We are awaiting a revised edition of “The Stick Chair Book,” which should arrive in early September. So we are closing out the remaining copies of the first edition of this book for $24 each (it was $51).
The forthcoming revised edition is about 10 percent smaller. It has the exact same content as the current edition, but I rewrote the text this summer to tighten it up to my satisfaction. Every sentence and almost page of the book has been streamlined as a result. Other changes to the revised edition include a new cover cloth (it will be black, of course) and better interior paper. The first edition of the book was printed during the supply chain crisis, and we were lucky we got any paper for this book.
Most publishers would simply pulp the remaining copies of the first edition. But we decided to offer them at a discount. It’s our hope that some readers who couldn’t afford the $51 price might be able to swing $24. Or perhaps some readers might want to pick up a copy as a gift for someone. Or a book collector might like a sealed first edition.
We have about 200 copies. All are sealed and are in mint condition. These are not factory seconds or returns.
We have a small batch of Warrington-pattern hammers in stock and ready to ship. The heads are made in Nicholasville, Kentucky by Craig Jackson’s crew at Machine Time. The oiled hickory handles are made in Tennessee. The hammers are hand assembled, wedged and glued.
They are $97 each. You can read all about the hammer in our store, including what the hammer’s cross-peen is used for.
Spend a weekend in October cutting dovetails with me (Megan Fitzpatrick) in gorgeous central Kentucky at the Woodworking School at Pine Croft (with luck, the trees surrounding the school will be a riot of fall color by then!).
It’s a two-day class – Oct. 14 & 15 – in making a classic Shaker silverware tray, with gently arced ends, handholds and, of course, dovetails. And speaking of Shakers – if you’re in the area, why not also plan a day at Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill.
In the class, you’ll learn:
Dovetail layout with dividers
How to cut the joints, aiming to “fit off the saw”
How to wield a coping or fret saw
How to pare and chop to a line with a chisel
Strategies for transferring the tails to the pin board
Techniques for fitting the joint
How to lay out then cut and fair the handles (both the hand holds and the curved top edge)
How to smooth-plane your surfaces
How to use cut nails (to secure the bottom board…if you wish – but there’s an argument for leaving it loose)
And of course, how to put it all together (and why I recommend liquid hide glue).
– Fitz
These make great handmade gifts – above is a stack of last-minute gifts I made in 2022 from pieces in our scrap bin.
We have a handful of “cosmetic seconds” available of our Type 2 Crucible Dividers. There are minor blemishes caused by the tumbling process, and perhaps a few small spots of rust. All are 100 percent functional and have been reinspected.
We’ve stamped all of them with a No. 2, (indicating a second) which is the biggest blemish or mark on the tools. We’ve included photos of some of the cosmetic marks, and we picked the worst-case ones.
These tools are normally $126. We are selling the blemished ones for $90. That’s about a 29 percent discount.
The following short excerpt is from Christopher Schwarz’s “Sharpen This” – a 120-page pocket book on how to get great edges, regardless of the sharpening system you choose. It is about what is important: Creating a sharp edge quickly with a minimum amount of equipment.
Simple side-clamp honing guides are a godsend for quick and repeatable work when it comes to chisels and plane irons. I do sharpen freehand a lot of unusually shaped tools, but when it comes to plane blades and straight chisels, I am happy to let the honing guide do the work.
Side-clamp honing guides can be had for a song – inexpensive ones cost less than $20.2 And I have found no valid downside to using them.
Critics of honing guides deride them as “training wheels” or as a crutch that slows you down. I have regularly challenged these people to sharpening contests for speed and fineness of edge – the winner determined by a judge who doesn’t know whose blade is whose. I have never lost – not because I’m a great sharpener but because the honing guide is an enormous asset.
While I do love my honing guide, my love has limits. I don’t use the endless attachments that allow honing guides to be used for oddball tools or skewed tools or short tools or extra thick tools. For those tools, the honing guide and its accessories slow me down. So I stick with the base model, which works well for chisels and plane blades.
So if you stick with the base-model honing guide, you are five minutes away from being a speedy sharpener. All you need is a simple block of wood that sets the blade at the proper angle in the guide so the steel at the tip of the blade immediately touches the sharpening media perfectly. Which brings us to a discussion of sharpening angles.
The plastic block sets the blade’s location in the jig.
Honing Angles – the Argument for Fewer (or One) Most sharpening experts steer you toward using a wide variety of angles for different jobs in the workshop. Lower angles for paring tools. Higher angles for chopping tools. And soon you are engraving all the sharpening angles on all your tools and doing more sharpening than woodworking.3
In my experience, the sharpness of the edge is more important than the angle (within reason). A 25° paring chisel and a 35° paring chisel will both do a fine job when really sharp.
When I realized this, I decided to see if I could hone and polish all my tools at 35° and be happy. That was about 10 years ago, and I remain committed to this simple approach. I am sure there are tools out there on the fringes that won’t work with a 35° hone and polish, but I have yet to encounter them.
Setting the tool is simple. Slap it in the guide, press the guide against the block and press the blade to the stop. Tighten the guide. Done.
So I have a block of wood with a stop on it. I put the tool in my honing guide, I press the guide and blade against the stop block, then I tighten the guide. I am ready to sharpen. (Making a setting block is simple. Use a school protractor to set the blade to the correct angle in your honing guide. Then screw a stop to a block of wood that matches that projection.)
