Before you can begin traversing with your jack plane, you should bevel off the far edge of the board with a few good strokes of your jack plane. This bevel reduces the “spelching” on that edge. (Spelching is the fun English word for “splintering.”)
The following is excerpted from “The Joiner & Cabinet Maker,” by Anonymous, Christopher Schwarz and Joel Moskowitz. The original short, book released in 1839, tells the fictional tale of Thomas, a lad of 13 or 14 who is apprenticed to a rural shop that builds everything from built-ins to more elaborate veneered casework. The book was written to guide young people who might be considering a life in the joinery or cabinetmaking trades, and every page is filled with surprises.
Unlike other woodworking books of the time, “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” focuses on how apprentices can obtain the basic skills needed to work in a hand-tool shop. It begins with Thomas tending the fire to keep the hide glue warm, and it details how he learns stock preparation, many forms of joinery and casework construction. It ends with Thomas building a veneered mahogany chest of drawers that is French polished. However, this is not a book for children. It is a book for anyone exploring hand-tool woodworking.
In our expanded version you’ll find the unabridged and unaltered original text; a historical snapshot of early 19th-century England; chapters on the construction of the three projects that show the operations in the book, explain details on construction and discuss the hand-tool methods that have arisen since this book was originally published; and complete construction drawings (you can download those files here).
With the glue dry, it’s time to flatten one face of all of your panels. Thomas begins with the jack plane then moves to the trying plane, yet the details of the operation are sketchy in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.”
Early workshop practice was to use the jack plane (sometimes called the fore plane) across the grain of a panel. This operation, which Joesph Moxon called “traversing” in his “Mechanick Exercises” of 1678, allows you to remove a good deal of deal without tearing the grain too deeply. Working the grain diagonally in both directions allows you to get the board fairly flat – Thomas checks the board with a straightedge as he works, which is always a good idea.
Before traversing a panel, check the panel using the edge of your plane, which is a fairly good straightedge. If the panel is cupped across its width (typically on the bark side of a board), then the work should be fairly easy to accomplish. If the board is crowned in the middle (typically on the heart side of a board), you need to watch what you are doing. Sometimes traversing and diagonal strokes aren’t enough to flatten a crowned surface.
Note: When you work at 45° to the grain of a panel, you will typically see more tearing in one direction than in the other. This is normal. Just make sure you finish your diagonal strokes in the direction that produces less tearing.
Traversing is a powerful hand-tool technique. You can remove a lot of material quickly and make the board flatter than when you began.
Determining when a board is flat can be a challenge. After some practice, you learn to tell by the way your planes respond when dressing the panel. The shavings become consistent in thickness, width and length all along the board. A straightedge can help. So can winding sticks, which aren’t mentioned in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.”
Diagonal strokes, as shown here, allow more of the plane’s sole to touch the panel. After some overlapping, you’ll find the panel is pretty flat once you can take a shaving from every point on the board.
Winding sticks are two identical sticks that are longer than the board is wide. They are placed at several points across the width of the board and compared by eye. When the panel is twisted, the sticks aren’t parallel. And because they are longer than the board is wide, they exaggerate any wind. The author of “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” has a novel solution: Compare your panel to a known flat panel. If your panel rocks on the flat one, it’s in wind. Of course, the trick is getting that first panel flat. It’s possible to create two panels that are in wind but don’t rock on one another – the high spots of one panel nest into the low spots of the other and result in a false reading.
Check the panel using the wooden straightedge. Look for light as you hold the tool diagonally one way, then the other. Work the remaining high spots using the jack plane until the panel is close to flat.
However, once you get one panel flat, the method explained in the book works well.
Then dress the panel using the trying plane (sometimes called a jointer). I use diagonal strokes first. Then I finish up with strokes that follow the grain of the panel.
The top panel is flat. By placing it on top of the panel I am working and trying to rock the panel at the corners, I can test for wind. You do have to be careful here. Sometimes you can miss a problem when you have one low corner but the three other corners are coplanar. Keep a sharp eye.
We needed an additional band saw for our bench room. We have several chair classes coming up fast, plus we use my old 1980s Rockwell band saw so much that there are times we need to have two band saws running simultaneously.
My first instinct was to buy a second old USA-made Delta band saw and restore it. But I honestly do not have time to restore a machine now.
So I bought a metalworking machine instead.
One of the odd little facts about machinery is that metalworking machines are built far better than their woodworking counterparts (and have a price tag to match). A 14” band saw for woodworking might cost $1,300, while its metalworking cousin will cost $2,300.
I first learned thiskl in the 1990s when working in the Popular Woodworking shop. We had a Wilton belt/disc sander that was built like a tank. All the controls were metal – no plastic. It ran smoothly and was insanely powerful. The machine’s trunnions were heavy cast iron. One day I looked up the machine in a catalog and discovered it was designed for metalworking.
