Lost Art Press

Into the Weird

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After three straight months of editing and writing during all waking (and drinking) hours, I was starting to wake up sore in the morning. Not the “I can’t look my spouse in the eye after last night’s weird” sore. It was the kind of soreness from my muscles dying.

Sitting all day. Typing all day. Processing photos all day. By Sunday morning I felt like a recovering coma patient.

So today I shoved aside all the clackety-clack and dove into the next project for “The Furniture of Necessity” – a staked dining table. I have been designing this thing on paper and in my head for months now. It’s such a nutty but perfect thing that I’ve been saving it like a tasty morsel buried in the backyard.

I was going to make the entire thing out of yellow pine. But after a stop at the lumberyard this morning I noticed the employees were restocking the hard maple rack. There I found a clear white board with amazingly straight grain.

After six hours of work I roughed out the six (six?) legs for this table, got them into octagons and then tapered them with a handplane. Tomorrow I expect to be sore in new places.

But at least sitting down tonight feels good – like it should.

— Christopher Schwarz

On Being Self-taught

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People just like what I do and buy it. As for schooling, my clients are my teachers. They’re the ones who bring me the design problems. Schools get too easily divorced from the real world. In many places students graduate and become teachers without ever making a living from their work. They grow stale. There’s a preciousness I see in a lot of student work that comes from having too many hours to put into it. Perfection is fine, and nothing has left my shop that I’m not proud of, but you have to produce if you are going to make a living. I’ve heard people say they have to put a piece of wood aside until the spirit hits them. That’s procrastination. Pick it up and work it – you’ll feel the spirit. No, I think it’s an advantage being self-taught.

— Sam Maloof, December 1980, Fine Woodworking

A Flip-top Workbench

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Combining a workbench with tool storage is always a balancing act. Here’s a solution I have not seen in the wild (though some have proposed it).

It’s a workbench where the back half of the benchtop (15” x 102”) lifts up to reveal a shallow tool well. Though I’ve not worked on a bench like this, I suspect it has these plusses and minuses:

  1. When the lid is down, you have a full workbench surface that will support carcase sides etc. This is superior to an always-open tool well in my opinion.
  2. The downside is you have to work in a manner that is particular to this bench. I suspect the best way to work on this bench would be to leave the top open as much as possible, giving you access to the tools in the well. Then, when you had to plane a wide panel, you would temporarily lower the lid to create a wide work surface. One other possible downside: Assembly on this benchtop could be tricky. You would have to ensure you had all the tools you needed before you closed the top to make an assembly surface.

So I think it’s clearly workable. If I were to build a bench like this, I would consider making the lid in two or three hinged sections. That, however, could create some problems with flattening the top and keeping all the bits in line.

From studying the photos, the person who built the bench clearly was skilled. Check out the mitered dovetail on the shoulder vise and the filleted ovolo on the end of the vise. I suspect the painted boards that fill the base were a later addition – they don’t seem in character with the remainder of the workmanship.

My favorite detail is they are using a marking gauge as one of the dogs for the tail vise.

According to the Craigslist ad, the top is 113″ long x 44″ wide. The top is 34” from the floor. The base is 77″ long. Thanks to Gerald Yungling for pointing this one out.

— Christopher Schwarz

Civil War Seating – You Could do a Book

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Campaign seating is one of my favorite furniture topics. Roorkee chairs, X-stools, Fenby-patent chairs etc. are all interesting because they are portable, mechanical and (duh) chairs.

Jeff Burks recently turned up a number of fascinating Civil War photographs by James F. Gibson in the Library of Congress that have convinced me that there could be a whole book on Civil War seating. It would sell four copies, and I would buy three of them (thanks in advance mom, for buying the fourth).

Still, take a look at these photos and tell me these wouldn’t be fun to build.

Look at the photo at the top of this entry. This photo is from a series by Gibson of men playing dominoes at a mess table in 1862. First off, love the leather bucket and the tree-trunk table. Now check out the two stools. They are so crude that they are basically dowels. If you get the super hi-res image you can see the grain run-out on the legs and the seat fasteners. These stool were from sawn stock, though the grain is quite straight.

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Next is a bunch of stool and X-chairs being used by secret service men. This image is a bit blurry, but you can see a bunch of three-legged stools and some X-chairs, which are being used correctly. (I don’t know how many moderns I’ve seen sitting on these 90° and getting their buttocks rightly pinched.)

The legs to the three-legged stools look somewhat tapered, but that could be perspective.

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This is an awesome photo. Three kinds (maybe four) of seating. On the left is somewhat of a folding director’s armchair with turned and detailed legs. I’ve seen these in British catalogs. There’s a folding sling chair that looks like it might have cowhide on it – another common sight in the Army & Navy Catalogs of the day. A three-legged stool. What could be an X-chair. And another sling chair.

Only the director’s chair looks like it has any finish on it.

Here are more in the series for those that are as obsessive as I am.

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cwpb.01007/
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/cwp2003000054/PP/
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/cwp2003005476/PP/
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/cwp2003005949/PP/
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/cwp2003005911/PP/
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cwpb.00118/

As always, thanks to Jeff Burks for turning up these photos. More pieces like this are in my book “Campaign Furniture,” but you probably knew that already.

 

— Christopher Schwarz

Revising my First Book, ‘Workbenches’

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For the last month, I’ve been revising and expanding my first book “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use” for F+W Media. The revised book is scheduled to be out by the end of 2015 and printed in the United States.

I started writing that book in 2005, and a lot has changed in the last 10 years – not in workbench design, but in workholding. Plus, after teaching 15 or so classes on building workbenches (and building another dozen benches myself), I have learned a few things about bench building that have made my life easier.

Oh, and there are a few small errors in the original edition, including one line that people give me inordinate amounts of crap for. I wrote that I added a coat of wax to a benchtop, and then in a later photo caption discuss how that’s stupid for handwork. So I gave bad advice and then I contradicted myself. Sigh.

So I’ve been nipping and tucking the text throughout the entire book. Most of my edits are to reflect changes in what’s available. When I wrote that book, there weren’t any commercial benches that I would buy, there weren’t any manufactured holdfasts that I’d buy and wood vise screws were extremely difficult to find. Today we have an almost-embarrassing array of benches and accessories to choose from.

It’s weird revising your own work. It’s like having a conversation with a younger version of yourself. As I make small changes I mutter to myself: “Yeah, you’re right. But you could have said it in a nicer way.” Good thing I work alone.

I also decided to add two benches to the book.

In the original edition I show how to build an English bench and a French bench, both from construction lumber. They are great benches, and are still in daily service today. But after much thought, I decided to add plans for a knockdown English bench and a no-compromises French bench with all the crazy sliding-dovetail joinery.

As I sat down to write these chapters, I didn’t think I had anything more to say about workbenches. About 10,000 words later, I proved myself wrong.

I’ll have more details on the revised edition as they are available. Because this book will be printed in the United States, Lost Art Press will carry it. We will have 500 copies, and all will be personally signed by me before going to our warehouse.

— Christopher Schwarz