Lost Art Press

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Join us Nov. 1-2 at the London Woodworking Show

Posted on by fitz
The venue for the 2024 London IWF: London Design & Engineering UTC, 15 University Way, Royal Docks, London E16 2RD.

There are just a couple of weeks to go before the 2024 London International Woodworking Festival (LIWF), so Chris I are are busy working on our presentations for the LIWF Bazaar on Friday, Nov. 1 and Saturday, Nov. 2. (Now just where on my computer did I stash those pictures of furniture from Union Village….)

We’re looking forward to catching up with old friends – and making some new ones/finally meeting Instagram buddies in person – and seeing what the still-growing list of vendors has to offer. So far, we know that on hand will be Classic Hand Tools; Lie-Nielsen with John Parkinson and Robin Nolan; Lee Valley Tools with Richard Wile and Ryan Saunders; David Barron; Ian Parker; Richard Arnold; Michel Auriou; Oscar Rush; Phil Edwards; Windsor Workshop with James Mursell; The Quiet Workshop; Nigel Melfi; Sean Hellman; Odie’s Oil; Sawsharp with Mark Harrell; Southern Fellowship of Woodworkers; Rubio Monocoat; London School of Furniture with Helen Welch; Skelton Saws; Israel Martin; International Boatbuilding Training College; Surrey Veneers; Kevin Gooch; G-Sharp Tools; Lamello; The Furniture Maker’s Company; Chris and me; and Derek Jones of Lowfat Roubo, who is one of the organizers.

Advance tickets are available now on the website (£5.50 for noon-5 p.m. Friday; £10.50 for 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday, or £15.50 for both. At the door, the price per day will be £15).

As Derek puts it, ”Speak to everybody on the list above and every insight, light-bulb moment and piece of advice will have cost you less than £0.30, €0.36 or $0.39. Attend one of our free seminars and well, you do the maths. And as for the fun, excitement and complete nerdery, you can’t put a price on that now, can you!”

Happy students following Chris’s chair class at the 2024 LIWF.

– Fitz

Also, there are still a few spots available for the 5-day course (Oct. 28-Nov. 1) on building your own Bad Axe saw plus mastering saw sharpening and maintenance for any saw, with Bad Axe Tool Works founder Mark Harrell. Click the link to learn more.

New Class with Jerome Bias

Posted on by fitz

We’ve added a new class: Build an 18th-century Southern Table with Jerome Bias – it’s Feb. 17-21, 2025, in our Covington, Kentucky, shop. You can read more about it (and register now) at our ticketing site – but if you’re interested, don’t dally. Space is limited!

– Fitz

Sharp Angles & End Grain

Posted on by meghanlostartpress

This is an excerpt from “Euclid’s Door” by Geo. R Walker and Jim Toplin. The book teaches how to make the tools from “By Hand and Eye.” At this point in chapter 7, a miter square that has a 15° tip is being constructed. This fragile corner of the tool has to be taken into consideration when choosing its placement on the grain of the board.

Fig. 7.13 The triangle on the left with its thin 15° tip poses a
unique layout challenge

Many geometric layouts begin with just a given line. This has real practical value. It means we can construct the layout from just a small piece of the overall picture. This construction is a little more complicated than what we’ve done so far, so I suggest you work through this sequence on paper to get an understanding of it.

Fig. 7.14 The blade we eventually end up with has a clipped corner so we can have a 45° reference edge.

Case in point is this second triangle from our multi square, Fig. 7.13. The sharp blade that juts out to the left begins life as a 30:60:90 triangle that gets altered to include a 45° reference on one end, Fig. 7.14.

But that leaves us with a fragile, narrow point. We must lay out our triangle so that the hypotenuse is aligned with the long grain on our blank, Fig. 7.15.

Fig. 7.15 This layout is a challenge because our right angle is located up in the middle of the blade material. The only line we can know for certain is our hypotenuse located on the bottom edge.

So we need to lay out our triangle, but all we have to start our construction is the line that will be our hypotenuse. Before we proceed, let’s step back and take a look at a different geometric layout to get an understanding of how we get there. Here’s the construction we’ll base this on, Fig. 7.16.

Fig. 7.16 We’re going to use a few bits and pieces from this construction to reach our destination.

Let’s break it down into smaller pieces. We begin with Euclid’s first proposition, which is how to construct an equilateral triangle from a given line. Start by using the ends of a line to set the compass span and, using the end of the line as anchor points, draw two identical overlapping circles. Connect the top intersection where the circles overlap. Take note that the lines that connect the intersections also happen to share the radius of both circles. You just created a triangle with all sides equal which means all three corners are 60°, Fig. 7.17.

