After my Feb. 7, 2022, post about how awful the new Irwin Speedbor bits have become, a couple readers suggested I try the WoodOwl spades. I didn’t know that WoodOwl made spade bits and had never seen them for sale.
So I purchased some from Hardwick & Sons and tested them up against my NOS (new old stock) Speedbors that were fresh from the package. And I tested them against some of the new, frustrating Irwin Speedbors – the ones missing their rim spurs.
The 5/8” WoodOwls cut just as fast as my trusty old Speedbors. They are exactly the same size (.635” diameter at the rim spurs) and weigh one-third less. Though the WoodOwl bits are made in China (not Japan), the machining is excellent, both on the bit and bit’s shaft.
So, problem solved. Don’t buy the Speedbor’s for chairmaking. Buy the WoodOwls.
The only open question is how good the steel is in the WoodOwls. I’m building a chair right now and should have that answer soon enough.
This two-bit drama reminded me of a Crucible tool I had worked on for a while and then set aside. I was trying to come up with a bit extension that didn’t wobble and held bits firmly, especially when you pull out of the hole. The Bosch bit extender is the best in the market, but it still wobbles more than I like.
So I built a prototype of a bit extender that is promising. Now designer Josh Cook and I are chewing it over to see if we can make something accurate, useful and inexpensive.
Dick’s snow-shoveled path to his woodshed. (Photo by Dick Proenneke, courtesy of the National Park Service)
Jan. 27, 1989:
Clear, Calm and -78°.
At nine, three and six I fed the fire but ice came to both water buckets and pretty strong. I had to break it before I could pour water from the plastic bucket. After seeing it a -72° when I called it a day I just wouldn’t hazard a guess as to what it would be come morning. Certainly not 80 below but it was so close I couldn’t be sure if it was -79° or 80 so I made it a -78° due to liquid in the tube separating a bit at the very top of the red. I just couldn’t believe that it could get so cold at Twin Lakes. After chores I went out on the lake to experience real cold. It was colder, the air had a bite to it, and it had better be dead calm or it would burn like dry ice.
Well now! What is causing this very unusual cold and how long will it last? From the 12 Jan. to the 28th now and all readings except two below zero and nearly all of them pretty far down the scale. The morning reading average for the past five days has been a -55° and I thought a -44° was cold.
So now at 8:30 we are headed in to another night of preventing frost damage to my perishables.
— Dick Proenneke
Splint made from the rib of a drum on Dick’s snow shovel. (Photo by Harper’s Ferry Center, courtesy of the National Park Service)
Sheet metal from the rib of a barrel spanning metal-fatigue cracks on each side of Dick’s snow shovel. (Photo by Monroe Robinson)
In a letter to me, dated April 1, 1989, Dick wrote, “…the cold set in Jan. 12th and ended Feb. 1st. The last two weeks of Jan had a morning ave. temp of -48.8° and from Jan. 24 for seven days a -58° ave. Was fortunate to have a -90° reading thermometer for I saw it a -78°. Not official of course and I would like to see how it compares with a weather service thermometer. At -80° the red did start to separate at that temperature. I wish I could report that my cabin was cozy warm but you know it wasn’t. But no pipes frozen and no fruit or vegetable due to being elevated and as stove at night and me stoking the fire 3-4 times at night. Strong ice in the water bucket several mornings. Here at the table writing I had my sleeping bag warmer hot rocks laying on the table by my writing hand. Great sport and I am glad I was here to experience some Siberian cold.”
The following is excerpted from “The Intelligent Hand,” by David Binnington Savage. It’s a peek into a woodworking life that’s at a level that most of us can barely imagine. The customers are wealthy and eccentric. The designs have to leap off the page. And the craftsmanship has to be utterly, utterly flawless.
How does one get to this point? And how do you stay there?
One answer to these questions is in this book. Yes, the furniture can be technically difficult to make. But a lot of the hard labor involves some unexpected skills. Listening. Seeing. Drawing.
As you will see, it’s a personal struggle – like the production of this book. On the day David began work on his manuscript, he received a cancer diagnosis with a grim prognosis. He wasn’t sure what the book was going to be about or if he could finish it. But David attacked the work with the fervor of a younger, healthier man. He did finish it, and got to see it in print before he died in 2019. His teaching legacy continues at the school he founded, Rowden Atelier, in Devon, England.
