We have lots of new projects in the works at Lost Art Press that we cannot talk about just yet. But I am quite pleased to announce a new book for 2012 by George Walker and Jim Tolpin that is tentatively titled “Divide & Conquer.”
Usually we wouldn’t announce a book this far in advance. But there’s a way you can help with the development of this book. More on that in a minute.
“Divide & Conquer” will explore the world of furniture design through the eyes of the pre-Industrial artisan. Design furniture without using measurements. Using simple tools – such as dividers and a straightedge – Tolpin and Walker contend that you can create furniture that pleases the eye and is sympathetic to the human form.
Many of the current books on design seek to explore the limits of the materials, or to play with our conceptions of what furniture should be or could be. That is not the aim of this book. “Divide & Conquer” seeks to ignite the pilot light inside your head that will allow you to create pleasing forms – no matter what style of furniture you build.
The authors are an interesting pair. Walker is the host of two DVDs on design produced by Lie-Nielsen Toolworks and is the author of the “Design Matters” column in Popular Woodworking Magazine. Jim Tolpin is one of the bestselling woodworking authors alive and helps run a woodworking school.
How can you help? Well Walker and Tolpin are working on the book right now and are trying out their ideas on students. This August, Walker will will teach a class at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking and the students will be guinea pigs for many of the book’s ideas.
Walker informs me there are a few spots still open in the class. You can read all the details here.
We will have more details on the book, including a release date and price, as they become available.
When I embark on a writing project I try to begin with a ridiculous premise. During the revisions and the re-writes, the absurdity begins to mellow or even drain out of the manuscript altogether.
Take “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” for example. When I began writing the book, the nutty, never-happen-but-it-would-be-cool premise was to sell most of my tools, write a book, then quit my cushy corporate job… aw crap.
When Roy Underhill asked me to be a guest on a couple episodes of “The Woodwright’s Shop” for the upcoming season we decided to do a show on planes and a show about the English Layout Square that graces the cover of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”
So I began thinking about new ways to talk about handplanes. Stupid and perhaps insensitive ways to talk about handplanes. Stuff that would generate angry letters.
Here’s the set-up: What if smoothing plane use were an addiction? And there were support groups?
The following unedited script was completely discarded. We probably used only one line on the show. And yes, I know that addiction is a serious problem – ask me about my family’s struggles with it over a beer sometimes.
— Christopher Schwarz
Smoothing Plane Recovery Program
Chris: My name is Chris Schwarz, and I am a recovering smoothing plane addict.
Roy: An addict? Really? Strong words. Well let’s see … there are basically six steps to recovering from some sort of addiction. Let’s check the list:
“Step one: Admitting that one cannot control one’s addiction or compulsion.”
Chris: At one time I had more than a dozen smoothing planes. I was trying out all the angles, all the mouth apertures, infills, vintage, new, bevel-up, bevel down, woodies, different sizes, you name it.
shows different planes
I had a micrometer to measure whether I was making shavings that were .0005″ thick. I was watching Japanese planing contests – where they measure the shaving thickness in MICRONS.
shows wispy shavings
My wife even caught me down in the shop making shavings… and I wasn’t even building anything. Just… smoothing.
Roy: That is serious stuff. What made you finally quit?
Chris: The good book.
Roy: You mean…
Chris holds up and opens book
Chris: Yup. Joseph Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises; or the Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Arts of Smithing, Joinery, Carpentry, Turning, Bricklaying.” The first English-language book on woodworking.
Roy: That’s the second step – recognizing a higher power can give you strength. So you found strength through a 17th-century printer and hygrometer to the king?
Chris: Yes I did. Moxon showed me the error of my ways.
Roy: How’s that?
Chris: When I first read Mechanick Exercises I was struck – nay – blown away by how much Moxon wrote about the “fore plane” and how little he wrote about the “smoothing plane.” It was incredible. More than 1,800 words on the fore plane. And on the smoothing plane: just 33.
shows fore plane.
Roy: Dang. Well I hope they were strong words about the smoothing plane – about how it is the end-all plane, end of story.
Chris: Hardly. Here’s all he said:
“S. 6. The Ufe of the Smoothing-Plane.
The Smoothing-plane marked B 4. muft have its Iron fet very fine, becaufe its Office is to fmoothen the work from thofe Irregularities the Fore-plane made.”
Roy: That’s it? Nothing about finding your power animal or opening your heart chakra or adjusting your aura with sub-thou shavings?
Chris: Nope. That’s it. So I started diving deep into Moxon’s text on fore planes and I found that this plane (holds up plane) is the most powerful bench plane in the world.
Roy: You don’t say.
Chris: With this plane I could correct all the things I was doing wrong with my smoothing plane, and that’s ….
