By Paulo Vincenzo Bonomini in La Chiesa di Santa Grata, Bergamo, Italy
With Halloween just days away you can be sure Chris and John are dusting off the handmade (and form-fitting) coffins they made last year. If you are contemplating making your own coffin keep in mind to include at least some small percentage for future expansion (yours, not the coffin’s) in your measurements. Nobody wants to be shoehorned into their coffin.
Loose translation: “You made it, let’s see if you fit in it.”
If you are carving pumpkins and having any difficulties I recommend switching to a keyhole saw. Several years ago I had the task of carving five pumpkins, two for my parents and three for neighbors. As I was struggling with several different knives on one Matisse-inspired carving my father handed me a keyhole saw and I joined the Keyhole Saw School of Pumpkin Carving. In the early evening of that same day my father called his buddies to join us in the neighborhood cemetery for the “lighting of the pumpkins”. There we were in the crisp October evening under the branches of a huge oak tree admiring our pumpkins when a cop walked up and told us we would have to disperse. Apparently, someone driving by reported a “satanic cult ceremony” taking place in the cemetery. My father and his cronies thought this was hilarious. We grabbed our pumpkins and dispersed.
Besides pumpkins and coffins (optional) let’s not forget the traditional witches, cats and bats. You will find some fine 15th and 16th century misericords and a haunted trade guild hall in the small gallery below.
–Suzanne (Scaredy-cat) Ellison
P.S. If you enjoy ghost stories look up the hauntings at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia or go to the Haunted Ohio Books website to read about The Strange Carpenter.
Great Malvern Priory, England
Oude Kerk, Amsterdam
Dunblane Cathedral, Scotland
Carpenter’s Hall, Philadelphia, built in 1773, haunted since 1879.
Last night I assembled the staked bed I built for “The Anarchist’s Design Book” and finished the CAD sketches for the three-legged-drinking table – the final project I’m building for the book.
I don’t quite have the wood in stock for this project, which means a trip to the lumberyard for some soft maple. Otherwise, I’d be milling that stuff right now instead of typing this ridiculousness.
Oh, and I need to finish veneering one of the tabletops with rawhide. I’ve been experimenting with soaking rawhide, shaping it, gluing it down with hide glue and then letting it dry back to its hardened state. The experiments are working well.
Tomorrow I pull the first skin out of its bath in the garbage can custom soaking station. I’m probably going to need some help getting this cow stuck down. Better call Megan.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. If you ordered a copy of the revised “Workbenches” book from us, I’m picking up the books on Monday, driving them to our Indianapolis warehouse and signing them. So they will hit the mail stream next week.
Panel saws, huh? Well I have got a few handsaws. A superb old Disston 10 point hangs on my wall gathering dust. I just got out of the habit of using it; lazy really. The dovetail and tenon saws see a quite a bit of daylight as they are bench saws. I could go to the table saw rather than pick up a tenon saw but I am probably quicker with a tenon saw. And I avoid the shlep. I have a nice, big, well-equipped machine shop just behind the studio here. But it’s a bit of a shlep. So a small panel saw seems to be getting more and more use as I get more confident in using it.
That’s an alarming admission. Yes, I have not used a panel saw as much lately as I did when I was younger. You forget a lot in 40-odd years of furniture making. That is the effect of the machine shop. The band or table saw are just too good, too reliable to not be used in this role every day. And the panel saw takes effort, work, sweat. All of which is pleasant to avoid on a warm sunny day – unless really necessary.
But it’s nice cutting down a line with a small panel saw using a sawhorse properly. No screaming router, just argh, argh argh. I wish I had had one years ago. My old Disston is great, but somehow too big, a small panel saw can become a bench tool, like a tenon saw. Saves a lot of shlepping about.
So what have we got for this young person’s tool chest that will make any sense? The biggest change in saws that I have seen is the arrival of the cheap, throw-away saw. These we have all over the shop; they hang on hooks behind almost every door. These are board saws. They usually have a Japanese tooth pattern and get loads of use quickly ripping up board material or crosscutting the odd bit of solid.
It’s hateful, but we buy them, use them and chuck them away. It’s a scandalous waste of resources that we should be ashamed of, as my daughter would tell me. But saw doctors are getting older and not being replaced. Our saw doc, Brian Mills, is retired now; thankfully he still does all our hand saws and planer blades. Getting them back into shape after we have mutilated them. Don’t tell him, because he would put his prices up, but he is invaluable. I don’t think Brian has trained a replacement, and when he stops, which will never happen, we are in trouble.
