Small cross-peen hammers are incredibly useful in furniture making. I’ve had one in my chest for almost 20 years.
“Wait,” you might be thinking. “Chris didn’t list this hammer in his recent inventory of his chest.”
You are correct. That’s because we’ve been reverse-engineering my favorite Warrington to make our own version. It’s now in pieces. Its handle is off to the handle-maker. And the head, which we carefully measured, is now sitting lonesome on my desk.
Americans don’t have much of a history with this form of hammer. It’s a Brit thing, just like the lump hammer we make. I don’t know exactly why that is the case. Warrington’s are quite useful.
This small hammer (with about a 4-ounce head) is ideal for setting and sinking small nails. The cross-peen (sometimes called the cross-pane) starts the nail. You hold the nail between your thumb and forefinger and strike it with the pane. (The pane misses your fingers and hits the nails.) Then you turn the hammer around and finish the job with the hammer’s round face.
The cross-peen is also ideal when setting moulding planes. I use it to knock the plane’s iron against the blind side of the escapement, ensuring the iron is in line with the profile of the plane’s sole.
And a Warrington is an excellent plane-setting hammer. Its weight and size are perfect for making lateral adjustments to block planes or bench planes. (Because I have a Warrington, I’ve never really wanted a dedicated plane-adjusting hammer. There’s no need.)
The Crucible Warrington will be milled out of one block of hardened steel and features a lot of the beautiful chamfering and tapering you don’t see on modern hammers of any type. The handle will be hickory and set into the head with a wooden wedge.
Like all our tools, the hammer will be made and assembled entirely in the United States.
It is going to be a little expensive, like our lump hammer. The hammer head is a tricky bit of machining. Though it requires less steel than our lump hammer, it has to spend a lot more time in the mill. And the handle is a 100-percent custom job (our lump hammer is a stock pattern that we modify).
I think it will be worth it. I absolutely adore these little hammers, and this one is based on one of the most beautiful ones I’ve ever encountered. It was given to me by planemaker Wayne Anderson a couple decades ago and I’ve kept it close ever since.
We’re closing out our reprint of the “Stanley Tools Catalogue No. 34,” and are selling remaining copies for $10 each, simply to free up space on the warehouse shelves. Every purchase comes with a free PDF copy – once the 450 (or so) print copies are sold out, we’ll continue to offer a free PDF of the 1914 catalogue here on the blog.
This catalog shows nearly every tool needed in a hand-tool shop 100 years ago, from the chisels to the butt gauges to every sort of plane in the company’s line. The text explains what each one is used for and how it functions differently from other similar tools.
The catalog also has fantastic exploded views of many of the complex tools, such as Stanley’s miter boxes, the multi-planes and handplanes. It’s a great resource to have on hand at a tool meet or antique market – not only to identify vintage tools, but to see if all the parts are intact.
If you are just getting into hand tools, we think you will find this catalog a delight to read, hold and learn from. The information in it is factual and straightforward – not the puffery you get from many modern catalogs. And if you collect or appreciate vintage hand tools, we think you will love this catalog, which reproduces the vintage drawings with remarkable clarity.
Once these are gone, we are not reprinting. So get it now or forever hold your (Harvey) peace.
Katherine (aka the Wax Princess) has a fresh batch of Soft Wax 2.0 in her store – just in time for this week’s chair class.
This is the finish Chris uses on his chairs, and that I use on everything that isn’t painted. I particuarly love it on walnut and cherry – it warms up the grain and brings out its beauty (as well as offering just enough easily renewable protection), plus it softens my hand and smells good.
Katherine cooks up this wax in the Lost Art Press machine room using a waterless process. She then packages it in a tough glass jar with a metal screw-top lid. She applies her hand-designed label to each lid, boxes up the jars and ships them in a durable cardboard mailer. The money she makes from wax helps her make ends meet at college. Instructions for the wax are below. You can watch a video of how to use the wax here.
Instructions for Soft Wax 2.0 Soft Wax 2.0 is a safe finish for bare wood that is incredibly easy to apply and imparts a beautiful low luster to the wood.
