Lost Art Press

The Perfect Canvas

Posted on by fitz

I wonder if Chris understood what he was unleashing when he first wrote about the Dutch Tool Chest. It’s the perfect blank canvas for woodworkers to exercise their ingenuity. Just a quick internet search will spill pages of configurations, colors, and creativity.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about DTC design and execution lately. This spring I’m co-teaching a class where students will build a version of the chest — but with a twist. My partner in crime is Thomas Latanè, one of the best blacksmiths working today, so the surprise spoiler is students will be both building the chest with me AND forging the hardware with Tom.

My influence for the project is easy to see but Tom’s comes from the tool chests that were attached to the sides of Conestoga wagons (a form curiously similar to the DTC). On many surviving pieces the strap hinge swings on a clenched staple as opposed to a standard barrel and pin. The example chest in the photo wears Tom’s vision for the hardware but there is opportunity for students to create something as complex or as simple as their skill set and time allows.

I’m really excited to be a part of this, it’s a wonderful handshake between two crafts that frankly ought to hang out together more often. The class will be divided into two, spending the morning with one instructor and trading to the other for the afternoon.

We’ve chosen to host the class at the picturesque Tunnel Mill Craft School just a few miles south of Rochester, Minn. Unlike many schools, they offer a dormitory bed and meals included in the price of tuition. After the official class time is over, it’s open campus where students can catch up in either area they feel they need to or just hang around the common room and enjoy the community.

Now the important stuff:

The class is May 2-5, and there are openings for only eight students this go around – so please don’t miss your chance. Dual skill classes are a rarity.

For pricing, booking, and questions email Carol Adams at jc-adams@msn.com or call 507-289-4189.

Derek Olson
Oldwolf Workshop Studio

See more of Tunnel Mill at http://www.tunnelmillcrafts.com/

See more of Thomas Latanè’s work at https://www.spaco.org/latane/TCLatane.htm

Spinning Chairs to Study

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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To develop a good eye for chairmaking (or spoon carving or alligator wrestling), you need to study as many chairs as possible. Do it until your eyes glaze over.

Here’s a set of nice “Spinnstuhls” compiled by Rudy Everts in Bavaria. These so-called sewing chairs are from southern Germany and the Alps. These chairs are interesting to me in several ways. Some have a traditional undercarriage for chairs from this region – radical rake and splay, legs that taper to the floor, battens to thicken the seat – but some do not.

Check out the bent legs on a couple examples. A good guess is these came from a bent section of the tree, perhaps a branch or from the root section of a trunk.

Also, the variety of uppercarriages is fascinating. Some are joined, some look sawn from solid and some look bent.

Look through the gallery. Zoom in. Class dismissed.

— Christopher Schwarz

Let’s rake some hay

Posted on by fitz

Psst.

Hey, man. Wanna have some fun?

Hayrake 3

What kind of fun?

Hayraking.

[Radio silence.]

Building a hayrake table. Killer joinery (exposed tenons with trapped, scribed shoulders; bridle joints; cool geometry), carving lambs’ tongues, decorative gouging and inlaid butterfly keys—all at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking.

Hayrake 2
Laying out a lamb’s tongue

Hayrake 4
Cutting one exposed tenon with shoulders scribed to a curved stretcher is fun. Cutting a pair when the shoulders are trapped between stretchers at a fixed length is a challenge.

Hayrake 5
Preparing to trim a stretcher tenon

At the end of six days you’ll go home with a table–or, depending on your proficiency and other variables, you’ll at least go home with parts of the table ready for you to finish working on them, and you will be familiar with the techniques required to complete the build.

The class will run from July 8-13 (six days) and students are encouraged to build their table to their own dimensions. You can bring your own lumber or buy it before the start of class at Edensaw Woods.

Join me?

Make Your Own Curved Card Scraper

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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If you didn’t get a chance to purchase one of the Crucible curved card scrapers, you can make your own with a dry grinder and an existing card scraper. It takes about 30 minutes.

Download and print out the following template. It’s a hand-drawn version of Chris Williams’s scraper, which is where our design started.

chriswilliams_scraper_shape

Cut it out and affix it to your card scraper with the help of spray adhesive. Or make a cardboard template and trace its shape on your scraper with a permanent marker.

At your grinder, set the tool rest to 0° – parallel to the floor. Dress the wheel of your grinder (we use an #80-grit wheel, but a #60 or #100 will also do) so it has a slight convex shape. This convexity in the wheel makes the scraper easier to shape.

Get a bucket of water and put it by the grinder.

(Hey wait, where are the step photos? I’m in a hotel room that’s 400 miles from my shop. You are going to have to use your imagination.)

Place the scraper on the tool rest and start grinding the excess metal away. Don’t work on one part of the scraper for more than a few seconds. Keep moving around the perimeter. After 10 or 15 seconds, try to pinch the scraper with a finger and thumb. If….

… you can pinch the scraper with no pain, continue to grind.

… your fingers reflexively jump away, cool the scraper in your water bucket.

… you smell bacon, also cool the scraper in the water bucket.

Once you have ground down to your line, you will have become pretty good at grinding flat shapes – congrats. Now you need to remove the grinder marks from the edges.

Use a block of wood to hold the scraper at 90° on a coarse diamond stone and stone the edges. Remove all the scratches from the grinder. Then move up to a #1,000-grit waterstone (or soft Arkansas) and then up to a polishing stone. Then you can proceed with normal scraper-sharpening procedures.

This is exactly how I made all of our prototypes. I promise that you will become emotionally involved with your scraper after putting all the work into it, and you might not ever want to buy one of ours.

So be it.

— Christopher Schwarz

New Crucible Card Scraper for Flat & Curved Work

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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You can now purchase the Williams Welsh Card Scraper in the Crucible store. It is $20 plus shipping and is available for immediate shipment.

The scraper is named after Chris Williams, a Welsh chairmaker who first showed us this shape in 2018. While there are many custom scraper shapes out there for specialty work (especially scraping mouldings) Chris’s scraper was the first shape we’ve seen that is ideal for scraping both flat and curved surfaces.

We think it’s a huge improvement compared to the typical square-cornered rectangular scraper sold today. Here’s why:

The gentle curves of its cutting edges mean that you don’t have to bend the tool with your thumbs to scrape a flat surface – the curve is built-in. That makes our scraper much easier to use. (Side note: many woodworkers with arthritis who cannot use a rectangular scraper report that they can use our scraper.) Here are the tool’s other features.

  1. It is made from 1095 spring steel that has been hardened and tempered to a Rockwell (C) hardness of 48 to 51. This hardness makes it easy to turn a hook with a standard burnisher (though carbide is always the superior choice for a burnisher) and the hook lasts plenty long.
  2. The faces are polished and blued for rust-resistance.
  3. The scraper is cut to shape using waterjet – both for precision and to preserve the hardness of the steel. Then the tool’s edges are hand ground and polished in Nicholasville, Ky., to make the tool easy to set up and maintain.
  4. The scraper comes with a magnet, which acts as a heat sink while scraping, making the tool comfortable to use for long periods.
  5. The tool is supplied with a heavy paper envelope that is perfect for storing the scraper, protecting its edges while it’s sitting in your tool chest or cabinet.

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Sharpening the Williams Welsh Card Scraper is as simple as sharpening a rectangular tool. (We’ve prepared a tutorial here.) In fact, I think our tool is a bit easier to sharpen than a flat-edged scraper, especially when stoning the edges.

Like all Crucible tools, the Williams Welsh Card Scraper is made entirely in the United States with domestic materials. You can purchase one here.

— Christopher Schwarz