With any luck, our first batch of Crucible Dividers (Type 2) will go up for sale in our store in the coming week for $110 plus domestic shipping.
The dividers are made from an alloy steel (about 28-30 on the Rockwell C scale in hardness). All the components are made in the United States – Kentucky and Tennessee. And the dividers are hand-assembled here in the Bluegrass State. You can adjust the friction on the dividers with a No. 8 screwdriver. This allows you to loosen them for gross adjustments, increase the friction so you can adjust them one-handed, and lock them – hard – in place.
During the last six months, we posted snapshots of these dividers on Instagram as we developed the tool. We received a lot of questions. Here are some of the good ones, with our answers.
Q: How are these dividers different from your Improved Pattern Dividers, which you no longer sell?
A: The Improved Pattern Dividers required a lot of handwork to construct and tune. And we never got the price/profitiability working for us. The Type 2 dividers have the same basic silhouette as the previous model, but they were redesigned from the ground up. Our goal was to make dividers that are attractive, fully functional and affordable. As with everything we make, we insisted they be made in the USA. And we wanted to be able to make a lot of them so they aren’t fetishized.
Q. Surely you had to cut corners to make them $110 (a $75 reduction in price).
A: To be honest, yes. The earlier design was hand finished on a precision belt grinder. They were shiny. The new dividers are finished with a different process that does not require handwork and leaves a gray, matte surface. They are not as flashy and look more like a workaday tool.
Q: So they are uglier?
A: We don’t think so. It’s just a slightly different aesthetic. The fit of the parts on these new dividers is excellent out of the mill. We completely redesigned the hinge to use a standard driver. Our goal was to have the dividers look like what you would get from Stanley (or the other top-line makers) in the early 20th century – the heyday. Not a custom tool. There are small milling marks on our dividers that show how they were made. Nothing is mirror polished. But boy, do they work well.
Q: Are they stainless steel?
A; No. They are made from alloy steel. They come oiled and in a plastic VCI bag to resist corrosion. When you put them away in your tool chest, we recommend you first wipe them down with an oily rag to prevent rust.
Q: Do I need to sharpen them?
A: The dividers come sharp – sharp enough for general woodwork. If they every become dull, you can rub the tips on some #220-grit sandpaper to refresh the points.
Q: Are you going to make an attachment that will convert the dividers into a compass?
A: That is not our plan. We like to have our tools do one thing and do it well.
Q: Are you going to make other sizes of dividers?
A: A second size is in the works. I can’t say more than that at this point.
Q: Why is the packaging so basic? Wouldn’t it be better to ship them in a custom box?
A: With every item we make, our goal is to use the least amount of packaging. Instead of spending $5 to $7 on packaging that will induce breathless “unboxing videos,” we’d rather keep the price low and put all the money into making the tool. It doesn’t matter if you are left-wing, right-wing or chicken-wing, making elaborate boxes that will be thrown away is wasteful. Plus, we have no interest in feeding the collector market and its creepy affection for original packaging.
A: Not at first. We need to make a lot of them to recoup our investment in these tools, and to figure out how to make them efficiently. After we can make them reliably, we hope to sell them elsewhere.
If you aren’t sure if you like them, we’ll have some on display at our Aug. 7 Open Day (10 a.m to 5 p.m.) at the storefront in Covington, Ky. Come try them out.
We still have a fairly large batch of our “Nothing Without Labour” bandanas to sell. The bandanas come with five of our beefy shop pencils for $33. These bandanas are made by One Feather Press, and they are the nicest ones we have found.
The first round of bandanas sold out in three hours, which is crazy I know. We are going to put this batch on sale in our store at noon (Eastern) on Saturday, July 3.
The good news is we have more bandanas in the works. And we are currently manufacturing Shop Pencil: Type 6 (maybe Type 7) and have figured out a nice way to sell five of them in a box as a standalone product. These pencils are not mere promotional items with cheap lead and rubbery wood. We have spent a lot of effort getting these right for woodworking (i.e. I have a whole cabinet filled with almost-right pencils. Guess what my sisters are getting for Christmas….)
