Last week we made a short (14 seconds!) promotional video about “The Anarchist’s Workbench” for Facebook and Instagram. In the video we mentioned the bench required only about $430 in construction lumber.
When we posted the video this morning, the first comment out of the gate was about how our price was wrong because the price of lumber has skyrocketed.
No, the $430 price is correct – using Home Depot prices from May 2021.
The bench requires:
Nine 2 x 12 x 8’s for the benchtop. Each 2×12 is $25.12. That’s $226.08
For the undercarriage, you need three 2 x 12 x 12’s and three 2 x 10 x 10’s. The 2 x 12s are $41.45 each ($124.35). The 2 x 10s are $19.13 each ($57.39).
Add up the subtotals, and you get $407.82. I then threw in another $20 for good measure.
Yes, lumber prices have gone up. Those 2 x 12 x 8’s were $8.81 each when I built the bench in 2020. But the bench is still a bargain to build, especially when you compare yellow pine to maple.
And the book itself is still a bargain. The pdf is still 100 percent free. Go here, and you’ll find a link to download the pdf. You don’t have to register, give up your email or anything. Just click and download.
The snarky comment on the video didn’t ruin my day. It had already been ruined by the bird that crapped on my shoulder when I went outside to fetch the morning paper.
Above is all the wood in mid-prep for seven “Anarchist’s tool chests.” The lid panels and carcase front/back and ends still need to be cut to final width and length. I’m excited to soon be teaching again…but just looking at this picture makes me tired!
I don’t make many unequivocal statements, but here’s one: Some non-stringy species of white pine is the correct wood for a tool chest. And if you can get it, choose sugar pine or Eastern white pine. These are lightweight woods that are easy to work with hand tools, and they are typically less expensive in the U.S. than any hardwood, with the possible exception of poplar. And while poplar will work for a tool chest – as will any wood, really – it’s heavy and harder to dovetail than pine. And that will make your tool chest heavier than it needs to be.
Fully loaded, a sugar pine “Anarchist’s Tool Chest” weighs in the neighborhood of 200-225 lbs. (The hardware and choice of wood for tills and other interior bits will affect the weight, as, of course, will the specific tools inside.)
And while I’ve never weighed a pine Dutch tool chest fully loaded, I used to work out of a poplar one while teaching on the road, and I had a heck of a time lifting it in and out of my car. So I’m keeping one of the pine ones I’m building right now to make my peripatetic woodworking life just a little easier.
For the tool chest classes I teach here, I do my best to source beautiful, clear sugar pine, which is typically available in wide widths – the fewer pieces in panel glue-ups, the better. But every once in a while, someone will ask if they can prep their own wood for a class – and it’s usually for the anarchist’s tool chest class – the one for which the wood prep is the most demanding and most critical that it be good. I say sure…but you darn well better do a good job of it. A) I won’t have time during the class to fix any out-of-square edges for you and B) I won’t have on hand matching stock to replace a piece should something go terribly wrong. C) I don’t want to help lift your full-size oak or purpleheart tool chest into your car at the end of class.
But if you insist on bringing your own, below are the steps to follow (some of which are pretty basic…but you never know what people already know).
The flatter the wood, the easier it is to prep – and the more plain the grain, generally the easier it is to dovetail. I don’t want any points of cathedrals or bird’s eyes in my pins and tails (or knots, or course). So the first thing I do is to lay out rough cuts to avoid anything problematic. I start with the largest pieces (above, that’s the front and back of the ATC), and try my best to have all my glue-ups be only two pieces (you can see above that I typically have to use three pieces in at least some of the carcase and lid panels).
So first, I mark out all the pieces, and if they’re longer than 14″ or so, I rough cut them about 1″ overlong at the chop saw and about 1/2″ overwide at the band saw (or I joint one edge then cut them overwide at the table saw). For pieces that are shorter than 14″ (and therefore can’t safely go through the planer), I keep them attached to another piece until after the surfacing is done. You don’t, however, want to leave the pieces much longer than they need to be. The longer a board, the more likely it is to be twisted – the less of that you have to take out, the better. Because the more you have to remove from one surface to correct twist or a cup, the more will go into your dust collector.
In order to run the wood through the planer to get it flat (and all of it to the same thickness), you need one flat face; that face registers on the bed of the planer. If you’re good with a jointer plane, you may not need a jointer. If you’re decent with a jointer plane but have to prep wood for seven people and have three days to do it, you definitely want an electric jointer.
If you have a helical head on your jointer, you don’t have to worry much about grain direction, but run the stock in the correct direction anyway; it’s a good habit to adopt. The grain should be running downhill. And if there’s a crown in the board on one face, there’s probably a cup on the other. When you run the wood across the cutters, you want it supported as much as possible at the outside edges, so the cupped face should face down. If you’ve already arranged it with the grain running correctly but the cupped face up, simply flip the board end for end, before jointing it. (Odds are pretty good that the heart side will be facing up.)
