Raney Nelson at Daed Toolworks has finished a new batch of Improved Pattern Dividers, which are now up for sale in his store. I use mine every day in the shop, and they are as wonderful as blacksmith-made dividers, but the tension is easily adjustable.
We’re glad that Raney has been able to get these back into production. If you’ve ever wanted a pair, here’s your chance.
— Christopher Schwarz
After building the green chair, I was compelled to build one more iteration. Instead of worrying about how easy the chair was to build, I wanted to make a chair that made me happy (technically speaking).
That meant some significant changes.
The back is pitched at 25° (5° more lean than the green chair). The seat is pitched back 3/4” from front to back. And everything that touches the sitter is curved.
This chair is also cosmetically flawed (as I’ve mentioned before). The mortises in the arms are tight, but they don’t look the way I want them to. The problem is the drill bits I’ve been using.
I’m still getting used to the Star-M bits from WoodOwl. They cut so clean. Their only downside is that the bits’ flutes are so sharp they can also do a lot of cutting. That means if you move off-angle, the bit’s flutes will cut the hole to an oval shape. This problem is exasperated when you use a bit extender.
I’m getting better at holding still when I drill, but the arms have cosmetic gaps around the tenons in the arms.
In my heart, I know that vernacular chairs are supposed to have imperfections. In some cases, the imperfections are what make the chair special.
But I also know that I can do better.
When I finished construction (and the day of “make pretty”) I was ready to burn the chair. But I didn’t. I applied a coat of Allback (organic linseed oil and beeswax) and drank a beer.
And that was enough for me to make peace with the thing.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. This chair is the most difficult chair I’ve ever photographed. Too many curves and angles.
The following is excerpted from “The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years: 1939-1967” Volume 4, The Shop & Furniture.
Although the shooting board is a well-known appliance in the workshop, we are frequently asked by readers for more information about it, and we therefore give here the chief types and their use.
The purpose of a shooting board is that of planing the edges of thin wood, either to form butt joints, to make the edge straight, to trim an end square, or to form a mitre. Normally the edge is made square, though in special cases it can be at an odd angle, as we shall see. If you tried to plane the edge of a piece of thin wood in the vice it would be difficult to hold the plane square and it would be liable to wobble. When the shooting board is used, the wood is held flat on the upper step, and the plane is worked on its side on the lower step, all wobbling being thus eliminated.
Types of Shooting Boards. The simplest form of shooting board for square trimming is given in Fig. 1. It can be of any length from about 18 ins. upwards in accordance with the size of the work to be trimmed. The upper step might be from 4 ins. up to about 6 ins. wide, and the lower one should project far enough to take the largest plane in use—say, 4 ins. At the far end a stop is fixed, this fitting in a groove. The near end is at right angles with the working edge, but it is tapered in width, partly to simplify fitting, and partly to enable it to be driven in with a dead tight fit. After being knocked in, screws are driven in and any projection is trimmed off flush.
There are one or two points to note. Firstly the heart sides of the two pieces face each other, so that in the event of shrinkage the twisting tendencies are opposed. Then again, ledges or battens are screwed to the underside, also to help in keeping the parts flat. Along the under-corner of the top platform a chamfer is worked so that any dust which may accumulate will not interfere with the true running of the plane. So far as thickness is concerned, the upper step should bring the work to about the middle of the plane—7/8 in. wood is about right.
A rather more elaborate type of square board is given in Fig. 2. The two parts are fixed to two or more notched cross-battens, a slight gap, say, 1/8 in., being allowed between them to allow dust to escape. Such a board is more likely to keep flat but will not produce better work. If desired, a detachable mitre stop can be fitted with dowels, though generally it is more satisfactory to have a separate mitre shooting board, as in Fig. 3. The construction of this is similar to that of Fig. 1, except that the stop recess is cut in at 45 deg.
Yet a third kind of square board favoured by some workers is that in Fig. 4. In this one end is raised so that as the plane passes forward a different part of the cutter comes into operation, thus spreading the wear over a wider length of edge. It is satisfactory providing the cutter of the plane is sharpened with its edge perfectly straight. Otherwise the shaving will be thicker in one part of the cut than in another.
