One of the biggest fears when you work for yourself is that the work will dry up. You will suddenly go from eating ricotta to ramen. And then you will call Mike Siemsen to get his recipe for “wiener water soup.”
As the last few days of 2017 drop off the calendar, I’m taking stock of the commission work I have booked for the coming year. I am pleasantly surprised at the amount of work I have in the works.
Most of the pieces are what you would expect: a couple Welsh chairs, a tool chest, a Shaker cabinet, some sawbenches, a Roorkee chair and a campaign secretary. But I also received a commission that is a gift for me as a designer.
A young customer asked me to build a chair that would further my work from “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” For the last 12 months I’ve struggled (and failed) to design a staked armchair that I’m happy with for the revised edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” This commission will allow me to take a good three weeks of time to nail down a design that has remained slightly out of my grasp.
So it’s also a gift for anyone interested in staked furniture.
I know there will be lean years ahead. It’s the natural cycle of things. But I plan to fully enjoy every bit of 2018 and make the most of the salad days.
In 1996 I was hired as the managing editor at Popular Woodworking, a struggling second-tier woodworking magazine that focused on publishing project plans (17 Must-build Plans Inside! Build an Alien on a Swing!). At the time I was hired, I was a nascent hand-tool woodworker (not by choice, really) with my grandfather’s hand tools plus a Craftsman table saw that seemed determined to eat me.
Before being hired by the magazine, I’d been building tables, chests, benches and bookshelves, but what I really wanted to build was chairs. Chairs are, to me, functional sculpture. Building a chair in 1996, however, seemed impossible. It involved wet wood, compound angles, foreign joinery and weird tools.
Plus, I wasn’t sure what kind of chair I wanted to build. Windsor chairs are beautiful, but they are too feminine and ornate (in general) for my taste. And while I have always loved modern chairs from the Scandinavian countries, the joinery and materials in those chairs seemed even more daunting.
One day I picked up a copy of Good Woodworking magazine in our magazine’s office mail. It had a UK postmark. And opening it was like being struck by lightning. For the most part, Good Woodworking was like the magazine I worked for. It was project-focused (Chopsticks! Build Something for Your Toast!) and was aimed at the not-Fine Woodworking crowd.
But inside that issue was a John Brown column that featured a chair so beautiful and hound-like that I thought it would bound off the page. I wolfed that column down. Then I scurried to our magazine’s “morgue,” where we kept back issues of all our competitors’ magazines. I read everything that had John Brown’s name on it.
That, I decided, was the chair I would build.
It took me six or seven years to build that chair. And it involved a trip to Cobden, Ontario, during an icy March. It was a trip north with a guy (John Hoffman) who would eventually help me found Lost Art Press. But despite the delay and challenges, I built that chair, and it changed the course of my woodworking.
My Monthly Visitor
Good Woodworking was published monthly, which is an insane pace for a woodworking magazine. But I waited impatiently every month for it to arrive. I photocopied the John Brown articles (which I still have) and read them several times over.
My affection for Brown was three-fold. First, it was about the Welsh stick chair. He introduced me to the form that has guided my taste in chairs since 1996. Second, it was about hand tools. I’d been using hand tools almost exclusively since age 11, and it was shocking that someone else I admired did the same thing. I didn’t do it by choice (my parents wouldn’t let me use power tools), but thanks to Brown I decided that I was OK. And third was how he declared “I am an anarchist” in one of his columns. (In fact, his column was labeled “The Anarchist Woodworker” for a period of time.)
I’d been introduced to anarchism my by my cousin Jessamyn West in the early 1990s when she explained how it wasn’t always about the violent overthrow of all government to create chaos. It opened my mind, and during graduate school in 1993 I became a fan of Noam Chomsky and his views on media, hegemony and anarchism.
When Lucy and I moved to the Cincinnati area, I discovered Josiah Warren, the father of American Anarchism and an amazing Cincinnatian. When I walked into the doors of Popular Woodworking magazine in 1996 I was a closeted American Aesthetic Anarchist. Believe me, it’s not something you should list on your resume or even talk about over lunch.
John Brown was the first person to put “woodworking” and “anarchism” together, and it was pure genius. Though I doubt his ideas and mine about anarchism were similar, I am forever in debt to him for making that connection. That is why I dedicated “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” to him and Roy Underhill (another political subversive).
How Did We Get Here?
When Brown died in 2008, I hoped that someone from Good Woodworking would write the definitive book on Brown and include all of his columns from the magazine. It seemed a natural salute to one of our generation’s most influential woodworkers.
That didn’t happen. Friends of Brown asked me why Lost Art Press didn’t publish that book. Here’s the short answer: I didn’t know Brown personally, and so I left that task to friends who did.
