The Union Village Shaker community is about an hour north of my home in Fort Mitchell, Ky., but it doesn’t figure large in the world of Shaker furniture like the eastern Shaker communities do.
Union Village was the first and largest Shaker community west of the Allegheny Mountains, and it was the parent community for the western Shaker communities in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Georgia.
Founded in 1805, more than 4,000 Shakers lived at Union Village during its peak and they were known for selling herbal medicines, seeds and brooms. The community declined until it was sold in 1912. The site is now a retirement community in Warren County, Ohio.
One of the artifacts remaining from the village is a walnut blanket box with fine lines and tight dovetails. The box is similar in form to many Shaker chests that are extant, but this one has always been a favorite.
I chose to adapt this design because it highlights the advantages of my preferred chest-building method. The fine bit of transition moulding around the plinth is easy to accomplish with this traditional construction technique.
While I retained the proportions and lines of the Union Village original, I used finger joints instead of dovetails. And I used figured maple instead of walnut. These two alterations give the box a contemporary feel.
Statistics: Dimensions: 21-3/8” high x 38-1/2” long x 18-1/4” deep Materials: Tiger maple exterior; poplar interior parts Finish: Custom blend of oil, varnish and linseed oil. Construction Details: All surfaces are handplaned using traditional techniques. Plinth and box are joined using entirely traditional joinery methods. All the hardware is iron with traditional pyramid-head screws.
I almost never get a phone call from the public relations people at the Stanley Works. Perhaps they are too busy selling garage door openers or thinking up double-entendre and obesity jokes to accompany the company’s line of Fat Max tools.
But in 2002, the phone rang, and it was Stanley.
The friendly public relations person had heard that I’d just reviewed jack planes in Popular Woodworking magazine and that Stanley had won the “Best Value” award. Could he get a copy of the review right away? And could they use it in their marketing materials?
At that moment I knew this was going to have a storyline that ended me with telling him that the tooth fairy didn’t exist.
Yes, I reply, Stanley won the award. Yes, I’d be happy to send him a copy of the review. Yes, they could use the test in their marketing materials.
“However,” I say, pausing for a moment, “I don’t think you’re going to want to use the review.”
And so I explained: When I set up our review of metal-bodied jack planes, I included all the major brands on the market at the time: Lie-Nielsen, Clifton, Record, Shop Fox, Anant and Stanley. And then, as a lark, I put a few vintage Stanley Type 11s into the test.
The vintage Stanleys in the test were about 100 years old and were bought at flea markets and on eBay for anywhere between $12 and $35. As you can probably guess, the vintage Stanley planes blew the doors off most of the new planes (except the Lie-Nielsen and, to some degree, the Clifton).
It was a fair fight. These vintage planes needed work. The soles were a bit wonky. The irons and chipbreakers needed work. The frogs weren’t perfectly tuned. But even though these vintage Stanleys should be retired to the old-folks home for cast iron, they were easier to set up than the new planes. The controls were finer. Heck the 100-year-old fit and finish was better than those on the Record, Shop Fox and Anant.
The guy from Stanley Works was perplexed by my explanation. But he still wanted the review for his files, so I sent it to him that very afternoon.
And now bear with me for a second story that begins with my phone ringing.
It is from a reader who wants help choosing a tool – the kind of call I get about five times a week. This guy wants some help buying a bit brace. No problem. I rattle off my standard favorites: The North Bros. 2101A brace and a couple from Peck, Stow & Wilcox. And I throw in a plug for Sanford Moss’s web site as a great place to research and buy the brace of his dreams.
“Um, thanks,” the guy says, “but I wanted to buy a new brace.”
Huh? Why would anyone want to buy a new brace? The best braces ever made are still littering the planet and can be had for less than the price of a tab of Oxycontin (not that I know anything about the price of illegal prescriptives).
“I don’t like used equipment,” he explains. “I want to be the first person who uses it. When I take it out of the box, I want it to be perfect.”
The reader then asked me about three brands of new braces he’d seen in catalogs. We went over the details of each one: junk, tremendous junk and crap-tacular junk. He settled on purchasing the brace that I had the fewest bad things to say. We both hung up the phone bewildered.
Sometimes I forget that there is a certain consumer that won’t buy anything that has been used. With all of the sturdy old houses on the market, they would prefer to buy something new in the suburbs that doesn’t have the same level of craftsmanship or detailing.
I used to get fairly worked up about this fact, but in the last few years, I’ve come to embrace it as a good thing. Here’s why: These people are helping expand the marketplace for high-quality new tools. They are the consumers who help ensure that Veritas, Clifton, Lie-Nielsen and other manufacturers will have a customer base.
