Alex Primmer and Deneb Puchalski during one of the many panel glue-ups last week.
The Nicholson-style workbench is a great choice for a woodworker who is short on time or materials – I can usually build one of these benches in half the time of a French bench and this English form requires half the materials.
Unless you have narrow wood.
This last week a group of us at the New English Workshop birthed 10 new Nicholson-style workbenches during a class held at Warwickshire College. After five days of work, we got all the benches assembled and ready for final clean-up and vises.
That’s exactly how long it takes to get a French-style workbench assembled in a classroom. What happened? Why weren’t we sipping sloe gin and eating meat pies on Wednesday evening while sitting upon 10 finished benches?
The Nicholson benches I have built used 2x12s. The top is two 2x12s glued on edge – that is the only panel glue-up. For this class, we couldn’t get our hands on any primo dimensional stock for the benches, so we used ash that was ripped down to about 6-1/8”.
One of the benches knocked down flat for travel.
So we had to glue up the top from four boards. The aprons were two boards. Some internal bits also had to be glued into panels. As a result, we spent two entire days gluing up panels and truing them up. And that’s why we barely squeaked by late on Friday afternoon.
The lesson here is to use dimensional 2x12s for a Nicholson bench. Otherwise, you negate the time-saving advantage of this classic English form.
— Christopher Schwarz
A stack of a few benches. Note that the legs are still over-long. Many of the students wanted high workbenches. Who am I to argue.
Antique furniture is a portal to the past and these surviving artifacts are the keys to the fading artisanal knowledge of our furniture making forefathers. By being intimately acquainted with the ins and outs of the work of their hands, it’s almost as if we become their apprentices. We see the artisans in their work. As John Watson has put it, “our cultural ancestors… are manifest in the artifacts they left behind. The work of their hands is not only material inheritance, but an indicator of our identity as their creative spirit reverberates in ourselves.”
I can’t imagine trying to learn to recreate historic furniture without spending a lot of time working on the originals. My training was in conservation and all my furniture making knowledge grew out of time in the conservation studio. This is also true of the best makers today. Phil Lowe, Al Breed, Patrick Edwards, etc… They’ve all spent a lot of time restoring antiques. It isn’t until you diagnose a problem, take the thing apart, and repair it that you get a real sense of the work of the preindustrial artisan.
This past spring, Thomas Lie-Nielsen and I were talking shop and during the course of conversation he asked if I’d be willing to teach a class on furniture restoration at his place. As we discussed the details, it became apparent that what we wanted to do was empower students to understand the appropriate treatments for an object that has survived a couple hundred years. I frequently get even accomplished woodworkers asking me about the “right” thing to do for an antique they were entrusted to repair. They intuitively understand the message we hear on “Antiques Roadshow:” There are appropriate ways to do restoration and there are inappropriate ways to do restoration. This is what we have designed the class to do.
My conversation with Tom confirmed my experience blogging at The Workbench Diary. The past five years there I’ve tried to show the lesser-seen details of the objects I work on, the techniques used to preserve the objects for the next generations, and the techniques used to make the originals. Through my interactions with readers I found that there is a real desire to learn to restore antiques with integrity. There is a lot you can learn from reading but conservation treatment operates more on the Goldilock’s principal: Not too little, not too much, but juuust right. This is hard to get from books.
“What’s the right thing to do for this piece?” “What is the right way to restore it without devaluing it?” If you’ve asked these questions I think this class may be up your alley.
Some folks have the (partially true) impression that conservators are a closed community. They don’t want to open and up and share their magical incantations. They keep their specialized training close to their chest by fogging inquirers with ivory tower jargon. Frankly, that’s a bunch of rubbish. This class is my attempt at democratizing the conservation. Come to Lie-Nielsen this September and let me introduce you to a responsible and no-nonsense approach to maintaining the integrity of your furniture for future generations to enjoy.
Besides, what’s better than restoring antique furniture at Lie-Nielsen on the coast of Maine in fall?
When people who teach woodworking get together for a beer, there is an inevitable discussion that is about as fruitful as the pins-first or tail-first dovetail debate.
Here’s the teachers’ debate: Should woodworking classes focus on building skills or instead emphasize getting a project complete and out the door?
During the last 10 years that I’ve been teaching I have tried to see if I could do both – teach skills and “git ‘er done.” But I can tell you this: It involves a lot of yelling with a horrible German accent to make it happen.
This week I wrapped up a class with beginning woodworkers that was designed to teach 16 students a lot of basic hand-tool skills and also to build a traditional nailed-together tool chest using only hand tools. I think we almost succeeded at doing both. (Download all the plans and instructions for this chest for free here.)
The class was at Bridgwater College in Bridgwater, England, and put on by the New English Workshop. The class was offered at a very low cost (95 pounds for five days) to make it possible for young and aspiring woodworkers to afford. I think seven of the students camped during the week to save money.
Before I launch into some of the cool stuff we all learned, I have to thank Paul Mayon and Derek Jones of New English Workshop for allowing this class to happen. In the end, I think all three of us lost money on the class, but that’s OK. The students were thrilled with their new skills and their chest.
Day 1: Panel pandemonium. We had more than 60 panels to glue up for the chest but only about 20 or so clamps for the job. Solution: Spring joints. By hollowing out the edge of each joint with a handplane we could glue up each panel using only one clamp. The easiest way to do this is with a trick that Bob Van Dyke showed me: Clamp the lowest board of the panel in your face vise. Glue up the panel vertically in the vise and clamp it all up in the vise. It’s a brilliant space-saving solution.
Day 2: The day of the jack. Some of the stock we used had some variations in thickness, and some of the students had some panel joints where the seams didn’t line up perfectly. So we took a detour to the grinder to make more than a dozen newly minted fore planes with a radically curved iron.
Many woodworkers I teach are afraid of the grinder. But these students didn’t know to be afraid. It was nice to see them just step up to the machine and do beautiful work at their first go (you can do it, too).
Day 3: Rebates by saw, chisel and plane. After teaching hand-cut rabbets (rebates over here) for many years, I’ve concluded it is difficult to expect perfection on the first go. So I’ve switched to teaching cross-grain rabbets and dados using a fence, a saw and a plane to remove the waste.
This week we experimented with using a block of wood to press the sawplate against the fence. Every rebate wall was dead 90° as a result. I am quite happy with this technique. A few of us began assembling the carcase on day three but….
Day 4: I am so hammered. We nailed the chests together with hammer and cut nails. We imported some Tremont clinch roseheads for the job, but one of the students brought some interesting nails that looked exactly like a Roman nail but were machine-made. Crazy. More details on these nails after I find out where his parents bought them.
We also attached the shiplapped bottoms and learned about beading planes. Beading is a sickness. One of the students who likes modern furniture said: “I don’t want to like the bead, but I can’t help myself.”
Day 5: Finishing. Thanks to the hard work of one of the students, we were able to bring in some amazing casein-based paint that we tinted in class and applied with foam rollers. Lucky for us England has an industry that caters to the historic trades. So we bought the most amazing milk paint I’ve ever used for a small fraction of the cost I pay in the States. (I don’t have the name of the company with me – I’m in a hotel. When I find it I’ll post it here.)
The class was a bit tiring. Or let me put it this way: I’m looking forward to a relaxing time on Monday teaching a workbench-making course with hundreds of pounds of ash to throw around.
