Lost Art Press

Category: Yellow Pine Journalism

The Hazards of Hand-tool Woodworking

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It’s easy to find lots of scolding about the hazards of using woodworking machinery.

I have seen some stuff. I have cleaned the interior of a jointer after someone else’s accident. I have seen a man wrestle a grinder (and lose). I’ve seen a guy try (and luckily fail) to cut off his finger with a jigsaw. Oh, and don’t forget the fine, cancer-making dust.

But what you don’t hear as much about are the hazards of hand-tool woodworking.

I have seen some stuff. Through-mortises in hands. Severed tendons in arms after a chisel poke. A dismembered finger from a Japanese pullsaw (one stroke). And sure, sharpening and axe gashes galore.

But this blog entry is not about the gory side of woodworking injuries. Instead, it’s about taking a reasonable approach to work that allows you to be creative into old age.

I started in hand-tool woodworking against my will when I was about 10 or 11. My parents were homesteaders building houses on our 84-acre farm outside Hackett, Ark., without electricity. This was not by choice; electricity had not come to Hilltop Lane in 1973. So it was all hammers, handsaws and braces at first. And it was work. Back in our house in town, my dad had a full machine workshop, but I wasn’t allowed to use the machines for safety reasons. So again, everything I did was by hand.

Our second house on Hilltop Lane. This was after we got electricity (you can see the transmission wire). We had one plug.

After I graduated college, I started taking classes in handwork at the University of Kentucky under Lynn Sweet, and that’s when I got the fire in my belly. I wanted to do everything by hand. And that deep dive into handwork coincided with my years at Popular Woodworking Magazine. I started at the magazine when I was 28 and ended my association with them when I was pushing 50.

For me, handwork has always been the best part of woodworking. And I do everything to maximize my time at the bench. When I make a chair, the whole process takes 16 to 18 hours. Only one of those hours is on machines. The rest is at the bench.

As I’ve gotten older, I have observed firsthand the toll that handwork has taken on my body. Because of ripsawing and planing, my elbows are not what they used to be. After a full day of planing, I cannot do another day of consecutive planing, or my body will revolt. When I saddle the seat of a chair, my hands are curled into claws the next day. I have to stretch them out. 

I am happy with the cardio I get while hand-tool woodworking, but I am humbled by the repetitive stress injuries that come from brute-force jack-planing, mortising and ripping.

Let me put it another way. When I read about people who consider hand-tool work as exercise, I think about the exercise I have to do in order to do hand-tool work. Every morning my day begins with 30-45 minutes of stretches recommended by my physical therapist. If I don’t do these, I’ll end up on my back on a workbench, trying to work out the kinks in my back, shoulders, arms and hands. In the evening, a heating pad takes care of the muscles that are damn whiners.

I am not alone. I know other hand-tool woodworkers who have suffered repetitive stress injuries. (Sorry, no names to protect the crooked.) I have friends who can do only so much planing or sawing before their elbows give out. What caused their injuries? Planing and sawing. I know woodworkers who can’t hold a chisel or scraper well anymore after years and years of chopping and scraping.

So here is the personal confession: As I have gotten older, I’ve had to rely more on machines than when I was 20, 30 or 40. Don’t misread me: I love handwork dearly. But I love woodworking more. So any small crutch that can keep me making things at pace is most welcome.

To be precise, I have no interest in router jigs, CNC machines or any tool with a digital brain. Those things are cool (and yes, they are “authentic” woodworking). But they don’t suit my analog belt-driven brain. I am a simple machine guy, mostly band saw. Sometimes jointer and planer. Occasionally table saw and drill press. 

I do not hide this fact, either. One of the other annoying aspects of handcraft publishing is watching some people do one thing and tell their readers to do another. After years of handwork, I can tell when a streak of dust from a handsaw has been faked (I’ve watched set directors do it). Or when material that has been machined is held up as four-squared by hand (i.e. they planed the already-machined boards). Not everybody does this, but it happens.

This legerdemain fools some beginners into thinking they should embrace pure handwork. I’ve met a lot of them who took the bait, became miserable, then bought a band saw or a planer. And they were much happier.

Since the 14th century, woodworking has been about simple machines, plus a small kit of hand tools. And it can still be that way in the 21st century. The best woodworkers I know use all the tools – hand and electric. And they are smart enough to know how to avoid ridiculous situations. Such as making a Plexiglas router jig to cut one butterfly recess. Or converting entirely by hand 300 board feet of rough lumber into a highboy.

If you take a pragmatic path – machines for tendon-destroying donkey work and hand tools for the joinery and surfaces – you might end up like me: an old guy still working every day at the bench. Still with all my fingers and still able to cut damn-good dovetails.

This is the balance I have found that works. You might experience a different journey.

