In all my years of messing about with old workbenches and their holding devices, I haven’t had much experience with the “bench knife.”
In its original form, the bench knife is nothing more than a broken piece of a dinner knife. It is used to secure boards on the benchtop for planing their broad faces. You first butt one end of your work against a stop of some kind. To secure the hind end of the board, you hammer the bench knife into both the benchtop and the end grain of the work.
Edward H. Crussell’s fantastic curmudgeonly “Jobbing Work for the Carpenter” (1914) describes it thus:
The bench knife is a tool of every-day use in Europe, but is not so well known or used in America. It is nothing but a piece of the blade of an old dinner knife about 1-1/4 or 1-1/2 in. long, and is used in lieu of a nail for holding material on the bench. It is used at the opposite end to the bench stop, being driven partly into the bench and partly into the material, as shown in Fig. 257.
For thinner stuff it is driven deeper into the bench. It is easy to apply, can be readily removed with a claw hammer, and does not mar the bench or material so badly as other forms of fastening. It is a good idea to have two or three of these bench knives because it is so easy to mislay them in the shavings.
Thanks to the worldwide butter knife shortage of 1915, ironmongers had to come up with a replacement to the simple broken knife. Most of the solutions that I see in books are a contrivance that drops into a row of bench dogs at the rear of the bench (who has a row of dogs on the rear of the bench?). Then you pull a lever that slides a thin piece of metal across the benchtop and into the end grain of the work.
I think there’s a reason that I have yet to see one of these devices in the wild: They were stupid. If you have a row of bench dogs, you could probably come up with a better way to hold the work than a mechanical doo-dad like the bench knife.
But today I saw a bench knife that I would buy and try.
Advertised in a late 19th-century magazine, this bench knife clamps to the front edge of your workbench and is infinitely adjustable. The obvious downside to this thing is that benchtop thicknesses vary a lot (1-1/2” to 4” being typical). But beyond that detail, I think the thing looks pretty smart.
This week I’m working on a magazine article on coping saws and I’d like to include a few paragraphs about its ancestors and the development of the saw.
My view is that the modern coping saw is related to the marquetry saws of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. A metal frame that tensions a thin blade has been a part of woodworking for about 500 years. However, if you have any evidence that I’m off base (evidence and not speculation, please, I get enough of the former), I’d like to hear from you.
Here is the rough draft of this short section. And thanks in advance!
— Christopher Schwarz
A Quick History of Coping Saws
While frame saws likely were invented by the Romans, it wasn’t until veneered marquetry was developed in the 16th century that the delicate bow saws required for the intricate work appeared.
In 1676, André Félibien published a drawing of a petite sie de marqueterie that looks all the world like a modern coping saw – you can even see that the teeth point away from the handle.
By the 18th century, these sorts of saws were sometimes called “Morris saws” – perhaps it was a bastardization of the word “Moorish” or relates to the inlaid game board for an old game called “Nine Men’s Morris.” These saws were used for all sorts of intricate cuts, both by cabinetmakers and jewelers. And the saws had blades designed to cut not only wood, but tortoise shell, brass and other semi-precious materials.
In the 19th century, the saws were commonly called “bracket saws,” and during the middle part of the century there developed quite a fretwork craze – you find advertisements for the saws and plans in publications that have nothing to do with woodwork, such as The Pacific Tourist and Beautiful Homes magazines.
Soon the saws spread to the schools, where 19th-century craft-based schools using the Sloyd system taught handwork that was based around using a knife, a “frame compass saw” and other simple tools. By the early 20th century, the saw had acquired its modern name, “coping saw,” as carpenters found the tool handy for coping inside miters when cutting moulding.
Historical purists might not agree that the coping saw is a descendant of the early marquetry saw, but from a user’s perspective these saws are functional equivalents: a metal frame that tensions a thin blade that is used for curved and intricate cuts.
“You can have art in your daily life if you want it, but you don’t. You prefer fountain-pens and motor cars.”
— Eric Gill, the creator of the Gill Sans typeface, as quoted in “Country Craftsmen” by Freda Derrick (1945)
Since the day my wife and I started work as newspaper reporters, we have collected what is called “outsider art.” The broad definition of the term is that it’s art made by people who lack formal artistic training. Usually, these people also have some sort of quirk or disability that shapes the way they see the world.
We first learned about this style of art from Mary Praytor, who runs a gallery on Main Street in Greenville, S.C. My wife and I would walk up there from the office of The Greenville News and Mary would tell us about all of the artists from her rotating stock. We were captivated. And, just as important, we could afford a few pieces. And so Lucy and I ate hot dogs plus mac and cheese in box so we could purchase our first pieces – two magic marker drawings on Formica by R.A. Miller.
