Lost Art Press

Category: Yellow Pine Journalism

David Charlesworth (1951-2022)

Posted on by Lost Art Press

David Charlesworth, one of the most influential woodworking writers and teachers of the last century, died on May 22, 2022, after a long illness.

Though he was a professional furniture maker by trade, Charlesworth was known worldwide for his three books and multiple long-form videos, which explored the details of furniture and sharpening technique in exquisite detail. 

He is perhaps most known for his “Ruler Trick,” a simple sharpening hack that greatly shortens the time required to set up and polish a handplane’s blade for use. 

No matter what technique Charlesworth studied, he brought a methodical and open-minded approach to the task, as opposed to an historical approach. As a result, Charlesworth’s research nearly always resulted in discovering new and better ways to perform old tasks.

Charlesworth studied furniture making with Edward Baly, the founding member of the Devon Guild of Craftsmen. In 1973, he began working as a professional craftsman, and later he turned his attention to writing and teaching. Charlesworth was a frequent contributor to Furniture & Cabinet Making magazine in the UK, and many of his best articles were compiled into his first book, “David Charlesworth’s Furniture-Making Techniques” (1999, Guild of Master Craftsman). 

During his long career, which focused on the fine details of sharpening and hand-tool use, Charlesworth developed the “ruler trick,” which was first widely broadcast in his 2004 DVD with Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, “Hand Tool Techniques Part 1: Plane Sharpening.”

Today the ruler trick is used by millions of woodworkers, and is still debated by some (personal note: It works fantastically). For many woodworkers, this small trick was an entree into Charlesworth’s other work, including his instructions for shooting planes, secret mitered dovetails, drawer making and knuckle joints.

Charlesworth’s influence on the craft of woodworking cannot be overstated. So many woodworkers and woodworking instructors have been influenced by his books, videos and methods. In fact, his influence is so widespread that many don’t even realize they are using modern techniques he developed for jointing board’s edges and faces, for example. 

Charlesworth mostly taught in the UK and Europe, but occasionally traveled to the U.S. to teach classes and make videos with Lie-Nielsen Toolworks.

That all ended in 2016, when Charlesworth was hospitalized for respiratory problems while teaching a class in Germany. He then stuck close to his workshop in Devon with his wife, Pat. Though he would occasionally venture out to some of the UK woodworking shows.

David Charlesworth and Thomas Lie-Nielsen at Cressing Temple.

I first met Charlesworth through Thomas Lie-Nielsen, who helped arrange for Charlesworth to teach a dovetail class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking in 2006. 

It was Charlesworth’s first trip to the U.S., and when he got off the plane late at night, we took him to the only place that was open, a Texas Roadhouse. We told Charlesworth that all the waitresses were going to be charmed by his accent. He thought we were pulling his leg. (If I recall correctly one of the waitresses tried to sit on his lap at one point.) Charlesworth was most bemused by all the peanut shells on the floor.

That weekend Charlesworth spent the entire weekend cutting a single set of dovetails to the absolute rapt glee of his students. In his methodical manner, Charlesworth went over every single detail of the joint and showed how to make it without leaving anything to chance.

During a subsequent visit to the Indiana school, he and Lie-Nielsen volunteered to help me and John Hoffman move a huge Nicholson-style workbench into Hoffman’s basement. We’d all had a few drinks that night, and the workbench almost killed Charlesworth, Lie-Nielsen and myself before crashing into Hoffman’s basement wall, destroying it.

While I have many funny stories about Charlesworth, my favorite is about his fingernails. Charlesworth worked with waterstones, and his fingernails were often long and packed with slurry and other workshop grunge. 

Many people noticed his fingernails. Charlesworth had written a few articles for my magazine, Popular Woodworking, and I had to stop the art director from cleaning up his fingernails in Photoshop.

During one of his visits to Indiana, Susie Adams (Marc’s wife) decided to take Charlesworth out for a manicure to do something about his fingernails. Instead of being insulted, Charlesworth was both gracious and delighted. 

The last time I saw him in person was at the Cressing Temple woodworking show in the UK. We chatted for hours and discussed how to get all three of his three woodworking books back into print (we failed).

As we parted, Charlesworth again invited me to visit his workshop in Devon. It was something I’d always hoped to do, and it will stand as one of my bigger regrets.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. If your life has been similarly touched by Charlesworth’s please leave a comment below. I know that his family and friends would love to hear it.

The Never-won-an-award Furniture Maker (Me)

Posted on by Lost Art Press
Meet your judge. The baby Schwarz.

