My daughter Katherine has cooked up another big batch of non-toxic Soft Wax 2.0, and it is now for sale in her etsy store.
As you can see, Shop Cat Bean is surprised/nonplussed/inscrutable in his reaction to the new batch of wax.
This Soft Wax is my favorite finish for chairs, and I use it on a lot of other projects when I was a low-luster finish that doesn’t create a film between me and the wood.
And yes, this stuff is safe enough that you can use it on your beard. More instructions below!
Instructions for Soft Wax 2.0
Soft Wax 2.0 is a non-toxic finish for bare wood that is incredibly easy to apply and imparts a beautiful low luster to the wood.
The finish is made by cooking raw, organic linseed oil (from the flax plant) and combining it with cosmetics-grade beeswax and a small amount of a citrus-based solvent. The result is that this finish can be applied without special safety equipment, such as a respirator. The only safety caution is to dry the rags out flat you used to apply before throwing them away. (All linseed oil generates heat as it cures, and there is a small but real chance of the rags catching fire if they are bunched up while wet.)
Soft Wax 2.0 is an ideal finish for pieces that will be touched a lot, such as chairs, turned objects and spoons. The finish does not build a film, so the wood feels like wood – not plastic. Because of this, the wax does not provide a strong barrier against water or alcohol. If you use it on countertops or a kitchen table, you will need to touch it up every once in a while. Simply add a little more Soft Wax to a deteriorated finish and the repair is done – no stripping or additional chemicals needed.
Soft Wax 2.0 is not intended to be used over a film finish (such as lacquer, shellac or varnish). It is best used on bare wood. However, you can apply it over a porous finish, such as milk paint.
APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS (VERY IMPORTANT): Applying Soft Wax 2.0 is so easy if you follow the simple instructions. On bare wood, apply a thin coat of soft wax using a rag, applicator pad, 3M gray pad or steel wool. Allow the finish to soak in about 15 minutes. Then, with a clean rag or towel, wipe the entire surface until it feels dry. Do not leave any excess finish on the surface. If you do leave some behind, the wood will get gummy and sticky.
The finish will be dry enough to use in a couple hours. After a couple weeks, the oil will be fully cured. After that, you can add a second coat (or not). A second coat will add more sheen and a little more protection to the wood.
Soft Wax 2.0 is made in small batches in Kentucky using a waterless process. Each glass jar contains 8 oz. of soft wax, enough for two chairs.
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.
