I can hold my tongue no longer. After a decade of teaching woodworking I have become fed up with schools, books and magazines that promote a jig that reduces the general skill level of the population. It slows you down. And it is one more silly device that gets between you and the craft.
Decent craftsmen don’t need it.
I am talking, of course, about the bench hook.
While promoted as a way to get perfectly square results, this jig is a crutch that will prevent you from ever sawing straight freehand – then learning to stop your cut as soon as the teeth break through the work. This basic sawing skill, taught to apprentices for centuries, is the foundation for a mountain of other skills, such as freehand knifing of parquetry, cutting tenons without scribe lines and full-blind (meaning blindfolded) dovetails.
Oh, and the expense of the jig. Manufacturers will sell all manner of bench hooks to an unsuspecting beginner, wasting his or her money and feathering their own pockets. And beginners don’t buy just one bench hook – they end up buying four or five different varieties and end up never learning to saw.
Will you stand with me by refusing to teach beginners the use of this ridiculous crutch? And will you send letters to the editors of your favorite magazine every time one of these spurious time-wasters appears in their pages?
Chris might have promised not to get too far into the “This Old House” mode as he works on the cool old building he plans to turn into the Lost Art Press Bat Cave. I however made no such promise, and my neighbor recently gave me a couple of pallets of old roof tiles as a contribution to renovating my own Bat Cave/barn (with real bats! but no belfry, which doesn’t seem fair or appropriate, somehow).
The tiles are hung on laths nailed across the rafters. The ergot, or the little hook, to the left, is used to hold the tile on the laths. In this one, you could probably get a good fingerprint or two of the fingers of the child or woman that formed it.
When you receive a few thousand old roof tiles as a gift, on the condition that you do not leave the pallets full of tiles decorating your neighbor’s yard for any length of time, you get out the wheelbarrow and decorously start to move them to adorn your own.
The tiles were made from clay deposits down the hill along the river Cher that runs through my village. The clay was pressed into molds and then left in the sun to dry enough to be fired, and during that time various kinds of marks made their way into the fresh clay. So to relieve the tedium of sorting and moving the tiles, it is fun, as part of making sure they are still sound and fit to be re-used, to inspect what was the sunny-side-up, which goes down when they are installed on the roof.
You get dog prints, cat prints, small birds, big birds, various other types of beasts, even children. There was the one with the number 1786 written on the back, which either means it was the 1786th tile of that production run, or that it was made in 1786. I figure that 220 years is pretty good for a hunk of terra-cotta exposed to the weather in all seasons, and if the tiles are sound, they will last for plenty more.
But the other day, I found a real puzzler, which lead me into a Felibien-esque journey back in time.
“Sante lu Douice” it read as I turned it over.
“Santé” means healthy or in good equilibrium. But there is also the trace of an “i,” after the “a,” which would make it “Sainté” – sainted or blessed.
“Douice” does not exist, as such, in French, but a few minutes rummaging around turned up a couple of books from the 17th century where I saw it as an alternate spelling of “douce,” or possibly “doulce,” meaning pleasant, agreeable, moderate, sweet.
“Lu” is a puzzler, the past tense of “lire” (to read), which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in context. But there is the word “lieu,” which means place, which makes perfect sense.
“Healthy pleasant place” or “Blessed pleasant place” would be exactly what one might expect from somebody wanting to bless the house upon which they were installing a new roof.
Of course it could also mean “Falling off the roof is bad for your health.”
Asking around online and in the neighborhood, the inscription mostly got a Gallic shrug. The writing is obviously a benediction, but as to the specifics, the thoughts ranged from “Who knows?” to an old non-standard spelling, or in the local patois?
There are perhaps 50 more or less regional languages in France, the patois, and they could vary even from village to village. They are based largely on the ancient north vs. south, Langue d’Oil vs. Langue d’Oc language divide in France, with Basque, Breton, Germanic, Catalan and others scattered around the edges. Some of them developed a literature and more or less complete dictionaries, but in the French heartland, they were mostly the spoken dialects, with educated people, publicly anyway, speaking and writing in French. One of the gratifying signs, as I was learning French, was the increasing frequency with which I began to understand conversation around me. One of the surprising things was how often, in more isolated and rural areas, I realized that the French people around me were not in fact speaking French.
In the 1780s the locals speaking patois as their first language would have been a large majority. So it is easy to see how a word in popular inscriptions like this could be misspelled, or a word like “lieu” could end up rendered phonetically as “lu.”
Two more, the top another benediction invoking “St. Clement pa pe”, or Pope St. Clement I. The second tile, slightly smaller than the rest and made with different clay, was apparently made “A BLERE” (in Bleré) a town a couple of miles down the river.
Graham Robb, in his book “The Discovery of France,” has a good account of the history of the patois, along with in this context a perfect anecdote.
He says that nobody knows why the divide between the Langue d’Oil and Langue d’Oc falls where it does. It does not consistently follow any natural or historic boundaries. Is it perhaps a general Roman as opposed to Burgundian influence, or something more ancient? But there is one way to tell where the line runs.
