Last night I dragged myself home after five days of building 16 workbenches at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. All of the benches turned out fantastic for two reasons:
1. Wonderful (yet inexpensive) material. We used Horizon Wood Product’s Roubo “bench bundles.” For just $650 per bench, we got some amazing 12/4 and 8/4 ash for the bench. It was all cut to manageable lengths, perfectly dry and clear. Out of the 16 benches, we had only two small, tight knots.
Another testament to the quality of the wood: Due to a mistake I made, I ordered 15 bench bundles for 16 students. We still were able to squeeze out a perfect 16th bench from the material supplied. Without a doubt, I will use Horizon again. The service was outstanding. Pete Terbovich, who handles the bench kits there, is great to deal with.
2. Teamwork. At some bench classes it’s difficult to get students to work together on everyone’s benches, hauling tops around, milling material that is not for their bench, assisting with layouts and goodness knows what. Not this class. These were special students.
I’m back on the road next week – I leave Tuesday for The Woodwright’s School, where I’m teaching a class in the Dutch Tool Chest and filming two more episodes on Roy Underhill’s Show “The Woodwright’s Shop.”
So if I haven’t answered your recent e-mail….
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Day 1 and Day 2 of the bench-building class are covered on my blog at Popular Woodworking Magazine. The music is from freemusicarchive.org and is by the Freak Fandango Orchestra.
If you are building a Dutch Tool Chest, you have a number of good choices when it comes to the hardware. Here is some of the hardware I’ve had success with.
Black Bear Forge. John Switzer, the blacksmith at Black Bear Forge, can provide everything you need for the chest at a reasonable price for handmade work. The strap hinges and hasp are $250 as a set. Chest lifts are $65 a pair. This is gorgeous stuff and is what I have on my personal chest.
John makes things one at a time, so be sure to give him some lead time when planning your project.
Lee Valley Tools carries a lot of hinges that work well with this project.
Unequal Strap Hinges. The two longer hinges (with the 9-1/2”-long leaf) are best for the Dutch chest. With these hinges, you screw the short leaf onto the back of the chest. Yes, it’s traditional.
Equal Strap Hinges. These are also surface-mounted on the back of the chest and the inside of the lid. No mortising is required – only a small notch in the lid to house the hinge’s barrel.
Large Strap Hinges. If security is a real concern, these hinges are a good choice. One end is mortised into the case and the strap is screwed to the lid. I don’t think these look quite as nice as any of the above options, but I’m a hardware snob.
The chest handles for this project can be difficult to source. I have some old brass ones, which are difficult to find for some reason. Lee Valley offers these nice iron ones. I also encourage you to search on eBay. I’ve had good luck there.
Van Dyke’s Restorers also carries a lot of strap hinges. Here is a good place to start. Most of the hinges that have one leaf that is a butt hinge and the second leaf is a strap will work. But check the measurements to make sure the leaves aren’t too big. Some of these hinges are for architectural woodwork.
Van Dyke’s also carries some reasonably priced hasps, including this one.
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.
