We’re busy getting ready for the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event (as evidenced by Christopher Schwarz’s full-on cleaning and organizational mode…he even made me dust and arrange the bourbon bottles yesterday). The event is Friday, Sept. 20 from 10 a.m.-6 p.m and Saturday, Sept. 21 from 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Lie-Nielsen will have its full line of tools here for you to try out – and you are heartily encouraged to actually use them – plus the company offers free shipping for event orders.
Lost Art Press will, of course, have the full line of books and Crucible tools on hand for perusal and purchase – but perhaps most exciting is the drawing for a free copy of the deluxe “Roubo on Furniture.” Measuring 12-1/4″ wide x 17-1/4″ tall by almost 2-1/4″ thick, “Roubo on Furniture” is the largest and most luxurious book LAP has printed. No purchase necessary – just write your name on a provided slip of paper, drop it in the hopper, and you’re entered. We’ll draw the winning name on Saturday at 4:45 p.m. – you need not be present to win. If the winner is local, I’ll drop your book off; if not, we’ll ship it.
‘Roubo on Furniture,’ cat for scale.
Chris, Brendan Gaffney and I are happy to give shop tours, answer questions about woodworking, demonstrate techniques and more. And I’ll have some copies of The Chronicle, the journal of the Early American Industries Association, to give away.
Andy Glenn joins us from the Berea, Ky., Woodworking School at Pine Croft – which you might recognize by its former name, the Kelly Mehler School of Woodworking. Berea College is continuing the fine tradition set by Kelly, with engaging workshops that use both traditional and contemporary methods (and in a gorgeous setting and shop, to boot). The school will soon be announcing workshops and guest instructors for the upcoming year.
At 2 p.m. on Friday, Andy will demonstrate how to weave a hickory bark seat, and at 2 p.m. on Saturday, he’ll give a chisel-sharpening demo – plus assorted benchwork throughout the event.
Donna Hill and Bob Compton from the Ohio Valley chapter of the Society of American Period Furniture Makers (SAPFM) will be on hand with examples of their stunning work. Throughout the event, Donna will be demonstrating stringing and inlay – a decorative technique that can be applied to both period and contemporary work. For those who don’t already know, SAPFM is a membership organization dedicated to the understanding, education and appreciation of American period furniture.
Mark Hicks is traveling from his Missouri shop with his small (but mighty) show bench, as well as an in-progress cherry shavehorse featuring the new Galbert Adjuster and a lower platform suitable for those with shorter torsos. He’ll also have a pile of Shavehorse Builder’s Kits, T-shirts and stickers. Plus, Mark will let you know about his workbench-building classes (and perhaps a few surprises).
Megan Fitzpatrick and I have spent the last couple days getting a huge batch of Crucible Card Scrapers finished and packaged up. And today we sent off nearly 700 of them to the warehouse.
I’d like to thank everyone in our supply chain – from the waterjet cutter to our machine shop to our magnet vendor – for busting hump to get these done. But mostly I’d like to thank Megan for helping me plow through QC, assembly and packaging today.
We think these scrapers are the cat’s pajamas. They are easy to sharpen and require little thumb pressure to produce beautiful shavings.
Note that the logo applied to the scrapers is a repositionable magnet and not a sticker. Hence they are a little crooked and off-center. You can satisfy your OCD to the max as the magnets are a precisely shrunk shape from my CAD drawings of the scraper.
Anyway, they are available now for shipment – $20 plus domestic shipping. You can read all about them (and how to sharpen them) here.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Brendan Gaffney is working on a huge batch of lump hammers that we hope to finish next week. Details, as always, on our Instagram account.
Editor’s note: This is the second Chair Chat with Rudy and Klaus where today we discuss a chair that was sold by a Welsh antiques dealer represented as being from Bronant in Cardiganshire. We don’t authenticate chairs – we just talk about what we like and don’t like. This one is another three-legged thing measuring 22″ wide, 15-3/8″ deep and 41″ tall.
I adore all three-legged chairs (it might have to do with my three-legged cat) but this one is especially special.
Chris: What I love about this chair is it’s so simple below the seat and has a lot going on above the seat. Like wearing a tux and a Speedo.