Their buying habits have encouraged competition among makers and have exposed more of their fellow woodworkers to the wonders of high-quality modern tool manufacturing. I myself started into the craft with vintage planes and balked at the price of Lie-Nielsen (and later Clifton and Veritas) planes when I first encountered them about 12 years ago. But after using the tools, I think they’re a tremendously good value.
The whole thing is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. Does the availability of quality new tools grow the interest in traditional tools? Or does an interest in traditional tools fuel the availability of new quality tools?
I’m not smart enough to answer a chicken-and-egg paradox. But I am smart enough to recognize that the world works in cycles. You see, last week I got an e-mail from a public relations person at Stanley Works….
If you own enough books, it’s easy to believe almost anything and yet be certain about almost nothing.
Take dovetails. I’ve seen this joint cut with a wide variety of slopes during the last 15 years. And every person who cuts this joint has a personal or historical preference about the slope they use.
For some craftsmen, the slope varies simply because they eyeball the layout. Frank Klausz, one of the two living dovetail savants I know, says he cuts his dovetails anywhere between 10° to 15° off the vertical. Tage Frid preferred slopes of “about 10°.”
Other well-known dovetailers use marking jigs to lay out the joint, which locks them into particular angles. Rob Cosman, the other living dovetail savant, uses 10° for softwoods and 8.5° for hardwoods.
For the last 15 years I’ve been cutting dovetails, I’ve used the angles used by my first instructor: 10° for softwoods and 8.5° for hardwoods, just like Cosman. But for some reason, I’ve become dissatisfied with the way the joints look when they are visible on a piece of casework.
So I hit the library a few weeks ago, and now my head hurts from the bludgeoning. Dovetails might take their name from a bird, but reading about them is a trip down the rabbit hole.
What the Dead Guys Say
To understand how little there is to understand about dovetails, let’s take an abbreviated journey through the literature. I promise to be quick like a bunny.
Charles H. Hayward, the mid-20th century pope of hand-cut joinery, suggests three slopes: Use 12° for coarse work. Use 10° or 7° for decorative dovetails. There is no advice on hardwoods vs. softwoods.
F.E. Hoard and A.W. Marlow, the authors of the 1952 tome “The Cabinetmaker’s Treasury,” say you should use 15°. Period.
“Audel’s Carpenter’s Guide,” an early 20th century technical manual, says that 7.5° is for an exposed joint and 10° is right for “heavier work.” No advice on hardwoods vs. softwoods.
“Modern Practical Joinery” the 1902 book by George Ellis recommends 10° for all joints, as does Paul Hasluck in his 1903 “The Handyman’s Book.”
So at least among our dearly departed dovetailers, the advice is to use shallow angles for joints that show and steeper angles if your work is coarse, heavy or hidden. Or just to use one angle and be done with it.
At least in my library, the advice on softwoods and hardwoods seems to become more common with modern writing. Percy Blandford, who has been writing about woodworking for a long time, writes in his new book, “The Woodworker’s Bible,” that any angle between 7.5° and 10° is acceptable. The ideal, he says, is 8.5° for softwoods and 7.5° when joining hardwoods.
My Own Eye
One Wednesday morning I laid out and cut a bunch of these dovetails. I ignored the really shallow angles (6.5° to 8.5°) because I wanted to adopt something more angular. The 10° dovetails looked OK. The 12° dovetails looked better. The 14° tails looked better still. And the 15° looked really good as well. (The photo at the top of this entry shows a 15° dovetail with a bunch of alternatives marked on it.)
But I’ve some defect in my personality that keeps me from choosing the most extreme position, so I settled on 14°. And it’s a good thing, too, because a few days after that, the mindreaders at Lee Valley Tools released a 14° dovetail marker (I really should start wearing my tinfoil hat more). I ordered one – it seemed to be a sign.
Whatever angle you use for your joint, you can rest easy knowing that someone out there (living or dead) thinks you are doing the right thing – unless you cut something more than 15°, then you’re just nuts (or use a dovetail jig with your router).
When I build too much stuff with straight lines, it starts to make me a little batty. So after finishing a blanket chest and a gaggle of sawbenches, I retreated into my quick, easy and curvy place.
No, it’s not a gentleman’s club, but it’s almost as stimulating. (Note to self: I must be getting old to write a line like that.) Today I spent a morning building a set of three Shaker oval boxes as a wedding gift. These boxes are an immersion course in curves, angles, steam-bending and nailing.
I first learned to build these boxes during a 2002 photo shoot with the undisputed master of the craft: John Wilson. After watching him make these boxes, I immediately built the bending forms and bought the copper tacks and some bending stock to make some boxes.
I’ve probably made 20 or so sets, and during the last five years or so I’ve altered some of Wilson’s techniques to suit my tools and way of working. And now I have it down to the point where I use hand tools for the entire process, save one little point when I fit the top and bottom slabs to their bent bands.
