Lost Art Press

Category: Woodworking Classes

Build the ‘Anarchist’s Tool Chest’ in Germany this Summer

Posted on by Lost Art Press

This June I’m returning to Germany to teach two classes at Dick GmbH, which runs a beautiful woodworking school in Bavaria outside Metten. My short course on sawing is fully booked, but there are still three two spaces left to build the tool chest from my forthcoming book “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”

The class runs from June 22-26 and costs only 480 Euros, a bargain for a week-long class. The Dick facility is first-rate and very hand-tool oriented. All of the benches are massive, and each student is allotted a box of tools during the course, which are of excellent quality and sharp.

And the region itself is gorgeous. I stayed in the town of Deggendorf, a quaint river city with lots of nice little restaurants and far too much great gelato. Last year I went out to dinner with the students almost every night, a pattern I hope to repeat again this year. I learned a lot about European-style woodworking, weiss beer and venison.

For more details on this class, visit the Dick web site here.

— Christopher Schwarz

In the Birth Canal

Posted on by Lost Art Press

This morning I processed the stock for 18 more sawbenches that we’ll build during the “All About Hand Tools” class I’m teaching this coming week at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking.

I feel a bit like a midwife on these days. I’ve helped build about 60 of these benches during the last few years, but I rarely get to see my babies after they leave the class.

But helping people cut more than 240 angled birdsmouth joints on the legs and 480 half-lap joints always inspires me to find ways to make this design more material-efficient, lightweight and strong.

The first version of this sawbench used twice as much material and took twice as long to construct. The lessons buried in that design (drawboring and wedging tenons) were the driving factors in its beefy-osity. Today I’ve got this design pared down to where I can build a sawbench in about three hours using hand joinery alone.

In addition to making these quick to build, I’ve also put the suckers on a diet. To build 20 sawbenches, I need only seven 2 x 12 x 10’s and five 2 x 8 x 12’s. And the leftover waste from ripping and crosscutting all that stock won’t fill an office wastebasket.

But I’m still not satisfied.

I hate the screws we use to join the legs and stretchers. So today I started planning out Sawbench 4.0 as I ripped the 80 legs. My new sawbench design will use a half-lapped dovetail to join the legs, top and stretchers.

Sure, it sounds intimidating, but once you learn to saw to a line, it doesn’t matter what angle that line is. All angles are the same to a handsaw.

So now I’ve got my Honda piled up with Southern yellow pine (Kentucky’s tropical softwood), and I can turn my attention to other things – like worrying that the next Frank Klausz is registered for this class that starts Monday, and I’m going to look like an idiot.

This, of course, is still better than my dreams of showing up naked to high school French class.

— Christopher Schwarz