This is an excerpt from “Euclid’s Door” by Geo. R Walker and Jim Toplin. The book teaches how to make the tools from “By Hand and Eye.” At this point in chapter 7, a miter square that has a 15° tip is being constructed. This fragile corner of the tool has to be taken into consideration when choosing its placement on the grain of the board.
Fig. 7.13 The triangle on the left with its thin 15° tip poses a unique layout challenge
Many geometric layouts begin with just a given line. This has real practical value. It means we can construct the layout from just a small piece of the overall picture. This construction is a little more complicated than what we’ve done so far, so I suggest you work through this sequence on paper to get an understanding of it.
Fig. 7.14 The blade we eventually end up with has a clipped corner so we can have a 45° reference edge.
Case in point is this second triangle from our multi square, Fig. 7.13. The sharp blade that juts out to the left begins life as a 30:60:90 triangle that gets altered to include a 45° reference on one end, Fig. 7.14.
But that leaves us with a fragile, narrow point. We must lay out our triangle so that the hypotenuse is aligned with the long grain on our blank, Fig. 7.15.
Fig. 7.15 This layout is a challenge because our right angle is located up in the middle of the blade material. The only line we can know for certain is our hypotenuse located on the bottom edge.
So we need to lay out our triangle, but all we have to start our construction is the line that will be our hypotenuse. Before we proceed, let’s step back and take a look at a different geometric layout to get an understanding of how we get there. Here’s the construction we’ll base this on, Fig. 7.16.
Fig. 7.16 We’re going to use a few bits and pieces from this construction to reach our destination.
Let’s break it down into smaller pieces. We begin with Euclid’s first proposition, which is how to construct an equilateral triangle from a given line. Start by using the ends of a line to set the compass span and, using the end of the line as anchor points, draw two identical overlapping circles. Connect the top intersection where the circles overlap. Take note that the lines that connect the intersections also happen to share the radius of both circles. You just created a triangle with all sides equal which means all three corners are 60°, Fig. 7.17.
Fig. 7.17 The internal angles of all triangles always add up to 180°, so if our sides are equal, each corner must be 60°.
If you bisect this triangle, you get a pair of back-to-back 30:60:90 triangles, Fig. 7.18. It helps to see what you are after by superimposing this construction over our blade stock to see how it might apply, Fig. 7.19.
Fig. 7.18 (left) Note the hypotenuses of these two new triangles are facing out. Fig. 7.19 (right) In practice though, we don’t execute the entire construction, just a piece of it. It’s not really practical to draw this entire layout because much of it is out in space beyond our blade blank.
This is quite common in layouts at the bench. We don’t need to scribe every line, just the important ones that get us our result. Let the bottom edge of your blank be the hypotenuse of our triangle. Set a compass to span the length of your hypotenuse and strike an upward arc from the lower edge. Leave the compass at the same setting and anchor it where the arc touches the bottom of the board then strike a second mark across the arc, Fig. 7.20.
Fig. 7.20 The first arc is a portion of one of those overlapping circles. That’s all we need to execute our layout. The second mark defines the second side of the equilateral triangle.
Strike a line connecting these points then bisect this chord on one end of the triangle. Now you’ve created our 30:60:90 with the correct grain orientation, Fig. 7.21.
Fig. 7.21 Go back and compare this with our first layout. Does it come together for you?
We’ll use this construction to create our second blade with the proper grain orientation.
Steve lines up the stick (taped to the drill) with the mortise location on the side stretcher.
I cut dovetails pretty much the exact same way I did 20 years ago. Same layout, same sawing, same chiseling, same fitting. But when it comes to my chairmaking, things seem to change every day.
I’ve been building stick chairs since 2003 (and frame chairs since 1997). So it’s not like I am new to the chairmaking craft. But for some reason, I am constantly finding new and usually small ways to make things easier.
When I wrote “The Stick Chair Book,” I thought I was pretty much settled in how I make my chairs. But by the time we had to reorder the second printing, I decided to revise the book. Not in major ways, but in many little minor ways. And I added a lot of little shortcuts I had discovered.
Now, about a year after releasing the revised edition of “The Stick Chair Book,” I’d like to revise it again for the next printing. Again, nothing major, just small things here and there that make it easier to drill and assemble things.
Even today, I came up with a stupid little trick that really helped. Here it is. When drilling the mortises for the stretchers, tape a stick or skewer or chopstick to the centerline seam of your drill. It helps immeasurably in lining up the drill between the mortises in the legs and between the mortises in the side stretchers.
I’ve seen lots of tricks that use rubber bands or lasers. But none is as simple as taping a scrap to the drill.
When the scrap is aligned with both mortises, Steve drills the mortise in the side stretcher.
As a chairmaker and author, I know I’m not alone in the way I feel about my past writings. Many other chairmakers are constantly finding new ways to make the process a little easier.
Why have we not created the “Unified Method of All Chairmaking?” Because there are at least 100 ways to make a chair. And 1,000 tricks that go with each method.
