This week I had to spend two hours in the dentist’s chair. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I was “Clockwork Orange-d” into watching two hours of a TV program about creative storage solutions for the home.
Some of the examples I remember over the whirring of the dental Dremel:
Hinge your steps and create trap doors on the landings of your stairs to make small bins in the wasted space between your stringers.
Find stud walls that are used for utilities and turn them into built-in chests of drawers.
In attic spaces, create sliding racks on the interior of a high-pitched roof. You slide giant plastic bins into the racks – it’s a bit like a top-hanging drawer.
Through the entire program I wanted to throw up – but that was mostly because I have a sensitive gag reflex. But it was also because these “storage solution” programs neglect to mention the easiest way to control clutter: Get rid of it.
Take your excess clothes, books and nicknacks to a worthy charity so the items can plague the homes of others. Give your excess tools away to Habitat for Humanity’s Re-Store or a local tool-sharing co-op. Burn your scraps for heat. List your excess machinery on Craigslist. It can all be done in a day, which is easier and better than building some lame hidey-hole in your house that will require three trips to the home center, four screaming fits and five bad words to complete.
Possessions are like fingernails – they need to be constantly trimmed (or else this).
You can now place a pre-publication order for the expanded edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” The book is in the hands of the printer and should be complete in early January. If you place a pre-publication order before January, you will receive a free pdf download of the book at checkout.
The expanded edition is 200 pages longer than the first edition and includes six additional projects, plus new chapters on the design and philosophy that is the backbone of the book.
The new edition is $49 – that’s only $2 more than the first edition. We’re also sewing in a red bookmark ribbon in each book. I’ve always liked bookmark ribbons, though they add some expense to the manufacturing.
What hasn’t changed: The book is still produced and printed entirely in the United States. The 656 pages are casebound, the pages are sewn for durability and the book is covered in a tough hardback cover. We want our books to outlast us.
You can order your copy from our store via this link. As always, we hope all our retailers will carry the book, but it is entirely up to them. Please contact your local retailer for information.
The Chapters
Below is the table of contents for the expanded edition. I’ve set the new chapters in italics.
Preface
1: The Furniture of Your Gaoler
2: A Guide to Uncivil Engineering
STAKED FURNITURE
3: An Introduction to Staked Furniture
4: Staked Sawbench, Plate 1
5: Extrude This 6: Staked Low Stool, Plate 2 7: Staked High Stool, Plate 3
8: Drinking Tables, Plate 4 9: Furniture in the Water
10: Worktable, Plate 5
11: Staked Bed, Plate 6
12: Trestle Tables, Plate 7
13: Seeing Red 14: Chairs! Chairs! 15: Notes on Chair Comfort
16: Staked Backstool, Plate 8
17: Staked Chair, Plate 9 18: Staked Armchair, Plate 10
BOARDED FURNITURE
19: All Aboveboard 20: Bare Bones Basics of Nail Technology 21: Low Boarded Bench, Plate 11 22: Boarded Tool Chest, Plate 12
23: To Make Anything
24: Six-board Chest, Plate 13 25: Mule Chest, Plate 14 26: Boarded Settle Chair, Plate 15 27: Boarded Bookshelf, Plate 16
28: Aumbry, Plate 17
29: Fear Not
30: Coffin, Plate 18 31: The Island of Misfit Designs Afterword
APPENDICES
A: Tools You Need
B: On Hide Glue
C: On Soap Finish
D: On Milk Paint E: Tenons by Hand F: Machine Tapers
G: Seat Templates
Acknowledgments
Supplies
Index
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. If you have a print or pdf copy of the original edition, you can download the new contents for free – no matter where you purchased the book. Here’s how.
P.P.S. Also, several people have asked why we didn’t simply publish a “Volume 2” of the design book containing only the new material. Two reasons: You need the information from the original edition to make sense of the new material. I dislike books that cannot stand on their own. Second: A second volume of 200 pages would have cost about $35 retail (the printing business is complex). So owning both volumes would have cost readers $82. The way we’ve done it is (I think) the most fair and the least wasteful. But that’s me.
