Lie-Nielsen’s shipment of Rivierre die-forged nails have arrived in Maine and the company has started to sell the nails on its website here.
I ordered one box of each size and style to take a look at the blued finish and the hammered-head variants. (Previously all the Rivierre nails I’ve used were black and had the diamond heads.) Yes, I paid full retail. All the nails are very nice. The blue is nice and dark – almost black. The difference is subtle and is something most casual observers would overlook (in other words: either is fine).
If you are looking for a good assortment to begin with, here are some guidelines:
30mm nails: Fastening 3/8”-thick stuff.
35mm to 40mm nails: Fastening 1/2”-thick stuff.
50mm to 55mm nails: Fastening 3/4”-thick stuff.
You’ll probably use 35mm and 40mm nails more than the other sizes. That’s because they are ideal for cabinet backs and bottoms. And once you reduce the thickness of a 3/4” cabinet side to 1/2” for a dado or rabbet, you’ll grab a 35mm or 40mm nail for that joint as well.
In general, the longer the nail, the more fastening power it provides, but the extra length also makes the fastener more likely to split the work or bend to follow the grain. The good news is that these nails are robust and don’t tend to follow the grain much (I have yet to have one wander, which is a significant concern with softer cut nails).
It took a long time for Lie-Nielsen to get these nails, so if you order I would err on the side of ordering a few extra boxes (nails don’t go bad – like chicken).
Here in Indy the big race is over and people have time to get back to their hobbies. Hopefully free time has come your way, too. Or maybe your kids are out of school and you are drowning in chaos? Whatever life is bringing your way, it seems like people are finding time to build and are looking for advice. 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.
Sliding Dovetails Ralph wants input on whether he can use sliding dovetails instead of dados on his bookcase. Would it work? Can it be done with nails as well? Or is that overkill?
When to Rive a Log
James had a question about splitting live oak, which has turned into quite a discussion. Take a look at the comments about splitting, the treatment of the wood, and the regions where live oak can be found.
Staked Coffee Table
The staked coffee table we have been keeping an eye on is done and in place (picture at top). It looks great and is an adaptation of a design from “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” See the detailed pictures here.
Tongue and Groove Planes Mark is ready to get a tongue in groove plane and is looking for suggestions. Lie-Nielsen planes or the Lee Valley conversion kit for the small plow are at the top of his list. Help a guy out and give him your two cents.
Boot Bench Design Feedback
Here is the picture, now give some feedback. We all know what it is like to think about something so long that we aren’t sure whether the design is quite right. Let’s get Chris started on his project.
I have a terrible weakness for marking and measuring tools. Even though most of my work eschews hitting a particular number, I am a sucker for squares, knives and marking gauges. Let’s start with squares.
Squares I have three Starrett combination squares. Two have been with me for 20 years. The third is a new acquisition. My 12” Starrett square was probably the first quality tool I bought when I was hired by Popular Woodworking Magazine. I was terrified by the price at the time – about $65 – but I was hooked after using a fellow employee’s Starrett square.
I also have a 6” Starrett combination square I bought at a flea market for $20 (Cincinnati is awash in machinist tools).
This year I bought a 24” Starrett combination square with the oversized H8 head. It was my reward to myself for finishing “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” With this square and its 24”-long blade I was able to retire my framing square and trade up in accuracy. I would never call this a “must-have” tool. But I’ve always wanted one.
Despite the above, I’m not much of a spokeman for Starrett. The quality of the new stuff seems to be falling lately. I hope it’s temporary.
I also have two squares from Chris Vesper. I have his 7” try square and his fantastic double square (with all the accessory blades). The 7” try square is the ultimate arbiter of squareness in the shop. The double square measures things in places that no other square can go.
Marking Knives I have two marking knives. A Blue Spruce Toolworks knife that is the only tool in my chest that I did not purchase. It was a gift from a reader in Arkansas who was dying and asked me to have it. The handle is some fantastic burl and the blade is, of course, the high quality you expect from Dave Jeske at Blue Spruce.
My other marking knife is a Veritas with a black plastic handle. Despite the plastic handle, it’s an excellent knife and is the tool I use when I am working out of town. I love how it won’t roll off my bench.
Marking Gauges I have four Tite-Mark gauges. I wish had four more. Don’t buy imitators or from people who ripped off Kevin Drake’s work. Your gauge lines will go astray and you’ll get a gypsy curse to boot (and then Marta will have to remove it).
