When I arrived in Barnesville, Ga., on Sunday afternoon I found that all the preliminary heavy lifting had been done.
Jameel Abraham, Bo Childs, Ron Breese, Jon Fiant, Jeff Miller, Raney Nelson and Don Williams had finished ripping up the tops and legs with a sawmill and had everything stacked. The wood is beautiful. Huge. And wet – in the “high teens.” I’ve made many benches with wood at this stage in drying, and the Roubo design is well-suited for wood that is a little wet.
The leg vise hardware was artfully displayed. And Jameel was tweaking an enormous banner hanging in the middle of the shop that showed A.-J. Roubo’s plate 11 in all its detail.
All I had to do was unpack my tools, buy some fried chicken and set up to give a presentation tonight on the history of woodworking benches from Egypt to the 18th century.
I’m sure I’ll get to do my share of sweating during the next five days. My work station is in the corner with all the flies.
When I built my first French workbench in 2005 from Southern yellow pine, I vowed to someday build one just like the version shown in A.-J. Roubo’s “L’Art du Menuisier.”
I’ve come close to filling that pledge a couple times, but that vow is now eight years old. If my vow were a hot dog, it would be almost inedible.
On Sunday I leave for Georgia to participate in the French Oak Roubo Project, which has been organized by the Benchcrafted Brothers. I’ll be helping the students build their benches from the massive and ancient French oak slabs that Benchcrafted and Bo Childs have gathered for the week-long workbench orgy.
But I will also get to build my own bench. (I am paying for all my materials. #eyeroll)
My bench will be designed to the print of plate 11 of “L’Art du menuisier.” It will have a grease pot. A drawer. The rack. And the exact pattern of holdfast holes shown in the well-known plate. And the hardware… well I’ll be blogging about that next week, I’m sure.
I will have a leg vise. But I’ll have the leg vise shown in plate 11, which doesn’t have a parallel guide. How does it work? Roubo explains that in his long discourse on shops and benches. To date, only a small bit of that text has been translated. But thanks to Don Williams, Michele Pietryka-Pagán and Philippe Lafargue, we now have an excellent and complete translation of the text relating to the bench and other shop practices.
With the leg vise, you use loose blocks of wood on the floor to pivot the jaw into your work. A parallel guide is shown in Roubo, but it is on his “German workbench,” which will be discussed in our translation coming out in August.
This bench will be a daily worker in my shop. I’m going to have to re-organize some things, but now that we are not a book warehouse, that should be do-able.
Next week I’ll be blogging daily about the class, as will many of the other participants. But I won’t be answering e-mail or my phone.
The Bench.—The tool most frequently used is the bench, and of this many varieties or patterns exist. Whatever pattern is adopted, however, the embodiment of these common principles must be ensured, if the maximum of utility is to be obtained :—
(a) It must be rigid and stable, by being suitably and securely framed, put together, and fixed.
(b) It must be level on the top of the planing board, which should not be less than 10″ broad.
(c) It must be of such a height as best suits the work and the height of the worker—30″ or 31″ being high enough.
(d) Details of construction must ensure that natural shrinkage and wear shall limit its usefulness to as small a degree as possible.
(e) It should have a clearance all round of at least 2½ or 3 feet.
From W.H.C., Tenn.–I inclose you here with a sketch of my clamp bench for clamping doors, sash, blinds or any other work that requires to be held in the same general manner. I have been using a bench of this description for some 24 years, and have found it quite satisfactory. It is made of hard oak, well seasoned and well put up. The size of stuff or clamp is 3 x 5 inches. The height is 2 feet, and of course may be made to any length required. A tenon on the end of the top of bench is made to go through the jaw, in order to keep the latter from working either right or left. A groove extends lengthwise of the top one-half inch deep and 1 inch wide, in which a tongue on the slide fits. The strap of the slide is made of eighth inch by 1 ¼-inch iron, with half-inch round iron pins riveted in. The small sketch shows the general construction of the slide.
The discovery of an intact 18th-century joinery shop in Duxbury, Mass., set off a storm of interest last year in the small outbuilding behind a school.
Now, months after the discovery, preservationists and employees at Colonial Williamsburg have begun to piece together the interesting story of the site, to document every peg and nail and take the first steps toward stabilizing and preserving the building.
This week I took a tour of the site with Michael Burrey, the restoration carpenter who discovered the shop while working nearby, and Peter Follansbee, the joiner at Plimoth Plantation.
The working area of the shop is about the size of a single-car garage, yet almost every inch of the room is packed with clues about the work that was done in the shop, the tools that were in use and how they were stored. There is so much detail to see that after two hours of rooting around, my senses were overloaded and there was still much more to see.
As a workbench enthusiast, I was quite interested in poring over the benches that lined three walls of the shop, creating a U-shaped ring of working sufaces along the outer wall.
The benches were all fixed to the structure of the building. I haven’t written much about this style of bench. These fixed benches seem to first appear in the 15th century as best I can tell (see the evidence here). These fixed benches exist at the same time as the typically freestanding Roman-style workbench. Eventually the Roman benches disappear (though not entirely in Eastern Europe), and are replaced by the movable forms we are familiar with now.
The benches in the Sampson shop have seen so much use that the bench along the back wall had been recovered with a new benchtop – you can feel the old mortise for the planning stop by feeling under the benchtop. None of the benches had end vises or even dog holes. There are planning stops and a couple huge holes that may have been for some metalworking equipment, Burrey says. There was at least one leg vise.
Dendrochronolgy on one of the benches indicates the top was pitch pine from 1786, Burrey says. That lines up nicely with the 1789 date painted on a beam in the storage area outside the shop door.
The shop was known in the area as a shingle shop, but it’s likely that a lot of other things went on there. One of the benches has been converted to a lathe, with a large metal wheel above it. The original owner of the shop, Luther Sampson, was (among other things) a planemaker, Burrey says.
Sampson was one of the founders of the Kents Hill School in Maine. And the school has some of his tools and the name stamp he used to mark his planes. Burrey also indicates that they have found shelves in the shop that were likely scarred by moulding planes set there.
Other tool marks suggest some other operations. Along the back wall, Burrey suspects that bench was used for crosscutting. The area is under a window. Right above the bench the wall is pierced with hundreds of jab marks from a marking awl. Above that is an unusual rack that would hold try squares. And the back wall looks like it has been hit by the tip of a backsaw repeatedly.
In fact, every square inch of surface seems to hold some message. There are bits of old newspaper pasted in places. The shapes of sailing ships are scratched into the walls with a nail or awl. A hatted figure is painted on one of the shop doors. And inside that painting is a series of concentric scratches made by a compass.
Empty tool racks are everywhere, many of them elegantly chamfered.
Burrey and Follansbee are cautious about making any firm declarations about how the shop was used.
“We’re just looking at ghosts here,” Follansbee says.
Follansbee is correct. The place is haunted. Like many unrestored old places you can still feel the heavy presence of the work that went on inside the walls. And now the really heavy work begins for the people who are not ghosts: Figuring out how to stabilize and preserve the building.
I don’t have any insight into the status of that end of the project. If I hear of any news, I’ll report it here.