Lost Art Press

Buying Wood by the Pound

Posted on by Lost Art Press

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from “The Anarchist’s Workbench,” which you can download for free here. This excerpt discusses one way to choose wood for your workbench: its cost per pound.

Yellow pine, Hot Springs, Ark.
After years of working with yellow pine on our Arkansas farm, I convinced myself it was an ideal wood for a workbench.

Let’s Talk About Weight
When you compare the weights of species, you need to make sure the comparisons are all at the same moisture content (12 percent is the typical comparison unit). You can compare the density of a species by comparing its “specific gravity,” which is a method that compares the weight to a cubic meter of water. Or you can look at the average dried weight of a cubic foot of the wood (also at 12 percent moisture content).

These are useful, but I think you can also make some important comparisons by factoring in the local price of a species. It’s like buying meat at the butcher. Is rib eye ritzier than hamburger? The price per pound helps us answer that question (and yes, it is).

For example, a cubic foot of hard maple consists of 12 board feet of maple. If maple is $4.73 a board foot, then a cubic foot of maple costs $56.76. That cubic foot weighs 44 lbs. Or $1.29/pound.

Longleaf pine (a yellow pine) is 78 cents a board foot (for No. 1 grade), so a cubic foot costs $9.40. That cubic foot weighs 41 lbs. Or a remarkably cheap 23 cents per pound.

Because I live to poke fun at Ipe, let’s run those numbers. Ipe costs $17 a board foot, so a cubic foot costs $204. That cubic foot weighs 69 lbs. So Ipe is $2.96/pound. Not a great deal at the wood butcher’s.



The chart compares some of the common U.S. hardwoods and softwoods using typical Midwestern retail prices circa 2020 (this is not wholesale or trade pricing). This cost-per-pound calculation is simple to do yourself using your local prices.

Here’s how: Take your cost per board foot (use 8/4 prices) and multiply that by 12. That’s the cost for a cubic foot. Now divide that number by the weight of a cubic foot of that species (a statistic that is easily found in books and online). The result is the cost per pound.

$175 workbench after 20 years of use, 2020
The yellow pine in this workbench is now about as hard as maple and moves little with the seasons.

Do the Math
From the chart, ash looks like a good choice among the hardwoods. The problem with that assessment is that by the time you are reading this book, white ash might be almost extinct. The emerald ash borer has devastated the ash forests in the United States. So, you might not be able to buy it at any price. And if you do find it, you want to ensure it hasn’t rotted. We have been plagued by punky ash for the last few years as the sawyers have milled up trees that have been standing dead.

Aside from ash, poplar and the maples are a great bang for the buck. Both are easy to work, readily available and fairly cheap by the pound. I’ve made workbenches using all three species and think they’re fine. Neither is considered a noble species for a workbench, like European beech. But as long as you aren’t out to impress anyone, go for it. You’ll have no problem finding those species at almost any lumberyard in America.

But if you want to go full redneck, read on.

Softwoods that are used for structural members in home construction – the yellow pines, Douglas fir, hemlock and some spruces – are an outstanding value. They are heavy, cheap and readily available at any lumberyard. After working with them most of my life in residential construction and workbench building, they remain my No. 1 choice for workbenches.

Here’s why: Anyone can buy it. You don’t have to search out a specialty lumberyard or set up a commercial account. Just go to the home center if you want (though I always prefer family lumberyards). They have plenty.

Also important: They have plenty. A typical home center or family lumberyard will have hundreds of planks of 2x material in the racks on any given day – everything from 2x6s to 2x12s – with lengths from 8′ to 16′. At a home center, you can spend hours sifting through the racks to find the best boards – the employees don’t care. At a family lumberyard it pays to ask permission (they will sometimes be happy to help you). Either way, just be sure to restack the lumber nicer than you found it.

Here’s another buying tip: Some lumberyard chains carry No. 2 yellow pine, others carry No. 1. The price difference is minimal, but the quality isn’t. No. 1 is worth the extra nickels. If you find a yard that deals in No. 1, you might be able to buy all the wood for your bench in one swoop. If you buy No. 2, you might have to hit all the yards in your town, county or region.

Yellow pine is easy to work. I’ve built yellow pine workbenches using only hand tools, and using a full-on machine shop. It’s friendly stuff. Yes, there can be some knots, but if you pick your boards with care, you’ll have almost none of those to deal with.

So there must be disadvantages. Yes, but they are slight. Construction lumber is sold in a wetter state than hardwood lumber.

While hardwoods are typically sold at about 12 percent moisture content (or at equilibrium with some environment) that is not the case with construction lumber. It is wetter.