Twenty-four years later, our house is filled with the stuff. I know a lot of visitors think our taste is odd (“It’s so cool that you have your childrens’ drawings on every wall,” is a common comment.) But I find this work important to me as both a writer and a woodworker.
Here’s why.
Whether you know it or not, newspaper journalism is one of the most formal and highly structured types of communication. I find it suffocating, and yet I cannot for the life of me shake loose from my four-year brainwashing. Even as I write this condemnation, I am paring back the words as I type, selecting simpler sentence structures and arranging things in series of threes to regulate the cadence.
So the outsider art is a visit to a place I cannot go. What does it look like to be a painter who doesn’t follow rules of composition, color and perspective? What if you didn’t start out by painting a bowl of fruit? And – most importantly – what does it look like if you do all these things without trying to do all these things?
With my woodworking, I had a glimpse of this non-formal approach. When I made my first pieces, I didn’t know what the heck I was doing, and I didn’t know that it mattered. I designed my pieces around my materials, my needs and what “looked kind of good.” I didn’t know there were rules for joints, unsupported spans or proportions.
Of the pieces I built, only about one in four was a success. The other three were recycled into something else or went to the fireplace. It wasn’t until I started work at Popular Woodworking in 1996 that I realized that .250 was a lousy batting average.
And so began my indoctrination into the rules of the craft. Like my journalism training, I am grateful for the knowledge. It puts food on the table, speeds my time in the shop and ensures my batting average is near 1.00. But the knowledge is also stifling to the design process.
The art around our house keeps me off-balance. I love it.
I don’t suspect these images will have the same effect on you, but I put them up here in the hope that you might think about the non-formal approach to the craft and how that relates to the “furniture of necessity.”
R.A. Miller
We own four R.A. Miller pieces (actually three; my daughter won one from me in a card game). Miller lived a half-day’s drive from us in Greenville, and we tried to go visit him once. This was in 1990 (pre-GPS), and we got turned around and lost.
The two Formica pieces we purchased are my favorites. One is a self-portrait of Miller yelling “Blow Oskar” to his uncle – asking his uncle to sound his horn as he drove by. The second piece is of Satan.
Though we were never able to visit Miller, two of our friends managed to find his place and bought some pieces from him where the paint was still wet.
Miller is also known for his animal, snake and dinosaur cutouts in metal.
Howard Finster
Howard Finster is probably one of the best-known artists of this genre and his “Paradise Garden” is an amazing place to visit. Lucy and I went there one weekend in 1991 and spent the day wandering around. We hoped to meet Miller, but he wasn’t around that day. So we got to spend the afternoon chatting with his family.
We purchased these two pieces for $35 each (and I think they knocked $5 off the total).
“Paradise Garden” is being restored and is open to the public. If you are ever in the Summerville, Ga., area you should go. It was built entirely by his hands and is jaw-dropping in its beauty and complexity.
Barbara Moran
I first encountered Barbara Moran’s work during a street festival in Cincinnati. The festival was put on by the Visionaries + Voices foundation, which seeks to cultivate artists with disabilities. In my view, the program is a stunning success, and it has made the city a hotbed of outsider artists.
Moran’s drawings were all in a pile – there must have been 50 or more. Many of them were of people who had their heads shaped as buildings. Or there were stoplights that walked. And a train with a person’s face, if I remember right.
I should have bought the whole pile. I was totally mesmerized.
But I just bought this piece, which hangs over me whenever I write.
Raymond Thunder-Sky
Raymond Thunder-Sky was one of Cincinnati’s best known outside artists. He was known as the “construction clown” because he would dress up in a clown outfit, don a hard hat and walk onto construction sites in Cincinnati. There he would record the events on the site.
I met Raymond once on the streets downtown. At the time I had no idea he was an artist.
I love his pieces, and I wish I could afford an original – they are hard to come by. My family bought me two prints from the gallery that now bears his name.
T7D
This guy is a volunteer at Visionaries + Voices and outsider artist himself. I’ve met him a few times, but I cannot recall his name. This chalk image, called “fuel,” is in my office.
The artist is well-known for his paintings of elephants and superheroes. I hope to run into him again.
To mark the release of “Campaign Furniture” next month, we’ll be releasing this T-shirt design, which amuses even my wife.
