The Anarchist’s Gift Guide – comprised only of stuff we have bought and used in our shop – starts today and runs over the next 13 days.
Chris started this “gift guide” years ago (read past recommendations here) after watching a woodworking TV personality’s “gift guide” for one of his sponsors. Clearly, he’d been given a list of worthless stuff that they wanted gone.
Chris thought: What if some poor spouse/child/friend actually took this crap advice?
This gift guide is – as always – unsponsored. Toolmakers who ask to be included in the guide (and they sometimes do) are automatically excluded from it. We don’t make money from these recommendations – there are no affiliate links. We paid full price for these items. And we’ve sought out at least a few things that your children could afford to buy for you.
Here goes.
Chairmaker’s Non-redneck Pencil Gauge
Last summer we made a batch of Redneck Pencil Gauges, which we still use here today. We started with a basic Marples marking gauge. Then we added a metal fence that allowed the gauge to be used for inside and outside curves. And we added a friction-fit hole so you could add a pencil (included) to the gauge.
It’s an ideal tool for marking out mortises and the spindle deck on a chair, plus dozens of other operations where a knife line or scribe line is undesirable.
After making one batch of gauges for sale, we never got around to making more. But now Marples has picked up the ball and created its own gauge, with three improvements.
They use a brass fence instead of a steel one (it looks classier)
They use a brass locking knob instead of a yellow plastic one (again, classy)
And they made the pencil clamp adjustable, a nice upgrade from ours.
The gauge is available through Workshop Heaven in the U.K. for £20.90, and they ship to the States. If you weren’t able to purchase one of our Redneck Pencil Gauges, this will definitely fill that need.
(You can, of course, make your own gauge using “The Stick Chair Book,” a free download.)
Note the notch. Other benches feature a notch on the long edge of the benchtop that could be used for cutting tenons or sawing out fretwork. This illustration is from about 1505 in Nuremburg. The painting is the “Holy Family,” part of a 10-panel work by Bernhard Strigel. PAINTING: GERMANISCHES NATIONALMUSEUM, NÜRNBERG (LEIHGABE DER BAYERISCHEN STAATSGEMÄLDESAMMLUNG)
The following is excerpted from “Ingenious Mechanicks,” by Christopher Schwarz. This book is a journey into the past. It takes the reader from Pompeii, which features the oldest image of a Western bench, to a Roman fort in Germany to inspect the oldest surviving workbench, and finally to Christopher’s shop in Covington, where he recreated three historical workbenches and dozens of early jigs. This specific excerpt is by Suzanne Ellison who is a regular poster for Lost Art Press and did historical research for the book.
It is not surprising to see low Roman workbenches in Italy or any of the former Roman provinces. By mapping our bench discoveries, we found a strong relationship to locations along the Roman roads and trade routes that continued into the early decades of the 18th century.
After mapping the Spanish workbenches, I put an overlay of the Roman roads of Hispania and found, with a few exceptions, the plot points fell along or very near the Via Augusta (formerly the Via Herculea). Via Augusta, one of the major commercial Roman roads, ran along the Mediterranean coast from the Pyrenees in the northeast, through Valencia, diverted inland to Seville and ended back on the coast at Cadiz. Eight workbenches fall along the Via Augusta, with six benches from Valencia and Seville.
Via Augusta. Many workbenches we found in Spain showed up along the Roman road called Via Augusta (in red). MAPS BY BRENDAN GAFFNEY
Of the 38 low, Roman-type workbenches we espied, we found 21 benches (or 55 percent) that date from the first decade of the 16th century to the end of the 18th century. You can thank St. Joseph for that. Thirteen benches were in paintings from Italy and eight from Spain. But wait, the Kingdom of Naples was part of the Spanish Empire for most of the 1442 to 1714 time period. We have cross-pollination! For instance, Jose de Ribera, a major artist from Valencia, completed his mature work in Naples. Luca Giordano, from Naples, spent a decade in Madrid as court painter for Charles II. Adjusting the numbers results in almost a 50-50 split, with 10 benches for Italy and 11 for Spain.
The Limes. The northern border of the Roman Empire – the dotted line above – was called the Limes Germanicus. Here you can see the benches and their relationship to the frontier.
Some features of the low Italian and Spanish workbenches are a massive top with or without a face vise, a twin-screw vise, an early crochet (possibly the earliest depiction so far) and unusual planing stops. Oh yes, two benches with squared-off notches on the bench ends also turned up in our searches. One of the benches would help solve those mysterious notches on the 2nd-century Roman workbench from Saalburg.
The Mystery of the Notches
Beginning with the extant Saalburg workbench, we found seven benches with notches on the side or end of the benchtop. The Saalburg bench and three 16th-century benches have a fairly close regional distribution, while the examples with a notch in the bench ends are from Italy and Spain. The seventh bench has a side notch and originates from the New Kingdom of Granada in present-day Colombia.
