Just as Chris was taking his first class in years, I went AWOL to accompany my wife on one of life’s greatest adventures, the early arrival of our second son. In the meantime, as many of you noticed, the web site experienced some glitches. Our forum, still in beta stage, crashed twice. Some readers notified us that they were temporarily locked out of their LAP accounts. Others reported problems posting comments using the WordPress function within posts.
Please accept my apology for these inconveniences, as well as my sincerest thanks to all readers for your patience and understanding. While these outages were not limited to our website (Muut and WordPress have been reporting system-wide outages), I do wish that I had been able to communicate better during these problems.
In related news, I am still working with Muut to hammer out some of the bare-bones issues revealed by the forum’s beta release. The areas I’m addressing with them include GUI, user experience, and login/logout issues. If you have additional concerns or suggestions about the test forum, please send them my way.
As a result of these glitches, we are delaying the full forum launch until October. Thank you for your patience. I will do my best to ensure that the result is worth the extra wait!
— Brian Clites
Addendum 9/10/15: A number of users have reported frustration when trying to login to the forum for the first time. Please note that the forum login should be the same username and password that you use to place orders within the LAP store. (Your LAP store credentials are not the same as the WordPress/Facebook credentials that you are prompted to enter for posting blog comments below.) If you have experienced a problem, please ensure you have created LAP store credentials at: http://lostartpress.com/account/register. If you still experience problems, please email me. brian@lostartpress.com
Before taking off for a second scoop of England this summer Marsha, I mean Chris, gave me a key to the blog. Silly rabbit.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve found some interesting woodworking references and will post a few while Chris is away. I will try to refrain from cat pictures, but can tell you there will be monkeys.
To start things off let’s discuss Chris’ obsession with his beloved (his word) $12 jack plane. Longtime LAP-landers are familiar with this infatuation and it is highly likely that many of you have your own little tool crushes. Did you know his nickname for the plane is Lola?
A while back I put together a little hommage for Chris and Lola. I call it “Schwarzlandia”:
Late one evening a large object fell through the mists shrouding the teeny-tiny Duchy of Schwarzlandia. Once the dust had settled and the sneezing had stopped the bravest of the brave Schwarzlandians rushed out to investigate.
We’re making progress on the Lost Art Press forum.
Chris found us a platform, called Muut. It is cutting-edge and looks pretty slick. Muut also has some invisible features that appealed to us, such as its infinite archiving of posts (nothing can be edited or deleted, except by me, after you post it), and its broader safeguards towards user integrity.
John worked like a bear last week to get the platform fully embedded into the site. Thanks to his efforts, you will be able to post to the forum simply by logging in with your existing LAP store credentials. The forum is already embedded in the product page for each book. And eventually links to the most relevant discussions will also be integrated into our blog posts.
We have tentatively scheduled the forum’s full beta release for Monday, Sept. 14. On that date, Chris, John and I will respond real-time to all questions LAP. Kind of like a Reddit-style AMA discussion within the new forum itself. More details to come.
Why do you still have to wait a few more weeks? Well, even though everything has gone smoothly so far, I am not quite ready to jump full-in. There are some technical kinks I’m still working out, some more CSS to embed, and some things I don’t like about Muut that their coders are helping me with. (For example, I’m obsessively organized, but Muut is designed to be automatically indexed and automatically categorized – my worst nightmare!)
I also anticipate some unforeseen glitches. In other words, I know there are knots hidden underneath the face grain. Will you help start planing it for me? You can use a limited preview of the forum here. For the preview, I have disabled all of the categories and sub-categories save the channels on “Workbenches” and “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” If you check it out now you can get in early on the conversations. Send me your impressions.
Finally, use of the forum (and of the LAP site more broadly) will henceforth be governed by a set of rules. (Cue the tomato-throwing.) Most of you already follow these previously unspoken guidelines. But the demise of past woodworking forums spurred us to put these in print. And I will enforce them vigorously. (I already deleted three posts on the blog in the past day – did you notice, you otherwise-nice people making jokes about the blind and deaf? Oh, and I deleted one of Chris’s comments, too. Sorry Chris – rules are rules.)
The following is our draft of the new Terms of Service for participating in the Lost Art Press community:
Welcome to the digital home of Lost Art Press (LAP). We strive to treat you as a guest in our house. We ask that you behave accordingly. Therefore, your use of the LAP web site is contingent upon the following Terms of Service:
Use of the forum is governed solely by the owners of LAP. The forum moderator(s) will delete any post that violates the following rules. Repeat violations will result in the deletion and deactivation of your LAP account.
This is a woodworking forum. Only woodworking will be discussed.
No political, religious or social commentary of any sort. This restriction includes users’ quotations, signature lines and avatars. If it’s not woodworking, don’t post it.
No sexist, racist or hateful language.
No bullying, harassment or intimidation. LAP welcomes woodworkers of all skill levels. If you don’t have anything helpful to say, don’t say anything.
No solicitation, advertising, self-promotion or spamming. Links to external websites are permitted only if they are directly relevant to a discussion.
No profanity.
No anonymous posts. To ensure integrity, users must login to their Lost Art Press account in order to post to the forum. If you do not already have a LAP account, you can create one here for free. We will not share your name or personal information with any third parties. Fake or duplicate LAP accounts will be deleted.
When in doubt, see Rule No. 1.
– Brian Clites, your forum moderator and author of TheWoodProf.com
Chris might have promised not to get too far into the “This Old House” mode as he works on the cool old building he plans to turn into the Lost Art Press Bat Cave. I however made no such promise, and my neighbor recently gave me a couple of pallets of old roof tiles as a contribution to renovating my own Bat Cave/barn (with real bats! but no belfry, which doesn’t seem fair or appropriate, somehow).