The front features a campaign-style chest of drawers from the 1909 catalog of the Army & Navy Co-operative Society. And on the back…
We’re using 100-percent cotton American Apparel shirts (made in Los Angeles) in an army green with white lettering. The shirts (4.3 oz. cotton) are printed by a small family-run firm in Noblesville, Ind. The shirts will be $20, plus first-class shipping in the United States.
Please note: Mouth-breathing hipster not included.
The shirts might be available a few days before the book. As the shirts will ship separately from the book (thank you, media mail regulations), we’ll likely put them up on the site a few days early so you can be wearing the shirt on the day your book arrives. I know no one will do that. It’s just too dorky to contemplate. OK, I’ll be doing that.
One of the treasures I inherited when buying my house was a falling-down chicken coop/rabbit hutch with (I can say without blushing) a brick shithouse tacked onto the end. It is in the courtyard, and was built in a hurried fashion, with the materials the farmer had at hand – some brick, some stone, concrete block, wood and a steel roof that had come loose at some point and was weighed down with odds and ends of heavy things. The toilet, judging from its style, was in use well into the 1960s, flushed with a bucket.
So, being the sensitive type, this fall I decided to have a go at renovating the ruin; I sought to maintain the fabric, the “built textures of the countryside,” as they say in the more sensitive kinds of house magazines.
I was sitting at the table outside, looking at the building and plotting my campaign when my neighbor Roger turned up and sat down.
The start of the rescue operation
“What are you thinking about, Brian?”
I told him I was going to fix up the chicken coop, and asked how he would do it.
He gave me a startled look, like he does sometimes, and took a couple of puffs on his cigar.
“Well, I’ve got a sledge hammer in the garage if you want, but you could just maybe give it a shove and save me the trouble of walking across the street. Probably faster, too.”
A couple more puffs, he laughed.
“Ha! ‘Course if you actually had any chickens, you could just find a feather and knock it down with that.”
So I got to work with some old bricks I had salvaged from a half-demolished chimney in the barn, learning the joys of bricklaying when one day my wife was watching me rip out some of the old rotten limestone. (The local stone is often very soft and porous; acids in the rain plus salts in the ground water can eat it up over decades.)
“It’d be nice if you could use some stone when you rebuild that part. Like it was kind of a patchwork, quoi. Roger gave you some stone, didn’t he?” she said.
Stone cutting. Why not? I remembered a book I had seen one time, and ordered it from the publisher’s site. “Pierre de Taille” (cut, or ashlar, stone) by Jean-Marc Laurent, Editions Eyrolles (2004). Turned out it is an excellent book. One interesting thing that struck me while reading it was how closely it followed Roubo. The tone and information is the same. The book is mostly oriented toward people looking to follow what a stone mason is doing on a renovation project of some kind. But in fact, almost all the info is there, set out in precise detail – the tools, how to use them, the sand and lime for mortars, the different kinds of stone, common problems in old stonework and how they should be fixed.
I needed to cut and dress some of the local stone. From this section: “The Cockscombs” (Chemin de fer, in French) “The straight cockscomb is used to dress the visible faces of a stone. It is made of a rectangular piece of wood (beech), to which is fixed a handle in the same wood, and in which on the other face cuts have been made with a saw. In the cuts, blades of tool steel, sometimes with teeth, sometimes not, have been embedded.”
The cockscombs are basically planes for stone, used on soft to medium stones, and are used for facings and mouldings, like wood planes. Laurent goes on for more than a page on these tools.
But how was I going to cut the old stones to more or less the right size? The next bit was on saws, and mentioned various types, among them “La scie type scie egoine” – that is, a regular hand saw, though the ones for stone have carbide-tipped teeth. In the end I tried a an old saw for wood that is too dull to use and had hardened teeth that can’t be resharpened. Worked OK.
Nothing earthshaking. You need the information, you can buy a book and get it. It’s obvious today that is how it works. You describe the tools, and then what to do with them to create what you want. But reading through parts of Roubo, and now the woodworking parts of André Félibien’s “Principles of Architecture,” it’s clear it wasn’t always obvious. Even just the idea that detailed information would or could be interesting to someone outside a given trade was actually quite new. Félibien was one of the pioneers, and it’s a fascinating book. Roubo created the form that we still use today.
— Brian Anderson
Brian Anderson is a translator and woodworker living in France. He is translating the woodworking parts of André Felibien’s Des principes de l’architecture, de la sculpture, de la peinture… avec un dictionnaire des terms for Lost Art Press. The book is due out in the Autumn of 2014. Anderson translated Grandpa‘s Workshop for us.
