I never get tired of looking at old drawings from woodworking shops. They confirm some of things I know about woodworking, challenge some of my ideas and make me want – really, really want – a cool joiner’s cap.
This weekend, Jeff Burks shared a bunch of images with me from the book “Angenehme Bilder-Lust, Der Lieben Jugend zur Ergötzung also eingerichtet” by Peter Conrad Monath (1683-1747) of Nürnberg.
Jeff’s stab at the translation for the book is: “Pleasant Diversions with Pictures: Thus Fondly Arranged for the Amusement of the Young.”
Monath was a Nürnberg printer who was famed for his children’s books and adolescents’ literature. Among the plates in this book is “Das Schreiner Handwerck,” or the “Carpenter’s Craft.”
Things that are interesting to note about this Germanic plate (aside from the fact that there must have been a sale on those hats):
1. A shoulder knife in use. The user is working on one of these “slab workbenches” I discussed last week. He has a cool hat, but it is not as awesome as the hat on the guy ripping at the same bench, which leads us to:
2. Clamps in use on the bench. The more old images you see, the more you’ll find this simple wooden clamp, which is described in A.J. Roubo’s “L’Art du Menuisier.”
3. Sometimes mortising looks like you are singing an aria.
4. A nice Germanic bench with a shoulder vise and no stretchers in the undercarriage. Could be the fault of the illustrator. But who knows?
5. More sawbenches with curved legs. Gotta make some.
6. Vanilla Ice is a member of the undead. Check out the cap on the guy sawing on the sawbenches. He is either with the crips or the bloods. I forget which is which.
7. The casework on its back. It’s good to see this – this is how I work on casework.
One last detail: I really like how the two shoulder knives are crossed in the little illustration below in amongst the text.
Question: What made you decide that you liked the Dutch tool chest design in favor of the one in “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest?”
Answer: I don’t prefer the Dutch chest.
This Q&A was repeated at least 20 times on Friday and Saturday during the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event in Cincinnati, Ohio. I had brought the Dutch chest so people could examine it and get a feel for how it works. I’d also brought an English-style chest, which was filled with Lost Art Press books.
So here is a list of the advantages and disadvantages of each style of chest.
Portability: The Dutchman Wins
With an overall size of 27” wide x 13” deep x 26” high, the Dutch chest fits on the backseat of almost any vehicle and can be strapped in with a seat belt. I can easily lift and carry the chest myself. The full-size English chest is 40” wide x 24” deep x 26” high. It takes two people to move it, and you have to have a truck, utility vehicle or station wagon to transport it.
My smaller traveling English tool chest can be handled (barely) by one person and fits in many cars. But it is still not as easy to move as the Dutch.
Ease of Construction: Point, Dutchman
The Dutch chest takes me about 16 hours of shop time to build (including the paint). It has only two dovetailed corners. The rest of the joinery is dados, tongue-and-groove, glue and screws. It can be built with dimensional pine and requires only one panel glue-up (for the lid).
The English chest takes me about three times as long to build because there is so much more wood and everything is dovetailed and nailed. It’s a major project that requires a lot of wood and considerable time to complete.
Durability: One for the English
Though I haven’t tested either chest into the ground, past experience tells me that dovetails will last longer than screws. The English chest really is designed to last forever. The bottom bits are designed to be replaced when they rot out. The orientation of the joints on the skirts are designed to hold the chest together even if the glue fails.
The Dutch chest is solid enough, but it’s not designed to take the same level of punishment as the English chest. If the bottom rots out, I’ve got to rebuild the chest. If the screws rust and the glue fails, lots of things are going to come loose.
Looks: I Like the English
The Dutch chest isn’t ugly – several people at the Lie-Nielsen show said they preferred the looks of the Dutch chest. But to my eye, the English chest is beautiful. I like the shadow lines created by the skirts and raised-panel lid. I’ve experimented with adding more visual interest to the Dutch chest with some success, but it still looks like a grain bin to me.
Utility: Tie
While the English chest holds more, the Dutch chest holds enough and makes it easier to move your stuff around. Getting to all the tools in the Dutch chest is easy if you put the chest on a sawbench. You don’t have to prop up the English chest, and its lid is another working surface in the shop.
And so this morning I brought my Dutch chest into the shop and removed every tool. I wiped them down with a woobie and put them back into place in the English chest. I know some of you out there are going to say this is an onerous task task, but it’s not. Whenever I travel, I have to clean all the tools and put them back in order. (I allow all my students to use my personal tools, and so they get a lot of use.)