Roy: …the third step.
Chris: Indeed. The secret is inside the mouth of the tool. The iron (shows iron) is a convex arc – this one is an 8″ radius. And this radius can give you superpowers.
(reinstalls iron)
Roy: Like making paper-thin shavings?
Chris: Like making shavings the thickness of an old Groat! (makes massive pass with plane, pulls off thick shaving). This is what gets the work done, not the mamby-pamby lacy doily shavings where each one is unique like a snowflake!
This is what flattens boards (continues to work). Every shaving from a fore plane equals 10 from a smoother. You can do 10-times less work.
Roy: But won’t thick shavings tear up the work?
Chris: Ahhhh. That’s where Moxon helps us again. He tells us to traverse.
Roy: Traverse?
Chris: Yes. Don’t push your plane with the grain (shows) or against the grain (shows). Instead go ACROSS the grain.
Roy: Won’t you go to a dark and very warm place for doing that?
Chris: Hardly (demonstrates). By going across the grain we can take a much thicker chip with much less effort. And because we aren’t levering up the wood fibers, the tearing is minimal. This also allows us to get boards really flat – something a puny smoothing plane can’t do.
(discussion and demonstration of flattening a board by traversing bark side, then heart side. showing the different sounds and how to determine flat – just wink!)
Roy: That’s pretty remarkable, but the tool seems rather coarse; aren’t you going to make a lot of clean-up work for the other tools?
Chris: Hardly. Moxon says we can reduce the cut of the fore plane and clean up our dawks before moving on. (demonstrates; discussion of dawks ensues).
Roy: It seems like you really got true religion here. As I understand it, you are supposed to “make amends for your errors” in cases like this. Did you. Did you really?
Chris: I did. I sold almost all of my smoothing planes or gave them away to friends. I’m now down to – two smoothing planes, which is probably still one too many. And I’m trying to live my life with a new code of behavior – working as much with a coarse tool before I switch to a fine tool. That’s the core message in Moxon.
Use a hatchet more than a fine file. Use a rough plane more than a fine one. Chop. Don’t pare. Pit saw. Not coping saw.
Roy: And then there’s the last step, right? Helping others who suffer from an addiction to smoothing planes?
Chris: Yup. Wherever there is a woodworker using a Norris A13, I want to be there. A Holtey No. 98? I’m there to take your hands off the $5,000 tool. I’ll be there to trade you a moldy Scioto Works fore plane and show you the way: Across the grain, to get thick shavings, to actually accomplish something.
Perhaps the best way to design nice furniture is to first look at thousands of examples of it.
That’s the path I take, and I always recommend woodworkers visit museums and galleries, or pore over books crammed with photos of pleasing forms. But it never occurred to me that looking at furniture could have the opposite effect – it can ruin you.
During my last week in Germany I spent a lot of time with Ute Kaiser, who is in charge of public relations and the class program for Dictum GmbH, the company that runs the classes where I teach.
Ute is a former newspaper reporter like myself, so we get along just great. And usually before or after I teach at Dictum, she and her boyfriend take me sightseeing somewhere in Bavaria. This time we went to Regensburg and ended up ducking some spotty weather in a cafe that looked like something transplanted from Paris.
As the three of us chatted about what we had seen that day, the conversation turned to furniture, both old and new. That’s when Ute told me a story about a Bavarian furniture factory and the time she had interviewed the owner while she was a reporter.
The man had made a lot of money selling factory-made furniture all over Germany, though the furniture wasn’t particularly well-made or beautiful. During the interview, he explained his business model.
As a long-time maker, he knew that his furniture wasn’t the best. But he also knew something about human nature.
So he bought regular advertising in the local paper that showed photos of his furniture. The more the readers saw the ugly forms, the more they became used to them – the stuff became comfortable and familiar. And after becoming used to it, they bought it.
As much as I hate to admit, this makes sense. We accept the familiar and reject the different, especially when it comes to filling our homes.
It’s just that the world is upside down now. The ugly is familiar and the beautiful is rare.
— Christopher Schwarz
For more design resources….
• If you are interested in furniture design, you definitely should check out George Walker’s blog. Walker, the author of the “Design Matters” column in Popular Woodworking Magazine, has been on a one-man crusade to help improve the design vocabulary of woodworkers.
• If you like period furniture, one of the best and cheapest sources of beautiful forms is Wallace Nutting’s “Furniture Treasury.” Volumes one and two can be had for a song at used book stores.
• The other place to find lots of forms to look at is at web pages for auction houses that specialize in fine furniture. Christie’s and Sotheby’s are always good sources. But there are other houses that specialize in other forms, such as this great site for Southern furniture, Neal Auction house.
