“Most of (Hans) Wegner’s furniture is delivered untreated – only buffed and treated with soap and water, so that the fine wood is ready to become more beautiful with use. Some furniture is delivered with a clear lacquer finish.”
— “Hans J. Wegner: Hacedor de Sillas (Chairmaker)” by Jens Bernsen (Danish Design Centre, 1998)
I’m in the middle of building a new chair design in ash and am planning on finishing the chair in soap and water – a finish that is common in Denmark.
It’s a simple, easy-to-mess-up finish that I first heard about from Bob Flexner while I edited his column “Flexner on Finishing.” You can read a 2010 column by Flexner on the finish here at Woodshop News. For more details, including photos of the mixing process, check out this blog entry from Caleb James.
I’ve seen this finish on some vintage pieces at a couple stores that carry Danish Modern pieces here in Cincinnati. I visited one of the stores yesterday to get some photos, but they had filled the showroom with giant live-edge tables. Dipped in plastic. Not good.
So the photo above is one of Wegner’s pieces.
Like paint, oil or beeswax, the soap finish appeals to me because it doesn’t require special equipment (spraying lacquer) or years of experience (a shellac polish) to execute. It’s a good place for beginners to start when finishing furniture (or floors). I’ll post photos of the finish next month when the chair is complete.
While I would love to use blacksmith-nails all day and every day, my customers aren’t willing to pay $1.35 per nail. So I use Tremont cut nails, which are about one-fifth the cost of a homemade nail – a 6d “wrought” nail with a head is about 22 cents. That’s still expensive, but cheaper than handmade.
But the Tremont wrought head nails are covered in black oxide, a fact that I’ve blogged about before and have offered dangerous solutions to fix (hydrogen chloride). (Edit: Not all the Tremonts are covered in black oxide; but the one with the “wrought head” are.) Why can’t I have a plain steel nail with a nice head?
Turns out that I can.
Dictum in Germany has been carrying a variety of excellent blued-steel nails that are forged (using dies) and have square-tapered shanks. I received my first shipment from Dictum today (it took only three days to get the order) and I am more than impressed.
These nails, which I recently encountered in England, are awesome. They are plain blued steel. They look way better than the Tremonts (sorry Tremont, but it is true), and they hold like crazy. Oh, and they are less expensive.
A 6d (50mm) nail from Dictum is about 6 cents a nail (plus shipping). Order a bunch to save on shipping. You will not regret it.
Most woodworkers will need only two or three sizes of nails to do most work. The 50mm nail is used for nailing together carcases – chests and the like. Dictum sells these for €6.30 for 100 nails (plus shipping).
For nailing 1/2”-thick backs and bottoms in place, you should get the 30mm or 40mm nails (30mm for hardwoods; 40mm for softwoods). Dictum sells the 40mm nails for €6.40 for 100. The 30mm nails are €4.80 per 100.
These are great nails at a great price, even if you include the shipping. And buying them rewards a nail-making company that has been doing it the hard way for a long time.
Author’s Note: During the next 10 months, Lost Art Press will mark the fifth anniversary of The Anarchist’s Tool Chest. As the quinquennial approaches, John and Chris might even have a few surprises up their sleeves. But before everyone gets all teary-eyed, Chris thought it would be more fitting to have someone grill him about everything that could be better about the book. I volunteered.
Hence, the conversation below is the first of what I anticipate will be a three-part interview. I focused on what I perceive to be some of the most challenging aspects of the book’s “anarchism.” The second interview will focus on the chest itself. In the final interview, I’ll ask Chris what major changes he would make to the book, if he was starting it all over again from scratch.
For the subsequent interviews, I’ll incorporate as many of my favorite reader inquiries as possible. So, if you’re dying to grill Chris about the ATC, please email me your questions.
Brian Clites: Good morning, Chris. Five years ago, you said that you disliked the word “anarchist.” Now that the term has become synonymous – at least among woodworkers – with your approach to the craft, are you less frustrated with it? Or, perhaps, has that made you hate it all the more?
Christopher Schwarz: Good morning. I still dislike it, but I have embraced it nonetheless because it tends to get people talking about what it means. Like, “Here’s a middle-aged man with no tattoos or piercings. Conservative haircut. Horn rims. He’s an anarchist?”
Once you explain what aesthetic anarchism is (a tendency to avoid large organizations and embrace DIY and self-reliance), and what it’s not (violent; an effort to overthrow governments), then a real conversation can begin.
BC: Do you think, as a whole, U.S. society is more or less consumptive of chip-board crap than it was five years ago? In other words, irrespective of your book’s philosophy, have things gotten better or worse for the furniture most people buy?
