Since the day we started selling books, readers have requested a sweatshirt with our logo. We have always demurred because we are a publishing company – not a clothing store.
But during our recent coffin-building party, our friends browbeat us until we agreed to produce a hooded, full-zip sweatshirt that was made in the United States with the Lost Art Press logo. (Note to self: Self, don’t drink beer around Raney Nelson because you become intellectually weak.) After a couple attempts at designing a logo worthy of a sweatshirt, I went to professional designer Joshua Minnich.
Joshua specializes in hand-lettered logos and has done some spectacular work for Texas Heritage Woodworks that I have been following on Instagram. Joshua developed two designs for us and, after a single tweak, we settled on the design above.
It will be featured on the front of the black sweatshirt with the zipper running through the middle of the logo (yes, I know, we never make things easy on ourselves).
John Hoffman is trying to get us a good price on the sweatshirts, but these should be ready to sell in the store in a few weeks. We will have pricing and details soon.
We are in the last stages of developing the design for our first Lost Art Press sweatshirt and need to order the full-zip hooded sweatshirts for the screen-printing.
To make sure we don’t order the wrong mix of sizes, could you take this poll?
The sweatshirts will be black, American-made, with a full zipper up the front and a hood. If you ordered a sweatshirt, what size would you order?
I’m sorry to say these are the only sizes available to us in the brands we have selected, they do not offer 7XL or “Chipmunk.”
The picture above is the clock tower of the Old Post Office building at the corner of Pennsylvania Ave. and 12th Street in Washington, D.C. Calvin Cobb’s workshop is behind the clock faces – so in his shop, he says, time runs backward.
But in reality, time marches relentlessly forward, and for the Old Post Office, that means stepping into new life as a hotel. Donald Trump is in the midst of developing the former government building into a luxury hotel, slated to open in 2016. It certainly beats razing the 1899 Richardsonian Romanesque structure.
And I suppose Calvin would be pleased – presumably, there is actual woodworking going on inside the walls of his old workshop as workers ready the hotel space for visitors.
The building, designed by Willoughby J. Edbrooke, was D.C.’s main post office for only 15 years; in 1914, the postal service relocated to a larger building near Union Station. What then became known as the “old” Post office was saved during the 1920s/1930s redevelopment of Federal Triangle only because there weren’t enough funds to tear it down (or perhaps because enough people realized how politically inexpedient it would be to spend money razing a perfectly sound building in the midst of the Great Depression).
In the early 1970s, there was another attempt to tear it down, but it was quickly (in political time) squelched by an ardent group of preservationists; in 1973, the Old Post Office was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, a multi-stage renovation project commenced that resulted in a mix of federal office space and three retail levels (and eventual addition of an annex).
But it wasn’t successful. By 2000, the vacancy rate on the retail space was 80 percent, the annex was closed and there was no income.
Since then, there have been several efforts to renovate the space, including the “Old Post Office Building Redevelopment Act of 2008” (H.R. 5001), which eventually led to movement (following a lot of maneuvering by various agencies including the General Services Administration (GSA)…which is too complicated to boil down into just a few sentences).
In early 2012, the GSA announced it has chosen the Trump Organization as the potential redeveloper for plans that included a conference center, restaurants and 250+ hotel rooms, as well as a small museum dedicated to the history of the building, and the agreement to preserve the historic integrity of the building. And the National Park Service retains control over the clock tower and observation deck.
So if all goes according to plan, you’ll be able to visit Calvin’s workshop when the space reopens – whether or not you can afford the room rates.
But you’ll be able to read “Calvin Cobb: Radio Woodworker! A Novel with Measured Drawings” well before the Old Post Office Building is once again open to the public.
We’re 99 percent there, and will have everything off to the printer within three weeks. Linda Watts is making the final corrections to the measured drawings and finishing up design work on the end papers. Illustrator Jode Thompson is putting the finishing touches on the drawing that will become the dust jacket, Roy is working on copy for the back of the dust jacket, and Chris and I are writing copy for the dust-jacket flaps.
By tomorrow evening, I should be able to export a soup-to-nuts PDF of the project for final review, then it’s off to the printer and then to you.
I am embarking on a project to (slowly) repopulate my deck with a better grade of furniture. First up is a pair of small folding tables. The design is adapted from one published a few years ago in Popular Woodworking. The table shown here is 20″ square by 38″…er, no…24.5″ high.
Designing furniture that can survive being left outdoors in the sun and rain without eventually degrading into a pile of sticks (or worse) is a whole ’nother enchilada compared to ordinary furniture making. There is significant overlap with campaign furniture, with the added bonus that wood that gets rained on moves. A lot. In fact, outdoor furniture has much in common with boatbuilding, and so one looks to suppliers like Jamestown Distributors for fasteners and finishes, SailRite for upholstery fabrics, etc.
The woods used must be durable (resistant to decay), of course. That limits one’s choices to the usual suspects: teak, mahogany and its relatives, white oak, etc. Some “cedars” are also suitable, though their relatively low strength means that the various components usually need to be beefier than in this table. Other North American woods that would be suitable are black locust and honey mesquite, both of which can be hard to find but are probably worth looking for. I haven’t worked with mesquite, but it’s on my to-do list, as it is supposed to have exceptional dimensional stability with changing humidity.