The finish is made by cooking raw, organic linseed oil (from the flax plant) and combining it with cosmetics-grade beeswax and a small amount of a citrus-based solvent. The result is that this finish can be applied without special safety equipment, such as a respirator. The only safety caution is to dry the rags out flat you used to apply before throwing them away. (All linseed oil generates heat as it cures, and there is a small but real chance of the rags catching fire if they are bunched up while wet.)
Soft Wax 2.0 is an ideal finish for pieces that will be touched a lot, such as chairs, turned objects and spoons. The finish does not build a film, so the wood feels like wood – not plastic. Because of this, the wax does not provide a strong barrier against water or alcohol. If you use it on countertops or a kitchen table, you will need to touch it up every once in a while. Simply add a little more Soft Wax to a deteriorated finish and the repair is done – no stripping or additional chemicals needed.
Soft Wax 2.0 is not intended to be used over a film finish (such as lacquer, shellac or varnish). It is best used on bare wood. However, you can apply it over a porous finish, such as milk paint.
APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS (VERY IMPORTANT): Applying Soft Wax 2.0 is so easy if you follow the simple instructions. On bare wood, apply a thin coat of soft wax using a rag, applicator pad, 3M gray pad or steel wool. Allow the finish to soak in about 15 minutes. Then, with a clean rag or towel, wipe the entire surface until it feels dry. Do not leave any excess finish on the surface. If you do leave some behind, the wood will get gummy and sticky.
The finish will be dry enough to use in a couple hours. After a couple weeks, the oil will be fully cured. After that, you can add a second coat (or not). A second coat will add more sheen and a little more protection to the wood.
Soft Wax 2.0 is made in small batches in Kentucky. Each glass jar contains 8 oz. of soft wax, enough for about five chairs.
The following is excerpted from Dr. Jefferey Hill’s “Workshop Wound Care.” The book – the newest offering in our pocket book series – delves right to the heart of what you need to know when faced with common workshop injuries, from lacerations, to puncture wounds to material in the eye. Dr. Hill is an emergency room physician and an active woodworker. So he knows exactly the information a woodworker needs to know when it comes to injuries. And he presents information in a way that a non-medical professional can easily understand it.
The initial steps of wound care are critically important to creating an environment that promotes healing with a quick return to normal function and (if it’s a concern of yours) good cosmetic outcomes. As we covered in Chapter 4, Wound Healing Primer, there are a number of factors that can affect the healing process.
Wounds that heal well have minimal tissue damage, don’t get infected and have tissue layers that line up well. The amount of tissue damage is, generally speaking, a function of the way the injury occurred (crush injuries mean more tissue destruction as opposed to lacerations, which have minimal destruction apart from the severed tissue layers). Sometimes, however, actions taken early in the wound care process can worsen some of the existing tissue damage, or, in the very least, can fight against creating the optimal healing environment.
Stopping ongoing bleeding is clearly the first step in addressing a fresh wound. But assuming the wound is small-ish and the bleeding is not severe enough to prompt you to seek care at your local urgent care or emergency department, your next steps should be focused on cleaning the wound to prevent infection.
In preventing wound infections, the single-most important step is thorough irrigation of the wound. Even a dump truck full of antibiotics won’t prevent an infection in a contaminated wound that wasn’t cleaned. Why? Exponential growth is the reason. A characteristic of exponential growth is that things seem fine until they aren’t and when things get bad, they get bad quickly (see the global COVID-19 pandemic).
Staphylococcus aureus, one of the more common bacteria on your skin and a frequent cause of wound infections, has a doubling time of about 90 minutes. So two bacteria become four in 90 minutes, four becomes eight in three hours, eight becomes 16 in four-and-a-half hours, 16 becomes 256 in six hours. Not too bad, honestly. By 24 hours you’re up to more than 130,000 bacteria in the wound. But, let’s say instead of starting with a wound with only two bacteria, you start in a wound that has 100 bacteria. This time, by 6 hours you’re at 1,600 bacteria. By 12 hours, 25,600. And by 24 hours, more than 6.5 million bacteria are in the wound.
Antibiotics are great and all, but by the time you get them prescribed, filled at the pharmacy, into your stomach, to the bloodstream and out to the wound, they would be greeted by a mass of hundreds of thousands to millions of bacteria.