Mitre Shooting Boards. The board normally used for small mouldings and for wood mitred in its width has already been dealt with in Fig. 3. When wood is mitred in its thickness, however (as in the case of, say, a plinth) the donkey’s ear board in Fig. 5 is used. The construction is obvious from the illustration. The piece beneath, running along the length, is to enable the board to be held in the bench vice. External mitres are trimmed in this way, the wood being held so that the plane always cuts into the moulding, so avoiding splitting out. Internal mitres need the board in Fig. 6. The stop of this could with advantage be fixed in the middle instead of at the end so that the moulding could be placed at either side of the stop, enabling the plane to work into it. Note the dust groove.
Use of the Shooting Board. When the end of a piece of wood has to be trimmed square it is held against the stop, and the plane worked so that its sole bears against the edge of the upper, step. As the plane is worked, the wood is pressed steadily against the plane. To prevent the far corner from splitting, the corner can be chiselled off. Should, however, the wood not be wide enough to permit this, a waste piece with its corner chiselled can be held against the stop as in Fig. 7. Thus the far corner of the wood is supported and is so prevented from splitting. Note that the waste piece should be somewhat thicker than the wood being planed.
In the case of a joint being planed the method is somewhat different. The wood should overhang the edge of the upper step by about 1/4 in. or so. The joint is planed true by virtue of the trueness of the plane itself. The latter does not touch the upper step. Remove shavings from the centre of the wood until the plane ceases to cut, and then take a couple of shavings right through. If the plane is accurate (and is long enough) the joint will be straight. It may be necessary to take an extra shaving where needed, but it will not be much out. It is better to rely on the truth of the plane rather than to keep it running along the step—unless the wood is quite short.
Incidentally, always have one board face side uppermost and the other face side downwards. In this way the two will go together in alignment, because if the edge is not dead square (possibly owing to the plane side not being square with the sole) the two angles will cancel out, so to speak.
Odd Angles. Sometimes several ends have to be trimmed at an odd angle, and, when the angle runs across the width, a piece of wood planed to the required angle can be placed against the stop as in Fig. 8. Thus any number of pieces can be planed to the same angle.
When the angle is across the thickness, an angle piece can be used as in Fig. 9, the wood being placed above it. Fig. 10 shows how compound angles which occur in both width and thickness can be dealt with. The two angle pieces are prepared to the required angles first, and the wood placed as shown.
After making the first prototype of a boxy Irish armchair, I sat in it for a long time. I circled it like a shark and took pages of notes. The goal with my second prototype (shown here) was to make the chair sit and look better without adding any complexity.
The biggest change was to tilt the back to 20° (the original was at 10°). I’ve found that 20°-25° is ideal for a stick chair for lounging. (The Gibson chair in my office is tilted at 31°, so there is a lot of ground to explore there.)
I raised the seat to 16”, which is still low but not as shockingly low as my first prototype (14-1/2”). All my other changes to the chair are cosmetic. The legs are octagons. The shaved sticks were made a little differently at the bench, and this really improved their entasis. Instead of rounding over the chair’s corners, I beveled them throughout the piece. The backrest, however, is rounded over for comfort.
Like the first prototype, this one was made with kiln-dried oak scraps. The legs and sticks were split out. The other parts were sawn. I might have $40 of oak in this chair (there is a lot of waste when splitting).
The paint is General Finishes (Fake) Milk Paint in Basil.
This design will be in my next book. I can’t think of any way to improve how it sits without adding complexity. However, I wanted to make a third version that represented how I would build this chair for myself. So I went to C.R. Muterspaw and picked through the piles of unsteamed walnut.
