I do what I can to avoid the mushy-mushy concepts and questions that are posed by the thinkers in our craft. You know: art vs. craft, sawdust is therapy, what is the saw nib for?
But I do have some answers to the practical questions that beginners ask during classes.
Q: Why do you sign your work? Isn’t that prideful?
I suppose my answer comes from my training as a journalist. Traditionally, your published writing remained unsigned until you “earned” a byline. As a cub reporter, you were first tested with writing unsigned news “briefs” or obituaries until you proved yourself responsible enough.
After you earned a byline, it was a mark of responsibility. If you screwed something up, your name was on it. So everyone in the community knew that you, Chris Schwarz, couldn’t get your facts straight, or spell the mayor’s name correctly.
That’s why I sign my work – unobtrusively. If something ever goes wrong with the chair, cabinet or chest of drawers, then I’m the one who deserves the blame. And I’m the one who has to fix it.
Q: Why do you stamp your tools with your mark? Do you not know your own tools? Aren’t you putting yourself on par with the true maker of the tool?
Again, some history. In many apprentice systems, your first purchase was your name stamp. Not to stamp the furniture you built, but to stamp your tools. Many woodworkers had their tools insured through benevolent societies. And to qualify for the insurance, your tool had to be stamped.
Some more recent history. When my parents sent me to Jesus Camp, my mom sewed my name into all my clothes so that when I lost them, they came back to me.
If you work with others or you teach or attend classes, you need to mark your tools. Every class I have been a part of ends with someone taking the wrong tool home or leaving a tool behind.
Q: Why do you modify your tools? Doesn’t that hurt their value?
This question comes mostly from tool collectors. And I suppose they are correct. Dead stock tools are going to sell for more than modified ones.
For me, however, a tool is worthless if it doesn’t work well. So I am happy to file the metal bits, carve the wooden bits and upgrade the innards in any way to improve the tool’s working characteristics.
I have no quibbles with tool collectors – they are preserving tools that will be used by future generations. That’s a noble thing. But tool collecting and woodworking are two different avocations. And I’m a user.
4–82. A view of the finished hammer showing the pared, wedged end.
The following is excerpted from David Finck’s “Making & Mastering Wood Planes.” No matter what sort of handplane you use, this book is perhaps the best guide available to understanding, tuning and using these tools at a high level.
Written by a graduate of the College of the Redwoods (now The Krenov School), “Making & Mastering Wood Planes” is ostensibly about the laminated handplanes that James Krenov made famous in the 20th century. But Finck decided to probe far deeper into the topic – so much so that this book is actually an excellent primer on handwork itself.
Use a length of 5/8-inch-diameter brass rod for the head. If ordering through an industrial supply catalog, remember that the minimum length will provide for many hammer heads. Smaller lengths may be found at a hardware store or machine shop. Saw off a segment 2-1/2 inches long, face the ends with a sander, and then round the sharp edges.
Now the trick is to drill a perfectly centered hole crosswise through the rod. To do this, make a simple fixture from a squared and trued length of hardwood that’s approximately 12 inches long x 1-3/4 wide x 1 inch thick. Divide the stick in half with two connected lines on a face and an edge, then mark the center of those lines (4–77). Drill a 5/8-inch hole through the mark on the face. Then insert the brass rod so that the ends protrude from the fixture the same amount. The rod must be a snug fit. If it is too loose, shim it with a wrap of tape.
4–77. Fixture layout for drilling a centered hole in a hammer head (holes already drilled on centers).
Chuck a 3/8-inch brad-point drill bit in the drill press. Lay the fixture on the drill-press table, edge up, and use the point to perfectly center the bit at the centerpoint on the line. Clamp the fixture securely. Drill down to the rod, but not into it. Replace the bit with a 3/8-inch metal-cutting bit and drill through the rod (4–78).
4–78. Drilling a handle hole into the hammer head.