Klaus: Good analogy. Everyone can relate to that, Chris. It’s incredibly beautiful. First of all, I love the wear on that finish.
Rudy: Funny how it’s worn on all sticks.
Chris: Yeah. Do you think the wear is authentic?
Rudy: Maybe, maybe not…
Klaus: Looks like it’s rubbed off. Not by buttocks, I mean.
Rudy: If the sitter had a large enough back to reach those outer long sticks…
Chris: That’s what first jumped out at me. The wear on the back looks right. But it must have been a fat dude wearing a 120-grit T-shirt to get the sticks that way.
Rudy: Exactly!
Klaus: How common is it to manipulate a finish in antique furniture?
Chris: Very. But aside from that, I love the boxy top.
Rudy: Yup, me too. The crest adds a lot to the overall appearance too.
Klaus: Very compact and perfectly proportioned. If the back was longer, it would tip the balance, I think.
Chris: Totally agree. I tend to like compact backs. Though they are much harder to make comfortable.
The three-piece armbow shows great skill. I think the ends of the joint are beveled in. But it’s a bit tricky to see with the photos.
Rudy: What is funny though is that one stick that protrudes on the right arm. Was that a repair?
Chris: A repair or a stick that has come loose from the mortise below. Odd how they antiqued it….
Klaus: If it was a repair, then why let it protrude like that?
Rudy: …and somehow it has the same wear as the sticks around it…
Chris: Exactly! Anyway, getting away from the CSI Wales, I also adore the comb.
Rudy: It is a thing of beauty in its simplicity.
Klaus: I like that that subtle bend to the comb. A good crest can really top off a chair
Chris: And the ends. Not an obvious shape until you see it. Like a stone worn by a river.
Rudy: Or by a fat back.
Klaus: Oooh, poetic analogy again, Chris!
Rudy: And there is no doubler.
Klaus: The scarf joint eliminates the need for that, I guess.
Chris: Indeed. Bent arms and the scarf allow you to get away with that. I gotta think that the arms are bent branches or roots – like what Emyr Davies and Chris Williams say.
The top of this chair is just perfect. The unusual stuff is in the seat.
Klaus: That seat grain pattern looks like the universe itself.
Rudy: What strikes me is that the seat is so thick, yet it doesn’t appear clunky or out of balance.
Chris: I LOVE the chunky seat. But I don’t have a butt, so perhaps I am just jealous.
Klaus: Very nice. And no bevel on the underside? Wait, there IS a small bevel actually… And this is what John Brown called a modified seat, isn’t it?
Chris: Yeah. And I REALLY want to know more about those.
Rudy: Yup! With three pegs going through the added piece from the front. Do you think the maker used glue in addition?
Klaus: I recently asked chairmaker Chris Williams about this subject. He pointed out that the arms always dictate everything. Which means that the front short sticks would come too close to the edge if the maker hadn’t made that add-on. And rather than shortening the armbow – if he only had that particular piece of ash seat available – he’d have to extend the seat. And there likely was no glue available when that was built.
Chris: I agree. But what about when the modification looks later than the chair? I assume these were added for comfort or another reason.
Klaus: If added at a later stage it must have been for added comfort, I agree.
Rudy: Part of the seat could have snapped off, but that is not so likely with a seat this thick…
Chris: I assume so. But we don’t know. What we do know is that it appears on chairs. Sometimes it looks original. Sometimes not. This one could be original. But I’ve seen some that look too recent. And by a different hand.
Rudy: Did you guys spot that big knot right in the seat right next to the back leg?
Chris Schwarz: Yes. I would have hated to drill that back leg mortise. I wonder if the maker was aiming for the knot (assuming he/she drilled from below).
Rudy: The maker could have made it a four legged chair, but instead drilled his mortise right next to a knot… puzzling. But the chair survived fine!
Klaus: Haha. Good point. And what happened on the back corner there? You think it split when he hammered in the stick or drilled the mortise? Or did some drunk Welshman throw the chair out of a window, perhaps?
Chris: I thought it was a defect in the seat. A loose knot?
Klaus: My wife says I’ve got a loose knot, too.
Chris: I think we are much pickier about wood for the seat than earlier makers.
