Above is a trailer for our video “Roubo Workbench: By Hand & Power” that Will Myers and I shot earlier this year. If you are thinking about building a French workbench using a giant slab, you might find the 4-hour-long video helpful.
The video is downloadable and has no DRM (digital rights management), so you can put it on any device you like and carry Will (and my off-color jokes that survived the editing process) with you wherever you please.
— Christopher Schwarz
It’s been almost six months since my last haircut and three months since my last shave. This is not intentional. I simply don’t care what I look like or what others think of my visage (hey, a Fancy Lad term!).
But I do notice that as my hair gets longer the people of Covington address me differently.
When I have short hair, they call me “sir” and ask for work. When I have long hair, they call me “brother” and ask for a cigarette. Alas, I have neither.
Today I processed all the stock for the doors for the Horse Garage. My goal is to get these suckers built by Sunday. If you are offended by machine work, please avert your sensitive eyes. While I would love to cut the joints by hand for these doors, I have winter bearing down hard on me. These doors are going together with loose tenons from the Domino XL.
The other project at hand is building a lot of bench accessories for “Ingenious Mechanicks.” Today I modified the Roman bench I built earlier this year so I can straddle it (without feeling like I’m going to the gynecologist) and to add some vises.
I did this by ripping down the top during a visit to the shop at Popular Woodworking Magazine. During the visit, David Lyell asked me why I was doing this. I said:
“So I can add a 14th century Italian twin-screw vise for boatbuilding.”
He busted out laughing like I was joking. I wasn’t.
I should get out more.
— Christopher Schwarz
You can read all about it on the Crucible blog if you like.
![IMG_2589[1]](https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/img_25891.jpg)
Hashtag intertextuality
At this point you may be wondering why Lost Art Press would ever have invited me to write a book about kitchens. This cabinet is a monstrosity: a plywood base without so much as a counter overhang, its floor-scraping doors hung on surface-mounted butt hinges and adorned with giant cherry decals…topped by an upper section that not only doesn’t match (to put it mildly), but offers a textbook example of the need to gauge shelf thickness according to depth, load, and span.
So let me assure you that I do not consider this cabinet an exemplar of the kitchen furnisher’s art. The key to its value (at least, to me) is its size: It’s only 18″ high — a toy, apparently made by someone of modest means for the delight of someone he or she loved. It is a perfect illustration of the kitchen’s magnetic appeal.
![IMG_2587[1]](https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/img_25871-e1511048589340.jpg)
![IMG_2592[1]](https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/img_25921-e1511107284276.jpg)
As for Kim, my friend in a high place, she’s also the one who hooked me up with a treasure trove of information about post-war construction, remodeling, and design published by the United States Gypsum Company (who knew?) that I’ve mined for info to use in articles and books.
![IMG_2591[1]](https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/img_25911.jpg)
Thanks, Kim!
***
Here’s a recipe I made last weekend in my own kitchen: my favorite pound cake, made in this case with dried Montmorency cherries that Mark brought back from a recent trip to northern Michigan. The recipe is adapted from one for pound cake in New Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant. Those hippies knew their dairy products.–Nancy R. Hiller, author of Making Things Work
Before heading out for Charleston, S.C., to visit my dad, I added a couple face vises to my circa 1505 Holy Roman Workbench. These vises have no screws and no real jaws. Instead they clamp the work with a wedge.
The vises are merely large notches in the benchtop, so “installing” them took about an hour of time.
These “vises” – if you can call them that – are based on paintings and drawings of workbenches that Suzanne “Saucy Indexer” Ellison and I have dug up during the last 18 months for my next book. In this case, I’ve made a notch in the end grain of the benchtop and in the edge of the benchtop. Both sorts of notches are shown in paintings and I want to sort out if there’s any difference between them.
I cannot say yet if they work differently, but I can say the notch on the edge grain was much easier to saw and bash out. When I return home on Sunday, I’ll get to work installing a wide variety of other long-forgotten bench accessories that Suzanne and I have unearthed.
As I mentioned earlier, the scope of this book has expanded far beyond where it began, with Roman workbenches. The workholding schemes we have found are ideal for both low benches and high benches. And both sorts of benches – high and low – have always existed side-by-side, as they do today.
I’m also exploring how low benches developed lots of accessories for building chairs (both shaved and turned), boats, baskets and all sorts of items that require steam-bent wood. I think I’ve also convinced Suzanne to write a chapter of the book that will detail the paintings we’re exploring and the socio-economic conditions in which they were made.
Oh, and the book is also part travelogue. It begins at the summit of Mount Vesuvius and ends below the ground in a German forest.
Believe it or not, all these disparate elements are stitched together without any Kierkegaardian leaps.
So, after a lot of thought, I’ve decided to title the book: “Ingenious Mechanicks: Early Workbenches & Workholding.” We’re on track to finish writing it by the end of 2017. So we should have it released by March 2018.
— Christopher Schwarz, editor, Lost Art Press
Personal site: christophermschwarz.com