Lost Art Press

I have heard that three piece suits are making a comeback but I am down on three piece arm bows. Yes I know they can work but I have a short grain crack problem. I recently graduated from the Windsor Institute Sack Back Class. The Sack Back

chair has a bent arm bow which not only is strong but is also adjustable after it dries!

One of the myths that was dispelled by King Dunbar, was that bent wood has spring back. “False!” said his Highness. When we tie the freshly bent arm with string to keep it in the correct shape, the string is taught. When we get the arm three days later in the drying room you will notice that the string has slack in it. This is all part of the principle that wood contracts as it dries. Note to self: don’t over bend.

The chair in the pics has a three piece arm bow, and yes I cracked the short grain on both sides of the arm putting it over the spindles. This leads me to a second revelation, gaps between the spindle and the hole in the arm are good! I have the Lee Valley set of tools that produce different sized tennons. I drilled the holes with a spade bit that I had filed to be a bit undersized which results in tight

hole and no gap in the seat. So a half inch tennon was placed in a slightly less than half inch hole.

However, this fit is not so good for the arm. Where the spindles fit through the arm there should be enough of a gap to have a loose fit. This allows a wedge to tighten up the spindle in the hole and secure it for life. When there is not a

loose fit, like in my chair, you get tremendous stress on the arm when fitting it onto the spindles. His Highness also explained that a round tennon in a round mortis is the second worst joint in woodworking next to an end grain to end grain but joint. A wedge makes this joint work because it adds a mechanical means to keep it together. When your tennon is exactly the same size as the hole there is also no room for any difference in tennon hole placement, which is only a problem if you make slight errors in drilling angles. I mean when drilling by sight lines and using a bevel gauge what could possibly go wrong????? Ok, so I put glue in the cracked arm bow and clamped it and am hoping for the best.

Will let you know how the chair holds up. In the future I am going to find a way to steam bend. Will write about that and I highly recommend getting to this class. It was great.

Regards John

Some furniture and cabinets built by commercial shops are held together with the equivalent of snot, paperclips and the coat of film finish on top.

Some pieces are even crazier than that.

A few weeks ago I spent most of a week holed up in one of the units at Pleasant Hill Shaker Village outside Harrodsburg, Ky. It was great to be surrounded by the inspiring architecture, decorative objects and the furniture of this colony.

But on my first morning there I visited the store where they sell reproductions of some of the Shaker pieces built by the colony in the 19th century. What I saw there still has me a little bit in denial. I hope I am wrong.

One of the nice originals at Pleasant Hill is what they call the “Saturday Table,” a small side table with tapered and faceted legs. No drawer. Just simple and nice. We published plans for it in Popular Woodworking a few years ago, and Kerry Pierce published plans in “Pleasant Hill Shaker Furniture” (Popular Woodworking Books).

Pierce built the piece like I would have: The aprons are tenoned into the legs. The top is attached to the aprons using hand-cut pocket-screw holes (just like on the original).

While in the store, I turned over a couple reproductions of the Saturday Table. To my eye, it looks like the aprons are joined to the legs using staples. Then the aprons are pocket screwed to the top. To give the maker the benefit of the doubt, I tried to peer into a couple of the small gaps between the legs and aprons. Surely there must be a tenon in there. Surely these staples are there only to hold everything together as the glue dries.

Or something.

But I saw no tenon or even the shadow of one. I saw only a narrow sliver of light that indicated there was no wood-to-wood joint between the apron and leg.

If my vision is correct, we should all grieve.

— Christopher Schwarz

Reading Robert Wearing’s “The Essential Woodworker” was one of three lightning bolts that have struck me since I began woodworking.

The first shock was cutting my first perfect dovetail. Then there was the moment when I processed my first board entirely by hand. And the third came one afternoon while I was sitting in my chair and cracked open an English book that I had bought on a whim for about $5.

I read the entire book in one sitting (it took only a couple hours), but in that short period of time, Wearing assembled all the random puzzle pieces I had collected for years about handwork. He filled in all the missing details about dozens of basic processes, from laying out door joinery to truing up the legs on a table.

When I closed the book, I couldn’t wait to get into the shop. All the bits and pieces made sense.

Then I did a bad thing. I wrote about the book on my blog at work. And the price of the out-of-print book went to a ridiculous $80 to $100.

So for the last several years, John Hoffman and I at Lost Art Press have been trying to reprint this book so it will be available at a reasonable price and in a nice and permanent format. It took a lot longer than we expected. Robert Wearing was very eager and willing, but let’s just say that other publishing companies kept throwing sand on our strop.

Robert Wearing (photo courtesy of David Wearing).

All that is behind us now, and I am pleased – thrilled actually – to announce that “The Essential Woodworker” will be available this summer on the Lost Art Press imprint. We re-set the entire book, incorporated corrections and revisions from Wearing and retook many photos, which were lost.

Like our other books, “The Essential Woodworker” will be printed in a 6″ x 9″ format, hardbound with a cloth cover, and produced entirely in the United States. What is different about this book is that we will be using more expensive paper. It’s a little thicker and has a more old-school texture. Like our other books, this paper is acid-free, and the signatures will be Smythe sewn and casebound. We have not yet set a retail price, but we expect the 256-page book will be $25.

But enough about the manufacturing details. What’s inside “The Essential Woodworker?” I think it’s a gold mine of traditional hand tool techniques. Assisted by more than 530 hand-drawn illustrations, plus dozens of photos, Wearing walks you through the process of becoming a hand-tool woodworker. He starts with sharpening and ends with dovetailed casework.

To illustrate all of the basic principles, Wearing deftly guides you through building a few small projects. He starts, most ingeniously, with building a table, which teaches many of the core skills you need to build more advanced casework.

He then works you through open casework, backs, plinths, doors and then drawers. He presents no shortcuts or cheats. All the the methods are “neat and workmanlike” and would stand up to the scrutiny of an 18th-century master joiner.

But most of all, I think that Wearing can help you organize everything you know (and don’t yet know) about handwork into a framework that makes sense and is the baseline for every skill you will acquire in the future.

I know, I know. I’m gushing. But believe me, we wouldn’t go to all the trouble to bring this book back if it were merely another brick of information on your bookshelf. This, my friends, is an entire brick wall.

As of May 1, here are our plans for this book: We will produce one run of these books with a hardbound cover. There will be no leather-bound edition. We also will be offering a digital version of this book that you will be able to download when you pre-order the printed edition. The first announcement will go out via our e-mail newsletter.

— Christopher Schwarz