The three 16th-century notched benches are from Memmingen (“Holy Family” by Bernhard Strigel), Nürnberg (Löffelholz bench) in southwest Germany and Bolzano (the Hans Kipferle panel) in northern Italy. The German benches are both dated 1505 and the Italian bench is dated 1561. When these benches are mapped along with the Saalburg bench, possible connections start to emerge. The Via Claudia Augusta, the Roman road that connected the Po River valley with the Raetia province (southern Germany), ran through Bolzano and across the Alps (it is a different road than Via Augusta). The road terminated at the capital of Raetia, Augusta Vindelicorum (present-day Augsburg). A branch off Via Claudia Augusta leads to the Roman city that became Kempten, just south of Memmingen.
Through the Middle Ages, the two main routes to cross the Alps converged in Bolzano and led to Augsburg: the Via Claudia Augusta through the Reschenpass and the Brenner route through the Brenner Pass. East-west Roman roads through Augsburg later also became important trade routes, turning the city into a commercial center. Similarly, Nürnberg benefited from the northsouth trade route it shared with Augsburg. The route was a portion of the Amber Road that linked southern Italy with the north and Baltic Seas. Trade routes were also information routes for cultures and technology. In the 15th and 16th centuries, this part of the former Roman Empire (and later Holy Roman Empire) experienced a cultural flowering. Considering the lengthy Roman presence in this region and the continued use of the trade routes, it is possible the side-notch feature survived and was in use on woodworking benches until at least the mid-16th century.
Local color. Keep your eyes open when in museums. Thanks to Suzanne Ellison’s sharp eye, this painting provided an important clue about the use of notches in workbenches. And the painting happened to be right up the road from me in Indianapolis.
The two end notches were in paintings from Ravenna, Italy, and Madrid, Spain. The Madrid painting, “Dream of Saint Joseph,” by Luca Giordano, shows a wedge in the notch and was a key to solving the “Saalburg mystery.” I found the image in mid-July and sent it with a few dozen other images to Chris. About a month later while verifying dates, titles, artists and locations of all the paintings I gave “The Dream” a closer look. St. Joseph’s side of the painting has an appealing composition with tremendous detail. One tremendous detail struck me in particular and that evening I emailed Chris asking if he had seen this detail before. The next morning he answered, and you can read about how the notches and wedges work in Chapter 5.
The last bench is from the New World when Colombia was a Spanish colony. The notch is sharply defined and dovetail-shaped. The email I sent to Chris with the image was titled, “Oh Look! What is that Notch in the Bench?” and two minutes later Chris’ response was a joyful expletive.
The post-and-rung chairs found in the final chapters of “Backwoods Chairmakers“ were printed without dimensions. This was by design; it was not an omission or mistake. The intention is for the chairmaker to make decisions – to determine rung heights and slat locations – that are common considerations when making a chair. The choice was not to hide the info or discourage the chairmaker, rather I followed a path similar to those of John Brown (“Welsh Stick Chairs“) and Jennie Alexander (in the first edition of “Make a Chair from a Tree”). Brown’s and Alexander’s books are not recipe books; the one making the chair is encouraged to make the decisions.
There’s another reason the dimensions were not included. The book’s focus is on the chairmakers and their chairs, their lives, their stories. The chairmakers’ traditions, approaches and methods varied greatly. Some used green wood, the drawknife, and the span of their hands for measurement. Others use a moisture meter, powered machinery and calipers. The tradition welcomes variety, and there is vibrancy within it. The last chapters of the “Backwoods Chairmakers” record a way to build post-and-rung chairs, with all the preceding chapters sharing the methods used by the Appalachian chairmakers.
With that said, I could have made my thinking more clear within the final chapters. The issue was in providing a significant amount of detail and dimensions without providing all of them.
Here’s the remedy: The dimensions will reside here on the LAP site, as a supplement to the book. We’ll make note in future editions that the additional details are available, should the reader desire more. I hope this will still encourage woodworkers to discover the details (and decide upon their own) when making their chair’s story sticks, while removing the frustration for those looking to replicate the three-slat or rocker as it is shown in the book. They can be downloaded below.
This is a an excerpt from Megan Fitzpatrick’s new book “Dutch Tool Chests.” I have been looking forward to its release for some time now and have finally had a chance to read through it. It is incredibly beautiful, which may not always be an applicable word for an instructional book, and clearly written. I appreciate this as one who is not a regular woodworker.
I will include bits of the instructional parts in later excerpts but for now I want to show off some fun pictures of Dutch tool chests that were submitted by LAP friends and readers. The options of how to make your tool chest more versatile seem endless after looking at these…not to mention some of the paint jobs!I only picked three at random but there are quite a few in the book to drool over.
