Monroe earned a degree in fisheries from Colorado State University before moving to Alaska. Turning down an offer with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he built his home, much of the furniture and later worked with master log builder, Lee Cole, in 1977. Building a trussed-log bridge over the following two summers led to his meeting Dick Proenneke – their mutual passion for craft and wildlife kindled a friendship until Dick’s death in 2003.
A graduate of The Krenov School of Fine Woodworking, Monroe has taught woodworking courses around the country and has written articles for Fine Woodworking magazine.
Today Monroe has given up part of his Saturday to answer your questions about woodworking, Dick Proenneke and a conversation he’s been having with himself and others about using tropical hardwoods.
Here’s how it works: Type your question in the comment field. Monroe will answer it. It is that simple.
With the disappearance of the Hold Heet glue pots from the market, readers have asked for some alternatives that don’t involve purchasing industrial equipment.
I’ve tried several options. This entry is about using a wax warmer that is designed to heat body wax for hair removal. The machine is sold under a variety of brand names, but they all have similar specifications. So while I cannot compare the Aowosa to the Daordaer, my guess is these white sheet-metal waxers are quite similar.
First, the good news: They are inexpensive (less than $50) and they work. Just don’t trust the temperature scale (more on that in a bit). They heat up fast and hold the temperature steady. Like the Hold Heet, there is a removable double-pot with a handle, which makes it easy to keep the pot full of water during long days. The lid is fairly useless unless you heat small containers of glue.
Now the bad news: This is not by any stretch of the imagination professional equipment. Everything is lightweight and thin. I’ve had my Hold Heet for as long as I can remember. It is built like a little tank. I don’t get that same vibe from these wax warmers. I hope I’m wrong.
The main problem is that the temperature scale on mine is not even close. When I set it for 140° F (60° C), it raced up to 180° F. I let the machine run for a couple days to see if there was some sort of break-in period. So far, no. So I put a piece of tape on the scale and marked where 140° really is.
I will continue to use this machine during classes when we heat a lot of glue. And it’s convenient for making small batches of Soft Wax, too. But will I bequeath it to my children at my death? I’m guessing no.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. If someone can recommend a reasonably priced heavy duty unit to test, please post it in the comments.
The drilling jig in use. I cut some more notches in it after this photo was taken, which are shown in the drawing.
I am fairly jig-averse. Not because of some philosophical reason – it’s just not the way my head works. When I look for solutions to problems, “making a jig” is way down on the list.
But sometimes, jigs are the only way forward. Last week I taught my first-ever class in making Gibson chairs. I was an emotional wreck the whole time, trying to keep seven students on track while I revised my lesson plan. But everyone ended up with a nice elm Gibson chair.
In my recent video on making the Gibson chair, I use the same drilling jigs for the Gibson that I use for all my chairs. But when thrown into a classroom environment, the old jigs were too finicky and required too much setup in order to get the arm positioned in the correct place over the seat.
So I went into our machine room for 20 minutes and devised the jig shown here. I’m sure it can be improved, but for now I’m thrilled with how simple and repeatable it makes the process.
It is made from 2x10s from the home center. Here’s a cutting list:
1 Front piece 1-3/8” x 8” x 14”
1 Back piece 1-3/8” x 8” x 17”
2 Top stops 1/2” x 1/2” x 6”
1 Bottom stop 1/2” x 1/2” x14”
Screw the front piece to the back piece in the T shape shown above. Glue and nail the top stops to the top edge of the front piece. Glue and nail the bottom stop to the underside of the front piece. Done.
Now you need to set up the jig so it can be used over and over. Place the jig so it is centered between the mortises for the short sticks and long sticks. Mark on the jig the location of where the seat meets the jig. This allows you to put the jig in the right place every time.
Place the arm on the jig and position it for drilling (as shown in the video). The top stops put the front of the arm in the same plane as the front of the seat. Shift the arm so it is in the correct position over the front mortise (the inside edge of the arm should be tangent to the center point of the mortise on the seat – also shown in the video). Then rotate the arm so its rear mortise is directly in line – a 0° sightline) with its mortise in the seat. I do this with a laser in the video.
Now trace the shape of the arm on the jig. You just made the process repeatable. Shift the jig to the other side of the seat and repeat the whole process for the chair’s other arm.
