Lost Art Press

High in the Andes

Posted on by fitz
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Volcán Cotopaxi (5,897m/19,347ft) peeking through the clouds. Cotopaxi is about 50km from our house, and last erupted in August 2015.

I’m used to working up a sweat while involved in some heavy sawing or planing, but what I’m not used to doing is gasping for air and getting a pounding headache in the process.

The Andes are big mountains, and Quito is one of the highest-elevation metropolitan areas in the world. Fortunately, we are living in the suburb of Tumbaco, which is about 1600 ft lower in elevation than Quito proper. Unfortunately, that means that we’re still at 7800 ft.

The traditional treatment for symptoms of altitude sickness is mate de coca, or coca leaf tea. In Peru, commercially produced mate de coca, in teabag form, can be found just about anywhere, and in the higher elevation cities like Cusco, you can purchase large plastic bags of the dried leaves for only a few dollars. Just about every hotel in Cusco has a bowl of coca leaves and a pot of hot water in the lobby for you to brew your mate. Strictly speaking, I don’t think the bulk leaves are legal, but nobody seems to care (probably because they’re all drinking mate).

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Mate de coca, the quicker picker-upper.

Mate de coca is far less common in Ecuador, apparently because of greater influence from U.S. Government policymakers. There is some tension between its classification as a harmful drug and its traditional use as a natural medicinal/spiritual plant. You won’t see mate de coca in a supermarket, but you can find it if you look. (I know of a specialty gourmet coffee and chocolate shop in Quito that stocks it, for example.) The only place I’ve seen whole leaves is at the market in Otavalo, and even there it’s in itty-bitty little bags.

The active ingredients in mate de coca are cocaine and related alkaloids (of course), as well as methyl salicylate, which is chemically similar to aspirin and has analogous pain-relieving properties.

Does it work? It seems to, although it might be that it’s the methyl salicylate that’s doing the bulk of the work, rather than the cocaine. Consuming mate de coca does have a couple of noticeable additional consequences: For one thing, it has an energizing effect (which the Incas used to advantage when they wanted their slaves to work harder). It also inspires confidence, which can be a good thing when one is immersed in artistic pursuits, but is probably not such a great idea while working with tools having very sharp edges. So for woodworking, I think I’ll stick to acetazolamide and ibuprofen.

–Steve Schafer

Who Has More Soft Wax for You?

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Katy has become a little owl-obsessed while reading Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” hence the stuffed animal in her photos.

She made about 50 more tins of wax last week but we sold a bunch at our storefront on Saturday (thanks everyone). This morning she listed the remaining 32 on her etsy store here.

I hope we can work on developing the black wax a little more (our carbon black showed up), but Katy is taking a class in screen printing this coming week, so the wax experiments might have to wait for a week.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Make (or Buy) a Sector and Learn to Use it

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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If you haven’t heard of the sector, it probably means you aren’t an artillery officer or a ship’s navigator working in the 17th century. An invention attributed to the great astronomer Galileo, the sector was a calculation instrument comprised of a pair of hinged plates engraved with a variety of scales that – coupled with a pair of dividers – enabled the operator to calculate proportions, polygons, trigonometric and numerous other table functions.

Gallileo-editedBy the late 1700s, documents show that the sector was also taken up by architects and artisans to lay out designs based on the once ubiquitous whole-number segmentation and ratio-proportioning system of their trade. However, as 19th century machine-based manufacturing eclipsed the traditional practices of the artisans, their design and layout tools – dividers, sectors and applied Euclidian geometry in general – faded almost entirely from use.

I have discovered, however, that a simple version of the sector can be an incredibly useful and efficient tool for creating scaled drawings (or even doing direct layouts on the stock) when working within traditional design and layout systems. As you may know, George Walker and I describe this system in excruciating detail in our hard-bound book “By Hand and Eye,” and somewhat less-so excruciating in “By Hound and Eye” – the workbook.

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With this three-scale sector in one hand and a pair of dividers in the other you’ll find that you can, literally in seconds, create equal segments between two points; derive harmonic proportional relationships along a line or between dimensions; generate angled lines to certain rise-to-run pitches; set out the facets of polygons (up to 12 sides); find the radius to draw arcs of these polygons between any two points; determine the circumference of a circle knowing its radius; and find out what your brother-in-law really does for a living.

Once you start working with our variant of this ancient calculator, you’ll wonder how you ever made do without it.

If you go to the “Shop” page of our By Hand & Eye website you’ll have access to a free-to-download template to make your own sector to play with. Here you’ll also discover a downloadable 40-page pamphlet on using the sector (offered for a small fee to defray expenses and keep George and me off the streets). For those who don’t want to cut out and assemble (i.e. hinge) the template, we also offer an assembled sector (with the “bonus” of being hand signed by George and myself).