Rudy: But going back to the fact that the chair has three legs: Three legged chairs were usually made to be stable on uneven floors. But this chair does not look primitive enough to me to be living in a barn somewhere. I could be wrong of course, but most three-legged chair examples I have seen were stools, backstools or lowbacks.
Chris: There are some nice three-leggers out there. But you are correct in general.
Klaus: Good point, Rudy. This one is perhaps one step above so-called furniture of necessity. What strikes me though, is how hard it would be for me to make a “primitive” chair like this.
Chris Schwarz: I agree, it’s a trick to have a chair that is so simple, balanced, elegant and rustic. I want to make one. This one just nails it down below. I love the splay on the front legs. Aggressive, but not overly. The maker had a good eye.
Rudy: Indeed. I love the general appearance, very balanced and a great form overall!
Klaus: I also love that the arm tilts ever so slightly upwards.
Chris: I hadn’t noticed. Nice catch! If that’s the case, it allows you to put the back of the armbow closer to the lumbar region. And get the hands up. It shows skill and thoughtfulness.
Rudy: Yeah, and it makes the chair very inviting to sit in.
Klaus: Definitely. It probably pitches the sitter a bit back. The slightly tilted arm adds an upward movement to the look of chair, too. And the sticks are also slightly longer above the arm, than under, which adds to that same upwards movement. I like that. Makes the whole chair stretch upwards.
Rudy: True. And all this is balanced by the thick seat.
Chris: Agree. I want to sit in it and see how it feels. So, anything bad to say about this chair? Any misses?
Klaus: Hm. well, about the turned legs? I mean, I like them, but..
Chris: They could be shaved. Look at the reflection on the front leg. It suggests a facet to me.
Klaus: Actually, they fit the rest of the chair. I’m not sure hexagonal or octagonal would fit here.
Rudy: My eye is distracted by the nice splay. But I agree, I don’t think hexagons or octagons would have worked as well here.
Chris: Lots of round legs were shaved I think. I really like doing that on Gibson chairs. Looks better than lathe work. Or my lathe work, that is.
Klaus: So the conclusion is that the chair is perfect, then!
Rudy: Do we want to give this chair a name?
Chris: How about Try Tri Again? …after last week’s three-legger?
Klaus: Yeah, that sounds good!
Rudy: Perfect!
Chris: Cool. Thanks guys. These chats are fun. Especially the parts we can’t print.
More than 43′ long and 5,000 years old, the top of the table made by The Fenland Black Oak Project is the culmination of more than 30 years of research, trial and error in milling and drying bog oak.
Around 2012 I was building some cabinets into a sitting room off my clients’ kitchen when Paul, a member of the general contractor’s crew, struck up a conversation. “I just saw this amazing video about bog oak,” he said. “There’s this guy in England digging up 4,000-year-old trees and using them for furniture. I bet you know him.”
Know him? I had never even heard of bog oak and certainly had no idea who Paul might be talking about. That night I Googled “bog oak and furniture UK.” Up popped a link to an article by Derek Jones published in Furniture & Cabinetmaking magazine, on the website of Adamson & Low.
It was one of those small-world moments in which time and space collapse. Here I was, working in rural Indiana, suddenly transported back more than 30 years to the woodworking shop at the Isle of Ely College in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, where Hamish Low was a fellow student in a City & Guilds furniture making course. It was no surprise that Hamish had distinguished himself in the field – he’d been the most impressive student in our cohort. The culture of that classroom was brutal, with intense competition and merciless teasing; I used to swear that someday people would brag about their “low quality” furniture. I knew he’d gone on to train at West Dean, then worked for the Edward Barnsley Workshop. But beyond that, his adult life was a mystery to me. So I was interested to read that he had partnered with Nicola Adamson to build a business and a family, and was involved in pioneering work.
Nicola and Hamish, 2018.
Nicola Adamson and Hamish Low met in 1989 when she was a student in the two-year residential program at the John Makepeace School of Craftsmanship in Wood at Parnham House. Hamish was employed in Makepeace’s workshops as one of the craftsmen who turned the renowned designer’s drawings into three-dimensional furniture.