— Christopher Schwarz

Wendell Berry on Making a Maul

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Drew Langsner’s mauls as shown in “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now”

Wendell picked up a maul, which Meb had made from a hickory tree. It had a smooth handle and a bulbous head, squared off at the end. “With it,” he told me, “you can deliver a blow of tremendous force to a stake or a splitting wedge.” Thinking about a modern sledgehammer, I asked how the handle was inserted into the head. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “No, no, honey,” then hastily explained himself: “That’s our way of taking the sting out of it, you see, when we correct someone.” He showed me the swirling grain of the maul’s head, chopped from the roots of a tree, and swung it over his shoulder to demonstrate how it becomes a natural extension of the body.

When I was back home, he sent me a diagram and explained how the strength of the wood came from the tree’s immersion in the soil: “The growth of roots makes the grain gnarly, gnurly, snurly: unsplittable.” After you cut the tree, you square off the root end. Then, above the roots, where the grain isn’t snurly, you saw inward a little at a time, “splitting off long, straight splinters to reduce the log to the diameter of a handle comfortable to hold. And so you’ve made your maul. It is all one piece, impossible for the strongest man (or of course woman) to break.” He scrawled at the bottom of the page, “There is a kind of genius in that maul, that belongs to a placed people: to make of what is at hand a fine, durable tool at the cost only of skill and work.”

— “Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age,” The New Yorker, Feb. 28, 2022, by Dorothy Wickenden

American Citizenship for the Stick Chair

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One of my “American” stick chairs.

I get asked (a lot) why there are so few stick chairs in the furniture record of the United States.

To that question, I reply, “Just you wait.”

Ever since I built my first stick chair in 2003, my aim has not been to reproduce the chairs I adore from Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Sweden. Instead, my goal has been to do what Americans have long done with furniture forms and other cultural movements: Adapt them to this continent and its people.

Black Americans took an African call-and-response form of music and made the blues (then rock ‘n’ roll). Rural Americans – black and white – melded African and Spanish instruments (the banjo and guitar), with spirituals and traditional British songs to make “hillbilly music” and “race music” – what we now call country music and rhythm and blues.

All cultures adopt and adapt elements from “away,” but Americans seem particularly prone to it. We even export our adaptations back across the oceans. In Naples, Italy, anyone can buy pizza topped with hot dog chunks and french fries.

Now before you start calling me “Jingo” Schwarz, know that I don’t think everything Americans do is good. Not even close. We took the éclair and made Twinkies. The baguette became Wonder Bread. It’s a mixed bag of vanilla soft serve and Vanilla Ice.

English secretary, 1810.

Wait, Isn’t This a Woodworking Blog?

In the world of furniture, American designers and woodworkers tended to simplify forms brought over from Great Britain, the European continent and elsewhere. To be clear, there were American woodworkers who equaled the ornamentation and excess of their counterparts across the Atlantic. But in general, American interpretations removed ornament, simplified overall forms and relied more heavily on the solid timber that was the greatest resource of this continent.

English secretary, 1805.

A long day’s walk down King Street in Charleston, S.C., lays out this story that played out in the 18th and 19th centuries. King Street is awash in antiques stores that specialize in British and European antiques. And there are other stores that specialize in American antiques – plus all the house museums that are stuffed with American and imported furniture.

This long stroll (it will take you all day) also shows what the market has decided, whether you agree with it or not. My father would buy English chests of drawers on King Street in the 1990s for $1,200. The American ones were entirely out of his financial reach.

American chest of drawers, turn of the 19th century.
Virginia bookcase, late 18th century.

Finally, to Chair Stuff

British Forest Chairs (aka Windsors) also faced the same story. American forms are – in general – simpler. Simpler turnings. No backsplat. Fewer carved elements. (I must add, however, that my favorite Forest chair of all time is British.)

Yorkshire Windsors, early 19th century.
Massachusetts Windsors, early 19th century.

When it comes to stick chairs, my goal has always been to Americanize them. (I’ve built only a couple close copies of antique Welsh chairs – mostly to prove I could do it.) What does this Americanization entail? 

First, I have changed my designs to reflect the wood we have here. Unlike Wales, we have enormous stands of straight timber. The curved stuff – which the Welsh use for arms and combs – exists here, but it’s more difficult to find. During my two visits to Wales, a walk among the hedgerows revealed a dozens of bent armbows. So my arms are different. They’re built differently, and you will see further changes in future designs.

One of the hundreds of Welsh chairs that are among my “favorites” and influence my designs.

I also tend to favor crisp lines over curved ones. All beautiful and well-worn antiques suffer “erosion,” for lack of a better word. But I try to take that crispness or clarity a little further. I avoid rounded and pillowed profiles for the most part. I like facets. I don’t like turned, round or bulbous components.

