Because of some military redeployments, there are two spots open in my Dutch Tool Chest class at Roy Underhill’s The Woodwright’s School on June 18-20, 2014.
If you can skip out of work (or are lucky enough to be an “individual of leisure”), you can register for the class here. Scroll down on the page and you’ll see the class listing. Keep scrolling. Yup. Oops. Too far.
Thanks to Roy, these classes are highly amusing. Thanks to me, they are also hirsute. Megan Fitzpatrick (who is not hirsute) has threatened to be my assistant during the class. And the Pittsboro, N.C., shop is a great place to take a woodworking class.
The Dutch Tool Chest class is a great introduction to handwork – even if you’ve never picked up a tool before.
Jameel Abraham at Benchcrafted has been scouting in Georgia to see if there’s enough massive old French oak to put on another French Oak Roubo Project (aka FORP) in fall 2015.
Jameel’s account of his visit to Georgia with photos of big oak can be found here.
If Jameel and Bo Childs do manage to organize a second French Oak Roubo Project, you can bet I will be there to take another chance to work with this amazing material. It is more akin to timber-framing and is both exhausting and exhilarating. The size of the material makes every construction step a challenge.
After last year’s event, I have come up with some techniques to make construction easier and the joinery more precise. So I want another wack.
Stay tuned to this blog and the Benchcrafted blog for details on this event.
While Jameel was in Georgia, he also got to inspect a Féron & Cieworkbench that Childs imported from France. Féron, which branded its products “a la La Forge Royale,” produced tools and workbenches in France.
You can download an early 20th-century Féron & Cie catalog here:
This workbench has some interesting details to consider if you have a workbench on the drawing board.
1. No flush surfaces. One of the most striking things about the bench is that the stretchers, front legs and benchtop are not in the same plane (a feature common on earlier French benches). The benches in the catalog are drawn similarly, so I don’t think this one is a fluke.
Make what you will of it. I suspect the non-flush surfaces made the bench easier to manufacture. Personally, I want all those surfaces in the same plane to make clamping doors and long boards a lot easier.
2. A splined or tenoned slab benchtop. One of the details from Jameel’s photos is that the slab benchtop is in (at least) two pieces. Along the seam there are pegs. My suspicion (and Jameel’s) is that there is a spline or loose-tenon in there, and the pegs keep everything together and aligned.
English benchbuilder Richard Maguire uses a similar detail on his benchtops, and he drawbores the loose tenon to keep the seam shut. After talking to maguire and seeing the detail on this Féron bench, I am itching to try it on a future workbench.
3. It’s a knockdown design. The top can be removed from the Féron bench. The top sits on tenons on the legs and is secured with a threaded wooden post.
After looking at the joinery in Jameel’s other photos, I am wondering (but am not convinced yet) if the bench was sent to the customer in pieces and the customer glued up the bits to the base and then attached the top. That is how I’d do it. And it’s how Plate 11 Bench Co. does it. But this is speculation only.
4. Nails in the planing stop. This feature shows up on old benches in place of an iron toothed stop. The benches in the Féron catalog show a planing stop that is just a shaft of wood. No nails. No toothed stop as best I can tell.
5. A simple parallel guide. The parallel guide in the leg vise is held in the chop with an open notch. This is a time-saving feature for the builder.
Thanks to Jameel for the photos and background information on this important bit of bench-building history.
Students David, Rebecka and Pete showing off the results of their work.
When it comes to the issue of transporting a fully constructed Anarchist’s Tool Chest home, not every woodworker owns a truck. And even though the finished dimensions of the chest are easy to calculate, some people’s eyes are bigger than their Impalas.
I have had to do some wacky things to chests to get them into cars. On a few of the weirder ones, I am sworn to secrecy. Among the less weird:
• Shrink-wrapping it to the top of a Honda, “Beverly Hillbillies” style.
• Building it completely without glue so it can be flat-packed like Ikea stuff.
• Abandoning it at the school!
This week student David Eads pulled another common trick: Taking the car door off the hinges to get just enough space to sneak the chest into the back seat of a sedan. The whole process took 10 minutes. Tips: Have a box below the door and helpers so you can remove the door gently without destroying the wiring or dropping the door on the ground (this has happened.)
