Ron is originally from Alabama, but he now lives in Ohio and works for Procter & Gamble. His tool chest reflects “Proctoid” sensibilities – they are notoriously precise people – plus his Alabama heritage. It’s a bit like a BMW 740 painted like the General Lee.
Which is all kinds of awesome.
This short video has a tour of Ron’s chest during a class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. And it involves (as always) nipple rubbing.
— Christopher Schwarz
People regularly ask what my favorite woodworking books are. It’s a tough question because I really love writings about dead trees that are printed on dead trees.
Most of the books I like are ones that altered the way I look at the world. Charles Hayward made the tools a thing I could master. Robert Wearing connected the dots so I could build stuff entirely by hand.
But Peter Follansbee and Jennie Alexander changed the way I look at furniture.
Their book, “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree,” is not just a treatise on building a joint stool. It is not just an examination of 17th-century joinery techniques. And it is not just the personal journey of two impassioned woodworkers.
While being all those things above, it is also a code of ethical conduct for building furniture from the past.
When we build furniture from the past, the ethical path is to build it true to the materials and techniques of the time. Only that path will produce a true understanding of these furniture forms that make our hearts beat faster.
Highboys built with shapers leave me utterly cold. Block-front chests built with a dovetail jig make me confused. Six-board chests built with a router and a pneumatic nailer make me want to chop down my neighborhood power lines with an axe.
All of this came into focus as I was editing “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree.” I’ve read the entire text at least a dozen times, so its lessons, which I first encountered more than a year ago, have had time to seep deep into my sinew.
It seems at first to be like your typical project book, but it’s not. It should perhaps be retitled: Make a Joint Stool from a Tree Without Idiot Compromises that Will Cripple Your End Product. For Alexander and Follansbee, the tools, techniques and the end product are all equally important. Why? Because the end product will not look right unless you embrace the other two. A joint stool made with a table saw might as well have been extruded from plastic resin.
I know that some of you are reading this and thinking: Yo Schwarz, don’t you have a table saw?
Yup. I have some machines. And when it comes to building furniture from the 19th century to the present, basic machinery is required so the end product will look right. But when I build a joint stool – and I will build a joint stool soon – you can rest assured that it will be with a froe and hatchet. I might not even turn on the lights in the shop that week.
The medicine in “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” is strong stuff. It’s just a delayed-release drug. Once you read it, all sorts of crazy things become perfectly reasonable. Then they become obvious. Then them become imperative.
If you haven’t had a chance to read the book, borrow a copy from a woodworking friend or your local library. Yes, you can also buy “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” in our store.
— Christopher Schwarz
The reason I’m not answering your e-mails or phone messages this week is that I’m teaching the “Hammer in Hand” class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking.
We’re building three projects this week – a shooting board/bench hook, a Moxon dovetailing vise and the Schoolbox from “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” book. And with the pace that this class is on, we might have to add a fourth project.
With more than a day and a half left, most of the students are working on the moulding for the piece.
That’s not supposed to happen until tomorrow.
So I think we’ll carve some garden gnomes tomorrow. Can’t have too many garden gnomes.
— Christopher Schwarz
For many years I tried to design a shooting board (and bench hook) that would be worthy of publishing in Popular Woodworking Magazine. I tinkered with adjustable fences to dial in a perfect 90° cut, grippy working surfaces and fences with replaceable bits for zero-clearance cutting.
All of my designs were failures.
In the end, the crappiest shooting board that I ever built turned out to be the best shooting board I ever built because I did the following things:
1. Forget the adjustable fence. Just nail and glue the sucker down and adjust it to 90° with a shoulder plane after assembly. Adjustable fences (well, mine at least), go out of adjustment all the time. The non-adjustable fence on the shooting board I made five years still makes airtight 90° corners every time.
