Many of you told us that “blue” was not a manly enough color. And so we now offer our hats in battleship gray with black thread.
These hats are – like everything in the Lost Art Press store – made in the United States. The soft and unstructured hat is made by Bayside and embroidered in Indiana. The hat’s size is adjustable by a steel clasp and headband. It fits everyone except Sean Thomas.
They are in stock and available for immediate shipment. The cost is $17.
The old Stanley router plane turned up in the mail from a colleague in the States a while back, the box a little crunched and the threaded adjustment shaft was bent. Not a huge problem, but the thing was that it made it impossible to set the iron for anything less than about 3/8” (9 mm). The question was; leave it as is, or try to bend and risk breaking the shaft? Not needing the plane right then, I decided to think about it…
The bent shaft made it impossible to decrease the depth of cut.
The other day when cutting some tenons for a desk for my daughter Rachel, I decided to try to fix the shaft. I figured even if I broke the shaft the plane would still be usable, as the thumb nut is only used for fine adjustments.
I had had a similar problem on a Record 044 plow plane I bought online a while back. It seemed at the time to be an incredible bargain. When it arrived, I could see why. Sharper eyes than mine… There is a machine screw that holds the irons, of different widths, up against the body and a pressure foot to hold the iron against its bed. Whoever bought the plane way back when seemed not to have understood how the screw and the pressure foot worked together, and had cranked the screw so hard he had bent it. Taking a closer look back at the photos online, you could see the problem, but I hadn’t noticed. The iron couldn’t seat properly and from the looks of it the plane was put back into the box and never touched again. None of the irons had ever even been sharpened.
For the plow plane, I took three regular nuts and threaded them down the screw, aligned them and clamped them in a metal vise and used a big Cresent wrench to bend the screw straight. Worked fine, but in this case, the shaft was a true 1/4” and the 6 mm nuts I have here in France wouldn’t fit. So I knocked together a little jig in 5 mm ply to protect the threads from the vise.
The soft aspen-cored okoume 5mm ply was perfect for the job.The 5 mm ply was the perfect thickness to leave space for the 1/4″ threaded shaft. You can see the slight indent where the wood compressed around the shaft.
Worked like a charm, not 100% straight, but fully functional.
The iron was in pretty good shape, and 15 minutes on the stone got it done.
Rachel’s desk
Oak and black locust, with maritime pine as secondary wood.
I have always liked a low angle for my wrists for typing, so I added an old-fashioned typing tray, wide enough to take a big laptop or a wide keyboard, with a drawer to store it behind the hinged center piece.
I ended up taking it to a joiner I know to cut the profile around the edges of the top on his table moulder. The end grain of the black locust was just too splintery to cut across it with the moulding plane I wanted to use, even with a sacrificial block clamped onto the end to keep it from tearing out. Other than that, I used a thicknesser, and then the rest was hand tools.
There is a reason it is a cliché among woodworkers to speak of the satisfaction of building something for your family that, as long as it lives in a home, will last centuries: It really is satisfying.
Now, if only someone could tell me what eschauffent means…
– Brian Anderson
Brian Anderson is a translator and woodworker living in France. He is translating the woodworking parts of André Felibien’s Des principes de l’architecture, de la sculpture, de la peinture… avec un dictionnaire des terms for Lost Art Press. The book is due out in the Autumn of 2014. Anderson translated Grandpa‘s Workshop for us.
This weekend (April 4 and 5) Lost Art Press will be at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event in Cincinnati. As always, the event will be held at the offices of Popular Woodworking Magazine (go here for directions and hours).
We’ll have all of our Lost Art Press books (including a deluxe version of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible”) to sell. But this year we’ll have some extra stuff because the show is in our back yard.
We’ll have discounted copies of our books that are blemished or were soiled (don’t ask) and returned. In addition, I have been cleaning out the basement and have gathered together a heap of tools I had forgotten about or were boxed up out of sight.
Some are new stuff I purchased to test years ago. Some tools are vintage ones I bought to study. All will be priced fairly. (And yes, the tools we do not sell will be up here on the blog for everyone at a later date.)
And one last thing: I’m bringing one of my unfinished full-size Anarchist’s tool chests to sell. The shell, skirts and lid are complete. You just have to add the internal guts. As I built this chest during a class, I have already been paid for my labor. So I’ll be asking the cost of materials only: $300.
If this doesn’t sell, however, I’m not going to put it up here on the blog. These are crazy to ship.
If you live within a day’s drive from Cincinnati, these events are totally worth the trip. This show is one of the bigger ones and has a lot of other toolmakers and furniture-makers.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Please, please, please don’t ask me to send you a list of tools in advance. It doesn’t exist. Or please don’t ask to come by the house at 5 a.m. tomorrow. Crazy requests will be ignored.
We’ve had several confused and irate people contact us about why we are selling “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” on Amazon for crazy prices – more than $92 today. The Amazon page uses our photos and our description of the book.
That is not us. We do not sell through Amazon. Never will.
We have asked Amazon to take down our photos and description of the book, but I have little hope we’ll get a reply.
Our books are available only through our Lost Art Press store and a handful of independent woodworking companies. The complete list is here. These sellers will not gouge you.
I’ve expended quite a few electrons recently, demonstrating that the “one year per inch of thickness” drying rule-of-thumb doesn’t work with thick slabs, both in terms of actual experience and in theoretical models of how wood dries. But that begs the question: Why, then, does the rule even exist? I haven’t been able to dig up any real evidence, but I can think of a few possibilities:
It’s close enough: For relatively thin boards (up to about 2″ or a bit more), it could be that our predecessors just figured that the rule was close enough. After all, 8 months is sort of a year, and 30 months really isn’t that much longer than two years, right?
We’ve got really wet wood: Some woods contain a huge amount of water when green. Such a wood, especially if it’s fairly low density, contains so much free water that getting rid of the free water can have a significant impact on the drying times. An example of such a wood is American chestnut—a species favored by our predecessors—whose green moisture content is a whopping 120%. Free water removal can make the initial stages of drying look more linear:
However, as the graph shows, the rule still fails with thick slabs.
We’re asking the wrong question: What if the answer is correct, and it’s the question that’s wrong?
“Alex, I’ll take ‘Woodworking Maxims’ for $600.”
– Jen Kennings
What if rather than, “How long will it take my wood to dry?” the question to the answer were actually, “How long until my wood is dry enough to use?” Let’s say that you have a 6″-thick slab of white oak that’s been drying for six years. Is it dry enough to use?
If you’re going to use it to timber-frame a barn, it’s more than dry enough.
If you’re going to use it as a cabinetmaker’s workbench, it’s probably dry enough, although it will continue to move a bit for the next several years.
If you’re going to make a Mid-Century Modern slab coffee table out of it, it’s probably not dry enough, since your customer is going to be upset a few years down the road, when it warps to the point that the ends have cracked and stuff starts rolling off the top.
If you’re going to cut it up into cabinet parts, it’s definitely not dry enough. In that case, you pretty much have to restart the drying clock from zero once the wood has been cut up.