A few years ago, Chris Williams sent me an email out of the blue. Chris worked with Brown for many years (though I’ll leave that story to his pen). He convinced me that Lost Art Press might be the best publisher for this important project.
So please know that I enter this arena reluctantly. While Brown is my woodworking hero, I’ve always thought I was unqualified to publish a book on him. I never met him. I’m an American. And etc.
But I am dedicated to do a good job. Lost Art Press is, at times, about lost causes or lost ideas. Our goal since 2007 has been to re-establish the balance between power tools and hand tools in the modern workshop. Exploring the ideas and influence of Brown will definitely tip those scales.
I am not sure when our book on Brown will be complete. In our world, a book is done when it’s done. But we will finish it, as sure as we finished a nine-year project on Charles Hayward or a seven-year project (at least) on A.J. Roubo.
I know, we all know about hammers. When I earned cash dismantling exhibitions at Earls Court Exhibition Centre in London in 1978 the deal was this: We meet at this pub on Sunday night at 9 p.m., each of us with a nice big 16 oz claw hammer. Two hours bashing apart exhibition stands, and by 11 p.m. we were back in the pub for last orders and with cash in hand.
“Most important tool in the workshop,” my mentor Alan Peters would say, whacking a builder’s lump hammer onto the bench. The so and so did it hard enough to make me jump. Alan used this tool to aid assembly of almost all carcase work. He was precise in how he used it, but he would drive home dovetailed sides where the glue was getting stiff with mighty whacks.
He told me once he had to assemble a small casket built to house the ashes of a client’s late husband. The client arrived. They carefully poured the ashes into the carcase, three sides had been assembled. The secret mitre dovetailed last side was glued and WHACKED down.
“Stop, Stop, please don’t hit him,” cried the distressed client. Alan carried on. Two more good whacks and it was all down and quiet resumed.
There is not much to a hammer. Weight, a nice, well-formed head and a handle of good length. “Well balanced” we say. Always hold your hammer low down on the handle; don’t strangle the damn thing. Use the length to give you accuracy and weight of the blow. It’s about rhythm and eyeballing the stoke.
We have a group nice hammers to chuck in the chest. My own hammer drawer is full of the damn things of all sizes, shapes and nationalities. Dead-weight hammers, nylon, soft-faced tappers and the good old Warringtons.
I used to not properly fit steel hoops to my Japanese chisels. I was a prat (some say I am still a prat, but they can b….. off). Now I do it properly and can whack the living daylight out of them. These are my favourite hammers; they are Japanese and bought on eBay. Though I did like a nice American hammer that Chris had when he was with us this summer.
“Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”
— Ernest Hemingway, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940)
When you tell people you’re into hand tool woodworking they look at you like you’re in a cult. From an objective stance, they’re not completely off base. The dominant religious belief in woodworking is still fueled by electrons coming from the wall and, the dominant faith tradition in our society is still consumerism. The hand tool woodworker is a weird duck. An outsider. A glitch in the matrix.
I’ve always had more books than shelves on which to store them because words and ideas are important to me. We are all storied creatures. We live, move and have our being in the great narrative of time where the right word at the right moment might just change your life. This week I received my copy of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” in the mail nearly one year to the day after opening a similar package containing “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” and so it seemed like a good and fitting time to stop and reflect on my own conversion experience and my first year as an aesthetic anarchist. A task easier said than done.
What you are reading now is (at least) the fourth time I have tried to write this story. The first draft read like hagiography, the second was philosophy and the third was autobiography. This version, I think, is the most honest. To be fair, though, this story didn’t really begin with The Anarchist’s Tool Chest. It began two years ago in March when my father died suddenly at 62. His death came, in part, because of a lifetime working in a factory he didn’t love for a company that considered him disposable. His father died at 62 under nearly the same conditions (albeit a different factory) and was put in the ground the day his first Social Security retirement check made it to the mailbox.
That sort of thing is apt to make you more than a little reflective.
I spent a lot of time during the year following my father’s untimely demise thinking about my own life, my aspirations and the things I was passionate about. The question loomed large in my mind: “If I knew only had 27 years left above the dirt, was I going to be satisfied with the way they were spent?” By the time “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” arrived in my mailbox the revolution had already begun.
I come from a family of capable tradespeople. My maternal grandfather spent his career as a journeyman electrician, but he was also a jack of all trades around the house. When I was a boy I would sneak into his workshop and wonder at the tools there. The massive cast-iron table saw was juxtaposed against the brace and handsaws on the wall, and I can still remember the acrid yet sweet smell of 3-in-1 oil mixed with sawdust hanging in the air. It was there I learned to tinker. To break things down and to create new things. I learned how to hammer a nail and saw a board more or less straight. I learned to design and create. I learned the power of my mind and the capacity of my hands.