— Christopher Schwarz
A quick look at Jenny Bower’s Instagram page will leave anyone who hasn’t met her in person wondering just who this woman is. A glamorous beauty with flawless hair and makeup, she usually appears in the kind of clothes most woodworkers only dream about – form-fitting sheaths, or retro mid-century dresses with poofy skirts when she’s renovating the interior of a vintage camper she purchased in 2020. But along with the glamour, a pervasive wholesomeness animates her posts – expressions of gratitude for family, friends and good work; visits to military veterans and vintage car enthusiasts; hand-crafting some of the most elaborate Halloween costumes you’re ever likely to see, only to lament the early onset of winter, which requires covering up all that hard work with a full-length coat; cooking around a fire pit with her daughter; late-summer cannonballs in a bathing suit off a dock into Lake Michigan’s chilly waters – the essence of down-to-earth pleasures. She peppers her posts with hashtags such as #workwithyourhands, a bit of encouragement to others based on how she and her husband, Nathan, earn their livings, as an engraver and clockmaker respectively.
“Which is the real Jenny Bower?” you may ask. Answer: all of them.
Jenny was born in Alpena, Mich., in 1980 and has deep roots in the area. Both sides of her family are from the same town. Her father is a retired chemist whom she describes as “very scientific, a super-perfectionist.” He worked at a paper company when she was little, then created new formulas for a company that made hot-stamp ribbons for products, such as the sell-by date on a bread bag. The hot-stamp tool was essentially a branding iron. “It was the weirdest job,” she recalls. “I never could explain it to my friends.” Her mother was a cosmetologist who worked at salons and also did hair for friends in their house. “I grew up around older people because she specialized in those old-lady hairdos with the hair sets.” Jenny has one brother, Jerry, who is two years younger.
When Jenny was about 6, her family moved to Michigan’s west coast. She has lived in a few towns since then, mainly between Kalkaska and Traverse City, where she and Nathan live today. She went to public schools, other than a couple years at private school between moves, and graduated from Traverse City Central High School in 1998 before attending college. To make college affordable (she paid for it as she went), Jenny did all her work through a “university center program,” basically a satellite campus, and graduated in 2004 with a BA in English Language and Literature and a minor in Elementary Education from Grand Valley State University; she planned to become an elementary school teacher.
That plan changed when she and Nathan married. “We had no money and one car. Most of the teaching jobs that were available were in surrounding districts. I had interviewed at a couple of surrounding districts, but by the time we thought about getting another car – we didn’t want to go into debt! – I thought ‘I’ll just wait a bit and work in my husband’s business.’” She liked it so well that she didn’t pursue teaching, despite her love of that work. Instead, she started her own business.
She and Nate met at a New Year’s Eve party in the winter of 2002-2003. She found him intriguing – he’d been home-schooled, then taken a few college business classes without feeling the need to graduate from college. In his spare time, he had fixed an antique clock for his mother and become increasingly obsessed with mechanics in general and how things work. At the age of 18 or 19 he cold-called a local jewelry store and asked if they needed someone to help with clock repair. They did; he started working there as an apprentice, then eventually opened his own business. Fixing old clocks was one thing – he found antique European clocks especially fascinating. But then he started making his own, a whole new world of creative mechanical endeavor. He now does both clockmaking and repair.
“My dad was concerned about me dating Nathan,” Jenny says – his primary concern was whether Nathan, being self-employed, would have a sufficient income. “My dad had always had a company job with benefits,” she explains. “[He] always worked a Monday-through-Friday, nine-to-five job.”
“(Nate’s) really mechanically-minded,” she told her dad. “I’m sure if the clock repair goes bust he’ll find something to do.”
While Nathan was single, he saved up as much money as he could. Those savings disappeared in short order once they were married and began renovating what Jenny calls their “junky old house,” a single-story built in the early 1960s. They bought the house because it was zoned as a residential home while being on commercial property, which made it affordable. They spent the first chunk of their marriage running their business and renovating. When they moved in, the house had fake wood paneling on the walls and shag carpet on the floors. One room had silver wallpaper with blue roses. They put in new ceilings – the dining room ceiling had caved in due to water damage caused by poorly planned rooflines. When they pulled up the flooring, they found the subfloor there, but Nathan had suspicions. “I just feel like I should pull up this floor and see what’s underneath,” he said. A good thing, too – the floor system consisted of boards simply stacked on bricks. There were no floor joists. They had to completely rebuild the floor system.