How wet? In the Midwest it might be 15-20 percent moisture content. On the West Coast, it might be even wetter (as in wet enough to ooze and squirt water). So, you need to gather up what you need to build your bench, cut it to rough length, stack it and wait a bit.

It might also be “case hardened” because it was kiln dried too quickly. When lumber is rushed through a kiln it can develop tension that is released when you cut it. It’s particularly obvious when you rip a board. Sometimes the wood will pinch so hard on a blade it will stop a 3-horsepower table saw like pinching out a candle.

How do you deal with this? It’s not difficult.

  1. Plan to cut things a bit over-wide. And have some wooden wedges handy to keep the kerf open when you rip the wood. After that first rip, a case-hardened board will usually lose all of its fight.
  2. Make your rip cut to a shallow depth at first – less than half the thickness of the board. Then raise the blade, flip the board end-over-end and finish the rip.

The final disadvantage: Softwoods are uber-redneck. No one is going to “ooh and ahh” over your choice of yellow pine. It’s the mullet of the forest.

The True Cost of Yellow Pine per Pound
I’m not a trusting soul. After I calculated the cost of yellow pine per pound (23 cents) based on published statistics, I decided to see if that worked in the real world. So, I weighed several 2x12x8s and came up with an average weight of 30.4 pounds each.

These were boards I’d had in my shop for months, so they had likely lost some of their water weight (as all softwoods do). Plus, the boards in this particular pile were fairly average – not full of sap or with lots of heavy summerwood. In other words, they were a bit on the lightweight side.

Each of these boards cost $8.81 each, so that’s 29 cents per pound – about 6 cents per pound more expensive than the published weight tables indicate. But still a great deal.

I wondered, how did that work out after surfacing the boards and gluing them up? What was the cost per pound of “finished” yellow pine?

Here’s how I calculated that. The benchtop for the workbench at the end of this book is made from nine 2x12s, ripped in half, glued up and planed so the top is 5″ thick. Nine 2×12 x 8s cost $79.29. After gluing up the top, I managed to weigh it on a heavy-duty scale we use for shipping crates. The top weighed 240 pounds. That’s 33 cents per pound. Still a bargain (if you ask me).

— Christopher Schwarz

Ho Boy!

Posted on by Kara Uhl
Dick Proenneke with his snowshoes, February 1993. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.

This week 28 years ago Dick Proenneke was rolling pell-mell down a mountain steep as a cow’s face.

Editing this book has been so much fun, in part because of what we didn’t edit. Dick made it very clear that he did not want his journal entries edited, which Monroe Robinson has respected. The result? Intimacy.

We editors love to tidy things up. Here at Lost Art Press we have our own house style followed by AP Style and Merriam-Webster. We like consistency. Our goal is to create smooth and easy reading, much like the experience of driving on a freshly paved stretch of road. No one likes to hit a pothole while admiring the scenery.

That said, voice is scenery. We respect voice. We also know that as much as we find comfort in lines drawn on a map, sometimes turning off the highway and onto a bumpy dirt road provides the best view.

So much of this book is edited – the photos, the illustrations, Monroe’s text, the front matter, the back matter, the maps, and even the journal entries chosen and the order in which they appear. But Dick’s words, for the most part, are not. And so we are gifted with porkypines (porcupines). Hurdy gurdy drill (egg-beater drill). Purty (pretty). Cuttingest machine (a tool that is performing its job well).

Much of this book is about the things Dick made from found materials while living alone in Alaska. But every once in a while Monroe includes a gem of a journal entry such as the one below. Once you catch onto the rhythm of Dick’s writing style you find yourself with him, circling the mt. (mountain), hiking in deeper snow than expected, noting the tracks of wolves, climbing, sliding, lamenting snow in mittens and a lost walking stick, surviving (not “sorry charley” this time!), and warming and writing by the fire. Each journal entry is a delightful detour down a dirt road.

The illustrations for this book by Elin Price are complete and Linda Watts, our designer, is already working on Chapter 6 out of 9. We can’t wait to share this book with you, a deep dive into Dick’s life, misspellings and all.

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

March 15, 1993:

Clear, Calm and -8°.

Clear and stars looking down, it could get pretty cool tonight. The half gallon carton of vanilla ice cream set on the table out front and morning would find it about right for dishing it out. Zero degrees makes soft ice cream.