First up are the two cheap throw-aways: the Irwin 990 Fine with a 10-point toothline and a disgusting purple plastic handle. There is also an Irwin 880 Universal 9 point with a disgusting orange plastic handle. They are both razor sharp to a state that they can easily cut you very badly. Both these do a great job, and I will not dwell upon them. Our experience is that the toothline holds up so well that you don’t chuck them away as soon as you should. This means you find yourself working much harder with dull saw than you should. Was that not always the way?
I will keep the purple one; it goes with my purple tool chest. So the orange one goes to our winner. What winner? You must have heard? Well, we are gathering tools to fill this tool chest. One Chris Schwarz made when he was here with us at Rowden in the summer. And we are giving it to a young maker under 25. Application details are here.
Now we come to the meat. Two of the best panel saws I could lay hands on. If I missed your saws I am sorry but I can only look at two. These are not “review” saws; I bought these and paid a pretty penny for the Lie-Nielsen 12-point crosscut saw at £174.46 from Axminster Power Tools. The best British saw I could find, and I can’t avoid wanting to support British tool makers, was from Roberts and Lee. Their Dorchester range made now by Thomas Flinn and Co. of Sheffield. This is another 20”, 10 pointer crosscut but at £100.31. Alan Peters had Roberts and Lee saws; my first dovetail saw was Roberts and Lee. So they have history with me. Not all of it good.
These are very different saws apart from the price. One is a stiffy one a floppy. Both are taper ground, meaning the plate of the saw is ground thinner near the top of the saw to give clearance. Both claim to be hand sharpened and indeed both cut very well. The differences come with the handle, the plate and the toothline.
The handle of the LN saw is beautiful, a ripple maple piece of work clearly inspired by Disston. Handles matter. It’s the bit YOU engage with. The junction of handle to the blade matters. This fit on the LN saw is pretty near perfect. The Dorchester saw handle is pretty crude in comparison without the decorative embellishments of the LN. But it fits my hand OK. The fit of the blade to the handle of the Dorchester is tight with five fixings, but the kerf of the cut the plate fits into is still a deal wider than the saw plate. The LN saw seems to be perfectly matched, kerf in the handle, to plate held in place with three brass fitttings.
The plates of these saws are fundamentally different. The Dorchester is a stiff saw with a thicker blade The Lie-Nielsen saw a floppy thin bladed saw in the Disston tradition. You could play a good tune on the LN saw. This is a personal preference thing. Common wisdom was, stiffies for board stuff and floppies for solid, but I don’t think that is totally true. I like the stiff blade of the Dorchester in this small saw, and it seems to cut well for me. Not that the Lie-Nielsen panel saw doesn’t do a great job.
The last difference which makes me sing with happiness is the breasted tooth line of the Dorchester. If you look down the line of the teeth they are not straight but slightly domed. Not much, probably a quarter of an inch. But that for me makes a difference. It’s to do with the geometry of my arm swinging away and the teeth engaging in the timber. Missed a trick there Tom.
Beautiful though the Lie-Nielsen 10-point panel saw is, I am going to put that saw in the prize winning box and keep the Dorchester for myself.
As we all know, three-legged chairs and backstools are inherently unstable. It’s really quite remarkable that they haven’t been outlawed in such progressive countries as Switzerland.
But, as you can see above in this photo from the Swiss National Museum, the three-legged chairs are not roped off. In fact, people are encouraged to sit in them.
These shots were taken by Mark Firley of The Furniture Record during a visit to the museum. He turned up a lot of very interesting furniture on this trip, and I am certain he’ll blog about it. So bookmark his blog.
I was amused when I first saw these photos – these Swiss examples look quite similar to the backstools I built over the summer for “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” The major difference is the way the backs are attached to the spindles. The maker notched the spindles and used screws or nails to attach the back.
Oh, and there are two fewer spindles.
I quite like the design and might incorporate some of those back details into my next chair.
We think we have licked most of the basic technical glitches for the Lost Art Press forum. We have high hopes that this will be a good way for us to interact with readers and help you get answers to your questions about our books and the techniques in them.
So John and I would like to invite you to stop by an “open house” on our forum from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. EST on Friday, Nov. 6. During those two hours, John and I will be online to answer any questions you have about our upcoming titles, woodworking techniques, tools, beer or cuddling (FYI, we’re not cuddlers).
To ask questions in the forum, you’ll need to have an account in our store. If you have purchased anything from us in the last two years, you probably have an account. If you don’t have an account, you can create one here.
You don’t need an account to read the forum. Some of you are already using the forum and have found it’s a good way to exchange information with other readers who are not wankers.
