Several readers have asked how far the students in my tool chest class at the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking got on Friday afternoon.
Everyone got their lids complete. About four or five people got the dust seal on. Honestly, I think every student could have finished both the lid and the dust seal, but everyone was tired and ready to crack open a beer or try a shot of Connecticut moonshine (that is not a typo).
So we spent the last hour just yacking it up.
As for me, I had Carl “Mr. Wonderful” Bilderback assisting me this week, so I was able to finish the entire shell of the chest and get three coats of milk paint on the carcase.
At one point I asked Carl, a retired union carpenter, to give me a hand with the painting. He readily and cheerfully agreed. But then he noted that during his career he always told people he’d “rather have a rat in my mouth than paint something.”
The real challenge in teaching a class on “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” is this: How can I make woodworkers cut dovetails as fast (and accurate) as possible?
When I first began teaching tool chest classes, we weren’t able to glue up the carcases until late, late Wednesday night or Thursday. Then it was a mad rush to get the rest of the chest completed.
Since then I have learned to put away the “encouragement whip” and get out the “punishment whip.” (I wonder why women rarely take my classes?)
Today – the second day of the course at the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking – we have a third of the 15 chests glued up. The rest will be glued up on the third day before lunch. This is a frickin’ cake walk.
What has changed? Well, to be honest, I am a poor teacher at best. Honest and true. But I have learned a few tricks from some fantastic teachers. Here are two of them.
1. Teach the information is small, manageable bites. Send students back to their benches to perform one operation. Repeat. This is from Trevor Smith, a high school physics teacher in Troy, Mich. The dude is an amazing teacher. I watched him teach for one day and learned more about teaching that day than in any other time period.
2. If you say it will happen, it will happen. Advice from Doug Dale, one of the outstanding assistants and teachers at Marc Adams School of Woodworking. If you set the goal for the day as “you will finish this particular operation,” then – surprise – the students achieve that goal. Weird.
And there is one thing I bring to the table: debasing the dovetail joint.
I do not treat this joint as a holy relic – St. Christopher’s duodenum. It’s a mechanical joint that is easy to cut if you break it down into small bites (thanks again, Trevor). None of the operations in cutting a dovetail is hard. The only thing that is difficult is being consistent with every operation.
With five chests together today, and all of them looking really, really good, I feel justified in drinking a beer.
After two full days of sawing, planing, hammering and gluing parts together, the 14 students in this Six-board Chest class at the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking laid down their tools. They swept up their shavings. They quietly loaded their chests into their cars.
Some classes end with exultation. Other with exhaustion. This one ended (I hope) with a little of both.
The pace of the class was particularly brutal. I was determined to cram in 400 years of history on the form of the “boarded chest” into the class time. And I wanted us to start with long boards that we had to knock down to size (by hand) and glue up into panels using jointer planes and spring joints.
Oh, and one more thing: There was no predetermined design for the chest we were going to build.
That was a good thing and a bad thing. Bad: Everyone had to think through his design and how it related to his material. This made every step forward a bit of a slog with 14 different answers to 14 questions.
Good: No two chests were the same. Not even close.
In fact, the chest that I built was not even the chest I set out to build when the class commenced on Saturday morning. Instead, I followed the needs of the material and ended up with a chest I am quite happy with. I’ll finish it up when I return home and post photos here on the blog. It’s stripped down, simple and appealing – to me at least.
As the students left – all a bit too weary – I could see that I had pushed things a little too far this time. It probably should have been a three-day class. And we should have used pre-cut stock. And worked to a predetermined design.
And… maybe not. I love to be dead tired when I have earned it.
We’re building 15 six-board chests this weekend at the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking. But after the first day, all we have to show for our labor are six boards.
One of the students asked me: “Are we going to be able finish these chests tomorrow?”
“Nah,” I said.
This was the wrong answer. So I changed my tune. “Of course we are!” I replied.
Getting six good boards is half the battle with these chests, and we fought that one tooth and nail today. Well, there were no nails used (that’s tomorrow), though some of the boards looked a little toothy after flattening them with fore planes and jointer planes.
So somehow we have to get these chests built in one day. My usual solution is to do what the Kentucky Legislature used to do when they had to pass a budget by midnight. One of the legislators would stand up on his desk, take down the wall clock and turn the hands back by three hours.
Problem solved.
Other possible solutions: nail guns, hot-melt glue and a Bedazzler.
Lucky for me I have my secret weapon with me: Carl Bilderback. Yup, Carl drove all the way out here from Indiana to assist me with this class plus a tool chest class in the coming week. He’s been helping diagnose problems and giving lessons on stock prep and edge jointing.
Everyone needs a Carl. He’s the best kind of assistant: Always willing to lend a hand or offer an additional viewpoint to mine.
This is the only opening in a tool chest class until 2014 I believe.
If you can ditch work that week, contact the school’s director, Bob Van Dyke, via e-mail or phone: bobvandyke@sbcglobal.net or 860-729-3186. During this class we’ll be building the chest out of some outstanding Eastern white pine – Bob is a wiz at finding beautiful stock.
And we will be eating at Frank Pepe’s pizza. A lot. Perhaps until I am sick.