“Broadly, the revival implies a rebellion against inutilities, a conviction that machinery must be relegated to its proper place as the tool and not the master of the workman, that the life of the producer is to the community a more vital consideration than the cheap production which ignores it, and that thus the human and ethical considerations that insist on the individuality of the workman are of the first importance.”
— C.R. Ashbee, “An Endeavour Towards the Teachings of John Ruskin and William Morris”
I’ve received this question about 20 times since June 15 – including from my wife – so I suppose I should deal with it head-on instead of simply demurring.
Is Lost Art Press going to start a hand-tool magazine, whether printed or digital?
The answer? Not right now, at least.
The primary reason I left Popular Woodworking Magazine was because I had so many projects piling up here at Lost Art Press that I estimated it would take me five years of working nights and weekends to tackle them. And that’s just too long a gestation period for books that I consider to be essential to the growth of handwork in the 21st century.
I’m not just talking about the Roubo translation. That itself is a mountain of a publishing project, but that’s only one mountain in an entire range of monumental peaks.
Why have I been quiet on these? Because we are still inking contracts. But you can expect that we will have at least three new products before the end of the year – a DVD I’ll announce next week and two or three books that are unlike anything in print today.
The DVD is from me (sorry!) and is part of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” The other titles are from other authors, people who should have written books long ago.
As we get these projects underway, you’ll hear more about them here. Promise.
Now about that hand-tool magazine: I’ve been in media – and media alone – since 8th grade. I’ve worked in almost every department except advertising, which I would stink at, and circulation, which is a tricky business.
I’ve launched two start-ups in my career – The Kentucky Gazette newspaper and Woodworking Magazine. Both of which are now shuttered. Those failures taught me a lot about what it takes to make a magazine that makes money and makes me want to read it.
1. All your waking hours.
2. A lot of money. And a willingness to lose money for a few years as you pull the magazine onto its feet.
3. A willingness to deal with unethical distribution schemes.
4. A willingness to throw away about 60 to 70 percent of your newsstand copies that don’t sell.
5. A certain level of optimism mixed with stupidity — I call it stupidimism. This trait helps overcome Nos. 2-4.
At this point in my life, I want to spend all my hours producing a hand-tool canon of high-quality books — a foundation that I or others can build upon. I want to get us beyond sharpening, basic plane use and hand joinery.
What’s beyond that? An entire world.
So I guess I’m asking for some patience. After I get this corpus of work complete and the technology catches up with my ideas, I think I’ll be ready to dive into the world of periodicals again. Or there’s always that llama farm.
The tape is about to start rolling on Sunday morning for an episode of “The Woodwright’s Shop” with Roy Underhill. I’m so nervous about being a guest on the show that I can feel my morning coffee surging in my throat — about to pulse forward like a brown Trevi fountain.
Roy pulls on his hat, which his mother gave him about 35 years ago, over his thicket of hair and picks up a foam tube. I think: That’s… weird. It looks like one of those foam insulators that you wrap around your pipes to keep them from freezing.
He walks over to one of the cameramen and whacks him mercilessly with the foam sword, and the cameraman submits meekly to the mock beating. Then Roy walks over to the next camera operator and administers another stage whuppin’.
But when Roy approaches Mike Oniffrey, a cameraman and set photographer, Oniffrey resists and parries Roy’s attack using a long metal pole (where did a cameraman get a metal pole?). The two men re-enact a scene from “Star Wars” and suddenly the show has begun and I’m babbling.
Today we shot two episodes of “The Woodwright’s Shop” for its forthcoming season. One show is about the importance of the fore plane and the impotence of the smoothing plane. The other show is about how to build the English Layout Square that graces the cover of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”
I have appeared on a fair number of television programs in the last 20 years, but those were nothing like “The Woodwright’s Shop.” The crew of “The Woodwright’s Shop” is tiny and close-knit. The entire program is shot in one take – there is no series of cuts that are spliced together. You either get it right the first time or you do the whole dang show over again.
And then there are the beatings…. Aw, who am I kidding? Most TV sets have people who beat you.
