I love spade bits, and I will always recommend them for people getting started in chairmaking. The bits are dirt cheap, widely available, sharpenable and are easily customized to do things other bits cannot.
But like many chairmakers, I am always game to try new drill bits. If someone told me there was a new drill bit made from hard cheese and rat pelvises, I would buy a few to try.
These bits cut quickly and cleanly and – insanely – leave a clean exit hole without any backing board. For the chairs I build, this is a big deal when drilling the holes between the armbow and the seat. With these bits I don’t need to clamp backing boards to the armbow. And I can easily drill through the seat – making the joint between the sticks and the seat incredibly strong with more surface area and wedges.
But the bits have a learning curve. Because the flutes along the body of the bit are sharp, you have to keep a steady hand when freehand drilling, otherwise you will make weird overly elliptical holes. And you need to learn how to start them properly. And to deal with what happens when the cut stalls.
The OverDrive Bits
These bits are widely available in the United States. But after using them for 16 months in chairmaking, I don’t recommend them for making chairs. The bit’s center spur is too short for anything but shallow angles.
Why is this bad? Angles greater than 12° or so are difficult. You have to start the bit vertical then move into the correct (sometimes compound) angle. And you might have only a second or two to do this.
Wait, can’t you do this at “sloth speed” and ease into the cut? No. The bits are (in my opinion) designed to be used at high speed. When used at low speeds, they tend to tear up the wood. The OverDrives are great bits for furniture making where the bit is 90° to the work and in a drill press. But for chairmaking? Pass.
The Star-M, F-Types
I buy these bits from Workshop Heaven in the U.K. If they are sold elsewhere I don’t know. But I haven’t found them in the U.S. These bits are similar to the OverDrive bits, but the center spur is radically different, which makes all the difference.
The long center spur and cone-shaped tip allow you to use this bit at radical angles (though I would argue that you shouldn’t do this without a stern warning, which is below). And because of the bit’s shape you can get the bit settled into the work with slow rotations until you spin things up to full speed.
STERN WARNING: When you use any bit at a radical angle, you tend to bring the flutes into the cutting equation. With a traditional auger, the flutes aren’t sharp, so it’s not a big deal. But with many modern augers, the flutes are pin-sharp. So it’s easy to make the hole an elliptical mess when the flutes start whacking at the rim of your hole.
During the last couple years I’ve found that while the bits allow you to start the hole at a 40° angle, that’s a bad idea. As you approach 20° off vertical, the risk of the bit’s flutes making a mess of things increases radically. Stay under 20° off vertical, and you’ll be OK (with a steady hand).
When I have to angle the bit more than 20°, I switch back to spade bits, which cut slower and don’t tend to ream the hole as much.
So here are a few tips for using the Star-Ms.
Start the bit’s spur slowly (or make a divot with an awl to start the bit). Otherwise the bit can skate across the work when cutting compound angles.
As soon as the bit is started, run up the bit to full speed without pushing the drill downward. The cut will be cleaner.
One you get to full speed, plunge in and let the bit determine your feed speed.
The bits are sensitive to changes in grain direction (like when you laminate two boards together. And when you drill through the far face of the board). No matter how powerful your drill is, the bit will sometimes stall. When this happens, ease off on any downward pressure on the drill. Run the bit up to full speed with no downward pressure then plunge gently again.
The Star-Ms can be difficult to find in stock, particularly in the 16mm (5/8”) size, which is common for chairmaking. But they’re worth the effort and the wait.
Craig grew up with his mom, dad and three older sisters on a 200-acre cattle farm just south of Owensboro, Kentucky, in Utica. They lived on his Grandpa Gus’s farm, who, semi-retired, was down to 40 head of cattle and a bull. There was a lot to experience, Craig says.
“We cut hay with the tractor and I could remember being so small, driving that Massey Ferguson 135 tractor that when I had to push in on the clutch I had to get both feet on the left side of the tractor to stand on that clutch so I could either do clutch or brake,” he says. “So it helped me make good decisions when I was young, that old survival of the fittest thing. And it was all on a hill. You know the old fold-down sickle bar mowers, these things that hang off the side of the tractor that are great at cutting legs off deer (I mean, I never did that). Just, from a really young age, I remember understanding the physics of things. If you didn’t, you got hurt.”
Poppa Gus’s homestead and cattle farm, Utica, Kentucky.
Craig was always the skinniest kid, so when lifting up bales of hay onto the trailer he would have to figure out ways to leverage his body to his advantage.
Craig on the farm.