When I was in journalism school we were encouraged (nay, forced) to enter our work in journalism contests. We were told that we’d never get a job without a long list of awards on our resumes.

Freaked to the bone, I did as I was told.

When I got my first newspaper job, I became skeptical of contests. Here’s why. When the newspaper’s publisher (the big, big boss) met me, he said: “I’ve wanted to meet you ever since I read your resume. Under ‘professional memberships’ you listed the Radio Shack Battery Club, and we couldn’t stop laughing. We had to interview you! Good job.”

Then, a few months later, I was asked to be a judge in a journalism contest. The editor dumped a dozen stories on my desk and said: “Read these before lunch and decide who wins first, second and third.” Yup, let a junior reporter with six months of professional experience decide who wins the award for best feature writing in Nebraska.

After that day, I never entered another professional contest again.

Maybe it’s my profound dislike of hierarchy, but I have never understood contests in the same way I don’t understand watching sports, running a marathon or rank-ordering anything. Ask me about my favorite band, movie or restaurant, and I’ll just stammer. I know I’m odd, but I cannot fathom making something first or last.

This is not because I’m some hippie slug. I am the most competitive person I know. I just don’t see the point in spending energy to compete in someone’s artificial framework. I’d rather make something – a book, a cabinet, a chair – and sell it. Teach someone to do something. Read a book. Fill the bird feeder. 

So it should come as no surprise that I’ve never entered a furniture-making or design contest. I’ve judged a few, and that process reinforced my unease. Even when there is a panel of judges (which is ideal), there’s always one person who barks louder than everyone else and runs the show.

And I was flummoxed as to how to judge a piece of furniture for a “Best of Show” award. I’ve seen hundreds of flawless Windsor chairs and Issac Youngs clocks in my time. Shouldn’t all these win? They are perfect. And what do you do with well-designed and original pieces that have cosmetic flaws?

Sure, you can write rules and directions for judges that guide them on making decisions. But in the end, it’s too artificial and arbitrary for my taste.

So all this is to say that we are winning an award next week. We didn’t enter a contest; we were simply notified. Sure, I could refuse the award, but to me that takes as much ego as entering a contest. So I’m just going to smile, wave and be thankful that someone likes us.

— Christopher Schwarz

Still No Cure for ‘Infill Disease’

Posted on by Lost Art Press

Larry Williams of Old Street Tool has a lot of good jokes about people with “Infill Disease.” This expensive malady plagues woodworkers who become smitten with these curious tools – infill handplanes – and spread the contagion by claiming that they outperform all other tools.

Larry, who recovered from Infill Disease many years ago, now makes beautiful wooden-bodied planes in an Arkansas workshop with Don McConnell. Their wooden handplanes put to rest any notion that wooden-bodied planes are anything but world-class.

Like Larry, I struggled with Infill Disease early in my woodworking career. I was deeply curious about the performance claims that got thrown around about these tools (“They don’t cause tear-out – no matter the grain direction!”). Plus, the tools just looked so damn different from the metallic and wooden-bodied planes I grew up around.

After years of using infills side-by-side with other planes, I concluded that a handplane’s performance is 99.9 percent in the hands of the user. After that, I sold or traded away most of my infill planes to help send my kids to college and improve my workshop (hello, windows!). But I still have a handful of these tools in my shop. Why? Because each one is a story, a relationship or a history that I can hold in my hands.

Wayne Anderson Infill Miter

1-3/4” blade; 2”-wide x 8-5/8”-long body

This was my first infill plane – I bought it in 2004 back when Wayne charged $100 per inch of the finished tool – and I know it as well as my wife’s hands. It also had the craziest journey of any object I’ve owned. You can read the whole tale here. But the short version of the story begins when it was stolen at a woodworking show outside Philadelphia. 

Ten years later, the tool resurfaced and was sold privately. It had been caught in a hurricane and became a rusted barnacle of its former self. After some horse trading, I got the plane back. My original goal was to restore the plane to its former perfection. Then I had a change of heart.

I’m not one to hide scars. I have a gash on my left hand that could be easily concealed, but I leave it as a reminder about the wrong way to push a knife. So I decided to fix the miter plane to work the way it used to, but I let the cosmetic flaws remain. Raney Nelson at Daed Toolworks did me a huge favor by refiling the plane’s ebony bed; I took care of the rest of the exterior.

Even with its flaws, I love this tool. I pick it up and remember meeting Wayne for the first time at a farm in Illinois and falling in love with his aesthetic. Every Wayne plane is different – I’ve never seen two that are identical. That idea, which was foreign to me at the time, continues to resonate with my stick chairs: No two are alike.

