This past week I taught the first Moravian bench class of 2018 at Roy Underhill’s Woodwright’s School in Pittsboro, NC. This is the sixth year I have done the class at Roy’s; we have produced about 120 benches in that time.
Morning of the first day before the mayhem begins.
Over time, the class has changed and become more streamlined as my experience teaching it has increased. Of course, with each new group of students, there’s a different dynamic, even though we are building the same project. This keeps the class from ever becoming routine.
You never know what new layout method is going to turn up.
A first for this class was using a boring machine to hog out most of the waste from the long stretcher mortises. This was a huge improvement over a brace and bit.
Roy supervised the boring work.10 minuets later.
We had a young fella named J.D. Stevenson and his father stop in to observe the class for an afternoon. We promptly put him to work. He made us all look bad – he’s 13 years old.
“The Kid” J.D. Stevenson, paring a mortise.By the third day most everyone has good feel for the rip saw.George showing off.Some of Lake Erie Tool’s handiwork.
Ready for the vise.Katie using the 2 1/2″ auger.
As always, I never seem to get any pictures of the very end of the class. The last day is always a mad dash to get as far as possible!
The book that became “Chairmaker’s Notebook” began as a chat with chairmakers Peter Galbert and Curtis Buchanan. We made a plan to produce a video of Curtis building a chair that would be accompanied by a pamphlet from Peter illustrating the construction details.
But that’s not why I remember that meeting with Peter and Curtis. Instead, I am continuously struck by something Curtis said to me in that cabin in Berea, Ky. Curtis began talking about teaching woodworking.
“We’re all not as good as people think we are,” he said. “We’re all frauds.”
This was Curtis Expletive Deleted Buchanan. A guy who has more skill than 10 magazine-grade woodworkers. And he was sitting before me explaining that – like all human beings – he has insecurities about his work.
If I ever get a tattoo, it’s going to be that quote from Curtis.
So this blog entry is a public service announcement. No matter how facile you think another woodworker operates, know that he or she spends a significant amount of time in personal freak-out mode.
This week was my week for this. I have a magazine article due on Monday about a simple chair with tricky geometry. I spent the entire week ruining $200 worth of perfectly good pieces of maple. And on Friday afternoon, I built the chair for the fifth time, and it actually worked.
I am a fraud. The craft of woodworking kicks me down the stairs and steals my lunch money on an almost daily basis. The only thing I have going for me – my only superpower, I suppose – is that I get right back up. I take a short walk to calm my mind. And I build the damn chair for the fifth time.
Richard Jones’s opus on wood technology – “Cut & Dried: A Woodworker’s Guide to Timber Technology” – is almost ready to go to the printer. There are just a few last-minute freak-outs to tend to today. And wrapping up the cover, which turned into a craft project this week.
“Cut & Dried” will be one of the largest books we’ve published (at about 400 pages) and covers every aspect of our beloved material, from how it grows, all the way to how it behaves when it’s in a finished piece of furniture. In between, Jones covers every aspect of the material, from fungi and pests to sawmills and kilns.
And, most importantly, the book is told from the perspective of a woodworker. Jones is a lifelong professional woodworker and instructor. While there are many other fine books on wood technology out there, Jones thought they were aimed more at a scientific audience than at furniture makers. And we agreed.
So Jones spent many years researching, writing, photographing and drawing this book to develop what we think is the most complete and understandable guide to wood.
We’ll be talking more about Jones’s exhaustive treatment of the topic in the coming days. But first, a look at how we developed the cover. It also involved woodworking.
“Cut & Dried” delves deep into the structure of trees and how that affects your work at the bench. And so I wanted a cover that displayed the structure without being too technical about it – this book is not written for wood scientists.
During my experiments with shou sugi ban, I became fascinated with how a torch can burn away the earlywood in some softwoods, leaving the hard latewood and exposing the pores that transmit fluid in the tree. I wondered if this could result in a woodblock-like print for the cover. After searching around, I became inspired by the work of Shona Branigan who does this sort of thing but takes it to a sublime artistic level.
This week, Megan Fitzpatrick, Brendan Gaffney and I spent a day messing around with different trees to make a block for the cover. In the end, Megan snitched an offcut of a neighbor’s Christmas tree – a Scot’s pine – that we cut, burned, brushed and inked. It took us about 25 tries to get the look we wanted.
If all goes to plan we’ll be offering this book for pre-publication ordering next week. When it’s released, we’ll have details on pricing and the ship date.
Getting the lid, the dust seal, the carcase and the top skirt of the tool chest all working in tandem requires some care. Small errors compound quickly.
In the end, the lid should overhang the carcase by about 1/16” on its front and ends before you attach the dust seal. Sometimes you have to trim the lid. Sometimes you have to trim the carcase.
Trimming the lid is straightforward. Mark what you want to remove and plane it away.
Trimming the carcase can be trickier. On one carcase on my bench today, the lid was out of square by less than 1/16” over its 24” width. The best solution was to trim the carcase. But the wood that needed to be removed was a thin taper that started at less than 1/16” at one end and diminished to nothing at the other end.
To mark this out I use blue tape.
I first used a knife to mark where the taper should begin. Then I laid the tape down on the edge of the carcase. I put a shoulder plane on the carcase. Because of the tape, I can easily see the wood I need to remove (even with 49-year-old eyes). If I get any blue tape in the mouth of the plane, I know I’ve gone too far.
The Dust Seal The dust seal is dovetailed at the two front corners and wraps around three edges of the lid. With these two particular chests, the dust seal is 1-3/8” wide. The problem here is the slope of the dovetails.
Usually I use a 1:4 slope for dovetails (about 14°). The problem is that the slope is a little extreme for a piece of wood 1-3/8” wide. So I use a less-radical slope, 1:8 or about 7°. This slope makes the base of the dovetail a good deal beefier.
While I’ve gotten away with a 1:4 slope on the dust seal, it looks like a pencil-necked chicken.
A few years back, Christopher Schwarz taught a handful of what he affectionately calls “the baby anarchist’s tool chest class.” The premise was to help build the woodworking community by offering to young would-be hand-tool woodworkers a low-cost class to jump-start their skills. These classes involved an intensive week of tuning up old tools, then learning to wield them while building a simpler version of his “Anarchist’s Tool Chest” in which to keep them, and little sleep or showering (because: camping).
Since Chris has stepped back from teaching, Mike Siemsen has taken up the baby anarchist baton, and is (for I think the third year) offering much the same at his Minnesota school. The 2018 “Hand Tool Immersion 101” class is May 7-11, and costs $650 (materials included). Mike is offering free camping and communal dinner prep on site. And bathrooms and showers. Because Mike spoils his students.
