Lost Art Press

The General Lack of Sophistication

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“There is a wonderful similarity between the traditional work of Korea and Japan and much of the early Cotswold School. The directness and honesty of construction and approach, with nothing contrived; the general lack of sophistication; the sheer joy and spontaneity that comes through into the finished work itself, which I believe is a direct result of contact with the materials at all stages with hand tools and hand skills. I now know what Edward Barnsley feared, and with some justification.”

— Alan Peters on the 1955 electrification of the Barnsley workshop. From “Cabinetmaking: The Professional Approach” (Linden)

Win My Souped-up &%$#%^&* Handplane — a Haiku contest

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When I first dove into handwork, I could barely afford diapers, wipes and formula – never mind a nice Bed Rock or infill handplane (this was before we had premium bench planes).

So I bought all my planes at antique markets and fixed them up using techniques I had to invent for myself – many of them too silly to even mention here.

The point? I had to fix up (and mess up) a lot of planes before I could get my tools to plane anything and everything I put under them. I wasted a crapload of time doing stuff the wrong way. Eventually, however, I perfected my methods after I talked to machinists, fellow woodworkers and abrasive manufacturers to figure out how to do it correctly.

So I know how to tune old planes, not to mention the unmentionable junk from Groz, Anant et al. And earlier this year I put it all down in a DVD called “Super-tune a Handplane” that was produced by Popular Woodworking Magazine.

In this DVD I take an off-the-rack old Stanley plane and tune it to the highest level possible using home-center materials and basic skills. You don’t need to learn to scrape a sole like a machinist. You don’t need special dyes or tools – just stuff you can find at any hardware store.

In the DVD, I cover the following topics:

• How to purchase a vintage plane, including how to identify a solid candidate for restoration using a simple flow chart.

• How to disassemble, clean and de-rust all the parts using completely harmless materials you can find in the canning section of your supermarket.

• How to flatten all the critical surfaces, including the sole, the frog, the back of the iron and the sidewalls of the plane. You’ll need only some belt-sander paper, a floor tile and a block of wood to get results.

• How to decide if you need to upgrade to an aftermarket iron and chipbreaker.

• How to reassemble the plane, lubricate the key components and tune up the tool to take a fine shaving.

• Plus a lot of information on troubleshooting a tool that won’t take a good shaving – information you don’t see very often out there.

• And tricks and tips on planing boards that allow the tool to really do its job.

The plane I tuned for the DVD is a Stanley Type 11, which was made during the early years of the 20th century. This particular tool had good bones but needed a full restoration. At the end of the video, I can easily plane a row mahogany board with crazy interlocked and reversing grain — without tearout.

Tonight I took that same plane downstairs to my shop and put it back to work. It is indeed a super worker. And it took only a few hours of my time to bring it up to this level.

To demonstrate my confidence in the tool, I’m going to give it away to one of our readers in a little haiku contest. To win the plane, all you have to do is write the best woodworking haiku ever and post it in the comments section of this entry. Be sure to include your e-mail and real name – we cannot send you your plane if we cannot contact you. Deadline for entries is noon EST, Nov. 22, 2012.

Note that you will receive the plane with the tool’s original iron and chipbreaker. I use my Veritas breaker and iron (shown in the photo above) in my No. 5, which I also tuned to this level, by the way.

Oh, and if you want the DVD, it is being sold by Popular Woodworking Magazine at its ShopWoodworking.com site. You can pre-order the DVD for $24.99. Lost Art Press will not be selling the DVD, so ShopWoodworking is the best place to get it.

And one more detail, if you order through this link, I’ll get credit for the sale. No, I’m not an affiliate of the ShopWoodworking site or any other site. I don’t believe in affiliate logrolling. So I won’t get a percentage of the sale. But using this link will encourage them to do more DVDs like this one. Just saying.

In any case, fire up your haiku gene and win this plane. I’ll pay the shipping and feature the best haikus next weekend.

— Christopher Schwarz

A Visit to Grandpa’s Workshop

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“Look, it’s Jean-le-Vert!”

Grandpa’s Workshop is real, and we visited it last weekend in Normandy.

My wife and I and two girls spent a long weekend in Normandy. It is a beautiful region, known for its timber-framed longhouses with reed roofs, D-Day, the unforgiving sea, seafood, hard cider, calvados, and crepes and gallets (paper thin pancakes in wheat or buckwheat flour with sweet or savory sauces spread on them). We touched on all those things, but for me, it was a must to meet Maurice Pommier, the author and illustrator of “Grandpa’s Workshop,” who lives there.

He and his wife, Francine, live in a charming old farmhouse with a small yard and his shop in a slate-roofed old brick-and-stone outbuilding across the garden.

Coming into his warm kitchen out of the misty Norman rain, I was still wiping the fog off my glasses when Maia started jumping up and down and pointed out Maurice’s carving of Jean-le-Vert. I guess I should have expected it, but it was all there. The girls spent the afternoon pointing out things they’d seen in “Grandpa’s Workshop.” When Maurice needed an image for the book, all he had to do was walk into the next room. Or maybe, he had them already in his head, and the book flowed out of his pen as it took form from his chisels and gouges, his planes and saws. A formidable woodworker and carver, I was tempted to ask to take some photos, but figured, why bother? He had already gone to the trouble of drawing them all better than one could show in a photo.


“There’s the angel, but his wing is not broken.”