Life has a way of taking over though, and some of those early lessons were lost to time and choice. During the next few decades I continued to work with wood on occasion, but if I’m being honest, confidence often outstripped skill, and I’ve made a fair amount of furniture that I’m not proud of. Some of it is still in use around the house, some of it has been relegated to the garage and some is waiting to be deconstructed and made into something better. At best you could classify most of the joinery as “inventive.” Nearly all of it is finished in “honey pine” stain.
Out in my shed you can find the remains of a queen bed I built using only a circular saw, chisel, jigsaw and router boasting what might be considered distant cousins to mortise-and-tenon joints. It saw almost a decade of use, but it isn’t anything to write home about. While building that bed I bought my first handplane — a newer model Stanley jack plane purchased at the local big box home store. It was clear I had no idea what to do with it and If you were to sneak into my shed right now you could still see the tear-out it left on that bed. A friend “borrowed” it and never brought it back. “Good riddance,” I thought, and I went out and bought a table saw. Like most hobbyist woodworkers, the idea had been implanted in my brain that if I just had better tools and a well-lit place I could produce world class furniture. But my skills leveled off, my heart wasn’t in it and I continued to make junk. Usable junk to be sure, but nothing I would be proud to pass on to my children.
“The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” and my ensuing journey into aesthetic anarchism has taught me more in the past 12 months about joinery and cabinet making than the preceding 35 years combined. It has helped me to understand that my work never improved because I was focusing on the wrong things. I was a consumer of my own work. I just wanted the finished products and didn’t really want to spend time developing skills. Rather than seeing each new project as an opportunity to learn something I saw it as an opportunity to acquire a new tool, but we all know that buying new tools to become a better woodworker is like buying a new pair of running shoes and believing that you’re healthier. What I really needed was fewer tools and more time understanding how they worked. Some people have that capacity with power tools. For me, at least, I needed to strip things down and start from a different place.
The past year has been an evolution for me from a power tool dominated shop to a hand-tool-only mindset. I began by setting aside my orbital sander and tuning up an old Stanley jack plane that I found languishing in an antique store. This plane worked immeasurably better than the one I had purchased new and I was amazed as I spent hours making shavings out of every scrap piece of pine in my shop. I was fascinated by how the blade interacted with the wood and how I interacted with the blade. The visceral and intimate connection this tool gave me to the work was intoxicating, and so it is not surprising that when the motor of my (admittedly underwhelming) table saw burned up while re-sawing some wood, I didn’t give it a second thought before carrying it out to the curb and seeking out a decent set of rip and crosscut handsaws to replace it.
I read “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” at least twice in the month between its arrival and the arrival of my third daughter in April of last year. Then, for the first few weeks of her life I would sit up at night rocking her to sleep with those new ideas swirling around in my mind, binge watching old episodes of “The Woodwright’s Shop.” Somewhere in the middle of all of that, enlightenment rested upon my heart and I finally listened to the lesson life had been trying to teach me for some time: My primary motivator is process not product. Something in my soul finds peace and purpose in each individual stroke of the saw and pass of the plane. When I focus on the product all I can think about is getting it done, but I take far more joy in how a thing gets done than gloating over the finished product. From the cradle to the coffin, delight is found in the pieces that make up the whole. The net effect of all of this enlightenment on my craftsmanship has been measurable. The work is more meaningful and the end result is far beyond anything I had previously done. I might almost call it good.
I still get concerned looks from time to time when I start talking about handplanes, clocked screws and breaking down stock with a handsaw, but I’m OK with that. Owning and naming my own tendency toward aesthetic anarchism has been refreshing, exhilarating and most certainly liberating. It has given me the courage to renounce my allegiance to many a falsely held belief, to call out bullshit where I see it, and to name beauty when it is apparent. I have been both challenged and encouraged by these books and this philosophy, but I have also found a community of others on the same journey and I have finally found my way back to a place where I can almost smell the sawdust and machinist oil in my grandfather’s workshop again. It’s not always a safe place, but it is a good place, and I’ll settle for that.
Panel saws, huh? Well I have got a few handsaws. A superb old Disston 10 point hangs on my wall gathering dust. I just got out of the habit of using it; lazy really. The dovetail and tenon saws see a quite a bit of daylight as they are bench saws. I could go to the table saw rather than pick up a tenon saw but I am probably quicker with a tenon saw. And I avoid the shlep. I have a nice, big, well-equipped machine shop just behind the studio here. But it’s a bit of a shlep. So a small panel saw seems to be getting more and more use as I get more confident in using it.
