While I was playing with baby alligators and hugging pine trees, something important happened: “Woodworking in Estonia” arrived in our Indianapolis warehouse. The book arrived more than a week early, so we are scrambling to get an assembly line organized to ship everyone’s orders as soon as possible.
If you have ordered the book it should go out this week and will arrive within five to 10 business days, depending on where you are in the country. We’ll also be fulfilling orders placed by our retailers all over the world.
So the wait will be over soon.
I haven’t seen the printed book yet, which makes me a bit crazy. I’ll probably drive up to our warehouse this week and pick up a bunch of copies for the storefront, which will be open for business on Aug. 13.
It is Monday and we are all dragging. Time to brew some coffee, relax and let the week start off right. With the forum. Remember, if you have a question about our products, procedures in our books or anything related to Lost Art Press, the fastest way to get an answer is our forum. Check it out here.
Staked Table from Green Lumber This question is similar to the question from last week about whether a workbench could be made from green wood. However, this week Jeremy wants to know if similar rules apply if he makes the staked table from “The Anachist’s Design Book.” See some of the responses and add your own feedback here.
Hanging Shelf Ethical Issue Dennis has a vision that he is not sure how he wants to execute. He has provided images of his inspiration and his sketches for us to ponder and give feedback on. See what you think and let him know how you would proceed here.
English Cabinet Makers Tool Chests Adam found some tool chests on E-Bay that are worth a look. One image is shown at the top of this page and the rest can be found here.
Visiting London Know any places around London that a woodworker shouldn’t miss while there? Make sure to let Kris know.
Using Ash for a 6-Board Chest Jacob is worried about the ogee feet and how they will work with ash. He has a plan to try to prevent the wood from cracking in the long run but is curious to see if others think it will work or if they have other suggestions.
from http://verktykista.wordpress.com
from http://verktykista.wordpress.com/
Tool Collection from West Norway Adam provided a link to a tool collection from a boatbuilders shop in Norway. (Two images are shown above) He points out the similarity between some of the tools in the images to those from Estonia. The link to the full collection is in his post.
When working in Australia, the weirdest thing about the experience wasn’t the accents, the plastic money or the fact that you can order a burger loaded with kangaroo and wallaby meat.
It was the birdsong.
Every day I walked a mile or two from my hotel to the shop and was unnerved by the birds singing in the morning because it was so alien. It’s akin to visiting a retirement home where the background music is death metal.
This week I’m back in Arkansas near where I grew up. It’s my first visit back in many years, and the first thing I did this morning was to walk off into the mountain forest around our cabin. While I love the hardwood forests of Kentucky, I miss the shortleaf pines (Pinus echinata) we had in every corner of our farm.
The bark always looks like a pile of tectonic plates crashing into one another. And I always loved walking on the brown carpet of needles that formed in a large stand of pines.
After getting my pine fix I spotted some blackjack oak (Quercus marilandica), with its odd-shaped leaves and shagbark hickory, which I see sometimes in our neck of the woods as well. It was all oddly comforting, even though I haven’t lived here for almost 30 years.
But I really knew I was back in Arkansas when the first roadkill I saw was an armadillo.
Today I turned the first four legs for the low Roman workbench but I left my lathe set up because I might need to turn four more tomorrow.
While most images I’ve come across of Roman workbenches show them made with four legs and with staked construction, there is one image from Herculaneum that looks a lot like there are eight legs. The image below is actually an 18th-century drawing of a painting from that doomed city that has deteriorated – all we have left is this image (plus a host of wrongly interpreted images).
Suzanne Ellison and I are fairly convinced this image is accurate for a variety of reasons that I’ll discuss in the forthcoming book. But even if the 18th-century image is accurate, a few experts have suggested that the Roman image it is based on is inaccurate.
It’s a bit of a hall of mirrors to discuss. But the bottom line is that some people think that the Herculaneum image actually depicts a work surface on top of two four-legged sawhorses. I tend to disagree. But there is no way to settle the issue.
So what I’m planning on doing is making the bench with four legs, like this image from Pompeii.
Then I’m going to work with the bench and see if I think it needs four more legs to be robust enough for operations such as hand mortising.
So stay tuned.
These four legs feature 4”-long tenons that are 1-3/4” in diameter. I roughed them out on the lathe and then shaved and scraped them to the finished shape. I like the process and the finished texture.
I’m more or less following the script of The Naked Woodworker for my workbench, making adjustments as necessary to accommodate the differences in sizes and shapes of lumber that are available to me here in Ecuador. I used the two-bucket sawbench illustrated in my prior post to build a “real” Mike Siemsen-style sawbench, and then used that one to build a second, twin (fraternal) sawbench.
Workbench material
I’ve been amassing the materials for the workbench over the past few days, most recently with a trip to a different lumber vendor, Maderas La Morita.
Their sign could use a little work…A fraction of the lumber for sale at La Morita, several different species
I ran into a bit of a language difficulty while there, not understanding the difference between tabla and tablon (roughly the difference between “board” and “plank” in English). I would have thought that the two words were fairly interchangeable, but apparently not so. Anyway, I got confused, which made the person trying to sell me the wood confused, which made me even more confused. But it all worked out in the end.
I was looking for some 3/4″ pine, which they did not have. “Not a problem! We’ll just make some.” (Loose translation.)
And so they did. They took a thick pine slab and resawed it for me on the spot:
Changing out the blade on the tablesaw; the one that was mounted wasn’t quite big enough to span half the width of the plankA couple of passes through the thickness planer, and we’re good to go
The pine lumber that I have is surface planed and jointed on one edge, but rough on the other. The leg assemblies of the Naked workbench require the two sides of the leg plank to be (or be made to be) reasonably parallel, which would be easy to do if I had a workbench, which I don’t. So I screwed two pieces of scrap to a 2×6, so that I could wedge a board into the tapered gap between the scraps:
My first vise
The improvised vise holds the board surprisingly securely, and I only crashed my plane into the wall once.
The Kywi that I’ve been buying most of my tools and hardware from has a decent selection of screws for wood and sheet metal, but hardly any bolts at all, so I wasn’t able to get the necessary carriage bolts there. But have no fear, because just down the road from our house in Tumbaco is La Casa del Perno (House of Bolts), and they had just what I needed.
All the bolts you want, all the time
Elsewhere on the tools and hardware front, I previously mentioned that I might buy another saw and make it a dedicated rip saw. I did just that, and now you can see why I was hesitant to buy it earlier:
Shark? Maybe. Saw? Definitely not.
I’m clearly going to have to spend a bunch of quality time with the saw to get the teeth into reasonable shape, but so it goes. I did discover something that I had somehow missed on previous trips:
Saw sets. In blister packs.
Knowing that a saw set is available to me makes me less reluctant to fiddle with the set of the saws that I have.
While I was playing with baby alligators and hugging pine trees, something important happened: “Woodworking in Estonia” arrived in our Indianapolis warehouse. The book arrived more than a week early, so we are scrambling to get an assembly line organized to ship everyone’s orders as soon as possible.