When I looked at the equivalent belt/disc sanders for woodworking, they looked like toys. Plastic controls, sheet-metal trunnions and aluminum where I would have preferred cast iron.
From that day on, I got a taste for metalworking machines. (Manufacturing tools for Crucible also pushed me along this path.) When I bought a belt grinder for our shop, I made sure it was designed for metalworking. Sure it cost about three times as much, but it is more than three times better than its woodworking cousin.
And when I started shopping for a 14” band saw, I went right to the metalworking section. I settled on a Jet 14” band saw that is designed for both metalworking and woodworking. It has massive castings, heavy trunnions, metal controls and carbide blade guides. It weighs 110 pounds more than its woodworking cousin.
FYI, I am not oblivious. For years I owned the Jet 14” woodworking band saw and was completely happy with it. It was the best 14” cast iron band saw I could buy at the time. But its metalworking cousin is another animal entirely.
Why am I telling you this? I love old iron. Most of our machinery was made back when I wore diapers (or my parents were in middle school). But sometimes buying and restoring an old machine is just not possible because of where you live, your skills or the time required to do the restoration right.
When that’s the case, here’s another option to consider: look at the metalworking machines. There isn’t always one available, but in some cases (especially with band saws, sanding machines, lathes and drill presses) there’s another line of machines out there that you might not be considering.
On Thursday, it was official: George Walker and Jim Tolpin handed over to Lost Art Press all the text and illustrations for their next book, “Euclid’s Door,” and I’ve just begun the initial edit. The book is about ancient layout tools, and what they can teach us…as George’s introduction below tells us. The book – which features illustrations by Barb Walker and Keith Mitchell – will be out later this year. – Fitz
Belly Hill is a hump in the sprawling wheat fields in southern Turkey. It kept its secrets hidden except in the spring when local farmers snagged their plows on blocks of limestone beneath the soil. Then in 1996 a group of German archeologists took a closer look. What they found turned human history on its head. They unearthed a temple complex known today as Gobekli Tepe, a massive 12,000-year-old building site sprawling across 22 acres, much of it still unexplored.
Scores of giant rectangular stone columns, some more than 20’ high arranged in circles, ovals and triangles. Much of the stonework is decorated with elaborate carvings of spiders, snakes and lions. Stuff that must have haunted the dreams of those early builders. Scholars debate who made those carvings and what they reveal about the builders. The most amazing thing is the early date. The complex goes back 12 millennia. Humans weren’t thought to have built things on this grand scale that far back. This was long before the invention of writing, before pottery, even before the invention of agriculture. It was built by a hunter-gatherer culture. That wasn’t supposed to happen. It was previously thought that nomadic hunters lived so close to the edge that they didn’t have resources to devote to architecture. So much for that theory.
When Jim Tolpin and I first read about the dig, we didn’t marvel at the elaborate carvings of snakes and spiders; we noted these builders had a working knowledge of artisan geometry. They understood plumb and level and were able to fabricate large stones with precise flat surfaces and right angles. They obviously possessed a skill-set and tool set that gave them tremendous creative power .
Over the last 10 years we’ve explored how artisans harnessed the truths of geometry throughout history. We began close to home, looking at early American furniture and quickly moved back in time to the Renaissance in Europe. From there, a clear path took us back to ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt, with a few side trips into Asia. Now we find the same thread ties back to prehistoric builders. Yet the structures on the Gobekli Tepe are so developed and refined, it implies that the knowledge about artisan geometry goes way back, deep back.
Tools of the Imagination Just what was their tool set? Given the scale and complexity of the work, it’s hard to imagine that these early builders spitballed this into existence without the aid of layout and design tools. Flint cutting tools and stone hammers survived, but any tools made of wood or fiber are long gone. No doubt they could have used strings to mark layouts and rough cuts on slabs of stone. A string with a weight attached could also gauge level and plumb. But those smooth flat surfaces and sharp right angles cry out for a sophisticated tool kit to tackle those problems. How did they make a stone (or board) flat and free from twist? How did they execute a corner so they could butt two stones (or boards) together and marry together perfectly?
Most woodworkers are curious about tool marks left behind. It might be the slashes left by an axe on timbers in an old barn or the stray cuts left from a backsaw. We can’t help ourselves. We pull out drawers and look closely at dovetails or crawl under a table to feel the wavy surface left by a scrub plane. Cutting tools leave their distinctive footprints, and another family of tools in the builders’ kit leave their marks hidden in plain sight. An axe or gouge leaves a texture we can see and feel, but some tools leave behind their shadows hidden in plain sight, evidence of artisan geometry at work. Boards that are flat and free of twist with square edges so they can be joined together are a different sort of signature. They are the ghosts artisan geometry left behind and they hint at the tools that created those ghosts. Some of these tools create layout lines that are later erased by a handplane or covered when joinery is knocked together tight and solid. We don’t often think of these ghosts as tool marks, but they speak to us about a set of tools used from ancient times.