Before we begin: My apologies for the terrible photos from my phone. The battery in my regular camera died and I am without a charger.
For someone who is now unemployed, I sure have been working a lot.
Saturday was the fourth day of teaching the class on building the chest from “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” and my sixth day of teaching at the Dictum workshop in Bavaria. I think I might be more tired than the students — and I am rationalizing that by telling myself that’s because I am building a chest along with the students, and teaching at the same time.
Or perhaps I’m drinking too much weiss beer.
Either way, I’m ready to curl into a refrigerator box beneath a highway overpass like a proper hobo.
Today we put the dovetailed skirts on the tool chest, which were a cakewalk for the students after they cut 44 dovetails for the carcase of the chest. Sunday — the final day — we’ll be making the lid and the dovetailed dust seal around it.
Then I ride to Munich Sunday night, catch a plane Monday morning and fly back to Kentucky.
Whenever I teach, I learn things. One of the most educational parts of teaching this course has been getting intimate with the wood we are using to build the chest. It’s Scots pine (pinius sylvestris). It’s a common species in Europe that is sometimes available for sale in the United States as a Christmas tree.
It is quite similar to our Southern yellow pine. It is heavy, resinous, tough and smells fantastic. The wood we are using doesn’t have the big differences in density between the earlywood and the latewood. It planes beautifully and is not terrible to dovetail.
As I was working with the wood this week I kept thinking that it would be an excellent material for making a workbench. So if you have Scots pine in your area and it is reasonably priced, I think it’s worth a look.
It’s time for dinner now. I still cannot read the menu at the restaurant at the monastery, but everything I’ve eaten has been great. As one friend put it about German food: By the end of the week I might have some blood in my porkstream.
I’ve said this a few times in public, so I figured that I better mention it here before somebody starts a rumor about how I have a tumor (not true) or a small gnome or dwarf growing in my stomach.
I won’t be teaching any classes or lectures or traveling to shows in 2012.
There are several reasons. If you care, read on.
• I’ve decided that I need to spend at least a year focusing on my own skills. I enjoy taking classes as much as I enjoy teaching them. And I have put off several classes for too long now. So next year I might be the dufus sitting at the bench next to you.
• I have far too many personal projects – both writing and building – that I am burning to do. I need to build the Pepys Bookcase I blogged about earlier plus … well it’s a long list.
• I want to focus my teaching energies on one student in 2012: my daughter Katy. I can see her interest in woodworking blooming. If I don’t work with her now, I’m going to regret it.
There are still opening for classes that I’m teaching in 2011. If you are interested, check out the links below.
• April 15-16.
I’ll be demonstrating at the Lie-Nielsen show here in our offices and showing off my new tool chest. And I’ll be eating tacos from the taco truck we hire to sit in our parking lot. Come see both and decide which is more boring.
• April 22-23.
Rochester Woodworkers Society. I’ll be giving lectures and demonstrating how to build an English Layout Square at the Rochester Woodworkers Society in upstate New York. Details are here. I cannot believe they chose that photo of me to promote the event.
• May 14-15.
Marc Adams School of Woodworking. This is the Handplane Weekend class I’ve been teaching for years. This year it’s going to be a little different, but I can’t say anything more until Marc Adams announces it. Details are here.
• June 22-26.
Dick GmbH in Metten, Germany. Build a Dovetailed Tool Chest. There is still a spot or two open in my class in building a traditional tool chest at Dick’s excellent facility in Metten, Germany. Details about the class are here. Details about Dick and its workshop, here.
• July 11-15.
Marc Adams School of Woodworking. Handplanes, Handsaws and Hand-cut Joints. This class seeks to show you how all three of these tools work together in a hand-tool shop. And that understanding all of the tools in depth and their relationships with one another will make you a better craftsman. Details on the Marc Adams site here.
• July 18-20. The Woodwright’s School. I return to Roy Underhill’s class for another class on precision sawing. This class is a blast because Roy is there lending a hand the whole time and generally making mirth. Details here.
• Aug. 8-12.
Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking. By Hammer & Hand: Build the Dovetailed Schoolbox. I’ve always wanted to teach a class based on the dovetailed schoolbox I built for Woodworking Magazine and the book “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.” So this should be a fun week. Details here.
• Aug. 13-4.
Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. Build an English Layout Square. We’ll build the English Layout Square by hand and learn how it is an excellent project for apprentices that teaches many of the skills necessary for learning the hand tool mindset. Details here.
• Sept. 5-6.
Port Townsend School of Woodworking. Build a Sawbench. Finally, I get to head out to Jim Tolpin’s school. Details here.
• Sept. 7-9.
Port Townsend School of Woodworking. Handplane Essentials. We use handplanes to build the English Layout Square (yes, I love this project). Details here.
