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No matter how much (or little) money you have, if you are clever enough you can score an exquisite chisel for about $1.

I was reminded this week when I picked up some items on eBay and had to take a few extra unwanted items in the lot, including three plastic-handled chisels. Two of them were Craftsman chisels that were dead ringers for my grandfather’s 1970s-era tools.

The third was a Stanley 1-1/4”-wide 720 chisel with a translucent yellow handle and steel striking button on its end. Normally chisels like this wouldn’t warrant a second look in a flea market box. But if you take a close look at these 720s, you could end up with an excellent worker.

The trick is to know what’s important and what’s not. Here’s my short list of the key features:

1. The handle has to be comfortable for paring or chopping. The 720 passes this test with flying colors. Its vague Coke-bottle-shaped grip falls right into your fingers in both positions. In fact, when gripping it for chopping, the chisel is comfortable only when your index finger is out of the way of the striking button. The only disadvantage of the 720’s handle is that it gets a little slippery when your hands get sweaty.

2. The chisel has to be balanced when you grip the tip of the blade like a pencil (this is the grip for holding the tool for positioning it for light chopping). The 720 is a tad top-heavy for this operation. It’s not unusable, but it’s not perfect.

3. The steel should be easy to sharpen and keep a decent edge. Chisels that are too hard take too long to hone. The 720s are good steel. I bought a couple of these early on in the craft and have also sharpened those belonging to students. They’re good steel.

4. The long edges should be narrow. Very narrow. This is where most mid-priced chisels fail. The narrow side-bevels allow you to sneak into the acute corners of the tail portion of dovetail joints. The 720s are generally very good about this. The one I just bough has side bevels smaller than 1/16”. Nice.

Oh, and there’s one more important characteristic: The chisel has to be fairly rust-free (especially on the unbeveled face side). This particular example is a miserable failure as it probably spent a few years in the bottom of a chum bucket. I cleaned the scaling off with a Klingspor Sandflex block and took a look. Craters everywhere.

Oh well, what do you want for $1?

— Christopher Schwarz

John is working on completing the Trestle Table

I used my tax stimulus money to buy a flat screen TV. The problem is that I have to walk past the TV to get to the shop. So I was enjoying TV in all it flatness when I saw the end of the table sticking out of the shop. It seemed to beckon me as it lay there cupped and in need of work. But, I am a man, so I grabbed the remote and ignored it. Now I am back at it and dealing with the cup across the width of the table.

The trestle table top (say that three times fast!) is made from two book matched cherry boards. They finished out at 103 inches long and 13 inches wide. I added a middle board to the two book matched pieces to get a final width of 31 inches. This was going to be a kitchen table but with the length, it goes into the living room. I could have cut the top…only kidding, I would never cut boards like that. Would you?

The thickness of the top is just under ¾ inch so it flattens when forced without that nasty cracking noise that indicates you just learned another lesson. The cup, which you can see in the picture, is a ¼ inch. For the picture I clamped on side of the table flat so you can see the total cup that I needed to flatten.

Now the bread board ends create a cross grain situation and wood movement becomes an issue. I like wood movement! There I said it. I like feeling the non flush edges that arrive with the seasons. My friend has a table from the great Christian Becksvoort and he insisted on bread board ends. He can feel with his fingers that the top has moved. I like these oddities and have added divots and ridges under the arms of chairs for a person to finger when sitting. These subtle aspects humanize a piece.

First thing to do was to determine the size and layout of the tennons. Since we have a cross grain situation I am only going to glue the middle tennon,. I decided on three tennons because it gives me a middle. I think five tennons would work if the width would accommodate it.I also used a stub tennon on the entire width of the top. This stub is 3/8 inch in length. The thickness of all tennons is a ¼ inch. A rule of thumb in deciding the widths of the tennons is the have all of them equal ½ the total width of the table. For me, I made them 5 inches for a total tennon width of 15 inches. It is also important to have enough wood at the ends of the bread boards so I started the tennons ¾ inch in from the edge. I marked the mortis locations from the tennons.I increased the mortis for the end tennons by 1/8 inch on each side to allow for movement.

One thing about mortis and tennons that is finally sinking in is that they are related. What you do to one has an effect on the other. For example, my first idea was a tennon that looked like the tongue from the Rolling Stones symbol. From the tennons’ perspective I was right, but what about the mortis? Chris pointed out that the walls of the mortis are just as important as the tennon. If the walls are too thin, the tennon will crack them and that old sinking feeling arrives.At least this time I learned a lesson without cutting wood!

Regards John

John is at it again. We just finished a brutal month of traveling and teaching and John has got back in the shop!

There is a certain order or Karma to life, and when you violate this flow events let you know.Like the time I saw this woman and said “when are you due” to wit she said, “I am not pregnant!” Now the natural order would have flowed thus, a woman appears pregnant, you keep your mouth shut until she admits being pregnant, at which time you hesitantly congratulate her.

Anyway, I am hard at the Trestle Table and got the top supports fitted to the leg via a bridle joint.When all looked great and fit perfectly I took the assembly apart and put the final touches to it with the jointer and smoother plane. Can you guess what I wound up with? Yep, my final touches with the jointer and smoother caused the perfect fit to become a 1/16^th gap! I went out of order. I should have made the leg complete then laid out the bridle joint. Oh well, out of the Karma flow and back to plan B.