This isn’t to say that antibiotics don’t have a role in preventing wound infections. They do, and are prescribed in certain circumstances based on the types of tissues injured, risk of infection and ability of the patient to fight off infections. But, the single-most important thing you can do to prevent a wound infection is to clean the wound thoroughly and decrease the bacteria cell counts in the wound. Get that number small enough, and the roving white blood cells that come to a healing wound will usually be able to take care of things.
‘Dilution is the Solution to Pollution’ Bacteria find their way into wounds in a number of ways. First, understand that bacteria are literally everywhere. They are on you, your skin, your chisel, your table saw blade, that nice piece of white oak that gave you a splinter while you were trying to rive out some leg stock. Everywhere. Bacteria can be forced from your skin into a wound by the chisel or whatever else caused your injury. They can catch a ride on a tiny sliver of wood or metal. Or they could be pressed into the wound as you try to hold a grimy rag to it attempting to stanch bleeding.
The goal of irrigation is to rid the wound of as many bacteria and as much bacteria-laden detritus as possible. As the old surgical maxim “dilution is the solution to pollution” suggests, the prime way that this is accomplished is through flowing a large volume of water over and through the wound. The surest way to clean the wound of bacteria and any foreign bodies is through a combination of volume and pressure.
The setup for this irrigation is shown in the photo [Above]. The splash guard is basically a fancy 19-gauge blunt plastic needle with a shield to keep water from spraying everywhere while you irrigate the wound. The combination of the syringe and this splash guard results in a flow of saline/water with pressures around 25 to 35 psi.
What About Tap Water? How much volume is enough volume? The general rule of thumb is that wounds should be irrigated with 500ml to 1L of fluid. But in practice, the real goal is to make sure the wounds are completely free of foreign bodies. Wounds that are clean in appearance to begin with might get away with smaller volumes of irrigation depending on location, depth of the wound and mechanism of injury.What About Tap Water?The type of irrigation just described is important for wounds that are relatively deep or fairly contaminated. Most of the wounds you’ll sustain in the workshop will be relatively small nicks, cuts and skin tears. For these minor wounds, thorough irrigation with tap water will do. In fact, there are a number of studies that show no difference in infection rates for wounds cleansed with tap water vs. saline, even for larger wounds. This of course assumes that the source of the tap water is clean – not really a concern for most municipal water sources, but could be a concern in developing nations or in underdeveloped and under-resourced pockets of the United States.
The process for irrigating a wound with tap water is quite simple (if a bit painful). Turn the tap to lukewarm/body temperature water (those newly exposed nerve fibers will be exceedingly sensitive to any stimuli). Let the water run over the wound for several minutes. Re-examine the wound to see if there is any debris remaining. If there is, you can try to irrigate again, or try to irrigate with the pressure irrigation setup described above, if you have a syringe with a splash guard. However, if the wound is that dirty you might need a more thorough irrigation in a healthcare setting.
Why not Hydrogen Peroxide, Iodine etc. Apart from water or saline, the only other thing that should be used to clean a wound is a mild soap and maybe a dilute iodine solution.
My experience while growing up in the United States Midwest was that every scrape, nick or cut should be cleaned out with hydrogen peroxide every day until the wound healed. And why not? It bubbles like mad, stings a bit and the wound looks a good deal cleaner afterward.
There are a number of problems with using hydrogen peroxide to clean wounds. For starters, it does a much better job of killing red blood cells than it does of killing bacteria. This can be helpful for wounds that have a lot of dried, caked-on blood as can often happen with wounds in hairy areas. It is far less helpful for your standard wound. For wounds that are a couple of days into healing, hydrogen peroxide has been shown to separate newly minted skin cells from the healing tissue at the base of wounds. And, in experimental conditions, hydrogen peroxide has been shown to delay wound healing. If you do choose to use hydrogen peroxide to clean dried blood off, be ready for some heat. The chemical degradation of hydrogen peroxide to water and oxygen is exothermic (it gives off heat). It’s not enough to cause any thermal burns to the area, but it is quite noticeable.
Iodine is frequently used to clean wounds and does have some advantages over saline irrigation alone in some situations. Iodine is sold in two formulations: a solution and a scrub. The scrub was designed for use on intact skin and for cleaning the skin surface prior to surgery. The detergent mixed into the scrub is toxic to tissues and shouldn’t be used in open wounds. Iodine solution is typically sold at a 10 percent concentration. When it is diluted to less than 1 percent, it is safe for use in open wounds and has excellent antibacterial, anti-viral and anti-fungal activity. In the emergency department, iodine-diluted solutions are typically used for irrigating wounds at high risk of infection (based on mechanism, contamination, location).
