The Lost Art Press storefront in Covington, Ky., will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, March 10.
This weekend you’ll see the shop in full-production mode (which is our way of saying “excuse the mess.”) Brendan Gaffney is finishing up a gorgeous and extremely complex bookcase that involves a lot of interesting techniques, including recording and veneering.
Megan Fitzpatrick is just finishing up a Dutch tool chest for a customer – it’s being painted right now. And I’m deep into two full-blown Anarchist’s Tool Chests for customers. These both use Peter Ross hardware. Come check out the crab lock Peter makes. It is stunning.
And we’ll be here to answer any woodworking questions you might have. Our address is 837 Willard St., Covington, KY 41011.
Some Food Options to Consider If you are looking for a bite to eat, Lil’s Bagels has opened a walk-up window, which is a short walk from our storefront, on Greenup Street. Great bagels – the best in the city – and bagel sandwiches.
For lunch, take a walk over to Wunderbar, which has dang good German food and fantastic pretzels and beer cheese. Or try Guiterrez Deli (right across the street from Wunderbar). Guiterrez is a Mexican grocery that will make you an outstanding burrito.
Editor’s Note: Apologies if you received this post twice. We had some technical problems with this entry (our fault and not Nancy’s).
In her profile on the Brigham and Women’s residency alumni web page, Dr. Ouida Vincent had some fun with the pro forma question “DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE MEMORY FROM RESIDENCY?”
“Spending the night out with co-residents at the ’70s disco,” she answered, punctuating her response with a single word: “Polyester.”
This disarming response will come as no surprise to those who know Ouida, whether in person or from Instagram, where her warmth, humor and sense of adventure are on regular display. “Headed to Handworks by way of MSP,” she wrote in May 2017. “Please say hello… I’ll be the BWWDL” – as she’d previously described herself, the “BLACK WOMAN WITH DREAD LOCKS” – because (let’s be real) how many Black women (or men) with dreads would you typically expect see at a gathering of hand-tool woodworkers in rural Iowa?
When we spoke, on a crisp Saturday morning this fall, she’d just returned from delivering sourdough cinnamon rolls to her mother. It was a short walk up the hill by her house; she was still in her pajamas, under a Carhartt jacket.
Along with thousands of others, Ouida (pronounced WEE-da) took up sourdough bread baking in April, when the pandemic prompted so many to plunge themselves into baking that stores could not keep yeast on the shelves. It wasn’t her first experience with baking; at Cornell she did a medical school rotation on the Navajo Reservation in 1989, staying with a family who baked wholewheat bread or cookies every day. Inspired by their example, she took up baking herself when she returned to med school. Although her first few loaves were “like hubcaps,” she kept at it and quickly improved. She baked every weekend until her professional work became too demanding.
Ouida approaches sourdough baking with the analytical rigor of a scientist and the enthusiasm of one who bakes for love, not money. Her Instagram feed is full of boules and batards – some whole, some sliced in half to reveal herbs, olives or “crumb.” An early September entry that shows the kind of springy texture I can only dream of producing reads like notes on an undergraduate’s experiment:
“[W]hen I want to check oven spring, I look at how the holes are oriented and if the entire loaf from bottom to top was involved in ‘spring.’ You can get three patterns[:] no spring (dense loaf) that may or may not have risen any, spring primarily on the outside of the loaf with a dense (yet hopefully done) interior and spring that involves the whole loaf. The holes will be elongated in the direction of spring and will glisten.”
She brings the same studious curiosity to woodworking. Ouida sees a piece of furniture she likes and figures out how to build it. Her office and home are furnished with pieces of her own making. And when she decided a proofing box would be a boon to her sourdough baking, she puzzled out what it would take to fabricate one.
These days, Ouida, whose day job is clinical director of a hospital on the Navajo Reservation, is “in a mask 10 hours a day, five days a week.” Anyone who pays attention to national events will be aware that Native Americans have been affected terribly by Covid-19. Ouida adds, “Even when there is a vaccine, I will wear my mask (even after getting the vaccine). This is about public health.”
Ouida was born in Nashville, Tenn., the fourth of five children. When her mother and father married, her father brought three from a previous marriage and her mother brought her; they had one son together. Her name is common in the South. “My mother told me that she heard the name and wanted me to be remembered, so she gave me the name.” Then comes the zinger: “You can imagine what kids and substitute teachers did with [it].”
She can’t remember a time when she wasn’t fascinated by making things and figuring out how to fix them. Her older brother David was “a real Mr. Fix It” from the start, Ouida says; she followed him around and learned from his example.
