Lost Art Press

Machines in the Workshop, Part 5

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mortise_g

Part 1 is here
Part 2 is here
Part 3 is here
Part 4 is here

HANDWORKER: Are we not approaching the matter from different angles? You regard the operation as nothing more than a means to an end. I do not agree. If we were speaking of the trade in which the pro­duction of so many pieces of furniture is all that matters there might be some­thing in it. For the home woodworker the case is entirely different. My belief is that, although a man may need, say, a sideboard, this need is more or less incidental to the fact of his making it. The real reason which sets a man at work is the interest in the work itself, the expression he is able to give to his ideas, and the desire to construct something useful and beautiful. In using a machine he is robbing himself of half of his pleasure. He may make the job more quickly, but he will have lost a great deal of satisfaction. It is like a man in a motor car. He will glance at fifty times as many things as the man who is walking, but it is the latter who really sees more.

New Stickers – and a New Way to Order Them

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Maddy has sold out of her first run of stickers, and we have three new designs that we are offering to everyone worldwide.

These die-cut vinyl stickers are made in the United States and are strong enough that you can use them outdoors (not that we would suggest you put them on the backs of traffic signs or anything).

You can order the stickers one of two ways. 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

Maddy will take your SASE and put three high-quality vinyl stickers – one of each design – in your envelope and mail it to you immediately. (If you send $10, she’ll send two sets; $15 will get you three sets). She also has been throwing in some bonus stickers….

For customers outside the United States (or those who don’t want to use an SASE), you can order stickers through Maddy’s etsy store. Stickers there are $6 for domestic customers. Because of the international postage, sets are $10 for international (sorry, but there are fees and this and that).

This little sticker business has been a huge boon for Maddy and making ends meet at college. She also is delighted when people send photos, notes, stickers or what have you. Your kindness has impressed a college student.

— Christopher Schwarz

Machines in the Workshop, Part 4

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bandsaw

Part 1 is here
Part 2 is herePart 3 is here

MACHINIST: I often wonder why such a fetish is made of sheer hard work. After all, the operation is merely a means to an end. A man wants, say, a sideboard. He has the choice of doing the whole thing by hand, involving a lot of really hard work and taking possibly a hundred hours, or of lightening his labours by letting a machine do the donkey work and taking half the time, leaving him free to get on with something else. In both cases he is getting pleasure from the exercise of his craft. Possibly the purist has pleasure in ripping down his timber from the rough, but for my own part I prefer to do the lighter tasks which call for every bit as much, if not more, skill.

Consider how short a time a man has for his woodwork. All day he is attend­ing to his normal duties, leaving possibly three hours in the evening for wood­work. This may be enough for one who goes in for small, light items only, but when it is proposed to make a bed­room suite it is hardly giving oneself a chance. It would take years to com­plete, and life is too short, it seems to me.

No, I think that the man who is going in seriously for woodwork will find a light machine an excellent in­vestment. I would suggest a circular saw. I have known many cases of men who would like to make certain pieces of furniture, but who have been put off because they know it would take a tre­mendous time and would involve some really hard, strenuous work. If they would only take the initial step of buy­ing a light power saw they could tackle the work without hesitation. Small saws do not cost much and they con­sume little power.

Now let me turn to your point about the danger of the saw completely oust­ing handwork. I do not think that this need be the case. Apart from straight-forward ripping out, I should certainly do my rebating and grooving on the machine, because it does it just as well as by hand without any disadvantage. But I still cut tenons by hand; also mouldings. When the machine saw will not produce so satisfactory a result as the handsaw the latter should be used. And the same thing applies to all other forms of machinery. For in­stance, a drilling machine is invaluable for the preliminary clearing out of the waste from mortises. The holes can be made to run one into the other so that subsequent chopping with the chisel is reduced to a minimum. On the other hand, to substitute dowelled joints for the mortise and tenon just because the machine is capable of making them rapidly is obviously a mistake.

The Reasonable Dictators

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planing

The first urge I ever felt to be a manager was at my first newspaper job in South Carolina. My desk was in the center of the newsroom and faced the glass-fronted offices of three people: the managing editor, the business editor and the special projects editor.

When I wasn’t reporting on a trailer fire or some piece of small-town political skullduggery, I’d look up from my keyboard and watch them. These three white guys decided everything – what was on the front page, who got to to write about the murder trials, who had to write about the centenarians’ birthdays (sorry Reece!) and who sorted the newsroom mail (sorry again Reece!).

Holy crap I wanted one of their jobs. Not because I wanted to boss people around, but because I’d get to make decisions that involved thinking, ideas, reason and the wisdom I’d accumulated about the region (I had none of the time). And those decisions would make the newspaper and community better.

It took 12 years for me to claw my way into one of those positions. After about six months in my perch I realized that my job was all about enacting the ideas (good and bad) of the layer of managers above me. And before I got any more bright ideas about further advancement, I saw there were two more layers of managers above my managers.