Chlorhexadine is a surgical scrub soap that is also widely available. It was also designed for use primarily with intact skin. If you have had an elective surgery you may have been instructed to shower with it for several days/weeks prior to the surgery. The reason being that it builds up on the skin surface and has potent anti-bacterial properties (great for decreasing the risk of surgical site infection). It also has a detergent that can be toxic to the tissues in open wounds so its use in wound irrigation is discouraged.
Soaps work by liquefying fats and oils, making them soluble in water and able to be carried away by running water. Because bacterial cell walls are made of fat, soap is able to dissolve some of these cell membranes, killing the bacteria. Commercially available soaps are all generally quite mild in their fat-busting properties (they are fairly mild detergents) meaning that they should not be particularly toxic to open wounds.
Putting it all together, how should you clean your wound? First inspect the wound. Large, gaping wounds or wounds that have a lot of debris in them will likely need to be cleaned and repaired in a healthcare setting. Some initial irrigation of these wounds with running tap water may help you triage the wound and may help lightly clean it in preparation for a more thorough cleaning by a medical professional. After you irrigate under running tap water, cover the wound with sterile gauze that has been dampened with sterile saline and head to your local medical facility.
Smaller wounds, scrapes and lightly contaminated wounds that you feel can be dealt with at home should be first lightly cleaned with soap and water. Then allow lukewarm tap water to run over the wound for several minutes until it appears to be clean to your eye and no debris remains. If you still see some debris, you can try to use the aerosolized saline wound washes that are available in your local drugstore. It’s not clear how the pressures generated by these products compare to the pressure irrigation setup used in your local emergency department. As a general rule of thumb, if the wound still appears dirty, then you’ll need more aggressive cleaning by a healthcare professional and should seek care.
Do note that oftentimes the process of cleaning and irrigating the wound may cause it to start bleeding (you may have washed away the blood clots that stopped any previous bleeding). That’s OK. After you have finished cleaning the wound, you should be able to stop the bleeding again with a combination of direct pressure and maybe a pressure dressing.
After the wound is cleaned thoroughly and the bleeding has been stopped, you’re on to dressing the wound to keep it clean and promote healing.
Whitney Miller, news anchor, author/illustrator of “Henry Boyd’s Freedom Bed” and presenter of the video “Make a Swedish Tool Chest,” grew up in Houston, Texas, with her mom, dad and younger sister. Her dad was a “computer doctor” who owned his own business, Millertech, and serviced computers for large companies. Her mom worked in insurance and financial services.
“I just remember her smelling really good, coming home from work and going to work,” Whitney says.
Whitney laughs, remembering for years telling everyone about how tight-knit her family was, like the family from “Leave It to Beaver.” And for years, they were. Her grandma, a nurse, lived with them for quite some time and took them to a nondenominational church, Christian Tabernacle, every Wednesday and Sunday.
“I feel like that church was very formative of who I am, who I turned out to be,” Whitney says. “I felt like it was a very non-judgmental-type of church. It was very relaxed. I was always there and always involved.”
Whitney was involved in choir, church plays, was a youth volunteer at church and attended a Christian school during her elementary years.
As a child, Whitney was encouraged by her mom in craft and play; she made sure to keep her girls busy. Every summer her mom would sign Whitney and her sister up for arts and crafts classes, and Whitney almost always chose an acting or drawing class.
“One summer my mom was like, ‘Y’all are not going to be bored this summer,’” Whitney says. “So we go to Hobby Lobby and she bought us this book that had 365 crafts to try, a huge book, and she was like, ‘Figure out what crafts you want to try, I’m going to buy all the materials and I don’t want to ever hear the word bored this whole summer long.’ So for two days we tried as many crafts as we could and then we stopped,” Whitney laughs. “But we always had this book that we could come back to and she was always giving us stuff that we could touch and try and do; I think that’s why I’ve always been curious to try different things.”
