During some annual inventory activity, John Hoffman and I turned up two cases of books we don’t sell anymore at Lost Art Press. These books aren’t doing anyone any good sitting in a warehouse, so we’re offering them at 50 percent off retail until they are gone.
We don’t have a lot of these, so they likely won’t be around for long. Here’s what we found:
“Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use” (19 copies). This is my first book and covers the principles of bench design and construction that I still follow today. We stopped carrying this book because it’s suicide to compete with Amazon.com, and I’ve never been happy that F+W chose to print the title in China. We’re selling it for $15 plus domestic shipping. All the copies are signed.
First edition of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” – the tan cover edition. The first edition has a few typos and doesn’t have an index. But you can download the index for free here. And at $17.50 plus domestic shipping, it’s a solid deal. These are signed via either bookplate or directly.
You can buy the first edition of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” via this link.
When predicting what a thick workbench top will do, I don’t consult the tables in the Forest Product Lab’s “Wood Handbook: Wood as an Engineering Material.” Instead, I prefer to think that building a thick benchtop is like moving into a haunted house.
Yes, the haunted benchtop is going to give you trouble at first. It’s going to scare the plop out of you when you stare into a gaping crack that seems to open up more each day. Your tools will behave erratically on the new benchtop, like they also have been possessed.
But if you are patient and observant, you will come to an understanding. Soon the ghost will be serving you tea.
Does that magic moment occur when it dries out and reaches “equilibrium moisture content?” No. I don’t think that thick benchtops follow the same rules of moisture loss that we expect from thin stock.
Benchmaker Richard Maguire recently told me about a slab-top workbench that he built from 50-year-old stock. After 50-plus years of drying, it still gave him fits.
“After all those years I imagined it was as dry as it was ever likely to get, and yet when I cut or drilled in to it it was apparent that there was too much moisture still in the middle,” Maguire wrote. “Thinking to the original French benches with these thick slab tops, I’ve begun to feel that these must have been very wet when built. Just based on the amount of time it takes for this thickness of timber to dry, I don’t imagine they had a good 50 years or more to leave it lying around.”
His experience lines up exactly with mine. When dealing with thick stock, getting the wood spirits out of the middle are next to impossible – and probably not necessary.
After observing how these benchtops behave, I have a theory for you to consider. I hope to ask the scientists at the Forest Product Labs about it someday. Here it is:
When you cut open these thick slabs, they dry from the outside-in and from the ends primarily. (That’s not the theory; that’s well-established). As the outsides dry, they move as they start to reach equilibrium moisture content. The middle stays pretty wet. Why? Don’t know. Perhaps something about being surrounded by so much dry wood keeps the moisture in.
But here’s the important part: I’ve found that the outside gets dry and hard – like the shell of a lobster – and is less susceptible to gross movements by further drying from the inside.
So waiting for a thick slab to reach equilibrium might never happen. And it might not be necessary.
A good example of this is the all-handtool Roubo bench I built for Popular Woodworking almost four years ago. The top had been in Ron Herman’s log yard for a long time. It was wetter than the French oak we used in Barnesville, Ga., this summer. And it was punky. But it was what I had to work with, so I built the bench with it.
The first year with the bench was rough. I flattened the top twice. It shrank around the legs, leaving the end grain proud. It didn’t, however, distort all that much. I thought of the top like a slat-bending frame you use for chairmaking. You put a wet slat in a bending frame and it stays that shape. You put a wet benchtop in a frame of legs and it is somewhat restrained from distortion by the legs.
It has been three years since I messed with the top of that cherry-top Roubo, and it is still functioning quite well. After my oak bench went wonkers on me, I decided to see how out the cherry bench was doing. Three passes with a jack plane brought it back to perfect.
So I wouldn’t be afraid of slab benchtops – even fairly fresh ones. Just remember my theory, which I’m sure is as accurate as my theory that a gnome or small dwarf in my stomach makes me sick each winter.
Reader: “But how will I know when it’s not working?”
Me: “You will know.”
And really, that is all there is to say about the topic that is meaningful. But as this is a blog, I am going to add some more words so you feel you are getting your money’s worth.
Workbenches don’t have to be all that flat to function well. Even if you have significant low spots that you can detect with your hand or eye, the bench can still be perfectly functional. Why? Several reasons.
We don’t use all of the benchtop surface for high-tolerance work. Consider the areas where you handplane things. That’s your “special place.” It needs to be flatter than the areas you don’t use. Example: I don’t have a tail vise on my oak workbench, so I don’t care about the extreme right end of the benchtop.
Second: The wood we work is stiff. So even if your special place is wonky, a typical 3/4”-thick board will behave just fine there. (Plane an 1/8”-thick board there and you will have a different experience; but I don’t plane 1/8”-thick boards on a benchtop.)
Last week, my oak workbench stopped functioning. My special place was in disarray. What had happened was this: The top had shrunk, and so the end grain of the front left leg was interfering with the planing stop. I knocked down the end grain of the leg with a jointer plane in less than five minutes, and my special place was ready for work. But because I am mostly Teutonic, I was compelled to dress the rest of the top.
It took four passes with a jointer plane to true the top back to a state that is overkill.
