The Veritas Power Tenon Cutters are incredible tools. They are based on the old hollow auger tools, but they are easier to set, maintain and use. They make perfect round tenons, and you don’t have to use a drill to power them. I have used a brace, and my right hand at times, to make tenons.
The tools have a bit of a learning curve. Many people end up with tenons that are slightly off-center. Or worse, wildly off-axis.
I first started using these tenons cutters when I was in my “willow furniture phase” in about 2000, so I have thought about these tools a lot and used them a lot. The following video shows my tips for how to get the tenon centered on your stock.
If you like this sort of hard-won information, you’ll find more of it in my three chairmaking products:
The last cabinet Krenov made at the school, the “Pearwood Drawer Cabinet.” David Welter pointed out that this leg shape, with its tapered and faceted shaping, was a new style for Krenov. “Jim often said that it was curiosity that kept him going,” noted Welter. Photo by David Welter.
The following is excerpted from “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” by Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney. After years of research and more than 150 interviews, Gaffney produced the first and definitive biography of Krenov, featuring historical documents, press clippings and hundreds of historical photographs. Gaffney traced Krenov’s life from his birth in a small village in far-flung Russia, to China, Seattle, Alaska, Sweden and finally to Northern California where he founded the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program.
While the school [what is now the Krenov School of Fine Furniture]was preparing for his withdrawal, [James] Krenov, too, was making plans for his life after the program. His craft practice had been uninterrupted in his last year, in spite of the turbulent conditions of his departure. He completed three cabinets, even venturing into a new form, a “drawer cabinet” whose interior was occupied by an array of drawers, with little or no open space inside the carcase. As he prepared to leave the school, unsure if he would or could return to the facilities, one student remembers that Krenov spent a sizable amount of time preparing and sawing materials for the cabinets he hoped to make when he returned home. The students, too, helped with Krenov’s move. Along with helping him with the physical move of his materials, the students built him a going-away gift of a veneer press, smaller than the school’s but sized to Krenov’s smaller scale of work.
Erik Owen, a student from the class of ’96, worked with the family to build an addition to the cabin behind the house on Forest Lane, to serve as a small workshop reminiscent of his Bromma basement workshop from Sweden. Into the shop they moved his workbench, a few small machines and his still ample supply of wood, all he needed for the construction of his small veneered cabinets on stands.
The move home was turbulent, and after leaving the school, it would be several months before Krenov would complete a cabinet in this diminutive space. But his family and friends also were careful to help see that Krenov would not have to endure too long a separation from his daily routine, for both Krenov’s and their own sakes. Tina remembers that Britta knew it was time for her husband to retire, having seen his demeanor and attitude with the school worsen, but was saddened to see it happen on terms not entirely his own.
Krenov’s ultimate critique of the school he gave after his retirement, now coming out from under his 20-year tenure, was that it could not bring the students to a place of maturity, both as technically solid craftspeople and capable designers. Krenov had never shied away from helping those students who sought his help, and many of his favorite students had come to the school without any background in furniture. Krenov had delighted at bringing many of those students far past a point of accomplishment that they themselves had thought possible. But he had long used an analogy that he had overheard Arthur Rubinstein, the famed Polish-American pianist, give when addressing the talents of his students.
“For example, you cannot teach a person to be musical,” he told Oscar Fitzgerald, just a few years later. “You can teach them to play, but you can’t teach them to be musical. I was in New York and I came back to my hotel room and they were having the 80th birthday concert by [Arthur] Rubinstein – Carnegie Hall, the whole ball of wax. And they were interviewing him in the intermission and somebody asked him … about the students of that time. He says, ‘Oh, such technicians, such skills. Oh, sometimes I ask one of them, when are you going to make music?’”
Krenov lectures from the bench in his back room at the school in 2002. Photo courtesy of the Krenov School.
In May 2002, Krenov officially retired from the program, after his 20th year at the school. Burns remembers that the last day was cathartic. Knowing that their time as colleagues was over, he and Krenov had a final argument, one that was their last conversation. However turbulent Krenov’s last years had been, the school’s faculty, with the addition of Hjorth-Westh and Smith, would forge ahead without Krenov, and the school continued outside of his presence on staff.