I think that’s when I developed a problem with authority.

die_ermordung_des_ulisses_banoit_de_sainte-moreI left corporate America in 2011 for a variety of reasons, but the No. 1 reason was to get a couple new bosses: failure and starvation.

After more than five years of working under failure and starvation, I can honestly say they are the most predictable and fair-minded superiors I’ve ever had. If I don’t work efficiently, I fail. If I don’t work hard, I starve. It really is that simple.

I can blame the economy when I fail, but that usually means I’m spending too much money or am making things that people really don’t need. So I need to adjust. You can say it’s more complicated than that, but it’s not. It’s how people lived for thousands of years before capitalist economies took hold. And these rules still apply today, just like breathing air is still good and breathing water will still kill you.

To my wife and friends it looks like I’m both always working and never working. On Monday morning I’m lingering over the newspaper and planning a nice meal for my family. On Christmas Day I’m furiously editing chapters for a forthcoming book. At 4 a.m. I’m answering frantic emails from Europe. At 10 a.m. I sleep for a while to clear my head.

Starvation and failure are totally fine with my behavior. There is no annual review session where I “meet” or “exceed” corporate expectations. There is only the bank account and the pantry. And whether or not they are full or empty is my decision alone.

— Christopher Schwarz

New in Store: ‘The Woodworker Vol. IV, Shop & Furniture’

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hayward_cover4_img_2253I’m pleased to announce that the fourth and final volume of “The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years Vol. IV, The Shop & Furniture” is now at the printer and you can place an advance order for the book here. The 336-page book is $39 and will ship in February.

This new volume covers three different topics:

1) The Workshop, including the design and construction of workbenches, tool chests and wall cabinets. There’s also an entire section devoted to “appliances,” which are workshop accessories such as shooting boards.

2) Furniture & its Details, includes a discussion of all the important Western furniture styles, including their construction, mouldings and metal hardware. This section also includes the construction drawings for many important and famous pieces of furniture examined by Charles H. Hayward during his tenure at The Woodworker magazine.

3) Odds & Sods. In addition to offering its readers practical information for the shop, The Woodworker also asked it subscribers to think about the craft and its place in modern society. We have included many of our favorite philosophical pieces in this final section.

You can download a nice excerpt here. The complete table of contents is here.

The History of the Project

The publication of this book marks the end of a journey that began even before John and I incorporated Lost Art Press. About 10 years ago, John and I began to investigate who owned the rights to material written by Charles H. Hayward during his time at The Woodworker.

After successfully obtaining the reprint rights to the material in The Woodworker, the next job was to obtain every copy of the magazine during the time Hayward was editor. All of these magazines had to be imported to the United States from the United Kingdom and Europe and were purchased from small bookshops and individuals.

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Luckily, The Woodworker used to bind a year’s worth of editions into a hardbound annual. So we had to track down about 35 annuals instead of 420 monthly issues. Even so, it was an expensive and time-consuming endeavor because some of the annuals published during World War II were difficult to come by.

Then we had to read them all.

During a long series of evenings, Megan Fitzpatrick, Phil Hirz and I pored over every page of every issue and flagged all the articles we thought were worth reprinting. The topics of the articles overlapped a lot – there were dozens of articles on French polishing and poultry sheds, for example. So even after picking the best articles we culled them further to minimize the redundancy.

To make the articles easier to scan, we cut apart the bindings of all the books. First we used a knife. Then we switched to the band saw.

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I can hear some of you howling about us destroying these books. But keep in mind that all these books are pretty much doomed because they were printed on acidic paper that is already falling apart. Yes, there are non-destructive methods to scan material (we use them all the time). But in this case, the band saw was the best way to go.

Enter Ty Black, a woodworker and computer nerd who scanned all of the pages and wrote a special program for processing the images that adjusted each image so it was crisp and clear. Though I wrote about the whole process in one paragraph, it took a year.

We reset all the text from scratch. So it had to be compared to the original paper files to make sure it was correct. It took John months of work to do this and enter all the text into InDesign files.

During the last two years, Linda Watts and Meghan B. designed the pages for the books and tried to retain the vintage feel of the magazine in the layouts. And Megan Fitzpatrick, Kara Gebhart Uhl and I gave a final edit to all the text to clean it all up.

It was as grueling as our Roubo project, but grueling in different ways. Roubo’s text makes my brain hurt after a large dose of it. With this project, it was dealing with the thousands of images and complexity of the layouts that made me wonder when happy hour would start (is 11 a.m. too early?).

We hope you like the result.

Like all Lost Art Press books, “The Woodworker: The Charles Hayward Years” is produced and printed entirely in the United States. At 336 pages, it is printed on smooth acid-free #60 paper and joined with a tough binding that is sewn, affixed with fiber tape and then glued. The pages are covered in dense hardbound covers that are wrapped with cotton cloth.

I am personally thrilled to close the book on this book and have one less gargantuan quest on my to-do list.

— Christopher Schwarz