“Growing up in all that, and all the conveyer belts and things that want to chop you up and spit you out in smaller pieces, it just gave me an attention to that, to looking at the mechanisms of the old equipment and the new equipment,” he says. “And then I always had a go-cart, four-wheeler, three-wheeler and motorcycle, so I was always riding those things. I didn’t like the feeling of crashing so I learned how to ride safely. But I was just around a lot of mechanical things.”
The day after Craig outgrew his go-cart.
Craig’s dad, a welder, and brother-in-law, a tool and die maker, started a machine shop in the backyard when Craig was 14.
The first location of J & L Welding and Machine, est. 1977, Utica, Kentucky.
“I started working out in the machine shop begrudgingly, you know when you’re 14,” he says. “My first job was sharpening jack hammer bits. A jack hammer bit gets blunted on the end so I stood at our shop-built belt sander and put a four-facet point on it, kind of a four-facet pyramid point on it, and I heated them up in the torch and dunked them in oil. I did that for probably a whole summer.”
They soon got into building weight-lifting equipment. By now it was 1983. Customers would bring in pictures from weight-lifting magazines and ask for four-station machines with pulldowns, bench presses etc.
“And I would just look at the picture and I would measure from my elbow to my shoulder and just build the machine,” Craig says. “I would drill all the holes in weight stack plates, make the benches, I’d do all the spray painting, I’d do all the upholstery, make all the pulleys – I learned to work from minimal information.”
By the time Craig was 18, he bought his dad out and moved J & L Welding and Machine just north to Owensboro, Kentucky. There he made all sorts of things, such as fixtures for furniture companies to glue up chair frames and fixtures to rotate an entire couch while it was being upholstered.
The second location of J & L Welding and Machine, 1022 Oglesby St., Owensboro, Kentucky.
“It was just so awesome to have the trust of customers and to build and deliver what they needed,” he says.
He was working 60 hours a week but he liked the work and he liked working. When Craig was 22, he sold his part of the machine shop and went to work as a machinist for America’s Best Chew tobacco factory in Owensboro (back then it was known as The Pinkerton Tobacco Company; the name changed in January 2022). The 10-acre factory produced about 25,000 pounds of chewing tobacco and about 600,000 cans of snuff a day on three miles worth of conveyor belts.
Craig as a machinist at the tobacco company, 1994.
“I was in heaven,” he says. “All this stuff, cutting and chopping and conveying tobacco, kind of like what I grew up with.”
He found himself remaking the same stuff over and over. “So, I set out to fixing the problems that caused the never-ending use of all these spare parts,” he said. “I would re-engineer and remake the part. I would make a proper shaft once, instead of 15 shafts a year. And that really increased throughput in the factory.”
For about seven years during this time, Craig held several other jobs too. He would work at the tobacco factory from 6:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., then he’d work his side business, Jackson Contracting, grading and seeding new yards until 6 p.m. Then he’d teach machine tool technology at the local vocational school from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Jackson credits his mom and grandpa for his strong work ethic.
“They didn’t just sit around,” he says. “And they seemed to be the happiest people I knew. My favorite book of the Bible is Ecclesiastics, by King Solomon, maybe the richest, most successful person in the history of the world. All he concluded was, nothing beats a hard day’s work. He had all the gold, all the women, all the power, and he just said, it ain’t doing it for me.”
After about a decade at the tobacco company, Craig was promoted into a management role as continuous improvement manager over the entire factory. Although he was being groomed for Factory Manager, he ended up leaving in 2010 to grow Easy Wood Tools.
A Better Woodturning Tool
Craig stumbled into woodturning in 2007 while shopping with his wife, Donna, in Evansville, Indiana. Donna needed a pair of shoes so while she went into a Shoe Carnival, Craig went next door into a Woodcraft.
“I had never heard of a Woodcraft,” he says. “I went in there and saw a book by Malcolm Tibbetts, on segmented woodturning. I opened that up and I was just amazed. I had no idea anything in woodworking could be this complicated.”
Craig got into making segmented bowls.
“I bought a little Jet mini lathe, put it in my garage, and kept making bigger and bigger bowls, got a big Powermatic lathe, and a trailer, and a 30” chainsaw and it kind of got out of hand,” he says. “But the whole time I was like, what is up with these bowl gouges? This makes no sense! If I had set out to make the most complicated and dangerous cut known to man, I would end up with a bowl gouge.”
So Craig started playing around with carbide inserts. Unable to find anything he liked, he engineered his own replaceable carbide inserts (eliminating the need to constantly resharpen) with crazy angles. He then designed tools with stainless steel to hold the carbide inserts and wooden (mostly maple) handles.
