My traveling Dutch Tool Chest, with all the stuff I’m about to load into it. And yes, I can lift it once it’s fully loaded…though I admit it’s getting more difficult the older I get!
Chris and I are once again headed to London to teach classes with the London International Woodworking Festival at the end of October. Chris is teaching a four-day (Oct. 26-29) Irish Chair Class, and a short class (Oct. 30) on Peasant Carving, and I am (no surprise) teaching a four-day (Oct. 26-29) Dutch Tool Chest Class, then a short seminar (Oct, 30) on making the most of your tool chest. And we’ll be around for the October 29-30 fair, of course!
Last week, we received a treat of an email from Douglas Lambert, who recreated three workbenches from “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use” by Christopher Schwarz* in Lego form, and sent us detailed plans for each:
You can download the plans for free at each of the links above.
We reached out to Lambert to learn more about him and his work.
“I’m a video editor from Brazil, living in São Paulo,” he says. “I love Lego – it’s been a passion of mine since I was a kid – but I also have a big fascination with woodworking (my grandfather was a woodworker, so I think I got it from him). For a brief period of time, I actually tried to be a woodworker, but I couldn’t really do it because I just don’t have the space for a working woodshop in my apartment. So, I started reading a bunch of stuff about it and decided that if I couldn’t be a ‘physical woodworker,’ I could be like an ‘academic woodworker’ in a sort of way. I follow the community, read the magazines, and love the books from Lost Art Press.”
Lambert says after spending so much time researching woodworking, he wanted to create something adjacent to the craft that people could actually build.
“I had previously designed a full woodworking shop for the Lego Ideas website, but it didn’t get the proper votes to become an approved project,” he says.
(Previously, he designed another project based on the Brazilian Ipê tree that got some great attention.)
“Since I already had Chris Schwarz’s book on workbenches because of my plans to one day build a real one, I decided to take on a new challenge,” Lambert says. “If I couldn’t have a real bench in my home, I could turn Chris’s iconic workbench projects into Lego sets. That way, I could finally have a woodworking bench that I could put right on my editing desk as a nice piece of decoration.”
It took Lambert about two days to come up with the design for the three sets.
“Doing the very first one was definitely the most difficult part,” he says. “I had to figure out the proper relationship between the Lego parts and the scale of a proper workbench, and I had to create a whole new design ‘language’ from scratch. I had to figure out how to make a wood plane look right, how to create the wood shavings, get the color schemes down and make sure everything was recognizable as woodworking tools using the proper Lego pieces.”
He designed everything digitally in a program called Studio, which gave him access to unlimited bricks.
“Once I cracked the code on the first bench, the other two went much faster,” he says. “After finishing the digital models, I bought the actual pieces to see if the design worked in real life, and they turned out very stable and awesome to look at.”
Lambert originally offered these instructions on his website.
“I used to sell them for a dollar, but I’ve decided to share them for free,” he says.
If you’d like to support Lambert’s work, you can use the site to leave a donation of a dollar or whatever you like.
“It’s just a cool way for me to share these designs with the community and help other people get these little benches onto their own workspaces,” he says.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
*Copies of Christopher Schwarz’s “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use” (Popular Woodworking Books, 2010) are readily available on the secondary market.
The fully stocked storefront offers all our books, tools and apparel, plus cash-only blemished seconds and tools.
The LAP editorial staff is happy to welcome to the Lost Art Press storefront (407 Madison Ave., Covington, Ky., 41011) from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. on most Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
But a heads up that we will be closed on Monday, May 25, for Memorial Day.
Editor’s note: Our Mind Upon Mind series is a nod to a 1937 Chips from the Chisel column (also featured in “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years”), in which Hayward wrote, “The influence of mind upon mind is extraordinary.” The idea being there’s often room for improvement.To that end, we’ve asked you what else you have thought of, tried out and improved upon after building projects from our books.
Send us your own ideas! Email [email protected]. You can read more about the submission process here.
In issue 3 of The Stick Chair Journal and on the Never Sponsored Substack, Chris gives a review of and instructions for using the Stanley No. 77 Doweling Machine for creating the round tenons on long and short sticks.
He recommends using the “stock guide plate,” and shares his method for holding the stick and feeding slowly while cranking fast.
I had already been experimenting with the No. 77 for this, but even following these great instructions, including using the Woodka and a spoke pointer to cone the end, I could not get a great, centered cut.
My solution: I had a cheap machinist cross-slide vise lying around for the drill press and decided to bolt it in front of my dowel machine. I can now clamp the stick with no wobble or vibration (I use shims to set the stick height on the vise). I can center the stick perfectly and feed it at a very consistent rate with the vise crank while turning the doweling machine crank at a consistent rate. Additionally, I can stop perfectly on the scribed line for the length.
With so many sticks to do, this method allows me to sit in a comfortable position and also lets me see the work more closely. It works amazingly well, and my tenons are really nice (the ones in the photo are in cherry).
Editor’s note: Our Mind Upon Mind series is a nod to a 1937 Chips from the Chisel column (also featured in “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years”), in which Hayward wrote, “The influence of mind upon mind is extraordinary.” The idea being there’s often room for improvement.To that end, we’ve asked you what else you have thought of, tried out and improved upon after building projects from our books.
Send us your own ideas! Email [email protected]. You can read more about the submission process here.
Today’s pick is courtesy of Rob, from Peachtree City, Georgia. Thanks, Rob!
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
This steambending tip is for kiln-dried hardwood.
I am building two staked side chairs from “The Anarchist’s Design Book” to go with our dining room table. Both are built out of kiln-dried cherry and I’m using the simple steambending jig as shown in the book.
The crests are 13/16″ thick and need to be steambent to a 15″ radius.
Typical bending failure.
I have built four of these same chairs previously, two out of ash and two out of cherry. The ash crests all came out well, but I had several failures while bending the cherry crests. Even when using straight-grained wood, cherry is prone to cracking and is a more difficult species to bend than ash or oak. This time around, I had three failures out of my first four attempts. All the failures were on the outside of the curve.
I knew a jig with a compression strap would give better results, but didn’t want to spend the time and energy to build a more complicated, albeit better, jig.
I had seen articles or videos in the past about steaming wood inside a plastic sleeve. While thinking about the best way to do this, I remembered that we have a vacuum sealer machine in our kitchen.
The crest is 18″ long and 2-1/2″ wide before steaming, so an easy size to work with the vacuum sealer. Vacuum sealing makes the bag/wood combination smaller and easier to handle and clamp, but still leaves plenty of moisture.
Here’s my process:
1. Soak the cherry for several days.
2. Put the wet wood in the bag and vacuum seal.
3. Steam for one hour.
4. Put the wood and sleeve in the bending jig together and clamp expeditiously.
5. After the crest has completely cooled and is at room temperature (4 to 6 hours), I unclamp the crest, remove the sleeve and reclamp in the same jig. This helps start the drying process, but it won’t dry very much while in the jig.
6. The next day, I remove the crest and put it in a bar clamp to dry. The wood will still be very wet and there will be some spring back. Tighten the bar clamp to match the 15″ radius of the bending form.
The sleeve retains the moisture during the steaming process, which is more efficient in conducting heat. Steaming without the sleeve heats the wood but also removes much of the moisture. The bag also helps retain heat and slows the cooling process while transferring and clamping in the jig.
If you plan on doing much steambending, my advice is to build a jig with a compression strap. In lieu of a compression strap, I think this is a good workaround.
Previous side chairs.
So far, this technique has worked well after a handful of attempts.