Note: We are in the final stages of getting the printed copies of “The Anarchist’s Workbench” complete and ready for shipping. It will be soon, and I’ll publish the details here when I have news. You can, of course, download the whole book for free here.
I’ve been asked why I wrote this book. Was it to spite a former employer or a corporate publisher? Nah. That’s not me. If you’re looking for the Revenge and Vengeance Department, press 1 to talk to my wife, Lucy. Instead, I think I wrote this book to get this story out of my system so I could move onto the next phase of my life as a woodworker and writer.
One of my biggest personality flaws can be explained with this simple story. I asked a blacksmith to make me a metal planing stop. He insisted that the best planing stops were made from railroad spikes and that he would charge me just $20 for the thing.
The box arrived, and I opened it. I took one look at the toothy and crusty metal stop and said: Nope. I refused to install it on the bench, and so my first adjustable planing stop was wooden. It worked OK. But I had absolutely no idea what I was missing until I installed a metal one two years and five months later.
I wonder sometimes: What is my malfunction? I could have installed the metal stop in an hour. If it didn’t work, I could have made a replacement wooden one in a second hour.
This kind of crap – holding desperately onto something that works OK instead of taking a small step that could improve everything – is exactly what kept me immobilized in corporate America way past my expiration date.
From the day I entered the workforce as an adult in June 1990 until I said “I quit” to my boss at Popular Woodworking in 2011, I was intent on holding onto every job I had. Getting fired or laid off crossed my mind almost every day. And (even worse) that fear seemed to make all the important decisions in my career. A few highlights:
For five years I wrote freelance copy for the now-defunct Woodworker’s Book Club and poured that money into my workshop at home. My rationale: I wanted to be ready to work as an independent furniture maker on the day that I got canned.
It wasn’t the stupidest fear. Being a journalist these days is almost as irrelevant as being a wheelwright or the guy who makes coats from the foreskins of sperm whales (that’s a real thing, by the way; you know I wouldn’t lie to you re: whale dongs). But it did make me do stupid things.
My office at home was next to my daughters’ bedrooms, and while banging out meaningless monthly drivel for the Woodworkers’ Book Club, Maddy would beg me to play “Baldur’s Gate” with her on the computer. More often than not, I put her off in order to get the freelance work done on time. And so Maddy would wait for me in my office and she illustrated a little book (that I still own) titled “The Monsters of Baldur’s Gate” containing advice for us.
Yeah, even then I felt like a crap parent. But I rationalized that all the freelance work would save us from future disaster. We wouldn’t have to go back to the days when our checking account dipped below $100 every two weeks, right before payday.
Every month, I got a check from the Book Club. I put half away for taxes. The rest I spent on the tools I thought I needed for a one-bad-father furniture shop. For starters: a chop saw, drill press, spray finishing equipment, mortiser, compressor with many nail guns and a stupid jig for drilling shelf-pin holes. These weren’t tools I really wanted to own. But they were tools I knew other furniture makers owned.
I’m not a prepper, but I think this is what it must feel like to put away 1,000 gallons of potable water and 300 cans of beans for the apocalypse. As my shop at home came together, I began to feel less anxious about being fired. I was ready.
One day one of my woodworking friends shut down his shop and went to work for his wife. Despite his talents (he’s a better woodworker than I’ll ever be), the work had dried up. The phone had stopped ringing. He had all of the tools (even a Timesaver wide-belt sander that was bigger than my truck). Plus, he had the skills and 20 years of experience. But nobody wanted to hire him.
This freaked me out. Owning the tools was not enough.
I started trolling around for commission furniture work, even if it didn’t pay much. I decided I had to build a customer base. (Tools plus customers equals job security, right?) I began making Morris chairs and selling them on eBay. I started building pieces for my wife’s boss, hoping he would spread my name among his wealthy friends. I even dabbled in trimming out a kitchen or two owned by friends in Cincinnati’s Northside neighborhood.
So I was building furniture at night. On other evenings I was still writing copy for the Woodworker’s Book Club. I hadn’t picked up my guitar in years. And “Baldur’s Gate” remained unsolved.