In fact, you could divide tool marks and their tools into two categories. One group is for shaping and forming. They leave the marks we can feel with our fingertips. A second group are tools of the imagination that we use to help us with design and layout. They leave a picture of artisan geometry at play. Both sets of tools have something in common. They both flow from the wellspring of artisan geometry, a deep understanding of points, lines and simple shapes. For as long as humans have been building, they have used tools to connect with the universal truths of Geometry. Tools not only help us to cut, smooth and manipulate wood and stone, they help us to harness geometry to create order from chaos. Tools were not just an extension of our hands, they were the means to extend the truths of geometry into the built world.
Illustration by Barb Walker
Ex Nihilo We can guess about how early humans made technological leaps. It’s not a stretch to think that fires ignited by lightning gave our ancestors a familiarity with fire and the possibilities it offered. A round stone rolling down a hill may have led to the idea of the wheel. Yet how would early humans have stumbled onto the mysteries and possibilities offered by straight lines and right angles? It even seems a larger leap to fabricate tools that could harness these mysteries. Perhaps an account of this will never be understood, but the evidence left by these early builders leaves no doubt that they understood artisan geometry.
These tools that harness the power of geometry generate and prove a handful of geometric truths or axioms, i.e. a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Yet, long before humans wrote these truths down, they harnessed the power of straight lines, parallel lines, right angles and a number of common angles, such as 45° miters. The one common thing about all these geometric truths is that they are all self-proving. A straight edge can prove itself, a try square or a miter square can prove itself. Just to be clear, every project in this book has a section where we prove the tool. This differs from the geometry you learned in junior high where proofs were expressed as theorems you had to memorize. Although all of the proofs we use could be expressed with theorems, that’s not what we are after. Every proof we use is a physical confirmation we can see or feel. Forget about numbers, they just get in the way. This self-proving property of geometric truths allows them to be created ex nihilo (out of nothing) and this is what we harness in this book to create our elegant set of design and layout tools.
Like the discovery of fire, some inquisitive ancestor of ours may have fussed about with a couple of straight sticks, trying to get them to fit tightly together. Slowly the realization came that the pair of sticks could be used to correct each other. Shave a tiny bit of material from one and it points out the imperfection in the other. Finally they reach an almost magical level of perfect straightness. Then these sticks could become tools that could be used to impart straightness (and flat surfaces) to stones and logs. Our ancestors could have become familiar with these tools of geometry because like the lightning generating fire, the truths of geometry were right at their fingertips. They just needed to become familiar with them, then begin to harness them.
Even though this knowledge goes back into the depths of time, the truths of geometry are still valid, and mastery of geometry is still powerful and brimming with possibilities. In this book we are going to walk in the footsteps of our ancestors both distant and near. We’ll be exploring artisan geometry with sharp tools. Plenty of knife lines and saw cuts. You’ll see the truths of geometry in three dimensions on your workbench – a much better way to grasp these secrets of our craft. We walk through the building of a set of layout tools found in a typical cabinetmaker’s tool chest. Tools that were frequently user made. Jim and I began making these tools ourselves out of curiosity. We came to realize that the process of making these tools results in much more than the tools themselves (which are in fact quite amazing). Today we think of these tools as teachers that take us on a journey into the secrets of artisan geometry. They develop skills important to the craft. These builds equip both the imagination and the hands.
We are slowly removing the evidence that our storefront was once a purple-and-glitter womb of wacky architecture. One of the things we have been working on are the HVAC registers and returns.
Today Megan installed a new cold-air return that she had made by Thane Lorbach, a local laser shop. The original grille was beat up and had been painted many colors. The new grille shows off 121 dividers, each inside a circle.
The grille is made from plywood, which Megan spray painted and then hung. I know most visitors won’t see it immediately, but I think it’s a huge upgrade.
If you use a tenon cutter on the sticks (or spindles) of a chair, it can be a challenge to cut the tenon so it is perfectly centered on the stick and inline with the axis of the stick. This can be a problem no matter how you drive the tenon cutter – with a brace or with a drill.
This short video shows how I teach students to cut tenons. If you take these steps, your tenons will start to improve immediately. Practice will get you the rest of the way.
Note that there is a way to get perfect tenons every time with a tenon cutter. It involves a lathe and a jig. It’s ideal for making 200 tenons at a time. I’ll show that process some other day.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Shameless plug: This tip is straight from the pages of “The Stick Chair Book.” There are lots of little tricks like this in the book.
An offset and off-axis tenon. A common fault when using tenon cutters.