Make a handle from a 12-inch-long x 1-inch-wide x 1-inch-thick stick of tough, springy hardwood such as hickory, ash, or oak. Shape one end to a 3/8-inch-diameter to fit the hammer head. The stick is longer than the handle will be, so the waste end may be clamped in a vise while the handle is worked with a spokeshave. Lay out the shape of the handle on one face; the shape should taper to 3/8 inch at the hammer-head end. Saw out the shape on the band saw, remaining outside the lines. Lay out a second set of lines on the sawn face, again tapering to 3/8 inch at the head end, and saw those as well (4–79). If dealing with gentle curves, place the con-cave surface down, to prevent the stock from rocking, while the second set of lines is being sawn.
4–79. Sawing the handle. The first set of lines are already cut, and the second set are being sawn.
Use a spokeshave to shape the handle (4–80). Form the 3/8-inch-square end of the handle into an octagon and then, with very fine cuts, shape it into a circle. Try the hammer head until it just gets started on the handle. Twist the head back and forth to burnish the handle and you will see exactly where to remove wood to improve the fit. Fit the handle snugly through the head and let it extend about 1/8 inch beyond. Simply trim off any excess if it goes through further. Cut the handle to length and trim up the end.
4–80. Shaping the handle with a spokeshave.
Next, saw a narrow kerf in the thin end of the handle, for wedging the hammer head in place. Saw it in line with, and 1/8 inch shy of, the full diameter of the hammer head. The kerf is visible only at the end when the hammer head is installed. It is difficult to clamp the tapered shape of the handle and make the cut with a handsaw, so use the band saw, running the handle against a straight piece of stock. Close off the throat plate of the band saw by sawing into another piece of wood that will act as a temporary table (4–81).
4–81. Kerfing the handle for a wedge. The scrap below the handle stock serves to close off the wide band-saw throat plate; otherwise, the narrow handle end might drop in and jam.
Now prepare a low-angled wedge from some 3/8-inch-wide stock. The wedge should take up most of the length of the kerf, without bottoming, before it jams. Install the hammer head, squeeze a little glue into the saw kerf, and tap the wedge into place. When the glue has dried, carefully pare the end of the handle and wedge, leaving them both a bit proud of the hammer head (4-82)[top].
A marking knife that hasn’t been properly sharpened for 10 years.
At midnight tonight the $50 introductory price for “Sharpen This (the Video)” will end. After midnight Eastern time, the video will be $75.
This video series is a deep dive into practical (not theoretical) at-the-bench sharpening. What do you need to do to get your tools to leave a perfect wooden surface? That’s the goal.
The series is an ongoing project. We have already posted 13 chapters, and most of them focus on particular tools and the tricks to sharpening them. And we are working on 18 additional chapters that will be released in the coming months.
So if you buy the video now, you will continue to get new content on sharpening throughout 2023. We are covering techniques for all sorts of tools, and we eschew almost all of the silly jigs.
For example: Today we just posted a new video on sharpening marking knives. There are a number of insane jigs out there for sharpening marking knives. And they all miss the mark. That’s because the most important part of sharpening marking knives isn’t sharpening the bevels. It’s sharpening the flat back.
Once you get the back flat, honed and polished (every time), then the bevels are easy. (No jigs.)
To prove it’s easy, I sharpen a marking knife that has been in use for 10 years without a single decent sharpening. And bring it back to life.
Normally we don’t share testimonials. They seem cheesy. But the response to the video has been impressive.
“I’ve read/watched people explain the process too many times now and it never clicked until I watched this series. After watching the grind/hone/polish video, I ran into my shop, tried it out, and had an actually sharp edge on my plane within 30 seconds — all of that without a bald spot on my forearm.
Seriously, huge thank you. I wish I had this series 2 years ago, I wouldn’t have wasted so much money, time, and angst.”
And:
“This video series has been incredibly helpful for me. My sharpening game has changed – less time sharpening and more woodworking!”
So if you want to save $25, here’s the link. Thanks to everyone who suggested we do this video and discussed their challenges when sharpening.