We are pleased to announce that Monroe Robinson (shown above) is hosting Open Wire this Saturday. NB: He’s a time zone or three behind us – so you might have to wait for answers. But don’t wait to post your questions – we’ll still open things up by 8 a.m. EDT, and cut off comments at 5 p.m. EDT)
When I volunteered to be a part of Open Wire, I thought it would be interesting and fun to answer questions about Dick Proenneke, including aspects of his life not included in “The Handcrafted Life of Dick Proenneke.” But when Chris asked me to write a few lines about what I’m currently working on, I realized I had an opportunity to include your ideas in a conversation I am having with myself and others about using tropical hardwoods.
First, a quick life update: My wife, K. Schubeck, and I spend most of our hours during the summer caring for what lies beyond our house and my shop, planting and harvesting our garden, caring for the many flowers, flowering trees and shrubs, picking berries and fruit to freeze, juice or jam. I am trying to perfect the making of intensely flavored jams with little added sweeteners. With each passing year I find myself seeking to share life’s experiences with family, friends and community rather than working by myself.
In September, my friend, Lou Krukar, will visit from Washington to help me make four large dining tables from the most beautiful planks of old-growth redwood I brought out of the forest in the 1990s.
The planks are eight book-matched pieces that were part of a 21’ log that sunk in a local river between 1850 and 1875, when trees were felled with axes and pulled to the river bank with oxen. This log sank on its way to the Big River sawmill and was covered in mud until I pulled it free. The bottom 9’ of the log is wavy grained leaving 12’ of straight and clear redwood above. This will be a collaborative project. First we will crosscut the planks and bring them into my shop to dry under metal roofing. When Lou returns a few months later, we will work on the tables and he will take one home.
Lou Krukar and I will crosscut the 21’ timbers to separate the 9’ x 20”-wide wavy grained end from the remainder.
The tables can be up to 9’ long. Both long edges of the 40”-wide book-matched tabletops will have a pleasing, natural, convex curve.
This is much closer to what clear, old-growth redwood looks like, wet, right off the saw – up to 4’ wide and 16’ long.
On the first day I removed a salvaged old-growth redwood log from the forest in 1992, my partner Roger Moore and I made a commitment that working in the forest would be give and take. I have no reservations of my having lived up to that commitment and am honored to still have many timbers from that dangerous yet special experience. But lately I have been trying to determine the best way to use up a few pieces of precious wood I purchased decades ago, from a place and in a manner that no longer fits with my values. And I am certain I am not the sole craftsperson in this position.
While I attended The Krenov School during its third and fourth years, Jim Krenov spoke a few times about his use of fine woods from around the world. He thought of himself as a single person who used limited amounts of precious woods in the creation of sensitive furniture that honored the wood he used. At the time, I felt as if this interpretation opened the door for my own use of tropical woods. While in the program I made a China hutch from Honduras rosewood (pictured in the introduction of my book) along with a shop-sawn veneered 58” circular dining table with four 12” leaves to match. The two pieces were in the student show at the end of my second year and resulted in my building a similar table for a client. When working up a proposal, I ended up purchasing some wood samples, including cocobolo, Thai rosewood, Andaman padauk and ebony. The client commissioned a 58” circular ebony dining table with eight 13” leaves, 18 folding ebony chairs with hand-caned seats and backs, and a 9’ buffet table that cantilevered from their adobe wall.
Veneered table made from ebony from the Celebes Islands with a hard maple dovetail sliding mechanism.
The sliders for my rosewood table operate as smoothly today as they did 38 years ago. For greater strength and stability, I first sawed the hard maple into strips and then glued them into little glue lam beans. I created a tight-fitting dovetail with a shaper before creating a smooth sliding action with right- and left-handed dovetail planes.
All of the surfaces on the Honduras rosewood and ebony tables were scraped. I first used a Stanley No. 12-1/2 floor scraper I made into a jointer scraper. I then created a smoother surface with thinner and thinner hand scrapers, sharpened with a finer burr. No sandpaper was used. The edge profiles and other surfaces were also scraped. Scraping is perfect for any hardwood that is too difficult to hand plane. I’ve used this process on two large oak dining tables and several coffee tables.
When my client questioned the structure of the 18”-wide buffet cantilevered from their adobe wall, I stood on its outer edge and did a few little jumps. It held solid.
When I built the ebony dining set, I was also writing articles for Fine Woodworkingand teaching a few gigs around the country. I realized I did not want to encourage the use of endangered hardwoods.
I came up with a plan: The retail cost of ebony cost accounted for 10 percent of the entire dining set. I decided I would be willing to build furniture with tropical hardwoods only if I added 10 percent more to the price, which I would then donate to a conservation organization close to the wood’s place of origin. However, future conversations about the impact of tropical wood extraction were enough to sway every client’s interest away from the use of such woods. As such, I have used only local woods for the past three-and-half decades.