After her parents split when Ouida was 10, her mother moved Ouida and her younger brother from one place to another, wherever she could find work, usually in college financial aid offices. Ouida would have signed up for shop class in school, but as a girl born in 1963 she wasn’t allowed to. That changed when her family moved to Virginia Beach, Va., in 1976; she enrolled in shop class and small engine repair. She and her classmates learned to strip down and rebuild two-stroke and four-stroke engines, restoring them to working order; they also had to frame the corner of a house, complete with functioning plumbing and electrical service.
When they moved to Alabama in 1979, Ouida found herself barred from shop class once again. Undeterred, she decided to go ahead and build things on her own, though she found that was more easily said than done, with few tools and no shop. While working on a body for an electric guitar she asked the shop teacher at school if she could use the band saw. He asked her to prove she knew how – a challenge she met in short order. He gave her permission to use the shop facilities when classes weren’t in session. She’s been building ever since.
Given her facility for learning new skills and diagnosing problems, it’s not terribly surprising that Ouida, who excelled academically, found her way into medicine. She graduated from Cornell Medical College in 1990 at the age of 27, then did a residency at Brigham and Women’s in Boston. “My uncle was an Ob/Gyn. It was really the first medical career I was exposed to. I was briefly attracted to general surgery, but the general surgeons I was exposed to seemed not to have personal lives. I was ultimately attracted to the combination of surgery and diagnostic medicine that obstetrics and gynecology offers.”
She originally hoped to do a medical student rotation in Alaska, but when she inquired, she learned that all rotations there were filled – she would have had to apply at least a year in advance, rather than a few months ahead of the starting date. “When I walked in to talk with one of our deans, she was opening a letter from alumni who had taken jobs in Shiprock, N.M. They had space for students, so I went. The year was 1989. I fell in love with the medical community and knew I wanted to return,” though she adds “I didn’t plan on making a career out of it.”
In 1998 she moved to Gallup, N.M., and became Chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology. When her real estate agent heard about her interest in woodworking, she mentioned there were classes at the local branch of the University of New Mexico. Ouida signed up for a course in cabinetmaking. The college had a well-equipped machine shop, but no hand tools. As she deepened her experience of working with machines, she learned another valuable lesson – “the frustration of power tools!” Even though the college had a full-time staff person charged with repair and maintenance, “there was always a machine down.”
Ouida’s work responsibilities grew, leaving her with less time for classes, yet she continued to pack in as much woodworking as she could. One of her early projects was an 8’-high x 3’-wide media cabinet. Another was a hutch based on an article in Fine Woodworking; it’s in her office today.
In 2006 she bought a property in Colorado, attracted in part by a dilapidated barn on the site. “This is my woodshop,” she remembers thinking when she first saw it. Termites and rain had done their worst; contractors she called for estimates to rehabilitate the structure said it wasn’t worth saving, that she should build something new. “But I wanted to work in a barn,” she says. Eventually she found a contractor who was willing to fix it up for her.
Ouida slowly taught herself to use hand tools. She learned a lot from Chris Schwarz’s videos on hand tool basics and watched the Popular Woodworking series “I Can Do That.” She made a desk of ambrosia maple and cherry for a friend; the hand-cut dovetails were “so gappy that I made the gaps the same size and backfilled them with filler of a different color.” She persevered and improved. The same went for sharpening. “The first time I sharpened a plane blade it took six hours,” she says. But she found the more she worked in hardwoods, the greater her appreciation of the need for sharpening and the better at it she became. In the end, she says, “the wood became my best teacher.”
Around 2011 she made some shop stools based on a video by Mike Siemsen. When “The Anarchist’s Design Book” was published, she built one project after another from it – a boarded bookcase, staked desk (now in her office), six-board chest and staked chair. “I would have made more from that book,” she says, “had Peter Follansbee not published his book and completely derailed my life! I’ve literally done nothing but carve since 2019.”
Ouida is well aware of the sacrifices her mother made as a single parent. She also deeply appreciates her maternal grandmother’s support, calling her “a constant figure in my life until she passed away in 2001.” She cites one incident in particular, which culminated in the United States Supreme Court case NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, to illustrate the impression her grandmother Dolly made.
Dolly Thompson was from Mississippi and had a ninth-grade education. “It was in the Jim Crow South,” Ouida points out by way of context. Even though the population of Claiborne County, where they lived, was majority Black, all the political seats were held by White people. Her grandparents owned a funeral home and were solidly middle-class. But when they traveled cross-country to attend mortuary conventions, they always had to think about where they’d be allowed to stay at night.