The tool walls are also big, heavy dust covers for the books.
In many of the picture of the Lost Art Press shop our “tool walls” show up. They’re hard to avoid, given that they’re in back of Christopher Schwarz’s workbench, and take up half of the back wall of the shop. And every time they show up, we get questions about them – so here are some answers.
The walls are actually heavy wooden sleeves that fit over three “boarded bookcases” (from Chris’s “The Anarchist’s Design Book“), made from pieces of not-great cherry that we’d had for at least a decade.
The walls are simply enough pieces of 3/4″-thick (or thereabouts) cherry butted together (with a small gap – about a dime’s width) to make up the width of the bookcases (which are about 36″ wide), long enough so that they leave a small gap at the bottom (of about 1″) to allow access underneath to lift.
The battens across the front are clinch-nailed to the vertical boards; those suckers aren’t going anywhere.
Clinch-nailed across the bottom on each wall is a piece of 3/4″ cherry, with another flush to the top; these hold the vertical boards in place. Glued and screwed to the back edge of the top is a panel that spans the top of the bookcase plus 3/4″ (3/4″ x 14-1/2″ x 36), with another piece (about 4″ wide) glued and screwed to it that sleeves over the back.
Here you can see the screwed-on triangles and back.
At the two front corners are two triangles (gussets?) screwed in place with (quelle horreur) Pozidriv (I think) screws. The ones on the sides are countersunk; the ones on the top are not. And I’m fairly certain the boards were used fresh out of the powered planer. In other words, these are pretty much slapped together out of available stock. And we finished them with two coats of shellac. But they hold a lot of tools and they look nice, as long as you don’t examine them too closely. We add a new nail or Shaker peg whenever a new tool needs a tool-wall home. Or we make a simple rack if that’s the best storage solution, and screw that to the wall.
The hammer corral. (Yes, Chris clocked the Phillips screws.)
Please note that only our non-personal tools live on these walls. If it’s hanging out in the open, it’s fair game for students, contractors, spouses… The stuff we don’t want people to use? Stashed in our tool chests.
The screwdriver rack.
I argued for some kind of hinged or sliding doors, so that the bookcases behind the tools would be easier to access, but I lost (so if I have to get into one of the bookcases, Chris has to help me – I can’t lift those myself…and Chris lifts them by himself only if absolutely necessary). For as often as we need to remove the walls, it was too much work/trouble. So, when we have an open house and need to access the bookcases (where we display the Lost Art Press books), we remove the tools from their various hooks, nails and pegs, lift the walls off the bookcases and stow them in the back, then hang the tools back on the walls until we’re ready to cover up the books again. Not only does this give us a place to store the shared tools, it protects the books from dust and workshop bruises.
And come Saturday, Aug. 7, 2021, we’ll be lifting off all three walls for the first time since December 2019 if memory serves – from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. that day will be our first open house in more than a year, and we hope to see you here!
Nancy Hiller’s “Shop Tails,” a companion book of essays to “Making Things Work,” is in the design phase. “Shop Tails” is different from “Making Things Work” in that it is structured around the animals that have come in and out of Nancy’s life, with each chapter focusing on a different one (or several different ones). The animal tales are sandwiched between some serious existential and biographical content provoked by her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and all of it is interwoven with true stories about non-human animals, in addition to reflections on how much they have taught her about life, love, illness, expectations, parenting, death and pudding.
In the weeks to come we will be sharing several excerpts from this remarkable book to give you insight into the essays’ depth, humor and the range of topics explored, all from the perspective of a woman who has spent most of her life as a cabinetmaker, period furniture maker and author, making things work while discovering her worth.
Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 6: “Oscar.” Enjoy!
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
Kent was adamant that I should cover the costs of college myself. I wouldn’t have had it any other way; I’ve always been stubborn and independent. I applied for every scholarship, grant and teaching assistantship available and entered essays in every contest. By the time I graduated in 1993, I’d paid for it all, in large part because tuition was still far more affordable than it is today. I had also kept up with the demands of our business: design work, drawing, bookkeeping and helping Kent with installations.