When you were born, the first thing that you could see, a thing of enormous significance to your suckling, dependent, vulnerable mind, was a circle. Slowly it came in to focus, and you came to attend it and see the love of your mother. The circle of the eye is the one thing as we grow old that does not change. The circle is a symbol of that humanity.
Circles and squares are a base – unarguable forms that we Classicists have used in our work since 400 BCE. The essence is to stick to low-integer numbers – whole numbers, if you can. I know – one and a half and a bit – but that’s what happens when you let mathematicians in.
The essence of this is not mathematical, it is visual. Just you and your dividers. Do you think the great masons who built Notre Dame did so with stick, rope and dividers, or with a slide rule and a calculator? Artisans’ intelligent hands throughout history have used visual measure, marking out with dividers proportions that made sense to them. Eight of these that way; five of these this way.
Before I round this section up and discuss how we can use classical proportion, I must give you a few more variants on this theme. We have been playing with it for 2,500 years, so there is a bit more to tell.
I want to return to two of the greatest proponents of classical proportions in Renaissance Italy: Leon Battista Alberti and Andrea Palladio.
Fig. 30.2. These are the systems Leon Battista Alberti, and people such as me, have used all our working lives.
I will be brief as I know this can get tedious. However, this is a reference section to revisit when you have a piece of work that doesn’t fit conventions.
This is the diagonal of the square, a ratio of 1:1.414 – a powerful form first outlined to us by Alberti. Next comes a simple whole-number variation, a square plus one third: 3:4. Then comes another simple whole-number variant, a square plus one-half: 2:3. Finally, we have a square, again solid and reliable, plus two-thirds of a square: 3:5.
These are the systems Alberti and people such as me, have used all our working lives. Palladio, however, went on to develop this further.
There is a wonderful road going inland from Venice to Verona that is punctuated by a series of magnificent Villas by Palladio. The first on this road is Villa La Rotonda, built with more squares and circles than you can shake a stick at. Then comes Palazzo Chiericati.
Fig. 30.3. The first is Villa La Rotonda (top left), built with more squares and circles than you can shake a stick at. Palladio’s plan for La Rotonda is above right. Then Palazzo Chiericati is below La Rotonda. Images: Graeme Churchard (La Rotonda); Francisco Anzola (Palazzo Chiericati)
Palladio’s designs incorporated not two but three proportions encompassing a space. The first is “The Arithmetical Mean.” Take the length, add to it the width and divide the total in half to give you a height.
Next is “The Geometric Mean.” Multiply the lesser extreme (4) by the greater extreme (9) to get 36; take the square root to get 6 and use this for the height.
And the third is the “Harmonic Mean,” which gives you a relationship of 12:6 with a height of 8. I have never bothered with it in 40 years of fiddling with shapes – but you may want to Google it. Palladio was no fool.
Palladio’s work formed the basis of inspiration for later architects including Inigo Jones and Robert Adam, who later in the 17th and 18th centuries went on to develop “Neo Classicism” – the form of the English country house. Those of you in the United States – can you see in these the forms and relationships between these and your nation’s great public buildings in Washington, D.C.?
Fig. 30.4. Andreas Palladio took this all a stage further involving not two but three proportions encompassing a space. The first is “The Arithmetical Mean.” Take the length, add to it the width, and divide the total in half to give you a height. Next is “The Geometric Mean.” Multiply the lesser extreme (4) by the greater extreme (9) to get 36, then take the square root to get 6. Use this for the height.
So, this is your toolkit – a set of ways other builders have used proportion to create a harmonic whole that is in tune with the natural divisions within nature. The difficult thing is that these tricks have been used by designers and makers for 2,500 years, and your fickle, all-seeing Mark One Eyeball has seen all this stuff; it bores her into a torpid sleep.
“Oh Darling, this is all so last season.”
(What’s the Mark One Eyeball? I use the term to describe the critical visual process. The eye has seen it all, has experienced all the visual tricks that designers and artists use. She knows it all and is desperate for something new, something that amuses and challenges her. The issue is to be amusing and new without being silly, without putting square wheels on a car. Most of the designer/maker frivolities of the late 20th century will end up in the Dumpster of History. The challenge is to amuse the Muse but avoid the Dumpster.)
The answer to the Mark One Eyeball is low, wicked cunning, deception and guile. You’ll recall that I described Leonardo as a cunning magician who distracts with a wave of an elegant glove. It took me about two hours to work out those simple proportions – he was so good at sending you the wrong way. You must do the same.
Never start with a proportional system. Start with a sketch, a drawing that you can feel good about. The relationships should be something you really like.