Makepeace wasn’t keen on having students mix with his cabinetmakers – students who were being trained in business and design might try to make off with an experienced cabinetmaker, robbing Makepeace of an invaluable member of his workforce. “Every student wanted a cabinetmaker to make their designs,” says Hamish, adding, “I was just head-hunted [by Nicola] for my cabinetmaking skills. Plus, Nicola had a whole load of machinery, so that was obviously part of her dowry! So it was basically a marriage of convenience.” Same old humor, even after three decades.
Bog oak ball and chain jewelry box, Hamish’s wedding gift to Nicola in 2000. The part that goes around your leg is laminated veneer with a knuckle joint.The chain is carved out of a solid block of plied bog oak, with alternating grain direction..
“I had started setting up a workshop in Kent,” Nicola adds. She planned to use the shop herself following her time at Parnham. For a couple of years, while she and Hamish had a long-distance relationship, she rented bench space to another student, until the couple started working together in 1992. “Business and I are just hopeless,” Hamish says. “Nicola has always run the business. Nicola is also more of a designer, so I was really shackled to the bench.” Another bit of hyperbole. They worked together until the birth of their first child, Hazel, in 1996.
Nicola has always lived in Kent, southeast of London. Her father was a motor engineer. Her mother was a housewife who also worked from home making lampshades and curtains commercially. In other words, “both [parents were] quite practical.” She went to the local comprehensive school, then to art college for two years before leaving for Parnham.
Initially, their work came by word of mouth. They did whatever clients wanted – furniture, as well as a few kitchens. One kitchen stands out – the cabinets were in burr oak, and the job was for an oast house. Oast houses are a traditional Kentish architectural form, built to dry hops for brewing beer. In recent decades, they’ve become popular for conversion to residential use. Circular in form, their roofs rise to a point, so anything built-in must be custom-designed. After Hamish and Nicola did that kitchen, the oast house clients called them back for a new commission each year. Gradually those clients’ friends began to hire them, as well. When clients had children, they wanted beds and desks “and stuff to go on uneven floors of Kentish barn houses,” Nicola adds. So while their clients were few in number, they had multiple commissions from each one.
“You only need one customer, one client, and if you’re successful they recommend you,” says Hamish. “It just seemed to snowball. We’ve always had a year’s work booked up ahead of us. When you work to commission, everything is always a compromise because [the clients are] paying the bill. You can’t really progress from that unless you make what you want and exhibit it. But it’s in your clients’ interest [for you to move on to your own work]. People are speculating on you more. You try to break into the art market.”
Early on, kitchens paid for everything. “It was a lot of work for two people,” Nicola says. “We designed it, made it, installed it, did all the plumbing and electrical; it was all-consuming.”
“People would spend a fortune on their kitchens,” notes Hamish, “and yet something that would become a family heirloom and become collectible, they didn’t seem to value it in the same way.”
Although the income from kitchens was good, they switched to freestanding furniture when their children were young – their son, Archie, was born in 2001. “The last [kitchen] we did, Archie was born in the middle of Hamish installing it,” says Nicola. Both children were born at home. “I had to call the client to say ‘I think Hamish ought to come home.’”
“It was just easier,” Hamish says, prompting Nicola to add, “I could just get down from the drawing board!”
Bog oak bench. Hamish made this piece before he had his drying technique worked out. The plank had twisted and also cupped significantly. He decided to embrace the defects. Before carving the seats he blasted it with crushed glass in a process like sandblasting, then he did the carving. The result: a lovely contrast between the rough texture of the main sections and the smoothness of the seats.
Backgammon set made with brown oak, burr oak, quartersawn and bog oak.
Part of a set of six bog oak tables.
Marquetry folding door screens inspired by the elevators in the Chrysler Building. The clients live in a 1930s Art Deco house and are Art Deco collectors.
Drinks cabinet in burr acacia and bog oak.
Since the beginning of their partnership, they’ve focused on using native hardwoods that would otherwise be wasted. Some of the timber came from their clients’ own trees. “We were quite unusual in that we would do everything, from tree to chair,” Hamish says. The client would be engaged in the entire process. “That was quite interesting to them; a lot of it is very old, established country tradition, and yet a lot of it was sophisticated technology.”