Craig holding Robin’s work of art.
“I was just making the heck out of these bowls with my carbide tools and I thought, maybe I need to show somebody,” he says.
Nick Cook tried Craig’s tool for the first time in 2008. Nick helped Craig land his first retailer.
“Nick Cook has probably done more woodturning than maybe anybody on the earth,” Craig says. “So I handed him the tool and I said, ‘Nick, I made this tool. I got $125 I’ll pay you to just try this tool out.’ He said, ‘Let me see that thing.’ He took a few cuts with it and said, ‘You don’t owe me nothing. You need to get this on the market.’ I said, ‘OK, I’ll do that.’ And then I said, ‘Hang on. How do you take a product to market?’”
Nick told Craig that he’d connect him with some folks at Craft Supplies USA. Craig sent Darrel Nish a sample.
“They were like, ‘Yeah, you need to start making these,’” Craig says.
Craig knew he needed to go into mass production, but he had no idea how to go into mass production. He simply had to figure it out. Craig sold his tool with Craft Supplies USA exclusively for a year. Then Woodcraft called him up. He sent them some tools.
“A week later, they sent me a $75,000 purchase order,” Craig says. “So I called them back and said, ‘Hang on now. This is just me, my wife, and my two sons – they’re 8 and 10 years old – and the baseball coach. So I mean – we’re just – this is not what you think!”
Craig says a couple things set them apart – aside from the product – that likely made them noticeable to a company such as Woodcraft.
“We did pretty good at marketing and presenting of the product,” he says. “No. 1, we loved the customer. Whatever the customer wanted. I didn’t care how ridiculous it was. If you wanted a purple handle, I made you a purple handle.”
Craig told Woodcraft he didn’t have the capital to buy the raw materials to fulfill the purchase order.
“So they said, ‘We’ll send you a check,’” Craig says. “About three days later I got a $75,000 check in my mailbox. They hadn’t met me, they hadn’t shook my hand, they hadn’t seen my face. No contract. I sat there in the driveway and cried. This is, this is, OK.”
Craig then laughs thinking back at this poignant time in his life, when Easy Wood Tools was officially in business.
“All I’ve ever been and all I am still is just a machinist,” he says. “That’s all I’ve ever claimed to be. So we had to figure out packaging, logistics, shipping, mass production, all in the backyard.”
At one point they ordered all the packaging for the tools and it arrived on a pallet. The delivery person left the pallet in the street, and Craig and his family crew were left figuring out how they were going to muscle the pallet and all its contents up a slope to his garage. At one point, everything fell off the pallet, into the street.
“Everything you can imagine going wrong went wrong,” he says. “But we shipped that order, on time, in full, with no rejects,” he says. “I don’t know how we did it.”
The humble beginnings of Easy Wood Tools in Craig and Donna’s small backyard garage.
At first it was a family affair. In the evenings, Craig, Donna and their two sons, Noah and Sam, would package up products Saturday and Sunday nights while watching “America’s Funniest Home Videos” while sitting on the living room floor. Sam would get a cutter and drop it in a bag. Noah would add a screw and Ziploc the bag shut. Donna would fold it and staple it. Craig would box it up.
“It was a little Jackson assembly line and they thought it was just as normal as could be,” Craig says.
Craig, Samuel and Noah Jackson
The company grew and grew with upwards of 20 employees, and moved from Owensboro to Lexington, Kentucky.
Craig designed most of his packaging and branding, with the help of Tim Jones, and did woodturning demos all over the country.
Easy Hollower, patented by Craig.
Easy Chuck, patented by Craig.
Noah and Craig with woodworker Thomas MacDonald (aka Tommy Mac).
Craig and Donna filming “The American Woodshop” with Scott Phillips.
Craig and Scott Phillips.
There are two things Jackson is really proud of when it comes to Easy Wood Tools. First, it was the company’s ability to capture the essence of the power of possibility.
Something Jackson has always found interesting: At woodturning shows, during the auctions at the end of shows, wood blanks would often go for more money than turned pieces of art.
“And what that told me is the value of possibility is much greater than the value of possession,” he says. “I think that’s what I was able to do with Easy Wood Tools. I would give the customer the path to the possibility of making a great bowl because the tools are so simple. We could hand them to 8-year-olds and they would turn pens.”
