Next month, I head to sunny/warm/tasty Anaheim, Calif., to teach two classes – a four-day class on building Roorkee chairs and a two-day class on building a Dutch tool chest.
The classes will be held at the William Ng School of Fine Woodworking. This is my first teaching assignment in Southern California, though I have been there many times for woodworking shows, vacations and tacos.
The Roorkee chair class is March 17-20. This is one of my favorite classes to teach because it involves so many new skills for woodworkers, such as learning to make tapered conical mortises, spindle turning and leatherwork. These chairs are great fun to build, plus they travel extraordinarily well.
I’ll also be teaching a two-day class in building a Dutch Tool Chest (March 22-23). This is a somewhat brutal but effective introduction to hand-tool casework. You’ll learn dovetails, dados, rabbets, cut-nail joinery and all of the rules for carcase construction in just two days.
When I teach this class, some of the students end up napping on the bench. But they all end up taking home a tool chest that is portable, tough and useful.
One the more difficult parts of writing a book is knowing when to slam the transmission into “park” while going 80 mph.
“The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” was supposed to have plans for five tool chests in it, including Dutch, traveling, gents and Japanese versions. But I soon realized that the additional plans would dilute the central message in the book. And the text was already longer than I wanted it to be.
The same thing is happening with “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” My sketchbook is filled with with more than a dozen new designs that I’d like to build and include with the core 13 projects. But that would delay the book a year, and I’m not sure it would do much more than just make the book thicker.
But then I ordered two full sides of unbleached rawhide today to dive into one aspect of the book that I had rejected months ago. I had a wild and beuatiful idea while looking at some drapes. Plus, I started eyeing my lumber stack to see if I had enough wood to build the refinement of my drinking table (sketch above).
I’ve promised myself (and my family) that this book will be complete by the end of the year. So I best shift into high gear.
Call me sick (or call me “cute as a button”) but I enjoy breaking down rough stock with a handsaw. Part of it is necessity. I don’t have a miter saw, and many boards I work with are outside their capacity in width or thickness.
But more important than the tooling is that handsawing the stock forces me to slow down a bit and it gives me a good feel for how much moisture and tension is in each board. I’ve found some real stinkers when boards tried to pretzel my handsaw or choke it to death.
Today I broke down all the stock for another Dutch Tool Chest. I drive up to Maine on Wednesday morning for a three-pronged mission.
1. Teach a class on building the Dutch Tool Chest on July 5-6.
2. Film a DVD on building the Dutch Tool Chest with the Lie-Nielsen crew the week of July 7-10.
3. Attend the Lie-Nielsen Open House on July 11-12. Both John Hoffman and I will be there with books, T-shirts and Dutch Tool Chests. If you’ve never been to an Open House event, it’s like a huge Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event with factory tours (I tour the factory every time) and a lobster bake. Plus Maine is particularly nice this time of year.
Check out all the people who will be there via this link. Dang. Make your reservation for the lobster bake before July 1 (it’s just $25). The Open House is free and open to the public.
I’ll also be bringing some campaign furniture I’ve built to show off.
My little Dutch tool chest has seen a metric crap-load of miles (or kilometers or hogsheads) during the last 12 months. And wherever I take it, I like to pick up a sticker from a local gas station or convenience store to apply to the chest.
The stickers are not to reinforce the joinery. Promise.
Today, the president of the Kansas City Woodworkers Guild gave me the coolest stickers yet. Rob Young gets to spend some of his working life in Antarctica and brought back a sticker for the South Pole Station, plus a sticker that indicates you shouldn’t freeze whatever is in the package (it could be a well-dressed live penguin).
I can’t wait to add these stickers to the chest. Even though I haven’t been to the South Pole, and I have little prospect of teaching there (I hear there aren’t many trees. Yet), I love the stickers.
This year I hope to get stickers from Alaska, Alabama and England – three of the foreign lands in which I’ll be teaching in during 2014. (Sorry Alabama. I’m from Arkansas and you know that we’re constitutionally obligated to make jokes about you because… uh, we’re Arkansas.)
When I finish writing a book, I send the manuscript to about a dozen people for comment, criticism and a typo hunt (and yet mistakes are like weeds).
With “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” about half the reviewers made a similar comment: Why don’t you expand the book’s seven brief sections on design philosophy and workshop ethics?
My answer is difficult to put into words, but here goes: My eyes glaze over when I read books, articles or blog posts that are entirely about the philosophy of the craft. I’ve read a good number of books on craft philosophy during the last 30 years. My dad had a bunch of them on our family’s bookshelves in the 1970s, and this type of literature is now experiencing a renaissance.
Here’s what goes through my head when I read this stuff: Hmmm. Good idea, but you already said this in a slightly different way 20 pages ago. Why do you have to use PhD-level language to describe this simple thing? OK, I think you’re writing in circles. Wait, maybe I’m just dumb.
Perhaps it’s my newspaper training, but I attempt to write for an 8th-grade audience and to be as laconic brief as possible.
Plus, I don’t think ideas about craft are particularly suited for words. My feelings about the craft are evident when I’m at the bench, not sitting on the couch with a book or a laptop. So I try to make my books work like a road sign that tells you what’s ahead. The road sign isn’t the thing – a construction zone, grooves in the pavement or a mountain switchback. It’s only a brief idea, a symbol, representing the experience ahead.
Reading the road sign or the book isn’t enough to know what’s really ahead. You have to pick up the tools or put your foot down on the accelerator to really get it.
The best I can do is this: Give you a peek at the rich tapestry of illiterate ideas and convince you that you can build seemingly complex things that you thought were out of your reach. If you read it and then do it, then you’ll get it.
The first line of 2011’s “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” was “disobey me,” a Russian paradox that challenges the ideas of authority and submission. How can you follow the advice without disobeying the text or obeying the speaker?
“The Anarchist’s Design Book” begins with a quote that no publisher should use in a book. It’s a segment of a sermon by a 13th-century Parisian preacher that I encountered years ago in an essay about early European printing.
“What knowledge is this which thieves may steal, mice or moths eat up, fire or water destroy?”
Your fingers don’t speak English, French or Dutch for that matter.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. While editing and photography of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” is complete, we still have a few plates to make. So we are aiming for a late February release.