I consider what I’ve presented in the preceding chapters to be the “base model” of the Dutch tool chest form – the Toyota Corolla, if you will. It will last you forever as-is, but might not be as comfortable in the long run as you’d desire.
This Dutch chest form is highly adaptable to different storage needs, sizes and aesthetics. And it sometimes serves, as you’ll see herein, as inspiration for variations that are at times but loosely inspired by the basic form.
I could not possibly cover all the possible storage options, bases, sizes, colors, wood choices and other creative decisions made by others who’ve built or adapted this form. So, I invited people to submit pictures of their chests, with detail pictures of their upgrades and clever ideas.
I present to you in the following pages as many of those as is practical – but without repeating too much of the same (I hope). But it turns out that many great minds think alike. So if you sent me pictures and I didn’t use them here, please know that I appreciate your submissions. It’s likely your chest isn’t blue, so I chose not to include it (just kidding). More likely is that the images simply weren’t large enough to use in print, or that there weren’t enough of them. But know that I nonetheless enjoyed seeing your work; I’m sorry if I couldn’t share it.
I hope the chests that follow (in no particular order) inspire you to build a Dutch tool chest and make it your own.
Jonathan Schneider
The chest is built from local (to Berlin) pine; the unpainted pieces are beech. There are pegged breadboard ends on the lid and fall front, and the dovetailed tray pulls out for easy access.
Note the groove in the drawer front’s center. That allows the drawer to be full depth, and it provides a sure path to guide the lock into its bottom recess. The lid-mounted saw till features cutouts that perfectly fit the blade guards.
Michael McCormick
McCormick’s walnut chest was made from “rough lumber, pretty much 90-percent unplugged,” he wrote. “It was exhausting.” Why the fancy wood? Because he had no climate-controlled shop space, McCormick’s chest lived in his family’s home office, where it needed to blend in as a piece of furniture.
The hardware is by John Switzer at Black Bear Forge.
McCormick says the lid board is the widest piece of walnut he’s ever found; the breadboard ends have kept it flat. Note the hanger for the tool brush, and the slotted hanging rack, which allows McCormick to slide wide chisels into a small hole.
In the bottom, McCormick made stalls for his shoulder plane, tongue-and-groove plane and router plane.
Olivia Bradley
The Dutch tool chest is the perfect size for Bradley’s small shop; she’s customized the interior to hold a lot in the chest’s relatively small footprint – but the interior is still flexible enough that she can stock it as needed for various classes. The elastic bands on the lid and fall front, which can be used for a number of tools, are inspired by toolmaker Liam Rickerby, who ships his winding sticks corralled by bands.
“When I got back from a stick chair class” at Lost Art Press writes Bradley, “I finally finished the cart to go under the Dutch tool chest. I needed a place to put [more] stickers.”
There’s a magnet embedded in Bradley’s lock, by which it sticks to a nail on the front of the chest when it’s not securing the fall front. The drawers in the lower compartment pull all the way out for easy access.
Against a side wall, a rack with 1″-dia. holes houses wider tools and bits. Also shown here is Bradley’s three-sided pencil box; the bottom is screwed to the shelf below.
“American Peasant” is back in stock with a new diestamp on the cover. When I designed the cover for the book, I developed six different images, all of which I liked.
So we decided to use a different diestamp for each printing. We sold out the first printing last month, which featured an engraved spell I developed (it is a wish for bountiful wood).
The second printing features a detail of a peasant cupboard I drew for the book. This cupboard is engraved with the “fishing net” protective spell, plus some other agricultural spells.
The interior content of the second printing is the same as the first (except for a few typo corrections). So there’s no need to buy the new one if you have the first one. If you prefer the old cover, some of our retailers still have some copies.
‘Good Eye’ Goes to Press
Late last week, we transmitted the final press files for “Good Eye,” the new book from Jim Tolpin and George Walker. It is, naturally, about furniture design. And it explores simple proportions in a new and deep way.
Their last book, “Euclid’s Door,” showed how artisan geometry could be used to create the essential wooden tools for bench work. “Good Eye” takes a different tack. Jim and George take several beautiful pieces of furniture from different periods and then show the proportional systems behind them. Plus, “Good Eye” shows you how to reverse the process and use the same proportioning system to create new pieces.
If you have been following the work of George and Jim, this new book will expand your understanding of artisan geometry. If you are new to design, “Good Eye” or any of their other books are great entry points to the topic.
We hope the book will ship by the end of the year. I suspect the retail price will be $29. We don’t take pre-orders, but we soon set up a page where you can sign up to be notified as soon as it is released. And, as always, we have no idea which of our retailers will carry it. Read this for more information.