For example, he explains, air drying of oak has been done the same way for centuries. “It’s a very direct process.” But the “technology” would come from the new mills, such as Wood-Mizers. “We would use technology alongside established traditional approaches to drying timber. You start with a huge, sopping-wet liability and you turn it into a plank of wood. Everything we make starts with a plank of wood. It becomes the most usable, fantastic thing. And there’s a lot of technology involved in drying it in the kiln. The client was involved in all of that.”
So much of the beauty of wood can depend on how you cut the tree, he points out. “Amazing grain and visual impact can be created from pretty shit trees. If you’re a little bit savvy and a little bit arty about how you apply yourself to using very defective trees, you can produce some very beautiful things.”
This appreciation for the design potential of timber considered low grade or defective is what led Nicola and Hamish to their work with bog oak.
Bog Oak
Hamish grew up near Cambridge and attended the Isle of Ely College in Wisbech, a town built on the banks of the River Nene. Wisbech and its environs lie close to sea level in a marshy region known as the fens. At the end of the last Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago, the area was densely forested with gigantic oaks, yews and pines. As the Earth warmed, sea levels rose and the area between England’s south and eastern borders was cut off from the European mainland by what we now call the English Channel. In low-lying areas of the east coast, such as the fens, the forests were flooded. Trees fell into the silt, where the absence of oxygen led to their preservation.
In the 1600s, wealthy landowners hired Dutch engineers to drain the fens and build dams in hopes of increasing their agricultural acreage. Newly exposed to oxygen, the peat began to oxidize, shrink and slowly blow away. Drainage work began anew in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; the entire region is crisscrossed by drainage ditches today.
Hamish had known about bog oak for years, because he often visited an uncle who lived in Wisbech to go fishing in the fens. He’d see bog oaks just lying in the fields. Farmers hit the logs with expensive modern farming machinery, which causes damage, so they typically want to get rid of them. His friend Frank, whose father was the vicar in the nearby village of Methwold, was into photography and had shown him photos of bog oaks coming out of the fields. “They were very arty photographs,” Hamish remembers. He asked what happened to the trees. “They’re going on the fire,” Frank told him. Hamish decided he’d be interested in trying to process them. As he soon learned, “That is notoriously difficult.”
“Other, very famous makers were using [bog oak], he says – Makepeace, Alan Peters, Wendell Castle. But no one knew how to dry it, so they were using it as details and accents, such as inlays or handles.” He was convinced there must be some way to process the wood for structural use in furniture. “It’s such amazing material. We’re doing it with all the other native hardwoods,” he remembers thinking. “This is the mother of waste! It’s the holy grail of trying to use material that would otherwise be wasted. They burn it, for God’s sake!”
The newly unearthed Jubilee Oak.
Air-drying is too aggressive, he learned. Bog oaks must be dried under the most carefully controlled conditions. While most woodworkers kiln-dry for speed, Hamish dries bog oak in a kiln because it’s a far more precise way to manage the process. “You can take a thimble of water over a year, or ten gallons in a day.” His kilns never go above 35° Celsius (95° F). It’s a technique in which he has invested 30 years of trial and error – “mostly error!” he adds.
“It’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen,” he continues, describing the kind of scene where bog oaks tend to appear. “The soil is jet black. Flat. You turn up and there’s the most enormous lump of black mud sitting there and you think ‘Where the hell does this come from?’ He has watched bog oaks get unearthed with huge machinery; a machine operator puts the bucket into the ground, “and you can see the peat moving 20 meters away. It’s an extraordinary sight. They are so straight – such perfect specimen oak trees.”
“You’ve found it,” he continues. “Then you have to decide whether it’s worth investing in. You can dry bog oak and it can be soft and full of splits; or it can be super dense, as dense as ebony – 1,166 kilos per cubic meter.” (That’s roughly 72 pounds per cubic foot.) “And it’s figured, so it’s like a figured ebony if it’s quartersawn. It has a particularly fat medullary vessel.”
“A log can be rubbish or black gold. You have to identify whether it’s any good. They all look the same and weigh the same.” So, how do you tell? “You get a very sharp hand axe and chip away at it. If it’s any good, you’ll meet resistance; it will sound like it’s going to be good. It vibrates.” It’s a subtle way of knowing material, he explains. “What you don’t want: It’s soft and mushy and you can keep going; it doesn’t reverberate. You can feel it and hear it.”