One week at work I received two phone calls that seemed like a gift. Marc Adams called to ask if I would teach at his school in Indiana. Then Kelly Mehler called to ask if I would teach at his school in Kentucky.
I said yes to both. Becoming a woodworking teacher was another layer of economic protection. I thought: Even if this bad thing happened and those other bad things happened, I also had teaching. I would be impossible to snuff out.
This is the point in the story where it should all come crashing down. But it doesn’t.
One of the many reasons I started Lost Art Press was to have something else to fall back on – yes, another stopgap – for when I was finally fired at Popular Woodworking. That fear might seem irrational. My only defense is that magazine editors are flushed with more regularity than most people’s bowels. Every year at Popular Woodworking I attended four or five going-away parties at bars for colleagues who had been canned.
The horror always seemed to be just around the corner. Even if you had 10 or 12 glowing yearly evaluations behind you [Editor’s note: Or 19], there was a decent chance that you’d soon be at the Buffalo Wild Wings on Lane Avenue, drunk and with your car’s trunk full of your kids’ drawings. Which used to decorate your cubicle.
So I worked. April became a bad month and a bitter family joke. My youngest daughter’s birthday is at the end of April, and I missed it about five years in a row because I was teaching out of town.
OK, I know for certain that the narrative arc should now take us to the breaking point. It wasn’t, however, a made-for-TV moment.
I was teaching a workbench class at Kelly Mehler’s school in May of 2011 when my mom phoned me in the middle of class. I knew it was bad news. Her brother (my uncle), Thomas West, had just died. He was 71.
I wasn’t close to my Uncle Tom. Instead I had always been in awe of him and was too timid to talk to him at the rare family gatherings. He was the genius in the family and had a newsworthy career at Data General. Tracy Kidder wrote a Pulitzer-prize-winning book about him, “The Soul of a New Machine.”
After my mother told me the news, I sat down. A switch had gone off in my head that I still cannot explain to this day.
I finished up the class and got into my truck to go home. I stopped at the Shell station down the road from Kelly’s school to fill up my tank for the drive. I remember my hands shaking as I pulled the fuel nozzle from the truck.
I got in the car and called Lucy.
“I want to quit my job,” I told her.
“OK,” she said. “Come home, and we’ll figure it out.”
That was on a Friday evening. On Monday I turned in my resignation letter at the magazine. I think I was as shocked about the moment as my boss was.
All those years of preparing for the day – buying tools, building up a commission book, teaching, starting a company – none of that was helpful or comforting in that moment.
On my last day at the magazine, I loaded up the last of my tools. I plugged my phone into the stereo. It picked up where I’d left off in the morning with Superchunk’s “Learning to Surf.”
I should have quit years before I did. I know that now. The freelancing, teaching, commission work and publishing were all excuses. I thought: If I built this business, then I’d be ready. If I built that business, then I’d really be ready.
I had been ready for years but had been too chickenshit to write the resignation letter. I know this might seem like a “chicken and the egg” paradox, but I was an overcooked baby. I hid in the womb. And boy is my therapist gonna have a field day with this paragraph.
I drove home to my family and thought: Now I’m going to be a better father and husband. And I was. I picked up my kids from school every day. I was home for birthdays and graduations and the landmarks. I made dinner every night. (I still haven’t finished “Baldur’s Gate,” however.)
This, I thought, is the reward for escaping the corporate world: More time with my family and the freedom to run my own life. But I was wrong. The real reward would come seven years later when my father lay dying.
At some point in my life, the following piece of trivia got lodged in my brain: There’s sufficient evidence that the word “deadline” meant something fairly sinister in Confederate prisons during the U.S. Civil War. The “dead line” was literally a line marked in the ground to restrain prisoners. Cross the “dead line” and you would be shot.
This thought crossed my mind several times as I edited magazine stories and approved page layouts at the foot of my father’s hospital bed after his first cancer surgery.
I was in downtown Chicago in the middle of winter trying, with the help of my sisters, to get my dad through the procedure in a city that was a world away from our Arkansas home.
I was also responsible for editing two woodworking magazines, one of which was just about to go on press.