Mary Ownby. A famous chairmaker near Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Ownby is shown here boring out a rifle barrel.
The following is included in Volume 1 of “The Stick Chair Journal,” an annual publication to expand the universe of all things stick chair: More history. More plans. More techniques. Reviews of tools. And Big Thoughts. (Important note: We have printed 4,000 copies of the Journal. Once that press run has been exhausted, we will not reprint this issue.)
We thought “A Vampire Chair” would be a perfect accompaniment to this spooky season.
Handmade sitting chairs have long been a staple of the antique and crafts business in rural, wooded communities. When Allen Eaton published “Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands” in 1937, there were several noted chair makers in eastern Tennessee. Mary Ownby, of Gatlinburg, was a highlight of Eaton’s book. She crafted her chairs from beginning to end. Mary’s first step in making a chair was finding the right tree, which she cut herself. She then split the wood and turned the posts. Mary made her own chisels. And, like other chairmakers, she bragged that she had made her first chair with a pocketknife.
Other well-respected chair crafters in the 1930s were Ebb Bowman, hard at work in Creeneville, and Noah McCarter in Sevierville. Along with those produced by Mary Ownby, Bowman and McCarter chairs are highly prized by today’s collectors.
Long before the craftsmen (Ed: and women) of the 1930s began to put together chairs, other southern chairmakers had adapted the standard slat-back chair into an item distinct from manufactured Hitchcock chairs. The rear posts were shaved down and curved backward. The result was a seat that folks now call a mule-ear chair. It is similar to the type made in the early 1800s. Sometimes there were two slats across the back, sometimes three.
In cold storage. A ladderback (unknown provenance) in a collection now in Indiana.
But the most famous handcrafted sitting chair made in the region hasn’t been located recently. When it is found, you don’t want to be the one sitting in it. The chair is cursed in a peculiar way and is apt to draw blood.
A true antique, the so-called Vampire Chair of East Tennessee was made by brothers named Eli and Jacob Odom up in the high mountains of Carter County near Shell Creek. The brothers seem to be of no relation to Solomon W. Odom, a highly regarded former chairmaker in the same area.
Eli and Jacob Odom came to Shell Creek in 1806, it is believed, and began making chairs that they traded for salt, sugar, meat and coffee. The brothers knew that a chair was only as good as its joints, and they had a secret for making perfect joints. They carefully fitted seasoned hickory rounds into green maple posts. The green wood shrunk over the rounds as it dried, holding them tightly into place. Old wood into new, that was all there was to it.
The brothers’ chairs became famous because they held together so well. Hundreds of chairs were made and traded. By the 1840s, the chairs Eli and Jacob made were being carried down the mountain and taken into stores where they were sold for hefty profit. Resort hotels lined their long front porches with the mule-ear chairs from Shell Creek.
Wagonloads of the chairs were eventually driven south and the slat-back seats of Carter County found their way into the finer homes of Chattanooga.
Through normal trade, a pair of chairs made their way into the domicile of a woman who lived alone in a little cabin high above the Hiwassee River near Charleston, Tennessee. This woman was nobody’s sweet little old lady. The woman who lived high on a cliff above the river was a vampire.
There is no record of her exploits, nor of the reasons her neighbors held for killing her. All that is known is how she died and where she was buried.
In 1917, a county crew was widening the upper road on the river bluff just outside Charleston. Not far from Oostanaula Creek, they unearthed the body of an adult woman who had been buried long before. She’d been buried, apparently, in the middle of the road. The body, according to the late Frank G. Trewhitt, was wholly petrified by the high level of minerals in the ground water there.
Also petrified was the wooden stake that had been driven through the woman’s heart prior to her body being buried in the road.
“The land on which the body was found was once the property of my great grandfather, and it was passed to his sons,” Mr. Trewhitt wrote in an article published in the Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin. “If they had ever heard of any vampire stories hereabouts, I would have been told.”