The front living room and bedroom became the clock shop and their office, and remained so for about 10 years. Then they built their dream shop on the same property; it’s connected to the house but no longer inside the house. “We were penny pinching on all sides,” Jenny says, “but it was worth it to have our own business. It taught us a lot. When we built the new building [for their workshop], lots of that confidence came from what we learned in the renovation of the house.”
Remarkably, she says, Nathan wasn’t raised to be handy. His mother is an oil painter; his dad was a pastor turned children’s book author. “His extended family are all business owners and very hands-on, so he grew up feeling like it was OK to have a business or pursue something that was not a typical job. He really understands the mechanics of things; he’s not afraid to take things apart and try to figure them out on his own. He fixes everything. We’ve never had to have a repair person fix anything.”
Nathan has passed that readiness to solve mechanical problems onto Jenny. Shortly after she bought her old Jeep Wagoneer, Nathan encouraged her to replace the radiator instead of paying someone else to do it. He’d planned to replace it for her, but asked if she might care to do it herself. He taught her how. “It was kind of cool for me, because car repair in general feels completely intimidating and so far out of my realm of understanding, but Nathan was really encouraging.”
Family
For a long time I wondered where Jenny got her dark good looks. What was the source of that bone structure, those eyes? Were her ancestors from Italy or Spain? A post about fry-bread answered my question. Her forebears on both sides are at least partly Native American. “They were very quiet about their heritage,” she says of her grandparents when she was growing up. “It’s been hard to find out the story” – not surprising, if you know anything about historical efforts in Canada and the United States to erase cultural memory and traditions from Native American children. Her mother has tried to research her family history, but there’s little available at this point about which tribes her family members came from, along with related background. But fry-bread is a potent carrier of tradition; her great-grandma, grandma and mom all made it. “I loved it so much as a kid I thought my daughter would enjoy it,” Jenny says.
Jenny and Nathan wanted to be parents, but it took them about five years to get pregnant. “It was a very difficult time for both of us. But for me as a woman, it was very hard. My husband is the eldest of 12 children – lots of siblings, and his siblings had lots of kids. We were the first to have any issue. It was hard for me to see so many people around me getting so easily pregnant. It was a long journey. It felt like a lonely time for me. I didn’t like to talk about it much with other people. I didn’t know what the problem was; later on I found I had some issues that complicated it, but when we did get pregnant with [Maylin] it was a very happy time for both of us.”
Her daughter, Maylin, was born in 2009 and is now 11. They chose not to know the baby’s sex before birth; Nathan came up with the name Maylin, which has no gendered baggage. “Maylin’s great-grandmother’s middle name is Mae,” says Jenny. “My middle name is Lynn. We tweaked the spelling a bit to make it easier to read and pronounce, but the sentiment of a family name is there.”
Business
Traverse City is a touristy, affluent, artsy area, especially when snowbirds return for summer. Many of Jenny’s and Nathan’s customers live within 30 miles of the Bowers’ home. Most of Nate’s customers come to him for clock repair, an art now so unusual that people will often drive from Detroit or Chicago and leave their precious clocks with Nate for as long as they have to, because they know of no one closer. Most of the clock-business customers are middle-aged or retired. They want to have their clocks fixed to pass them down to their grandkids.
Jenny came to engraving through the clock business. Many old clocks have engraved numbers and decorative designs on their faces. Jenny had collected a lot of antique jewelry; she had a couple of engraved pieces she found especially compelling. “I really was fascinated by art on metal,” she explains. Nathan saw many engraved clocks come into the shop for repair, some dating back to the 1700s. After seeing the gun and knife work of a local engraver whom Nathan had met through a customer, Jenny became interested in the engraving process. She ordered some engraving tools and tried her hand at the new skill; the timing was ideal, as Nate was toying with adding some engraved components to new clocks he was building.