I head home on Sunday with this tool chest on my mind. We are getting the electronic files ready for our sixth printing of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” Love it or hate it, this is the book that let me quit my job. So thank you for buying it.
One of the interesting aspects of the book “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” is how many of the readers are active members of the military, government officials or managers in huge internet corporations.
I have lost count of the number of e-mails that begin like this: “I would like to order this book, but I don’t think it can be mailed to me on base, and I can’t have it show up on my credit card.”
We are happy to oblige and always ship our books in a plain brown wrapper.
This last week I’ve been teaching a class in building The Anarchist’s Toolchest at The Woodworker’s Club in Rockville, Md. The club is an interesting place – you don’t see many clubs like this except on the East or West coasts of the United States or in Europe.
Essentially, The Woodworker’s Club is, first of all, a place where you can pay a monthly fee to use a fully equipped and impeccably maintained workshop. There are lots of workbenches and an impressively equipped machine shop (a 16” SCMI joiner with a Shelix head?).
There is a lot of staff support, and the Maryland club also has an entire Woodcraft store up front.
As we were building a dozen tool chests this week, I got to watch the club’s members work among us, both in the bench rooms and in the machine room. I have to say this: Without a doubt, I have never seen a more diverse group of woodworkers. There was a healthy mix of men and women of all ages, races and ethnicities, working away at their personal projects.
It was very cool and quite heartening. If you live in the D.C. area and cannot set up shop in your apartment or condo, stop by the club and talk to Chris, Matt or Amy. They will be happy to help you get started in the craft without having to invest a year of your salary in machines alone.
During this class, I lost track of how many of the students were connected to the military or the government. And after a Thursday-night open house at the club, I was overwhelmed by the response of people to the anti-establishment ideas I write.
So now I think it’s a good idea if I sneak out of town before anyone notices what I’ve been teaching.
Yeah, we all built rectangular boxes this week, but what is radical is what goes inside.
When you read advertisements for woodworking classes, books and magazines, one of the selling points sounds something like this: “You’ll learn to work just like the pros do, with plenty of tips and articles from pros on how they build stuff in a professional woodworking shop.”
It sounds compelling. I should know. I’m sure I used that bit to help promote Popular Woodworking. Professionals work fast. They have to be practical. And they do woodworking every day.
Amateurs, on the other hand, can work at their own pace. They can try antiquated or oddball techniques. And they do it at night and perhaps weekends.
My point: Professional techniques might not suit the amateur shop.
During the last year or so, I have tried to become a better teacher of amateurs. Instead of teaching a technique that gets things done quickly (but requires a lot of skill), I have tried to teach techniques that get things done well with a minimal amount of skill and a few more steps.
One example: Dovetails.
When I cut dovetails, I put the saw next to my knife line and cut down to the baseline as fast as I can manage. I have been cutting dovetails for 20 years now. I should be able to work without much in the way of guidelines or tricks.
But if you started cutting dovetails this Monday, the advice in the previous paragraph isn’t helpful. It is, in fact, frustrating and arrogant.
So the way I teach cutting dovetails is not the way I cut dovetails in my shop. It sounds duplicitous, but the results from my first-time dovetailers have convinced me it is a better way to go.
So sawing a pin is a multi-step process.
1. From the rear corner of the board, nibble a kerf along your knife line until you reach the corner near you.
2. Make one or two “cleansing strokes” to clear your nibbling into a kerf into which you can saw smoothly.
3. Saw down the face of the board only, dropping the handle of the saw gradually and never letting the saw leave the kerf on the end grain. Stop when your saw touches the baseline.
4. Remove the saw and clear the sawdust from its gullets.
5. Reinsert the saw and saw quickly forward. Let the two kerfs guide you down until your saw’s teeth touch the baseline at the front and rear of the board.
Whew. That’s a lot to explain. But it works. I also explain to students that someday they might leave this technique behind. And then I show them how I cut a tail or a pin as a demonstration.
I’ll admit that I feel guilty on some level. Perhaps I should pull a Mother Superior on them and just expect better. Show them how it’s done and expect them to work that way.
Here is what keeps me on my current teaching trajectory. Students say this during every class: “These are the best dovetails I’ve ever cut.”
