want with students.) But here it is for you to mock. Or perhaps take something away from it.
Compressing a tenon with non-scratch pliers. It takes about 10 second of work with each tenon.
Compressing Tenons in Stages My goal is to get the tenon compressed so it goes easily into the mortise with light hammer taps and little risk of everything snapping or splitting. But then I use the heat and moisture in my glue to lock the joint up.
Here are the numbers and the process. The sticks I make end up at .635” in diameter after they are scraped. And I want them to go into a mortise that is .600” in diameter (I grind my spade bits to a custom size).
The first step is to take my non-scratch pliers and compress the tenon evenly and as much as possible. This will usually take an ash or oak tenon down to .625”.
Then, and this is the crazy part, I drive the tenon into a wire-drawing plate. The plate shown is a crazy heavy plate used in the jewelry industry. It allows me to size tenons to 1/10 of a millimeter. That’s way more holes than anyone needs. If I had to do it again, I’d get a machinist to make me a steel plate with a couple holes with a chamfered rim.
This is not a dowel plate. I drive the tenon in on the chamfered side of the hole so it doesn’t “skim” the tenon. It simply compresses it.
With my wire-drawing plate I get my tenons down to .600”.
The completed tenon.
Now it’s time to assemble. I’ve done some experiments by adding hot glue and water to these tenons and they swell up initially to .610”, which locks the joint. Then, after a few hours, they settle down at .615” or so (yes, they continue to expand a bit).
That is a great lock, and I have yet to have a mortise split apart in the last year.
I’m not recommending you go down this route. If I were you, I’d probably get the non-scratch pliers and simply compress the tenons with that tool alone. Then tune the diameter of a spade bit to give you a good lock.
The highlight of my trip to the Republic of Ireland earlier this month was spending the day with Mark Jenkinson, a chair collector and cider maker in Slane.
Mark generously invited Lucy and me to spend the day looking at the chairs he had stored in his barn, to see the cider-making process at work and to eat a delicious “Spanish/Irish” stew for the midday meal.
The chair collection was staggering. I saw more vernacular stick chairs in one day than I have seen in the last 10 years combined. These were unrestored examples that Mark had collected during a life-long fascination with vernacular architecture and furniture, including six Gibson chairs.
“I’ve always been into old shit,” he said. “The older and wonkier the better. I started with vernacular architecture – Irish vernacular architecture. And part and parcel with that is vernacular furniture. And at first I bought antiques without a lot of focus.
“Then I was at an auction about 20 years ago and there were six Gibson chairs. They just jumped out at me.
“I bought a lot of stuff, perhaps the largest collection in the country – 100 to 150 chairs. I’m down to 60 or 70 now – not all stick chairs. Maybe half are stick chairs. What I have left is stuff that was too close to my heart to sell and stuff that didn’t sell at auction (in 2014). The best and worst you could say.”
The Gibson Chair We don’t know a lot about Gibson chairs from official records as of yet. Mark says there’s a photo of a chairmaker – perhaps Mr. Gibson himself – taking the chairs to market circa 1880. But most of what we know about the chairs comes from the archaeological record.
They are stout and dramatic chairs, with a remarkable lean to the backrest of the chair – about 25°. The seats are wide.
Mark thinks they likely were made for the sturdy local farmers who would appreciate the comfort and solidity of a Gibson chair after a long day of work.
Despite the radical lean of the chair’s back, the Gibson doesn’t sit radically different. It’s not at all like a recliner. You can sit and have a great conversation in one. I know this because I do it everyday with the sorta-Gibson I’m sitting in right now.
Earlier this year I built a prototype of a Gibson based on photos (hundreds of photos) I had harvested from books and the internet. Mark helped guide me on the key points, and my Gibson sits almost exactly like the originals I sat in earlier this month.
But seeing the real thing. Touching it all over and simply getting a sense of it – that has changed the way I’m going to make my next set of Gibsons.
What’s different? Well the legs are certainly riven. All the components are different in cross-section and many feel like riven material – rough triangles, ovals, squares, slight rectangles. All with rounded arrises and dead-straight grain. Likely ash (Fraxinus excelsior).
The sticks are likely ash as well, Mark says. The seats, arms and crest are usually sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus), which is known as sycamore maple in this country. It’s not like the sycamore in our country. It’s in the same genus as our soft maple or red maple and works the same way. Mark says he’s also seen elm seats.
In one room of Mark’s barn, he kept two museum-quality examples of Gibson. One had the same radical lean as mine. The other had a more upright back. They both sat extremely well. I measured these carefully and have been figuring out the design patterns embedded in each one. These chairs were likely made commercially. But there is a lot of handwork and variation to them. They were not manufactured.
In the next room, Mark had four Gibsons in various original conditions. Seeing unrestored chairs is a goldmine for a chairmaker. It allows you to see what held and what didn’t. The weaknesses and strengths of the designs are laid bare.
Examining the details was eye-opening. The way the back sticks locked to the arms is a key feature of these chairs, as is the oval shape of the stick that passes through the arms. These features tension the components above the seat.
What’s Next After a long day of looking at chairs, Mark and I agreed that the Gibson chair is one of the most important unsung vernacular forms out there. And we are going to work together to change that.
Next month, I’m going to build a run of these chairs, and Narayan Nayar has agreed to photograph the process. Mark has agreed to be a co-author or consultant on the project, and I think we are headed for a very interesting book on these chairs.
— Christopher Schwarz
One unexpected find: Mark had these two side chairs, which look like they were made by someone who also made Gibson chairs.
P.S. In case you were wondering, Mark’s cider is fantastic. His Cockagee cider has a pure apple essence. Not too sweet (like American ciders). Just a delight to drink. It’s a shame we can’t get it in the United States. But it’s also a good thing because I’d probably drink too much of it.
