Lost Art Press

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12 Tool Chests, 5 Days, 1 Tired American

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When I teach woodworking classes, I am sometimes asked the following question: Do you consider yourself first a writer or a woodworker?

I don’t have an answer to that question. I have to do both things just about every day to feel human. And so I usually answer the question by saying: I don’t know. But right now I’m… (pick one) thirsty, tired, bloated, crampy, malodorous or oblong.

But today I was tired. Only tired (and a little oblong).

This evening we wrapped up five days of building “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” at the Melbourne Guild of Fine Woodworking in Australia. This is, hands down, the furthest that all the 12 students have come to completing the project. Almost all of the students had their lids glued up and were adding the dust seals when we called it quits. A couple students still had to glue up their lids, but that was more by choice than because it was 5 p.m.

There are two reasons we made it so far. First, I changed a couple simple things about the course with the dovetail layout and the cutting that saved us almost an entire day. Read my blog entry here for more details on that.

Second, the students were relentless. It was honestly unlike anything I had seen before in any class. They worked like dogs during the day (barely stopping for lunch) and we had to shoo them out in the evening. Also notable: They saw, hammer and plane much faster than Americans, Canadians or Europeans. Faster is not always better, but their swifter pace was noticeable.

So now I am about 90 percent prone in my hotel room with a beer from Coopers Brewery at my side. Tomorrow I’m off to a meeting of the Hand Tool Preservation Association of Australia and then to visit the shop of toolmaker Chris Vesper.

It’s all enough to make you “dry as a dead dingo’s donger” (my new favorite idiom) and need a second beer.

— Christopher Schwarz

Learn About ‘Register Calipers;’ Hunt One Up for Yourself

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For those of you who won’t be able to attend Handworks in May, you can still find yourself a pair of Studley-like calipers for your shop with the help of the always-digging Jeff Burks.

Jeff did a little research on the so-called “register” calipers, which is the name that some manufacturers (but not all) used for this tool. Below are a good number of links that will help you search for the different brands.

The best link? The last one. It’s to a Japanese company that still makes this tool. Stainless steel. Several sizes. Hardened tips.

And metric.

The good news on the manufacturing front is that we are hopeful that a modern toolmaker will produce these for sale. The company borrowed our prototype and all our photos and measurements from the Studley version. So keep your fingers crossed.

I’ve been using our prototype in the shop for many months and find it to be a useful apron tool for handwork.

For the most part, I use it as an “adjustable mullet” – there’s a thumbscrew on the back of the tool that locks in a particular thickness. So when I’m raising a panel by hand, I lock the caliper at the groove’s width and use the caliper to determine when I’m finished.

I use the same basic procedure when cutting rabbets and surfacing stock by hand.

You can, of course, use a locking dial caliper to do the same job. Or a block of wood. This is just another way to do it.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Links from Jeff Burks:

Illustrated Price-List of W.C. Duyckinck, 1877

Illustrated Catalogue of General Machinery and Supplies – Cooke and Co., 1883

A book of tools: Chas. A. Strelinger & Company, 1896

1890 Seeger and Guernsey’s Cyclopaedia of the Manufactures and Products of
the United States has a listing for all the caliper manufacturers in the
U.S. (Scroll to bottom) One of these companies likely made the Studley
register caliper.

Using that list I found an auction for a register caliper on Worthpoint. The style matches the Studley caliper, though it appears to be one of the larger versions. This one was stamped with the name Wm. Johnson Newark NJ. This company was founded in 1834 and operated from a building complex called the Hedenberg Works.

1898 G.W. Davis patent register caliper that piggybacks the earlier design.

1899 Seeger and Guernsey’s added a category for register calipers with one company: Kraeuter Co. Newark, NJ – founded 1860 and also operated from the Hedenberg
Works.

Several books printed after 1900 contain illustrations of the register caliper:
1906 Henley’s Encyclopaedia of Practical Engineering.

1913 The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia: Volume 2

Niigata Seiki of Japan currently manufactures a stainless steel version of the register caliper under the SK brand name. They are available in multiple sizes with metric graduations and hardened tips.

Special Sale on Lost Art Press Hats

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The company that embroiders our hats made a mistake this week and delivered the wrong type of hat.

Rather than let those go to waste (quite literally), we purchased them at a significant discount and are passing that on to you – these hats are $10 plus $3 shipping. That’s a savings of $7 compared to our regular hat.

What’s different? The details. These are still U.S.-made hats made by the same company (Bayside) and in the same color. The embroidery is the same. These less-expensive hats are adjusted with a Velcro strap instead of a steel keeper. And these less-expensive hats lack the white piping on the brim.

We have 80 of them in stock. When they are gone they are gone.

Click here to see the item in our store.

— Christopher Schwarz

Tools for Sale (Not Here)

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Local woodworker, chairmaker and former air-traffic controller Ray Schwanenberger is culling his herd of good user tools.

Check out what he has for sale on his blog.

And while you are there, check out his gallery of chairs and casework. That gun cabinet he built for a client was all hand mortised. In oak. Ouch. But nice.

— Christopher Schwarz

Changes in Our Shipping Department

Posted on by Lost Art Press
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Our inventory filled up this truck. Dang.

Starting immediately, all of our packages will be shipped out of our Fishers, Ind., warehouse – aka my partner John Hoffman’s garage. This change has some good points and bad points for you, which is why I’m writing this blog entry.

First the good stuff.

Shipping and customer service will be much faster. During the last 18 months, my family has been shipping all of the orders from our Kentucky home. It worked OK, but it required me to juggle packing boxes, editing books, building furniture, blogging, writing freelance magazine articles and a somewhat crazy travel and teaching schedule.

So we would sometimes get behind. And when we made a mistake or a book was damaged in transit, it took us a few days to fix the problem.

Hoffman and his family have more space to warehouse the books and more time to deal with shipping and customer service.

So not only will your books ship faster, I’ll have more time to write and edit, which means more new books from Lost Art Press.

The bad news is that – for now – I won’t be able to directly autograph all of my books that we sell. Instead, each book will have a bookplate (the publishing world’s name for a sticker) affixed to the inside that I’ve signed. Yeah, I know it’s not ideal. But it’s the best solution we have right now. My 2013 travel schedule is the most brutal one yet, and adding monthly trips to Indiana to sign books just simply isn’t going to work.

greenupThese changes – good and bad – are the result of the growth of Lost Art Press. When we started five years ago, we mailed out three or four books a day on average. Now we’re shipping out more than 12,000 books a year to customers and our handful of retailers. And that’s a really low estimate – I am a bit afraid to do the math.

During the next few years, we plan to purchase a building and consolidate all of our operations – building, publishing and shipping – under one roof. We’re actively looking for an old building with a storefront, warehouse and living quarters. (The photo shown here is one we looked at last week.) But we are taking our time, and we refuse to borrow money and saddle the company with debt. Our accountant thinks we are nuts not to get a mortgage, by the way, but I’ve seen too many publishing companies drown in debt service.

So thanks for your support – that’s why we are growing. And apologies in advance for the temporary and poopy bookplate solution.

— Christopher Schwarz