Second, in the beginning, traditional tool companies would chastise Craig for taking away business. At first, this stung. But in his heart he knew he was not taking away anybody’s income. So he simply asked competing companies to simply give him a chance. He told them he would increase their sales by growing the number of woodturners. And sure enough, he did. Easy Wood Tools produced more woodturners who not only bought Easy Wood Tools, but woodturning tools from every other woodturning tool company as well.
The goal was to make woodturning simple enough for anyone to try.
“And then, by 2013, everybody and their brother was knocking me off and I was about done with it,” Craig says. “I mean, it was like 20 companies. I’d go to a trade show and on each side of me there were companies selling knockoffs, and they weren’t as good.”
This hurt, Craig says. “I built that company best I could not taking nothing from nobody and I just, I don’t know.”
In 2015 Craig sold Easy Wood Tools to Chicago-based Pony Tools Inc., of Jorgensen clamp fame. Within six months Pony Tools went bankrupt, and Craig didn’t get all his money. So he turned to what he knew best – machine work.
(Note, Craig has not had any affiliation, whatsoever, with Easy Wood Tools since 2015.)
To mark the launch of The Stick Chair Journal(coming in August 2022), we are giving away 400 Stick Chair Merit Badges to readers who have built a stick chair and can follow instructions.
This promotion ends when we run out of the merit badges or on Dec. 31, 2022, whichever comes first. (When the time comes, I’ll announce the end of the promotion on the blog and delete this blog entry.)
Here’s how to get your merit badge – one to a customer. Please read carefully.
Build a stick chair with your own hands. (Not a frame chair, ladderback chair, Windsor/Forest chair, IKEA chair, folding chair etc.) A genuine, vernacular stick chair. (Edit: A stool without a back is not a chair. A backstool, which is essentially a side chair, is indeed a chair. I deem that to be a “chair,” the thing needs a backrest.)
Take a picture and print it out on any paper.
Send a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE) to us with the picture of your stick chair. Here’s how to address the envelope:
Stick Chair Merit Badge Lost Art Press 837 Willard St. Covington, KY 41011
If you have never used an SASE, here how it works. There is an outside envelope addressed to us. A second envelope addressed to you that you put a stamp on. And a photo of your stick chair. Easy!
When we receive your envelope, we will add your photo to a cool collage I’m creating. Then we’ll slide a merit badge into your SASE, seal it and put it in the mailbox at Greer and 9th streets.
This is the *only* way to get a merit badge. You can’t buy one. You cannot twist our arms to accept an emailed photo. International readers are welcome to participate, but they’ll probably have to put a U.S. Global stamp on the SASE.
We are DIY people, right? You can figure this out without asking us to bend the rules, can’t you? Of course you can!
Please don’t send photos of 10 stick chairs and ask for 10 merit badges. They are one per customer. Please don’t ask our customer service people to do you a favor and mail you one. They can’t. Please don’t pester Megan to sneak you one. She won’t.
So put on your big-person britches, build a stick chair and earn your merit badge.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Sorry if this post sounds condescending – the condescension is for the 1 percent. We have done promotions like this in the past where 99 percent of the participants follow instructions and have fun. The remaining 1 percent chap our hides asking for special treatment because “there are no sticks in my county” or “I have never seen an envelope” or “I’m a very important bossy pants, and you should send me one because of that.”
Really, this video could have been done in four words…three words, one repeated: Wax on, wax off. But that’s already been said. So instead, I’ve blathered on for a few minutes about soft wax and how easy it is to use.
Pro tip: Do not leave oil-covered scrapers (or any scrapers) sitting in the sun in 90° heat. Ouch.
If you’ve been waiting on a Crucible Dovetail Template, click the link to head on over to the store – as of 8 p.m., we have four score in stock.
And exciting (and long-awaited) news on the scraper front: They’re almost ready. Chris and I burned our hands today loading them into the back of his pickup truck…because we were so stupid as to leave the oil-bathed beauties sitting in the hot sun in the back of Catbus for a few hours, after they delivered from C.T.S. Waterjet. Oops. Tomorrow morning, I’m driving the scrapers down to Nicholasville, where Craig Jackson and the crew at Machine Time will machine and polish the edges, and engrave them with the Crucible logo. (Note: You can find out more about Craig in Sunday’s post.) So we hope to hve those back in stock soon!
Plus I got an update today from the foundry, where a run of holdfasts was poured the first week of June. The grinding is almost done, and those should be shipping next week.
Finally, we got notification this morning that our (long-awaited) hardcover edition of Joseph Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises” was in line at the printing plant’s shrink-wrap machine – here’s hoping it got on the truck later in the day, as it was supposed to. It should be in the warehouse next week.