These tables are in sapele, an African relative of mahogany that’s rated as “moderately durable.” To give them a leg up (pun intended) in terms of surviving the elements, I’ve fitted them out with “shoes” made of UHMW polyethylene. The shoes are held in by a 1/8″-diameter oak pin, which can easily be drilled out to allow for replacement, in case they wear out or the whole experiment turns out to have been a bad idea.
There are four legs and four top supports, and no two are exactly the same. They come in each of the four combinations of inner/outer and left/right mirror-image pairs. It got to be so confusing that I made up some custom labels before I drilled all of the holes and counterbores.
For want of a good locknut…
Chris isn’t the only one with hardware woes. Because the joints of this table need to allow folding for storage, the fasteners have to stay put without being fully snugged up to the wood (which in any case is only going to be a temporary condition as the wood shrinks and swells). So some kind of locking fastener is called for. The standard solution is a nylon-insert locknut (leftmost in the photo below). These work well, but I didn’t want to use them, for two reasons. The main reason is that they’re thick, quite a bit thicker than an ordinary hex nut, which would mean having to reduce the thickness of wood left at the bottom of the counterbores more than I was comfortable with. The secondary reason is that nylon is not UV stable, meaning that they would degrade over time (although, to be honest, so will the wood).
Back when I was in the cyclotron business, we used some aircraft-grade locknuts that were all stainless steel, and worked by having a thinned-down collar that looked like it had been slightly squished in a vise. I wasn’t able to find that kind of locknut, but I did find some at McMaster-Carr that were superficially similar. I ordered a pack of the center-lock style (second from the left). You can see a small indent on the flat; there’s a matching one on the other side, and together they deform the thread just enough to create a locking action. Or at least that’s how they’re supposed to work. I found the nuts to be wildly inconsistent from one to the next, and most barely locked at all.
So I ordered a pack of the top-lock style (third from the left). These have three small deformations on the top of the nut, which you can just barely make out in the photo. These turned out to be a lot more consistent than the center-lock variety, although there are a still a few bad apples in the pack. These are the ones I’m using in these tables, but to hedge my bets, I also ordered a pack of low-profile nylon-insert locknuts (rightmost), in case the top-lock nuts turned out as bad as the center-lock ones.
Finishing touches
I haven’t yet applied any finish to the table. One option would be to leave it unfinished and let it go gray (like Megan the teak chair in the photo). I have a piece of sapele that’s been sitting outdoors for about eight years, and while there’s a fair bit of surface checking, it still looks pretty good, and remains structurally sound. I will most likely go with Osmo “One Coat Only.” I’m currently field-testing another piece of sapele with that on it, and it’s holding up well after a couple of months, but I’m going to see how it survives the winter before making a final decision. I decided early on against a traditional exterior varnish finish (e.g., Sikkens Cetol); I just can’t stand the look of varnish on unfilled open-grain woods, and I wasn’t about to try to use a pore filler on an outdoor piece.
In order to facilitate the inevitability of refinishing, the only parts of the table that are glued are the components of the two halves of the top. Everything else is bolted or screwed together. The top panels and the two leg braces are attached with #6-32 screws and brass inserts. The screws (also from McMaster-Carr) have a patch of locking goop that you can see in the photo. The makeshift insert installation tool on the right, along with a drill press to keep everything square, works better than any commercial tool that I’ve tried.
Lessons learned
If I were to build these tables again, I’d increase the thickness of the top from 1/2″ to 9/16″ and reduce the thickness of the legs and supports from 3/4″ to 11/16″. I also realized after it was way too late that bronze saw nuts like these might be just the thing for the leg/support joints.
I think the most important lesson I learned, though, is that writing a blog post using an iPad (from a hotel room) is never a good idea…
The handful of you who witnessed the incident during the Midwest Woodworking wood sale already know that my block plane spontaneously disassembled while I was using it to check out some 8/4 incense cedar, with the various components flying out of my hand and scattering themselves across the concrete floor.
Surprisingly enough, I couldn’t find any signs of damage afterwards. There was a nick in the front adjusting knob, but that may have been there already. Anyway, once I got home I decided that it deserved the full spa treatment after an experience like that.
I disassembled it as far as I could, lightly went over the sole and sides with some 400-grit silicon carbide paper to remove any incipient rust, then cleaned everything with soap and water. After everything was good and dry, I sprayed the bare iron surfaces with Boeshield T-9.* Once that was dry, I wiped it all down with a cotton cloth to remove the excess.
Ready for reassembly
Then it was just a matter of putting all the pieces back together in the correct order, honing the blade, and verifying that I hadn’t screwed something up and it still worked. Speaking of honing, I’ve been experimenting with some freehand honing techniques recently, and while the jury is still out, one thing I’ve decided to permanently add to the regimen is a final stropping. I bought a couple of Genuine Horse Butt strops from Joel Moskowitz, and—as he advises—use the rough side of the leather with some micro-fine stropping compound.
The proof is in the shaving: sugar pine end grain
I suspect that the slight round-over produced by the stropping acts sort of like a micro-bevel, and helps toughen the edge. The net result is that the edge seems to last a bit longer between sharpenings.
–Steve Schafer
*I’ve also used TopCote (now apparently called GlideCote). Boeshield has gotten better reviews with regard to preventing rust; TopCote is less messy to use.