I also had a small gap appear up near the planing stop. This has happened on many slab benches I’ve built before. I pushed some epoxy into the gap, a procedure I have covered many times over at my blog at Popular Woodworking.
Total elapsed time: About 45 minutes.
But that’s not the end of the story. During the summer I brought my daughter’s slab workbench back into my shop to use it for photography for “Campaign Furniture.” I haven’t flattened its benchtop for three years. It has been working fine, but I became curious and picked up a jack plane…
And now this blog entry is too long. I’ll finish it later. I have a date with a creepy janitor.
I know that my recent blog entries have been lightweight at best – thanks to Jeff Burks for picking up my slack. I’m determined to finish writing this “Campaign Furniture” book by Dec. 31, and so all my energy is going into the laptop.
And the benchtop.
Today I’m finishing up the collapsible bookcase – the last (I hope) project for the book – and none of the boards were behaving when I planed them. That usually means something is out of kilter – the plane’s sole or the benchtop. It was, of course, the benchtop. This bench is the one I built during the French Oak Roubo Projects in Georgia this summer. Until recently, the benchtop was settling in gently.
During the last two weeks, things got ugly. The benchtop itself has shrunk more than 1/16” in thickness – and shrunk even more near the dog holes and planing stop. This is, of course, totally expected because the holes expose more end grain to the atmosphere.
My benchtop after two passes with a jointer plane.
That doesn’t bother me. What’s distressing is the glue joint has opened up a 1/32” at the surface of the benchtop for almost 24”. The opening isn’t deep – less than 1/4” – but it looks like a gaping maw when I think about everything I did to get that seam airtight while gluing the benchtop.
It is what it is. Chances are it won’t fall to pieces.
But I have to get the top flat tonight so I can finish up this bookcase before the snow arrives. (It’s no fun to spray shellac in a snowstorm.)
When I appear in public (always against my will), one of the nice things that people have to say is this: Boy you have an interesting job.
Not really. For the most part, my life is a lot of dead ends and “rabbet holes” (thank you Geo. Walker and Jim Tolpin). Here is a look at what a single blog entry looks like, from start to finish. Warning: This is messy, boring stuff.
And so Chris repaired to his workshop to make a notchy stick.
I have a bench it tilts a bit. I’m making a stick to whack a wench. Oh, hey diddle day….
— Suzanne “Saucy Indexer” Ellison
“When I first saw the Durer stick tonight, I thought – brilliant, they bored a hanging-hole at each end. I have 3’ steel ruler that hangs on the wall. More than half the time I go to hang it up, it’s the wrong way up. If there was a hole at each end, it would always be right. But maybe you’re right, and there’s some actual use, rather than just stupidity-prevention. The Rivius stick has only one hole – which shoots your nailing-it-as-a-fence theory. IF we can put all this stock in these engravings/woodcuts, etc. I think for arguments’ sake we accept what we see there. So one hole in the first, 2 in Durer. Hmm.”
— Peter Follansbee
“Check out the photo on page 29 of ‘The Workbench Book’ by Scott Landis. It shows Rob Tarule at his Roubo bench using a batten & holfast to stabilize a board when planed against the stop. It is the same thing as the Maguire video, without the notch. I’m not sure why the Internet reacted to much to the Maguire video. I suspect many of them have not read the Landis book, or forgotten that photo exists. I agree that the technique is cool, and would love to find supporting evidence that the technique is as old as a holdfast, but not so sure those Melencolia sticks are the “smoking gun.
“I’ve always tried to play it safe with the mystery stick in the images you have referenced, and just consider them straight edges. Most of the wooden drafting tools from those old images have a hang hole & one or more decorative cuts. Perhaps the fancy cuts are just to help identify the tool in the pile of junk, and prevent it from being used as kindling to heat the glew…”
— Jeff Burks
reglet, n.
Etymology: Middle French, French †reglet, †riglet small ruler (1370), carpenter’s rule (1530), (in printing) strip of wood used to create blank spaces between blocks of text (1635), (in architecture) narrow strip of moulding used to cover joins.
†b. A thin, flat piece or strip of wood used in carpentry or frame-making. Obs. rare.
1678 J. Moxon Mech. Exercises I. vi. Explan. Terms 112
Riglet, is a thin square peece of Wood: Thus the peeces that are intended to make the Frames for small Pictures, &c. before they are Molded are called Riglets.
1683 J. Moxon Mech. Exercises II. 25
On the..Fore-Rail..is nailed a small Riglet about half an Inch high, and a quarter and half quarter of an Inch thick.
1754 W. Emerson Princ. Mech. 307
Riglets, little flat thin, square pieces of wood.
1860 H. E. P. Spofford Sir Rohan’s Ghost xi. 223
It is not a small canvas, being about four feet in height,..and is set in a quaint frame of black, carved wood, with an inner reglet gilt to relieve the want of that color in the painting.
During some annual inventory activity, John Hoffman and I turned up two cases of books we don’t sell anymore at Lost Art Press. These books aren’t doing anyone any good sitting in a warehouse, so we’re offering them at 50 percent off retail until they are gone.
First edition of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” – the tan cover edition. The first edition has a few typos and doesn’t have an index. But you can download the index for free here. And at $17.50 plus domestic shipping, it’s a solid deal. These are signed via either bookplate or directly.