Krenov himself would not retreat, in totality, from the school for a few more years. He returned on occasion in subsequent years to see and advise on student work, suggest or offer up a board of wood for a certain project and, sometimes, to fill his pockets with dowels from the boxes in the machine room. The school’s students, too, would not cease to visit Krenov. Laura Mays, a second-year student in the first year without Krenov in residence, remembers that many of her classmates, even those who hadn’t studied under Krenov, would make frequent trips to the Krenovs’ house for tea and conversation. And alumni, those who had stayed in the area or who returned for visits, would come to their teacher’s home to check up on the aging cabinetmaker. Krenov would even weigh in on some students’ attempts at recreations or reinterpretations of his own designs; as late as 2008, Krenov advised one student, Tom Reid, on his version of Krenov’s “Carved Curves” cabinet, and gave Reid the compass plane he had made decades earlier for his own construction of the cabinet.
Krenov’s departure began the last chapter of his life. In those years, visitors to his home remember his fondness for Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Krenov, with failing eyesight, arthritis, body pains and faltering hearing was moving toward the end of his life, but retirement was never an option for the 82-year-old. From his small world on Forest Lane, he would still host a rotating cast of visitors, friends and well wishers, reach out into the world by phone and written word, and continue to pursue a craft practice by any means necessary.
We’ve reprinted “Ingenious Mechanicks,” Christopher Schwarz’s tour de force on workbenches of yore, with a new cover – and this new printing is now in stock (we’ve been out of the previous one for a few weeks now). The cover’s new die stamp is shown above…but I’ll need you to imagine that image printed atop the brown cloth cover color shown below (which has a much smaller weave than shown in this close-up I pulled off the cover cloth manufacturer’s site).
“Ingenious Mechanicks” is about a journey into workbenches of the past (which deserve a place in the modern shop!) and takes the reader from Pompeii, which features the oldest image of a Western bench, to a Roman fort in Germany to inspect the oldest surviving workbench and finally to our shop in Kentucky, where Chris recreated three historical workbenches and dozens of early jigs.
These early benches have many advantages:
They are less expensive to build
They can be built in a couple days
They require less material
You can sit down to use them
They take up less space than a modern bench and can even serve as seating in your house
In some cases they perform better than modern vises or shavehorses.
Even if you have no plans to build an early workbench, “Ingenious Mechanicks” is filled with newly rediscovered ideas you can put to work on your modern bench. You can make an incredibly versatile shaving station for your bench using four small pieces of wood. You can create a hard-gripping face vise with a notch and some softwood wedges. You can make the best planing stop ever with a stick of oak and some rusty nails.
And here’s a little inside baseball to explain why I’m asking you to tap into your visual imagination:
Before we have an actual book in house of which to take nice photographs, we…by which I mean Chris…create a fancy mock-up of said new cover with the proper cloth color and texture, dropped behind a transparent .tiff of the cover’s die-stamp.
But Chris is out of town, and I am just too tired after three days of teaching (then thoroughly cleaning the shop after three days of teaching), to figure out how to turn the In Design die stamp file – that has a non-transparent .jpg image in it – into a transparent .tiff (no, the transparency tick box does not come up when I do a “save as” and try to rename my exported .tiff … which is to say please don’t offer me instruction in the comments as to how to do it; I’ve searched Google, tried my available-at-the-moment best, and given up. Did I mention I’m tired?)
We’ll get the image on the store site updated with the new cover as soon as possible.
One of my recent comb-back classes. You’ll notice they have nearly cleaned their plates. This is important.
Sometimes students ask what they can do to prepare for a class in handwork at our storefront. In the past, I’ve told students to sharpen their tools and try to read up on the project or the topic we’re covering in the class.
But I don’t think that’s enough. I’ve been teaching woodworking for almost 20 years, and I’ve watched students who succeed versus those who struggle. Here are some suggestions to consider if you have a class coming up with us or any other hand-tool instructor.
Get in Shape a Bit
This recommendation is for hand-tool classes only. When I have taught machine-based classes, it’s not as much of a factor. During a week-long handwork class, a fair number of people are exhausted by Wednesday evening. And the last two days are difficult – sometimes uncomfortable.
