It is easy to labor so long as we are encouraged by cheers and waving of hats, but to toil on and on, with only the silent approval of one’s own heart, requires a noble fortitude which the hero alone possesses.
George Houghton
The Hub – November 1, 1875
—Jeff Burks
Now I have the glue on these boards and am ready to drive some brads in and can’t find my hammer. “John, have you got my hammer? I do wish you would try and get some tools of your own; I don’t mind lending mine, but it is such a nuisance and inconvenience to me and takes up a lot of my time.”
“You first started by asking my permission to take them, now you say nothing but come and help yourself; you take them and never think of returning them unless I ask for them, and when I do get them they are in bad order: You borrow my planes, wood bits, chisels, oilstone, and even my pencil. Can’t you scrape up a pencil some place? What are you doing with my inch chisel? You have one of your own; why don’t you use that?”
“I tried to use it, Mr. Martin, but it is too dull and I knew yours would be sharp.”
“John, if you want to learn the trade you must learn to keep your tools in order. You can’t do work without tools, and you can’t do it with dull tools. If you are going to learn this trade you’d better start in at once and buy some. Get a few at a time, what you need most, and be sure and get nothing but the best.”
“Didn’t you tell me you took a piece of calico to a hop last Saturday night and it cost you three bucks? If you had put those three dollars in tools, don’t you think they would do more good and leave you something to show for it? Some fine morning you will wake up and find you are obliged to look for work in another shop; then you will wish you had given more of your attention to your trade and tools, and not so much of your time to calico and money for hops.”
“Journeymen are not obliged to, and do not care to, lend tools to any person, and less so to apprentices because they do not understand how to take proper care of them. When I was an apprentice, I took great pleasure in new tools when I knew they were my own, and they gave me a kind of ambition to care and work with them.”
“Try and keep yourself and your bench tidy. You have had that old, dirty, torn apron on until it can stand up alone. A clean apron don’t cost much, and your bench looks like a pawnshop window. When you lay anything on it you have to get a search warrant to find it; learn to be neat. Don’t forget what I said about saving your money and getting a few tools.”
Mr. Martin
American Machinist – October 2, 1902
—Jeff Burks
One of my goals of the “Furniture of Necessity” is to encourage people to build things that look complex but are actually simple once you know the trick. Think: compound joinery without a single numeral or calculation. Or, in today’s case, make curved parts using raw materials from the grocery store.
Steam-bending wood is fun and easy. And I own a steambox, a steam generator and all the clamps and forms that make it a snap. But that’s a lot of money and effort if you want to make one steamed part, such as a simple crest rail for a chair or backstool.
When I first learned to make Shaker boxes from John Wilson more than a decade ago, we boiled the parts in a steel planter box that was heated by a hot plate. That works pretty well, though you have to monitor the temperature to keep it boiling.
Another way to bend wood without fussing over the temperature is to use my mother’s recipe for beef brisket.
She would seal the brisket in a roasting pan covered in foil and cook it in the oven until the meat fell apart on your fork.
So I went to the grocery on Friday and picked up a bundle of firewood ($3.99) and a roasting pan ($2). The firewood is all split stuff that is 14” to 16” long and air-dried. My bundle of wood had oak, ash, poplar and sappy walnut. All the stock was about 30 percent moisture content – plenty dry enough to use for this operation.
I managed to get three crest rails from a split of oak and planed them all four-square. I preheated the oven to 450° F. Then I filled my aluminum roasting pan with hot water, put the oak in and sealed the pan with two layers of aluminum foil. I cut a small 1/2” slit in the top and roasted the oak in the oven for 75 minutes. Then I took it to my bending form.
My bending form is made from a stack of 3/4” MDF that’s glued together. The easiest way to bend a 3/4” crest rail is using the help of a bench vise. I clamped half the form to the jaw of my vise and the other half to the bench.
I dropped the oak between the two parts of the form and cranked the vise closed. Simple. I then put two bar clamps across the form and removed it from the vise. In two days I’ll take the clamps off and I’ll have another crest rail for my next chair.
— Christopher Schwarz
The following is not a petition for affirmation. It is merely a reminder to myself not to order so many books at press time.
Though I loved journalism school, it didn’t love me. During my first two years, both my academic adviser and news writing instructor recommended I transfer to a school that was better suited to my odd writing style.
“You are like a big puppy that pees on the rug all the time,” said David Nelson, my newswriting instructor. “I don’t know what to do with you.”
The vice principal at my high school would have agreed with Nelson.
“You have got to stop wearing that bathrobe to school,” he told me one spring day.
So today I am officially tempering my enthusiasm for my next book, “Furniture of Necessity.” I have about half the projects built for the book, and they are slowly being integrated into our daily lives on Greenbriar Avenue.
Three-legged backstools sit at the ends of our dining table, and I steer every guest in our house to sit on them (we’re up to about 20 pair of buttocks now). Some visitors are clearly fearful that it is a trick.
My first 14th-century trestle table has become a portable work table and has been out in the yard, in the sunroom and set up in the living room for a number of dinners. But a couple visitors have asked why the table is missing legs. Or why it has too many legs. Or they have just asked what the heck it is.
I love these pieces, perhaps more than any other pieces I’ve built in recent memory. But the outside world isn’t sure. The three-legged chairs and table trestles are particularly off-putting. As one woodworker recently told me: “It looks like you’re just trying to save a little wood by having one less leg.”
I seek out and appreciate this sort of honest response. It shapes the way I will explain these pieces in the book and, more importantly, tells me I need to show you more examples here on the blog. The problem is that in the last five years I have looked at hundreds of images of aumbries, trestle tables, backstools, medieval worktables and staked pieces of all sorts. They don’t look weird to me anymore.
But deep down, I know they’re difficult pieces. Just like I knew it was strange to write about stabbings at adult bookstores (suggested headline: “Ouch! Wrong Hole!”). Plus, terrycloth bathrobes are odd attire at high school pep rallies.
So write a birdhouse book, you idiot.
— Christopher Schwarz
It’s always good to work with people who are smarter than you. It’s even better if you can marry them.
While John and I do most of the day-to-day grunt work at Lost Art Press, I’d be lost if I didn’t have my wife, Lucy May, to guide me and keep my head on straight. She’s a busy full-time journalist in her own right at WCPO-TV, but she still makes time every day to listen to a recitation of our operations and help us plan pricing, strategy and the editorial direction of this company.
Plus, while other people thought (and said) I was nuts when I stepped down as editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine in 2011, she had faith that we’d still eat and I wouldn’t end up writing marginalia for Waste Age magazine.
For a couple years I’ve been trying to think of a way to thank her that also serves as a reminder of the important role she plays in Lost Art Press. Eventually, it came to me: Ask Marco Terenzi to create a pair of working dividers – our logo – that she could wear around her neck.
Marco is the super-talented woodworker and metalworker who specializes in miniature tools, benches, tool chests and the like. You might remember this amazing miniature copy he made of the Anarchist’s Tool Chest last year. He also makes miniature working tools for sale; follow his Instagram feed if you want to be blown away.
On Thursday the dividers arrived. They are stunning and Lucy loves them (she wore them on TV yesterday). They look exactly like the dividers from Joseph Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises” – no matter how closely you examine them. And they work. If I have to lay out some miniature dovetails, I’m going to hit up my wife’s jewelry box.
Marco is considering making a run of these that will be cast. So if you’d like a pair, be sure to follow his work.
Apologies for the personal note. Now back to woodworking.
— Christopher Schwarz