You have to test the whole length of the log, because there are pretty much always pockets of rot. The really big logs were typically immersed unevenly in the peat, with parts exposed to the elements and subject to insect attack, splitting and fungal disease. Color is another good indicator, once you cut into the log, as is how far below sea level the log has been buried. Hamish looks for logs from 3′-4′ below sea level as a guide.
Generally speaking, he cuts logs with a chainsaw, in the field, into 12′ lengths; anything over 6′ is usable. He looks for those that look like a half moon, a segment of an orange – no heart, no pith, and so, no heart shake. Nicola explains: “The logs are often dug up half-moon-shaped, as one half has already rotted away.” They mill them to produce quartersawn planks for optimal figure and stability.
At times he has brought trees back in the round, planked them and put them in the kiln. Even boards close to each other in the log can vary dramatically – one will have splits all over; the next won’t, even though both have been processed in exactly the same way. This variation in quality is often due to part of the tree having been exposed to the elements, which causes it to split along its medullary vessels. To illustrate this, Hamish once put a tree back together after it was dried. While the “top” half of the log was all split, the bottom was perfect, because the bottom half had originally fallen into the silt. The part that had been exposed to oxygen “split like mad” before falling into the silt, whereupon the splits filled up to absolute fiber saturation, only to split again when dried.
In 2012, Hamish and his colleagues found the best bog oak they had ever encountered. The log was perfectly preserved, with not so much as a single pocket of rot or insect fly hole. And it was massive, at 43′. “You couldn’t even tell which end was which; it was so parallel,” he recalls. “It was only part of a much, much bigger tree.”
Nicola and Hamish call this image “18 people carrying a wet 43′ Black Oak plank.”
“I don’t think we should cut this,” Hamish decided on the spot. “We should keep it full-length.” He and his crew returned home empty-handed. The whole way back, Bob, a friend, neighbor and experienced woodworker who often travels with Hamish to the fens when collecting trunks, was saying, “You’re bloody mad. How are you going to lift it and dry it?” Hamish simply replied: “Imagine jet-black planks that are 13.2 meters long.” They subsequently named it the Jubilee Oak.
Tell me you’re not drooling as you look at this material.
Nicola recounts how they put together the people and resources required to turn this prized find into a piece of furniture – a table – worthy of its history and rareness. “After finding the Jubilee oak, Hamish contacted The Worshipful Company of Carpenters and subsequently The Building Crafts College (The Worshipful Company of Carpenters run this college) to help further this endeavor. Steve Cook and Mauro Dell’Orco were both students there at the time and have now become part of the long-term project. Steve became artist-in-residence at The Building Crafts College for a year after he completed his course and was also funded for a year by the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust to assist Hamish in the drying of the boards. Mauro, who previously had a career in architecture, has become the lead designer for The Fenland Black Oak Project.
They milled the tree in 2012 and dried it in a purpose-built kiln at The Building Crafts College. The drying took nine months. In 2019, with help from more than 20 students who gave up part of their summer holidays for the privilege of contributing to the project, Hamish painstakingly constructed the table’s top from four of the boards in the spacious and well-equipped workshop at the Building Crafts College.
The tabletop at the Building Crafts College.The joints between the boards are not glued. They’re a perfect fit (you can find information about the process on Instagram @fenlandblackoakproject).
In the intervening years, they had set up a charitable trust to manage and protect the boards. The trustees come from varying backgrounds – farming, accounting, film making, legal work and administration. Hamish was appointed chairman in 2020, after the previous chair stood down.
The tabletop is currently in a climate-controlled kiln while the group raises funds to complete the base, which will be fabricated in bronze, in recognition of the era during which the trees were standing. “There’s a whole team of people who have worked on the design,” Hamish says. “It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done, and the most amazing.” When I ask, in view of how integral Nicola is to their business, whether Hamish really means to use the first-person singular in that quote – “It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done” – Nicola replies: “I in theory am not involved in The Fenland Black Oak Project. It is very much Hamish’s other woman! That said, there does seem to be quite a big workload that comes my way!”
