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.
Reading Robert Wearing’s “The Essential Woodworker” was one of three lightning bolts that have struck me since I began woodworking.
The first shock was cutting my first perfect dovetail. Then there was the moment when I processed my first board entirely by hand. And the third came one afternoon while I was sitting in my chair and cracked open an English book that I had bought on a whim for about $5.
I read the entire book in one sitting (it took only a couple hours), but in that short period of time, Wearing assembled all the random puzzle pieces I had collected for years about handwork. He filled in all the missing details about dozens of basic processes, from laying out door joinery to truing up the legs on a table.
When I closed the book, I couldn’t wait to get into the shop. All the bits and pieces made sense.
Then I did a bad thing. I wrote about the book on my blog at work. And the price of the out-of-print book went to a ridiculous $80 to $100.
So for the last several years, John Hoffman and I at Lost Art Press have been trying to reprint this book so it will be available at a reasonable price and in a nice and permanent format. It took a lot longer than we expected. Robert Wearing was very eager and willing, but let’s just say that other publishing companies kept throwing sand on our strop.
Robert Wearing (photo courtesy of David Wearing).
All that is behind us now, and I am pleased – thrilled actually – to announce that “The Essential Woodworker” will be available this summer on the Lost Art Press imprint. We re-set the entire book, incorporated corrections and revisions from Wearing and retook many photos, which were lost.
Like our other books, “The Essential Woodworker” will be printed in a 6″ x 9″ format, hardbound with a cloth cover, and produced entirely in the United States. What is different about this book is that we will be using more expensive paper. It’s a little thicker and has a more old-school texture. Like our other books, this paper is acid-free, and the signatures will be Smythe sewn and casebound. We have not yet set a retail price, but we expect the 256-page book will be $25.
But enough about the manufacturing details. What’s inside “The Essential Woodworker?” I think it’s a gold mine of traditional hand tool techniques. Assisted by more than 530 hand-drawn illustrations, plus dozens of photos, Wearing walks you through the process of becoming a hand-tool woodworker. He starts with sharpening and ends with dovetailed casework.
To illustrate all of the basic principles, Wearing deftly guides you through building a few small projects. He starts, most ingeniously, with building a table, which teaches many of the core skills you need to build more advanced casework.
He then works you through open casework, backs, plinths, doors and then drawers. He presents no shortcuts or cheats. All the the methods are “neat and workmanlike” and would stand up to the scrutiny of an 18th-century master joiner.
But most of all, I think that Wearing can help you organize everything you know (and don’t yet know) about handwork into a framework that makes sense and is the baseline for every skill you will acquire in the future.
I know, I know. I’m gushing. But believe me, we wouldn’t go to all the trouble to bring this book back if it were merely another brick of information on your bookshelf. This, my friends, is an entire brick wall.
As of May 1, here are our plans for this book: We will produce one run of these books with a hardbound cover. There will be no leather-bound edition. We also will be offering a digital version of this book that you will be able to download when you pre-order the printed edition. The first announcement will go out via our e-mail newsletter.
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.
