Lost Art Press

Off to Australia – Spots Still Open in my Classes

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By the time you read this, I will be on my way to Melbourne, Australia, for three weeks of teaching and building at the Melbourne Guild of Fine Woodworking, which is run by Alastair Boell, a graduate of Boston’s North Bennet Street School.

I’ll be teaching four classes there, including a full-size tool chest from “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” a Schoolbox from “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” and an authentic Shaker wall cabinet.

Curiously, there are still six openings in the class for the Shaker cabinet March 25-26. That class almost always fills up pronto when I teach it in the States and Germany. Perhaps some Australians are leery of building a piece of furniture from an odd religious sect. So let me make the following very clear:

During this two-day class, we will not be practicing sexual abstinence. No one will be abstaining from intercourse during the entire two days.

The Shaker cabinet class is a great introduction to the principles of hand joinery. We’ll process stock by hand, cut dados and rabbets by hand and learn a lot about nail technology and fitting doors.

If you have those days free, you can sign up for the class here.

There also is one opening in the tool chest class. Details here.

During the last two weeks, I’ve received a lot of advice on making the 16-hour flight across the Pacific. Here are three perspectives:

1. Slow down a couple of days ahead of the flight. Eat lighter foods, avoid a lot of salt and fat.  Hydrate (not just beer). Do your normal exercise. Once on the aircraft, use anti-bac wipes and clean your tray table, etc. If anyone hands you a bottle, wipe it. Keep drinking water and avoid alcohol (if you can). Move around as much as you can. If you can’t walk around then do whatever you can to stretch/move your body as much as you can. About halfway through the long haul go to the restroom and do a quick wash (I take a small wash cloth & towel along in a plastic bag), change underclothes (that would be your drawers), socks, brush teeth, put in moisturizing eye drops, etc. and you will feel much better.

2. Take some fried baloney sandwiches with you, about six to eight will do. Swill as much beer as they will give you. Take your shoes off, put on some fuzzy slippers, put the seat back as far back as possible and pass out with your mouth wide open. But don’t ask the flight attendant which channel has “the porn.”

3. Drugs. Lots of drugs.

I am planning on using all three strategies.

I hope to post a few blog entries while down there, so be sure to check back during the next three weeks.

— Christopher Schwarz

Update: ‘By Hand and Eye’

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Jim Tolpin and I dove into the writing of “By Hand and Eye” with a shared excitement. As we combed through historic pattern books and design literature we asked each other the question: “Would this be valuable to the modern woodworker?” Ninety percent of what we uncovered was at the point of a tool. The secrets simply would not pry loose by reading alone. Each gold nugget broke free under the points of a compass, or shined brightly at the workbench as a body of knowledge emerged. Time and again Jim and I found delight as one discovery lead to another and our modern assumptions crumbled.

Myth: Traditional Design is Formulaic
Truth be told, early on we did scour for a formula that might open a door to a secret passage. We found no silver bullet, but over time new horizons opened before us, which assured us that we were on a good path. Even the things that seemed like rote memorization, such as the admonitions to draw the classic orders or dozens of geometric exercises, were in the end anything but rote. We both marveled when we realized that drawing a classic order has little (or nothing) to do with drafting a historical form and everything to do with reshuffling the way the brain sees objects in space. Same goes for all the simple geometry exercises. Learning to construct an ellipse is much more than a quaint bit of compass calisthenics. It’s about imprinting an ellipse on the inner blackboard and gaining a sense of perfect visual pitch. You might have brushed up against this in high school geometry (before they killed all the fun with a boatload of theorems), but it’s at the workbench where this ancient knowledge slides into the groove and you find yourself uttering, “Shazaam!”

Make no mistake, “By Hand and Eye” is not a book about making period reproductions. Yet it is about equipping you with the same core design skills that inspired much of our most revered furniture. This is an entryway into a living design tradition that is still capable of propelling the modern woodworker to new heights.

Here’s an added bonus. We decided early on to use technology to assist the learning curve on some of the geometrical drawing exercises. Using text alone, generating a simple polygon requires a stampeding herd of confusing words, i.e. draw line AB and erect a perpendicular bisecting points Q, W, & F….etc. Jim enlisted a tech-savvy helper, Nico Prins, to make animations of 29 geometric exercises. These visuals let you grasp the concepts quickly and immediately try your own drawing. These animations will be available as a free download for anyone who purchases the book. You can click on the links below to view a sample. You may find this alone is worth the price of the book.

Draw a Volute.

Construct an Ellipse.