Then draw it again, coming up to scale, enlarging the image and tightening all the relationships. This is the time to test your drawing’s relationships with 8:13 or whatever. If it nearly fits. Hurrah! Now tighten your design so it fits exactly. If nothing fits, and you have been though everything including Palladio’s Harmonic Mean, have a really hard look at your divisions. Are they really as good as you think? Feeling they are OK is great – but are they really right?
Fig. 30.5. Most of my furniture has curves, and for a damn good reason. Having curves allows me to put the edge of a curve on a Golden Section and a foot just tickling the other side.
This is where I listen to that tiny voice in the back of my head. It’s very different in tone and volume from the negative voice in my left brain. He says in a big voice, “You are Prat.” “You never could do this; why, for God’s sake, aren’t you selling insurance to feed the kids?”
This guy, I can ignore. I know his tone. It’s her tone I want to hear. “David,” she says very quietly, “might you want to think about this again, darling?” That’s the silent killer; she is always right. The more I follow her words the better I get. So, get clever at hiding this proportional stuff.
For example, I have just seen a student’s table elevation. He had wide, lovely cabriole legs on a low table. If he placed a proportional relationship on the outside of the knees, the extreme outside dimension where there are no verticals, that is being a cunning, sneaky woo.
The last thing you want to do is bang up a box with 8″ by 13″ as the outer dimensions. Your eye will not forgive you. It might look OK, but ultimately will be consigned to the “also ran” Dumpster of History. Hitting the numbers dead on and obviously doesn’t often work.
Most of my furniture has curves, and for a damn good reason. Having curves allows me to put the edge of a curve on a Golden Section and a foot just tickling the other side. Sneaky Woo. You be one too, or that miserable bitch will consign your stuff to the “dumpster.”
Visiting John Hutchinson’s workshop outside Columbus, Ohio, was an unusual experience. And he wanted it that way.
To get to his shop, you left his home and set off down a path through the woods. Then you encountered a stream and had to jump over it. Eventually you arrived at a small cabin surrounded completely by woods.
The shop was cozy, well-lit and wonderfully equipped. And whenever you looked out the windows, all you saw were trees.
Hutchinson, a prominent Ohio architect, wanted it this way. He wanted the trip to his workshop to require you to encounter and deal with nature. And as you worked, nature was everywhere you looked.
I know a lot of woodworkers who would build the same sort of shop if they could. But I thought it was odd. Sure, I love trees and nature and birds and deer scat as much as the next woodworker. But I don’t look at trees and say: “Eureka – there is an idea for my next cabinet!”
Instead, I have always been inspired by good architecture. Good buildings. Thoughtful details. Window layouts. Overall proportions. These things are an endless diet of good design.
Yes, you can visit beautiful cities to get a taste of it before returning to your rural or suburban home. But it is another thing entirely to live surrounded by buildings and have them seep into your skin. Good architecture – like good furniture design – requires you to live with it for a while to really understand the patterns behind it. And to see the details that escape your first (or 10th) viewing.
The short film above is adapted from a piece I made a couple years ago for the furniture conference at Colonial Williamsburg. It offers a short architectural tour of Covington and shows how some buildings have directly influenced my designs.
This is why I live in an old (for America) city.
I am sure that other woodworkers can take inspiration directly from nature. And I think that’s great. But I have always relied on architecture. And here’s a look at how that works.
In the summer of 1997, Drew Langsner held a Chairmakers’ Symposium at Country Workshops with John Brown and Dave Sawyer in between classes from the two chairmaking legends. (JB had just wrapped up a Welsh stick chair class and Dave was about to teach an advanced Windsor chair class).
The gathering was captured on video by Grant Libramento, and Drew generously loaned the VHS tapes to us to see if we could do anything with them so the video could be shared with the chairmaking world. We had them digitized (at one of those “preserve your past” commercial places), but I don’t know if some of the quality was lost in translation, or if the originally tech wasn’t great, or if I chose poorly when I sent the videos off for digitizing. I just don’t know. There’s a clip below to give you an idea of the challenge.
So, we’re hoping one of you has mad video/audio enhancement skills, and might like to tackle this wee project. Maybe the video can be enhanced but the best audio solution is to create a transcript/running text crawl? Maybe it can also be condensed into a highlight reel (there are about 12-1/2 hours of footage)? This would be volunteer work (though I suspect some LAP swag might come your way) and we’d then share it for free, too.