If you’ve never tried building these boxes, I highly recommend you give it a try. You can order all the materials directly from Wilson at ShakerOvalBox.com or buy a small kit from Lee Valley Tools. It’s so much fun, it might even keep you out of the strip clubs.
Here, in brief, is how I’ve altered Wilson’s tried-and-true procedures in my shop.
1. Feathering: All the oval bands have to be feathered in thickness at one end so the two ends meet in a smooth curve. Wilson uses a belt/disc sander for this operation. He presses about 1-1/4” of the end to the belt sander and tapers the end to almost nothing. I do this with a block plane. I mark a line about 1-1/4” from the end and plane a taper on the end. Takes but a minute.
2. Drilling: Wilson uses an electric drill with a 3/32” bit to make the holes for all the copper tacks and for the toothpicks that secure the top and bottom slabs to the bands. I use an eggbeater drill. I look for any excuse to use my Millers Falls No. 2, and this is a good excuse.
3. Surfacing: Instead of sanding all the parts, I surface them with a handplane or scraper plane. It works great with the straight-cut stuff that Wilson sells.
4. Cutting the tops and bottoms: Wilson uses a band saw. I use a bow saw. My way is much slower, but I like using my bow saw.
So which power tool will I not give up with these boxes? It’s the table saw. Once you cut out the top and bottom slabs, you need to put a little bevel on the edges so they will snuggle into the bands with a cork-like fit.
I have a disc-sander plate I put on my table saw for this operation. I tilt the arbor a couple degrees and sand away. Someday I’ll switch to a spokeshave for this operation I’m sure.
So how fast is this process? The photos here show what happens after an hour of work. I feather the ends of the bands, cut the “fingers” with a knife and boil the bands for 20 minutes. Then I remove the bands, wrap them around the forms and tack the bands. I put a couple plugs in each band to help them hold their shape and walk away for a day.
Tomorrow I’ll spend an hour fitting and attaching the top and bottom pieces. Then a little touch-up work and I’ll be ready to spray them with a little lacquer.
Because I like my day job, I’ll spray them here at home. Click here for the back-story on that.
It’s 5 p.m. on Sunday, and almost all of the students in my “Precision Handsawing” class are packing up their tools to head home after two punishing days of listening to my drivel while trying to perfect their handsawing.
But in one corner of this picturesque Kentucky classroom, Michael Rogen refuses to stop laying out his half-lap joints. He refuses to lay down his tools and quit. Michael above all refuses to lay down, give up and wait to die.
Things are getting worse for Michael. His degenerative disease – its name is unimportant – has claimed most of his mobility, nearly all of his natural dexterity but absolutely none of his stubborn will to be able to saw, plane and chisel furniture-quality joints by hand.
These tasks are hard enough for a grown man in good physical condition – most of my students from this weekend are probably still recovering from sore feet and forearms. But when you add on the fact that Michael can barely stand without two canes and has virtually no grip in one of his hands, it makes you ashamed to be so dammed healthy and lazy in comparison.
I’ve known Michael – a former actor – for a few years now. He started asking my advice on buying some tools and bit by bit has worked his way into my life and the lifes of other woodworkers, tool makers and woodworking instructors.
Despite the advice of his doctors, Michael traveled to Indianapolis last year to take my “Introduction to Hand Tools” class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. He was in better shape then, but by the end of the week I couldn’t believe that the guy was on his two feet and pounding out mortise after mortise with a mallet and chisel.
As we parted last May, Michael said, “I think this is it. I think this is my last class.”
Hardly.
Michael went on to take a class in building a blanket chest at Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking. Then he took a class in making moulding planes from Larry Williams and Don McConnell followed directly by my class in sawing.
For the class, Michael took the bench next to mine, and while he had to have a little assistance with knifing a couple notches, he stubbornly declined other offers of help. He insisted on cutting his stock to rough length on a sawbench (I don’t know how he kept his balance), and he plowed through the project at a steady and slow pace.
At the end of the first day of this sawing class, I held a contest. I asked each student to make the best tenon he or she could manage with handsaws and a chisel. The tenon had to be consistent in its thickness and have clean shoulders.
Then all the students wrote their birthdate on their tenons and tossed them on my workbench. I left them there overnight so I was certain to forget whose tenon belongs to whom. On Sunday morning before class, I sorted through the joints, marked up their good points and bad and decided on a winner.
To everyone’s surprise (and delight) it was Michael’s tenon. For a piece of hand-cut work, it was solid. The tenon varied in its thickness by only a thousandth of an inch (or maybe two). The shoulders weren’t dead-nuts perfect, but they could be cleaned up with a shoulder plane easily and they outclassed many of the other tenons on my bench.
Michael (who lives in New York) was naturally suspicious that I had rigged the contest.
No so, my friend. You beat us all. Not only on that day, but in many other ways that have nothing to do with cheeks and shoulders, or tools and joinery.