Daed Toolworks Infill Miter

1-1/2” blade; 1-15/16”-wide x 7-1/2”-long body

When Raney Nelson started selling infill planes (many years after he began making them), I was one of the first people in line to buy one at Woodworking in America. We have similar aesthetics tool-wise (and music-wise). So the steel miter plane with boxwood infills spoke directly to me. 

The mouth on the plane is as tight as any I’ve encountered. Of all the infill planes I’ve owned, it comes as close to fulfilling the “superplane” myth that gets thrown around. It remains a fantastic tool that is easy to set and use. Plus, Raney is a good friend, so I always smile when I get to use it. Corny, but true.

Robert ‘Bob’ Baker Infill Miter 

1-1/2” blade; 1-13/16”-wide x 7”-long body

This plane, made in 1983, was a pioneer. It was featured in an early issue of Fine Woodworking magazine, and Baker was one of the early American makers of infills.

Bob and I met only once, in 2006, but I was immediately charmed and drawn to him (like others were). And we kept in touch after that meeting, exchanging jokes and emails about tools until he died before his time in 2010.

But that’s not why I own the first infill plane he made.

Tool collector Carl Bilderback had purchased the miter because of its provenance and beauty. And he used it in his shop in LaPorte, Indiana. Carl and I met about 1999 or 2000 when he called to complain about something I had written in Popular Woodworking about Norris-style depth adjusters. After that day, we became good friends and hung out at tool meets and woodworking events for many years. (You might remember Carl singing the National Anthem at the first Handworks event in Amana, Iowa.)

As Carl was losing his battle with cancer, he asked Megan Fitzpatrick and me to visit him in LaPorte for lunch. There, he presented us each with a Bob Baker plane and said there was only one string attached to the gift: I had to use the tool. So now when I pick this tool up I think about two wonderful people I have lost.

If you think this story is getting sadder, don’t worry. It gets worse.

Bristol Design Thumb Plane

1-1/4” blade; 1-1/2”-wide x 5”-long body

While teaching at David Savage’s school in Devon, England, he gave me this small plane as a gift for coming all the way from America. It was a prototype tool made by Bristol Design. David said it was the only plane that worked better than his Lie-Nielsen block plane, and it was one of his favorites.

It was a special gift because David had become a father figure to me. The man was incredibly encouraging about my work – more so than any other person I’ve met. And his encouragement and attention came at a time in my life when I needed it badly. The relationship was, at first, bewildering to me because his woodwork is simply on a different level than most people (and certainly mine).

Aside from that, David was also a bombastic writer, self-deprecating, generous, a snappy dresser and all-in-all a lovely person to spend time with.

I don’t connect with many people, and I’m always circumspect around others. But within a few weeks of meeting David I was telling him things I had told only my wife in the dark.

When David died of cancer in 2019, it was almost one year after I’d lost my father to cancer. I felt the loss of both men acutely, and I don’t think I have yet to recover.

The good news was that we managed to publish David’s book, “The Intelligent Hand,” before his death. It’s a book that Megan and I are quite proud of. David’s furniture and mine look nothing alike on the surface – his is insanely perfect. But the book, his design process and his way of looking at the world are forever stamped on my brain.

Whenever I want to remember that relationship, I have only to reach for this plane. The tool might not be a so-called superplane. It’s just a couple castings, two pieces of wood, a screw and two thin slabs of steel. But like any plane, it’s what the user brings to the tool that makes all the difference.

— Christopher Schwarz

Preserving the Purely Bonkers

Posted on by Lost Art Press
One of our lump hammers that was engraved by Jen Bower for the fifth anniversary of Crucible Tools.

(Note: This piece is more about writing than it is about woodworking. So if you’re in a “chisel and mallet” mood, I’d move along. — CS)

When I come up with an idea for a book, it is so fragile that I’m afraid to speak it out loud.

Several years ago I decided to explain one of the core ideas behind “The Stick Chair Book” to friends to see if they could help me flesh out a couple things.

I explained my idea in five minutes. Then, for the next 45 minutes, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise as my idea was mutilated, and my reasoning behind it was slashed to pieces.

I walked away from the conversation a bit shaken – ashamed I had even brought up the idea. I put the book’s outline away for almost two years before I could bear to examine it again.

This is why I’m leery to talk about future book ideas. I have dozens. And whenever I’m interviewed for a podcast or have woodworking visitors, I get asked – with genuine curiosity – about the unwritten books ahead.