The tiles are hung on laths nailed across the rafters. The ergot, or the little hook, to the left, is used to hold the tile on the laths. In this one, you could probably get a good fingerprint or two of the fingers of the child or woman that formed it.
When you receive a few thousand old roof tiles as a gift, on the condition that you do not leave the pallets full of tiles decorating your neighbor’s yard for any length of time, you get out the wheelbarrow and decorously start to move them to adorn your own.
The tiles were made from clay deposits down the hill along the river Cher that runs through my village. The clay was pressed into molds and then left in the sun to dry enough to be fired, and during that time various kinds of marks made their way into the fresh clay. So to relieve the tedium of sorting and moving the tiles, it is fun, as part of making sure they are still sound and fit to be re-used, to inspect what was the sunny-side-up, which goes down when they are installed on the roof.
You get dog prints, cat prints, small birds, big birds, various other types of beasts, even children. There was the one with the number 1786 written on the back, which either means it was the 1786th tile of that production run, or that it was made in 1786. I figure that 220 years is pretty good for a hunk of terra-cotta exposed to the weather in all seasons, and if the tiles are sound, they will last for plenty more.
But the other day, I found a real puzzler, which lead me into a Felibien-esque journey back in time.
“Sante lu Douice” it read as I turned it over.
“Santé” means healthy or in good equilibrium. But there is also the trace of an “i,” after the “a,” which would make it “Sainté” – sainted or blessed.
“Douice” does not exist, as such, in French, but a few minutes rummaging around turned up a couple of books from the 17th century where I saw it as an alternate spelling of “douce,” or possibly “doulce,” meaning pleasant, agreeable, moderate, sweet.
“Lu” is a puzzler, the past tense of “lire” (to read), which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in context. But there is the word “lieu,” which means place, which makes perfect sense.
“Healthy pleasant place” or “Blessed pleasant place” would be exactly what one might expect from somebody wanting to bless the house upon which they were installing a new roof.
Of course it could also mean “Falling off the roof is bad for your health.”
Asking around online and in the neighborhood, the inscription mostly got a Gallic shrug. The writing is obviously a benediction, but as to the specifics, the thoughts ranged from “Who knows?” to an old non-standard spelling, or in the local patois?
There are perhaps 50 more or less regional languages in France, the patois, and they could vary even from village to village. They are based largely on the ancient north vs. south, Langue d’Oil vs. Langue d’Oc language divide in France, with Basque, Breton, Germanic, Catalan and others scattered around the edges. Some of them developed a literature and more or less complete dictionaries, but in the French heartland, they were mostly the spoken dialects, with educated people, publicly anyway, speaking and writing in French. One of the gratifying signs, as I was learning French, was the increasing frequency with which I began to understand conversation around me. One of the surprising things was how often, in more isolated and rural areas, I realized that the French people around me were not in fact speaking French.
In the 1780s the locals speaking patois as their first language would have been a large majority. So it is easy to see how a word in popular inscriptions like this could be misspelled, or a word like “lieu” could end up rendered phonetically as “lu.”
Two more, the top another benediction invoking “St. Clement pa pe”, or Pope St. Clement I. The second tile, slightly smaller than the rest and made with different clay, was apparently made “A BLERE” (in Bleré) a town a couple of miles down the river.
Graham Robb, in his book “The Discovery of France,” has a good account of the history of the patois, along with in this context a perfect anecdote.
He says that nobody knows why the divide between the Langue d’Oil and Langue d’Oc falls where it does. It does not consistently follow any natural or historic boundaries. Is it perhaps a general Roman as opposed to Burgundian influence, or something more ancient? But there is one way to tell where the line runs.
South of the line, the tiled roofs of vernacular buildings have a slope of about 30° and are covered with canal, or Roman, tiles. North of the line, the slope is much steeper, around 45°, and the roofs are covered with flat tiles, like these.
The old barn – late 1600s, probably, roof in split chestnut lathes at least 90 years old. Needs work.The track of a wading bird. Could be some kind of small heron, but it looks more like a moorhen.The top could be a weasel of some kind, but more probably a cat because in the the first two tracks there is no sign of a weasel’s claws, but in the third, the very fine and sharp retractable claws of a cat coming out for the pounce. In the second a dog is turning around and overprinting in the wet clay, perhaps wondering “Why is that guy yelling at me again?”
— Brian Anderson. Anderson is translating Andre Felibien’s “Des Principes de l’Architecture, de la Sculpture, de la Peinture, et des Autres Arts qui en Dépendent.”
When I teach edge-jointing by hand, I am surprised by how many woodworkers (even experienced ones) evaluate their work incorrectly.
For starters, every board has a “true face,” sometimes called a “datum surface.” This is the one surface that you should press the stock of the square against. This applies even to machine work – electric planers are notorious for creating boards that taper across their width.
So you should mark one true face and always check your progress against that face.
Second: Tilt the square so one arris touches the edge (see photo above). Putting the square flat on the edge will put small errors in shardow. Ergo: You think you have a perfect edge, but when you get to glue-up you learn the gappy truth.
Just as Chris was taking his first class in years, I went AWOL to accompany my wife on one of life’s greatest adventures, the early arrival of our second son. In the meantime, as many of you noticed, the web site experienced some glitches. Our forum, still in beta stage, crashed twice. Some readers notified us that they were temporarily locked out of their LAP accounts. Others reported problems posting comments using the WordPress function within posts.