An armoire, identical in style down to the wonderful carvings in oak, to the cupboard in “Grandpa’s Workshop” was built by Pommier for his wife soon after they were married.

Maurice in his other workshop.

So we spent a beautiful afternoon eating roast chicken and talking and rummaging through his extensive collection of books on woodworking, house carpentry and the sea. Then, after a last glass of wine, went out to his shop.

Maurice has an amazing collection of antique and handmade tools, axes, adzes, planes, chisels, you name it. They are all users, sharpened and ready to go. Tool geek’s paradise. My wife ventured out through the rain after an hour or so, listened for a moment to Maurice and I discussing the forge marks on a very old German broad axe, said something like “OK, I understand,” and headed back into the house.

Toward the end of the day, he pulled out an old Disston saw, its teeth gleaming in the light from a lamp over the workbench. Sure enough, there was an anchor carved on the tote.

“Was the anchor on the saw when you got it?” I asked.

“Ah, that, I’ll never tell,” Maurice said, laughing.

So, some woody bits from the rest of the vacation. The Bayeux Tapestry. Embroidery on linen cloth, 900 years old.

“Build me an invasion fleet,” said William the Bastard, who would soon be known as William the Conqueror. Note the Scandinavian-style broad axe.

Cutting trees and hewing riven planks.

The man, top left, is sighting down the boat to make sure all has been faired out properly. Some things don’t change.

Drilling holes with a spoon bit to take iron rivets or treenails to join the planks in the lapstrake hull. “Modern” spoon bits here have an iron tang fitting into a wooden cross piece. This one looks as though the bit fits into a turned wooden head through which a dowel is fitted to provide the torque. I think the difference was that with this style, you could put the head against your chest clad in a lanolin-lubricated lambswool sweater, or a wooden or leather pad, while turning, to provide extra force and control.

At the sea at Port-en-Bessin, some carpenters were replacing some planks and decking on a Chalutier, a local type of fishing boat, this one built in 1947. The bizarre assemblage in the foreground is a spiling batten: you tack it in place of a plank that needs replaced and then use a compass to mark the contours of the hole on the batten. Then you tack it to the new plank and reverse the process, cut and plane to fit.

A carpenter works on the wonky shape you get on a plank that has to curve in three dimensions after spiling.

Couldn’t go to Normandy without taking the girls to learn a bit about D-Day. Near dark, Gold Beach, Arromanches-les-Bains, Normandy, seen from a Nazi bunker. The day before Veterans’ Day, too.

— Brian Anderson, who translated “Grandpa’s Workshop” into English for our edition of this delightful book.

In Defense of the Spear-tip Knife

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Comparing marking knives is akin to comparing wives. It is ill-advised.

But what the heck. I use a spear-point marking knife for almost everything relating to marking out handwork. I settled on this knife after using lots of knives, both bought and borrowed.

The primary reason I like it is its shape. The thin profile gets me inside joints when transferring layout. The flat back of the tool allows me to register it against my work. And if I’m attacked in the shop, it’s good for plucking out eyeballs.

The two primary criticisms of the knife are as follows.

1. It’s not traditional. Well, neither is air conditioning, but it’s a modern invention that makes Kentucky livable. While I usually prefer traditional shapes, I have compared them to this knife and prefer the spear-point. I have room in my heart for progress.

2. The spear tip becomes rounded over in use, rendering it useless until you re-sharpen. When you see this criticism you should translate it as, “Blah, blah, blah, I don’t have much experience with spear-points.” Dude, you want a rounded tip. You should desire it. You should even create it using your stones. A rounded-over tip (see below) makes the knife track better, especially when working along the grain. And it doesn’t affect its ability to make a line. It just doesn’t.

If you want to try out a spear-point knife without plopping down a sizable payment on a Blue Spruce or Czeck Edge knife, here are two recommendations: Make one from a 1/4” spade bit. I’ve done this many times on a grinder. Cost: $1.

Buy one of the new plastic-handled marking knives from Lee Valley. These are less than $10. The Lee Valley knife is the perfect thickness and shape for handwork. Its only demerit in my book is the plastic. But you cannot beat the price and it functions just as well at the bench.

— Christopher Schwarz

See the Lost Art Press statement of ethics here if you haven’t read it already.

A New Corporate Logo?

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We are running low on T-shirts, and so it is time to come up with a new design and pithy expression for the back of the shirt.

As a tractor trailer pulled up to my driveway in the pouring rain this morning, I began to think that what we need is more than just a stupid pun to put on the back. Since our first book, “The Art of Joinery,” we’ve used Moxon’s compass as our logo. We’ve put it on hats, tattoos, shirts and books.


With the release of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” in June 2011, we started using the A-square as a symbol for the book and its ideas.


But as I birthed each 35-pound box from the soaking blue uterus of tarps spread out over 3,000 books, my mind began to wander. Perhaps our logo should be this:


The good news is that all the books made it into our sunroom warehouse this morning without any water damage. It’s our third printing of Robert Wearing’s “The Essential Woodworker.” For this printing, we changed the color of the cloth and the cover stamp. I never liked the purple or eggplant or whatever it was on the first two printings.

So we switched to a navy blue with a white stamp. Other than that, the book is unchanged from the first two printings.

We are down to our last case of the purple books, so if you have a thing for purple, get out your credit card now. We’ll be switching to blue in about a week.

— Christopher Schwarz