Katy has been busy – this weekend she made more than 100 jars of soft wax, which are up for sale in her etsy store. They are $12 each for a 4 oz. tin.
I’m not only the father of the Soft Wax High Priestess, I’m also a customer. I use the stuff on many of my pieces. While the wax is intended to be applied to the insides of casework (it’s fantastic for drawers) it also works really well on turnings, stools and chairs, projects such as the three-legged stools I’ve been building this spring.
I also use it on the wooden vise screws on my workbenches, tool handles and on iron and steel tools (we use her soft wax on our Crucible Improved Pattern Dividers).
Katy’s business has taken over half of my workbench at home – and I couldn’t be happier. She makes it completely on her own and sources all her supplies (and buys it on her own credit card). It really is her business, and it’s hard to believe she’s only 16.
She’s even been approached by a few companies who want her to wholesale it (she can’t because there’s not enough margin).
While a compass and straightedge can design simple pieces of furniture, you also need curves that have a varying radius to draw smooth shapes that connect three or four points – the accelerating curves that give motion and life to furniture.
The tools for these important curves are commonly called French curves or Burmester curves. And they are the starting (and ending) point for any designer who wants to escape rigid rectilinear shapes and simple circles.
While you can buy inexpensive plastic curves at an art supply store, the plastic tools have disadvantages compared to traditional wooden curves.
Most plastic curves have a small rabbets along their edges. While we understand the function of the rabbet, we think it interferes with making a true and smooth line because you can tilt your pencil or pen. Traditional wooden curves have no rabbet, allowing greater accuracy.
Second, plastic curves are difficult to mark notations on, such as where you want a curve to start and stop. You can mark them with a permanent marker, but this is slow, inaccurate (in our experience) and messy. Plus, smooth plastic curves slide too easily on the paper while making your mark, again, spoiling your accuracy.
Traditional wooden curves, which are difficult to come by on the used market, are a joy to use. Warm in the hand, they are precise, they stick to the paper while you are drafting and it’s easy to write (and erase) notations on their surfaces.
The problem with traditional wooden curves is they were not truly dimensionally stable as they were typically made from solid hardwood. They were also fragile.
The Crucible Design Curves When we set out to design our curves we wanted them to be strong and stable (like plastic curves) but warm, accurate and easy to use (like wooden curves). The solution was a special five-ply bamboo material specially designed for laser-cutting.
We designed our curves using an English set made in 1943 as our foundation and inspiration. The curves are cut and engraved in Covington, Ky., then sanded to #220-grit in our shop in Fort Mitchell, Ky.
Bamboo is the perfect material for this tool. It is more dimensionally stable than any hardwood or softwood that we know of, it doesn’t absorb moisture as readily as wood and the five plies of veneer ensure it will stay the same shape year round.
Like plastic curves, these will bend readily across curved shapes without breaking.
Our first set of curves consists of three of our favorite shapes. The large curve is about 12″ long. The smaller two are about 6″ long. A full set of curves encompassed many individual tools. And while we hope to bring out more curves in the future, we think these three are an excellent starting point.
We are introducing these curves at Handworks 2017 where we will sell a set of three for the introductory price of $37. After Handworks they will be available in our online store. We might have to increase the price slightly for shipping and packaging costs charged by our warehouse.
Please stop by our booth at Handworks and give them a try. We’ll have a huge pile of them to sell in protective boxes suitable for travel.
With school out, our sticker heiress (Maddy) is hunkering down for a long summer of lab work and unpaid research assisting a PhD candidate in Columbus. The good news: the lab work and research helps her as an animal science major. The bad news: The two jobs pay less than working the counter at a pizza restaurant (one of her many other jobs at college).
Thanks to sticker sales, Maddy has saved enough money to scrape by without having to sell any organ meat attached to her skeleton.
She’s home this weekend so we can feed her, replenish her toilet paper supply and help with her laundry. Oh, and so she can abuse/love our cats. Shown is Wally, who is up for anything. Want to see him in a tuxedo? We can probably arrange that.
Maddy reports that she is down to the last 150 copies of the current set of stickers. So if you want an engraving of A.J. Roubo to adorn your band saw, laptop or cat, don’t tarry.
You can order a set of three stickers from her etsy store here. Yes, she accepts international orders.