Living in a wooded part of Brown County made Oscar easy to care for. All we had to do was open the door, and he could take himself up the hill for a quick run, or out to the ravine to do his business. Now that we had a real home, I went into full-on domestic mode in my spare time, building new cabinets with ash faces to replace the generic dark-stained oak ones the previous homeowners had bought from a building-supply store. We tore out the “butcher-block” laminate counters and installed white laminate with a solid ash edge (again, it was the ’90s). While Kent was on a hiking trip out west I pulled out the same generic oak cabinets in the dressing area just off our bedroom and replaced them with a vanity designed after the circa-1815 counter at the Shaker Museum in Old Chatham, N.Y., pictured in June Sprigg’s book “Shaker Design.” I painted it pale blue, added a solid maple top and plumbed in my first sink, following the page of directions that came in the box with the faucet. I made flower beds in front of the house, digging compost and manure into the hard-packed clay while Oscar rolled in the grass and occasionally trotted off to investigate a rustling at the edge of the forest.
Oscar knew he was an integral member of our family. We made him hamburgers with a celebratory candle for his birthday every year and homemade Christmas crackers with Milk Bones inside for the holidays. We took him with us on trips to visit my family in Florida. We took him hiking. On the rare occasions when I joined Kent for a paddle, we put him with us in the canoe. I loved knowing that after so many years of living in small apartments where he had been cooped up alone all day while I was at work, he finally had the perfect home.
Our marriage, though, was less happy. I quickly became so consumed by my studies that Kent felt neglected. I gave him less and less attention as I devoted every available moment to reading and writing. Instead of really listening to his complaints and talking about what might make him feel less lonely, I told him to stop being needy. It didn’t even occur to me at the time that my obsession with excelling in my studies was fueled by a deep-seated urge to prove my own worth.
I had already decided to go on to graduate school and applied for fellowships to fund that project when we got a commission for a large armoire in hard maple. I can’t recall the exact dimensions, but this thing was big – around 42 inches wide and at least 6 feet tall, with a pair of massive doors. When delivery day arrived, we removed the doors and drove it to our clients’ house. “I’m so happy you’re delivering it, and not a moving company,” said the wife. “I know you’ll take more care with the wallpaper on the stairs.”
Kent took the top position, with me below. I have always found it easier to bear weight from below than to be the one on top, leaning over a massive piece of furniture while walking backwards up a flight of stairs. The staircase had a couple of steps at the bottom, then a dog-leg landing before the main flight. After we’d maneuvered the beast around the turn, I repositioned myself for the long haul; to push with my shoulders, I had to bend my head sharply to the left, which immediately felt like a bad idea. “Be careful of the wallpaper!” our client reminded us. I powered through. We re-hung the doors, adjusted the piece so it was level and left with a check.
About a week later I was giving Oscar a bath, something he reluctantly allowed me to do. It was late summer, 1993; my first semester of grad school had begun. I leaned over the tub, wrapped Oscar in a towel and lifted him out. I felt a click in my upper back but thought nothing of it and carried on with the rest of the day.
A burning ache developed in my upper right back, between my shoulder blade and spine. Over-the-counter painkillers took off the edge, but the pain was unrelenting. One night I awoke around 2 a.m. feeling as though a stick was wedged in my esophagus. It hurt like crazy, but more troubling to me was the thought that one of my ribs might somehow have become dislodged and was poking into my throat. (I have a vivid imagination. Anything can happen within the invisible recesses of the body.) I woke Kent up and said I needed to go to the hospital. “You can drive yourself,” he replied. Not wanting to argue – time seemed of the essence – I got up, dressed and headed to town. It was pitch-black out; I was driving myself to the emergency room in tears, terrified about what might have gone wrong in my body and hurt by Kent’s unwillingness to go with me.
An X-ray showed no apparent injury to the ribs or spine, so the doctor prescribed a muscle relaxer and sent me home.
Figure 8.1. Cross section of a board illustrating the three zones used to describe a moisture gradient, i.e., the core, intermediate zone and the shell. This is convenient but there aren’t actually distinct lines between each zone.