The fire was buried the whole night. I would have coals but puny ones. During breakfast I knew what I was going to do today. A good day to circle the mt. I had suggested it to Leon [Alsworth] and he said we will have to go on snowshoes. Maybe next week he could go but I was sure he wouldn’t. On those little Sherpa aluminum and plastic snowshoes I wouldn’t go. Only thing good about them is the ice claws for mt. travel. It was 9.30 when I closed the door. I would pack my snowshoes to the mouth of Low Pass creek. I had the Olympus OM1n with 50 and 28 mm lens. I was dressed cool for it would be a warm three hrs getting to the divide. That last 400 feet of elevation is as steep as a cows face.

I took a few frames from the mouth of Low Pass creek and then headed for the pass. No sign of porkypines at their winter home and now I wouldn’t know where to find one. I see no tracks.

I was breaking a deeper trail than I had expected. It would be a good climb up the trench to the pass. Old tracks of a wolverine headed or coming from the pass. I have seen porkypines in the pass making that slow hike to the Kijik country. In due time I was up there enjoying the view back down and across the lake. Lots of snow up there and I believe there is more snow in the bottom behind gold ridge than I have ever seen there. 1,700 feet from the lake is the gain in elevation when you climb to the pass. From the pass it is a gain of 1,300 feet to the summit where I would cross. No tracks not one as I traveled on. The fresh last snow laid like a cotton bat and about 6 inches deep on top of the settled snow pack. Just before I got to that last very steep pitch to the divide I came to a reasonably fresh wolf track coming down from the high ridge. Later I would see that track climbing up 1st canyon. So wolves cross there some times and so do wolverine for today I would see a wolverine track climbing to the 3,000 ft. ridge.

At last I stood at the base of that 400 ft. very steep climb. I would have to climb it without snowshoes so I put them on the light pack frame with my camera gear. The snow more than shoe pac deep but a base that was soft enough to give good traction. Traverse back and forth across a width of a couple hundred feet of the mt. Climb at a comfortable angle. Slow but steady does it and in due time I was up near the eye in the mt. I had looked for it as I climbed from Low Pass but couldn’t spot it. I found the snow so deep only a little of the eye was visible. At last I stood on the divide and the time a quarter till three. It had taken me more than five hrs from my cabin to the top 3,000 ft. up.

The sun was bright and a cool breeze had me looking for sun on the protected side of the ridge. I shot a few frames and ate my sourdough sadwich and one of Sis’s good cookies. Now it was down hill all the way to my cabin and about 2 hrs. steady going to get there. Steep for the 1st quarter mile. Now I learned what I once knew. Crampons can be necessary for that 1st quarter for the snow can be too hard to kick steps. Right there I should have turned back and down where I had climbed. I expected it to get better a hundred feet down. There is hard wind pack near the top. To play it safe I moved in the clear of rock outcrops below.            

To lose footing and go pell mell down a steep pitch and hit a rock will spoil your day, but good. I was in the clear but footing was poor. If I started I wouldn’t stop for about 200 yds. And I started. I was using both hands on my good walking stick for a brake. Faster and faster and it was a pretty rough slide. My pack kept me from staying on my back and when I went side wise I started to roll. Ho Boy! All I could see was snow and blue sky revolving at a terrific rate. Presently I slowed and stopped. It had been the six inches of loose snow I was expecting higher up. It is surprising how much snow gets inside a tumble down the mt. My mittens were full. Snow inside my jacket. Didn’t lose my Bean cap with the ear flaps over my ears. Still had my pack on for I had hooked the rubber link across my chest. First thing I noticed was that my right upper arm pained a little. If it hurt so soon it wouldn’t hurt a lot more tomorrow. Legs were ok and that was good. If I had broken a leg it would be “sorry charley” you didn’t make it. Tonight would be well below zero. So I could put up with a sore arm and not complain. I discovered that I had lost my good walking stick. I looked for sign of it above and below. Even tried to climb but after climbing 50 feet I slid down 25. Tried again and just couldn’t get traction. So I got organized and headed down the mt. in the loose 6-8 inches of snow. When the incline flattened a bit I put on my snowshoes and came down the water course from the base of the steep going. I hadn’t gone far when I met a wolf track climbing to the divide. It was short steps and feet making drag marks in the loose snow for the wolf. Headed for the Kijik for I hadn’t seen tracks in the pass coming to the upper lake. Down, down but not so steep that I would lose control on snowshoes. At times I would support my right arm with my left hand. It was uncomfortable hanging free. Lower I came to a wolverine track climbing so it was going over the top. I find mr. wolverine just doesn’t seem to care how steep or rough it is. He doesn’t seem to appreciate an easy route.