CS:I am an eternal optimist and am happy to see more Americans interested in well-made things created in their communities – bread, cheese, beer, leather goods, clothing, even flasks. I haven’t seen much interest in craft-made furniture, however. And that interest might be a long way off. What I do see, however, is an overall increased interest in “making” things, furniture, robots, jewelry, whatever.
That is where it will begin: People making things for themselves that clearly outclass the mas-manufactured junk. Then your friends see it and ask: “Will you make me one?”
My personal focus is not on society as a whole. I think my best hope is to train makers and get them to a very high level quickly – and that’s what “Furniture of Necessity” is all about. In some ways it is more radical than “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”
BC: Does the readership of LAP satisfy your mantra “disobey me”? Do you worry sometimes that too many of us – particularly novices – want you to be their guru?
CS:We all need some help at first – I sure did. So I’m not bothered by beginners who ask endless questions. That’s totally natural.
What I don’t like seeing is people who cannot cut the umbilical cord. Even after years of bench work and building dozens of great projects, they still want someone to validate their decision to buy a particular brand of 3/16” chisel. Or worse – for me to do the research for them.
BC: You described the ATC as a chest for the tools you really need, and proclaimed that you should probably throw away any tool that doesn’t fit in the chest. The ATC represented for you a moment of enlightenment, a breaking free from the endless cycle of tool attachment. Setting aside for the moment stationary machinery, how would you grade yourself as a tool consumer over the past five years?
CS: I’ve added only two tools to the chest since I finished building it in 2010: a shooting-board plane and a large specialty square for laying out compound angles. I’ve replaced a few tools, but those have actually been downgrades in terms of expense – a simpler coping saw and a Stanley 45 instead of my Barrett plow, for example.
I have bought several tools to review them for Popular Woodworking Magazine – but then I have given those away or sold them. I’m doing those reviews as a favor to Editor Megan Fitzpatrick. I am a reluctant reviewer.
BC: Stated a bit differently, what would you say if someone suggested that perhaps you’ve merely substituted hand tools for power equipment, and that you remain firmly wed to the joys and challenges of tool lust?
CS:Let me put it this way: When I go into a general woodworking store (or the tool crib at the home center) I feel a little ill and upset while surrounded by all those jigs, tools and accessories you don’t need. So I just put my head down, pick up the shellac flakes or glue that I came for and head for the cashier.
My attitude toward tools has seeped into every aspect of my life, as I suspected it would. I beg my family not to get me gifts for holidays. I’ve given away all the cooking gizmos that people have bought me over the years. When I buy socks, I buy the best darn socks I can find.
One thing I want to add, however, is this: I don’t expect or ask anyone to behave like I do. I don’t ask my family to eschew consumer goods. Our household is not “The Mosquito Coast.” Everything I do is by example only.
BC: Thanks Chris. I look forward to our next conversation about the book.
For almost two years now, I’ve been using a Lie-Nielsen honing guide to sharpen all my plane and chisel blades. It’s an outstanding little tool and was well worth the long wait for it to come into full production.
Unlike the old Eclipse guides, the Lie-Nielsen guide is solidly made from stainless steel and bronze. It offers a variety of swappable jaws so you can handle odd-shaped tools, such as skewed irons. And it has only one dovetail-shaped aperture for holding tools, which greatly simplifies your setup for sharpening and improves the accuracy of the tool’s angle to the stone (if that’s your bag).
In short, I love it. My old Eclipse now lies neglected in my “bin of discarded thingys” – I shall have to find a new home for it.
If you have recently purchased the new Lie-Nielsen guide (or plan to), here are a few notes on maintenance and use that will make your transition from the cheap-o guide to the Lexus a little easier.
Jack Plane Blades Because the aperture for holding tools is lower on the Lie-Nielsen than on the Eclipse, I had to change the shape of my jack plane’s blade slightly. With the Eclipse guide, I could hone an iron that had about an 8” radius on its edge. When I put that same iron in the standard Lie-Nielsen (at a 35° honing angle) I could not hone the blade’s corners. The guide hit the stone before the corners of the blade did.
So I switched to a 10” radius – an equally valid historical curve – and everything works fine now. My jack is technically a little less aggressive with this shallower curve, but I cannot tell the difference.
Note: There are other ways around this (swapping to the tall jaws for mortise chisels is one path), but I seek to spend as little time sharpening as possible. Bottom line: You can make small changes to the way you sharpen (angles, radii etc.) to achieve the results you want with this jig. This was how I tackled the problem; your approach might be different.