It was once tradition to refuse sanctified burials to known murderers, witches and other perceived villains of society. Scoundrels and witches were at times buried at crossroads, so that their eternal rest would be anything but peaceful. It was the practice to bury evil persons where foot, horse and wagon traffic would create a continual clamor overhead.
Traffic would also keep the dirt above the grave tightly packed down. This is important, particularly with vampires and witches. Such evildoers might be able to return from the dead and escape their coffins by tooth and fingernail, clawing their way to the surface to seek revenge.
As an additional measure of safety, these ghouls, once executed, were buried face down. Should they wake from death interred and seek to dig themselves from under the earth, they would dig in the wrong direction. They would only dig themselves more deeply into the earth.
The piece of wood through the dust-dry heart of the mummified corpse of Bradley County’s lady vampire wasn’t any old piece of wood. It was a cradle-lathed post, a bottom leg support, from one of the chairs that had been in the woman’s cabin on the ridge. The chair had been crafted by brothers Eli and Jacob from Shell Creek.
Soon after her murder and burial, the woman’s furniture and other worthwhile belongings were carried from her home by those who desired them. The house fell to ruin. Nobody would live there.
It wasn’t long until the Eli and Jacob chair, its round expertly replaced, found its way into a prompt series of trades among the citizens of Bradley County. No one wanted to keep that chair. After a few years, it ended up at one of the hotels. Someone, who was afraid to throw away or light fire to it, left it on the hotel’s porch at the end of a line of similarly made chairs.
Legend says the chair sits as comfortably as any, with a finely woven seat of hickory splits. Well, at first. Then it becomes very uncomfortable for the person who sits in the chair.
Nothing is seen, but plenty is felt. The occupant is held fast for a time, against one’s will, until a scratch appears on a forearm or bare leg, and blood drips to the floor. Only after a drop of blood stains the floor or the ground under the chair, is the occupant capable of fleeing from the chair.
Those familiar with the blood-drawing qualities of this individual chair were afraid to destroy it, beat it to pieces with hammers, or catch it on fire, lest they be cursed in a manner much worse than a drop of blood hitting the floor. So they passed it along.
The Eli and Jacob Odom handcrafted slat-back chair haunts eastern Tennessee still. Reports have placed it in any number of antique stores over the years. Others have sworn it was once on the creaky front porch of a bed-and-breakfast in Gatlinburg, on the college campus at Tusculum, and at a garage sale in Kingsport. Truth is the Vampire Chair of East Tennessee could turn up just about anywhere. The hope remains that it doesn’t turn up perched under you.
The lower left cubby in the Covington Mechanical Library is a bit of a hodgepodge that spans oceans and centuries. In it are two series of books, a British furniture tome, some American furniture collections – regional and not – a few Charleston furniture titles and a falling-apart copy of “The Furniture Makers of Cincinnati 1790 to 1849.” Let’s start there – on the far right.
Jane E. Sikes’ “The Furniture Makers of Cincinnati 1790 to 1849,” was first printed in 1976 by the author, and reprinted in paperback by the Merton Co. Chris bought this ragged copy decades ago because he lived in the area, knew a lot of furniture had been made here, and wanted to know more about what it looked like. It’s also one of the first books in which he read anything about Henry Boyd – Chris first learned about him at the Golden Lamb (a storied inn and restaurant north of Cincinnati), where there is a Boyd Bed.
To the left are three books on the furniture of Charleston, S.C.: “Charleston Style” by Susan Sully (Rizzoli, 1999), “Charleston Furniture 1700-1825” by E. Milby Burton (Charleston Museum, 1955) in hardcover and a paperback copy of the same (U of South Carolina, 1970). Charleston – home to as many as 250 cabinetmakers in the early 18th century – was the Southern center of high-style furniture making in the Colonies, and while styles changed after the American Revolution to not as closely mimic the fashions of London, the city remained and important furniture location well into the Federal period. (The city also has some personal importance to Chris; his father lived there for more than a decade, so Chris spent a lot of time in the “Holy City.”)