I also tend to favor geometry that is more dramatic. Many Welsh chairs had dramatic rake and splay. But a lot of them had little rake or splay. Many had sticks that were dead-vertical. I try to take the dramatic bits and pieces from old chairs and combine them into something else. I won’t say it’s new, as there is no such thing.

I also like color and grain. I am happy to paint my chairs a vibrant color or use an oil and beeswax finish on them. I am dead certain that many old chairs got flashy paint jobs back in the day or a finish that was mostly soot and smoke from the hearth. So my finish choices stand in contrast to what the old chairs look like today.

Why am I telling you this? Well, in some small way, I know that the Welsh get irritated when someone builds one of my chair designs and calls it a “Welsh Stick Chair” on Instagram or Facebook. In truth, they are building an American Stick Chair designed by a guy who dreams of Welsh, Scottish and Irish chairs all the time. So if you want to avoid a Welsh invasion of Kentucky, I recommend you call your stuff what it is: American.

Also, I want to start a conversation about this form and what it could become. I hope that other American makers will look at 11,564 old chairs and see different details that could make up a vocabulary for American stick chairs. Because there isn’t an “American Stick Chair” yet, there is enormous opportunity to explore this idea and contribute to something that just might have some legs.

— Christopher Schwarz

Hands down, my favorite Forest Chair of all time. A lovely early example of the form.

A Workbench for Making Chairs

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M. Hulot’s workbench for chairmakers. You don’t need one.

Because I have written books on workbenches and chairs, I am regularly asked what sort of workbench is best for making chairs.

Here’s my answer: the same bench you use to make cabinets, boxes and snake toys.

Unless you are a professional chairmaker who makes chairs and only chairs in a tiny space, there is no need to make a dedicated bench for chairs. I build my chairs on whatever workbench is handy, and I’ve never felt constrained by them. Nor have I ever wished for a bench dedicated to my chairmaking.

This is not a knock against people with chairmaking benches. My chairmaking hero, John Bown, made dedicated workbenches for chairs. As has Peter Galbert, Drew Langsner, Christopher Williams and a long list of people who are much better chairmakers than I am. AITA?

Instead, this blog post is an effort to remove one of the artificial barriers we all erect in our minds when it comes to tackling new kinds of projects.

“I can’t build a chair until I own a steambox, shaving horse, drawknife, froe, chiarmaker’s workbench….”

Use what you have on hand, and you’ll find a way to make it work. Then, after you’ve built 20 chairs and decide it’s your life’s work, you can think about what specific equipment you will need for your journey.

A few of you who have followed my work might say: “Ah yes, but what about your Roman workbench? Isn’t that dedicated to chairmaking?”

No, it’s not. That workbench gets used for everything, including as an occasional buffet table when we buy lunch for students.

OK, last question from an imaginary voice: “But if you did build a bench for chairmaking, what would it look like?”

I’ve given that a lot of thought. Here’s the answer. (You can download the plans for free.)

— Christopher Schwarz

The 10 Worst Mistakes I Made as a Beginner

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No, my biggest mistake was not this shirt.

We all have a list such as this. Here’s mine.

If One is Good, 12 is Better

When you acquire a good tool, such as a block plane, and it really, really works, the tendency is to buy all its friends. After I bought my first No. 5 (about 1996-97), I fell in love with handplanes. To be precise, I loved all the handplanes. Every single handplane ever made or collected or drawn up in some patent document. 

Most weekends I’d hit the antique markets with whatever dollars I could scrounge to buy handplanes. What kind of handplanes? All of them. At one time I owned at least 10 smoothing planes, five block planes, six shoulder planes and Justus-Traut-knows-how-many rabbet planes.

This was the start of a dangerous pattern you’ll see throughout this list, which is when I would try to buy my way into a new skill. I thought: If I bought a plow plane, I would be able to make frame-and-panel joints. But that’s not how the craft works.

If I could go back in time, I’d tell myself to buy one No. 5, one No. 3 and one block plane. Then buy additional planes only when I needed them – and after a lot of research.

Reading a Little About Finishing & Sharpening

When I started woodworking, I knew nothing about finishing or sharpening. And so I finished the pieces I made and sharpened the tools I owned in peace and satisfaction. But then one day I started to read about finishing and sharpening, and I realized I had been doing everything wrong. 

So I did what the experts said to do, and I became miserable. I refused to put this finish over that finish (the book said it wouldn’t work). I bought some Japanese waterstones. And I entered a long and tortured phase where my finishes and my tools’ edges sucked. I was experimenting too much with this finishing/sharpening system or some other system. I was trying to obey a lot of gurus simultaneously.

To get out of this misery, I had to read a lot more about finishing and sharpening. And I came to the conclusion that I teach today: Learn one system. Stick with it for a long time. Refuse to change until you have mastered that system. 