Fig. 7.17 The internal angles of all triangles always add up to 180°, so if our sides are equal, each corner must be 60°.

If you bisect this triangle, you get a pair of back-to-back 30:60:90 triangles, Fig. 7.18. It helps to see what you are after by superimposing this construction over our blade stock to see how it might apply, Fig. 7.19.

Fig. 7.18 (left) Note the hypotenuses of these two new triangles are facing out.
Fig. 7.19 (right) In practice though, we don’t execute the entire
construction, just a piece of it. It’s not really practical to draw
this entire layout because much of it is out in space beyond our blade blank.

This is quite common in layouts at the bench. We don’t need to scribe every line, just the important ones that get us our result. Let the bottom edge of your blank be the hypotenuse of our triangle. Set a compass to span the length of your hypotenuse and strike an upward arc from the lower edge. Leave the compass at the same setting and anchor it where the arc touches the bottom of the board then strike a second mark across the arc, Fig. 7.20.

Fig. 7.20 The first arc is a portion of one of those overlapping
circles. That’s all we need to execute our layout. The second
mark defines the second side of the equilateral triangle.

Strike a line connecting these points then bisect this chord on one end of the triangle. Now you’ve created our 30:60:90 with the correct grain orientation, Fig. 7.21.

Fig. 7.21 Go back and compare this with our first layout.
Does it come together for you?

We’ll use this construction to create our second blade with the proper grain orientation.

A How-to on Filing New Spokeshaves

Posted on by kalevogt

Last week I walked into work to a brand-new Veritas spokeshave sitting on my bench. Chris had ordered several for students and kindly ordered an extra for me. (I’m spoiled, I know.)

Grateful, I took a picture of my new tool and posted it to my social media account, not thinking much of it.

The following day I received a comment: “Would you mind posting a video of how you file the throat (if you follow Chris’s approach)?”

Huh? File a throat?? This was news to me, but according to Chris, this is common practice when breaking in a new spokeshave.

He explained that in chairmaking, sometimes cuts that are ranker than the spokeshave will allow are needed. The solution? File the throat, just a hair or two to allow a thicker shaving to pass through.

So as asked, we created a video demonstrating the process. Next week’s chairmaking class will be the first to break the new spokeshaves in.

Well, back to work for me. I have two more spokeshaves to file.

Shaker Stamps

Posted on by Kara Uhl

This summer, the U.S. Postal Service released 12 stamps featuring photographs by Michael Freeman from six different preserved Shaker communities, commemorating the 250th anniversary of the first Shakers arriving in America. Freeman, along with June Sprigg and David Larkin, published “Shaker: Life, Work, and Art,” in 1991.

The stamps were designed by Postal Service Art Director Derry Noyes. Unhappy with the first design, which featured more detailed, close-up shots, Noyes put the project on hold for four years. Revisiting, she redesigned the stamps with a broader perspective. You can read more about her process here.

The pane selvage (the area around the collection of stamps) features a photo of Brother Ricardo Belden (1868–1958), taken by Samuel Kravitt, in 1935. Belden joined a Shaker community in Enfield, Connecticut, when he was 4 years old. Initially, he worked on the farm. In 1926, he joined the Hancock Shaker Village in Hancock and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and spent much of his time repairing clocks with wooden works.

The stamp’s First Day of Issue was June 20, 2024, at Hancock Shaker Village. If you’d like to know more about each individual stamp, check out this article.

Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill

One stamp features the beloved staircases at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. Chris has visited and written about Shaker Village many times (including in 2006, which is this Saturday’s Earlywood post in American Peasant, free for anyone to read). His first visit was more than 30 years ago, and that experience sparked something new.

Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill

For John Wilson, it was Ejner Handberg’s “Shop Drawings of Shaker Furniture and Woodenware, Vol. 1.” In 1977, Wilson was offered a job to teach furniture making at Michigan’s Lansing Community College. He had two hours to prep for the class. He drove to the library, checked out Handberg’s book and taught his students how to make a dovetailed dining tray. Wilson, who died in 2023, built a life building Shaker oval boxes and producing copper tacks.

For Chris Becksvoort, it was a 1974 exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick gallery. “I went back to visit it five, six, seven times,” he says. Years later, Becksvoort would reproduce two of the gallery’s pieces in his shop.

For Jennie Alexender, it was several trips to Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community. There, she met Sister Mildred. Jennie wanted to see the chairs and remembers Sister Mildred quipping, “You know, it’s interesting. People think we’re chairs.” Several visits later, Jennie built her first Shaker one-slat dining chair.

Perhaps something as simple as these stamps will spark something for you, too.

— Kara Gebhart Uhl