The first show on Sunday we did was about the English Layout Square. I was happy with my performance because I made only three embarrassing errors.
1. I cut myself. Yup. Just as the cameras started rolling I nicked my left index finger with my panel saw. I don’t know if you’ll be able to see the wound, but I’m trying to stop the bleeding for the first five minutes.
2. I threw Roy’s mallet off the bench during the show. I meant to just put it down, but the thing went flying off the end of the workbench. Lucky for me I had a second mallet on the bench and I just pretended that nothing happened.
3. I grabbed the wrong piece of wood when I demonstrated how to cut a bead on the square. I was supposed to put it on one of the legs of the square, but I grabbed the horizontal brace instead. Roy helpfully pointed out the error.
Despite all this stupidity, the cameras kept rolling and somehow didn’t record me wetting myself, which is what I wanted to do.
And this first taping of the day was the tame one. The second show was like “Pretty Woman” meets “Fight Club.” More later.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Roy wanted me to tell you that his show is free to all PBS stations. So call your local station and demand they run “The Woodwright’s Shop.” And don’t let them tell you that they can’t afford it. No more “Teletubbies” — we want the Woodwright!
When I embark on a writing project I try to begin with a ridiculous premise. During the revisions and the re-writes, the absurdity begins to mellow or even drain out of the manuscript altogether.
Take “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” for example. When I began writing the book, the nutty, never-happen-but-it-would-be-cool premise was to sell most of my tools, write a book, then quit my cushy corporate job… aw crap.
When Roy Underhill asked me to be a guest on a couple episodes of “The Woodwright’s Shop” for the upcoming season we decided to do a show on planes and a show about the English Layout Square that graces the cover of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”
So I began thinking about new ways to talk about handplanes. Stupid and perhaps insensitive ways to talk about handplanes. Stuff that would generate angry letters.
Here’s the set-up: What if smoothing plane use were an addiction? And there were support groups?
The following unedited script was completely discarded. We probably used only one line on the show. And yes, I know that addiction is a serious problem – ask me about my family’s struggles with it over a beer sometimes.
— Christopher Schwarz
Smoothing Plane Recovery Program
Chris: My name is Chris Schwarz, and I am a recovering smoothing plane addict.
Roy: An addict? Really? Strong words. Well let’s see … there are basically six steps to recovering from some sort of addiction. Let’s check the list:
“Step one: Admitting that one cannot control one’s addiction or compulsion.”
Chris: At one time I had more than a dozen smoothing planes. I was trying out all the angles, all the mouth apertures, infills, vintage, new, bevel-up, bevel down, woodies, different sizes, you name it.
shows different planes
I had a micrometer to measure whether I was making shavings that were .0005″ thick. I was watching Japanese planing contests – where they measure the shaving thickness in MICRONS.
shows wispy shavings
My wife even caught me down in the shop making shavings… and I wasn’t even building anything. Just… smoothing.
Roy: That is serious stuff. What made you finally quit?
Chris: The good book.
Roy: You mean…
Chris holds up and opens book
Chris: Yup. Joseph Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises; or the Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Arts of Smithing, Joinery, Carpentry, Turning, Bricklaying.” The first English-language book on woodworking.
Roy: That’s the second step – recognizing a higher power can give you strength. So you found strength through a 17th-century printer and hygrometer to the king?
Chris: Yes I did. Moxon showed me the error of my ways.
Roy: How’s that?
Chris: When I first read Mechanick Exercises I was struck – nay – blown away by how much Moxon wrote about the “fore plane” and how little he wrote about the “smoothing plane.” It was incredible. More than 1,800 words on the fore plane. And on the smoothing plane: just 33.
shows fore plane.
Roy: Dang. Well I hope they were strong words about the smoothing plane – about how it is the end-all plane, end of story.
Chris: Hardly. Here’s all he said:
“S. 6. The Ufe of the Smoothing-Plane.
The Smoothing-plane marked B 4. muft have its Iron fet very fine, becaufe its Office is to fmoothen the work from thofe Irregularities the Fore-plane made.”
Roy: That’s it? Nothing about finding your power animal or opening your heart chakra or adjusting your aura with sub-thou shavings?
