The Benchcrafted brothers have officially opened registration for the French Oak Roubo Project II, which will be held Nov. 8-14, 2015 (that’s next November).
If that’s all you need to hear, click on over to the Benchcrafted site here and register.
The seven-day event costs $4,800 – that includes the incredible ancient wood, the blacksmith-made hardware, access to the world-class machinery of Bo Childs, lunch each day and all the assistance you need to build the bench. While I know there are those who will scoff at the price, I dare them to offer this sort of class themselves. The Benchcrafted folks (and the assistants) do this because it’s fun – not to make money.
I’ll be there (building a bench for a customer) and helping out all week. I can’t wait.
With every class there are three types of students.
The type that is there to learn. They learn. They go home happy.
The type that probably should consider a different hobby. (To be honest, that was me during my first woodworking class. Somehow I persevered.)
The type that has no business there because they could easily teach the class.
Ed Sutton is in the third category. Ed runs the blog thingswemake.co.uk, and is actively involved on Instagram and Twitter. If you haven’t joined in on Instagram and Twitter, you should consider it. It hasn’t (yet) been overrun by trolls.
(By the way, Lost Art Press is on Instagram and Twitter, as well.)
Anyway, Ed was in my Dutch Tool Chest class in England this month (last month? who am I?) and has finished it up right pretty as we say in Arkansas (about our cousins). Here is his blog entry about the class. And check out his video, which is comprised of stills from the class.
I’ve built a lot of knockdown workbenches in the last 15 years, but I’ve never been 100-percent happy with my knockdown mechanisms.
The problem: barrel nuts, bedbolts or whatever you want to call the cross-locking nut.
When installed, these things work OK. But installing them so they work smoothly is a lesson in precision down to the gnat’s angstrom. This summer I’ve been noodling a bench design that is inspired by three things.
Mike Siemsen’s Nicholson workbench that he built for “The Naked Woodworker” DVD (coming very soon!) and has been taking to woodworking shows.
2. Planemaker Caleb James’s knockdown version of Mike’s bench, which used hardware found in woodworking jigs. I saw this bench at a Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event in Charleston, S.C.
It was No. 3 that pushed me over the edge. I have vowed to build a 6’ version of this bench this weekend using the surface-mount inserts and 3/8” hex-head bolts. Why are these inserts special? They can be screwed to the wood. Most tee-nuts use simple prongs that grip the wood. And these prongs have all the holding force of a fetal squid.
But these surface-mount inserts should stay put.
I’ll be documenting the build in my driveway and will post photos, a shopping list and several animal similes. And if you live in England, I’ll be teaching a class in building a bench like this for The New English Workshop next July. Peter Follansbee also will be teaching there at the same time (yup, read it here). And other yet-to-be-named people whom I like.
I keep every Anarchist’s Tool Chest photograph that readers have sent me through the years. I’ve seen my tool chest designs painted with flowers. I’ve seen it painted electric purple. With a Kleenex dispenser in the front wall.
But that didn’t prepare me for the tool chest of Marco Terenzi.
The story begins one morning at a hotel breakfast in England. I’m teaching a class of 18 students how to build the Anarchist’s Tool Chest for the New English Workshop. Derek Jones and Paul Mayon, who run N.E.W., are eating their eggs and toast and chatting away when I sit down for coffee. It’s a scene we’ve repeated several times that week, but today something is different.
Behind Derek’s chair is an odd-shaped Pelican case, which doesn’t enter the conversation. We finish breakfast and prepare to head to Warwickshire College, which is where the tool chest class is being held. But then Derek and Paul take a detour into the hotel’s sitting room.
They put the Pelican case down on the coffee table and Derek starts telling a story about a guy in Detroit who spent 400 hours making the thing that is in the Pelican case. Then they let me open it.
