…for writing a book that is shorter than “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”
Matt’s book, “Mouldings in Practice,” arrived a few minutes ago. And there are 26 books in a case instead of 16 (like the tool chest book). That allowed me to get them all into the house before the rain soaked them.
Time to shut up and start packing.
— Christopher Schwarz
It’s raining. I have Lost Art Press’s world-class collection of tarps at the ready. But the truck that’s supposed to deliver “Mouldings in Practice” hasn’t shown up. Perhaps the driver is waiting for a thunderstorm to kick in before backing a semi down my street.
So instead of drinking some of the beer from the Upper Midwest that a student brought me, I attached the steel binding to the Traveling Anarchist’s Tool Chest. I stink at metalwork, so I took my time hacksawing all the pieces to length and drilling the bores and counterbores.
As a result, this was a fussy three-hour job for me.
I’m fairly happy with the results, however. I managed to get almost all the counterbores at the right depth, and the screws from blacksmithbolt.com look great. The only task that is left is to file the metal corners flush and remove any snaggy bits that might bite me or my students.
Now I get to turn my attention to the chest’s interior fittings. I tried to dig up enough pine for the sliding tills from my wood rack, but I’m still awash in mahogany from building campaign furniture. I know I’m going to catch some grief for using such a bourgeois wood on a proletariat project, but I don’t want to buy more pine and wait for it acclimate.
So mahogany tills, here I come. Now where did I put my pocket square and ascot? Oh Muffy, have you seen my velvet smoking jacket?
— Christopher Schwarz
My favorite part of a project isn’t the joinery – it’s the assembly. Today I got to attach the lid to the base of my traveling tool chest using hinges made by blacksmith Peter Ross.
These are, in a word, bada%&.
Unlike simple butt hinges, these hybrid butt-straps (as I like to call them) are designed to resist the typical stresses on a chest lid. The weakness of using a butt hinge in a tool chest is that the screws in the carcase tend to wrench out – especially when the lid has an integral stop system to keep the lid standing open.
These hinges from Peter resist those forces. And they look awesome. Peter is now working on the crab lock for this chest. So stay tuned on that front.
I also attached the cast iron lifts to the ends of the chest today. These vintage lifts were given to me by a reader, who acquired them in a box of stuff. The funny thing about adding all this metal hardware is that it seems like it should make the chest more difficult to lug around. But the opposite is true. The lifts and hinges make the chest a svelte thing to move around by myself – just like my vintage traveling chest.
My plan is to sneak down and install the steel banding this week, though I probably will be thwarted by you, the loyal reader. We have almost 1,000 orders to fill for “Mouldings in Practice” starting tomorrow morning. So my woodworking will be taking a backseat to my taping and cardboard-folding skills.
Lots of people have inquired about how I’m going to install the steel banding. Here’s the straight dope: I’m going to butt joint it and screw it to the chest.
Why not weld the corners? I haven’t seen any extant chests with welded corners.
Why not dovetail the steel corners? I’ve done steel dovetails when building infill planes. I know it’s easy. But I haven’t seen any extant chests with dovetailed steel corners.
Why not join the steel corners with my heat vision? Sadly, I have no superpowers.
Oh, speaking of the fact that I lack superpowers: I screwed up this tool chest during the glue-up. I’m telling you this because my students take a crazy amount of gleeful delight whenever I make a mistake. When I glued up the carcase it ended up out of square by 1/16” over the 18” depth. That’s not enough error to see with the naked eye, but it is enough to mess with the construction of my two sliding tills.
So I’m going to make my tills as parallelograms in plan view. Fun on a bun.
— Christopher Schwarz
With sonorous stentorian solemnity I say to myself, “It is in, it is in.”
The complete draft of “To Make As Perfectly As Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” – 94,000 words of translated Roubo, 350 Roubo illustrations, 15,000 Donwords and well over a hundred photographic images (actually I submitted about a thousand to select from) – now resides on the desk of Monsieur Christophe du Schwarz. The end is still a long way off, but this is a huge hurdle for everyone involved.
There will be corrections. There will be additions. There will be subtractions. But now we know that there is definitely a light at the end of the tunnel. Let’s hope it is not an oncoming train.
I just spent my first Roubo-free weekend since I can remember. It was very, very nice. I built a Japanese planing beam from a perfect 8×10 southern yellow pine timber out at my mountain-side Fortress of Solitude, listening to a college-level course on Austrian Economic Theory punctuated by the angelic voices of Eva Cassidy, Alison Krauss, and Jennifer Warnes. Now that is self indulgent escapism at its best.
Once Chris and Wesley Tanner, the book’s designer, and everyone else at that end of the rope get their hands on it, my nose will be back to the grindstone.
Currently I am reveling in the first glimpses of the 90 percent of our second Roubo volume that has been translated. (Waiting until now for this treat has been perhaps my second greatest exhibition of self control, the first of course being the time I was all alone with a prominent and particularly loathsome politician and refraining from wringing his scrawny chicken neck.) It is very, very good, but I have come to expect nothing less from Andre Jacob’s text and Michele’s translations. Reading deliberately through the recitation on the iconic bench of Plate 11 is a long passage I am savoring, and I expect you probably will too.
In one sense this second volume will be easier, as we are now in full groove, but in another it will be more difficult because of 1) the esoteric jargon-laced verbiage – it is mostly about tools, after all (as one note from Michele exclaimed, “Philippe, help! I don’t even l know what these things are called in English.”), and 2) the sheer scale of it. Like Chris’ Roubo holdfast which could double as an anchor for a large ship, this volume will be huge. For example, the main chapter on tools and techniques will run almost 250 pages in illustrated translation. All tolled, :To Make As Perfectly As Possible: Roubo on Furniture Making” will be about 60 percent larger than the marquetry book. I could not see Chris when I told him that, but he might have reached for the antacids immediately thereafter.
I know this is just the calm before the storm, when the editorial process reaches through the ether and grabs me by the throat. But for now, it feels pretty good.
— Don Williams
I’ve been traveling with tool chests since 1997, and so I have found their weak points. Or, to be more precise and passive in voice, their weak points have been found by elevators, loading docks and falls to the concrete.
Here is a list of parts that take a beating.
1. The bottom rim of the plinth. Even if you have casters on the bottom of your chest, the plinth gets dragged over concrete blocks, door jambs and the like. My latest chest, which is only 18 months old, looks like a spastic 5-year-old attacked it with a rasp.
2. Speaking of casters, this is also a weak point of a chest. Simply screwing casters into the carcase is no good. As soon as the caster drops into a hole, it gets ripped off the case. The best solution is to bolt the casters through the bottom boards. Yes, it’s a pain and it’s ugly, but it works.
3. The lid. Oh the poor lid. Its top corners get wacked by all manner of things. Lumber gets stacked on it. People sit on it and make rude noises with their bottoms. TV stars stand upon it to speechify as if it were filled with soap.
To remedy problems No. 1 and No. 3, I’m adding steel plate to the rim of the plinth and the lid. This is mild steel, and 1/8” x 1” x 4’ strips cost about $5 at the hardware store. Last night I rabbeted the lid’s dust seal and plinth – the entire process took about 30 minutes with a rabbet plane.
I’m going to attach the steel to the chest using slotted steel screws. I have found an outstanding source for these that I will write about this weekend.
— Christopher Schwarz