Hope creek at last and from 1st canyon down it was nice going. Wished for my walking stick but managed without it. It was going to take just about 2 hrs. from the divide to my cabin and the sun would be just about ready to set directly behind the Pyramid mt.

I opened the cabin door and learn’d Leon had been here. A bag containing letters a package and two batteries for my Bendix “King” radio. I still had a very few coals under the ashes and fine stuff would have a fire going quickly. I wanted to auger the ice this evening for I might not do it so easy tomorrow. I found it 27″ this 15th of March. Did my chores with little difficulty and got out of my damp hiking clothes. How would my journal entry go with that gimpy right arm. It has worked better but I managed better than I expected. I’ll take an “Ascription” at ladder climbing time. Now 10.30 Clear, calm and -3°.

— Dick Proenneke

‘Be Seated; Get Dirty’

Posted on by fitz
Not lazy. Sometimes working while sitting is the right approach. I have long sat while doing close-up work and some dovetailing. Early woodworkers likely sat while planing, sawing and other tasks as well. Photo by Narayan Nayar.

The following is excerpted from “Ingenious Mechanicks,” by Christopher Schwarz.

Many operations on low workbenches seem difficult or a lower-back nightmare until you overcome two obstacles.
The first is that many operations are much easier when you are sitting down. Not just sitting on the bench but sitting on a sawbench or stool that is next to the low workbench. Dovetailing while sitting isn’t difficult as long as you allow your sawing arm to swing freely – just like when you are standing while dovetailing.

Likewise, traversing a board with the side stops (detailed below) is fairly easy. The worker remains stationary in front of the side stops and the board is moved from right to left. So, before you dismiss an operation as impossible with a low workbench, sit on it for a while before you pass final judgment.

The other obstacle to consider is your smooth, modern floor. Many low benches will move quite a bit because they lack the mass of many taller workbenches. Many early shops had dirt floors, or the work was performed outside (the book “Woodworking in Estonia” made this clear to me).

So, take your bench into the yard or find a way to immobilize the legs, especially for traversing. A quick solution is to purchase some adhesive anti-skid pads at the hardware store. Those help for all but the heaviest work.

Hobbit Chair: Against my Better Judgment

Posted on by Lost Art Press

This is how much I dislike these chairs: I have offered to give my children $100 each and a new stick chair if they will let me burn theirs to the ground.

This is how much they like the chairs: They refuse.

These chairs are based on the scene at the beginning of the film “The Fellowship of the Ring” where Bilbo is beginning to write his tale at Bag End. My kids adore these movies (I much prefer the books as they were life-changing for me). So this style of chair was the logical choice for the kids.

At the time, I had never made a backstool with an integrated armbow before. And I struggled to make the sticks as I was trying to turn my sticks at this point. (I gave up turning sticks after these chairs and now shave all my sticks.) 

I could go on and on about everything that is wrong with this chair. But I won’t. 

After I finish “The Stick Chair Book,” I think I’ll make a couple replacements for my daughter’s red hobbit chairs and see if they’ll take the bait. And, I’ll be sure to publish the plans here, too.

— Christopher Schwarz

Chairs & Crapitalism

Posted on by Lost Art Press

Editor’s note: When I write a book, I usually write about 10 chapters that get cut out because the tone is wrong or they just don’t fit into the flow of the chapters. This was written to be the final chapter of “The Stick Chair Book,” which is what I’m working on now. It’s flawed, but good enough for a blog entry.

If there is one thing we can agree on, it’s probably this: Factory-made wooden chairs are the biggest hunks of garbage on the market today. With rare exception, their parts are joined with dowels or (worse) flimsy mechanical fasteners.

These chairs are designed to fail after a certain number of uses. Then you are supposed to buy a new chair with the same limited lifespan. Furniture manufacturers don’t tell you this, of course. Who would buy a chair that was advertised to be good for 6,000 sits or 400 lap dances?

But we all know it. And somehow, we accept the fact without complaint. As soon as a wooden chair starts to sway, you better throw it to the curb lest you end up in the ER with a new stick implant. (And a new nickname.)

Here’s the other maddening thing: This is not a new problem.

I own a gorgeous Morris chair made by the Shop of the Crafters, circa 1905. It’s made from thick quartersawn oak and looks to be built like a tank. The truth, however, is that the chair is a piece of crap. After I owned it for six years, its base became loose. I decided to take it apart and reglue the mortise-and-tenon joints with hide glue. Do the job properly.

I injected a little alcohol into the joints and the whole thing popped apart. It was completely joined with dowels. Dowels. And not that many dowels. I have no idea how the thing survived as long as it did.