My boss had, with great grace, allowed me to leave town to attend my dad’s surgery. No questions and no complaints. The only catch was that I had to keep the magazine running. We couldn’t miss printing deadlines. That’s when things got royally screwed up and it began costing the company money.
There also is an unspoken rule at most media companies. If you miss hard deadlines, you will – sooner rather than later – be fired. No matter how good the content is that you produce, editors who blow deadlines are marked as difficult. And difficult editors are the first ones to go as soon as the magazine’s budget or reputation hits the tiniest pebble.
Among the consultations with nurses and doctors I wrote an article about cutting tenons by hand. I approved about 100 pages of layouts. I edited an entire magazine issue with my laptop perched on my knees. I made dinner for my sisters. And I drove my dad back to Arkansas with his colostomy bag on the floorboards of my pickup truck.
When we pulled into town in Fort Smith, Ark., it was late, and my dad was craving fried chicken livers. I looked at him over the rim of my glasses.
“Really?” I asked.
My dad – the guy who ate sprouts and whole wheat bread for lunch every day – wanted some deep-fried organ meat?
“I think I need the iron,” he said.
I pulled into a Church’s Chicken that had just closed for the night. In my hometown, white people don’t go to Church’s; we’re supposed to go to KFC. So, I know it freaked out the employees when a long-haired bearded white dude banged on the door asking for chicken livers. The manager came to the door a little wary. I explained my problem.
He started up the deep fryer and made my dad a double order. Which dad gobbled up before we made it the two miles to his house.
I got my father into his bed, where he fell asleep immediately after an entire day in the car. I wasn’t tired, and so I wandered around his house.
This wasn’t the house I’d grown up in, but it was filled with the things my dad had made. There were the Japanese garden benches on his deck – a design of his so perfect that I ripped it off for a magazine article years later. There was the weird glass-topped coffee table that was made from about 120 pieces of redwood that had all been bolted together using all-thread – no glue.
I sat down in the living room and tried to decompress after the journey. And I noticed something new and curvy on the other side of the room. I walked over to investigate. It was a heating register made from wood, but it was handmade, pierced and carved with lovely curves. Who does that?
I knew the answer.
When I was a kid, my dad had built (and finished) furniture while confined to bedrest after some spinal surgery. He taught himself how to veneer furniture, build decorative brick walls and design houses (two of his original designs still stand today) before he was 40. He took piano lessons in his 50s. Vocal lessons in his 60s. Cello lessons in his 70s. If he wanted to do something, he just did it.
And here I was terrified of missing a printing deadline.
My dad and I were usually close. You would think that we’d be closer because we both loved making things. But we seemed to see handwork through different lenses. While he loved making things – furniture, music, pottery – it was the reward or the release after his difficult and meaningful work. My dad was a family physician.
For me, making things was the difficult and meaningful work. He wanted me to be a lawyer.
After I quit my job at Popular Woodworking I didn’t see my dad as much. He was building a new life in Charleston, S.C., and I was trying to forge a life as an independent furniture maker, writer, publisher and teacher. And trying to be a decent parent (if not a decent son).
In 2016, dad’s cancer came roaring back. And that was when I knew I had made the right decision to leave the corporate world. After talking to my dad on the phone one evening, I said, “I’ll be there tomorrow.” I packed my bags and threw them in my truck. I didn’t ask anyone for permission.
I just went. I didn’t have any deadlines. Well, not for work.
When I arrived in Charleston the next afternoon my dad was impossibly skinny. He had converted to a vegan diet a few years before and was an insufferable evangelist about it, to boot.
“You hungry?” he asked. “I know a place.”
During my previous visit the “place” was a Vietnamese gas station that served zero meat, eggs or dairy. In fact, I think they waited for the vegetables to drop off the vine before harvesting them.
We drove north on the peninsula to a neighborhood that had been crime ridden for decades. He pulled into a parking lot that was awash in the smell of brisket and smoked pork.
“Really?” I asked.
“It’s going to change your life,” he said.
We sat down in one of the booths and waited for lunch to arrive. And I waited for him to tell me exactly how bad things were with his cancer (they were bad). I had left my laptop and my phone in my truck or back at his house, where they would sit for a few days.
