A big pile of chairs in progress this week. Mine is in there somewhere….
We just finished up the chair class with students selected by Chairmakers Toolbox, and we are both inspired and exhausted. Building eight stick chairs in five days with limited tools is no joke. But working with a group of chair-crazy enthusiastic young woodworkers gives me hope for the future of our craft.
So today I am happy to sit on my tukus and answer Open Wire questions. Type your question about woodworking into the comment field below. Megan and I will try our best to answer it. Apologies if our answers are brief and not surrounded by the usual pleasantries. Saturdays are a lot of typing.
The following is excerpted from “The Essential Woodworker,” by Robert Wearing. In our opinion, “The Essential Woodworker” is one of the best books on hand-tool usage written in the post-Charles Hayward era. Wearing was classically trained in England as a woodworker and embraced both power and hand tools in his shop and in his teaching.
He begins with a table. As you read the chapter on building a table, Wearing connects the dots for the hand-tool user by showing how all the tools are used in concert to produce accurate work. It’s not just about sawing a tenon or planing an edge. Instead, it is about how to gather these skills and apply them to building furniture – tables, doors, carcases, dovetailed drawers, plinths, etc.
The book is filled with more than 500 hand-drawn illustrations by Wearing that explain every operation in a hand-tool shop. His illustrations are properly drafted, drawn in perspective and masterfully clear.
The accurate sawing of tenons (Fig 119) is a vital skill. They should be sawn with confidence and should fit from the saw. To saw clear of the lines, for safety, is not recommended since whittling an overthick tenon to size is both more difficult and less accurate than sawing correctly in the first place. A 250mm (10in.) tenon or backsaw is the most commonly used for this purpose. Frame saws are used in Europe and by some workers in the USA, but they have never been popular in Britain since the manufacture of good-quality backsaws, and beginners usually find them rather clumsy.
Before starting, check over the names of the parts on Fig 95 [top] and shade in the waste. While there is little chance of throwing away the wrong piece, it is essential that the sawdust should be removed from the waste and not from the tenon. That is, the ‘kerf’ (the sawcut) should be in the waste and just up to the line. Beginners using the thick pencil aid in Fig 105 [see bottom of post] should saw away one pencil line and leave the other intact. The technique is not difficult if the following guidelines are followed: do not saw down two gauge lines at a time; do not saw to a line which is out of sight. (A modification to the saw is described in Appendix B.)
Start sawing always at the farther corner not the nearer one. Beginners may find it useful to chisel a triangular nick there to start the saw accurately (Fig 120). With the rail held vertically in the vice, start to saw at that far corner, slowly lowering the handle until a slot is cut about 3mm (1/8in.) deep (Fig 121). Now tilt the workpiece (Fig 122) and, keeping the saw in the slot, saw from corner to corner. Then turn the work round, or stand on the other side, and saw again from corner to corner, leaving an uncut triangle in the centre (Fig 123). Now grip the work vertically and, running down the two existing sawcuts, remove this last triangle, sawing down to the knife line, but no farther. Keep the saw horizontal (Fig 124).
If there is a set-in or haunch, saw this next. Repeat these stages on all the other tenons (Fig 125). The haunch may be sawn right off now or later.
Sawing the shoulder is most important as this is the piece left exposed. Except on wide rails, which may be planed, the shoulder should go up from the saw.
Cramp to the bench, deepen the knife cut and chisel a shallow groove (Fig 126). Lay a very sharp saw in the groove and draw it back a few times to make a kerf, then saw off the cheek. Take the greatest care not to saw into the tenon (Fig 127), which would then be severely weakened. Should the waste not fall off, the cheek has probably been sawn with an arc-like motion, leaving some waste in the centre (Fig 128). Do not saw the shoulder deeper. Prise off the waste with a chisel, then gently and carefully pare away the obstruction. Saw off the haunch if not sawn previously.
Saw off the set-in with a little to spare, and trim this back to the knife line with a chisel only just wider than the tenon size. This avoids damage to the corner of the shoulder. Finally saw the mitre (Fig 129). The tenons should be lettered or numbered to identify them with their mortices.
Make a preliminary fitting of the joints. The tenon may be too wide or too thick. Check for the latter by inserting it diagonally into the mortice (Fig 130). A tenon may be wrongly thought to be too thick when in fact it is too wide. It may have been sawn too wide or the mortice may have been chopped tapered (Fig 131), in which case trim it square. The most accurate way to correct an overthick tenon is to use a router plane, to the sole of which has been screwed an offcut of rail material (Fig 132).
Having checked that the tenon will enter the mortice, grip the rail in the vice and tap on the mortised member using a woodblock and hammer (Fig 133). The hammer face is small and makes it a more precise tool than the mallet. Check every joint in this way. If the shoulder does not close, either the tenon is too long or the haunch is too long, and either of these problems can easily be corrected. But a badly sawn shoulder can only be corrected by re-squaring and taking back with a shoulder plane.
“Thick Pencil Trick” – Beginners will find it helpful later on, when sawing the tenons, if a thick, soft pencil is run in the gauge marks. This produces a double pencil mark (Fig 105).
