Chris is back from Australia, and already prepping for an upcoming class.
Comments are now closed (but Chris will be in the blog back end later to answer the chair questions and any I missed…either on purpose or by mistake.)
Got a woodworking question or a question about what’s cooking at Lost Art Press? It’s your lucky day –it’s time for Open Wire!
You have until 5 p.m. Eastern to pose your question in the comments section below, and we’ll respond – hopefully with a informed and useful answer…but no promises on that front. (And it’s possible your fellow readers will have answers, too – and perhaps you’ll have an answer for someone else!).
You’ll hear mostly from me during the day; Chris will chime in to answer the myriad chair questions, and comment on the tensile strength of wombat poop, after his class ends.
– Fitz
p.s. The final Open Wire date for 2025 is December 13.
I’ve long been interested in fish glues since reading about them in A.J. Roubo’s “l’Art du menuisier” from the 18th century. After two years of testing fish glue in our shop, we have decided to begin selling it.
Fish Stick Glue is a reversible adhesive with a long open time. It is ideal for complex assemblies and furniture that deserves to be repaired in the future.
Made from the skins of cod, Fish Stick flows nicely at room temperature, much like PVA. It has a long open time of 90 minutes, and it cleans up easily with hot water, even after it has dried.
It’s a little different than our liquid hide glue, Piggly No Wiggly. Here are the important differences.
Fish Stick Glue has a longer open time (about 90 minutes) compared to Piggly No Wiggly (about 20 minutes). We find that Fish Stick Glue needs more clamp time (about 12 hours) compared to Piggly No Wiggly (about four hours).
Fish Stick Glue doesn’t require heating before use, while Piggly No Wiggly needs a little gentle heat to flow nicely.
Fish Stick Glue is more easily reversible than Piggly No Wiggly, and it also is a little less water resistant.
Fish Stick Glue contains a bactericide, which makes it resistant to attack by microorganisms. The bactericide is an irritant, so the glue should not be swallowed. Piggly No Wiggly is made from only food-grade gelatin (from pigs), salt and water.
Both glues dry colorless and basically transparent. And both glues are made from by-products from the food industry that would otherwise be thrown away.
Finally, Fish Stick Glue is more expensive to make, so the price is a little higher.
Like all animal-based glues, you can expect Fish Stick to last at least a year in the bottle. If you keep it sealed in a cool, dry place, it will last much longer. It doesn’t smell like fish. Because of the bactericide, it smells a bit… minty. But I don’t think any mint plants were harmed in the making of the glue (can’t say that about the cods, however).
Fish Stick comes in 8-ounce bottles. Purchase two or three bottles, and you’ll receive a small discount. Made in Canada. Bottled in Covington. Product name by Megan Fitzpatrick.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. We have a small number of pinch rods in the store. More arrive tomorrow and Monday (in case we run out).
Terry Gordon shows visitors one of the tools he uses at his assembly bench, where he assembles every plane his company makes.
Every plane that HNT Gordon sends out to customers is assembled and inspected by the company’s founder, Terry Gordon. The process takes place at Terry’s workbench near the front of the company’s factory in Alstonville, Australia. There, Terry makes small adjustments to the wood and metal components with a wide variety of tools, from simple chisels to custom-made floats they’ve made on-site.
That’s the way it has been since Terry started the business in 1995, and how he expects it to continue for years to come.
That’s a surprising level of care and dedication for a company that makes more than 50 products, from (fairly) simple smoothing planes up to a moving fililster that is made up of dozens of brass and wooden parts.
Aluminum vises during assembly.
And Terry’s painstaking care shows through all of the company’s products, including its new range of aluminum vises that are unlike any vise I’ve ever seen or used.
This month, Terry loaned a couple of workbenches for a stick chair class I taught in Newrybar, Australia. It was the first chance I ever had to use both his face vises and his tail vises for more than just a few minutes in a showroom. During the week I used the vises with as much gusto as I would at home (I had to work fast and hard because I had to build a chair and teach 11 students to do the same). So the vises got a workout.
