During the last week my family and I rode mules to the bottom of the Grand Canyon to stay at Phantom Ranch. (John, you’ll be happy to know I didn’t fall into the canyon so you don’t need to look for a new business partner.)
I’m granting myself a few more days of radio silence, but I will return the workshop and blogging later this week.
— Christopher Schwarz
American sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) has long been one of my favorite woods. I first started using it about 2001 when Frank Miller Lumber started offering it for sale at ridiculously low prices (less than $2 a board foot).
At the time I was building an addition on our house and saved hundreds of dollars by using sycamore instead of hard maple.
It’s a wood that commands respect. Your tools have to be sharp and well set or you’ll just end up with a mess of tear-out. You have to insist on quartersawn stock – flatsawn sycamore moves quite a lot and looks like cheap Asian plywood. Quartersawn sycamore is beautiful – I call it “redneck lacewood.” Sycamore’s grain is interlocked, so it is one of my favorite woods for chairmaking, especially seats and armbows.
But recently it’s become hard to find in my area. Frank Miller doesn’t cut, dry or carry it anymore. Our local lumberyard never has it. Forget the retail outlets such as Rockler and Woodcraft. They just sounded confused when I called to inquire.
After striking out at my usual haunts, Megan Fitzpatrick and I hit the road last week to visit some rural sawmills and lumberyards. Between us, we called or visited more than a dozen places and came up empty-handed until I called C.R. Muterspaw lumber, which is an hour north of me.
They had four or five boards of it. I hopped in my truck and raced toward Xenia, Ohio.
It took about an hour of digging through the stacks at Muterspaw (they were very good sports), but I found four spectacular boards of the stuff for about $5 a board foot. And I’m using them to make a Welsh stick chair.
It all left me wondering: Why has sycamore disappeared from the local market? It’s not a rare tree. Platanus occidentalis is a junk tree around here and grows to a sometimes enormous size in low, wet areas.
I’m going to ask around. If anyone knows of a good source, speak up.
— Christopher Schwarz
The Romans used the square to layout the ubiquitous half-circle arc flutes along the length of their temple columns. You can too: Just set alignment pins at the start and stop points; hold the square against the pins; hold your marker at the apex of the square; and scribe away!
— Jim Tolpin, ByHandandEye.com
One of the advantages (or curses) of studying a lot of old furniture is you can feel certain designs tug at you as you work on a piece. This weekend I got a little time to work on this Hall’s Croft chair and I could feel several other similar chair designs tug at my brain.
First, I abandoned the pine seat and switched to quartersawn sycamore for the seat, arms and crest. The spindles are hickory and the legs are beech. I selected the stock so I could use an oil and wax finish instead of paint or a dark pigmented finish.
I changed the seat profile slightly to make the front corners sharper. I altered the leg shape a bit. But the biggest change is going to be the crest rail. Instead of the “three holey mountains” of the original I’m going to use a different shape I’ve been experimenting with. It uses rived stock that is somewhat triangular in cross-section.
When I offer it for sale, I’ll give the customer both crest rails and let them decide which they prefer. Or they can swap them out when they are feeling sassy.
— Christopher Schwarz
One of the tropes in journalism is to bring a story full circle in the last paragraph. It’s called the “kicker” or the “kick” and it is supposed to leave the reader amused, saddened or something. The following story has a six-year arc, and today comes the kicker.
It started in 2010 when I received Patrick Leach’s monthly tool list (subscribe here; it’s a thing). In that list of tools for sale, Leach had offered a graphic mahogany layout square that spoke to me. But I hesitated on buying it because of the cost, and it sold to another person.
Check out this blog entry to see photos of the original.
Sadly, the original square was destroyed during shipment to its new owner, but Leach had taken some measurements for me so I could build one for myself.
That square became the cover image for by book “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” as it summed up a lot of ideas in one shape: it represented an “A” for “aesthetic anarchism,” it was a beautiful and highly functional tool and it was something you had to make for yourself.
According to Leach, this form of square shows up in England occasionally in the batches of tools he purchases and brings to the United States. The squares are fairly consistent in their design (if not execution), and Leach suspects that the square was used as a manual training exercise in English joinery schools.
I have tried to confirm or debunk that theory with no success. But it is the best idea so far.
In December 2010 I published plans for the square in Popular Woodworking Magazine, and you can download a SketchUp file of the square for free here. You can purchase a pdf of my article from ShopWoodworking.com for $2.99 here.
In 2014 I taught my first class in England at Warwickshire College in Leamington Spa. The woodworking program there is headed by Jamie Ward, an extremely capable and passionate woodworker and teacher.
This year Jamie decided to introduce the square as a project for his students to build. Students in their first year built a basic frame and then were offered the layout square as a more advanced project. One of his older students in his evening classes also decided to take on the square.
“(I)t did push their skills a touch so early on,” Jamie wrote, “but they all enjoyed making it.”
You can see photos of the construction process and the nice templates Jamie made via this link. When Jamie sent the photos to me this week I could only smile. An English square that was likely a manual training exercise for joinery students traveled to America and – thanks to happenstance – returned to England to become a manual training exercise.
That is a proper kicker.
— Christopher Schwarz