Earlier this week, I put up a chair for sale that I was proud of. Not my thing, pride. But the chair represents a small milestone in my work.
I didn’t expect many people to bid on the green Irish chair I’d built. It’s a painted chair. It’s not a comb-back chair. And it’s painted. But here’s the humiliating thing. No one has bid on it.
So here’s the thing. The rules of the sale are the same. Bid on this chair (or not) by 5 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 21. If the highest bid is $1, I will honor it. Here are the instructions for bidding.
Or maybe I shouldn’t build any more Irish armchairs in the future (no matter how comfortable they are).
Paul Murrett, working on a seven-stick stick chair during an early 2023 class.
Next Monday, Sept. 25, 2023, at 10 a.m. Eastern, bench spaces go on sale for January-June 2024 Covington Mechanicals classes at the Lost Art Press storefront. (And we’re excited to announce that both Roy Underhill and Matt Cianci we be once again make the trek to Kentucky to teach!)
We have only eight benches, so classes are – with rare exceptions – limited to six students (which leaves the not-teaching editors here at LAP one bench on which to work). Thanks in part to the small class size, most classes sell out in nanoseconds – for which we are grateful; thank you. But it does mean that it’s best to be ready to hit “register” the split second classes go live on the Covington Mechanicals Ticket Tailor page (and it helps to have a pinch of luck). If a class is sold out, I recommend registering for the waitlist; we end up filling a slot or two from the waitlists for almost every class.
Dovetailed Shaker Tray class, February 2018 (I wish my knees still bent like that, sans pain).
Upcoming classes are: • Build a Comb-back Stick Chair with Christopher Schwarz, Jan. 15-19, 2024 • Make a Dovetailed Shaker Tray with Megan Fitzpatrick, March 9-10, 2024 • Window Joinery with Roy Underhill, March 23-24, 2024 • Build & Engrave a Shepherd’s Coffer with Christopher Schwarz, April 5-7, 2024 • Build a Traditional Sawbench with Megan Fitzpatrick, April 20-21, 2024 • Saw Sharpening 101 with Matt Cianci, May 18-19, 2024 • Build & Engrave a Shepherd’s Coffer with Christopher Schwarz, June 7-9, 2024
Classes for the second half of 2024 will be posted in February.
Click here to go to our registration site. From there, you can click on each class for more details about it. NOTE: There will be a button on each class page that says “Register Now.” You can click that, but you won’t actually be able to register until 10 a.m. Eastern on Sept. 25.
Check out FAQs about classes here. If, after reading the FAQs you still have questions, please post a comment here, or email covingtonmechanicals@gmail.com. (These classes are independent of Lost Art Press/Crucible Tool, so please do not email the LAP help desk.)
– Fitz
p.s. There are still 2 spots available in my Shaker Tray class in beautiful Berea, Ky., Oct. 14-15, 2023. Come cut some dovetails with me; I promise to pay more attention to my students than to Woodsy, the new Pine Croft shop cat.(Or I at least promise to try.)
A set of try squares made by George Walker, co-author (with Jim Tolpin) of “Euclid’s Door” and other artisan geometry books. Leave a comment on this post, and you’ll be entered to win the set in a random drawing.
George Walker made the lovely set of walnut try squares shown above, following the step-by-step instructions in Chapter 4 of “Euclid’s Door.” (I don’t know if he had to refer back to his own writing or not…I know I sometimes do!) If you’re interested in adding them to your tool kit, leave a comment on this post by noon on Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023. I’ll pick a random winner from among all commenters that afternoon, and send them out as soon as I get the winner’s address. Below are the introductory paragraphs to the try squares chapter.
– Fitz
I spent my early years as a machinist in a bearing factory in Ohio. A string of red brick buildings that employed thousands of workers. Making bearings is all about precision and the heart of that was a department called the “Cold Room,” an island kept at 67°F and constant humidity behind a set of heavy double doors. The workers inside wore white shop coats and stood at benches with chrome-plated vises. They were the high priests who guarded that precision. Most of us regular shop rats avoided the cold room if we could. The factory was Africa hot in the summer and stepping in and out of the cold felt hellish. Reluctantly, I paid a visit one hot August afternoon. I’d just bought a precision engineer’s square and needed to get it certified. An engineer’s square has a steel fixed blade made to a high level of accuracy. A bored looking lab technician with tobacco-stained fingers took my square and placed it in a machine called an optical comparator – sort of an industrial microscope that projected the silhouette of my square onto a screen. He slid my square up against the side of a master square, a perfect steel cylinder with a mirror-like finish, and the comparator shined a light beam from behind to measure its accuracy. Any variation showed up as a sliver of light that the machine could magnify and measure.
That was years ago, but when I think about it now, a couple of things stand out. In a modern precision setting, we used essentially the same method to check for square that builders have used for thousands of years. Hold it up to a light and variation shows up glaringly. Secondly, the comparator exaggerated the error through some fancy optics to precisely measure variation from true. In this chapter we will go through the building of a set of wooden try squares and learn some geometric methods to create then test it. We can produce a tool that has an astounding level of precision.
