Lost Art Press

The Second Backstool, Designed for Work (or Space?)

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The underside of the seat of the backstool.

The second backstool for “The Furniture of Necessity” is going to be significantly different than the first three-legged example from last month.

I’ve slimmed the seat down and replaced its rounded shape with tapers and flat chamfers. Though there is still one curve at the rear that will mimic the crest’s curve.

The seat will be a bit lower than the first example, which was tall enough to sit at a modern dining table. This one is going to be a few inches lower so it will be suited for work by the fireplace, playing guitar or drinking a beer in the living room with friends.

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The smushed hexagon legs. majQa’!

I’m experimenting with the legs. While the first backstool had tapered and shaved round legs, this one is going to have tapered octagons or (maybe) smushed hexagons. I have two sets of legs planed up at this point. The high-gravity hexagons looked good to me at first, but now I think they look a wee bit Klingon.

I’ll cut joinery for both and take some test photos before committing to a shape.

Finally, the crest is going to be a little lower to hit the sitter below the shoulder blades and condense the chair vertically a little more.

And now back to finishing up Peter Galbert’s “Chairmaker’s Notebook.” We will be taking pre-publication orders starting this week. As usual, all pre-publication orders will receive free domestic shipping.

— Christopher Schwarz

I Don’t Know, Let’s Say 90 Percent

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A chair made by Jennie Alexander, author of "Make a Chair from a Tree."
A chair made by Jennie Alexander, author of “Make a Chair from a Tree.”

When you design a cabinet, chair or tool chest, it’s too easy to let the following words slip from your lips:

“I made it to fit my needs, my body, my tools. Like anything custom-made, it needs to suit the user exactly.”

To me, that’s a cop-out. When designers sketch out kitchen cabinets or bookshelves they don’t base the depth and height off the client’s books, dishes and glassware. There is a sweet spot for designing these pieces that can accommodate a wide variety of household objects and books.

The same rules are out there for chairs, tool cabinets, workbenches, dressers, chests and the like. Yes, you can make a cabinet that is designed to fit a specific shrunken monkey head you brought back from the rainforest. But if you open your eyes and do a little math you can design a cabinet that will suit any shrunken primate head from any continent.

The worst offender when it comes to over-customization is – in my opinion – chairs. I have sat in some awful custom chairs. Beautiful, yes. But after a few minutes of sitting it felt like the chair was trying to inseminate me. Or at least make me turn my head and cough.

As I start to squirm, the most common excuse from the owner is: The chair was not made for you. It was made for someone who is smaller/fatter/shaped differently/a giant praying mantis.

I call bunk. Good chairs, cabinets, tool chests, workbenches, stools, bookshelves or whatever should be able to serve a variety of masters. I don’t know, let’s say 90 percent of the people. Just about anyone can sit in one of Jennie Alexander’s chairs and say: “Wow. This is an amazing chair.” And that’s because Jennie paid close attention to both history and the human body. She did her research. She thought it through and didn’t settle for: this chair fits this person.

It takes a lot more design work and thought to find that sweet spot. But the result is a piece of furniture that will be coveted instead of kicked to the curb.

— Christopher Schwarz

New Tool Chest is a Joint Project

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Juggling a book and a furniture commission is like juggling two balls – pretty easy and not all that impressive. These last two weeks have been a full on circus: two books in overdrive (Peter Galbert’s “Chairmaker’s Notebook” and Don Williams’ “Virtuoso”) and two all-consuming projects, some three-legged chairs and a tool chest for Popular Woodworking Magazine.

The tool chest is a joint project between myself and Jameel Abraham at Benchcrafted. I built the box (the easy part) and he created a carved marquetry panel for the lid.

The chest itself is a new traveling design based on a bunch of old examples of chests I’ve studied and measured. After a lot of calculations, I found a chest size that will hold an impressive and nearly complete set of furniture-making tools in the minimum footprint. And it has nice lines and is a bit easier to build than an “Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”

I’m not giving up my floor chest. It is too much a part of the way I work. This smaller chest is going to be ideal for woodworkers who have limited floor space but want to hold a lot of tools that can all be accessed with one hand movement (just like the full-size chest). What’s the downside? There’s not a lot of room for moulding planes.

I’ll write up a full description of the chest’s inner workings and post a video on it when the sucker is done.

Jameel’s marquetry panel arrived about a week ago, but I haven’t had time to install it on the chest because I’ve been a slave to Adobe’s Creative Cloud software. But when I couldn’t stare at a screen anymore, I sneaked to the shop to install the hinges and attach the lid to the carcase.

The hardware is from blacksmith Peter Ross – Jameel and I decided to go whole-chicken on this project. I’m not going to show the lid here. That’s for the magazine’s editors to reveal. But you can see some glimpses of Jameel’s gorgeous work on the lid on his blog here.

The hinges are bolted through the lid and secured with square nuts.
The hinges are bolted through the lid and secured with square nuts. This is off-the-rack hardware, not from Peter Ross.
Here is the Peter Ross chest hinge on the interior of the lid and carcase.
Here is the Peter Ross chest hinge on the interior of the lid and carcase.

This morning I convinced the lid, carcase and hinges to work nicely together and released a huge sigh of relief. Now I just have to attach the dust seal to the lid. And add the crab lock. Paint the sucker. Attach the chest lifts. And write the article. No problem.

After three hours of 100-percent concentration on these hinges, I’m ready to work on something that has an “undo” button. Yeah, InDesign and Photoshop sound like a good idea.

— Christopher Schwarz

Forgotten Details of Cooking & Screwing

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Whenever I have to wait in a doctor’s office, I don’t mess around with their pile of last year’s Time magazines. I bring my own really old magazines – and this week it was issues of The Woodworker from 1916.

Tucked in amid the magazine’s 10-part series on making your own poultry gear (no lie), I found two little gems worth sharing here.

The first article, “Screws and Screwdrivers” is the kind of article that most people would skip over. After all, what is there to say about this basic operation? As always, if you read The Woodworker closely you’ll pick up details and fine points that are worth knowing.

This short article even discusses a pattern of screw – the improved American form – that I’ve not seen before. Sure, the shank is familiar, but the head?

Screws and Screwdrivers

The second article is on “Hay Box Cookers.” I do almost all the cooking in our household, and I enjoy exploring old cooking techniques as much as I enjoy old woodworking stuff. So this article was aimed right at me.

Hay Box Cookers

Hay box cookers are like the CrockPot of the 19th century. The cooker is a wooden box filled with hay. When you make a stew, you bring it to a boiling point. Then you take it off heat, cover it and put it in the hay box cooker and shut the lid for two or more hours.

The hay insulates the stew (or boiled bacon, yum?), cooking it slowly without any more energy. And you can’t scorch the food. There’s even a recipe book out there.

— Christopher Schwarz