Whitney switched from Christian school to public in middle school, and remained active in after-school activities. She enrolled in Leadership Officer Training Corps (LOTC, similar to ROTC). Whitney’s mom had been in the Army and the elective had a description for orienteering. Whitney loved the idea of a treasure hunt – using a map and compass to figure things out on her own. Turns out, the course didn’t actually do orienteering at all but the elective did teach her a lot about leadership. So she stuck with it, continuing with ROTC through high school.
The switch from Christian to public school was, in many ways, relatively easy, Whitney says, in part because her parents instilled the importance of self-esteem in both their daughters. In high school, Whitney’s parents divorced, something she didn’t necessarily see coming as a child. Although the divorce didn’t faze her much as a teenager, it was something she says she eventually faced later on, in college.
On a Hustle, Straight Through Grad School
When Whitney was 16 years old, she got her first job, outside of babysitting, at Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC).
“My mom used to call me the ‘snacker lady’ because they used to have these sandwiches called snackers,” Whitney says. “I got hired because this woman was like, ‘I like your smile – I want to hire you. And then she changed the billboard sign outside of KFC to ‘Hiring Smiles.’ It’s a little strange now to think about it,” she adds, laughing.
“I was a clown once. I was a clown,” Whitney says. “But for no reason at all I just felt like I needed the money. I don’t know what I was buying, but I needed money. Someone said, ‘You just have to dress up like this clown and go to kids’ parties.’ So, I dressed up like a clown and I went to one party. I don’t know how much money I got, maybe $50 or something like that, and I never did that shit again,” Whitney laughs.
“I never did that shit again. These little children – they loved it! But never again! I don’t even know how I got there. Why did my mom let me do that? I was on a hustle. My friends used to say, ‘Oh, you’re a true Jamaican.’ Because I used to have all kinds of jobs.”
It’s a stereotype she says she didn’t mind leaning into because she loved the feeling of being responsible for herself. “I had a lot of jobs. Especially in college – I had multiple jobs when I was going to school. I just liked to work.”
Whitney didn’t grow up wanting to be an author or news anchor. In high school she loved the TV show “CSI”; after learning about DNA in her biology class, she was sure she would be a forensic scientist.
“And then I would tell my friends I also wanted to be the female P. Diddy because I wanted to be a singer but I knew that singers don’t get as much money as the person who owns the record label so I decided I would own a record label and make my own music,” she says. “Obviously, I didn’t do any of that.”
What she did do was get a free ride to The Ohio State University (OSU) thanks to good grades and scholarships. When she got there she was asked what she wanted to major in – she had no clue.
“I hadn’t figured that part out,” she says. “A lot of people I was there with were doing communications and I thought, I like to talk.”
As a communications major she found that only a small number of students could join the journalism program. This inspired her and she got in.
“I was like, OK. I’m going to be a journalist,” she says. “And the minute I figured that out I was on it.”
Whitney interned at all four major news stations in Columbus while an OSU undergrad.
“You were literally not allowed to do that,” she says. “But I would go to my counselors and I would say, ‘You got to figure out a way I can do this one and that one – I want to do all of them. And I did that.”
Whitney shot her résumé tape on campus. It included a video of her and her friends chasing winter storms.
“And when President Obama became president I stood outside and said, ‘This is a historic day.’ The video of me doing that is hilarious because I look a mess,” she says. “I didn’t know what I was talking about. But I was so hungry to be a journalist. I just remember really, really wanting to do it by any means necessary. I later found out that tape was trash because nobody hired me from it.”
After Whitney graduated from OSU she moved to Cleveland, thinking her tape and Ohio connections would help her get a job in journalism. But they did not. So in 2010, she enrolled in a Master of Arts program in broadcast journalism at DePaul University in Chicago.
“And that’s when I got a way better tape – and a way better understanding of broadcasting,” she says. “At Ohio State I was learning print journalism. I had all the journalistic ethics but I did not have the foundation for television in terms of delivery and on-camera presence. I was just winging it.”
Whitney loved DePaul’s hands-on broadcast journalism program. There she took classes on how to put a story together and she took an entire class dedicated to creating a tape she could use to look for future jobs.
Angels Filling in the Gap
Whitney graduated with an M.A. in broadcast journalism from DePaul in 2012. At the time, broadcast journalists simply had to go wherever they could to get a job. So she sent her tape everywhere.