Then it’s a whiplash trip to Canada, with “The Furniture of Old Ontario” by Philip Shackleton (Macmillan, 1973). Chris has always had an interest in vernacular furniture, and when we first delved into stick chairs, he couldn’t find many in the furniture of the United States, so he wondered if there were any examples in other British colonies. So, we have several books in this vein scattered throughout the collection. (His curiosity paid off; below is a spread from this book – never mid that the chairs are identified as “Windsors.”)
Now we head back to the American South with “Southern Furniture 1680-1830” by Ronald L. Hurst and Jonathan Prown (Colonial Williamsburg, 1977), and “Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture 1735-1835” by Jack D. Holden, H. Parrott Bacot and Cybele T. Gontar with Bruan J. Costello and Francis J. Puig.
To the left of the South are volumes 1-10 of “American Antiques from Israel Sack Collection” (Highland House, 1988-1992) According to the Washington Post, Sack (1883-1959), a dealer whose family firm specialized in early American furniture, was “reputed to have invented the American antique market.” We consider this collection an important reference for anyone interested in American furniture.
Then it’s more in the same vein, with “Early American Furniture from Settlement to City” ed. by Mary Jean Madigan and Susan Colgan (Billboard Publications, 1983). I always have fun checking out the Post-It notes stuck to pages of our books, and trying to guess what Chris (and sometimes I – especially in our Shaker books) was working on at the time that sticky note was stuck there. In this case, I’m guessing it was the trestle table from the Autumn 2006 issue of Woodworking Magazine. (We’ve been working together for a loooonnnggg time.)
Then it’s “Duncan Phyfe: Master Cabinetmaker in New York” by Peter N, Kennt and Michael K. Brown (Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y, 2011). Yes, Phyfe is undeniably an important American maker…but it’s equally possible we have this one for its form factor. It’s sewn signatures with headbands, and a “half bound” cloth-covered hardcover (leather or leather-like spine), with a tipped on title on both the front board and spine. It’s a pretty thing inside and out.
To the left of that are two volumes of “American Furniture” edited by Luke Beckerdite (Chipstone, 2011 and 2012). For those unfamiliar, this annual is “an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to advancing knowledge of furniture used or made in the Americas from the seventeenth century to the present,” as quoted from the volumes’ editorial statements. It has been published every year since 1993. So why these two volumes? Chris says “I started buying them, then I fell off the wagon.” Oops.
Now it’s a quick trip to the other side of the globe (and back in time) for “The furniture of the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans” by GMA Richter (Phaidon, 1966) (more vernacular stuff – and Chris has been talking on and off about making a Klismos chair since I first met him, more than two decade ago.
Back to North America and a few thousand years forward to Wallace Nutting’s “Furniture Treasury (Mostly of American Origin)” (Macmillan, 1965 – the “two volumes in one” version). You can’t be a student of American furniture and not have some version of this one. An aside: Berea College in Berea, Ky., has a significant number of pieces from Nutting’s collection.
Alongside to the left is the revised edition of Victor Chinnery’s “Oak Furniture – The British Tradition” (ACC Art Books, 2016), which covers furniture in Great Britain from the middle ages to 1800, as well as that of Connecticut and Massachusetts in the 18th century as a microcosm of colonial pieces in that period.
And finally, we come to my favorite series in our collection – if only in their looks and production – “The Modern Carpenter and Joiner and Cabinet Maker” edited by G. Lister Sutcliffe (Gresham, 1903). In terms of content, there isn’t much there there; it’s all information covered in greater detail elsewhere. But gosh do these eight volumes look nice, with tooled covers featuring a Glasgow Style design and typography by Talwin Morris.
— Fitz
p.s. This is the fourth post in the Covington Mechanical Library tour. To see the earlier ones, click on “Categories” on the right rail, and drop down to “Mechanical Library”