2. Forget sanding or finishes. I make my shooting boards out of 1/2” Baltic Birch. Unsanded. Unfinished. And I chop dovetails on them all the time. The result is a very grippy surface. My work doesn’t slide around like it does on shooting boards I have finished.
3. Forget fancy. Every add-on I have added to my shooting boards has been more trouble than it is worth. I could make a long list of mitering accessories, zero-clearance bits and UHMW tape.
The above is not a rant on commercial shooting boards from Tico Vogt and Rob Hanson. They have mastered many of the above problems and produce some sweet shooting boards.
Instead, I’m telling you that if you are like me and make your own shooting boards, keep it dirt simple. The more complexity you add, the less likely the shooting board will work.
The shooting board I use is made from 1/2” Baltic Birch plywood that is glued together. After the glue dries, I true up the fence for the shooting board with a shoulder plane until the appliance gives me 90° cuts every time. Then I use the shooting board until it is completely chewed up.
How does it get chewed up? I use the other side of the shooting board as a bench hook. And I chop dovetails on both sides. It’s a big shop coaster during parties in my shop. And etc.
You can download a SketchUp drawing of the appliance here.
— Christopher Schwarz
Back before the invention of wood movement, joiners had much more flexibility in the way they designed furniture.
Without the fear of cross-grain self-destruction, furniture makers would build chests, cabinets and sideboards with the grain running in opposition – horizontal grain on the front and back; vertical grain on the sides. They could nail a tabletop to its base without worrying about the coefficient of expansion for radial and tangential grain. They could make ledged doors that were vertical boards clinched with horizontal and diagonal boards.
And they could make this stool, a common sight in Europe and at Old Salem Museums and Gardens in Winston-Salem, N.C.
This type of simple stool shows up a lot in the furniture record, and it is still in use today in kitchens, workshops and homes around the world. I’ve always been fascinated by these stools because they should have torn themselves apart, been thrown out for firewood and replaced by the Mammut.
But they survive, and they vex woodworkers, many of whom try to improve the joinery so the stool will survive. I don’t think you have to improve anything.
But first, why do I call this Moravian stool a “Windsor-style” stool? Well, for the lack of a better word, I’ve decided to use “Windsor” to describe constructions where a plank seat or platform is pierced by legs – like a Windsor chair, a Roubo bench or a Moravian stool.
The “problem” with the stool is that the seat is joined to battens with sliding dovetails. Nothing wrong with that, according to the wood-movement scientists. But then the joiners would pierce both the seat and the battens with the through-tenons for the legs.
The legs then prevent the top from expanding and contracting the way it wants to, and so the top splits. Game over, right? Nope. While the top splits, it doesn’t destroy the stool. The sliding dovetails keep everything together. If you like, you can drive a few nails through the top into the battens to keep things tighter – this was a common solution on originals.
So the question is: Why were these stools built this way in the first place? Without a Ouija board, we don’t know (wouldn’t that be a great session at Woodworking in America?). But after building one of these stools, I can make a few guesses.
The stool is very light. By using this sliding dovetail construction, the entire stool weighs only 3 lbs. 9 oz. in poplar. Had the seat been a solid plank of 1-1/4” poplar, it would have weighed a lot more.
It uses less material. The stool can be pieced together from thinner, narrower pieces of wood. I used scraps. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Moravians used scraps as well.
It appeals to the Germanic mind. I’m mostly German. I teach in Germany and deal with many German woodworkers. I don’t have a better explanation, but I see this sort of interlocking joinery in vernacular Bavarian joinery. I know this point is weak, but I think it’s true.
But why would a joiner of any skill or sense build a stool with this kind of cross-grain construction?
The answer, for me, was to change my definition of wood movement.
As woodworkers we try to tame the wood so that it stays in some sort of pristine form – flat tabletops, unwarped doors, tight seams all around. We allow and accommodate for wood movement in tabletops, benchtops and panels. That wood movement is allowable and OK.
But what if a split was OK?
— Christopher Schwarz