I learn through mistakes.I could be in the minority here but when I mess something up, I remember why and am less likely to repeat it.Like cutting on the wrong side of a line or jamming a perfectly sharp Barr chisel into my hand and cutting a tendon.Chris and I have been on the road a lot last month and I have not been in the shop much. The project shows my “learning” and I hope someday to make something without learning anything.

To fix the problem I re-sawed a ¼ inch piece of wood and glued it to the full length of one side of the leg. After the glue up was dry, I snuck up on the fit. It now looks like this.

Can you guess which side has the wood glued to it? If you can, I will say that there is another learning experience in here. If you see a small glue line it is a result of that part of the piece not being clamped down to the leg. It could be that the piece was not flat or maybe the clamp is a bit off.Nonetheless, next time I will ensure the “show” side has a seamless glue joint, and yes I am already fixing that nice nick off the bottom edge. Fortunately this will be painted!

-John

Kevin Drake was a drummer turned computer programmer turned furniture-maker, and in 2001 he got so aggravated with his marking gauge that he threw it into the street.

The good news was that Kevin saw the solution to his problem in a book by Jim Kingshott, “Making and Modifying Woodworking Tools.” Kingshott had a marking gauge in that book that you could micro-adjust, and Kevin wanted it.

The bad news was that you couldn’t buy it. Kingshott’s had been made by a metalworker.

So Kevin was aggravated.

Sometime after that he saw an ad in the newspaper for a guy who was selling woodworking machines. Kevin needed some machines because he had sold his when he moved out to Ft. Bragg, Calif., to attend the woodworking program at the College of the Redwoods under James Krenov.

He went and saw the guy with the machines; and though the guy didn’t have any machines that Kevin was interested in, Kevin found out he was a metalworker. So Kevin brought him a copy of Kingshott’s book.

“Can you make this?” Kevin asked. He could, and a few days later Kevin had a working version of the marking gauge he’d always wanted.

“I liked it for about an hour and a half,” Kevin said. “Then I saw it had a major limitation. So I redesigned it (the gauge), and the guy made me one of those.”

That was the first Tite-Mark gauge. Kevin liked it so much that he had the guy make him 30 more, which he sold to summer students at the college.

“Then I asked him to make me 100 more,” Kevin said, “and he told me to get the hell out.”

The metalworker put Kevin in touch with a student who did this sort of work, and the business Glen-Drake Toolworks was born. (By the way, “Glen” is Kevin’s middle name.)

Now the parts are made on precision CNC equipment in Northern California for Kevin. Then Kevin tunes up the parts, assembles the tools and ships them out to customers. Since he invented the Tite-Mark, he’s made and sold about 10,000 of them.

For those of you who have been ignoring my writing for the last 12 years, the Tite-Mark gauge is my favorite. No waffling. No equivocation. I knew it from the first moment I picked up the tool, and I feel just as strongly today.

And I know that at least one other person agrees with me (and I’d love to meet them someday). You see, I’ve only had three tools stolen from me in the last 12 years. One was a Wayne Anderson plane that someone snitched from a show at Ft. Washington, Pa. A second was a plane hammer from Glen-Drake. And the third was my first Tite-Mark.

— Christopher Schwarz

As I consumed Jonathan Hale’s book “The Old Way of Seeing” about 11 years ago, I could feel the excitement and tension twisting in my gut. This was the book that finally was going to show me the secrets to designing well-proportioned furniture.

It was all there. All the famous formulas: The Golden Section (sometimes called the Golden Mean or the Golden Rectangle), the Hambridge Progression, the Fibonacci Series and even some discussion of the mysterious “column orders.”

Perhaps I should never have finished reading Hale’s book. Because somewhere in the second half, Hale makes a passionate argument that following these formulas will not make you a better designer. Instead, they likely will crowbar your work into unnatural forms that will appear forced or bogus.

Instead, we should design like the mechanics and builders of the 18th and early 19th century did (Hale contends that decent architecture ended about 1830). That is: We should be aware of these formulas, but not use them as tools. The formulas describe the patterns found in nature. So our designs will be better off if we draw and build things from nature and from our gut. Oh, and symmetry is overrated.

This week I’m in the shop building a pair of early 18th-century-style wall cupboards. The doors are based off a piece that came from historian Wallace Nutting’s furniture collection. The carcases and mouldings are based on pieces that I saw this fall at Winterthur. But the piece isn’t a copy. I’ve fiddled with it far too much. So whether the piece fails or not is really my fault.

As I was preparing to build the piece, I mocked up the elevation in Foamular insulating foam and made some significant changes, including beefing up the width of the face frame’s stiles to make room for the rattail hinges now lying on my bench.

They weren’t large alterations, but the piece sure looked different. I thought it might be a trick of the CAD drawing because the new mock-up looked great. But to be sure, I wanted to see if I’d made the horizontal dimension too expansive, even though I’d also increased the height to compensate.

So I checked the ratio of the old design vs. the new. And that’s when I got a little shock. The cupboard’s overall dimensions, 36-7/8” high x 23-1/8” wide, are a near perfect and spontaneous Golden Rectangle. It took 11 years, Mr. Hale, but I think I’m finally getting it.

— Christopher Schwarz