Barely in time for Christmas, we have a batch of our Special Edition Engraved Lump Hammers in the store and ready to ship. This will likely be the last batch before the end of the year.
The engraving was designed by Jenny Bower and translated into really fluid toolpaths by machinist Craig Jackson – a real group effort. The result is a pleasure to hold and use.
— Christopher Schwarz
One aspect of woodworking that is difficult to explain to non-woodworkers are the physical and mental effects the tools have on us.
Sometimes I wonder if I should bring my Lie-Nielsen No. 3 in bronze to the doctor’s office with me. I can promise you that my blood pressure and pulse are lower when my right hand is gently curved around its tote.
When we set out to design our large Center Square in brass, I knew exactly how it should function. But we were also chasing something else that is much more difficult to achieve – an almost totemistic way that the tool looks and feels in your hand.
The size and heft of the tool were carefully considered to make it something that feels at home in your hands. Overall it’s 5-1/2” long and 2-3/8” wide, so it sits nicely in most palms. The Center Square is machined from solid brass and weighs a pleasant 5.6 ounces. All its edges have been eased after machining, so there are no sharp and unpleasant corners.
But the real stunning part of this tool is the machine-engraved pattern on its blade. I wanted woodworkers who might not be able to afford an engraved tool to be able to own something that is (almost) as perfect and beautiful.
So I reached out to Jenny Bower, an engraver and maker in Michigan, to see if she would lend her hands and eyes to this project. You might remember her from our small run of engraved lump hammers. There’s no way we could ask Jenny to engrave hundreds of these Center Squares. They would be too expensive and it might burn her out.
But I was willing to bet that our machinist, Craig Jackson, would be willing to try to translate Jenny’s designs into something that one of his mills could engrave. Jenny drew up about a dozen designs for us. Then Craig selected the one best suited for his mill. It took many hours of work, but Craig managed to translate Jenny’s fluid and floral lines into something his machines could cut.
The result is not something intended to fool an engraver. The lines are clearly incised by a machine. But they also retain the fluidity and life that Jenny put into them.
The Crucible Center Square is now in production and the first big batch is in our store. These tools are made in Kentucky with a little help from Michigan thrown in. Right now the price of metals such as brass is volatile. The price of this Center Square is $120 (domestic shipping is free). That might change as the price of brass fluctuates.
All thanks to Jenny and Craig for making a tool that exceeded my high expectations for it.
— Christopher Schwarz
The Crucible Cross-Peen Hammer is in production, and the first tools will go up for sale in a week or two. This has been a year-long project that required a lot of programming, plus finding a new handle supplier. The result? Craig Jackson, our machinist at Machine Time, said about the finished hammer “I’m happy for once!”
Here are the details on the hammer, which has the in-house nickname “Peeny Weeny.”
The hammer head is milled from a solid block of hardened steel. Weighing 4.5 ounces, the head is 4” long overall with a 5/8”-diameter striking face. The cross peen at the opposite end has a striking surface measuring 1/8” x 1/2”.
The handle, made for us by Hoffman Blacksmithing, is hickory and is 11” long overall. The neck of the handle is a scant 3/8” x 1/2”, which was a challenge to cut without chattering. The handles are all sanded and hand-finished with oil. The wedges are walnut.
Overall, the hammer weighs 5 ounces, and is an ideal weight and size for small workshop tasks. In addition to sinking small brads and pins, the cross peen is ideal for starting headless nails without mashing your fingers.
The head and the peen are also ideal for adjusting handplanes. For my entire career, I have used one of these hammers to tap my irons laterally to get the iron centered in the plane’s mouth. I also use the cross peen with side-escapement planes, knocking the iron in place against the blind side of the plane’s escapement.
Antique versions of this tool can be hard to find in the United States, especially with a decent handle. Modern imported versions are – sorry to say – not a pleasure to use.
We don’t have a retail price yet. It likely will be about the same price as our standard lump hammer. Though there is a lot less steel, the machine time for this head is considerable. The handle is custom-made and is about three times the cost of the lump hammer handle.
As always, we will first fulfill all domestic orders for the hammer before we can offer it to our other retailers.
— Christopher Schwarz
If you’ve been waiting on a Crucible Dovetail Template, click the link to head on over to the store – as of 8 p.m., we have four score in stock.
And exciting (and long-awaited) news on the scraper front: They’re almost ready. Chris and I burned our hands today loading them into the back of his pickup truck…because we were so stupid as to leave the oil-bathed beauties sitting in the hot sun in the back of Catbus for a few hours, after they delivered from C.T.S. Waterjet. Oops. Tomorrow morning, I’m driving the scrapers down to Nicholasville, where Craig Jackson and the crew at Machine Time will machine and polish the edges, and engrave them with the Crucible logo. (Note: You can find out more about Craig in Sunday’s post.) So we hope to hve those back in stock soon!
Plus I got an update today from the foundry, where a run of holdfasts was poured the first week of June. The grinding is almost done, and those should be shipping next week.
Finally, we got notification this morning that our (long-awaited) hardcover edition of Joseph Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises” was in line at the printing plant’s shrink-wrap machine – here’s hoping it got on the truck later in the day, as it was supposed to. It should be in the warehouse next week.
– Fitz
The following is the preface of “Campaign Furniture,” by Christopher Schwarz.
For almost 200 years, simple and sturdy pieces of campaign furniture were used by people all over the globe, yet this remarkable furniture style is now almost unknown to most woodworkers and furniture designers.
