With several hundred pounds of red oak now sitting on my workbench, it’s time to get serious about building the two benches for my next book, “Roman Workbenches.”
The simpler of the two benches has a top that is about 3-1/2” thick, 18” wide and 7’ long. This will be a low bench – somewhere slightly above knee height but below the groin. The height will require some experimentation because the operator needs to sometimes straddle the benchtop for some operations.
As a result, 38” would be too high, even with my ostrich legs.
This bench’s workholding is super-simple: a planing stop (copied from one recovered at the Roman fort at Saalburg) and a Roman holdfast. Both iron bits were made by blacksmith Peter Ross. In the last couple months I have become very fond of the Roman holdfast, which holds like crazy.
This simpler bench will also feature some holdfast holes that occasionally will have some tall wooden stakes in them. More on this later (those of you who have read “Woodworking in Estonia” probably know what I’m tilting at).
The second workbench will be taller and made with a larger slab of oak. It will have a wagon vise (perhaps the first one ever illustrated), a series of forged-iron dogs and a twin-screw vise. Oh, and a ripping notch.
Both benches will be made using staked construction with no stretchers connecting the legs. For a variety of reasons I’ll explain later, the legs’ tenons will be cylindrical instead of tapered. Boring these 3”-diameter compound-angle mortises might seem like it will require a ship’s auger. But I have a plan.
After a long weekend of bagging groceries, Katy is cooking up more wax and she just listed 33 more jars on her etsy site.
This time she conned Funky Winkerbean to pose in a photo. Unlike the last cat, Funky didn’t mind the smell. Of course, this animal licks its own butt and seems to like it.
We’re also experimenting with making a non-stinky black wax. Our next batch is going to have carbon black in it – we are just waiting for our shipment to arrive. So stay tuned.
“Woodworking in Estonia,” the cult classic woodworking book, is now available for pre-publication ordering in the Lost Art Press store. The book is $29 (that price includes domestic postage) and will ship in August.
You can read more about the book and order it here.
Our version of “Woodworking in Estonia” is the first authorized translation of this classic 1960s text about hand-tool woodworking in this fascinating Northern European country. The original Estonian book was translated by the Israel Program for Scientific Translations in 1969 for the Smithsonian and the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Since then it has earned a small but loyal following of readers including Roy Underhill, who named it one of his three favorite woodworking books.
But what’s the book about? And why should anyone in North America care about this ethnographic study?
I first obtained a copy of the book about six years ago – a version that had been in the Albion College Library and then dropped from its collection. It’s a curious-looking book. The text is typewritten, not typeset like a nice book from the 1960s. And the images are terrible. Dark, murky and occasionally indecipherable.
Despite this, I read it all in one sitting. It’s a fascinating look at hand-tool woodworking during the last 2,000 years. The tools are similar to what we know, but different in places. But what struck me then – and still strikes me today – is how well these woodworkers knew their material.
It’s not a “green woodworking” book. Yes, there are times that they use green wood. But there are times they dry it in a variety of ways, steam it, bury it in dung, whatever it takes to get the job done. They take advantage of the natural shapes of the branches to make tools and furniture components.
It is, I think, a much more balanced view of what woodworking was really like during the last 300 years. The wood isn’t all perfectly seasoned for years. And it’s not all fresh from the tree. It is, instead, all of those things and more.
Also fascinating are the objects made in Estonian workshops: spoons, beer tankards, bent-wood boxes, sifters, rakes, tables, chairs, chests and all manner of household implements.
In the coming weeks we’ll publish a couple excerpts from the book. But for today, we need a short nap.
About the Price In an effort to make “Woodworking in Estonia” accessible to all our readers, we’ve kept the price as low as possible – $29, which includes domestic shipping. We consider publishing this book both an honor and a public service. And we have tried to do the right thing at every turn.
This book is the first authorized translation, done with the full cooperation of Ants Viires (until his death in 2015) and his family, which will receive royalties from sales of the book.
We have obtained the rights to the original photos and drawings, which are crisp and clear compared to the original 1969 translation. And we are, as always, manufacturing the book to a high standard, with sewn signatures and cloth-wrapped hardcovers.
We hope you will take a chance on “Woodworking in Estonia,” like we did when we first made contact with the Viires family through woodworker David Lanneorg. Getting this book to press was a long and sometimes difficult process, but we think it was worth it, and I hope you’ll agree.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. We do not have any information yet on which retailers will carry “Woodworking in Estonia.” We’ll post it here when we know.
About 8 a.m. Wednesday morning I’ll pack a thermos of coffee and hit the road for North Carolina in the hopes of gaining some small understanding of the craft culture of ancient Rome.
Thanks to Will Myers, there’s a large load of dry oak waiting for me in North Carolina that I’ll use to build two Roman-style workbenches. The benches are separated by about 1,400 years but share the same DNA.
The reason I do this stuff, which is admittedly a bit bonkers, is the same reason I started building nearly vanished French and English style workbenches in 2005. I’m not looking for a better workbench, just another one that might make sense for your work and mine.