Dividers and Compasses I have two pairs of small dividers from Starrett. One is vintage; one is new. The new one is not in the same league as the vintage one. I also own two Starrett compasses – one new and one vintage. The quality hasn’t slipped on these. These compasses allow you to swap the pencil for a second point, and so they serve me well for large layout chores.
Sliding Bevel Gauges I have two of them, a 7” and 4”, both from Chris Vesper. Before I could afford Vesper’s work, I was a sucker for the Stanley No. 18 butt-locking gauge.
Pencils I use a variety of mechanical pencils and lead holders for rough marking of the material. I also use the fine-lead pencils to accentuate knife lines so I can see them.
Trammels & Odd Bits I finally gave up my grandfather’s Japanese trammels and picked up the Veritas ones. I have wooden shop-made winding sticks, a straightedge and pinch rods stashed in the front chamber of my chest next to my saws. Somewhere in there is also a plastic protractor.
For marking dovetails, I have the Sterling Saddle-Tail. Love it.
And Tape Measures I can’t imagine working without a tape measure on my belt. And I get the funniest looks when I walk into the local hardware store with it. It’s a 12’ Stanley Powerlock – the kind with the metal case. Contractors look at me like I’m wearing a dress or a dominatrix outfit. In our hardware store it’s 50’ or go home.
I also have a few Lufkins floating around that I use when I go to the lumberyard or need to get a rough measurement. But for measuring anything “for keeps,” I use the Stanley. Every tape measure is a little different and a little off from its brothers and sisters.
Next up: Chisels and such.
— Christopher Schwarz
Part 1 of this series on handplanes can be found here.
Part 2 on saws is here.
Part 2-1/2 on frame saws is here.
I don’t know why my brain refused to acknowledge the two frame saws in my chest while I was writing part 2 of this series. So here’s part 2-1/2 of the series on my coping saw and fretsaw.
Ah, now I remember why my brain froze, I didn’t want to revisit the topic of coping saws. I’ve still not found one that satisfies me on all fronts. I’ve tried, cheap, expensive, vintage, yellow and rare. All have some aspect that I don’t like.
So I’ve given up and reverted to the German-made Olson coping saw I bought in 1996 or 1997. It’s been modified significantly, especially the blade-tensioning mechanism, and I’ve stretched the frame. And you can’t buy this saw new anymore. The Olson saw is now made overseas and I’m not a fan of what’s happened to it.
What I can recommend, however, are the blades for whatever coping saw you do end up settling for. I have been very happy with the Pegas coping saw blades, which are made in Switzerland and cut like a dream. And they are tough; I’ve had individual blades last for more than six months.
For fretsaws, I also went full-German. I’ve had an old German jeweler’s saw since the 1990s that tensions blades to a remarkable level. Why? Because I filed grooves into the pads of the blade-clamping mechanism. That improved its grip to “Coach Stan Turnipseed’s Handshake” level on the EU’s fretsaw clamping matrix.
You can find these jeweler’s saws on ebay for $10 to $20. The old ones are better than the new ones. Be sure to get some Pegas blades for these as well.
Back in April of this year, my friend Chris Schwarz wrote a post about a staked table he built. I’ll confess – my first reaction to the photo was “WTF?” – but there was something about the table’s aesthetics that intrigued me and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. It was as if the photo of the table begged me to stare at it longer, goading my brain to make sense of it. I should have responded with an anyeurism emoji.
I know from personal experience with some of the staked pieces in The Anarchist’s Design Book (and other similar forms) that photographs don’t express the (potential) spatial elegance of these forms very well, so I was willing to look past the picture. And as I did (I studied that photo three or four times the day I received it), the more I wanted to “riff” on Chris’ table. So I started sketching.
It became clear that I had to build the thing I kind of-sort of had in my head in order to move on with life. But even after sketching, it was more of a conceptual puzzle that needed working out rather than a design. Whatever it ended up being, it apparently had the following criteria:
Three legs. I thought four would resolve “too well” or too easily.
Round. I wanted something to place next to my “big chair” which has a Scandinavian aesthetic that lends itself to curves. Also I thought that the roundness would help alleviate some of the M. C. Escher problems that occur when your brain has corners against which it can “register” what it’s perceiving.
Funky geometry – square or round, everyone knows what an end table with equally ordered legs looks like. I wanted the legs to look like they were wrapping around a column that wasn’t there.
I would normally spend a few hours in Sketchup trying to work this out into something that would then come together in the shop. But I’ve spent the last year doing home improvement projects in plywood, particleboard and veneer and wanted to get to work immediately. So after taking some measurements of the chair mentioned above, I decided to make good on my commitment to clear out my lumber rack and go straight to prototyping, knowing that the best outcome would be a failure to learn from (followed by a funeral pyre for the prototype).
