Megan Fitzpatrick, the editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine, has started a personal blog that documents her work and contains copious references to cats and their fecal matter.
Called Rude Mechanicals Press, its opening salvo of entries are about her attempts to sell her current house in order to purchase a house with a suitable workshop.
Personal note: I offered to help her convert her current dining room to a hand-tool shop. She demurred.
So if you like proper English and all that good grammar stuff – plus woodworking and cats – definitely bookmark her site. I have.
Asked whether or not they handled American wares, one of the members of an Edinburgh wholesale firm dealing extensively in implements and sundry articles of steel, iron, and wood answered: “O, yes; largely; come into our warerooms and see for yourself.”
Leading the way, he pointed to rows of boxes in the first room we entered, remarking: “These are American axes—the best and the cheapest in the world.” Around the wall, standing ten deep, were ranged forks of all descriptions for the farmers’ use, and heaped on the floor were thousands of handles for hayforks, hoes, picks, axes, spades, and shovels. Observing a notebook in my hand, he said: “If you put down everything in our place that is American, you will fill the book.” This was soon apparent.
Going into another room and directing my attention to shelves bending with the weight of packages, and to dozens of boxes at either end, he informed me that this was a recent importation, something new for his firm—10 tons of bolts and nuts from the United States. In every part of the great establishment most of the articles were American made, including hay knives, lawn mowers, saws, files, wheels, hubs, spokes, rims, spades, shovels, rakes, washing machines, washboards, and wringers. (more…)
It took only six years, but you can now buy the deluxe edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” in the Lost Art Press store.
The book is made to the highest manufacturing standards. The content of this book took a worldwide team of dedicated people more than six years to complete. It is, in a nutshell, the first English translation of the most important 18th-century book on woodworking.
If you cannot afford the deluxe edition (which ships in August), we recommend selling your plasma. Or… we will be selling a nice trade edition this fall for about $60. But the deluxe edition will be printed only once. We are printing 600 copies. And more than 450 have already been sold. And I am sure you are lousy with plasma.
If you want one, you plasma-rich carbon-based lifeform, click here to read more about it.
Time has proved that when parts are glued with the best of glue, used according to well-known rules by first-class mechanics, the pieces will not come apart during reasonable wear. We have seen coach bodies built over one hundred years ago, and a great deal longer, where the panels would stick to the framing and the inside canvas glued to the panels was still in good condition.
Furniture that has been made in centuries past with tenons fitted and glued, is as solid today as when made. We have examined furniture, knowing that it was eighty years old at least, and the mahogany veneering was as solid as if only glued the day before. All such furniture was well made and well glued and the workmanship was of the best.
The high-class furniture at the present time looks far better, when compared with the antique, but it will not stand the usage. We refer to furniture in this article because the difference in construction and finish and their defective qualities are far more apparent than on carriages, but in both furniture and carriages the same means have been and are still employed; that is, the woodwork is fitted and glued by hand or machinery, and the timber is either air or kiln-dried. (more…)
It would be part of my scheme of physical education that every youth in the State—from the King’s son downwards—should learn to do something finely and thoroughly with his hand, so as to let him know what touch meant; and what stout craftmanship meant; and to inform him of many things besides, which no man can learn but by some severely accurate discipline in doing. Let him once learn to take a straight shaving off a plank, or draw a fine curve without faltering, or lay a brick level in its mortar; and he has learned a multitude of other matters which no lips of man could ever teach him.
John Ruskin
Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne : Twenty-five letters to a working man of Sunderland on the Law of Work – (London) 1867