And then I did something I hadn’t done since I was 5 or 6. I reached out across the table and grabbed his hand. He raised his eyebrows, smiled and nodded.
For the next eight months I drove to Charleston to visit him almost every month, taking turns with my sisters in taking care of him to the end.
Every time I packed my truck up for the trip, I had this same thought: I couldn’t do this if I still had a corporate job. So, during my visits, instead of writing magazine stories while my father’s health spiraled slowly downward, we watched “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune” every night together. I made him dinner (he gave up on veganism at his doctor’s request; plus, he really wanted some brisket). And when he was feeling only half-horrible, we went to his favorite restaurants.
When he died, I was sitting on his bed with him and my sisters, singing his favorite Crosby, Stills & Nash songs. It’s a morning that I will always be grateful for.
I’m not saying that quitting your job will make you a better person. But it did for me.
Today I still work damn hard. You have to when you work for yourself. In fact I work just as hard as I did when I had to meet my corporation’s personal performance and financial goals, fearful of not being rated as “exceeds expectations.” (My reward for exceeding expectations? A 3 percent merit raise. Yup, I worked every weekend so they could reward me with $2,400.)
But now I can turn my work off like a water faucet. When I want to take my daughter to the art museum, I just do it. When I feel the urge to hike the Red River Gorge with my family, I make the reservations that instant instead of checking to see how many days of PTO I have banked.
And when I want to build a workbench, I don’t have to ask Steve for permission. I don’t have to submit the plans for the bench to a bunch of people who really don’t give a crap about traditional woodworking.
We came in through the basement door of George Reid’s tidy ranch-style house. Like most basement workshops, George’s was a dark cave. As I put down my photography gear, my eyes adjusted to the dimness and I found myself staring at a full-scale drawing of a Chippendale chair that was tacked to the wall.
“Hmm,” I thought. “Nice poster.”
For the next two hours, a co-worker interviewed George about his lifetime of work. How he built his first milking stool on his family farm, constructed miniatures while he was working at Wright Field and fell into making furniture for clients by building hi-fi cabinets.
We looked at his exquisitely cared-for machines. We admired his carving tools, which he bought from a guy who worked on Pullman train cars. I was there to take photos, and what I remember most is how I just couldn’t see anything in the low light.
At his workbench, George showed us two of his miniature pieces – quarter-scale chests of drawers with bow fronts. It was nice work, we said. Do you have any other of your pieces here?
“Oh yes,” George said. “Let’s go upstairs.”
George lived on a nice middle-class street in Kettering, Ohio, in a compact, mid-century ranch home. He led us around the house from the shop, through the front door and into a state of speechlessness.
All I remember was that every wall was painted brilliant white, and every bit of space was occupied by amazing pieces of dark 18th-century-style furniture in mahogany. I almost kicked a Newport kneehole desk. There were highboys, lowboys, carved chairs and corner cabinets in every corner. All in Chippendale, Hepplewhite, Sheraton and Queen Anne styles. And they were all perfect, like they were fresh from the tool of the maker.
I have never seen anything like it since.
George Reid was one of the most talented makers I have ever met. Yet, I’ll never forget how wrong his beautiful pieces looked in the living room of his humble Ohio home.
This is Not for You While the work itself is amazing, most of the American furniture we celebrate as the pinnacle of design can be overbearing, over-embellished and a monument to waste and excess.
It also represents the furniture of people you probably dislike. These high styles of furniture took hold in North America in the 18th century and persist to this day as both cult objects for collectors and as rites of passage for artisans. These are precious pieces that are auctioned, collected, reproduced and written about in exhaustive detail.
We call them by the names of their champions or designers – Chippendale, Sheraton and Hepplewhite to name a few.
And while I am quick to admit these pieces were made using exquisite materials by talented hands, I want to add an asterisk to the discussion of high-end furniture: This stuff was built for the ultra-rich to satisfy their whims and fancies.
Or, to put it a slightly different way, the people who could afford this furniture also owned mega-farms, factories and (sometimes) entire towns. This is not a knock on their wealth. But it is a simple way of asking a question that rarely gets asked among amateur makers: Why would you want to imitate the taste of your boss’s boss’s boss?
