Lost Art Press

A Machine Heart

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“I’ve heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you’ve spoiled what was pure and simple; and without the pure and simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest. Where the life of the spirit knows no rest, the Way will cease to buoy you up. It’s not that I don’t know about your machine – I would be ashamed to use it!”

— From The Chuang Tzu, Section 12, tr. Burton Watson

Invent Nothing: Volume II

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In my early days at Popular Woodworking magazine, we would draw up the projects we wanted to build for an upcoming issue and present them to the other editors for review and comment.

On the one hand, it was a great idea. After years of the process I learned to receive criticism with grace and now look forward to it.

On the other hand, there are cupholders.

When presented with a design, a group of woodworkers will complicate it until it is unbuildable, unsittable and will require custom titanium hardware made by a water-jet cutter.

And that’s just for the birdhouses.

So I also learned to keep things simple. I’m always trying to take things away from a design instead of adding them. But last week I forgot that lesson.

Right now I’m building a traveling tool chest for an upcoming article that’s also a prototype for future classes. I spent two days designing the thing in SketchUp and was convinced I had created the Tardis of tool chests. It was a traveling chest that could hold a full set of tools, including full-size handsaws instead of the shorter panel saws. Plus a full working set of full-size planes.

On Saturday night I glued up the dovetailed carcase and I saw the folly of my design. While it might hold all these tools, I could see that the chest’s proportions were going to be totally wrong at the end. Ugly even.

I walked outside and stared at a tree for a good five minutes.

Then I came back inside and redrew the chest using the same proportions and principles I’ve used since I built my first tool chest in 1997. And these are the same proportions used since tool chests first emerged in the furniture record. I pulled some more rough pine from the woodpile and fetched my jack plane.

Anyone need a dovetailed pine casket for an Oompa Loompa? Cause I’ve got a nice one right here.

— Christopher Schwarz

I Don’t Need No Stinking Lighter

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For the past couple weeks, I’ve been hunkered in the bunker out here in the Virginia Highlands, only partly because a) it was Thanksgiving week and b) we got a foot-and-a-half of snow earlier in the week. No, the culprit behind the current spate of sedentary-ness has been the tasks of c) reviewing and revising the completed text, and d) selecting, editing and captioning the approximately 450 images that will impart great richness to “Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley.”

The chapter inventorying the tool cabinet and its contents is slated for – at this point – more than 275 photographs! Because I will be sending the FINAL version to Chris a week from Monday I will be “nose to the grindstone” until that occurrence.

Some weeks ago, as I had the written manuscript in its final stages, I confessed to Chris that my enthusiasm for the project was flagging a bit and I was frankly pretty tired. His reply took me by surprise. Paraphrased, he exhorted me with the dictum that no book project is really finished until some time after the point where its contributors want to put it on the table, pile manure on it, whip out the butane lighter and set it on fire.

Given the current usage of the wood stove here in the cabin, I don’t need no stinking lighter.

— Don Williams, www.donsbarn.com & www.studleytoolchest.com

Last Day for Free Shipping on ‘Calvin Cobb: Radio Woodworker!’

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Midnight tonight (Nov. 29, 2014) is the last time you will see free domestic shipping on Roy Underhill’s “Calvin Cobb: Radio Woodworker!” The book is $29. Shipping and handling fees will be about $7.

To give you a further taste of this funny book, today I took our video camera to the home of Megan Fitzpatrick, who edited the book for us. Megan read one of her favorite chapters. It’s a bit long, but it’s a good one.

While she was reading it I laughed at a joke in the chapter I hadn’t caught before: Brown University. See if you can catch the joke in the reading. The book is absolutely filled with little things like this that you don’t get unless you read it with care.

I’d say that Roy is the Thomas Pynchon of woodworking novelists, but as this is the first-ever woodworking novel, he’s also the Danielle Steel of woodworking novelists.

Anyway, enjoy Megan’s scolding of her cat JJ at the beginning of the video.

“Calvin Cobb: Radio Woodworker!” is available from the Lost Art Press store and our other retailers.

— Christopher Schwarz

Mrs. Frisbee Will Eat Your Eyes Out

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There is a certain segment of my extended family that has a theory about garbage disposals.

Their theory, and I will try to be as neutral as possible, is that sink-installed garbage disposals are bad. Quite bad. Why? Well the disposals make a sort of gray paste out of all the foods that you grind up with this seemingly handy kitchen appliance.

This paste gets caked to the inside of your pipes and attracts rats. The rats crawl up the pipe of your sink to eat the gray paste. Eventually, they crawl into your home – hungry and with a taste for meat….

I encounter this theory during holidays and other family occasions, and I let it pass without comment. I don’t have the time, energy or electronic scope to bother. Some other members of the family (no names here) have figured out that the dangerous gray paste is a myth. We maintain our silence together.

This is how I deal with stupidity on the Internet.

Most serious woodworkers I know don’t have the time or patience to debunk all the idiotic stuff that gets passed around as fact. We roll our eyes and simply continue to do what we do. Who knows? Perhaps we’re the dolts and the rats will come eat our entrails one night.

My fellow journalists will chastise me for failing to jump into this battle between truth and falsehood. I admit that at times I am tempted to ride a steed down the hill into the melee, though I know it’s a waste of time. Why?

There is no Church of Woodworking. No true gospel of bark. Woodworking information is more like food than it is like religion. You are responsible for the information you consume. Try a little bit of everything – we all need a little junk food – but ultimately you are what you eat.

Consume the things that make you more productive. Things that get you in the shop and building stuff, instead of wondering how much chromium is in an exotic alloy. That’s the difference between protein and marshmallow puff.

And don’t condemn the Ding Dongs. Have one every year or so – the empty calories will remind you of what good food is.

— Christopher Schwarz