This is one of the things I love about woodworking – the constant discovery. But it can be frustrating both as an author and a reader.
Last week I walked into work to a brand-new Veritas spokeshave sitting on my bench. Chris had ordered several for students and kindly ordered an extra for me. (I’m spoiled, I know.)
Grateful, I took a picture of my new tool and posted it to my social media account, not thinking much of it.
The following day I received a comment: “Would you mind posting a video of how you file the throat (if you follow Chris’s approach)?”
Huh? File a throat?? This was news to me, but according to Chris, this is common practice when breaking in a new spokeshave.
He explained that in chairmaking, sometimes cuts that are ranker than the spokeshave will allow are needed. The solution? File the throat, just a hair or two to allow a thicker shaving to pass through.
So as asked, we created a video demonstrating the process. Next week’s chairmaking class will be the first to break the new spokeshaves in.
Well, back to work for me. I have two more spokeshaves to file.
This summer, the U.S. Postal Service released 12 stamps featuring photographs by Michael Freeman from six different preserved Shaker communities, commemorating the 250th anniversary of the first Shakers arriving in America. Freeman, along with June Sprigg and David Larkin, published “Shaker: Life, Work, and Art,” in 1991.
The stamps were designed by Postal Service Art Director Derry Noyes. Unhappy with the first design, which featured more detailed, close-up shots, Noyes put the project on hold for four years. Revisiting, she redesigned the stamps with a broader perspective. You can read more about her process here.
The pane selvage (the area around the collection of stamps) features a photo of Brother Ricardo Belden (1868–1958), taken by Samuel Kravitt, in 1935. Belden joined a Shaker community in Enfield, Connecticut, when he was 4 years old. Initially, he worked on the farm. In 1926, he joined the Hancock Shaker Village in Hancock and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and spent much of his time repairing clocks with wooden works.
The stamp’s First Day of Issue was June 20, 2024, at Hancock Shaker Village. If you’d like to know more about each individual stamp, check out this article.
Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill
One stamp features the beloved staircases at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. Chris has visited and written about Shaker Village many times (including in 2006, which is this Saturday’s Earlywood post in American Peasant, free for anyone to read). His first visit was more than 30 years ago, and that experience sparked something new.
Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill
For John Wilson, it was Ejner Handberg’s “Shop Drawings of Shaker Furniture and Woodenware, Vol. 1.” In 1977, Wilson was offered a job to teach furniture making at Michigan’s Lansing Community College. He had two hours to prep for the class. He drove to the library, checked out Handberg’s book and taught his students how to make a dovetailed dining tray. Wilson, who died in 2023, built a life building Shaker oval boxes and producing copper tacks.
For Chris Becksvoort, it was a 1974 exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick gallery. “I went back to visit it five, six, seven times,” he says. Years later, Becksvoort would reproduce two of the gallery’s pieces in his shop.
For Jennie Alexender, it was several trips to Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community. There, she met Sister Mildred. Jennie wanted to see the chairs and remembers Sister Mildred quipping, “You know, it’s interesting. People think we’re chairs.” Several visits later, Jennie built her first Shaker one-slat dining chair.
Perhaps something as simple as these stamps will spark something for you, too.
The cabinet I made in pippy (also known as burly) white oak with shop-made walnut-and-maple beading and hardware in walnut, based on Gimson’s original 1919 design for a sideboard for Guy de Gruchy in “Ernest Gimson: Arts & Crafts Designer and Architect.”
Nancy Hiller’s “Shop Tails,” a companion book of essays to “Making Things Work.” “Shop Tails” is different from “Making Things Work” in that it is structured around the animals that came in and out of Nancy’s life, with each chapter focusing on a different one (or several different ones). The animal tales are sandwiched between some serious existential and biographical content provoked by her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and all of it is interwoven with true stories about non-human animals, in addition to reflections on how much they taught her about life, love, illness, expectations, parenting, and death.
I continued to run up against the crucial big-picture question that so many books and articles told me I had to answer: What was I living for? What gave me joy? I still had no satisfactory response. Looking back over my life while fitting doors and discussing next steps with my oncologist from the top of a ladder as I painted cubbies for sheet music and CDs, I realized that I had rarely been motivated by a vision or a dream. I could recall few well-defined goals or desires. Sure, I had a basic three-fold vision: Do good work, make a home, have a happy partnership. But this was just an outline that would take a lot of filling-in. Why was I so vague about what I wanted?
In part, I realized, it was because I was raised not to want, but to be grateful for what already was. I worked at being happy, whatever situation I faced, and went from one situation to another without any real plan. When my mother told 8-year-old me that wanting things would make me unhappy, she was probably not referring to the important stuff, but to the latest toys we saw advertised on TV. But you can’t really predict what a kid will do with the Buddha’s First and Second Noble Truths, which, in a nutshell, see all life as suffering, and suffering as a product of selfish desire. I don’t recall any discussion about the need to envision my future, let alone plan my studies around my need to earn a living. Sometimes I was happy. Sometimes I was miserable. But eventually something would change and things got better. Only in my 30s, when I was reading Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in graduate school, did it dawn on me that desire can be among the most powerful motivations for good; what matters are the nature of that desire and its goal.
