Warning: My wife often comments that I dress like a foreign exchange student. That I have no sense of color or clue about how pieces of clothing are supposed to coordinate with one another.
That said, I love my Le Labourer work jacket. It is one of the few pieces of clothing I own that fits me well. I have long arms but I am not stout enough for a typical XL shirt. This is cut long enough in the arms and I’m not swimming in the thing.
Made in France, the workmanship is impeccable. The moleskin is lightweight, breathes and moves easily while I’m working at the bench. Nothing pinches or restrains me from reaching, sawing, planing or chiseling.
It’s so comfortable that it has become my new bathrobe. I wear it while editing, cooking, reading, whatever.
I’ve had this one for 18 months now and am considering buying another one just in case I lose this one. (I can’t imagine it ever wearing out.)
It’s $120, but worth way more than that.
In the United States, you can buy them from Hand-Eye Supply. I bought mine in England from The Shopkeeper Store before they were available here.
After numerous requests from Roy Underhill fans, we are now offering a limited edition 18” x 24” poster of the cover of “Calvin Cobb: Radio Woodworker!”
The poster is printed on #80 lb. recycled stock with a matte finish – much like the dust jacket of the book itself. The poster is printed in the United States and ships in a heavy-duty protective tube.
The price is $15, and that includes domestic USPS shipping. You can order your poster here.
The print quality is gorgeous. Every detail from Jode Thompson’s original cover is produced in crisp detail, right down to the stubble on Calvin’s cheek. (If you’d like to read about the development of the cover image, check out this blog entry.)
Note: If you purchased one of our letterpress hammer posters, please know that this is not the same paper. For this project we used a typical high-quality poster paper – not the card stock for the last project.
As long-time readers know, we have resisted getting into selling posters – it simply wasn’t something we knew enough about to make sure we didn’t lose our shirts. Well thanks to John, we have a reliable service that will package and ship these. I found a good printer that does work that doesn’t remind me of an out-of-register “Heavy Metal” poster.
So we are putting another toe into this water. And, with any luck, we might be able to produce a gorgeous poster of the H.O. Studley tool cabinet in 2016.
When I finish writing a book, I send the manuscript to about a dozen people for comment, criticism and a typo hunt (and yet mistakes are like weeds).
With “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” about half the reviewers made a similar comment: Why don’t you expand the book’s seven brief sections on design philosophy and workshop ethics?
My answer is difficult to put into words, but here goes: My eyes glaze over when I read books, articles or blog posts that are entirely about the philosophy of the craft. I’ve read a good number of books on craft philosophy during the last 30 years. My dad had a bunch of them on our family’s bookshelves in the 1970s, and this type of literature is now experiencing a renaissance.
Here’s what goes through my head when I read this stuff: Hmmm. Good idea, but you already said this in a slightly different way 20 pages ago. Why do you have to use PhD-level language to describe this simple thing? OK, I think you’re writing in circles. Wait, maybe I’m just dumb.
Perhaps it’s my newspaper training, but I attempt to write for an 8th-grade audience and to be as laconic brief as possible.
Plus, I don’t think ideas about craft are particularly suited for words. My feelings about the craft are evident when I’m at the bench, not sitting on the couch with a book or a laptop. So I try to make my books work like a road sign that tells you what’s ahead. The road sign isn’t the thing – a construction zone, grooves in the pavement or a mountain switchback. It’s only a brief idea, a symbol, representing the experience ahead.
Reading the road sign or the book isn’t enough to know what’s really ahead. You have to pick up the tools or put your foot down on the accelerator to really get it.
The best I can do is this: Give you a peek at the rich tapestry of illiterate ideas and convince you that you can build seemingly complex things that you thought were out of your reach. If you read it and then do it, then you’ll get it.
The first line of 2011’s “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” was “disobey me,” a Russian paradox that challenges the ideas of authority and submission. How can you follow the advice without disobeying the text or obeying the speaker?
“The Anarchist’s Design Book” begins with a quote that no publisher should use in a book. It’s a segment of a sermon by a 13th-century Parisian preacher that I encountered years ago in an essay about early European printing.
“What knowledge is this which thieves may steal, mice or moths eat up, fire or water destroy?”
Your fingers don’t speak English, French or Dutch for that matter.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. While editing and photography of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” is complete, we still have a few plates to make. So we are aiming for a late February release.
During the Christmas season, we get asked to endorse and promote a lot of products, which is not something I am inclined to do. I publish a yearly Anarchist’s Gift Guide on my Popular Woodworking Magazine blog, but those are all little things that I own and use – not the result of a corporate PR campaign.
But here are two things that were brought to my attention – both workbench-related – by people I trust.
First is a hand-forged holdfast and bottle opener set from Horton Brasses. Horton makes a lot of the brass and iron hardware I use, and this year the company has made a set of two iron holdfasts and bottle opener for $99. I would order a set to check them out, but I use 1” holdfasts. These are designed to work in a more modern 3/4” hole.
The other item is a long-term investment. Will Myers, a workbench-building friend in North Carolina, convinced a sawmill he uses to cut up some oak kits for massive old-school workbenches. The kit includes a top 6”-thick top that is 18”-26” wide and 8’-9’ long. The legs are 4” x 6”, the stretchers are 2” x 4” and you get wood for a vise chop, too.
The price is $500 if picked up. Shipping is available.
It’s all green oak, so you’ll want to sticker it to dry. Red oak dries fast, so it might take 5 years, maybe more, depending on your storage environment.
Will is solid gold in my book, and he’s doing this to help keep this wood from becoming pallets. You can read Will’s account here. Or you can contact the sawmill at lesley27011@yahoo.com.
I have always wanted to make one of these grease boxes for the underside of a workbench. Knowing me, however, I’d probably keep paraffin in it instead of tallow. I learned to handplane using paraffin (which has no smell) as a lubricant. There is something odd about using mutton tallow – I work up a sweat and smell lamb chops.
A.J. Roubo does not say much about the grease box or how it should be constructed: “Below the table of the bench you attach with a screw a piece of wood in the form of a box, in which you put some grease, useful for rubbing the tools to make them smoother.”
I decided to make the box 1-7/8” thick, 3” wide and 5-1/2” long and out of oak. But I started with a bigger chunk of oak to make it easier to bore out the cavity that holds grease and to hold the piece as I finished chiseling the cavity.
The walls of the grease box are about 5/16” thick – give or take. That makes the cavity roughly 2-1/4” wide, 3-1/2” long and 1-1/2” deep. I bored out most of the waste and cleaned up the interior with a chisel.
Then I used a compass to draw a nice arc around the back of the box, as shown in Plate 11 of “l’Art du menuisier.” After rounding that off with rasps and sandpaper, I drew the curved relief under the box. This relief allows you to use a shorter lag screw, and it looks nice. I simply sketched it freehand and then roughed it out.
I also rounded the square corners of the box, a la Plate 11.
The box will be attached to the bench with a 5/16” x 3” lag screw and washer. I created a flat area for the washer (thank you, Forstner bit) and then bored a clearance hole for the lag screw.
Then I oiled up the exterior of the box and am now soaking the hardware in citric acid to remove the buttocks-ugly zinc plating.
This is the last little bit on this bench. I have only to apply my signature plate and await the truck that will come to pick it up.