South of the line, the tiled roofs of vernacular buildings have a slope of about 30° and are covered with canal, or Roman, tiles. North of the line, the slope is much steeper, around 45°, and the roofs are covered with flat tiles, like these.
The old barn – late 1600s, probably, roof in split chestnut lathes at least 90 years old. Needs work.The track of a wading bird. Could be some kind of small heron, but it looks more like a moorhen.The top could be a weasel of some kind, but more probably a cat because in the the first two tracks there is no sign of a weasel’s claws, but in the third, the very fine and sharp retractable claws of a cat coming out for the pounce. In the second a dog is turning around and overprinting in the wet clay, perhaps wondering “Why is that guy yelling at me again?”
— Brian Anderson. Anderson is translating Andre Felibien’s “Des Principes de l’Architecture, de la Sculpture, de la Peinture, et des Autres Arts qui en Dépendent.”
When I plan a new woodworking class, I have to resist all optimism when it comes to how long a certain task will take.
It takes me a day and a half to glue up a top for a Roubo workbench by myself. For a class, I have to double that time (at least). It’s silly to expect the students to be as fast as I am, or be accustomed to being whipped like dogs, or even willing to work with fellow students.
So when I teach a workbench class I cross my fingers that we will get all the tops glued up (with their mortises and planing stops complete) by late Wednesday evening. With that one special student finishing up Thursday before lunch.
This class at the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking absolutely blew the doors off the previous record time for building workbench tops by 24 hours. At 2 p.m. on Tuesday, all the tops were glued up and done.
At the moment they cruised to victory I was trying to process 500 pounds of leg material. So I did the only sensible thing. I bought them all beers and let them hang out all afternoon fiddling with their vise hardware.
Why were they so fast? It wasn’t special machines or a super-abundance of clamps – we ran out of clamps several times. The material was the same as always. As was the bench’s design.
“By Hound and Eye” isn’t for everyone. If you’re a geometry whiz or an 18-century cabinet maker, you probably won’t learn anything new from the workbook. I’ve created a three-question quiz to help each blog reader decide whether or not “By Hound and Eye” will be worth its $20 price tag to you ($10 for the pdf alone):
Do you already use a sector and a divider to layout your designs?
Can you readily produce a set of full-scale measured drawing from the sketch of the writing desk below?
Can you write out the musical harmony literally embedded in the desk below?
If you answered “yes” to all three questions, “By Hound and Eye” might underwhelm you.
I probably should have learned all of these skills two years ago when I first picked up “By Hand and Eye.” But I didn’t. Tolpin and Walker’s prose was so eloquent that I imagined I was already seeing “the music frozen in furniture.” Thanks to their persuasiveness, I became a haughty, complacent reader. I didn’t do the exercises on page 28, let alone the dozens suggested in the following 150 pages.
By the final section, I felt completely underwhelmed by the simplicity of the projects, which seemed so straightforward that any electron-slaying woodworker could produce each of them in just a long afternoon. Instead of seeing design proportions, I saw easy joinery. Instead of hearing music, just the hum of my table saw.
In “By Hound and Eye,” Walker and Tolpin take the inverse approach. Instead of telling you about the music of furniture, they teach you how to read and write your own. After my first time through the book, I still cannot answer “yes” to questions 1 and 3 above. And I never had a singular “aha” moment of the sort Chris described. But I imagine I will, once I work my way through them another three or four times. This is math, after all, and translating theory into skills takes multiple rounds of practice (at least for me).
A final note: If you’re one of those brave souls who has already broken free of the rectangularity of arts-and-crafts designs, you might benefit particularly from Section III of the workbook, “Curves.” It was in those pages that I felt most inspired and, paradoxically, still more than a little ignorant.
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Image credits: Author’s photograph of hand forged dividers by Seth Gould; detailed crop from Raphael’s masterpiece “The School of Athens,” Images from By Hound and Eye, illustrated by Andrea Love.
There are times that I want to think I have become a better teacher during the last 20 years I’ve been a woodworking and writing instructor. But then I always discover the real reason for that feeling.
Today we started a new workbench-building class at the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking, and I was surprised how much progress we made during only six hours of work. We will be done with the workbench tops tomorrow – definitely ahead of schedule (but don’t tell the students that; I’m telling them we are already two days behind).
For a fleeting moment I thought I had finally figured out a way to organize every task and explain it so it was efficient and inevitable.
Then I looked at the notes I had written down when I’d interviewed the students at the beginning of class.
These guys were not newbs. We have a former instructor at North Bennet Street School, former model makers, people with art degrees involving shop, and amateurs who had been at it for 20 years.
Really, these 12 guys don’t need me. I’m just there to make sure it all gets done in a week and to fix any minor missteps. And if we fall behind, I get to start yelling in a German accent.
I’m OK with that. It should be a fun week. And I also get to eat at Frank Pepe’s Pizza about 10 times.
Here’s a tip if you are building a bench using a laminated top: Borrow a friend’s old biscuit joiner – there are millions of them out there that aren’t being used. If you are gluing up your top alone, the biscuits will help align the boards and save you hours (maybe days) of work.