Is it because their elaborate furniture is the peak of design? Or is it because it’s put on display by institutions that are supported by the generous wealthy patrons – foundations, trusts, museums and cultural heritage centers?
Here’s how I see the equation: Because the wealthy were (as always) scarcer than the rest of us, there simply aren’t a lot of these pieces extant. It’s their rarity more than anything that makes them expensive and desirable. Yes, the furniture is nice. But don’t confuse a price tag with beauty or utility.
So if every log cabin on the frontier wasn’t decked out with a set of Robert Manwaring chairs, then what were most people sitting on, eating off of and sleeping in during the last 500 years? After years of researching this question for myself, I think the answer is this: furniture that doesn’t have a name, a museum or many champions.
What seems to have happened is this. Certain pieces of furniture, because of their essential practicality and usefulness, began during this period [the 17th century] to achieve definitive forms for which they were to retain for many years. Skilled but unsophisticated country craftsmen, usually joiners rather than cabinet-makers, repeated the same designs again and again, without changing them much, because they had been found to be the best for a particular purpose. A good deal of furniture thus escaped from the influence of fashion and, however unconsciously, responded only to the principle of fitness for use.
— Edward Lucie-Smith, “Furniture: A Concise History” (Oxford University Press, 1979).
The Furniture of Necessity Among furniture historians, little has been written about this so-called “vernacular” furniture in comparison to the mountains of scholarship on high styles. There are a few books here and there (thank you Christopher Gilbert), plus magazine articles tucked between the gilded and carved masterworks. But the furniture of necessity is, for the most part, invisible. Why? To be honest, vernacular items are tricky to study. They can be difficult to date because they don’t change much – many of these forms are still made today in the same way they were built in the 1600s. Most of their makers are anonymous. These pieces, by and large, were built by amateurs or part-time, self-taught woodworkers.
This book does not pretend to be a proper study of Western vernacular styles from 1300 to present. I’ll leave that to someone who is better at formatting footnotes. Instead, I want only to introduce you to pieces of furniture – some of them shockingly unfamiliar at first – that represent the core of our common furniture history.
This is the furniture of the people who work for a living. It is sturdy, made from everyday materials and isn’t orchestrated to impress you with ornament. Instead, it is designed to keep you dry, comfortable and safe. Also – and this is important – this furniture is largely disconnected from fashion. It cannot be labeled as a particular style, so it does not fall in or out of fashion. It looks at home in a log cabin, ranch house or an industrial loft. In fact, the only place it looks out of place is a high-style parlor or drawing room.
I admire the everyday ordinary furniture from the past, particularly from before the Industrial Revolution, what’s known as vernacular furniture. The makers are usually unnamed, often not professionals. I like it because of its directness, honesty and functionality. It tends to be kind of minimal and spare for reasons of cost. It is striking how the dictates or slogans of Modernism align with those of the vernacular or craft: less is more,” “form follows function,” and so on. It’s ironic because Modernism typically saw itself as release from the bondage of tradition.
— Laura Mays, a furniture maker and graduate of College of the Redwoods.
About this Book In the 18th century, there was an explosion of so-called “pattern books” that were stuffed with illustrations of fashionable architecture, interiors and furniture. One count from the Metropolitan Museum of Art estimates there were 250 pattern books for architecture and 40 for furniture.
These books were usually gorgeous, oversized and expensive. Their copperplate engravings regulated and transmitted fashion throughout England, the United States and other parts of the world. In fact, the books are so influential that many are still in print (though usually as falling-apart paperbacks, which amuses me).
But there’s never been a pattern book for the furniture of necessity. This book, in a small way, is designed to echo those pattern books. Each of the furniture forms has a full-page illustration by Briony Morrow-Cribbs, a Vermont artist who specializes in intaglio printing.
Following the plate is an explanation of the piece – how it is constructed and its general features – much like the explanation you might find in André-Jacob Roubo’s “l’Art du menuisier” or any other 18th-century text. Then each chapter departs from this historical format.
