Lost Art Press

Win a Traveling Anarchist’s Tool Chest (and the Tools)

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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

Last Class (for Now)

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If you donated tools, time or money to our hand tool immersion class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking, I have two things to tell you:

  1. Every one of the 17 students walked away with a tool chest that was stocked with tuned-up hand tools – thanks to you.
  2. It was an awesome experience, both for the students and myself. Thank you.

This week-long class affirmed my undying optimism that the craft has a great future. I’ve always told pessimists that woodworking is written in our blood and that it doesn’t take much to awaken that primal connection we share with the forest and all it gives us.

For the last five days we lived in the forest behind the school. We took our meals there. And during the day we worked like dogs to build a tool chest and the skills that ensure that the craft won’t stop with this generation.

Yeah, I know all that sounds hokey. But the truth is that governments, corporations or institutions won’t raise a finger to sustain the craft. It’s up to you. And it’s do-able.

This fact lays a little heavy on me tonight because this class is the last one I’ll be teaching for several years. I need to edit and write some books, build a lot of stuff in my sketchbook and restore a building.

So go to it.

— Christopher Schwarz

If I Could Give Every Woodworker One Tool…

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The goals for the first day of the “Hand Tool Immersion 101” class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking were simple:

  1. Sharpen a 1/2” chisel to perfection.
  2. Sharpen and set up a block plane so it could take fine, fine shavings.
  3. Grind, sharpen and set up a jack plane.

Of the three goals, I was most excited about getting 18 vintage jack planes set up and running. If I could give every woodworker in the world one tool, it would be a jack plane set up with an iron that was ground, honed and polished with an 8” to 10” radius on its edge.

That tool can accomplish incredible feats of flattening. With this tool, you can flatten a board of any width – you are limited only by the length of your arms. Machinery be dammed.

Plus, a good jack plane is handy when working edges, or anytime you need to remove a lot of wood in a hurry.

Thanks to the help of Raney Nelson of Daed Toolworks, all of the students became grinding aces in short order. Then they honed up their irons, tuned up their jack planes and started destroying the sample boards we gave them.

Tomorrow (Tuesday) we start on the real stuff – building a tool chest with only hand tools. Then we’ll find out if the first day of teaching was worth a dang.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. So after a long day or hard work, the entire class retired to the forest behind the school to cook dinner, drink a beer and talk about woodworking. As I scooted off to bed, they had built a fire in the school’s fire pit and were talking about the day ahead.

You can follow the classroom experience with the hashtag #babyanarchists on Instagram.

Bedtime for the Baby Anarchists

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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

Kansas City Here We Come

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I may have chopped off one of my favorite fingers on Monday, but not even that could keep me away from Woodworking in America 2015. Chris’s three classes on staked furniture, workbenches and back irons are, respectively, just the tip of the Lost Art Press iceberg at this year’s festivities, which also feature courses by LAP contributors Roy Underhill, Megan Fitzpatrick, Don Williams, and Mike Siemsen.

Over in the WIA Marketplace, the Lost Art Press booth is hosting two special “meet the author” book signing events that I just learned about. At 2 p.m. on Friday, St. Roy will be in the booth to sign babies, chests and books. In addition to Calvin Cobb: Radio Woodworker!, we welcome you to bring any of Roy’s other eight inimitable titles for signing.

On Saturday afternoon, also starting at 2 p.m., Don Williams and Narayan Nayar will be at the booth to sign copies of their works, including Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley.

And most importantly of all, I your fearless forum moderator will be at the booth all day Friday and Saturday. In addition to showing you my “accidental amputation” (as they labeled it in the emergency room), I am particularly looking forward to hearing your thoughts and suggestions on the forthcoming Lost Art Press forum.

Part of our delay in launching the full forum has been due to our internal deliberations over how deeply to plunge into the universe of hand tool woodworking. We originally envisioned the forum as a space to discuss LAP books and the projects contained therein. But one thing we learned almost immediately from the beta forum is that many of you have questions and interests which delve more deeply into the marrow of the hand tool world. To hear more about the options we’re considering, and to weigh in, please stop by the booth.

Your nine-and-a-wee-bit-fingered moderator,

— Brian Clites