We have received 25 leather bound versions of By Hand & Eye and they look great. They were bound by the Ohio Book Store in Cincinnati and just made it to the LAP warehouse. The price is $195 (yes binding in leather is expensive) which includes shipping. They will be sold on a first come basis.
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Essential Woodworker: Episode 1
In an effort to bring this book to a wider audience we are having woodworkers come show their favorite techniques from the book. This video shows Tim’s favorite which was the mortise block. To quote Tim “that has really helped me chop a slot.”
Price Cut for the Trade Edition of our Roubo Translation
In between cutting dovetails and teaching 10 students to cut dovetails for a tool chest, Megan Fitzpatrick and I are making the final changes to the proof of the trade edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.”
The book goes to the printer on Friday so it will be ready for Woodworking in America in October.
Thanks to some competitive pricing from our printer, we are happy to announce that the trade edition will cost $40 plus shipping instead of $60.
The book will be printed in the United States using all the same details that are typical to our books – cloth-covered boards, Smythe-sewn spine and so forth. The book will measure 8-1/2” x 11” and be 264 pages long.
We will have an introductory offer – free domestic shipping – on the book that will be announced here in the next week or so when we put the book up in the Lost Art Press store.
International customers will be able to buy the book through our network of international retailers.
I would like to write more, but we still have more than 100 pages to check.
— Christopher Schwarz
Benjamin Seaton Squares in Old Mahogany
This week I’m finishing up a run of a dozen Benjamin Seaton try squares for friends and customers (sorry, they are all spoken for). Oh, and I’m going to talk about building them on “The Woodwright’s Shop” during a taping on Sunday.
The squares and the material I’m using are quite interesting in my opinion. Also interesting: The stupid mistake I made that led to a little detail about try squares I’d never considered.
The construction details of these squares comes from a must-have book for hand-tool nerds: “The Tool Chest of Benjamin Seaton 2nd Edition,” which is available at Tools for Working Wood and other retailers.
Seaton built three mahogany squares for his chest, and I’m replicating the small one, which has a 15”-long blade and a stock that is about 11” long.
Despite its simple appearance, this square is more challenging to build than the Roubo try square that I can now almost build in my sleep. Though the French square has more flash with its scrolled ends, the Seaton square has complicated joinery and wide chamfers that are tough to get just right.
The blade of the Seaton square is a two-pronged tenon that passes into the stock. The top tenon goes into an open bridle joint on the top of the stock. The lower tenon goes into a 1/4”-wide through-mortise.
The joint has to be bang-on to work. And when you assemble the square, you have to drive the blade in dead straight. Cock it at any angle and the blade splits.
In fact, all three of Seaton’s squares were split at this point – perhaps due to seasonal wood movement; perhaps to the assembly process.
The first time I built one of these squares in early 2012, I did a dumb thing. The drawings for the square are on the same page of the book as a profile drawing of Seaton’s scriber. At first glance, it looks like the drawing of the scriber is actually a drawing of the blade in plan view.
The reason I was so easily fooled by this gestalt is that the text indicates that the blades of the three squares taper in thickness. So I tapered the blades dramatically – like the taper of the scriber.
I discovered my mistake later, but in the meantime I used the snot out of the square and found that the tapered blade was ideal for hand work. When the square is applied to the edge of a board, the taper tilts the stock slightly so it reads only on the top corner of the board. This is nice if you are dealing with an edge that isn’t perfect or has lumps.
The Mahogany
Last year I bought a truckload of old wood from a retiring woodworker. As we were loading up the last of the stock, the woodworker’s wife implored me to take some old table parts that were cluttering up her garage.
They sure didn’t look like much – some busted tops and extension leaves that were covered in many coats of a black finish. I was hot, tired and ready to go home, so I threw the pieces on top of the pile in the truck and headed out.
Earlier this year, I pulled out some of the table parts to use as secondary wood on a campaign chest. The undersides of the pieces were covered with the tell-tale signs of handwork – no machine marks. Lots of sawblade marks from a large circular mill. All the hardware was let in by hand. Knife marks were everywhere. And the edge detail on the leaves was one that hasn’t been popular for a very long time.
Once I planed the finish off the boards, I was totally enchanted. The mahogany was darker, denser and tighter than any I’ve ever laid my hands on. And these boards were 30”-wide planks – not pieced together.
Even more shocking was what the stuff looks like with a little oil on it. It’s gorgeous and purple and dark – much like Seaton’s squares.
I still have two more planks of this stuff, perhaps enough for a small campaign lap desk.
— Christopher Schwarz
A Dumb Way to Run a Class
Sunday about 7 p.m. is a good time to give up.
After two full days of sawing, planing, hammering and gluing parts together, the 14 students in this Six-board Chest class at the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking laid down their tools. They swept up their shavings. They quietly loaded their chests into their cars.
Some classes end with exultation. Other with exhaustion. This one ended (I hope) with a little of both.
The pace of the class was particularly brutal. I was determined to cram in 400 years of history on the form of the “boarded chest” into the class time. And I wanted us to start with long boards that we had to knock down to size (by hand) and glue up into panels using jointer planes and spring joints.
Oh, and one more thing: There was no predetermined design for the chest we were going to build.
That was a good thing and a bad thing. Bad: Everyone had to think through his design and how it related to his material. This made every step forward a bit of a slog with 14 different answers to 14 questions.
Good: No two chests were the same. Not even close.
In fact, the chest that I built was not even the chest I set out to build when the class commenced on Saturday morning. Instead, I followed the needs of the material and ended up with a chest I am quite happy with. I’ll finish it up when I return home and post photos here on the blog. It’s stripped down, simple and appealing – to me at least.
As the students left – all a bit too weary – I could see that I had pushed things a little too far this time. It probably should have been a three-day class. And we should have used pre-cut stock. And worked to a predetermined design.
And… maybe not. I love to be dead tired when I have earned it.
— Christopher Schwarz