As suggested in The Anarchist’s Design Book, I first made a quick model by turning a small disc and using coat hanger segments to play with angles. My goal was to get a very rough idea of the issues at play, not to faithfully represent the piece (because I had no real clue on where it was going yet). The model proved to me that the concept wasn’t completely bonkers, but also that it needed more careful consideration than banging a bunch of sticks into the bottom of a circle and calling it a day. It was clear that much of the overall design would be “derived” from a number of elements:
The radius between each leg and the center of the tabletop (I’ll call this the leg radius)
The angle between the legs and the bottom of the tabletop (I’ll call this the splay)
The angle of the legs from the center (I’ll call this the rotational angle)
The length of the legs, which would determine the proportional distance at which the legs would appear to intersect (I’ll call this the fleemkoopen stropfheimer)
Though I love incorporating curves into the things I build, I don’t work on round furniture very often, so while many of these design considerations are also present in rectangular furniture, it took my brain some time to reorient itself to working on radii off a circle’s center rather than more Cartesianally-oriented distances from edges.
I had 11” wide stock in the lumber rack so the table was going to be some multiple of that–I decided 22″. I decided to work first on a small square piece of 8/4 poplar. This would allow me several attempts at finding a good set of angles for the mortises and experiment with different ways of marking them out and drilling them. My plan was to drill the mortises and use dowels to evaluate the angles–basically a larger version of the disc-and-coat hanger model.
I failed over and over, each failure more exciting than the last. Some failures were cognitive failures (e.g. forgetting which layout line was the rotational angle) and some were construction failures (sloppy brace-and-bit handling). But after a few attempts on a couple of boards I landed at something that was close enough from a design perspective. I had also streamlined techniques for markup and drilling with a brace and auger bit.
In the end, on an 11“ square piece of poplar, I landed on:
A leg radius of 3–7/8”
A splay of 124° or 56° depending on which way you splay. (I think in conventional terms this would be 34°, measured as the acute angle between the leg and a line perpendicular to the bottom of the tabletop, but my brain won’t accept that. In this case, I want to capture the angle to which I set my bevel gauge and to also reflect that the legs point into the table, not out)
A rotational angle of 17°
A fleemkoopen stropfheimer of 18–19“ for a total table height of 21–22”
Knowing that it was going to be way easier to work on an 11“ square piece than a large round piece, I drilled the holes with a brace and auger bit (leaving the tapered mortise for later), laminated the block to the bottom of a 22” wide, 8/4 poplar panel. I marked and cut out a rough circle, affixed a face plate and went to the lathe. While at the lathe I realized that the curve I was shooting for needed more wood than I had laminated onto the bottom of the tabletop, so I made some design compromises. Turning the top was otherwise pretty straightforward (and lots of fun!), though by the time it was all said and done I would end up taking the tabletop back to the lathe three times to refine the shape.
As for the legs, I wanted something round-ish. I’ve had an 8′ long piece of oak stair rail sitting on my back porch for over a year, and by using my Jedi powers to check off the “mount new stair rail” item in my household to do list (i.e. I convinced myself I didn’t want a new stair rail), I decided to use that for prototyping.
It was convenient in that it was mostly round and made from wood, but was a piece of crap in all other respects (namely that it was laminated in both thickness and in length). But it got used and is no longer sitting on my back porch. In any case, I started with a pretty chunky ovular design by using offset turning, but unhappy with that I put them back on the lathe and turned them to be more svelte. I then planed two sides into each leg and did some rough shaping with some spokeshaves to get them to communicate “not round, not flat”, which is what I was going for.
I dry-fit the legs into the table and decided that the crappy grain from the stair rail was drawing too much attention to the legs, making it hard to evaluate the overall form. So I charred them and that helped immensely, as did reducing the contrast of the top by giving it a quick coat of stain.
After staining the top and leveling the legs, I called this first prototype done. I almost tossed it right after inserting the legs, but I’m glad I took it through a rough “coloring” process because that changed my impression of the piece significantly.
It’s very much built as a prototype–I concentrated on stuff that I wanted to resolve in the design rather than fit-and-finish or engineering. I will probably give this to a friend or burn it, but I’ll keep it around a bit and ponder my next moves.
I’ll leave my more specific opinions on the piece itself this out of this post except to say that as a prototype, it was successful. It came together quickly (maybe 5–6 hours actual build time across a few days) and allowed me to experiment and refine both form and process. Most importantly: through the process of repeatedly failing, it’s very clear to me what I want to change as I go forward.