That ebony from the Celebes Islands was the last tropical hardwood I purchased. But those samples? They still reside, untouched, on my lumber rack.
As a very young child, I could never understand how people killed almost every buffalo on the plains. What did that do to the people who depended upon them for survival? I wondered. I have maintained a commitment to never be a part of something like that. And yet, despite my convictions, I now find myself having been part of a tragedy of even greater magnitude for the world’s environment and possibly our own survival.
Creating surfaces from beautiful woods has always been what excites me most about working with fine wood. Everything I do beyond that supports the expression of that surface. I have enough of each of the sample woods I’ve mentioned to create a sizable buffet table. I plan to collaborate with a friend, Doug Carmichael, to make a wrought iron base for at least a table or two. Another friend, Tony Perelli, will make two candle holders and a set of hors d’oeuvre saucers to live with each table. Once my friends are compensated I plan to donate at least 50 percent of what remains of the selling price to conservation in the country of the wood’s origin.
Here are some of my questions: Is it possible to get a permit to sell a piece of rosewood furniture even though I no longer have the original invoice? I wish I had never purchased this wood, but I can’t undo what I’ve done. Making something beautiful, to be owned with reverence and knowing that the profit goes to conservation, is the best I can think to do. Any suggestions?
And now I look forward to answering your questions as well!
Finally, if you wish to keep in touch, my email is monroe@mcn.org.
In a space of just 10” x 39” x 19-1/2”, H.O. Studley managed to arrange – with perfection – more than 250 of his tools into a dovetailed mahogany cabinet that has captivated tens of thousands of woodworkers since it was first unveiled in 1988 on the back cover of Fine Woodworking with a single shocking photograph.
After a brief stay at the Smithsonian, the cabinet was sold to a private collector and hadn’t been seen by the public for well over a decade. Studley’s workbench has never been on public view.
This book is an in-depth examination of one of the most beautiful woodworking tool chests ever constructed and presents the first-ever biography of Studley (1838-1925), a piano and organ builder in Quincy, Mass. It features measurements, details and photographs of all the tools in the cabinet. Every swinging frame, hinged panel and nook of this three-dimensional, multi-layered sculpture has been analyzed so you can understand how it folds in on itself like a giant piece of mahogany origami.
But most of all, you will see the cabinet in a way that only a handful of privileged people ever have. And you will realize that the magazine photograph that electrified the woodworking world in 1988 only scratches the surface of the cabinet’s complete magnificence.
The scale and density of the decorative details in the Studley cabinet limited each element, especially the inlays, to about a quarter the size of a postage stamp.
My late colleague and dear friend Melvin J. Wachowiak, Jr. once remarked that anything made more elegantly than necessary for its usefulness was Art. By that assessment, with which I agree, the Studley tool cabinet is unrestrained Art. There are a multitude of visual and physical moments in the cabinet that did not need to be there. Their presence is either to aesthetically enhance the whole, or to demonstrate the maker’s virtuosity at his craft and his delight in it.
The Inlays To a modern woodworker the tool cabinet might seem opulent, even garish, but in the late-Victorian world of organ and piano building, the exuberance made sense. The material vocabulary is what you would expect for a palette of inlays on a piano-maker’s toolbox: ivory, ebony and mother-of-pearl.
The inlay techniques Studley used on the cabinet were straightforward and exacting. For the round, button-like inlays he likely used a drill bit to excavate the pockets. The inlays vary in size, but most are in the range of 1/4″ in diameter plus or minus, with a few in the 1/8″-diameter range.
Almost all of the 136 ivory inlays are buttons or roundels.
On the right side of the cabinet, where Studley located sets of graduated drill bits, he marked the sets not only with engraved flat ivory roundels but also with half-spherical ivory buttons.
The 217 mother-of-pearl inlays are more evenly divided between buttons and roundels, and pieces of other shapes (alas, I did not conduct a count on that distribution). The shaped pieces were “made to fit,” but there is no way to identify which came first, the void or the infill.
Typically intarsia (a technique by which pieces are literally “inset” into a background) is accomplished by first creating the decorative element, then creating a void to fit that element by scribing the outline of the element on the background and excavating a void. My microscopic examination of the inlays was cursory and inconclusive, but I did not see any tool marks on the background surfaces.
Regardless of their material or shape, on all but a few of the inlays there are no irregularities until extreme magnification is employed.