It was common in that time and place for Black people to be called names (if their presence was even acknowledged) and forbidden to use public restrooms or sit at lunch counters. Tired of being treated as second-class citizens when they were upstanding members of the community, Ouida’s grandmother (her grandfather died in 1962) and many of her fellow community members, working with a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), decided to “talk with their dollars.” They organized a boycott of White-owned businesses, setting up a supply house of their own called Our Mart to keep fellow citizens supplied with hardware, food, clothes and other everyday needs. They funded the project by selling shares.
Several of the White-owned businesses joined forces and sued for damages – in a majority-Black county, their businesses couldn’t survive without the now-missing income. When the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in the White businesses’ favor, Ouida’s grandmother and her fellow boycotters took the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the NAACP.
The whole thing, she notes, came about “simply because that group of people wanted better treatment.” Although this was her grandparents’ experience, Ouida understands it’s not that far removed from our own time — she belongs to the first generation to grow up outside of Jim Crow. And it’s easy to see how Ouida, with these determined and hardworking role models, became the kind of woodworker who doesn’t flinch at challenges, but sticks at a task until she has mastered it, having lots of fun along the way.
Summing up our conversation, she reflects that “the reason I’ve continued doing [woodworking] is the stimulation it provides.” She trained as a surgeon, but her work for the past several years has been in administration. She misses the contact with tools and materials. Bread making helps fill the gap; woodworking goes even further. “Now I get to hold instruments in my hand that use fine motor skills., similar to using a scalpel,” she adds. No wonder she can’t stop carving.
You can build furniture without a block plane. But why should you? The block plane is one of the greatest hand-tool inventions of the Industrial Revolution, in my opinion. With a block plane and a little skill you can accomplish almost any task. These tools trim end grain, face grain and whatever else you ask of them – and they do it even if the iron is a mite dull (thanks to their lower pitch). They are the most flexible plane ever manufactured. You can change the pitch of the tool with great ease and close or open the mouth with no special tools. And they are simple to set up.
Woodworking purists scoff at the tool, but I think that this is only because it doesn’t fit into their narrow tool list. If block planes had been invented in the 18th century, you can dang well bet that every re-enactor would be spouting off about how the block plane was the savior of the age.
In fact, I have to say that the block plane is one of my favorite planes because it was the first hand tool I ever used with great success.
When making my very first piece of handmade furniture, a sitting bench, I realized that I needed a way to trim the bench’s front and back pieces to the seat of the bench. I didn’t have an electric sander – much to my chagrin – so I decided to go to Walmart and buy a block plane. I don’t know where I got this idea; probably from my grandfather.
They had one block plane. It was a “Popular Mechanics” brand and was cheap and blue. I bought it, took it home and put it to work. It was not sharp. I did not sharpen it. It cut the pine surprisingly well. I can remember being amazed at the curly shavings that emerged from the mouth. I knew at that moment how powerful hand tools could be, even if wielded by a moron.
If you look at the history of block planes, you should be prepared for some enormous diversity and confusion. It seems that toolmakers made more kinds of block planes than any other kind of tool. I’m going to try to boil down the major features here for you, but be aware that I cannot cover every kind of block plane ever made.
Low Angle or Standard? Block planes come in two flavors: low-angle or standard-angle. Low-angle tools have the iron bedded on a ramp that is 12° off of the sole. Standard planes have a 20° bed. Low-angle planes make it easier to achieve lower planing angles, which are nice for end grain. Standard-angle planes make it easier to achieve higher planing angles, which are nice for reducing tear-out.
The reason I always use a low-angle block plane is two-fold.
The lower angle makes for a more compact tool that fits better in my hand. Your mileage may vary here.
With the low-angle plane you have a wider variety of planing angles available to you. You can achieve angles as low as 37°. Standard-angle planes can only go as low as 45°, if you want the edge to last more than a few strokes. Both planes can achieve high-planing angles. So the low-angle tools are more versatile.
So I see no reason to even own a standard-angle block plane. And I don’t.
Adjustable Mouth or Not? Low-rent block planes generally have a fixed mouth, though there are some nice small block planes with fixed mouths. I prefer an adjustable mouth. Why? When I am using a block plane to true end grain, I don’t want the leading corner of the work diving into the mouth aperture. When I work in tricky grain, I will use every weapon available to me to attempt to reduce tearing – including an adjustable mouth.
And when I need to hog off material, I simply open the mouth as wide as it will go. Easy. If you have only one block plane, I recommend a low-angle tool with an adjustable mouth.
