Lost Art Press

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Mary May’s Carving Book is In-house

Posted on by Kara Uhl

Awhile ago we told you about Mary May, one of our favorite classical woodcarvers, and her forthcoming book: “The Acanthus Leaf: A Rite of Passage for the Classical Carver.” It’s now in-house. And it’s tremendous.

This week I flowed all the text into InDesign, and checked out the images and illustrations. And here’s what struck me: The exhaustive amount of attention and detail Mary put into teaching.

Artists, by nature, often do their best work while in the zone. In her book Mary talks about her first real carving job, which she completed in her modest second-floor apartment in a small Victorian-era house in Minneapolis. (Each chapter begins with short stories like these, allowing us to be privy to her woodcarving life thus far, and they’re a joy to read.) Her workbench was in her bedroom. Her work was to carve a pastoral African scene in an oval-shaped umbrella stand made of butternut. “On most days, I was so engrossed in my work that I became completely lost in the carving world,” she writes. “There were times when I discovered that it was 3 a.m. and I was still pounding away with my mallet and making chips fly across the room.”

And yet, with this book, Mary steps out of that zone again and again and again to write detailed steps, draw detailed illustrations and take detailed pictures. She makes a most impressive art suddenly seem accessible.

With each new leaf (from basic to Roman to Scandinavian to Greek), she teaches you how to draw the leaf, and then carve, with thoughtful illustrations and photographs. Take, for example, the basic acanthus leaf. She walks you through a simple 12-step drawing process. Here’s the illustration for Step 10:

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Then she walks you through the carving process, with carefully written instruction, including proper tool selection, illustrations and photographs.

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The book also includes a fair amount of history and photographs of the acanthus leaf as seen on antiques and in architecture around the world.

Now begins the editing and design process, which we’re all looking forward to. To get updates on Mary’s book, consider subscribing to her email newsletter here. We don’t have a release date yet for the book, but when we do we’ll be sure to let you know.

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

Clinching Nails

Posted on by meghanlostartpress
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When your nails are driven home, you’ll have a small forest of nail tips awaiting you on the inside of your bottom assembly. You’ll be turning these over and back into the bottom boards using the power of clinching.

This is an excerpt from “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” by Anon, Christopher Schwarz and Joel Moskowitz. 

Clinching (sometimes spelled “clenching”) is when you drive a nail that passes through both thicknesses of wood you are fastening. The tip of this nail sticks out about 1/4″ and is bent over and driven into the wood.

Clinching adds remarkable strength to a joint. A 1948 study by the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory concluded that clinching can increase the holding power of a nail between 45 percent and 464 percent – depending on a variety of factors, including the species of wood and its moisture content.

Also interesting: The study concluded that bending the tip across the grain increased the holding power by 20 percent compared to a nail clinched along the grain.

But how do you best clinch a nail? There are several methods.

Four Ways and a Trick

Here’s how automated clinching machines do it: They fire a nail in at an angle, and there’s a steel plate waiting for the nail’s tip when it emerges. When the nail hits the steel it bends over into the wood – essentially it ricochets like a bullet or pool ball.

I’ve never tried this with a pneumatic nail gun, but it sounds like fun on a Friday afternoon.

For the hand clinchers, there are at least two common techniques. The first one is to first drive the nail through the work. Rest a steel plate, anvil or a second heavy hammerhead on the nail’s head. Then tap the tip of the nail with your hammer. It will curl over. Then you can drive the drooping tip back into the wood.

The second technique is similar to the machine process. You drive the nail through the work and against a waiting “bucking iron,” which curls the tip and forces it back into the wood.

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If you don’t have clinching confidence, try bending the tip a bit with needlenose pliers – then drive the nail home.

There’s one more technique I’ll sometimes use when I’m being really, ahem, retentive. I’ll drive the nail through. Then I’ll use needlenose pliers to bend the tip to the angle I want. Then I’ll drive it into the work. This results in a tidy appearance. I admit it’s a bit much.

When I have a lot of clinching to do, I’ve found that a cast iron table saw wing can be your best friend when clinching at work – doors, lids and the like. Lay the cast wing on your bench and you have a nice big area to support your work as you merrily clinch away. And no, the clinching does not really mar, crack or otherwise defile the cast iron wing.

— MB

Free Download for Halloween: The Coffin Chapter

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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If I had to guess, I’d say my wife’s favorite projects of mine are the coffins I built for “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” One coffin ended up at Raney Nelson’s place (it’s where he sleeps, I think). One ended up on the wall in our TV room and holds my vinyl records. And the third is in the basement and is trotted out for Halloween.

Lucy, my wife, adores Halloween.

Building a coffin is great fun, whether you are making it for yourself and your final remains (as I did), to use as a liquor cabinet/vinyl record cabinet or yard decoration.

For fun, here’s the chapter on building a kerf-bent coffin from “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” It’s in pdf format. No DRM or any garbage. Just something fun to read and try.

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— Christopher Schwarz

Shaker Firewood Box: Simple & Sweet

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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As a furniture maker, visiting museums is important. But what is more important is visiting those same museums again and again. Every year you are a different person, and the same pieces of furniture will look new and different to you every time you visit.

On Sunday I took my 10th or 11th trip to the Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill in Harrodsburg, Ky., with woodworkers Megan Fitzpatrick and Will Myers. I got to visit a lot of old friends that day at Pleasant Hill, such as the wall-hanging cabinet and Saturday table. But I also made a new friend: a firewood box that I’d never noticed before.

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This box represents what I like about Shaker design. It is simple, practical and shows an advanced understanding of geometry. The carcase itself is nailed together, but the parts are arranged so that there are no awkward places where parts overlap or are misaligned – something you see on a lot of vernacular furniture.

For example, the maker was careful to add small fake stiles (with nails) to the bottom of the case to make the drawer inset. As a result of this extra effort and a hundred other details the exterior carcase of the piece appears to be like the carcase of a complex piece of furniture, though it clearly is not.

The profile of the carcase shows the maker had a good grasp of geometry – Roman vs. Grecian. The curve on the side of the carcase is an elliptical arc with a perfectly sized fillet where the curve meets the front of the carcase. It’s like an enormous Grecian ovolo.

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The feet on the sides of the carcase echoed this Grecian ovolo without screaming this fact.

And then (while no one was looking) we opened the drawer at the bottom. It had sweet and well-executed dovetails, a nice surprise on a nailed piece.

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I hope to build a reproduction of this piece someday, but we’ll first have to get a working fireplace. The last time we lit a fire in our living room it ended with me running half-naked into the snow.

— Christopher Schwarz