In our household, we have offered the following guideline to our young girls: Words are not weapons. The only way that words can hurt you is if you let them hurt you.
So, as you can imagine, we allow complete freedom of speech within our walls (though we caution them to take great care with people outside our family). This is the same policy I follow on this blog. I will never write any words here that I would not say in front of either of my grandmothers (God rest their souls). It’s just polite.
This makes it difficult for me to discuss dovetailing on the blog. When I teach dovetailing, I use an awful expression to describe the amount of compression that the joint can and should endure where you drive the bits together. In other words, I try to explain how far away from your knife line you should saw your pins to fit the joint together tightly. Wood compresses. And we should take advantage of it.
So in an effort to describe this tiny measurement, I today asked my students for ideas (after using my foul expression). The students are British, for the most part, and should have some sense of propriety. Here are the three top suggestions.
When sawing your pins, you should saw slightly away from your line – exactly one…
1. Gnat’s firkin
2. Gnat’s chuff
3. Gnat’s nasty
I personally like No. 3 (alliteration is the mark of quality writing). Why they focused on gnats I do not know.
If someone has a better G-rated suggestion, I’d like to hear it. There could be a beer in it for you.
If you want to build a tool chest or a workbench in 2015 with the assistance of a sasquatch (me), 2015 could be the year. I have just about finished lining up all my classes for next year. While it might seem early to be discussing this, I know that many busy students need to plan their lives a year in advance.
I’ll be discussing these classes in more detail in the coming months. But here is a broad overview.
January: It looks like I’ll be returning to Highland Hardware at the end of the month to teach a weekend class, perhaps on building a Dutch tool chest.
February and March: I return to Australia for a tour of the country – very exciting. Here is the preliminary schedule:
Feb. 23-27. Build a Roubo Workbench at the Melbourne Guild of Fine Woodworking.
Feb. 28. Hand Tool Event at the Melbourne Guild of Fine Woodworking.
March 2-4. Dutch Tool Chest class at the Melbourne Guild of Fine Woodworking
March 6-8. Class at Robert Howard’s School in Brisbane. Topic to be announced.
March 11-13. Dutch Chest class at the Henry Eckert School in Adelaide.
April: I’ll be teaching at the Guild of Oregon Woodworkers April 9-12, topic to be announced.
May: I return to the Woodworkers Club in Rockville, Md., for a week-long class May 4-8. The topic is still up for discussion.
May 15-17. Handworks in Amana, Iowa. Do not miss it.
June 12-19: I return to Dictum (yay!) in Germany to teach classes on building a traditional sawbench, mallet and marking gauge.
June 22-28: I get the honor of teaching at Phil Lowe’s Furniture Institute of Massachusetts. We’ll be building the Anarchist’s Tool Chest for one class and I think we’ll be doing a two-day seminar on tackling the tricky bits for campaign chests – the full-blind dovetails and hardware, in particular.
July: I return to England to teach two classes for the New English Workshop. At this point, one class will be a workbench, the other will be a chest. We’re still working out the details, but both classes will be brand new ones. One of them is a project I’ve been mulling over for years now.
Aug. 10-14. We build Roubo workbenches at the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking.
Sept. 28-Oct. 2. I’ll be teaching a tool chest class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. Just like the classes for the New English Workshop, I can’t say much until we finalize some details. But this will be a class that is very important to me.
There are a couple more classes that I’ll add to the schedule. But the schedule above really is the physical limit for me if I want to build furniture and edit books as well. I do hope you can make it out to a class next year.
People gripe about traveling abroad, especially for work. I don’t get it. Here is how it’s done.
1. Take yourself on a “date.” Jet lag is easy to conquer with modern chemistry. I tell people that I give myself a “roofie” before I fly across the globe. First I take myself out for a nice dinner – in this case an overheated Mexican craphole in a New Jersey airport. And I order extra salsa – in this case they brought ketchup.
Then I get myself a nice girlie drink, the ones that come with either a paper umbrella or a glittery tube top. And, after telling myself how irresistible I am, I slip myself a few pills while I’m not looking. Two ibuprofen and two Benadryl.
With the help of this concoction I can sleep all the way across the Atlantic while a 6-year-old ninja goes all Donatello on the back of my seat.
2. Don’t nap. When I land I behave like I’m on local time. I stay up as late as I can the first day I am there and crash hard. After that, the trick is to never stop swimming.
3. Embrace everything. When I teach, I always round up the students to go out in the evenings to get dinner and a couple of drinks. We usually enlist a local to help us find a cheap dive with good food, good beer and a goodly amount of patience with loud-mouthed woodworkers. Tell bad jokes. Stay up too late. Crash hard. Repeat.