Vintage pattern books don’t tell you how to build a Chippendale chair. The local cabinetmaker was supposed to be able to reproduce the particular set of details to suit the fancy of the customer. But unlike high-style pieces, the furniture of necessity was usually built by its designer and end-user. So I offer step-by-step instructions for constructing the pieces featured in the plates.
I hope you will find these pieces liberating in several ways. Like many furniture makers, I spent my adult life in the shadow of the 18th-century masterworks. I was told that to be a real furniture maker, you needed to build these high-style pieces. You needed to learn veneering, carving, turning and even gilding. Otherwise, you were just a glorified trim carpenter.
That is complete crap.
Beautiful, durable and useful furniture is within the grasp of anyone willing to pick up a few tools and learn to use them. It does not require expensive materials or a lifetime of training – just an everyday normal dose of guts. Millions of people before you – and just like you – built all the furniture in their homes. They might not have left pattern books behind, but they left clues sprinkled through paintings, sketches and the furniture record. That is where our design ideas will come from. And that is where we will begin.
In all its horrible eccentricity of non-descript Gothic, worse Chinese, and inane rococo, combined though they be with the most exquisite workmanship and occasionally a quaint gracefulness, Chippendale’s style is not in favour with those whose training enables them to discriminate between the true and false in design.
— D. Adamson, “A Chat About Furniture,” Work magazine, March 23, 1889.
These planes earn their name because they consist of a metal shell that has been “infilled” with wood. And they also have been “infilled” with a fair amount of mystical hooey. Don’t get me wrong, I like infill planes for what they are (well-made, beautiful and functional tools), but I haven’t chugged the infill Kool-Aid that makes one believe they have superpowers.
I can say this because I have worked with many infills during the last 12 years. I’ve used $100 pieces of clap-trap garbage and a $10,000 masterpiece from the shop of Karl Holtey (pronounced Hol-tie, FYI), the grand master of custom planemaking.
They are just planes, and they face many of the same trade-offs that the metal, wooden and transitional planes do. Wood moves. Metal can be difficult to work.
So here are their advantages: They have a metal sole that may or may not need truing when you get the tool. After the sole has been flattened, it rarely goes out of true unless the tool is dropped, run over by an automobile, or the wooden infill inside the shell distorts the metal significantly when the wood moves.
Infills have scads of mass, which some woodworkers prefer. The weight really can keep the plane in the cut with less effort. Most infill planes have a screw-powered lever cap (though some infills secure the iron with a wedge). The screw-powered lever cap is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Its advantage is that you can screw down the iron with almost superhuman force. This creates a stable cutting environment and can close up a slight gap between your iron and chipbreaker that would spell curtains for other types of planes.
It also can make your plane’s iron difficult to adjust or – in some cases – be plane suicide. Most infill planes lack mechanical adjusters that control the depth of cut – you use hammer taps. However, infills that have adjusters use a mechanism that’s usually called a “Norris-style” adjuster. These are sometimes, but not always, fragile.
So if you cinch down your lever cap with lots of force then adjust the iron, you will wear out the adjuster quite quickly, and perhaps even strip the threads.
One of the other advantages of infill planes is hard to quantify. Most woodworkers (me included) find them fetching. So as a rule they are better cared for (like a sports car) and rarely abandoned to rust (like a Vega).
The disadvantages of infills are real. Because the iron is bedded on both metal and wood, you can encounter some problems with this marriage of materials. The metal won’t move, but the wood will. The result is the iron won’t be bedded securely, so you get chatter or inconsistent results until you file the bed flat.
Also, be wary of new infills that are filled with exotic wood. Exotics are notoriously hard to dry properly. And if your infill isn’t dry it could distort or crack as it acclimates to your shop. Always ask the seller or the maker about the moisture content of the wood. If he or she is not sure, you should be on your guard for possible problems ahead.
Infills don’t have movable frogs, and I know of only one infill that has an adjustable mouth. As a result, the mouth aperture is fairly immutable. You can open the mouth with a file. But to close up the mouth, you are going to have to invest in a thicker, custom-made iron or in a welding class to patch the mouth.