Mark Firley at The Furniture Record (one of my favorite blogs), sent me these photos of a workbench he encountered in his travels. He was on;y able to snap these photos before the antiques dealer shooed him away.
My first (and fifth) reaction: A Narwhal and some ship’s tackle had a baby. And it didn’t live….
So if you look at the top of the bench, you can see there is probably a vise nut bolted to the underside of the workbench’s top.
The bolts might be (OK, almost certainly are) a later addition to the bench. Judging from the wear and tear on the thing (and the dealer’s guess at the age), that hardware is new.
But then everything goes sideways when we consider the vise. The vise screw itself looks handmade – not manufactured – and could very well be from the same era as the bench itself. The big thing sticking in the air is definitely… sticking in the air.
To my eye it resembles a leg vise chop after a vicious dog attack. And then there’s the second vise nut in front of that. It’s bolted in places (perhaps a repair?).
I wonder if the vise screw is in backwards and its hub is under the bench. And we just have, for some odd reason, two vise nuts. That’s my best guess.
Since the release of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” book in 2011, customers have asked for a DVD that explains how to build the English tool chest featured at the end of the book.
To be honest, we resisted making this DVD for one reason: It’s a complicated project to film, and we didn’t have the equipment, personnel or skills to produce the DVD to a high level of quality.
With the fifth anniversary of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” however, we decided to make it happen with a production crew from Popular Woodworking Magazine. It was an excellent partnership. I could focus on how to present a lot of complicated woodworking tasks to the viewers, and the crew could figure out how best to translate my ideas to video.
The result is the new “Make a Traditional English Tool Chest” DVD, which presents the construction process for the Anarchist’s Tool Chest exactly as it is drawn in the book. During the last five years, I have built dozens of these chests, and I have collected a lot of small tricks to make the construction process a lot easier for new woodworkers.
The DVD begins with dovetailing and ends with outfitting the interior of the chest. It is designed for a woodworker who has already built a couple projects. We don’t cover basic stock preparation, but we do cover dovetails and all the other joinery with detail that is suitable for a beginner.
Here are some of the operations we cover on the DVD:
Cutting through-dovetails
Cleaning up and assembling large carcase work
Adding dovetailed skirting to a carcase
Making tongue-and-groove bottom boards
Affixing cabinet parts with traditional nails
Shooting pieces to perfect length
Making through-mortises and tenons
Creating a traditional raised-panel lid
Installing butt hinges and fitting a lid
Building sliding tool trays
Making tool racks and saw tills
The DVD is 3 hours and 40 minutes and is on two all-region DVDs. It is $30, which includes free domestic shipping.
While not as gorgeous as blacksmith-made hardware, the Whipple’s Carpenter Combination Bench Hook is an immensely clever way of creating a temporary workbench.
Patented in 1900 by Rollin P. Whipple, the sheet steel device screws to a surface to create a crochet on the front edge of the bench and an adjustable planing stop on the top surface.
Jeff Burks dug this advertisement up from The American Carpenter and Builder that was published in October 1911. The patent (below) shows the device constructed in a slightly different way, with an angled steel brace that holds boards for “taking off corners.”
I do a lot of drafting and sketching at my workbench, so I’m always swiping stools from the house and they are always underfoot in the shop.
So when Jeff Burks sent me this 1916 photo of a manual training bench designed by D.V. Ferguson of St. Paul, Minn., I immediately latched onto the swing-out seat. I’ve seen these seats before in factory lunchrooms, but it never clicked as a bench accessory. Until now.
Vintage ones are expensive ($400 or so), so I’ve got my brain thinking on MacGuyvering one from off-the-rack metal components and (duh) wooden ones.
People often ask us where we find the interesting plates and images of early woodworking for our books and this blog.
Though it sounds snarky, the true answer is “on our computers.”
There isn’t some grand repository of awesome images of early woodworking images that you can visit and suddenly become Jeff Burks or Suzanne Ellison, our two hardest-working researchers for Lost Art Press.
Both researchers have taught themselves to work in other languages and comb the network of research libraries across the globe that are stitched together by the Internet. Though all three of us have been doing this a long time, I’m never surprised when one of them turns up a new database of images.
If you haven’t fallen asleep yet, here’s a brief peek into how we operate to nail down one single detail.
So this year I’m building a pair of Roman-style workbenches for Woodworking in America. One of them will be from a fresco at Herculaneum, which was covered in thick ash after Pompeii erupted in 79 AD and rediscovered in the early 1700s.
The fresco doesn’t exist anymore, according to Suzanne’s conversations with Italian antiquities experts (she’s a brazen one). But there are engravings that were made for royalty and (eventually) a more general public throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Once you start looking at these engravings however, you can see that they don’t agree.
For example, in plate 34 shown above the bench has been drawn at other times without a holdfast, without holdfast holes, with four legs missing, the toolbox moved and the oil on the shelf moved. So in order to make sure it’s OK to use a holdfast on my reproduction, we have been researching this tool for about the last year.
Scholars are little help on this question. Books on Roman tools were written mostly by people who don’t know what a holdfast is. That’s not to crap on their mortar board. Many modern woodworkers don’t know what a holdfast is.
So Suzanne dug up the original royal volumes of the images shown in plate 34. Then we compared those images to frescos that survived to see how accurate they were drawn and then engraved. The answer is: The accuracy on the early royal drawings is remarkable. So it’s fair to say that the artists saw what they thought was a holdfast in the fresco.
In our research we both stumbled onto “The Antiquities of Herculaneum” by Thomas Martyn and John Lettice (1773). (Download the excerpt here.) In the section on plate 34, the authors have a footnote saying a holdfast was shown in a Gruter marble. Is Gruter a place? No. A person. Yup.
So Suzanne and I spent hours last night scanning all the pages and pulled out the four images of woodworking tools. Did we find the holdfast?
Maybe.
Below are the four images. One of them has a snake-like thing that could be a holdfast.
The net result of all this work is that I feel fairly confident in adding a Roman-style holdfast to that bench (blacksmith Peter Ross has graciously agreed to make all the hardware for these benches).
But I will have an asterisk by my holdfast at all times.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. What motivates Jeff and Suzanne to do this sort of work? I don’t know. In this particular case, Suzanne’s grandfather is from San Giuseppe Vesuviano, which is near Herculaneum and Pompeii.
Since the release of “
