Lost Art Press

Rust Hunting in Australia

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I always enjoy tool sales, such as those put on at the Mid-West Tool Collectors Association, but after years of attending them, surprises at these shows are few and far between.

So it was quite a rush to attend a tool meet put on by the Hand Tool Preservation Association of Australia this morning. There were so many tools and brands that I’ve never seen before. I stayed until they started packing up the boxes to leave.

What’s different? Plenty.

  1. Common Stanley stuff was pretty expensive. While you could still find garden-variety bench planes for $50 or so, the 19th-century Stanley planes were crazy expensive – like $250 for a Type 8 No. 7.
  2. Some expensive stuff in the U.S. was cheap in Australia. I saw a Millers Falls No. 42 coping saw for $2. Tons of Swedish Eskiluna chisels for almost nothing. Sweet combination squares (in Imperial measurements) for less than $20.
  3. Used Japanese tools. Thanks to Australia’s somewhat closer proximity to Japan, they actually get a fair amount of used Japanese tools imported into the country. I saw many beautiful Japanese chisels for $15 each. I didn’t dare buy one because I don’t know any of the names.
  4. Infills, infills, infills. They were everywhere. I saw Norris, Mathison and a bunch of other lesser makers. There was an unused shell casting ($55). Lots of shoulder planes and bullnose planes, many in gunmetal. Two panel planes. And infill mallets ($55 each).
  5. Buttloads of cross-peen hammers. I think I saw 50 or 200, I can’t remember. Most were going for about $20.
  6. Very few moulding planes. Unlike U.S. shows, there were hardly any moulding planes. I saw one beat-up beader. One hollow. A few wacky profiles.

In any case, it was great fun poking through all the piles of rust. I could have stayed for another three hours and still not seen everything I wanted to pick up and play with.

I did buy one small item – a wooden architect’s triangle made from boxwood and very cleverly joined.

— Christopher Schwarz

A Warning on Threadboxes

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If I am sent to a bad place when I die, I am certain it will be filled with bockety threadboxes.

Today I spent the entire afternoon preparing for a class at the Melbourne Guild of Fine Woodworking and prepared the stock so every student could make a Moxon vise. I started by making the blanks for the screws.

While I was turning these spindles, I threaded one with my generic “Made in Taiwan” threadbox that is available everywhere.

The spindle jammed in the tapped hole.

I adjusted the threadbox and made another spindle. It jammed in the hole. I made another. Jam. Alastair Boell, who owns the school, sensed my despair (it might have been the fact that I was screaming and peeing myself) so he came to take a look.

He made some adjustments. Jam.

Then he had the brilliant idea to cut open the threaded hole to see if we could diagnose the cause of the jamming. The problem was obvious. The tap and the thread box each cut different a tpi.

I had heard there was a batch of bad threadboxes last year. But the suppliers assured me that the problem had been resolved.

I don’t think it has been fixed entirely. There are still bad threadboxes in the pipeline. This was a new, unused threadbox I’d purchased recently with another threadbox (which worked perfectly). I brought the unused one to Australia to make sure I had a cutter that was in good shape.

If you buy a threadbox, keep your receipt. If the results from your threadbox won’t work, cut open a threaded hole you’ve made and check out the tpi.

— Christopher Schwarz

12 Tool Chests, 5 Days, 1 Tired American

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When I teach woodworking classes, I am sometimes asked the following question: Do you consider yourself first a writer or a woodworker?

I don’t have an answer to that question. I have to do both things just about every day to feel human. And so I usually answer the question by saying: I don’t know. But right now I’m… (pick one) thirsty, tired, bloated, crampy, malodorous or oblong.

But today I was tired. Only tired (and a little oblong).

This evening we wrapped up five days of building “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” at the Melbourne Guild of Fine Woodworking in Australia. This is, hands down, the furthest that all the 12 students have come to completing the project. Almost all of the students had their lids glued up and were adding the dust seals when we called it quits. A couple students still had to glue up their lids, but that was more by choice than because it was 5 p.m.

There are two reasons we made it so far. First, I changed a couple simple things about the course with the dovetail layout and the cutting that saved us almost an entire day. Read my blog entry here for more details on that.

Second, the students were relentless. It was honestly unlike anything I had seen before in any class. They worked like dogs during the day (barely stopping for lunch) and we had to shoo them out in the evening. Also notable: They saw, hammer and plane much faster than Americans, Canadians or Europeans. Faster is not always better, but their swifter pace was noticeable.