“My professor told me, ‘You just need to show up in these cities and put yourself in front of the news director so they know who they’re talking to and who they’re dealing with,’” Whitney says. “For example, I would call a station in Peoria, Illinois, and I would say, ‘Oh, I’m going to be in town visiting family.’ I had no money either. It was Jesus and friends who would send me $50 to get back to Chicago. I would literally just drive everywhere. I’d go in to these stations and they’d look at my tape and say, ‘Thank you for stopping by’ and I would just leave and nothing would come from it. At all. But I wouldn’t give up. I just kept doing it.”
Toledo was the last city Whitney tried this in and although that news director didn’t offer her a job, he did critique her tape.
“He was like, ‘You should move this here, that here, get rid of this,’ and when I got back to Chicago, I fixed my tape and I literally started sending it out again. I got an email immediately because of those changes from a news director in Anchorage Alaska.
After a Skype interview Whitney was offered a job.
“I called my mom and I was like, ‘I’m moving to Alaska,’” Whitney says. “And she was like, ‘Um, what?’ You could tell that she did not really want me to go but I think she knew there was no stopping me. She was happy for me. She was happy that I was finally getting my dream job because I was living on my uncle’s couch at that point, having quit my job at a bank to search for a reporter gig. I didn’t have anything. I sold my car, packed up all my stuff and flew to Anchorage.”
Whitney says she was more excited than nervous.
“When you’ve been searching for a job for a long time, you don’t care,” she says. “You just go and get started.”
Whitney recently watched her old tapes from her time in Anchorage.
“I was terrible then too,” she says, laughing. “Oh, girl, you could just see how green I was and how I think I’m doing what all news people do. I can see that in my face. I was searching for my voice, my identity as a journalist. But now I’m just me. Before I was definitely trying to be someone else.”
Whitney worked in Alaska for two years. While she says she had a good time and made some great connections, she did find it isolating at times, only visiting home once while she lived there.
“And they didn’t have a Chipotle,” she adds, laughing. “They didn’t have a Chipotle! What? I got out of there. When my contract was over I was done.”
And then Whitney moved back to Houston.
“I thought I would get a job immediately because I was so good now!” she says. “I thought I was so good at being a journalist and I did not understand that the Houston market was too large and they would never hire someone on-air with only two years of experience.”
At this point, Whitney was living with her mom in a small apartment in Houston.
“She was getting on my nerves and I was getting on her nerves,” Whitney says. “And I remember I went to Chick-Fil-A, and this is like a month in, and I give them my credit card and they’re like, ‘Um, you don’t have enough money to get this sandwich.’ But they gave it to me anyway because, you know, Chick-Fil-A is like Jesus, they gave me the sandwich and I sat in the car and I just cried and cried and cried. I just wanted a journalism job. It was there I remembered that same person who used to drive to Toledo, who used to drive to all those places. I told myself ‘I just gotta do what I gotta do.’ So I went and got a job at a call center.”
The call center was terrible, Whitney says. She was in training for two weeks. She remembers seeing roaches in the bathroom.
“I would cry on the way to the training class because I was like, This is not my career! I would ask God ‘why do I have to come here?’” she says.
Around this time she walked into a Walgreens. A friend who used to work there encouraged Whitney to talk to the manager. So she did. She told the manager that she no longer wanted to work at the call center and she needed a job. He agreed to an interview and she showed him her news tapes from Alaska.
“And he was like, ‘No. You need to be on the news. You can’t work here.’ I said, ‘No, I literally can’t buy a chicken sandwich,’ Whitney says. ‘I need to work. Please let me work here.’ He doubled down and said, ‘No. You really can’t work here. You need to be on TV and I don’t want you to give that up.’ And I was like, ‘I will literally never give up trying to be on TV. I just need money to live.’”
The manager finally relented. Whitney applied to be an associate but he gave her an assistant manager position.
“I worked there and he would check in with me often, he’d say ‘What’s going on with you? As soon as you get a job with one of these TV stations, you can just go. You can quit,’” Whitney says.
“It has been that way my whole life. I just like to call them angels. These people who have dropped in to stand in whatever gap that occurs in my life. I know I am completely blessed and I don’t take it for granted. I just know.”