The Arts & Crafts movement was supposed to be a reaction to this shoddy type of joinery. It was supposed to embrace the mortise-and-tenon joint and solid construction principles.

I guess every movement has its charlatans.

What can we do about this problem? Burn down the chair factories? Petition Congress to ban dowel joinery? Nah. Screw that. Instead, let’s learn to make our own damn chairs and make them so they’ll last forever.

In many ways, we are in the same situation as the people who made stick chairs in the 18th and 19th centuries. Back then, well-built chairs that were made by a professional were far too expensive for a farmer or day-laborer to own. In other words, good chairs were unobtainable.

So, the solution was to make chairs for yourself. With the tools you had on the farm and the wood around you.

There isn’t much written about these amateur chairmakers. Most of the academic research on old furniture is focused on high-style pieces made for the wealthy. And when the research does mention vernacular work, the broad assumption is that these farmers were imitating the high styles from the cities. But because vernacular makers didn’t have the skills to copy the high styles, they produced simple items that were shadows of Windsor chairs, highboys or secretaries.

These assumptions and declarations always piss me off. While we don’t have a written history of stick chairs, we do have a wooden one. And it is writ clear.

Thanks to a few furniture historians and open-minded museums, we still have collections of the old chairs that weren’t burnt for heat when the farmers could finally afford tubular steel chairs with plastic cushions. And if you spend some time with these chairs, you will see that these makers spoke their own language.

Stick chairs are their own weird and wonderful thing. Most of the forms have no analog to high-style pieces. None. They have unusual forms. Unexpected shapes. And a lot of knots, bark and splits.

If you are reading this, there’s a chance that you already appreciate stick chairs. So, this next section is on how to educate (pronounced “placate”) your family.

When people encounter stick chairs for the first time, they are usually repulsed or confused by them. They don’t look like any sort of chair they’ve encountered – ever. Stick chairs aren’t something you see on television, in furniture stores or in magazines about interior design.

It’s like visiting a foreign country where they eat raw fish for breakfast. It takes some getting used to.

When I first started making three-legged stick chairs, no one in my family or circle of friends would sit in them. It was like having a live tiger at the dinner table. The three-legged chair seemed a wild and unpredictable thing. You could be thrown to the floor at a moment’s notice.

After a few months with no injuries, however, the three-legged chairs became part of the normal dinnerscape. And when I gave my last one away to a family member, our kids howled in protest.

The best way to make the people around you appreciate (or even accept) stick chairs is to build some and put them in your home.

Well, that’s what I did.

Every stick chair around our dinner table is unique. They aren’t a matched set. They’re made from different woods. Some are painted and some aren’t. They all have different forms – tall comb backs, medium-size comb backs, a backstool with arms, and lowbacks. None of the chairs looks more important than the other.

All of them are scratched, stained and dented from almost 20 years of daily use, thanks to thousands of meals, homework sessions, family budget talks and late-night games of Uno. And while I feel sorry for the chairs at times, I sometimes I wonder if the chairs have also affected my family.

When my daughters were ages 4 and 9, I built them each a stick chair that was based on chairs in the background of the film “The Fellowship of the Ring.” We are a nerdy J.R.R. Tolkien family.

These chairs were made roughly and quickly. I was working full-time as an editor and didn’t have time to fuss over a couple chairs. We needed them for the girls, and I built them in a week or so. Even though they are the ugliest chairs I’ve made (yet), the chairs were built to last using all the principles that I now use to build chairs for customers. And they are pretty comfortable.

When our oldest daughter left for college seven years ago, she packed up her car. Then she plucked her “hobbit chair” from the dining table and put it in among her other things.

I wasn’t expecting that.

The chair followed her from Ohio to Connecticut to Pennsylvania. She eats dinner in it every night. It is her chair, and no one else’s. Her younger sister has the same plan for her red hobbit chair.

When I made those ugly red chairs, I had no preconceptions that they would become personal totems. Now I know better. It’s highly unlikely that anyone would claim this-is-mine-because-I-sat-in-it-for-decades rights from a matched set of dining chairs from Pottery Barn. But stick chairs, like three-legged stray cats, tend to imprint on you.

That might be because chairs are a reflection of us – more so than any other kind of furniture. They have many of the same parts that we do ­– legs, seat, arms, backs and hands. And they cradle us – like a never-tiring skeleton – after a long day in the world.

You can abuse them, and they won’t go away. They get better looking with age. And if made well, they will never leave you.

I can’t think of a better way to tell my family that I love them.

— Christopher Schwarz