So now I am about 90 percent prone in my hotel room with a beer from Coopers Brewery at my side. Tomorrow I’m off to a meeting of the Hand Tool Preservation Association of Australia and then to visit the shop of toolmaker Chris Vesper.

It’s all enough to make you “dry as a dead dingo’s donger” (my new favorite idiom) and need a second beer.

— Christopher Schwarz

The Unheralded Furniture Style Under our Noses

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When I tell people I’m working on a book about “campaign furniture,” the response is usually complete confusion.

Is this, perhaps, the furniture used by presidential candidates on their tour buses?

Once I explain that it was the furniture used by colonials, government workers and military officers during 1790 to 1920, the response is usually utter revulsion.

Is this, perhaps, the furniture of oppression?

And so I just stop telling people I’m working on a book on campaign furniture and just tell them I’m doing a thing on birdhouses for bondage lovers and people who drink human blood.

Sometimes, however, I run into woodworkers who follow my work and have also stumbled onto pieces in this furniture style. They see its honest construction, its simple lines and its durability. It is furniture that is understated and fits in well in a wide variety of settings – many woodworkers have sent me photos of campaign chests they have encountered in Victorian, Arts & Crafts, period and contemporary homes.

So does campaign furniture have political baggage? The answer is: Who cares?

Every furniture style can be associated with something unsavory. Any piece of American furniture before 1860 can be labeled “the furniture of slavers.” Furniture before the 19th Amendment was passed? Furniture of the people who hate women. Shaker? Furniture of people who despise reproduction. You can twist and contort history however you like. (A true history of any style of furniture is more complex than a blog entry can capture.)

Instead, I tend to focus on furniture’s form, its construction and its beauty. If we carry those things forward – and discard the retrograde social baggage associated with some (or all) furniture styles – we might just … I don’t know… find something interesting to build?

—   Christopher Schwarz

P.S. I’m in Australia for the next few weeks, where I hope to see some campaign furniture. If you’d like to see what I’m doing in Melbourne, check out my blog at Popular Woodworking Magazine here and here.

 

To Make as Perfectly as Time Allows

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After seven hours we have completed reviewing the galley proofs (the mock-up of the book pages as they will appear in print) for the first chapter of “To Make As Perfectly As Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.” To put it simply, the layout design is sumptuous. Book designer Wesley Tanner is brilliant at making our efforts look beautiful.

Much like making sausage or enacting legislation, there is much to cause you to avert your eyes when gazing on the business of book making. To give you a peek at what is going on just now, let me recount our current labors.

In most instances for most books, the author(s) only have to review the galleys to make sure 1) it says what they want it to say and submitted in the first place, and 2) catch any typos or editorial mistakes. When translating and annotating a historic volume, it is a bit more complicated. Sometimes when working our way through the stack of pages we come to the conclusion that we were using a wrong word or phrase, and it has to be changed throughout to make it the best book possible. At the least, this causes editors and designers to gnash their teeth. In a worst-case scenario they might start poking little rag dolls with long straight pins.

We settled on what we believe to be an excellent procedure. Because we have to compare the galleys to both our annotated text manuscript and the original volume of 240 years ago, it is a long slog. In order to pull all the pieces together I read each line aloud slowly and clearly while Michele followed along by reading the original French text simultaneously. In the hour-upon-hour of reading this aloud, the full import of the project became apparent.

Through this multi-sensory experience of reading, hearing and speaking, the grandeur of Roubo’s monumental effort becomes clear. Honestly, for the first time – after silently reading the text (10, 15, 20 times?) I understood more fully several passages I already thought I knew, but I was wrong. As the old-time evangelists used to say, “Knowing something in your head and knowing something in your heart are not the same things.” The rhythm of reading it out loud at a steady but deliberate pace caused many descriptions to become a real practice, not simply an articulate description.

This delight of new understanding keeps the task of reviewing from being tedious. I am not used to reading out loud for several hours.

In the end the book will be one with which we will be pleased, yet know also that there will be changes we could envision to make it better. To tell you the truth, if we had the fulfill a deadline of 10 years from Tuesday, we would be working until 10 years from Monday to make it better, and still it would not be perfect.

Unfortunately that’s just the way it is, and we recognize that some readers will find typos or homonyms that no one else found, and others will not like the way we phrased a particular translation or will object to some sections we chose not to include. We will have to reconcile with ourselves that in a world of limited resources, we did the best we could.

Onto the next chapter.

— Don Williams