It’s a perfect (and I don’t use that word often) quarter-scale version of The Anarchist’s Tool Chest. It is built exactly like mine. The same material, the same number and slope of dovetails, the same hinges with the same clocked screws. But it is the size of a small toaster.
All of it was made by Marco Terenzi, a 24-year-old artist and woodworker from outside Detroit. It seems like I spent a good 10 speechless minutes looking at the thing. Moving the three perfect trays, eyeballing the hardware, marveling at the perfection of it all.
And then they dropped the real bomb. Marco was coming to England that weekend and would be taking a class on building a Dutch tool chest the following week.
Now, before I carry this story any further, I urge you to check out Marco’s Instagram feed, which documents the construction of the tool chest in incredible detail. Also check out his web site. Yes, that’s a quarter-scale Roubo workbench. Yes, he made those tools to make the chest and the bench.
The rest of the story is that Marco and I got to hang out a bit during and after the class and he gave me a quarter-scale version of my Andrew Lunn saw. And it works. Incredible.
The photos of the chest are amazing, but if you play your cards right, you will be able to see the chest in person. The New English Workshop boys will be displaying the chest at shows around England in the coming year. And they have promised me that I’ll be able to show it off as well.
I am hoping to get it here for Handworks in Amana, Iowa, in 2015. And I think I have Marco talked into coming to Amana, too.
So stay tuned. This story has just begun. Marco is starting to make all the tools that go in the chest – including casting the metal planes.
Jeff Burks has written here several times about the drinking habits of 17th- and 18th-century woodworkers viz. they used to work like the devil all day and then spend all of their hard-earned largesse on gin (known as “mother’s ruin” here in the old country). Workshops typically set up a system of penalties for unsuspecting apprentices to generate alcohol for the journeymen.
It should not have been a surprise that when students joined Chris for the first New English Workshop course the evenings were, in short, a mess; our group of budding anarchists simply reverted to 17th-century type. They worked like the clappers and then went nuts every night.
Inevitably talk turned to differences between U.S. (i.e. damned colonial) and The Queen’s English. It all started innocently enough with the usual woodworking terms: English “timber” being U.S.’s “lumber,” the English cutting “rebates” whilst Americans cut “rabbets” (though there is evidence that “rebate” was originally pronounced “rabbet” here in dear old Blighty). Then we moved onto the more general terms like “chips” in the UK being “French fries” in the U.S., pedestrians getting hit with the hood of the car in America whereas we run them over by hitting them with the bonnet. You get the picture.
I can’t remember who mentioned it in the deepening alcohol-induced haze but somehow the word “chub” came up, and Chris and another American plain flat out snorted their (warm) beer through their noses. So for the next 5 minutes:
Americans: Hooting with laughter.
English: Staring in shock, bemused.
We managed, eventually, to get out of them that in America a chub (chubb?) is a semi-erect willie, whereas in civilised parts of the English speaking world it is a fish or a brand of lock. I’m serious: Englishmen everywhere lock up their homes with a large Chubb at night and fine upstanding Englishmen spend long hours on riverbanks here trying to catch the biggest chub they can….
But then in the U.S. if you have a “semi” you are driving an articulated truck, whereas here in the UK you have a semi-erect johnson… Result:
English: Hooting with laughter.
Americans: Staring in shock, bemused.
But then there are always going be differences: In America “Hooters” is a chain of family restaurants with a friendly owl as its mascot. We also have “Hooters” in the UK but this is dirty, salty, saucy Edinburgh Hooters that has naked ladies of the pole writhing barely inches above your burger and chips. (If my better half is reading this, I heard that on BBC Radio 4, I swear.)
So, thanks to the power of alcohol we established each evening that The Special Relationship is alive and well. Our sorry anarchic crew would then troop into the workshop each morning, scarf down a litre (about a quart) of water and crack on banging out tails in time to the jackhammer pounding in their head. But then on a course where everyone got their bottom ripped French style (see photo above) at least once isn’t a special relationship just what you need?