Chris: Nope. That’s it. So I started diving deep into Moxon’s text on fore planes and I found that this plane (holds up plane) is the most powerful bench plane in the world.
Roy: You don’t say.
Chris: With this plane I could correct all the things I was doing wrong with my smoothing plane, and that’s ….
Roy: …the third step.
Chris: Indeed. The secret is inside the mouth of the tool. The iron (shows iron) is a convex arc – this one is an 8″ radius. And this radius can give you superpowers.
(reinstalls iron)
Roy: Like making paper-thin shavings?
Chris: Like making shavings the thickness of an old Groat! (makes massive pass with plane, pulls off thick shaving). This is what gets the work done, not the mamby-pamby lacy doily shavings where each one is unique like a snowflake!
This is what flattens boards (continues to work). Every shaving from a fore plane equals 10 from a smoother. You can do 10-times less work.
Roy: But won’t thick shavings tear up the work?
Chris: Ahhhh. That’s where Moxon helps us again. He tells us to traverse.
Roy: Traverse?
Chris: Yes. Don’t push your plane with the grain (shows) or against the grain (shows). Instead go ACROSS the grain.
Roy: Won’t you go to a dark and very warm place for doing that?
Chris: Hardly (demonstrates). By going across the grain we can take a much thicker chip with much less effort. And because we aren’t levering up the wood fibers, the tearing is minimal. This also allows us to get boards really flat – something a puny smoothing plane can’t do.
(discussion and demonstration of flattening a board by traversing bark side, then heart side. showing the different sounds and how to determine flat – just wink!)
Roy: That’s pretty remarkable, but the tool seems rather coarse; aren’t you going to make a lot of clean-up work for the other tools?
Chris: Hardly. Moxon says we can reduce the cut of the fore plane and clean up our dawks before moving on. (demonstrates; discussion of dawks ensues).
Roy: It seems like you really got true religion here. As I understand it, you are supposed to “make amends for your errors” in cases like this. Did you. Did you really?
Chris: I did. I sold almost all of my smoothing planes or gave them away to friends. I’m now down to – two smoothing planes, which is probably still one too many. And I’m trying to live my life with a new code of behavior – working as much with a coarse tool before I switch to a fine tool. That’s the core message in Moxon.
Use a hatchet more than a fine file. Use a rough plane more than a fine one. Chop. Don’t pare. Pit saw. Not coping saw.
Roy: And then there’s the last step, right? Helping others who suffer from an addiction to smoothing planes?
Chris: Yup. Wherever there is a woodworker using a Norris A13, I want to be there. A Holtey No. 98? I’m there to take your hands off the $5,000 tool. I’ll be there to trade you a moldy Scioto Works fore plane and show you the way: Across the grain, to get thick shavings, to actually accomplish something.
I am not easily surprised or struck speechless. But this morning at 8:55 I was both.
This was the final day of class for “By Hammer & Hand” at the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking in Manchester, Conn. The students have been working like dogs building three projects, including the dovetailed schoolbox from “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.”
As I walked into the school I was struck by the fact that almost all 13 students were wearing “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” T-shirts (yes, we will soon have more of these in stock). This wasn’t too surprising — many times students buy my T-shirts because they don’t have anything clean to wear for the next day.
Because of this interesting fact, we will start carrying Lost Art Press thong underwear next year.
Anyway, the other odd thing was they were all wearing name tags again, just like the first day of class. Whatever — I was behind schedule and it was time to start class.
Before I could open my mouth much, they handed me a wrapped present. That has never happened in all my years of teaching. Usually they just give me grief.
I opened it. It was a copy of “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.”
“Thanks guys,” I said. “I hate to tell you this, but I own THOUSANDS of these.”
They told me to look inside. They had all signed their names on the inside with their first name listed at “Thomas” – the apprentice hero of the book. Then I looked closer at someone’s name tag. It read “Thomas.” But his name was David. Rick’s name tag? Thomas. They all were wearing “Thomas” name tags.
That was pretty cool. So I went over to the bowl filled with name tags and made one for myself. Mine said “Sam” — the doofus of the novel.