So the bottom line is that I’m glad I have the Dutch chest because I am on the road teaching for about 13 weeks out of the year. And the Dutch chest makes travel easy. But when I come home, I’m always happy to see my English chest with its open lid, waiting to get back to work.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Megan Fitzpatrick, the editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine, says my story on Dutch tool chests should be in the October 2013 issue of the magazine. There are no promises in the magazine world, but that’s the word today.
There are lots of ways to confirm that a carcase or sub-assembly is square, but my favorite method is to use so-called “pinch rods.”
Pinch rods are simply two pieces of wood that have pointy end bits. You put the pointy ends into two diagonal corners of your carcase. If that measurement matches the measurement of the other diagonal, your case is square.
There are lots of ways to hold these two sticks together, from splines to blue tape to a commercial product from Veritas. The best way, in my opinion, is to make a metal and wood assembly yourself. I first saw this sort of arrangement at Roy Underhill’s “The Woodwright’s School.” I was so enamored with them, that I decided to make some for myself and friends today while taking a break from an editing project.
I went to the home center and bought some 3/4” steel square tube (with 1/16”-thick walls) and some 1/4” x 20 thumbscrews. For about $12, I got enough metal supplies to build a dozen sets of these jigs.
Here’s how a friend and I made them:
Cut the steel tube to 7/8” lengths – you’ll need two of these bits to make a single jig. Deburr and dress all the raw edges. Drill a pilot hole in one of the pieces and tap it for 1/4 x 20 hardware (a very common tap size).
Mill up some wood. You’ll need something stable with straight grain. I used old heart pine flooring I had sitting in the racks. The interior dimension of the channel is 5/8” x 5/8”, so I milled up two sticks that were 5/16” x 5/8” x 30”. Two 30”-long sticks will handle most assemblies, but your mileage may vary.
Point the ends of the sticks and you are ready to assemble.
Some of the hardware I bought was covered in zinc, so I stripped that off with a citric acid solution. This greatly improves the appearance of the metal bits.
That’s about it. Sleeve the two metal bits onto the wood and engage the thumbscrew (make sure the screw is pressing into the face grain of one of the sticks instead of pressing into the seam between two sticks). You are done.
You can finish the sticks if you like, but heart pine makes its own resinous finish.
In my opinion, pinch rods trump all the other systems I’ve used for checking the squareness of an assembly, from measuring diagonally with a tape to using oversized try squares.
Jeff Burks turned up a great print dated 1651-1725 (artist unknown), that is owned by Herzog August Bibliothek in the German city of Wolfenbüttel.
Lots of interesting things to see here:
1. A “slab” bench. I don’t write about these styles of benches much because I haven’t seen any in person yet – only in paintings and drawings. The benches show up fairly regularly in the images in Mendel’s and Landauer’s house books. They appear somewhat built-in at times, and sometimes have a suggestion of an undercarriage.
2. The shoulder vise/pierced crochet. This is my favorite part of the drawings (besides the guy’s hat). The shoulder vise is a lot like the vise shown (poorly) in Joseph Moxon’s “The Art of Joinery,” which he calls the “bench screw.”
c. The Bench-Screw (on its hither ſide) to Screw Boards in whiſlt the Edges of them are Plaining or Shooting; and then the other edge of the Board is ſet upon a Pin or Pins (if the Board be ſo long as to reach the other Leg) put into the Holes marked aaaaa down the Legs of the Bench…
The bench screw in the Wolfenbüttel illustration appears to be made with a through-tenon that is pegged.
3. The sawbench/axe bench. These proto-Windsor-chair things show up in early illustrations a lot. I like this one because of its slightly curved legs.
What Jeff and I can’t quite get our arms around is the text below the illustration: Wil ich mein Sach mach schlecht und grecht bin ich alzeit ein armer Knecht. A Google translation of the text doesn’t turn up anything meaningful.
If anyone out there can offer a better translation, we’d be grateful.
A mechanic that is always in a hurry is incapable of doing good honest work. The excitable man who is always “flying around,” and whose tools are never at hand when wanted, does not amount to much; he may be busy all day, and apparently — in fact, does — work hard and seems to get over a great deal of ground, but what he does do is neither fine nor substantial. The cool, calm workman who allows himself neither to be driven nor persuaded to do more than a solid day’s work is the man who leaves his impress on each piece of work he turns out, and a hundred years hence it may be found as good and as solid as the day he completed it; but where! Oh, where! will be the work that was thrown together at the same date, by the man who was always “flying around?”
The Builder & WoodWorker – March, 1881, Fred T. Hodgson, editor.