With enough magnification you can receive a bit of comfort knowing that Studley was not a flawless automaton.
The opulence of using ivory buttons, inscribed with inked numbers to mark the progression of tool sizes (for example, the graduations of the drill bits) is awe-inspiring.
There is place for every drill bit in the graduated set, and an engraved ivory button for each drill bit. Also take note of the subtle but elegant treatment of the bottoms of the spacers between each Gothic arch; the curved double-chamfer is found in numerous locations throughout the cabinet, almost never glaringly obvious.
Concurrently, the mother-of-pearl elements used as mere decoration impart an intense luminescence to the cabinet, especially as the light or the viewing position changes.
The Sculpted Details The strictly sculptural elements of the cabinet, by which I mean those that are rendered and presented to the viewer in three dimensions, number literally in the hundreds. Because it is not possible to rank them in importance or even prominence, I will cluster them into four major areas.
First are the roundels, turned button-like elements scattered throughout the cabinet, never haphazard and always enhancing adjacent elements. There are many different sizes of roundels, ranging from about 3/8″ to 1-1/2″ in diameter. Most, but not all, of the roundels are festooned with round mother-of-pearl inlays at their tips, about which I will speak more in a bit. Each of the roughly two dozen roundels is turned from solid ebony.
The technical and artistic complexity of this one element is astonishing. The turned ebony plugs for the nickel-plated tube (there is one at each end) are adjacent to a series of ebony and mother-of-pearl roundels mounted on sculpted ebony backplates. To carry the power of the accomplishment even further, the swinging tab that restrains the tube in its shaped wire fitting is a spectacular carved ebony “L” with tapered chamfers on both sides of the two curves.
Closely related to the roundels are the drawer pulls and stopper buttons at the ends of the metal tubes containing tools. I include these 17 examples here because, like the roundels, they are small, turned ebony elements.
Second are the shaped decorative elements, which are further subdivided into those that are 1) functionally similar to the roundels in that they are applied to the background, or 2) movable tabs or catches used to restrain tools. Most of these from either category are further enhanced by mother-of-pearl inlays and reflect the element outline as a whole.
Of the first group, numbering roughly 90, many serve to frame a space but others are demarcations between tools belonging to a graduated set, such as the chisels and drill bits. The second group consists of about 50 ebony tabs.
In this single image you can see clearly eight movable ebony restraining tabs, six with inlays, and another five fixed saddles. For scale, the diagonal ebony piece is made to hold a 6″ rule.
The third type of sculptural enhancements are carved elements serving as stand-alone sculptures in their own right. The most prominent of these is the drop pendant that tops the arch above the niche containing the Stanley No. 1 plane. The detail on this element is breathtaking, all the more so when you consider its scale; it is roughly the size of a dime. There are only a dozen or so of these examples in the case, but they are spectacular and attention-grabbing.
The final widespread instance of sculptural exercises in the cabinet includes the arches and their buttresses, most notably around the set of four awls above the Masonic symbol, along with those around the chisels and the two sets of drill bits, which are in the upper right portion of the cabinet on the second and third layers. The arch-and-buttress vignette framing the awls takes its place proudly among the most beautifully designed and crafted artworks I have ever seen.
There are several diminutive carved ebony “S” scrolls in the cabinet, and this one acts as a support bracket where none is needed. Even at this scale, the entire detail is approximately 1/2″ in height, there is a minute chamfer to the edges.
Quantifying precisely the inventory of these decorative details is nearly impossible (is it a series of a dozen arches, or is it a single element of an ascending set of arches?) and frankly not especially useful.
But because you asked, I number the total of individual decorative elements to be in excess of 500.
Perhaps the most gifted craftsman I know recently replicated a single inlaid mother-of-pearl and ebony element from Studley’s cabinet and found it to be a vexing and time-consuming effort. If we fixate on the Herculean labors of Studley we might become obsessed with the mechanistic minutiae of envisioning and fabricating hundreds of stylistic touches, each consuming some quantity of a superb craftsman’s time.
The use of Gothic arches is prevalent throughout the cabinet’s interior, but nowhere is this feature more prominent than in Studley’s presentation of graduated drill bits. Appreciating this decorative feature requires the tools to be emptied to see the bare cabinet and the vision Studley had for it.
Instead I ask you to think of them – and the case itself – as a unified cornucopia in which the whole is infinitely more affecting than a summation of the magnificent individual components.
Editor’s note: There are many more photographs in the book than I’ve shown here of the artistic details discussed above.