For the first 18 months after its completion, the Jubilee Oak table will be on display at Ely Cathedral, a spectacular Gothic structure on high ground overlooking the fields where the ancient oaks were buried. “By displaying this table at Ely Cathedral we are hoping to raise awareness amongst local land owners of the urgent need to preserve as much black oak as we can,” says Hamish. “It’s going to run out. We just want to save this best-ever example so people can see it when it’s all gone.”
Other Work
Nicola and Hamish are no longer working to commission. After 30 years of that, they’re ready to switch to spec work and are currently developing some innovative construction techniques. “In order to make something amazing, you’ve got to go back to the basics,” Hamish says. His motivation: “Let’s develop some construction techniques that will allow us to do something visually amazing! You can’t just decorate something in a different way. Who cares? You need to start again.” For now, this is all I can reveal, as they’re keeping the particulars of these techniques under wraps.
They make their home on a smallholding in Kent, where they live with cats, chickens and Paisley, their dog, and finished building their own workshop in 2020.
Hazel, Nicola, Archie and Hamish.
At this point we return to Hamish’s youth. His father worked as an underwriter for Lloyds of London. His mother was a school teacher who eventually became a headmistress. Hamish went to a Quaker school, Sibford Ferris, that had a good woodworking department.
“I was severely dyslexic,” he says. “Still am. Basically I was hopeless at school until we were allowed in the woodwork shop. The woodwork teacher said, ‘You’re good at this!’ This useless pupil was good at something.”
“Don’t ever underestimate a craftsman,” he emphasizes, “because they’re highly disciplined, highly trained, very determined individuals. I’m a real advocate of traditional apprenticeships. I don’t think you could be good at this job other than by doing it as an apprenticeship. Doing it as an apprenticeship teaches you humility. One of the people I worked with said, ‘Somebody who never made a mistake never made anything.’ Processing bog oak went so wrong, so often; you could take the view that it’s a waste of time. Or you can say, ‘I’ve applied myself to this in the wrong way, so what can I do to do it right?’ A craftsman accepts that they’ve made a mistake. Then, rather than saying, ‘That’s a stupid idea,’ or ‘This is impossible,’ they say ‘What did I do wrong and what have I got to do to make it work?’”
With bog oak, Hamish applied himself to this question for 30 years and now says, “You only have to get it right a couple of times for it to show you that this is worth it.”
If you’d like to contribute to The Fenland Black Oak project, you can do so here. All contributors donating £1,000 or more will have their names carved into the underside of The Jubilee Oak top as a reminder to future generations of this shared vision.
Paisley, whomNicola calls “the bog oak inspector.”
This week I’ve thrown myself into production for Crucible Tool along with help from Megan Fitzpatrick and Brendan Gaffney. Today, Megan and I finished up 600 card scrapers and sent them to the warehouse. They should be for sale by the end of the week – so take this as fair warning.
We have a new jig for machining the scrapers in a CNC mill. This speeds the process and eliminates the abrasive polishing of the edges. That’s a win for everyone’s lungs (and fire suppression equipment). Abrading metal blows. And burns.
Speaking of abrasives, during the last month, we’ve redesigned the way we make hammer heads to reduce – and almost eliminate – the abrasive grinding processes to make the heads for our lump hammers.
I know that some of you simply want your hammers and don’t care about how they’re made. If that’s you, know that we should have a batch of hammers for sale next week. You can now go back to your cat videos.
For those interested in how your tools are made, here’s what we’ve been up to. When we started making the hammers we machined the heads and then had five abrasive processes to finish them. We used three grits on the flat faces and two on the striking faces.
With the magic of changing the tool paths, we’re down to one abrasive process. We’re hoping to eliminate that one as well and just have a little power buffing.
The heads won’t look different to the naked eye. All the facets are the same. The striking faces are the same dome shape. But the surfaces look a wee bit different under a loupe. I think they look better.
Note: After five minutes of hard use, all our hammers look about the same.
All these changes will make the heads easier to make. And it’s safer for the machine operators. So thanks for your patience (like you had a choice).
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Before you email John and Meghan: No, we’re not working on dividers. That tool has been suspended until it can be redesigned.