Lateral Adjustment or Not? All block planes have lateral adjustment – you can tap the blade left or right to tweak the position of the cutting edge in the mouth. The question here is whether you need a lateral-adjustment mechanism, which can be as simple as a plate that shifts left or right to move the blade left or right, all the way up to a Norris-style adjuster that will control both the depth of cut and the lateral adjustment.
I find that all lateral-adjustment mechanisms that are supplied on a plane generally offer only coarse adjustments. The fine adjustments come from tapping the plane’s iron with a hammer. So to me, it doesn’t really matter if the plane offers some sort of formal lateral-adjustment mechanism. That’s because of the way I adjust a block plane:
• Sight down the sole and extend the iron until it appears as a black line against the shiny sole.
• Use your fingers to shift the iron left or right until the black line protrudes consistently from the mouth.
• Retract the iron to take up the screw-feed mechanism’s backlash. Then extend the iron a bit and use a small hammer to tap the iron left or right into its final position.
So do what you want to here. You don’t have to have a lateral-adjust mechanism. But it won’t hurt your efforts either.
I am thrilled to announce that Lost Art Press is bringing the classic “Welsh Stick Chairs” by John Brown back into print with a high-quality North American edition.
I have read “Welsh Stick Chairs” more than 20 times, and it has had an incredible influence on my life.
John Brown introduced the world to the Welsh stick chair (in fact, he might have coined the term). And that style of chair set me on a path that eschews fancy furniture and embraces pieces that were made by the end users, most of whom were amateurs.
Further, John Brown was the first person to put the words “anarchism” and “woodworking” together in his columns in Good Woodworking magazine. This bold move gave me the courage to let my own anarchist flag fly in “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” and “The Anarchist’s Design Book.”
I am not alone. Thousands of woodworkers all over the world discovered a different way to look at the craft through John Brown’s writings. Every time I encountered one of his die-hard fans, they would ask: Why haven’t you brought “Welsh Stick Chairs” back into print?
The answer was simple: We didn’t own the rights.
But thanks to John Brown’s heirs, particularly his son Matty Sears, we have obtained the rights to print “Welsh Stick Chairs” for the North American market. (A second publisher retains the rights in the U.K. and Europe.)
We will do this book justice.
We are resetting the entire book from scratch using the original fonts. This will make the text as crisp as possible. For the photos, we will scan original first edition books (the original photos have been lost) and use high-tech scanning tricks and a very advanced printing press to produce images that will look as good as the originals.
The new edition will look a lot like the first edition. The cover will be a heavy and rough paper. The interior pages will be heavy, smooth and coated. The only change we will make to the binding is that we will sew the signatures together for added durability.
We don’t have a price yet – we are shooting for less than $30. And we expect to release the book in June. Why so fast? I have been working on this book for quite some time. Only now can we talk about it publicly.
“Welsh Stick Chairs” will serve as an excellent companion to our forthcoming book on John Brown by Chris Williams. Their book, which should be out in 2019, will explore John Brown’s woodworking career and the path his chairs took after the publication of “Welsh Stick Chairs.”
It is my sincere hope that this pair of books will inspire future generations of woodworkers, and that the works of John Brown will never be forgotten.
Every book I write has a guiding principle. Something I mutter during the research, building, writing and editing. (For example, “Disobey me” from “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”)
For “Ingenious Mechanicks: Early Workbenches & Workholding,” my mantra wasn’t as catchy. But I love it all the same.
“The principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” — Prof. Richard Feynman (1918-1988), winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965
When you write a book, it’s like constructing a little world. And what you include, leave out or emphasize can change its message, even if you are want to do something as straightforward as building old benches and figuring out how they work.
So for my last couple books, I subjected myself to peer review. For “Ingenious Mechanicks,” I invited a bunch of woodworkers of all stripes – modern, traditional, all hand-tool, powered-to-the-max, beginners, experts – and showed them what I found. Then I gave them free reign to use the benches. I watched and wrote down what they said.
(Even better, photographer Narayan Nayar took dozens of gorgeous photos to illustrate the book. The photo at the top of this entry is one of his unprocessed jpegs.)
The participants had a lot to say, and the review process eased my mind. These benches and early workholding devices work brilliantly (with a few exceptions). And, most importantly, their comments didn’t send me back down a rabbit hole for more research.
The book is nearly done. The text of “Ingenious Mechanicks” is now being edited by Megan Fitzpatrick. I have to draw a few maps to illustrate Suzanne Ellison’s chapter. Then I can begin designing the book’s pages.