The winter 2012 issue of Furniture and Cabinetmaking magazine have called out two Lost Art Press books – “The Essential Woodworker” and “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” – as 12 of the “must-have titles for your workshop library.”
It’s an honor to be in a list of books that includes many of our woodworking heroes, including Charles Hayward, Jim Kingshott, Alan Peters and James Krenov.
The article praises Robert Wearing’s “The Essential Woodworker” as “a seminal text that every single woodworker should have to hand when undertaking any project.” I couldn’t agree more. Wearing’s book is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle in my personal development as a craftsman.
For “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” the magazine says it “makes a compelling case for the use of a traditional tool chest and shows readers how to build it well.”
In celebration of this, we will continue to do exactly what we’ve been doing since 2007. So back to editing A.J. Roubo.
Despite word from Tibet from my milk paint supplier that Agnes the yak was busy assembling her hope chest and flirting shamelessly with a certain strapping young specimen of yakhood, I decided that I needed to take the bull by the horns and get on with painting my six-board chest.
Vinegar, skim milk, a stainless soup pan, spaghetti strainer and a measuring cup.
I poured a liter (quart) of skim milk into the soup pan, let it warm on very low heat to the point where there were just the faintest hints of steam coming off it, and then added 4 cl (1.5 fluid ounces) of vinegar –stirring a few swipes, enough to mix, but no more. This is not a critical thing, the curds will form in one way or another. You can even just let it sit at room temperature, but that will take hours. The important thing is not to bring the mix to a boil.
The fresh cheese.
I did this twice, and the second time I ended up with much less cohesive curds. No matter. After washing, it looked the same. If you substitute whole milk and maybe a little cream, and lemon juice in place of the vinegar, the same process will yield a fabulous farmer’s (or ricotta or quark if you want to be fancy about it) cheese.
The finished cottage cheese, cement/lime-mortar pigment, and hydraulic lime.
You pour out the “cottage cheese” into a strainer lined with cotton cloth, and then rinse it under cold water two or three times. Given that vinegar is an acid used to curdle the casein milk protein and separate it from the whey, this is an important step in that a basic powder in the form of slaked lime or chalk is often added to the cheese, which if not rinsed could cause a chemical reaction that would spoil the mix, at least. Then I added water to a handful of slaked lime with a couple of pinches of borax mixed in. In place of the slaked lime, you could use various kinds of finely ground chalk powder, or nothing. The lime or chalk powder is a filler, and results in a more pastel color. But some just add the pigment directly to the cheese and go from there. The borax is to help break down the casein protein in the fresh cheese, increase the adhesiveness of the paint, and adds some anti-microbial protection.
It took a while to mix all of the lumps out. Would have gone faster with an electric mixer, but that would have been too much for even my remarkably tolerant better half. “Darling, you know I love it when you whip up a new recipe, but if you even think about serving rusty nails and hinges braised in vinegar this evening, you will be sleeping in the rabbit hutch tonight.” We don’t have a doghouse.
The other thing was I used a natural hydraulic lime, NHL3.5, instead of the non-hydraulic lime usually recommended, because that was what I had. It worked OK, but you have to use the paint quickly and stir often because the lime will start into its hydraulic set after a while, and the paint becomes useless.
The chest after two coats.
It doesn’t show in the photo, but I used a little more lime and a little less pigment for the second coat and it gave the chest the slightly two-toned look I was aiming for.
Mostly people use linseed oil for a topcoat over the milk paint to give it a little depth and a slight gloss. I wanted to finish the inside of the chest, too. You can’t use linseed oil inside a chest, especially one that will be used to hold clothes or linens, because it starts to stink after a while. So I opted for some lovely natural shellac I picked up a while back. Just the ticket.
Very slight gloss, nicely highlighting the cross-grain tear-out from the moulding plane. Whoops.
It’s done.
All in all a good experiment. Start to finish, making the paint is about a 20-minute process. There are a number of recipes online. Lots of different permutations, but the upshot is that it really isn’t that critical what you do or which ingredients/quantities you opt for, as long as you make enough for the whole job, or are looking for the slightly two-tone effect.
Thanks to Megan Fitzpatrick at Popular Woodworking Magazine, we have a winner of our Lost Art Press haiku contest.
I had to call upon Megan to judge the entries because all the haikus I liked had to do with “poo.” (And not the honey-loving morbidly obese bear.) So Megan combed through the entries and selected the following as the winner. I couldn’t agree with her choice more.
forgotten in time
I hold her like men before
her sole cries, “Save me!”
The winner is TJ, who will receive the Stanley Type 11 plane that I restored for my latest DVD: “Super-tune a Handplane” from Popular Woodworking Magazine. Megan also selected a runner-up, in case TJ could not fulfill his duties as LAP poet laureate, or is for some reason not snared in a sex scandal.
Here’s the runner up by Mike Agnew.
MIstress seductive
Whispers, “Come and play with me.”
Cubicle life sucks.
If you have blacksmith taste but a Hillman Fastener budget, here’s a tip on how to make your hardware look better.
I’m working on the lid of a six-board chest for a customer today and started tweaking the hinges, which I plan to install tomorrow. These hinges are made in India and sold by Van Dyke’s Restorers for $5.50 each.
That’s the good news. The bad news is they are covered in a thick coat of black oxide. It’s so thick and loose that it will smear all over your bare wood. So my first step was to remove the oxide.
You can remove this stuff (usually) using hydrochloric acid – or you can bead-blast it or sand-blast the stuff off. I don’t have that courage or equipment. So I scrape the stuff off with a carbide Skraper and then scrub it with a gray abrasive pad and some WD-40.
About 10 minutes of scraping and rubbing shows off some of the hardware’s welds and filing, which is better looking at the black powder, which isn’t fooling anyone that it’s “patina.”
One of the chapters I’m working on for “The Furniture of Necessity” is on hardware – not only how to use fluids (safely) to alter off-the-rack hardware, but how to enhance hardware even more by filing it. After I strip the zinc off a Home Depot hinge and add some decorative filework, it’s not 100 percent butt-ugly.
In addition to the A.J. Roubo translation of “L’Art du Menuisier,” we have been working on lots of other projects. Here’s a quick look at what the Lost Art Press extended family is doing in the final days of 2012.
1. The 6-board chest chapter from “Furniture of Necessity.” It’s complete, but I’m messing with it a bit as I worked on a chest for a customer this weekend. I’ll post it this week for a free download.
2. New LAP T-shirts. We have a new design and slogan. We’re ordering the shirts this week and they should be in the store by next week. They will be green and made in America. Details to come.
3. “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” audiobook as read by Roy Underhill. John Hoffman has finished up the editing on this project for me (thanks John!). It goes to get mastered this week. So it should be in the store before the end of the year.
4. A new book from Christian Becksvoort. Yup, we’ve been keeping this one under wraps. Chris revised one of his earlier books that is now out of print. The design is complete, thanks to Linda Watts, and we are working on the final editing.
5. “By Hand and By Eye” by George Walker and Jim Tolpin. That book is edited and just about ready to go to Linda to be designed.
We’re working on a bunch of other projects that aren’t listed above, H.O. Studley, my campaign furniture book and etc. I don’t, however, have any updates on those projects this morning.
It’s an honor to be in a list of books that includes many of our woodworking heroes, including Charles Hayward, Jim Kingshott, Alan Peters and James Krenov.