Though we emphasize conserving your energy and show ways to sit down while you work (Roman-style), students are on their feet a lot. If you are a mouse-worker in an office, standing for eight hours in a day can wear you out.
So, wear the most comfortable, lightweight shoes you own (fashion is a low priority here). Plus clothes that move easily (gusseted pants and shirts work with you; not against you). And to prepare for the standing, we recommend getting in decent cardio-vascular shape. That is as easy as taking a 30-40 minute walk each day. This will work wonders for your ability to stand at the bench for the long hours.
We try to keep you well fed while you are here. This is not just because we are nice. We also want you to have the energy to make it to the end of the week.
Diet
Forget your weight-loss diet during the class. You need energy. We have a lot of students who skip breakfast and/or lunch and are absolutely spent by 3 p.m. You need protein and carbs to do the work. It doesn’t have to be junk food. But you need to eat.
Upper Body
We emphasize using your core as much as possible in handwork. But your arms need to be in decent shape to assist with planing and sawing tasks. The best exercise for this is – shocking – planing and sawing. (More on this in a moment.) But if you can’t practice in the shop, try some beginning strength training. You can find many simple tutorials on the internet for this.
A simple stick-making exercise will jump-start your chairmaking efforts.
Practical Practice
Depending on the class you are taking, I recommend some different exercises to try in the week leading up to the class. If you are taking a class on chairmaking or staked furniture, there is a lot of planing. I mean, a LOT of planing.
There is a point at which you learn how to “ride the bevel” of a coarse tool, which greatly reduces the effort required to plane a stick or taper a leg. This is not something you can teach through words. It’s something you have to figure out yourself.
When smooth planing or jointing work, there is a lot of downward pressure required to end up with straight edges and flat boards. With chairmaking the goal is to use minimal downward pressure because you might take 60 or 70 strokes to shape a spindle. So you have to feel where the cutting edge of the tool is, put it to work and try to get the sole out of the equation as much as possible.
Scratching your head? Here’s how to start the process of finding that magic moment.
Take a 3/4” x 3/4” x ~15” stick of straight-grained hardwood. Place a small stop in your face vise. Press the end of the stick against the stop with your off hand. Plane the stick with a block plane set for a rank cut.
Try to make the stick into a dowel. After it’s round, use taper cuts to make it into a magic wand with a pointy tip as quickly as you can. Plane fast. Skew the tool. Try to find a place where the cutting edge is the only thing contacting the work. (It’s not possible, but it’s the goal.)
Do a stick like this each night for a week before class, and you will ace my class.
Also, learn how a cordless drill works – especially the clutch and speed settings and how they interact with the torque of the drill.
This is one way to practice sawing a bunch of dovetails. Read on for a better one.
Saw to Success
Megan’s classes on casework joinery involve a lot of sawing and chopping. Most people seem to struggle with the sawing. Frank Klausz had a straightforward solution to prepare a student to cut dovetails for the first time: 100 lines.
Draw 50 lines that slope to the right (like one side of a dovetail) across the end of the board. Scribe in a 3/4” baseline. Then saw right next to those 50 lines, one after the other. Try to do each one a little better and faster. When done, saw off all those kerfs. Now draw 50 lines the slope to the left, put in a baseline and saw those.
This accomplishes a few things, some of them not obvious.
First, beginners usually own a new saw with freshly filed teeth. These teeth are grabby and difficult to start. About 100 kerfs helps break in the saw.
Many beginners have difficulty starting the kerf. Doing 100 lines one after the other rapidly (it takes less than an hour) teaches you to take the weight of the saw off the teeth when starting. I like to tell students that they should almost hover the teeth over the wood as they begin to push forward.
And the 100 kerfs help you fall into a comfortable sawing stance. Figuring out where your feet should be, how your sawing arm should swing free and that the work should be level to your elbow. Oh and stop trying to choke the saw to death (not a euphemism).
I’m sure I could come up with more exercises, but I’d worry that I’d scare you off. But these simple things will definitely make your week (or weekend) here a lot more rewarding.
— Christopher Schwarz
“If you do what I say, everything will work out fine. Otherwise, put your head here between these hands.”
