“My envy is all too frequently aroused by those marvelously equipped cabinet benches that the hardware store displays at its center of interest in a holiday window. Folding doors are thrown back, bristling with tools of every conceivable kind; the top lid is raised to display supplemental racks of more tools; drawers and cupboards hold neat arrays of supplies….
“The cabinet workbench is a blood brother of the plaid golf bag; there is no inherent reason why its owner should not do great things with the contents, yet he rarely does.”
— Henry H. Saylor, “Tinkering With Tools” Little, Brown, and Co. (1924)
Immersion is a transforming experience. Whether you drown or learn to swim, you are transformed. Such has been the process of bringing “L’Art du Menuisier” to the English-speaking world. At times I feel overwhelmed, like when it takes six or eight hours to edit and revise a single page of transliteration. It is not Michele’s fault; she is doing simply brilliant work. It’s just that moving arcane descriptions from one language into another 250 years after the fact is a challenge. (By the way, Michele is about two-thirds finished with the initial transliteration for “To Make As Perfectly As Possible – Volume II”! Not that I get to enjoy it much, yet….)
Occasionally I reflect on my evolution as a craftsman over the past four years of swimming with the French sharks. For almost 40 years I have made my living salvaging damaged furniture. At first I was called a restorer and refinisher. Lately the description has been “furniture conservator.” (When you are working on furniture more valuable than your lifetime’s earning potential, they no longer refer to you as “the handyman.”) Whichever label was accurate, I have worked on hundreds, probably thousands, of pieces of furniture but have made precious little furniture from start to finish. A dozen pieces, none important, and that’s about it. Jake Roubo is changing all that.
These days I am actually building things in those three hours a month when I am not working at my job, editing and creating content for “To Make As Perfectly As Possible,” maintaining the house and yard, enjoying the company of loved ones, prepping for the end of Western Civilization, etc. Not just my gigantazoid barn studio (40’ x 36’ x 4-1/2 stories) in the mountains, although that is a pretty substantial project, but furniture and wooden decorative objects. A pie safe of salvaged old-growth 11/4 cypress from a circa 1840 water tank. A pair of serpentine mahogany veneer knife boxes (to hold my carving chisels, of course). Several replicas of Samuel Gragg’s chairs. Turning bowls from stumps I harvested myself.
I am building these things more by hand tools than I used to. In part because I find it therapeutic, and in part because it is often the most efficient way to get the particular tasks done. I find my machines in the way more now than in the past. Useful in their moment (hand planing several thousand linear feet of Southern yellow pine flooring just might be the clinical definition of insanity, hence my little Ryobi 10-incher), but more often dust magnets or workbenches.
Speaking of which, did I mention that I have contracted Stage 4 Schwarzaholism? (schwarzaholism – the unnatural and irresistible urge to build workbenches, especially of an ancient form). Exposure to Chris has been a good/bad thing as you can all attest. His ability to inspire is beyond dispute, but the things to which we are inspired consumes all available resources and then some. Transformation can be a mixed bag.
I currently have several workbenches underway. There are about 20 big ol’ vises to build and the adventure of making them is exhilarating. To get there I am re-exploring Roubo’s recitation of thread cutting – 2-1/2” x 4 TPI threads don’t come from the local hardware store.
The first bench is a 4”-thick curly maple top German Roubo bench along the lines of Jameel Abraham’s from the video (download it as a wmv file here). If you haven’t seen the video, folks, you gotta sit down, buckle in and be prepared to get blown away. Next is a Schwarzian Roubo Traditional in 6”-thick Southern yellow pine. And a Baltic birch torsion box folding portable bench. And Bob Lang’s 21st Century bench. And a Japanese planing beam. And I should do something with that 42” x 16” x 16’ slab of air dried white oak I bought last winter. And I’ve got another Emmert vise to put on something. And, and and… Hey, I’ve got a classroom to equip!
The Roubo Transformation has driven me in other directions as well. His exposition on Boullework marquetry has rekindled a fire that really had not abated much. As an aside, you just have to chuckle when Roubo remarks something to the effect of, “I really don’t know much about X, Y, or Z” and then proceeds to write authoritatively for several dozen pages. I really should fire up the smelting furnace and make my own hardware.
On reflection I note the odd similarity between Hannah Arendt’s assertion about the banality of evil and Roubo’s simple assumption that magnificent craftsmanship is what we are all about. Both proclamations are demystifying yet all the more powerful because of that. Skill should be routine. Or at least what we aspire to. For craftsmen the true transformation is the operating system I call Roubo 2.0.
May it be my desire to make routine the pursuit of excellence and exploration, indeed, the point of walking into the workshop.
