Lost Art Press

Can You Help us Find a Winner?
Chris Schwarz came here this summer and made this wonderful tool chest. He sells these in America for $4,000 which is a pretty fair price. We are offering this chest a s prize to a young talented woodworker full of tools and with an all expenses paid trip to Rowden for a one week course (this will be for the finalists). Entries close Nov. 30, 2015. MORE DETAILS HERE and pass it on.

All they have to do is send me a short paragraph about themselves and why they make and a file of images of what they have made. Anyone 25 or under. I am not restricting this to UK, but finalists would need to get to Devon for the week course and would need to get the tools chest home if they won.

What Tools go in that Tool Chest?
Today and over next few weeks we are going to look at the tools we are putting into this chest and why. The aim will be to fill the chest with either new or secondhand, quality tools. Many will come from my own tool collection or from Rowden toolboxes or, maybe, from donations. What I can’t find here I will ask other makers to help donate and what is left we will buy. Maybe one or two tool sellers and manufacturers are going to be asked to contribute a specific tool that we cannot supply ourselves.

Chisels
This will be controversial. Well, this is an English tool chest and I wanted Sheffield steel chisels. I could have gone for Ashley Iles chisels, which are very popular in Rowden. But I didn’t. I could have gone for Lie-Nielsen carbon steel chisels, but they are American and I get the message from my students that one member of the staff is pushing the A2 chisels as being just as good as O1 steel.

Well, after 40 odd years doing this I would disagree. O1 carbon steel takes a sharper edge than A2. This modern A2 is great above 30°. It is also great for the amateur who does not sharpen every day as it holds the 30° edge for a long time. But a bench chisel is not just for battering with a mallet.

At Rowden we grind at 25° and hone at UP TO 30° (without the training wheels). The advice we give is that once 30° is reached, regrind to 25°. Then you can pare and chop with the same blade. Above 30° you can only chop. I have a mixture of pre-1960 Marples chisels and Japanese chisels in my own tool chest and I have bought the blades shown on eBay for my own students. The steel is hot forged, not cold fabricated. This makes it, I believe, a carbon steel better than O1, which is the modern high carbon steel.

So I have gathered a mixed set of Marples and Sorby blades plus a very nice thin-bladed paring chisel that I have had for 20 years. You can see from the existing Marples labels two or three of them are hardly run in, let alone used. Most have boxwood handles and the narrow neck that defines the period of Sheffield steel that I am talking about – pre-1960.

I use Japanese paring chisels, so this lovely paring chisel will go in the chest. It’s a really beautiful tool: thin bladed, forged steel, as hard as it comes and sweetly shaped by an expert. Jon Greenwood, bless him, is tasked with the problem of flattening the backs of these blades and grinding and honing a perfect edge. Ready for work.

Next screwdrivers, then marking and measuring, then maybe planes. We are really stuck with the saws!

— David Savage, finefurnituremaker.com

People ask me what I do with all the tool chests I’ve built while teaching classes during the last five years. The quick answer: I sell them, of course. Sometimes I’ll sell a partially completed shell for $300 to $500. Finished and fully fitted chests with custom blacksmith hardware fetch $3,600 to $4,000.

(Yes, it was weird at first selling tool chests to woodworkers. But Lucy and I are happy for the business, especially now that my oldest daughter is in college.)

This summer I built my last Anarchist’s Tool Chest for the foreseeable future while teaching a class at David Savage’s Rowden workshop in Devon. I built the chest entirely by hand, including all the interior fittings, hinges and lock. I painted it black. Darren Millman, Savage’s right-hand man, made the veneered panel for the lid.

It’s a pretty good piece of work, considering it was produced by a jet-lagged American trying to teach a class of 18 students and build a chest in a week.

Savage is giving this chest away to one fortunate young maker in the UK. He’s filling it with tools. And you’ll get a course at his very excellent workshop.

Entering is easy. Check out this entry on Savage’s blog. And please spread the word to anyone you know who might be interested.

— Christopher Schwarz

Though I’ve taught at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking for almost a decade, I’ve never been there after dark. It’s a bit like running into a familiar school teacher in an unfamiliar place, like the grocery store.

When I teach at MASW, I like to eat lunch in the young forest behind the school, but tonight I was tripping, fumbling and crunching across that familiar ground trying to find my students so I could make sure they didn’t poop in Marc’s lake.

I found some tents in the clearing, but they were deserted. That’s spooky. I looked out over the surrounding corn fields that were lit up by the Super Blood Moon and thought: This is going to be a weird week.

For the next five days I’m leading a class of 18 young aspiring woodworkers in a class officially called “Hand Tool Immersion,” but which I affectionately call “The Baby Anarchists.” We’ll be fixing up hand tools and building a tool chest. While that doesn’t sound extraordinary, it is.

Marc Adams graciously agreed to slash the tuition for the students to make it affordable for young woodworkers. He donated the materials for the tool chests we’ll be building. And he is allowing all the students to camp in the forest behind his house and school (I think 14 or 15 are back there now).

About 100 readers of this blog have donated tools and cash so that all of these students will end up a kit of tools they need to seriously get started in woodworking.

And woodworking friends – Raney Nelson, John Hoffman, Brian Clites, Tim Henriksen, Justin Leib – are donating their time to help the students get individual instruction.

Now we just have to feed this crew, so I’ll find out if Domino’s pizza delivers out here (just kidding; this is Papa John’s territory).

I’ll be posting photos of this class all week here and in Instagram under the #babyanarchists hashtag. I hope you’ll follow along here and on Instagram because a lot of you out there made this class possible. And I am deeply in your debt.

— Christopher Schwarz