John Porritt, author of “The Belligerent Finisher,” has been designing and building furniture, restoring furniture and tools, as well as making chairs inspired by older Welsh stick chairs and English country Windsor chairs for more than four decades.
Born in 1953 in a military hospital in Aldershot, a town in Hampshire, England, John was the youngest child of John and Myra Porritt. At the time, his father was teaching at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Growing up in an army family, John moved around a lot, eventually attending six different schools throughout his childhood.
“I’ve always felt slightly removed, not part of any group, an outsider through the years. And that’s OK. It opened my eyes to a lot of things, meeting different people and getting to know some of them. My mother was very supporting and accepting of my brother, sister and I. She was very creative. She understood line and form. My father’s credo was: ‘Be firm but fair’.”
John’s family growing up: His mum, Myra; father, John; older brother, Wilson; and sister, Pam. John is the little one on the right.
In 1957, the Gold Coast became Ghana, gaining independence from British rule. Prior to this, John’s father had been seconded from the British Army to help train the Ghanaian Army, so John’s family had moved to West Africa.
“Some of my earliest memories are from the village of Teshi, outside of the capital Accra,” John says. “Company Degarti, originally from Liberia, would watch out for me in the garden, pointing out lurking snakes, including a very thin poisonous black one that looked like a boot lace. I remember him picking me up to get bananas from the trees in the garden, cutting the pineapples growing down low, and us together digging up peanuts – which my mum would roast. Once, I saw Company sit down suddenly, take out his knife, cut into his heel, then quickly sucking at the wound and spitting out the poison from the snake bite. He did get better. What wonderful man with a great name – Company.
“I would see the Hausa men from the north, selling their beautiful carvings door to door, very tall and dark in their immaculate white robes. They moved so slowly, pacing themselves in the heat.
“I remember my family together on a golden, sandy beach, looking off in the distance to a beautiful white castle: Christiansborg Castle. My father wouldn’t take us there. Years later, I found out that it was a slavers’ castle, built for human beings to go directly into the boats to be sent to the slave markets.”
When John was 6 years old, they moved back to England. They lived on the 5th floor of a hotel in Portsmouth, Hampshire.
“I started to go bald,” John says. “It was something called alopecia. My mom would take me to a hospital to have this stuff rubbed into my hair. They worked out that I was so used to being on the ground in the bungalows that living up high was very stressful for me, or, at least, that’s what the theory was.”
So John and his family moved to Romsey, Hampshire. A quiet boy at the time, John attended church school. The head teacher “…was a bit of a sadist,” he says, “who used to cane certain children regularly.” At just 10 years old, John walked out of school one day, angry that he was about to be caned yet again for something he did not do. Through school, John spent a lot of time in Romsey Abbey, built in the 10th century.
“I remember, at 10, being impressed with the light coming through the windows of the stained glass onto the stone, that soft sunlight and the effects it would make on the building,” he says. “And I loved singing in the choir.”
Broadlands, Lord Louis Mountbatten’s estate, was nearby, so Queen Elizabeth II would come twice a year and attend services in the abbey. During those services, John, a choir boy, would steal glances at the Queen – the head of the Church of England – sitting alone in her pew by the high altar instead of his tucked-away Southampton football program, which was his usual go-to.
“I remember being completely impressed by the color of her coat,” he says. “Later, I found out that she was dressed by Hardy Amies, and he was known for the cut of his clothes. She had this beautiful blue that she would wear and it was just stunning. She looked wonderful.”
John attended three more schools before leaving at 15.
“My favorite subjects were history, geography, English and running. Running for me was a chance to get out on my own, with my own thoughts. I was the school cross-country champion. But it was a small school. I was glad to finish school and get out into the world of the late ’60s.
Although he was a skinny teen, John first found work as a builders’ laborer. In the mid-’70s, he was walking around West Kensington and got a job at Stokecroft Arts making simple pine beds – lots of sanding, gluing dowels and screws.
“It was run by a guy called Bernie,” John says. “Bernie was a great guy in that he gave a lot of people a chance. He had a lot of soul, a lot of heart. He came to England just before the war at the age of 10 on a Jewish Kindertransport from Germany. I remember he wouldn’t get pissed off, he’d be disappointed. ‘Come on, John, you can do better than this.’ He was a great guy. Bernie was a great guy.’”