With thick wood, you can get away with jointing it only enough to create flats at the outside edges to register on the planer bed. But the planer rollers will flatten thin wood…which will spring back after it exits the planer. So for 3/4″ (or thinner) stock, I always run the stock as many times as necessary across the jointer to flatten one face completely. And because I think it’s unsafe to have to push too hard, I’d rather make several light cuts than one deep cut; I usually have the cut set to no more than 1/16″
The knives are to the left of the wood; note how the grain is running “downhill” – when the cutters spin clockwise into the wood, they’re moving in the same direction as the grain is running out of the bottom of the wood. If you run the cutters against the grain, it can lift it up and tear it.
The crown of this board indicates that the other face need to go against the jointer bed. Were I to run it over the cutters like this, the board would rock.
After the final jointer pass, I stack the boards atop the planer, flat face down, with the last end that went over the jointer facing toward the planer mouth – that’s the way they get fed in (last off jointer, first in planer). Though again, if you have a helical cutter, it’s not (usually) that critical.
Stacked and ready to feed, with the jointed faces down. As I pull a board toward me for the first pass, the end that needs to go in the planer is the end already facing in that direction.
I follow the same steps every time I use the planer; that way, I never get turned around. As I pull pieces off the far end, I stack them back in the exact same orientation as they were run through the machine. Then if I have to run them again to get to a certain thickness and the first face is flat, I flip them end for end as I feed them into the planer for the second pass. And repeat. That way, I’m removing wood from both faces, and hopefully equalizing the moisture exchange. (And if I have someone catching for me, I make sure they don’t flip the boards as they stack them.) Same steps for the operator every time. And if the first face isn’t flat after one pass, the board is in the right direction without flipping it to simply run it through again.
And here’s the critical part for classes when it comes to thicknessing: I run all the wood that has to be the same thickness at the same time. I would never run, say, the front and back of a through-dovetailed carcase then come back three days later and run the ends. In order to avoid problems, all the pieces must be the exact same thickness – your best shot at achieving that is to do it all at once. I don’t care if the pieces are a hair over or under 7/8″ – I just care that they’re all the same.
Once all the stock is flat and to thickness, I joint one edge in preparation for cutting it to final size (even if I’ve already jointed an edge to cut a piece to rough width, I do it again, in case it got bashed up), and mark the jointed edge; that edge will run against the table saw’s fence.
This curlicue mark on the jointed edge helps me quickly know which edge is straight and flat.
But it’s the table saw work that scares me the most in folks prepping their own stock; if the pieces aren’t square, the person’s class experience is doomed – and I don’t want that. But if I have to take the time to correct problems, the other students in the class suffer. So at least one person (in addition to me) is going to be unhappy.
So I am ultra careful at the table saw to make sure my cuts are square. First, I rip the pieces to final width, making sure I keep the wood tight to the fence. Then I triple check that the crosscut fence is dead square to the blade, and before we got a reliable slider, I clamped like pieces together to make sure they were the exact same length. (Now I trust the stop on our slider. But I don’t trust the stop on your slider.)
As long at I don’t jam the workpieces against the stop, I am confident that our slider will cut multiple pieces to equal length. (But as you can see from my tape measure, I don’t yet trust the tape on the fence!)
So after setting my stop I raise it, then crosscut one end square (with the jointed-edge mark against the fence), then drop the stop, flip the board and cut it to length. Boom – two square ends, and the right length. Repeat.
Once all the pieces of that length are cut, I reset the stop and cut the mating pieces. And so on with the rest of the stock.
Before we had a sliding crosscut fixture, I used this shop-made sled. If the pieces were longer than the sled, there was no way to set a stop. So I crosscut one end of each like pieces, then carefully…so carefully…clamped them together to cut the final length of both at the same time. It was the only way I felt confident that the pieces would exactly match. And I also had to then make sure each pair stayed together.
Note that all of the above assumes no glue-ups. Throw wide panels into the mix and you add glue-ups to the prep. I’ll write about those in a few days.
My class prep cutlist for the Anarchist’s Tool Chest.
We have received several questions (and a threat of a lawsuit) about why we are requiring students in our classes to be vaccinated for COVID.
This decision was entirely mine, and I wanted to explain it here (and give Megan a place to send future questions).
In simple terms, COVID-19 is a deadly and highly transmissible disease, vaccines are not perfect and this building is my home, where I live with my wife and one of our kids.
Our workshop is a tight interior space, and students are almost on top of one another, huffing and puffing as they cut, plane, chop and carve wood. In other words, this is an ideal place for COVID to spread.
And though the vaccines work well, they are not perfect. And so I ask that if you come into my home that you be vaccinated to keep everyone as safe as possible. The vaccine is free and widely available, so there is no economic or class discrimination at play.