They’re fantastic. And I plan to incorporate both the HNT Gordon bench vise and end vise into the next workbench I build (probably next year). And if I can swing the cash, I might even spring for the company’s Pattern Maker’s Vise.
Near the end of last week, I visited the company’s factory for a tour and a look at the range of high and low industrial technologies that Terry uses to make his tools.
The Wood
HNT Gordon is known for the dense and stable woods they use in their handplane bodies, particularly ringed gidgee. In many cases, Terry and his employees cut the trees down on farms and slab up the planks. Other times the wood comes from trusted suppliers or occasionally from the customer.
After being cut to size, the wood chunks go into a kiln for several months to get the moisture content down. The blanks are then cut into plane bodies (the company is in the midst of switching to a CNC mill) and then the bodies are further conditioned in a humidity controlled room for even more months until they are ready to be used in a finished plane.
The Brass
Brass parts are made in a variety of ways, from old manual lathes to four-axis milling machines. Many of the latest changes at HNT Gordon involve milling bench plane bodies from one chunk of wood (instead of laminating them from multiple pieces). And simplifying the metalwork by using CNC technology to cut parts from single billets of brass (such as a spokeshave body) instead of assembling the brass bodies from multiple pieces.
The Aluminum
The back of the factory houses the machines that make the parts for vises (and other tools) and the stockpile of parts for future vises. Like all the tools at HNT Gordon, the vises are assembled in small batches.
It’s a small operation (five full-time employees and more part-timers) for a company that makes so much complex work. And Terry’s attention is now focused on training the next generation of toolmakers to carry the company forward.
Moving fillisters – an impressive bit of manufacturing.
In fact, Terry remarked that the company’s plow plane was the last tool he planned to design for his company. He still will assemble tools for the company, but he said he wants to get back to doing what he set out to do before he started making handplanes: And that’s making furniture.
I’m sure we’ll be writing more about HNT Gordon in future blog entries, especially when I start reconfiguring our bench room in January and Megan and I start building a new bench.
Several of my students bought HNT Gordon spokeshaves after our tour and were thrilled with their performance.
Editor’s note: Our Mind Upon Mind series is a nod to a 1937 Chips from the Chisel column (also featured in “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years”), in which Hayward wrote, “The influence of mind upon mind is extraordinary.” The idea being there’s often room for improvement.To that end, we’ve asked you what else you have thought of, tried out and improved upon after building projects from our books.
Send us your own ideas! Email kara@lostartpress.com. You can read more about the submission process here.
Today’s pick, which pulls from “The Stick Chair Book” by Christopher Schwarz, is from David Farnum, in Greer, South Carolina. (“The Stick Chair Book 2nd Revised Edition” will be available soon.) Thanks, David!
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
On this chair, I wanted to use a shape on the end of the backrest that I haven’t tried before. My main concern was getting the same size and shape on both ends.
After rounding the vertical ends of the backrest, I mocked out one end with blue tape, as described in “The Stick Chair Book,” and used the steps below to transfer the shape to the other end. There may be a simpler way, but this worked.
Mark a reference line on both ends, equidistant from the center line of the backrest.
Tape from the reference line around to the back of the end. Overlap the edges of the tape.
Draw the shape you want and cut the tape to your line. Carefully peel off the tape, leaving the tape on the waste that you’re going to cut away. Trace the tape to mark where to cut.
Stick the tape you peeled off to a sheet of paper and cut out the shape to make a stencil. The tape will make the paper stiffer, more like cardstock.
Flip the stencil over so the paper shows and the tape is on the back side. Line it up with the reference line on the other end of the backrest. Trace the cut line from the stencil.
Before reaching for the saw, check by eye and see if it looks right or needs to be tweaked.
Don’t dally! We’re offering free shipping on EVERYTHING only through the end of October. Want a set of five Lost Art Press shop pencils? Only $13 for those and they ship free. So does a $25 jar of Soft Wax 2.0. And a $20 signed copy of “Sharpen This.” And a $24 Lost Art Press ball cap. In other words, no matter how little (or how much) you purchase, we’ll ship it to you, free. But only through the end of this month.