John moved to Kent with his girlfriend at the time and took a six-month carpentry course at a government skill center in Sittingbourne, Kent.
“I learned a lot,” he says. “I learned how to handle tools. I learned how to sharpen. The instructor there was a man named Peter Dense and he was excellent. Very small, very quiet. Authoritative but quiet. And for the first two days he gave me chisels and plane irons and told me to sharpen them and I’d sharpen them and bring them back and he’d say, ‘Do it again,’ and I did that for two days.”
Halfway through the course, John split up with his girlfriend, leaving him without a home.
“I ended up living in somebody’s cupboard,” he says. “In hindsight, it was horrendous.”
“I remember my mum had said to me, ‘What are you going to do? Just find something you love doing. Find something that interests you. Find something to do and do it.’ And luckily, I did. I think about people like Bernie, Peter Dense and later John Price and I’m kind of humbled, really. Decent people who helped me out, great teachers.”
John also spent many of his younger years traveling. For a while, he worked in Germany as a shuttering carpenter, making forms for concrete.
“I remember Germany in the mid-’70s as quite a place,” John says. “The gaps between the generations, the intensity of it all. At one stage I was working in Nuremberg. One evening I went to the area where the rallies had been held in the 1930s, now completely deserted, listening to Joan Armatrading on my cassette player and enjoying the sight and calm of the willow trees there, wondering about what had passed and all that had happened there.”
At one point John and his crew were sent to Munich, but the directions were incorrect. They ended up at a beer festival and the carpenters from London John was with decided to take advantage of the situation and get absolutely drunk. John decided to take advantage of the situation and visit the state art museum.
“I was looking at the Blue Rider artists, which included Kandinsky, Franz Marc and August Macke,” he says. “In Germany, it’s Blaue Reiter. Before the first World War, they did a lot of pictures of animals in gorgeous colors and this guy, Franz Marc, did beautiful horses, stunning horses, which seemed to me to be symbolic of freedom and joy.”
John moved back to England and found a job with a company called A.J. Dunnings, working on an interesting site in Winchester complete with a stone barn from the 15th century. Early on John remembers the foreman asking him to rehang some sliding sash windows. John took the first window out, changed the cords, properly cleaned everything, sorted it all out and put it all back together.
“It’s tricky stuff,” John says. “You’ve got to stretch the rope and get the weights properly balanced.”
John showed the foreman his work.
“It’s a great job,” the foreman said. “Great job, you’ve done it really well. But there’s only one problem. You put the top sash inside, and the bottom one out. That will let the rain in.”
John is a wonderful storyteller and most of his life’s stories contain lessons learned, some subtle, some not.
“What I had done was I had gotten completely absorbed in the details,” John says, when telling his sash-window story. “I had forgotten the overall idea, which I think is something that a lot of woodworkers do from time to time. And I think that’s quite an important lesson there.”
A fellow carpenter, Joe, at this particular job called payday “Golden Wonder Day.”
“I didn’t get what that was about,” John says. “Turns out, Golden Wonder was a brand of peanuts so he was saying, we’d be getting paid peanuts. I like the banter you get with working people. I enjoy that a lot.”
John has worked all sorts of jobs in his life, with all sorts of people. He talks about working in a massive, cavernous room with high ceilings in, he thinks it was, Strasbourg, striking forms and then dodging them as they dropped, “an absolute nightmare,” he says. He talks about unloading a brick lorry where people would chuck bricks, five at a time. They were on the lorry and he was off it – he’d catch the bricks and stack them. One of the loaders once called him John and surprised, John asked him how he knew his name.
“We call everyone we don’t know John,” the loader said.
John laughs, remembering.
John had worked as a day laborer with Jack Dee, who, at 16 years old, had a deadpan humor that everyone loved. Jack Dee became a nationally known comedian with his own television show, using that same deadpan humor he used on the job site.
And John remembers digging clay for a German potter in West Cork, Ireland, “an unbelievably beautiful area,” he says. It was 1971 and he and friend were hitchhiking through at the time. A man picked them up who turned out to be astonishingly drunk. Chaos broke out when John, sitting behind the man, was trying to get him to stop the car while the man was trying to reach for his shotgun.