“For me,” says Jenny, “when I’m engraving, I get into this zone where I’m really absorbed in my work. Three hours could pass in a few minutes. I’ve always been a very artistic individual; I enjoy drawing and hand-lettering. But with engraving, I like cutting the metal.”
Most of her designs incorporate an artistic flourish or scroll, with a lot of acanthus leaves, vines and flowers. She prefers natural forms – she doesn’t do much with Celtic or repetitive geometric designs, both of which are common among engravers. She describes her designs as asymmetrical but balanced. “I like to draw things out to fill a space and look balanced, but if you look closely, [the design is] often not symmetrical.”
She started doing Instagram after she and Nate did a couple of TV shows “A Craftsman’s Legacy” with Eric Gorges and “Handcrafted America” with Jill Wagner. Jill and the cameramen on Eric Gorges’s show suggested that she share what she was doing. She looked into it. “I had started engraving some tools and posted some on Instagram,” she says. She quickly found twofold value in sharing her designs. “It became a way for me to document projects I was doing, for myself and to share with other people. Unless people know what hand-engraving is, they think it’s done by machine. I wanted to show [them] ‘I’m not a monogram machine or a CNC laser! I’m carving the metal with my own hands and doing my own designs.’ I wanted people to see that process. I didn’t want to get into teaching, but I wanted to show how I [create] a piece, so if you buy my work, this is how it’s done. There were a lot of assumptions, and the best way to explain was to show how I do it.”
Instagram, she finds, calls for a delicate balance. “I don’t want to come across as a braggart,” she says – ‘Look at me!’ It was more, the process might be interesting to people because it’s an unusual art form that people aren’t familiar with. That’s why my Instagram page isn’t just pictures of finished work. I include pictures of my car and my garden. I’m not just an engraver. I’m an artist, and that sprawls into different categories.”
At this point Jenny has engraved so many handplanes that she’s lost track of the number; other common engraving projects are squares, tape measures, hammers, straight rules and calipers. She also engraves locks, and nameplates for badges. And ferrules for chisels – lots of them. “Those are fun. It’s so silly, really. A chisel doesn’t need to be pretty.” In 2020 she took part in a project to raise money for Color of Change; she engraved the ferrules, and each woodworker involved in the project made a handle. “Every chisel was different. It was so fun seeing what different woodworkers came up with.”
Jenny’s hand-tool engraving led her to woodworking. Her posts on Instagram caught the interest of quite a few woodworkers. “From that point I got questions about engraving hand tools and got to know a lot of people through the Instagram community and formed friendships with these people.” New friends encouraged her to try woodworking. “I was very nervous about that but interested in learning more about it. Through building friendships, I got to see the delight they had in their work.”
She took a chairmaking class locally to familiarize herself with hand and power tools – “a nice way to learn some of the fundamentals of woodworking.” The class was titled “Chair Making for Women.” When she showed up, she found herself alone with one other woman. Fortunately, the instructor was willing to run the class, which gave them a lot of one-on-one time. After taking another woodworking class locally, she took one with Greg Pennington in the fall of 2019 in which she made a continuous-arm Windsor chair. That chair is now in the clock shop.
Nate has been turning a storage shed on their property into a small woodworking shop for both of them. “Woodworking and clockmaking don’t really go together well,” she notes. “The dust from woodworking – you don’t want to get [that] into the mechanics of clocks!”
Going back to the question of who, on Instagram, is the real Jenny Bower, she remarks, “If there’s a realness that comes through, it’s because this is my real life. This is what I do every day. I don’t have a fancy camera; I just use my phone. It’s a snapshot of what I’m doing today. If somebody’s standing next to me in the shop, that’s what they’re going to see.”
“When I was growing up it was always about going to college. I didn’t understand that there were craft schools, that you could go away and learn these different crafts. Now I can say to my daughter, ‘If you want a college degree, we’ll support you in any way we can.’ But I want to expose her to craft alternatives before she makes that decision. There’s a lot of opportunity open to her.”
—Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work” and “Kitchen Think.”