Don’t get me wrong, I like talking about workbench design. But I easily get five e-mails or phone messages a day about the topic, and sometimes I think I should open a 900-line for woodworkers with questions about bench design.
Here’s the TV commercial: Imagine me wearing only a shop apron (i.e. picture a monkey at the zoo with glasses and a shop apron). There’s some candlelight – tallow candles, natch. And a little Vaseline on the lens of the camera for that “soft” effect that hides the crows’ feet around my eyes.
Cue the wife-swapping music.
Then cue my husky, nasal voice, slightly slurred from the date-rape drug my boss slipped into my coffee to convince me to do this.
“How big is it? Press 1 to talk about how large it should be, and if you need a third leg.”
“Should you put wood in those holes? Press 2 to chat about wood dogs or brass ones. I have a pair of brass ones.”
“Who doesn’t want a twin-screw? Press 3 to talk about wood screws and 4 to see if you should upgrade to metal.”
“Do you have a curly crotch? Press 5 to talk about your wood options. Just 99 cents a minute. 1-900-Got Wood.”
OK, that’s is quite enough of that. Good thing our human resources people are out this week.
People want me to bless their mistakes when they design a workbench.
Just about every week, someone writes or calls me to say that they have designed their own workbench. But because it violates some of the principles of good bench design (as I see it) from my book “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use,” they want me to sign off on it before they start cutting wood.
No matter how silly the bench is, I always sign off on it. That’s because here’s what I’ve learned about people during the last 41 years: You cannot change their minds without a monumental effort. Believe me, I’ve tried pushing that rock up that hill. And I’m dang tired of it.
Build what you want because… listen, can you hear that? It’s the sound of trees growing. You can always build another bench.
Today I finally completed my latest workbench, a fairly pure Andre Roubo-style bench using massive timbers and built using (mostly) hand tools. After I built the skeleton of the bench, I decided to add some tool storage that was in the spirit of the the great Roubo. Here’s what I did:
I turned the lower shelf into a tool well with a covered lid. I’m sure someone has done this before, but I haven’t yet seen it in any old (or new) book (Edit: Roy Underhill did this. See below). In essence, I put a shelf inside the stretchers of the workbench’s base, then I added a lid that covers the shelf. The idea here is to provide just enough storage for your daily users. Pull them out of the toolbox, place them on the top of the lid and get to work. Put them away at the end of the day.
Also, I added an authentic French “rack” to the back edge of the benchtop. This rack holds all my chisels, vital marking tools and turnscrews. I secured it with some awesome Roman-style headed nails. Those were fun to install.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be sure to add a locking drawer under a portion of the benchtop that I don’t use so much.
The bottom line here is that tool storage on workbenches was fairly minimal in the 18th century. And I think it should be minimal today, as well. So what should you do with all the tools you haven’t touched in two years? Get rid of them. I’m of the mind (and you’ll be reading more about this in the coming months) that you should be focused on purchasing fewer high-quality tools instead of a metric diaper load of poor-quality tools.
But that is the subject for another book.
The finished bench is awesome. I know because I have been using it (to the disdain of my 2005 Roubo-style bench) almost exclusively.
Is it worth the trouble? Find out and see. The completed bench will be at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event on June 4-5. And it will be at Woodworking in America on Oct. 1-3. Check it out and let us know what you really think.
Whenever I pore over old woodworking books, drawings and photos, I spend as much time deciphering the background as the foreground. There are always clues hidden in shadow.
Case in point: I have copies of some 19th-century photos from German workshops. In one photo there are about 20 guys standing at their benches, pausing to have their picture taken. Curiously, none of the handplanes are on their sides. All are resting on their soles.
This week I’m building something hanging on the wall of the shop from André Félibien’s “Principes de l’architecture, de la sculpture, de la peinture, &c.” (1676-1690). This is the book that we think Joseph Moxon used to make the illustrations in “Mechanick Exercises.” (You can see more of Félibien’s plates in our digital edition of “The Art of Joinery.”)
Félibien calles the device a “press for wood” and in the text gives the thing one line: “Les presses de bois qui se serrent avec des Vis.” Or, roughly translated, a vise for wood that uses screws.
So if you take a look at my terrible scan of Félibien’s plate XXX (above) and squint your eyes like you’ve had one too many glasses of Maderia, then you could guess that Moxon’s engraver took this French press and scabbed it on the front of the bench for Mr. Moxon like so.
Maybe the vise isn’t supposed to be attached like that. Maybe it’s not supposed to be attached at all (see Peter Follansbee’s recent posts on this topic). Now my take is a little different than Peter’s. I just have to check one more thing this week to see if I’m correct.