— Jim Tolpin, ByHandAndEye.com

An Estonian Tool in the Wild

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Mike Mascelli, upholsterer extraordinaire, dropped by the Lost Art Press storefront today. He had just finished shooting a couple DVDs with F+W Media and was on his way to teach at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking.

He also had a small treasure to show me.

An Estonian friend of his, Indrek Lepson, had given him an Estonian draw knife (what we might call a draw shave or scorp) and it was like looking at an illustration right out of our forthcoming book “Woodworking in Estonia.”

Like the shaves shown in the book, this one was made from a forked branch and the blade was secured in exactly the same manner as shown in the illustration. Here is Mr. Lepson’s description:

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“Scorp made from an Estonian woodworker from the island of Saremaa.

“I visited the island about 25 years ago, and his 90+ year old widow, who still lived on the farm, showed me his workshop, with his hand made tools and an amazing workbench.

“The island has its own history, and style, of woodcraft, and that was a veritable museum of old craftsmanship, pertaining to a specific region of Estonia.

“Her husband was among the thousands on Saaremaa, killed, or deported to Siberia, by the Russians in the early years of the Russian occupation, when over 200,000 men, women and children were crammed into cattle cars, shipped off to Siberia, and their properties confiscated. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, properties were returned to the survivors of the purges. It’s more complicated than that, but family properties were eventually returned to their original owners, if they survived the purges, or to their kin.”

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Here is a small part of Ants Viires’s description of the tool from the book:

“The Estonian draw knife finds may be divided into three different groups, mainly due to the nature of the handle. The most widespread is the fork handle type (Fig. 25), which makes it possible to work with one hand. It is rare only in the easternmost parts of the country, or it does not exist there at all (see Fig. 27). The two-pronged fork handle has usually been carved from wood, but a natural fork is relatively seldom used. Such a handle can be either short or wide (Fig. 25.2) so that it is necessary to stick the fingers between its prongs, or with a shorter or longer “tail,“ by which the worker can hold it in place (Fig. 25.1, 3). Such a handle with a “tail“ measures seldom more than about 7-3/4″ (20 cm); Pakri Swedes have produced some pieces that are nearly half a meter long. (ERM A 489:189). The shaft of the blade is attached to the handle either below or above it. With that type the blade is fastened to the lower side of the handle (usual on the islands and in northwest Estonia) or on the upper side (the dominating method on the mainland) where a respective slot has been made there. The ends of the shaft are bent and knocked into the wood. Often the shafts are attached with tight rings, sometimes made of string, all along the handle (Fig. 25.3). The curve in such draw knives usually ranges around 4″ (10 cm).”

The work this tool does is far-ranging – basically anything that deals with hollow work (which includes a lot of different items in Estonia).

It was a small thrill to see this tool in person – still sharp and ready to go after decades of not being used.

I think you’ll find many small treasures like this in “Woodworking in Estonia” when it arrives in early August.

— Christopher Schwarz

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Therapist

Posted on by Lost Art Press

“Don’t go looking for trouble.”

— Peter Follansbee

“I hope you lose everything so that your wife and daughter see what the fruits of obtuse narcissism reap. I hope you will have the experience of knowing that you have created extreme hardship for your family and that they resent you for the rest of their lives. It probably won’t happen that way, but a man can dream can’t he?”

— An email to help@lostartpress.com this year

ADB_2nd_printing_hires_IMG_2490_1024x1024I won’t lie to you. For the last four months I’ve felt like my psyche has been muddled in a mortar and pestle.

Since April I’ve been revising my book “Handplane Essentials.” As part of that process, I looked for contrary viewpoints to the ones I presented in the book seven years ago. My goal was to find objections or criticisms so that I could discuss them as valid (or not) in the revised book and give a more shaded and complex view of the craft.

I shouldn’t have done this.

I’ll spare you the details of my dark descent because we all have black times. But I can tell you the two things that pulled me out. Today we opened the Lost Art Press storefront to a throng of 50 woodworkers who liberated me of my excess tools. And there is nothing better than putting good tools in the hands of enthusiastic beginners.

Secondly, I came home afterward, drank a beer and saw an entry that James Watriss had posted on his now-shuttered blog about “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” Now, I like to read reviews of my work as much as I like squirrel porn, but I read book reviews because I know they will make me a better (though more rattled) writer.

James, like only a few other reviewers, saw the message clearly. He got the subtext. He basically called out “The Anarchist’s Design Book” for what it is: a birdhouse book for furnishing your entire house (and the houses of others). Plus what those ideas can do to your life.

You can read his complete review here.

I think I’ll have a second beer tonight, lie in the hammock and forget a few urls.

— Christopher Schwarz