Richard Jones has spent his entire life as a professional woodworker and has dedicated himself to researching the technical details of wood in great depth, this material being the woodworker’s most important resource. The result is “Cut & Dried: A Woodworker’s Guide to Timber Technology” (from which the information below is an excerpt). In this book, Richard explores every aspect of the tree and its wood, from how it grows to how it is then cut, dried and delivered to your workshop.
In section 6.4 the drying and rewetting of wood was illustrated by using a sponge or towel to represent wood. An extension of this analogy serves as a preliminary introduction to terminology about the wood-seasoning process. Let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that you soak a very large and thick bath towel in a water bath. Lift up the sopping towel and wring it out as thoroughly as possible. Let us also assume you have the unlikely physical ability to wring out every drop of loose (free) water in the towel so the only water left is that bound within its fibres. This towel now stands for wood commonly and erroneously described as being at fibre saturation point (FSP), although the comments on FSP made in section 6.5 should be borne in mind. Fold the towel up three or four times into a long large sausage and hang it over a washing line. It’s a cool, dull, still, overcast day with, perhaps, intermittent, very light drizzle.
The towel will barely dry any further in the described weather conditions until either a breeze starts, the sun comes out or both changes happen together. It’s common knowledge that even if the sun doesn’t come out but a breeze starts the bundled-up towel will dry. Similarly, if there’s no breeze but the sun comes out the additional warmth causes water to evaporate from the towel’s fibres. In both cases described, the towel will eventually dry through. Put the two factors together, i.e., warmth and moving air, and the towel dries more rapidly than it will with either just a breeze or just extra warmth. Within the bundled-up drying towel there is a moisture gradient: As the towel dries it remains wetter in the middle of the bundle than near the surface. Assuming drying continues, the moisture content within the towel gradually evens out until it has an equal moisture content all through.
Without really knowing any science or terminology we know how to dry clothes quickly. Options include hanging them on a washing line on a warm, lightly breezy, sunny day, putting them out on a dull but dry and windy day, or hanging them over a warm radiator, and so on. Clothes fully opened and pegged on a line dry much quicker than clothes bunched up tightly.
What applies to drying clothes has similarities to the conditions that will dry wood. To dry wood quicker, heat air and move the hot air over it, although with wood, when it has dried to approximately 20 percent MC, the primary drivers for further drying are air temperature and humidity, not the speed at which the air passes over the wood. Thin boards dry faster than thick boards, which is analogous to opening clothes out to dry rather than leaving them bunched up. Fast drying of wood with very hot dry air will certainly accomplish the task, but it usually comes with an unacceptable price, i.e., degradation of one sort or another such as splitting, surface checking, case-hardening18, collapse (aka core collapse), honeycombing etc., making the wood unusable and unsellable. It’s imperative to control the speed at which wood dries in order to produce an acceptable end product.
The air’s RH must be low enough to absorb more water vapour. Air at 100 percent RH cannot absorb any more water vapour. Wet wood in RH conditions like this is comparable to my earlier description of hanging washing out to dry on a cool, damp, intermittently drizzly day – the clothes dry very slowly.
Warm air transfers heat to the wood causing the moisture in it to evaporate into the air. Again, the RH of the air must be low enough to absorb the water vapour given off by the wood. Drying kilns add warm air to the drying chamber, which transfers heat energy to both the wood and the water within it. The difference in temperature between the introduced dry air and the wet wood is often, but not always, quite small at the beginning of the kilning process. Water in the wood converts to vapour and evaporates through the wood surface into the air introduced into the drying chamber. The air temperature within a kiln is high, e.g., at stages in the wood drying process temperatures of 65.5° C (150° F) or more are used. At this temperature if the air stays at 70 percent RH it will eventually dry wood to approximately 10.5 percent MC (see figure 8.2).
If the air becomes too humid to dry the wood effectively, one of two things must happen for the wood to continue drying. First, further raising the temperature of the air in the kiln reduces its RH. Hotter air is capable of holding additional moisture released from the wood. Second, moving the humid air out of the drying chamber and replacing it with drier air will continue the drying process. Raising the temperature of the air already in the chamber is the cheapest option, but too high a temperature may lead to faults in the wood, particularly in some species more than others, e.g., surface checking as described earlier.