And never say “no” when you are invited to do something with the locals. The best way to see a new place is through the eyes of a resident. The worst way to see it is from the seat of a tour bus.
The week I’ve been at Warwickshire College, teaching a class in building “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” for the New English Workshop. We’re in a nice little town called Leamington Spa outside Birmingham. The place is awash in Georgian architecture, quaint little shops and just enough pubs to get us into trouble.
It has been a remarkable week for many reasons.
This is my first course in England and the first course for New English Workshop. It’s a great little company run by Derek Jones and Paul Mayon that seeks to really honestly and truly prop up the craft.
Here’s one example: The tool chest I’ve built for the course will be auctioned off by David Stanley Auctions while it is full of incredible tools donated by toolmakers all over the world (Karl Holtey, Veritas, Bad Axe Toolworks and many others – a complete list to come). All the proceeds from that auction will go back to Warwickshire College to support its furniture-making program.
I’ll have more details on the auction as we get closer to the date.
As a nice gesture, I had all 18 students sign the underside of the tool chest. That should confuse some future tool collector.
The other great thing about the course has been getting to know the students, many of whom I’ve corresponded with via e-mail. One of the highest of the highlights was getting to meet Kieran Binnie, a luthier, woodworker, music lover and history nut.
Kieran runs the Over the Wireless blog, where he discusses woodworking, building guitars and martial arts and somehow blends them all into a very interesting and readable mix. Oh, and his guitars are gorgeous. Do subscribe to his blog. And read more about Kieran on Chris Hughes’ blog at Artifact Bag. And check out this Telecaster he built. Must. Resist.
A dozen of the 19 chests we built in five days.
As we loaded up the 18 students’ chests today, I marveled that we got so much work done in only five days (and without a single stomach pumping and only one instance of barfing). When woodworkers build a serious tool chest it is usually the point where they give themselves over to the craft. You can see that after five hard (nay, brutal) days of dovetailing under extreme time pressure, that each person has become a little different. And it’s not just the odd smell.
Building such a difficult piece in a short period of time gives them the confidence they can do a lot of other things in the craft. And it can be done quickly and precisely.
So this blog entry has gone on far too long. I’ve got another date tonight. This time with a pillow and an unplugged alarm clock.
The No. 1 question I get from students in my tool chest classes: “Aren’t you tired of building tool chests?”
That’s like asking a delivery-room doctor: “Aren’t you tired of delivering babies?”
Helping woodworkers build a tool chest and workbench that will set them on a life of making things never gets old. Building a chest or a workbench in a classroom with 18 other people is a sometimes-grueling way to learn the basic joints of the craft and make mistakes in a place where they can easily be fixed.
And in only five days, it’s all over. You have a place for your tools and you know how to use them.
This week I’m teaching a particularly special Anarchist’s Tool Chest class at Warwickshire College in England. It’s a big deal for me for two reasons. First, it’s the first time I’ve ever taught in England. Second, I am the first instructor hired by The New English Workshop, a small company that has a lot of the same fundamental principles as Lost Art Press.
The two founders, Paul Mayon and Derek Jones, are committed to growing the hand-tool craft in England and supporting the existing structure of craft education in this country (more on that later in the week). They have a lot of interesting classes and events planned for 2015, so do sign up updates from their their blog.
We are three days into the class right now, and things are going well. Except for the fact that I am having the occasional and strange attack of deja-vu. Here’s why: We are building these chests from yellow pine, which is almost certainly from the United States. So as I am surrounded by these tea-sipping, warm-beer-loving English woodworkers, I am occasionally overwhelmed by the familiar turpentine odor of yellow pine. It makes me feel like I’m back in Arkansas and in one of our unfinished houses on the farm. And all the turkeys and armadillos have English accents.
So yeah, it’s a bit weird.
But I love the weird, and so I’m off to a sports bar with the students in a few minutes. I wonder if Bud Light sponsors the local cricket league. I hope not.
I leave for England Saturday to teach two classes for the New English Workshop at Warwickshire College, but before that English experience, I have to tend to another.
Today I started roughing out the parts for two more Roorkee chairs in sapele that will incorporate some interesting details. One of the details will be this little piece of brass awesomeness.
If life doesn’t go off the rails I hope to get the legs turned tomorrow.
While in England, I’ll mostly be teaching and sleeping. I’m teaching two tool chest classes, which are about as grueling to teach as they are to take. But I am going to get to meet David Savage on Tuesday, which I am greatly looking forward to.
And I know some of the students in the class, so I’m packing extra ibuprofen for the inevitable hangover(s).
This is my first teaching assignment in England, and I hope it’s not my last. The Germans didn’t seem to mind my occasional nudity. I wonder if how the Brits will?
Better yet, perhaps I should pack one of my wife’s dresses….