Finally, we are not asking for your medical information. No one will ask to see your vaccination record. It’s the honor system. If you are happy to deceive us, that’s on your conscience.
My hope is that by 2022, infection rates will be so low that we won’t have to worry about COVID much. But for this year, I’m asking: Please, get vaccinated before you visit my home and shop.
Republishing out-of-print books is one of the most technically challenging things we do at Lost Art Press. In a perfect world, it should be easy: Take the old files, send them to the new printer and start the presses.
In my entire career in publishing, however, that hasn’t happened once.
With every older book that we have republished, the original publisher has lost or destroyed the original files. While I’m sure this happens sometimes out of malice or laziness, most of the time it occurs because of a change in technology or ownership.
Quick example: When F+W Media acquired American Woodworker magazine, it inherited a tractor-trailer load of original files – photos, manuscripts, drawings, contracts etc. I saw these files when I stopped by the office about four years ago. What did F+W do with them? They are now in the landfill.
So when we set out to bring back Scott Landis’s two classic woodworking texts, “The Workbench Book” and “The Workshop Book,” I knew we would be in for a technical slog. There was, however, some good news. Landis had many original photos, which allowed us to create new dust jackets with crisp, high-resolution photos.
Also, the last publisher had a press-resolution pdf of “The Workbench Book.” That book was published in the early days of desktop publishing. So the book existed on film – one layer of film for each color. That film was digitized and reassembled into a pdf. Getting it on a modern press with modern aluminum color plates, however, was no small feat.
For “The Workshop Book,” on the other hand, there was nothing. No digital or physical files whatsoever. The only good news here was that Landis had a pristine first edition of the book that we could attempt to use to make a new edition.
I won’t dive too much into the technical details, but you can’t simply scan a printed color book with photos and republish it. Well, you can, but it will look like garbage.
Luckily, I’ve been working with a company that has developed a proprietary scanning process that can take apart printed color photos (called halftones) and separate them into digital color plates – one for each color, cyan, magenta, yellow and black. These digital plates can be processed and reassembled into something that looks damn good on press.
We hadn’t tried this process, however. So it was a gamble with tens of thousands of dollars.
Thankfully, the printed result looks great. Better than I could have ever hoped, really.
The interior of “The Workshop Book,” which looks indistinguishable from a book produced with traditional files.
Everyone on this project, from Landis down to the press operators, did everything they did to get these books right. Landis and his son even created some nice new diestamps for the cloth below the dust jackets. When these dust jackets wear out, the books will still look like a cohesive set.
And if these books ever go out of print again, it’s my hope that we have made it easier for some future publisher. All our contracts guarantee the author will receive all the publishing files we’ve created, which are stored digitally at multiple locations.
We hope you’ll consider adding “The Workbench Book” and “The Workshop Book” to your woodworking library. We definitely think they were worth the effort and expense to republish and offer information that is useful to this generation and future ones.
The last few weeks have been filled with finishing experiments for “The Stick Chair Book” that answer some minor questions I had about paint, soap and linseed oil/beeswax finishes.
One question I can’t answer: Does anyone know what’s in Odie’s Oil at $130 for a quart? (Wrong answers only.)
One of the finishing projects I’ve been working on is to show some of the possible color combinations of the “Far East Wales” finish. (Why do I call it by this name? The answer is here.) I also wanted to see if the finish worked OK with shellac instead of lacquer. Answer: Yes, it works great. And I wanted to see if I could get away with applying only one coat of base color instead of two. Answer: Yes, again!
So here’s the updated procedure I used for the following finish samples.
Apply a base coat of water-based film-forming paint, such as acrylic or latex.
Apply two coats of shellac or lacquer by brushing, wiping or spraying.
As soon as the finish is dry, apply a second coat of a water-based film-forming paint.
When the paint flashes from wet to dry, you can begin the blistering process. You will get more dramatic results the sooner you start blistering.
Use a heat gun on its highest setting (or a propane torch) to heat the paint. Heat a small area (about four square inches) then use a paint scraper to remove the blisters. Work the entire project this way.
Use a woven 3M gray pad or steel wool to smooth all surfaces and remove any loose paint.
Apply a black wax (I use Liberon black bison wax). When it flashes, buff it off with a coarse cotton cloth, such as a huck towel.
I tried a bunch of different color combinations using the paints we had in our finishing cabinet. I was surprised by how much I liked the bright colors, especially the yellows, with this finish. Here are a few sample boards. All paint colors are from the General Finishes Milk Paint (not a milk paint but an acrylic) line of paints.
— Christopher Schwarz
Note: I haven’t tried this process with any casein-based paints, so I don’t know if they will work as the base coat (my guess on this is yes, it will work) or the topcoat of color (my guess is no, it will not work). So feel free to experiment with this yourself.