As timber dries, a moisture gradient develops inside the wood much like the earlier-described folded-up towel hanging over a washing line. In a wood-drying kiln where air temperatures are artificially high, generally the greater the temperature of the air acting on the wood, the steeper the moisture gradient within it, and moisture moves out of the wood faster. This also leads to faster evaporation of moisture from the surface of wood. Conversely, when wood is air dried and therefore experiences normal weather conditions, or if the wood is in service in a typical environment found in habitable buildings, RH is the primary controller of the steepness of the wood’s moisture gradient – air temperature in these circumstances has only a small effect.
For green wet wood to dry, as freshly milled boards or planks, for example, air must be moving to carry moisture away from the wood’s surface; this creates a place for the water deeper in the wood to migrate to, where it will also be carried away by the flow of air. If only a small volume of stagnant dry air surrounds wet wood, that air quickly becomes fully saturated with evaporated water. At that point no further drying can occur until that pocket of air moves away and is replaced by drier air.
Moving air carries moisture away from the wood’s exterior, thus drying the wood. But the air molecules adjacent to the wood surface stick to it. Air molecules just above the surface collide with the stuck air molecules and their movement is disrupted and slowed down. In turn, these air molecules impede the flow of air molecules just above them. As distance from the wood surface increases, the collisions diminish until air movement is unimpeded and becomes free flowing. In effect there is a thin layer of viscous “fluid” near the surface where velocity changes from zero at the surface to free flowing some distance away from it. “Engineers call this layer the boundary layer because it occurs on the boundary of the fluid.”19 (Benson, 2009, p 1) Within the boundary layer next to the wood the air is wetter (because it’s picked up moisture from the wood) and travels slower than the air above the boundary layer – it tends to hold the moisture taken from the wood close to the wood’s surface. A faster-moving air stream reduces the effect of the boundary layer and it sweeps away the damp air with its high-vapour pressure. The damp air is replaced with new drier air, i.e. air with a lower vapour pressure better able to absorb further moisture from the wood.
Whether wood is air dried or kiln dried the air entering the wood stack from one end has a lower RH than the air leaving the stack at the far end. Moving air leaving a stack of drying wood is cooler than the air entering it. The air cools as it transfers heat to the wood, thus enabling the drying process. If the air continuously passes through a stack of wood in one direction, the wood at the “upwind” end of the stack always dries faster than the wood at the “downwind” end. This results in unevenly dried planks of wood where the downwind end of a stack might be 3 percent or 4 percent wetter than the upwind side. In more extreme cases, the difference in moisture content between the upwind and downwind side of a stack may be 8 percent to 10 percent MC if the wood is very wet at the start of the drying process – in this case one possible result is the stack of wood may lean toward the drier side. This effect is more evident in wide stacks of wood, e.g., greater than about 2 metres (~6′), than in narrow stacks. Natural changes in wind direction and speed cancel out this effect in stacks of air-dried wood. It is only if a kiln operator is drying a wide stack of wood, or some particularly difficult to dry woods, that there is a real need to regularly alternate the air flow direction within the chamber. To achieve this, the fan blade rotation is reversed at evenly spaced intervals, e.g., every two hours, four hours, 12 hours etc. This upwind and downwind disparity in the drying ability of moving air in a stack of wood limits the size of a stickered pile of planks. This is especially the case with air drying where the yard owner really has less control over temperature, wind speed or wind direction. However, it should be noted that air velocity in either a kiln or in an air-drying wood pile is most important at the initial drying stage of wet wood because of its role in carrying away moisture from the wood surface. As the wood dries the significance of air movement gradually diminishes until the wood reaches about 20 percent MC. At this MC the primary critical factors for further drying are humidity and temperature, with the importance of air movement reducing significantly the drier the wood becomes.
Figure 8.2. North American research showing the relationship between the EMC of (primarily) Sitka spruce samples in response to a range of temperature and atmospheric RH conditions.