In place of motivation by well-founded desire, I had spent my life in search of validation that I didn’t get at home. Growing up, it seemed my sister and I were constantly being urged to be other than we were: Hold in your stomach, don’t slouch, don’t whine, get off your backside and do your chores – much of it the typical, benign work of training Baby Boomers for adulthood. The critical messages far outweighed any expressions of approbation.
My sense of never doing or being enough was only worsened by the father figures introduced to our household in the aftermath of our parents’ split. When I was 14, our mother’s boyfriend, George, told me I had a naturally down-turned mouth and should make an effort to smile, lest my face put others off. He said I was getting fat (I wasn’t) and should go on a diet, so I ran with that and developed an eating disorder. He told me I knew nothing – true, relatively speaking, but how does angrily hurling “You know nothing!” at a teenager really help matters? (Answer: It doesn’t. There are more precise and effective ways to make the point about youthful over-confidence versus lack of life experience.) His general demeanor was that of a smug, entitled guy who had put his degree from Oxford to profitable use by getting a job in law or finance in London and resented the intrusion of his girlfriend’s teenage daughters on what would otherwise have been his uninterrupted “me time.” I recognized his bitterness as evidence of his own unhappiness, but his words had lasting effects.
So when this arrogant man who arrived at our doorstep a few times a week, only to be ushered into a comfortable chair and handed a drink to enjoy while he read the evening paper, promised me 5 pounds for every A I got in my O-Level exams, I happily stuck it to him. I’d already experienced the satisfaction of earning good grades in middle school and realized I had the power to view my teachers less as unreasonably demanding authority figures than as partners in my education; I would do my best for them, as well as myself, not least because at the slightest imposition of real discipline, most of my fellow students complained. It had to be tough, being a teacher.
I lived by my As and A-pluses, my 10s-out-of-10. With every one, I felt better about myself and hoped that my teachers felt better about themselves, too. I worked hard to get into the University of Cambridge, only to discover, once accepted, that I had no idea why I was really there, even though I loved the day-to-day life of a scholar. What mattered most to me, I’m embarrassed to say, is that I got in – and with an honorary scholarship. No one could ever again call me lame-brained, even though my stepfather would do his best to prove my intellectual inferiority to his own sophistication in argument and repeatedly called me “useless” to my face. The same went for university after I returned to the States. I was determined to graduate Phi Beta Kappa, as my mother had. And I did. But again, in grad school, I was struck by the realization that I really had no idea why I was there, beyond my awareness that I enjoyed learning, having my mind lit on fire by new perspectives, and proving my ability to excel. In the end I did not want the life of a professional academic. And the most oft-cited alternatives for those with a doctorate in ethics, which I had planned to pursue, were nothing I wanted, either; I had no interest in being an ethics advisor to some big corporation, a job that too often means circumventing profit-diminishing foundational moral stances through arguments on behalf of ethical exceptions. What I wanted, for 50 years, was to prove that people were wrong about me, to exceed their low expectations. When people mentally translated my work as a furniture maker to “She makes ‘furniture’ out of pallets or fruit crates and decorates her work with cut-outs of ducks and bunnies – you know, because that’s what women like,” I would show them my take on an Edwardian hallstand with a perfectly fitted door and drawer and a cornice of compound bevels. Anyone who assumed that, as a tradesperson, I would be less intellectually curious and articulate than someone who works in an office (any kind of office would do; this is a matter of longstanding prejudice against “manual” and “blue-collar” workers) would have to square that assumption with a growing body of published essays and books in which I brought my academic training in Classical languages, history and ethics to bear on the social and economic significance of commonplace things such as kitchen furnishings. I did my best to illustrate the ways in which a house, typically thought of as “property,” could fulfill many of the roles we usually associate with a human partner. In response to the critics who might deride my ways of putting cabinets together, I would point out that there really are as many ways to build a cabinet as there are cabinetmakers, not to mention that the cabinets I build, however simple their construction, are far stronger than most that are commercially made.
No ducks and bunnies. Edwardian Hallstand, circa 2002. Curly white oak with locally quarried limestone counters. (Photo: Spectrum Creative Group.)
Throughout all of this, I now saw, I had moved forward in reaction to others. I was dangerously dependent on outside forces, people who expressed their opposition, no less than their approval. It suddenly felt deeply exhausting. I let my awareness of that exhaustion sink in. Whatever might happen with the course of my cancer, I was not going back to my old ways of living.
To be fair, those other-influenced decisions always reflected something of me – a love of houses, gardens and animals; an intellectual fascination with the endless ways in which people make meaning out of the seemingly random circumstances into which we are born; a desire to make myself a home. But viewing the span of my working life as a whole, I was staggered by a deep, yet vague sense that I had always been running away. What was I running away from – the person I was not, but was too often taken to be?
