Well I would, and many others did. So to update all on our newest production here goes:
“The Essential Woodworker” by Robert Wearing has been printed and bound. The book will leave the bindery on Monday, July 19th, 2010. The book will be at Lost Art Press this week and shipping will begin immediately. We are fully supplied with boxes, tape and shipping labels. Thank you all for your support; we are confident that you will enjoy this new book.
Robert Wearing’s masterwork, “The Essential Woodworker,” is now at the printer in Pennsylvania and is scheduled to arrive in our office on July 16.
In the meantime, we’re offering a special pre-sale of this product for those of you who don’t want to wait to consume this book, which is packed with everything you need to build casework, tables and boxes using hand tools and traditional English methods.
Purchase this book before July 15, and you will receive a pdf version of this book immediately — you’ll be the first woodworker on your block to own this book and not pay $80 (or more).
Yup, that is how much vintage copies of this fantastic book are going for. We have entirely re-set the text, restored missing photographs, incorporated revisions from Robert Wearing himself and printed it on nice 55-pound paper in the United States in a hardbound, cloth-covered 256-page edition. This is the official version sanctioned and approved by the author. The price is $23 plus $4 shipping in the United States. International customers can contact Sharon at sharon@lostartpress.com for a quote.
To pre-order the book, visit our store here. Once your order is confirmed, you will receive an e-mail from us within 24 hours (please be patient — we’re a small company) with a link to download the entire book.
When people visit our shop, they almost always marvel at all the tools and machinery sitting around. And they almost always say: “It must be fun to get to play with all these tools.”
Truth is, reviewing tools has always been the least favorite part of my job – well, it’s actually right above unclogging the dust collector.
My feelings about tool reviews might be colored by the fact that I’m not really a gear head or gadget freak. Case in point: I am crazy about cooking, but my knives, pots and pans are mundane. I follow music as closely as I do woodworking, but I have a stock stereo in my car and don’t even own a home stereo.
So maybe I’m not genetically predisposed for reviewing tools.
I’m sure you’re thinking: You whiner. What’s not to like about trying new tools? Well, nothing really, except that it takes away from time I’m actually building. I get an endorphin squirt when I’m writing, building, cooking or listening to music. I don’t get much pleasure from comparing stats on drills or measuring the sole flatness of a handplane.
What makes it harder for me is that I’ve come to know many of the people who design and make the power tools and hand tools that pass through our shop. And being asked to compare brands A, B and C sometimes feels like I’m choosing who to side with when married friends get divorced. I try to separate my feelings from the tools on the bench before me, but I’d be lying if I said it was easy.
Another thing that troubles me: When I review tools it always feels like small differences get magnified by writing about them. With almost any kind of tool, there is a point where the differences among the brands are minor. Let’s take cordless drills as an example. You don’t need me to tell you that a $39.95 drill is disposable. You can’t build a durable tool for that. Once you get somewhere above $100, most drills are pretty good, especially if you don’t make your living with it.
Lastly, there are some qualities of tools that fall under the adage: familiarity breeds.
Each tool has a personality. Once you get used to it, you can even learn to like it (ask my wife about this re: my personality). My first dovetail saw has a certain feel to its tote – its thickness, girth and the distance between its horns. When I pick up a similar saw, I’m immediately more comfortable with it than, say, a new design.
The solution to these problems are not things that any woodworking magazine could afford to do, such as forming a peer-review panel, having a team of reviewers or reviewing tools over a year of daily use. All those ideas are great for medicine and other critical comparative tasks. But they are financially unworkable for a small publisher (and for large publishers — have you ever read a tool review in Consumer Reports about a category you knew something about?)
So why have I dragged you down this path? I’m not soliciting solutions. I think I just want you to understand the forces at play when I do discuss tools in the magazine and on the blogs, and that I would always rather be building something than flattening another chisel back.
I have heard that three piece suits are making a comeback but I am down on three piece arm bows. Yes I know they can work but I have a short grain crack problem. I recently graduated from the Windsor Institute Sack Back Class. The Sack Back
chair has a bent arm bow which not only is strong but is also adjustable after it dries!
One of the myths that was dispelled by King Dunbar, was that bent wood has spring back. “False!” said his Highness. When we tie the freshly bent arm with string to keep it in the correct shape, the string is taught. When we get the arm three days later in the drying room you will notice that the string has slack in it. This is all part of the principle that wood contracts as it dries. Note to self: don’t over bend.
The chair in the pics has a three piece arm bow, and yes I cracked the short grain on both sides of the arm putting it over the spindles. This leads me to a second revelation, gaps between the spindle and the hole in the arm are good! I have the Lee Valley set of tools that produce different sized tennons. I drilled the holes with a spade bit that I had filed to be a bit undersized which results in tight
hole and no gap in the seat. So a half inch tennon was placed in a slightly less than half inch hole.
However, this fit is not so good for the arm. Where the spindles fit through the arm there should be enough of a gap to have a loose fit. This allows a wedge to tighten up the spindle in the hole and secure it for life. When there is not a
loose fit, like in my chair, you get tremendous stress on the arm when fitting it onto the spindles. His Highness also explained that a round tennon in a round mortis is the second worst joint in woodworking next to an end grain to end grain but joint. A wedge makes this joint work because it adds a mechanical means to keep it together. When your tennon is exactly the same size as the hole there is also no room for any difference in tennon hole placement, which is only a problem if you make slight errors in drilling angles. I mean when drilling by sight lines and using a bevel gauge what could possibly go wrong????? Ok, so I put glue in the cracked arm bow and clamped it and am hoping for the best.
Will let you know how the chair holds up. In the future I am going to find a way to steam bend. Will write about that and I highly recommend getting to this class. It was great.
Some furniture and cabinets built by commercial shops are held together with the equivalent of snot, paperclips and the coat of film finish on top.
Some pieces are even crazier than that.
A few weeks ago I spent most of a week holed up in one of the units at Pleasant Hill Shaker Village outside Harrodsburg, Ky. It was great to be surrounded by the inspiring architecture, decorative objects and the furniture of this colony.
But on my first morning there I visited the store where they sell reproductions of some of the Shaker pieces built by the colony in the 19th century. What I saw there still has me a little bit in denial. I hope I am wrong.
One of the nice originals at Pleasant Hill is what they call the “Saturday Table,” a small side table with tapered and faceted legs. No drawer. Just simple and nice. We published plans for it in Popular Woodworking a few years ago, and Kerry Pierce published plans in “Pleasant Hill Shaker Furniture” (Popular Woodworking Books).
Pierce built the piece like I would have: The aprons are tenoned into the legs. The top is attached to the aprons using hand-cut pocket-screw holes (just like on the original).
While in the store, I turned over a couple reproductions of the Saturday Table. To my eye, it looks like the aprons are joined to the legs using staples. Then the aprons are pocket screwed to the top. To give the maker the benefit of the doubt, I tried to peer into a couple of the small gaps between the legs and aprons. Surely there must be a tenon in there. Surely these staples are there only to hold everything together as the glue dries.
Or something.
But I saw no tenon or even the shadow of one. I saw only a narrow sliver of light that indicated there was no wood-to-wood joint between the apron and leg.
Robert Wearing’s masterwork, “The Essential Woodworker,” is now at the printer in Pennsylvania and is scheduled to arrive in our office on July 16.