My answers are terrible, and so I usually pull a Bob Dylan. “I don’t know.” “A book about a snail who finds love in unlikely places.” “Another workbench book.”

The truth is, the only good answer to that question seems to be a completed manuscript. “Here, this is what I’m working on – fully fleshed out. Read it, then you can tell me if it’s a good idea or not.”

Book ideas are funny things. When they are just ideas, they can seem profoundly stupid or awesome. If I expose an idea to others too soon, it will almost certainly die, whither or change entirely. And that’s not a good thing. Diluting a crazy idea with someone else’s sanity might sound like a positive step. For me, it’s not. I’d rather a crazy idea remain purely bonkers, untouched, so that it can either take root or self-immolate.

Sometimes that means that I have to create a “urinal pitch” for my books as I write them. The urinal pitch is a couple of harmless sentences about the project that I can tell to friends and neighbors until the book comes out. The real idea remains subtext. How does that work? Here are some examples:

“Workbenches: From Design and Theory to Construction and Use”

Urinal pitch: Two workbenches you can build with construction lumber – plus a way to choose the right vises and workholding for your work.

Subtext: Modern benches are too complex and don’t offer many advantages. Simpler benches do everything you need.

“The Anarchist’s Tool Chest”

Urinal pitch: How to pick the hand tools you need and build a tool chest to store them.

Subtext: Stop buying tools. We all have too many, and that sabotages furniture making. Here’s a tool chest that can help thwart your consumerism.

“Campaign Furniture”

Urinal pitch: Here’s a furniture style that hasn’t been explored much. There are lots of interesting forms to build.

Subtext: Here’s the missing link between the 18th and 20th century furniture styles. Campaign furniture set the stage for Danish Modern, Mid-Century Modern and even Bauhaus. It’s a crime that this style is unacknowledged.

“The Anarchist’s Design Book”

Urinal pitch: You can build a house full of furniture with two sometimes-maligned techniques.

Subtext: You can make money making furniture if you focus on underserved populations and make forms that can be built quickly.

“Ingenious Mechanicks”

Urinal pitch: Roman workbenches are easy to build and surprisingly effective.

Subtext: There is an entire world of workholding out there if you are willing to sit down and use your body instead of vise screws. Speed comes from less workholding.

“The Anarchist’s Workbench”

Urinal pitch: The culmination of 20 years of writing, building and using all manner of workbenches. Plus plans for my favorite bench.

Subtext: Sometimes the only way to lay claim to your work is to crap in your nest.

“The Stick Chair Book”

Urinal pitch: How to build chairs with a simple set of tools and easy-to-find lumber.

Subtext: I’ll let y’all chime in here in the comments.

— Christopher Schwarz

Body of Work

Posted on by Lost Art Press

When my former boss hired cabinetmakers, he would always ask for photos of their work. It didn’t have to be a fancy portfolio – snapshots were fine.

Some of the job candidates brought this to the interview instead: “I’ve made some incredible pieces. I just finished up this coffee table with bookmatched veneer panels, stringing and inlay. Just stunning.”

Those people were not hired.

That policy stuck in my craw. So when I started selling pieces in the 1990s, I kept photos of every piece I made – even if it was just a snapshot. Those photos are organized by date in three-ring binders in my office.

These days I simply load a selection of my photos to my personal website, christophermschwarz.com. Even though I closed my commission book in 2019, I keep the website up to date because it’s easy, and it’s a great way to answer the question: What sort of work do you do?

But there’s another reason I keep my website up – one that might not be obvious. Whenever I encounter someone online with interesting ideas or opinions, I try to find pictures of their work. I always like to see furniture. And I like to see if the person’s words match their deeds.

If I can’t find photos of the person’s work, or if the photos don’t jibe with the words, I roll my eyes. What do I mean when I say “the words don’t match the work?” Example: People who jabber on about handwork and David Pye but the only pieces they show are crazy-quilt cutting boards with a routed-out juice groove. Or the person goes on and on about furniture, but the only work they show is router jigs. 

These days, keeping a record of your work is practically free. Phones take better photos than cameras. You can upload your photos for zero dollars to a free blog. Or Instagram. So I don’t buy the argument that only professionals or wealthy people can keep and display a record of their work.

I’m not saying everyone should do this (but it would be fun and awesome if everyone did because I love to see furniture). If you’re an amateur woodworker who doesn’t spout opinions, proclamations, maxims, criticisms and homilies everywhere you go, then feel free to just continue being a good citizen.

But if you’re trying to change my mind, you’re going to have to have the photos to do it.

— Christopher Schwarz