The coarse threads on the Eclipse.
The fine threads on the Lie-Nielsen guide.
On Gunk Maintenance on the Eclipse guide was all about preventing its wheel from rusting and seizing up. As soon as it seized you were in danger of grinding a flat on the wheel, ruining the wheel.
I haven’t found the same problem with the Lie-Nielsen, even after heavy use by students. Two drops of light machine oil on the wheel’s bearing keeps it moving smoothly. It hasn’t seized once, and the wheel hasn’t even tarnished.
What you do need to look out for is sharpening gunk on the Lie-Nielsen’s screw threads. The pitch of the Lie-Nielsen’s screw is finer than that on the Eclipse. And the fit between the screw and the body is much tighter. These details make the Lie-Nielsen clamp down hard on your blade with only finger pressure (though it always is a good idea to secure the screw with a partial turn with a screwdriver).
But when the guide’s threads get swarf on them, the guide can be sluggish to open and close. So clean the threads occasionally with a little oil or degreaser and a stiff-bristled brush. Once a year seems to be enough for my heavy sharpening habits.
And that’s it. It’s a wonderful piece of engineering and a joy to use. Highly recommended. The Lie-Nielsen guide is $125 with the standard jaws. Accessory jaws are $25 to $35 each.
I’m a mathematical Einstein. More specifically, like Einstein’s mother. When she was 2.
In middle school, I whizzed through geometry. But then came algebra. When I nearly failed calculus, my dad promised I’d still become the next Gary Kasparov. It turns out, not so much. After I flicked the bird to Combinatorics and P-Chem in college, I prayed that I’d never have to “do math” again. And so it went for fifteen years. Then I met “By Hound & Eye.”
I couldn’t sleep last night, so I printed out the excerpt Chris posted. It was fast, fun and addictively satisfying. Like crack. Er, I mean Sudoku, that first time you played it. Armed with nothing more than a pen, some napkins and a pair of chopsticks, I’m now equipped to show all my art historian friends how mankind first invented that perfect 90° angle.
If, like me, you tend to think descriptively, you might want to approach By “Hound & Eye” as if it were titled “Da Vinci For Dummies” or “Shop Trignometry 101.” The entire exercise on squaring circles, pages 41-55, took me nine minutes to complete. The second time, just two minutes. So that brought my total investment to 121 minutes. Oh wait, did I forget to mention what I did for the first 110 minutes of insomnia? That’s how long it took me to find a compass.
The problem is that I’ve thrown all my compasses in the waste bin. The most recent iteration was a “Made in Germany” model by one of my favorite writing brands. I’d paid about $30 for it at a nice art store, in hopes of improving my Arabic calligraphy. But man, that compass was one of the most frustrating, imprecise, cheap-#@$ pieces of %^&@ I’ve ever purchased. I tolerated it for five years. Then last summer, after seeing my three year old draw a better circle by hand, I chucked it in the trash. It turns out globalization has brought us not only thousands of tool-like-objects, but also millions of writing-like-instruments.
So last night I spent 90 minutes scouring the house in hopes that my wife still had a cheap compass squirreled away somewhere. Turns out, I must have thrown hers away too. (Yes, I have a bad habit of burning things that don’t work. I know some people resell their junk on e-Bay, but I just can’t bring myself to pretend – even to a complete stranger – that an object that doesn’t do what it was designed to do is worth even a penny.)
Around minute 90, I started deliriously screaming expletives in the basement. I’d forgotten it was 2:15 a.m. Startled, my pregnant wife wobbled downstairs to find out what the crisis was. I explained. Confused, she asked me, “Don’t you have a bunch of those in your workshop?” “No,” I replied, “Those are dividers. A compass is like dividers but with a pencil on one side.” Still bleary eyed, she yawned for fifteen seconds, then went into my office, picked up a pencil and handed me a roll of scotch tape. I blushed.
This now-obvious solution works better than any compass I’ve ever owned. First I used a wooden pencil and the tape. Then I found that a mechanical pencil with rubber bands was even sturdier and faster to adjust. Both variants allowed me to draw the concentric circles on p. 46 on my very first try.
So, if you haven’t completed the excerpt yet, here’s my promise: it will only take you 10 minutes. That’s assuming you already have a Starrett 85. Otherwise, this exercise will take you 12 minutes, because you’ll have to first spend two minutes making your own compass.
Oh, and save some trees. Unless you want to use the excerpt as a coloring book, the only pages you’ll need to print out are pp. 46, 48, 51 and 56. Go get ‘em, Albert.
— Brian Clites, your new moderator and author of TheWoodProf.com blog