— George R. Walker & Jim Tolpin

Editor’s note: “By Hand and Eye” is in the final stages of production. The book is designed (thank you Linda Watts) and edited (thank you Megan Fitzpatrick). All that remains is for the completion of the index and my final edit. Thanks to both everyone who has worked on this massive project and to everyone who has waited patiently for it. The end is near.

For the Love of ‘Rippers’

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It’s not often that I’m thrilled to paw through another man’s garbage, but when that man is Frank David….

Teak is expensive stuff – upwards of $50/board foot at times. So every cut counts. And when it came time to buy stuff for the interior guts of this campaign chest, I was thinking of using walnut, pine or oak. But then I saw a magnificent pile of narrow teak offcuts while hunting through the stacks of lumber at Midwest Woodworking.

These pieces of 2-1/2”-wide, 4/4 rough stock were the leftovers from rip cuts made decades ago. Frank stashed them in the attic of his shop in Norwood, Ohio. Some of his employees asked if they could have these teak “rippers” to burn for firewood in their homes.

Frank merely raised an eyebrow at their request.

These rippers are perfect for web frames. So I purchased a few of these (at about $15/board foot) and built the two web frames for my latest campaign chest with them today.

Like all the other old pieces of teak from Midwest, this stuff is like a buttery dream (which is better than a wet dream but not as good as a lard dream) to work with. And I saved enough teak from my wide boards to scrounge just enough teak to make a copy of Napoleon’s desk for my book on campaign furniture.

Viva la refuse!

— Christopher Schwarz

Update on ‘To Make as Perfectly as Possible’

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Today marks a major milestone in the production of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.” Designer Wesley Tanner has sent us the first 126 pages of the book for us to mark up.

It is gorgeous work on Wesley’s part.

For those of you waiting on your copy, you’ve probably figured out that we’re running behind. We’d hoped to have the book out this month, but we’re still proofing the pages. Everyone working on this project wants this book finished, but everyone also wants it (apologies in advance) as perfect as possible.

So I’ll be editing this book in Australia this month. Don Williams and Michele Pagan will be checking the text (again) from their homes. I’ll post updates on the process when we reach another significant waypoint.

And no, I’m afraid we don’t have a price settled on either version of the book – we have to have a final page count to get a good quote from the printer.

Because I don’t have any more good information, I’ll merely distract you with this photo of a shiny object we do have in-house this week.

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— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Tomorrow I’ll post an update on “By Hand & By Eye” by George Walker and Jim Tolpin. It’s near the finish line.

The Price of Teak

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Lately I’ve been getting hammered via e-mail because I’m using teak (Tectona grandis) to build my latest campaign chest for an upcoming book. The comments go something like this:

“Don’t you see the hypocrisy in publishing ‘With the Grain’ – a book that advocates using local species – and then using teak in your own project?”

It’s a fair question, and one I struggled with as I embarked on writing a book on campaign furniture. Furniture built in this style was made from a wide variety of tropical and domestic species, however most of the pieces I’ve encountered have been made from mahogany, teak, camphor and (less frequently) English oak.

When I started planning the projects for the book, I toyed with the idea of using domestic species for the projects – walnut, cherry and white oak for the most part. And while that’s an option I plan to present in the book, I decided to go with the historical species for building my projects.

It was a tough decision because I rarely use exotics. If you look at my published work since 1996, I think you’ll find the vast majority of my projects have been built with common domestic species, occasionally to the detriment of the project itself. Tansu made with sugar maple? Rice paper lanterns built with white oak? Workbenches built with Southern yellow pine?

This campaign chest would look wrong in shagbark hickory.

Exotics come with political baggage. And I dislike politics. Exotics are sometimes unethically harvested. They can be sold in a corrupt system that is unfair to workers and harmful to the environment and habitats. Now, I know that you can find 10 sides to this argument, and if you launch into this nuttiness in the comments below, I will close my eyes, put my hands over my ears and chant, “nunga, nunga, nunga.”

For me, the question was only this: Can I make something beautiful and enduring enough from these three boards to outlast the life span of this magnificent tree? To make the tree, in effect, nearly immortal?

This campaign chest is my own design, and yet it stands upon the shoulders of every chest I have studied and lived with since I was a child. The joinery is the best that I can do. The brasses I’ve purchased are older than I am. Though this isn’t the most technically challenging piece of furniture I’ve built, I am aiming for it to be my best.

So I walked into this project with my eyes open, knowing that the wood carried a high price – both in real and environmental terms. But I also knew that this chest was going to be one of the high points of my furniture-making to date.

I made my choice. And now you can make yours.

— Christopher Schwarz