Shiny is not sharp
Smooth is not flat
Shaker is not simple
Tools are not skills
Ornament is not beauty
Nails are not cheap
Polyurethane is not a finish
Grinding is not hard
Design is not art
Dimensions are not necessary
Sharp is not visible
Paint is not evil
Micrometers are not woodworking
Form is not function
IKEA is not benign
PVA is not necessary
Dovetails are not the goal
Glue is not joinery
Accuracy is not precision
Anarchism is not violence
Aardvarks are not anteaters
Keyboards are not woodworking tools
Forums are not magazines
Branches are not lumber
Shakes are not fatal
Pocket screws are not the devil
Workbenches are not a certain height
Handplanes are not a religion
Bevels don’t give a crap if they are up or down
XXXXX will not affect the finish
— Christopher Schwarz
You can download a pdf of this (thanks to Jared Tohlen) here:
Whenever possible, I try to build projects in pairs. Building two pieces doesn’t take twice as long as building one project – it seems to add only about 25 percent to the hours I log in the shop.
By building two pieces at once, I end up with a second one I can also sell. And if something goes totally south during the construction process, I still end up with one finished piece and a bunch of extra parts or firewood.
The funny thing about working on projects in pairs is there is usually one of the two projects that fights me the whole way.
This week I’m finishing two chairs for a client. But I’m beginning to think I should have made three. One of these chairs, we’ll call him Joey, has resisted my every effort to make him a chair. When I assembled his undercarriage, one of his legs busted out a huge chip on the seat when I drove it home.
His armbow split twice during the bending process, even though the oak for both was all from the same dang tree.
While assembling the spindles and arm bow I had to use a 3 lb. sledgehammer to knock Joey’s armbow into the correct orientation.
And when I began bending his crest rail, it split. Twice.
So right now Joey is in “time out” on the bench while I hack up a new log of fresh pin oak for his crest rail. The other chair – its twin – has been waiting for paint for three days now.
When working in Australia, the weirdest thing about the experience wasn’t the accents, the plastic money or the fact that you can order a burger loaded with kangaroo and wallaby meat.
It was the birdsong.
Every day I walked a mile or two from my hotel to the shop and was unnerved by the birds singing in the morning because it was so alien. It’s akin to visiting a retirement home where the background music is death metal.
This week I’m back in Arkansas near where I grew up. It’s my first visit back in many years, and the first thing I did this morning was to walk off into the mountain forest around our cabin. While I love the hardwood forests of Kentucky, I miss the shortleaf pines (Pinus echinata) we had in every corner of our farm.
The bark always looks like a pile of tectonic plates crashing into one another. And I always loved walking on the brown carpet of needles that formed in a large stand of pines.
After getting my pine fix I spotted some blackjack oak (Quercus marilandica), with its odd-shaped leaves and shagbark hickory, which I see sometimes in our neck of the woods as well. It was all oddly comforting, even though I haven’t lived here for almost 30 years.
But I really knew I was back in Arkansas when the first roadkill I saw was an armadillo.
My favorite T-shirt. I used to wear this to the first day of class when I taught at woodworking schools.
The best thing I can say about graduate school is that it taught me to think.
When someone presents an idea to you that is the opposite of everything you’ve read before and everything you believe is true, how do you react? Most people reject the new information like a kidney grafted to the place where the liver should be.
I used to be like that until I started reading Noam Chomsky’s criticisms of how mass media works.
Here’s the dime-store paperback version: Look for information that doesn’t match the conventional wisdom. This new information may not be correct either, but you should examine it closely because it will teach you something.
Here’s how this plays out in the workshop.
In 2007, we re-published Joseph Moxon’s “The Art of Joinery” – the first English language book on woodworking – with some commentary from me. In the book, Moxon discusses “traversing” a board with a fore plane to clean it up and remove twist. I demonstrated this operation in the book and readers on the discussion forums howled.
Sadly, posts on the forums expire, so digging up the discussion is difficult. But here’s the gist:
“Traversing” doesn’t really mean working across the grain.
You never work across the grain with a plane. You work “with the grain,” that’s why we have this expression in our language.
Moxon wasn’t a woodworker so he’s wrong.
You interpreted Moxon wrong.
You are wrong.
Please die.
Ten years later, it seems funny that this conversation ever happened. That’s because enough people (the Fox Mulders of the world) tried Moxon’s techniques and were able to discredit the Cotton Mathers.
After 20 years in this business, I’ve seen this happen time and again.
A.J. Roubo’s workbench from Plate 11 is for carpentry. Not furniture making.
The bark side of a board cups and the heart side bows? Ridiculous.
You have to finish both faces of a board or it will warp.
You have to alternate growth rings in a panel glue-up or the panel will warp.
Hide glue is outdated.
Paint is for covering poor workmanship only.
Nails are for carpentry, not fine furniture.
Workbenches need a tail vise.
I could go on and on. And it would soon sound like I’m giving you a list of things to believe, or not to believe. All I really want to say is my favorite Russian paradox: “Disobey me.” And I’d like add one more bit of information to that: There is a way out of the paradox, but you have to find it for yourself.
The workbench shown above is featured in Johann Georg Krünitz’s “Oekonomische Encyklopädie,” a remarkable work of 242 volumes. I don’t have the translated text that accompanies this plate, so I’m going to make some educated guesses about this workbench. (In other words, you get what you paid for with this blog entry.)
This 1781 plate looks like a French workbench, not just in its form but also based on the handplanes shown on the floor (that tote is tres French). Also, this bench is shown on a page of “Oekonomische Encyklopädie” with other benches that are quite obviously Germanic, perhaps as a contrast between the forms.
My best guess is the engraver copied it from another work, which is why the bench is shown in reverse – the crochet and planing stop are on the right side of the bench.
Several things are notable about this bench. Briefly:
It shows a “doe’s foot” in use on the benchtop, secured under the pad of a holdfast.
And look: A fathom leaning against the wall to the left of the bench.
The most titillating part of the plate is the double-screw device shown on the floor at bottom left. It looks like half of a Moxon-style vise that is missing its back chop. My best guess is that the screws thread into the holes shown on the left side of the benchtop. This is what Moxon’s engraver seemed to be showing in his 17th-century plate. I measured the distance between the two screws on this plate from Krünitz, and it matches the distance between the two holes on the left end of the benchtop. And this is exactly where I would put such a device.
For me this plate raises a lot of questions about the original source material. I have always assumed that Joseph Moxon copied his bench from André Félibien and modified the engraving to add a double screw vise and some other bits and pieces. This plate makes me want to search a little harder for French drawings of benches in the 17th century in addition to André Félibien’s. I know this sounds like a grassy knoll theory. That’s because it is.