Or, for customers in the United States, you can send a $5 bill and a SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) to Maddy at:
Stick it to the Man
P.O. Box 3284
Columbus, OH 43210
She’ll put the three current sticker designs in your envelope and mail them back to you. These are nice, 100-percent vinyl weatherproof and cat-proof stickers.
One of the primary reasons I decided to expand the book “Roman Workbenches” into a larger text was an unexpected gift from Jennie Alexander that was courtesy of John and Eleanor Kebabian.
The story starts some months ago when Jennie sent me photocopies of some old drawings and asked if I saw anything of interest. After about two seconds I wrote her back with an emphatic “yes.” The photocopies had sent my head reeling.
A few weeks later Jennie sent me a box. I was in Italy at the time, and the delivery person was not too bright. So he left it on top of the air conditioning unit, where it was rained on for several days until I returned.
I found the box in tatters and took it inside the shop, expecting the worst. The box fell apart on the bench and inside was a no-worse-for-the-wear copy of “L’Art du Tourneur Mécanicien” by M. Hulot. It’s a 1775 book about turning and many other aspects of woodworking.
Written about the same time as A.J. Roubo’s “l’Art du menuisier,” it’s in a similar format: giant pages of text followed by gorgeous plates. After browsing through the plates, many looked similar to Roubo’s, but others didn’t. I’ve spent several hours studying the plates and am convinced this book deserves my undivided attention.
Of particular interest are plates 13 and 31, which depict a low staked workbench that is outfitted with a variety of appliances for chairmaking.
So I started isolating all the text that relates to these two plates so I could translate it. (And here I thought my meager French skills would get a rest.) Unlike Roubo, Hulot discusses these two plates in more than a dozen places in the text. This is not going to be easy. But you have to start somewhere.
During one long evening, I translated the section that introduces the bench, which Hulot calls appropriately “a saddle.” Take a look:
IV Description of the Saddle for Planing & Boring & Assembling the Work
FIG. 4, Plate 13, shows a bench type which is called a Saddle for planing/flattening and assembly; That is a piece of oak wood 5 feet long, about 12 to 14 inches wide, and very thick, carried on four feet, R, Y, X, Z, which enter into as many Round holes which have been pierced in the whole of the Saddle AB. The workman has the face, turned towards the head, B, which is a large piece of soft wood, such as alder, and the tail of which forms a flat tenon which passes into a mortise through the saddle; The top [of the head] forms a kind of step, the steps of which are cut into different fences, some at right angles and shallow, to receive the ends of the flat workpieces for planing its sides/edges; The flat stage receives the pieces that are to be planed flat. Other stepped [heads] are horizontally and vertically notched with the shape of a teaspoon to receive the tip of a stick. There are small cuts [or kerfs] that are perpendicular to the round hole [in the head], as seen in the figure. Independent of the tenon which fixes the head H, it rests against the support K, which is also called the crossbar or buttress of the head, and which is a stop at the end and is across the saddle. [It is secured] by two strong wooden dowel pins, [made of a wood] such as ash or dogwood, which pass perpendicularly through the saddle.
When the wood that is to be worked is large and long, we do not rely on the saddle, but we stand it upright. Place the end of the wood in the recess HK formed by the crossbar and the side of the head of the saddle.
I see many long nights of (exciting) translating ahead. I’m fairly certain this bench is another important piece of the puzzle in understanding the low workbench and all the ways it can be used.
Thanks to the good work on the press and the bindery, we are going to have about 150 copies of the letterpress version of “Roman Workbenches” to sell in our online store at the end of May 2017.
Yesterday, Megan Fitzpatrick and I repaired all these excess copies, pasting in the two missing lines that were snipped off during the plate-making process. All these copies now need to return to our warehouse in Indianapolis and we need to take care of a few customers who received severely damaged copies.
Then, after we take care of all those details, we will put up the remaining stock for sale in our store at noon Eastern time on Friday, May 26, 2017. The price will be the same as it was for the first batch of books and it will be available for international customers.
We will not have any of these books at Handworks later this month, I’m afraid.
After these books sell out, they are gone. We will not do another run of letterpress copies of this book. So you have 20 days to sell your plasma, etc. I am, however, working on a greatly expanded book on this topic that we will print on our usual offset presses and will include photos and additional research I’ve conducted this year.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Several customers have asked if we will print any books in the future using letterpress. The answer is: I hope so. It has to be the right sort of book, and we’ll have to marshal all the people involved in this project and hope they’ve forgotten what a pain in the crotch mahogany it was.