And always refuse to read articles that say “never” and “always.” 

Five Planers; Six Table Saws

When it comes to machines and critical hand tools (dovetail saws, block planes, smoothing planes, layout tools), I spent entirely far too much money upgrading my equipment incrementally. 

I started out with crap equipment – a plastic table saw and sheet-metal thickness planer, for example. And then I sold the used equipment (it wasn’t worth much) to upgrade to a slightly better table saw and planer. And so on until I ended up where I am today.

It was a dumb and expensive journey for someone who was planning on making furniture for a living all along. I should have just plunked down the $1,200 for a cabinet saw and $800 for a 15” planer in 1996. Instead, I’ve spent at least $7,000 on table saws and $8,000 on planers since then. And I’ve had the agony of buying, selling and setting up all this equipment.

Yes, there’s a chance that you’ll buy a nice $3,000 table saw and then be swayed by the Bare Bosom Goddess of Golf. But that $3,000 table saw can be sold for almost that same amount. Cheap tools, on the other hand, depreciate quickly and to nothing.

Using a Cutting List

Don’t trust someone else’s cutting list. Not from me, Norm Abram or even Jesus the carpenter. Even if the cutting list is accurate (and it’s probably not), you shouldn’t cut all the pieces out to the specified sizes and start building. Things change as you build a project. And the sizes of your parts will change slightly, too. 

Make your own cutting list based on a construction drawing. And only cut pieces to final width and length when you absolutely have to. 

Cutting lists are dirty liars.

Buying Lumber Sight Unseen

Every time I have bought lumber before laying eyes on it, I have been swindled. The first time this happened was when I ordered 100 board feet of cherry from a reputable supplier to make a bookcase that needed about 40 board feet.

I picked the wood up, and it was so sappy and twisted that I barely squeezed the bookcase out of the 100 board feet. Yes, I complained to the supplier. They laughed in my face and said that sap and twisting was not a defect, and that the lumber met grade. I didn’t buy from them for five years after that – not until they hired a new customer rep. 

Reading Tool Catalogs on Friday Night

After I finish work on Friday, I like to drink a beer and relax for a bit before making supper. Sometimes I have two beers. And sometimes I read tool catalogs with that beer in hand. And sometimes I order stupid tools that I don’t need but look pretty cool and now I read nonfiction on Friday evenings.

Don’t drink and shop for tools. That is the only explanation I have for owning an Incra Rule.

Believing the Jig Lie

This is a corollary to the above rule. Tool catalogs are great at explaining how jigs can solve your joinery problems. Can’t cut perfect miters/dovetails/spline joints? This jig does it with ease. You will be a master in no time. Promise. 

Here’s what I learned: Cutting miters is a skill. Learning to set up, use and then remember again how to use a jig to cut miters is also a skill. Both skills take about the same amount of time to learn. 

Yes, there are some jigs that can speed you along if you need to do something 134 times in a week (such as making a dovetailed drawer). But those jigs are rare and are usually needed only by production or industrial shops. 

Most woodworking skills are mastered after a few tries, and then you will forget about owning the jig. 

Buying Sets of Tools

Sets of chisels, router bits, carving tools, templates and so on are usually a waste of money. Buying a set seems like a good idea – and you sometimes save a little money compared to buying all the tools separately. But it’s usually a lie. 

I use three chisels for 99 percent of my work. Six router bits. Three moulding planes. One sawblade. So buy one good chisel/gouge/router bit/moulding plane – one that you really need. Then, when you absolutely positively can’t work without an additional bit or blade, buy another. Reluctantly. And buy the best you can afford.

Buying the Hardware at the End

I can’t tell you how many times I made this mistake. I built a project and afterward bought the hardware for it. Then had to remake the drawers or doors to suit the hardware. 

The hardware typically makes fundamental changes to your cutting lists and drawings. Buy the hardware before you cut the wood.

Being Poly-Guru-ous

When I was learning woodworking, I had four teachers, plus the books and magazines I was reading. So I got pulled in a lot of directions. All of the teachers produced good work, but they all had strong ideas about how to go about it.

And so most days I felt like I was a Muslim-Buddhist-Pentcostal-Atheist. There was no consistent instruction in my life. And so it took me a lot of error and error to sort things out. In time, I gained the confidence to go my own way. But it took a lot longer because I had so many masters whispering (or yelling) in my ear.

Pick one person to teach you joinery. Or sharpening. Or finishing. Stick with that person until you have mastered the basics and can start exploring joinery, sharpening and finishing on your own.

Oh, and if you own that little Powermatic 12-1/2” lunchbox planer I sold off in 1998, I’m sorry. I hope you now use it for something it is powerful enough to handle – such as slicing deli meats.

— Christopher Schwarz