For me, the appeal of 18th-century French and English workbenches is that they are simpler. They are far easier and faster to build than your typical Scandinavian or Germanic bench. I don’t have anything against those central and northern European benches. The ones that are made by woodworkers for woodworking are great.
But not everyone wants to build a bench that is that complex, with a tail vise and a shoulder vise, a fifth leg, a dovetailed skirt and square dogs. Some of us would rather do something else with our time.
In the same vein, the Roman workbench has always interested me. It is even simpler than a French or English bench. No stretchers. Simpler joinery. Less mass (perhaps). And during my last 11 years of ongoing bench research, I’ve concluded that the Roman workbench has never fully gone extinct. Instead it has gone out to pasture, so to speak.
By building and using these two Roman benches in my shop, I hope to learn their strengths and weaknesses – all bench forms have upsides and downsides. None is perfect. My hope is that I can show how these even simpler benches can be used to hold boards so you can work on their faces, edges and ends. Because that goal has never changed for woodworkers, whether they wear togas or flannel.
The Pelican case and its contents have arrived safely in Ecuador. One of the two locks on the case, however, did not make it. R.I.P.
We are now reasonably settled into our rental house, so it’s time to think about woodworking. While I believe I have pretty much all of the “real” tools I expect to need, I’m otherwise going to be bootstrapping this entire operation from scratch, so I need to buy some Stuff.
First stop was Ecuador’s version of the big box store, the Mega Kywi:
The Kywi stores are a lot like big box stores in the U.S., although the relative sizes of the different departments are different. They don’t have much of a garden section, for example, but they have plumbing fixtures out the wazoo. Like our big box stores, they’re tailored more to the do-it-yourselfer and homeowner than to professionals.
I was surprised to discover that they don’t have any of the standard-issue handsaws with uncomfortable handles and induction-hardened teeth that are omnipresent in the U.S. There were some Stanley saws that looked okay (well, not really), so I bought a 20″ 8 ppi one. I also bought a (too big) triangular file with the expectation that the saw would need some work. I could have bought a more appropriately sized file, but only as part of a set.
Among the hammers were these strange beasts:
The handle is a piece of galvanized steel tubing that’s swaged into the head. They were cheaper than the conventional hammers to the right ($8 vs. $13), but as you might imagine, they did not exactly fall naturally to hand.
These drawknives were hanging next to the saws:
You can’t really tell from the photo, but they’re very roughly ground, and don’t have any kind of brand marking. I thought $38 was a lot to ask for one.
Prices in Ecuador are weird. Food is generally pretty inexpensive, but other stuff is unpredictable. If it’s something that’s made in Ecuador, it’s usually reasonable, but if it’s imported, the price depends on whether or not it’s classified as a necessity or a luxury item. So some imported things cost about the same as in the U.S., while others are double or triple. A medium-sized Coleman ice chest is nearly $100. In our local supermarket, there is a locked glass case in the liquor department containing, among other things, four bottles of Johnny Walker Blue Label (I’ve never seen that much Blue Label in the same place at the same time) at $551 each.
One thing I forgot to pack with me is a countersink, and I have yet to find anyone that sells one here, which is strange since there are plenty of flat head screws for sale. I may have to have my brother-in-law bring one down when he comes to visit. Chris will be happy to hear that Kywi sells unplated flat head steel screws with slotted heads. Unfortunately, they appear to be available only in relatively large sizes, too big for hinges and the like.
Kywi doesn’t sell lumber, although they do have a small selection of rather pathetic looking sheet goods. So next up is the maderera (wood merchant). An architect acquaintance gave me a couple of suggestions for local wood suppliers, but I haven’t yet had a chance to check them out. At least one of the ones he mentioned sells colorado, which is known by the name quebracho in the U.S. Quebracho means “axe breaker,” which is apt, since its Janka hardness of 4570 lbf makes it the hardest commercially available wood species in the world. I don’t know if I have the courage to try it out.
Yesterday, we drove by the two places to figure out exactly where they were. Being that it was Sunday, they were both closed, so I didn’t get to see what they had in stock. In general, it looks like Monterey pine (Pinus radiata) is the common softwood, while blue gum (Eucalyptus globulus) is the “utility” hardwood. Both species are plantation-grown.
As we were heading back from our quest, my wife noticed a small shop (also closed) with a sign reading herramientas para madera (“woodworking tools”) out front. So this afternoon, I walked into town to do some grocery shopping as well as check out this store. It turned out not to be of much interest, stocking mostly the same kinds of tools that Kywi has. They did have a much better selection of cabinet hardware, though, and despite not having the slightest clue what the Spanish term for it was, I was able to find a sliding bolt latch to replace a broken one on one of the windows at the house.
During my walk, I passed by a place that I had driven by several times but never noticed from the car. They stock a variety of sheet goods along with some S4S pine (madera cepillada = “planed wood”):
The prices seem a bit on the high side, but the (roughly) 2×8 boards look suitable for a workbench. And given that the place is about a five-minute walk from the house, I can easily pick up a board (or two) and carry it home without worrying about how to fit it in the car. Maybe not the 13-ft 2×8’s, though.
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