That’s an alarming admission. Yes, I have not used a panel saw as much lately as I did when I was younger. You forget a lot in 40-odd years of furniture making. That is the effect of the machine shop. The band or table saw are just too good, too reliable to not be used in this role every day. And the panel saw takes effort, work, sweat. All of which is pleasant to avoid on a warm sunny day – unless really necessary.
But it’s nice cutting down a line with a small panel saw using a sawhorse properly. No screaming router, just argh, argh argh. I wish I had had one years ago. My old Disston is great, but somehow too big, a small panel saw can become a bench tool, like a tenon saw. Saves a lot of shlepping about.
So what have we got for this young person’s tool chest that will make any sense? The biggest change in saws that I have seen is the arrival of the cheap, throw-away saw. These we have all over the shop; they hang on hooks behind almost every door. These are board saws. They usually have a Japanese tooth pattern and get loads of use quickly ripping up board material or crosscutting the odd bit of solid.
It’s hateful, but we buy them, use them and chuck them away. It’s a scandalous waste of resources that we should be ashamed of, as my daughter would tell me. But saw doctors are getting older and not being replaced. Our saw doc, Brian Mills, is retired now; thankfully he still does all our hand saws and planer blades. Getting them back into shape after we have mutilated them. Don’t tell him, because he would put his prices up, but he is invaluable. I don’t think Brian has trained a replacement, and when he stops, which will never happen, we are in trouble.
First up are the two cheap throw-aways: the Irwin 990 Fine with a 10-point toothline and a disgusting purple plastic handle. There is also an Irwin 880 Universal 9 point with a disgusting orange plastic handle. They are both razor sharp to a state that they can easily cut you very badly. Both these do a great job, and I will not dwell upon them. Our experience is that the toothline holds up so well that you don’t chuck them away as soon as you should. This means you find yourself working much harder with dull saw than you should. Was that not always the way?
I will keep the purple one; it goes with my purple tool chest. So the orange one goes to our winner. What winner? You must have heard? Well, we are gathering tools to fill this tool chest. One Chris Schwarz made when he was here with us at Rowden in the summer. And we are giving it to a young maker under 25. Application details are here.
Now we come to the meat. Two of the best panel saws I could lay hands on. If I missed your saws I am sorry but I can only look at two. These are not “review” saws; I bought these and paid a pretty penny for the Lie-Nielsen 12-point crosscut saw at £174.46 from Axminster Power Tools. The best British saw I could find, and I can’t avoid wanting to support British tool makers, was from Roberts and Lee. Their Dorchester range made now by Thomas Flinn and Co. of Sheffield. This is another 20”, 10 pointer crosscut but at £100.31. Alan Peters had Roberts and Lee saws; my first dovetail saw was Roberts and Lee. So they have history with me. Not all of it good.
These are very different saws apart from the price. One is a stiffy one a floppy. Both are taper ground, meaning the plate of the saw is ground thinner near the top of the saw to give clearance. Both claim to be hand sharpened and indeed both cut very well. The differences come with the handle, the plate and the toothline.
The handle of the LN saw is beautiful, a ripple maple piece of work clearly inspired by Disston. Handles matter. It’s the bit YOU engage with. The junction of handle to the blade matters. This fit on the LN saw is pretty near perfect. The Dorchester saw handle is pretty crude in comparison without the decorative embellishments of the LN. But it fits my hand OK. The fit of the blade to the handle of the Dorchester is tight with five fixings, but the kerf of the cut the plate fits into is still a deal wider than the saw plate. The LN saw seems to be perfectly matched, kerf in the handle, to plate held in place with three brass fitttings.
The plates of these saws are fundamentally different. The Dorchester is a stiff saw with a thicker blade The Lie-Nielsen saw a floppy thin bladed saw in the Disston tradition. You could play a good tune on the LN saw. This is a personal preference thing. Common wisdom was, stiffies for board stuff and floppies for solid, but I don’t think that is totally true. I like the stiff blade of the Dorchester in this small saw, and it seems to cut well for me. Not that the Lie-Nielsen panel saw doesn’t do a great job.
The last difference which makes me sing with happiness is the breasted tooth line of the Dorchester. If you look down the line of the teeth they are not straight but slightly domed. Not much, probably a quarter of an inch. But that for me makes a difference. It’s to do with the geometry of my arm swinging away and the teeth engaging in the timber. Missed a trick there Tom.
Beautiful though the Lie-Nielsen 10-point panel saw is, I am going to put that saw in the prize winning box and keep the Dorchester for myself.