“Campaign Furniture” seeks to restore this style to its proper place by introducing woodworkers to the simple lines, robust joinery and ingenious hardware that characterize campaign pieces. With more than 400 photos and drawings to explain the foundations of the style, the book provides plans for nine pieces of classic campaign furniture, from the classic stackable chests of drawers to folding Roorkee chairs and collapsible bookcases.
Like a dormant case of malaria, my fevered love for campaign furniture began many years ago without my knowledge – probably during some hot Connecticut summer.
My maternal grandparents’ home (and ours) was full of campaign furniture. When you drank tea with grandmother West, it was on a folding coaching table my grandfather had built. My grandfather, an enthusiastic woodworker, had brought back campaign brasses from his trips to Asia, some of which I still own. So his pieces definitely had an Anglo-Indian campaign feel to them. And when you visited the West’s house for the summer, you put your clothes in a campaign chest.
My father and mother were fond of the furniture as well. And when my dad built pieces for our home they were at times festooned with brass corner guards, brackets and flush-mount pulls.
As a child, I didn’t think much of the provenance of all this furniture. In fact, I assumed it was Chinese or Japanese furniture because my grandparent’s house was also awash in tansu, Chinese chests and ink paintings of landscapes and animals.
Eventually I wised up and sorted out the furniture record of all our households. The campaign style became a favorite of mine, and I wanted to build pieces of it for the magazine I worked for at the time, Popular Woodworking.
My fellow editors, however, were inoculated against the bug. There was almost nothing written about the style of furniture. And whenever we surveyed our readership, subscribers told us that there were three furniture styles they preferred: country (anything with a duck or pineapple on it), Shaker and Arts & Crafts. “Campaign furniture” was somewhere down the list near “narwhal nose guards” in popularity.
I persisted. I was rejected again. And after I stepped down as editor in 2011, I asked them one last time to publish two articles – one on campaign chests and a second on Roorkee chairs. After some wrangling and veiled threats, they said OK.
That was the start of my obsession with researching and building campaign furniture. Since 2010, I have been neck-deep in researching the style of furniture that I cannot remember living without. During the last 200 years, there has been surprisingly little written about campaign furniture, which also goes by the name of “barracks furniture,” “camp furniture” or sometimes “patent furniture.” There’s an excellent book by Nicholas A. Brawer that is the single reference work for collectors and dealers, but it is out of print. Plus there are some magazine articles.
Most of the knowledge out there on campaign furniture is in the hands of auctioneers, antique dealers and restorers. So my research began with their sales records, and that led me to the catalogs of the British furniture makers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Plus I dug up several helpful 19th-century books that sought to prepare a British citizen for a long trip abroad.
The real surprise from my initial research was that these pieces of beautiful “military” furniture weren’t just for the military. With the incredible expansion of the British Empire in the 19th century, there was an urgent need for a bureaucracy to manage the Empire’s colonies. (Brawer writes in his book that by 1897 the British Empire comprised one-quarter of the world’s land surface.)
So these campaign chests, folding tables, collapsible chairs and writing desks were in use by bureaucrats, writers, doctors, merchants – plus their families – all over the globe.
Even more interesting: The knockdown aspect of the furniture made it popular with city dwellers who were crammed into tiny city flats – it allowed them to convert a parlor to a dining room to a bedroom. And if you left England on a ship to colonize an island, such as New Zealand, this type of furniture filled your stateroom during the journey and your home when you arrived.
Oh, and if you were a student who left home to go to school, you might tote along some of these items, such as a folding bookcase and a writing slope.
In fact, the romantic idea that all of these pieces of campaign furniture were portaged on the backs of elephants through the jungle is mostly off the mark. In truth, most of these pieces of furniture were the workaday backbone of furniture for people who needed stuff that that was rugged, simple and a bit stylish.
And that idea – rugged, simple and stylish furniture – is what kept me coming back to the belief that campaign furniture is a sorely underappreciated furniture form.
As a woodworker, I love the first-class joinery: dovetails plus mortise-andtenon joints. The simple and rectilinear lines are easy for beginners to make and are as familiar as Shaker or Arts & Crafts items. If you’re not a woodworker, I hope you can appreciate the simple forms and clean lines that look good in almost any room, whether you fill your rooms with 18th-century stuff or Bauhaus. Campaign furniture fits in everywhere, across the globe and in every time period.
I think that’s true in part because it was truly an international furniture style. The roots of the style might indeed be related to tansu, as some have suggested, or in Chinese traveling forms, as others contend. But what is certain is that when Asian craftsmen saw these British forms they reinterpreted them for their customers. When their customers took these pieces back to England, the cabinetmakers there were influenced by the changes made by their far-flung brothers. And so forth and so on.
When I finally made that last connection to that circle, I didn’t feel so stupid about assuming that my grandparents’ campaign furniture was from Asia.
It is my hope that this book opens your eyes to a style of furniture that was around for about 200 years – 1740 to World War II by some reckonings – and remains sturdy and stylish (if somewhat underappreciated) today.
This book is not an academic investigation of this furniture style – I will leave that desperately needed task to more capable researchers. Instead, this book is a too-short look at the furniture style from a builder’s perspective. My interest is in the wood, the hardware, the joinery and the different forms themselves.
I think that if you put your hand to building these pieces to the high standards of the 18th and 19th centuries, you will become fascinated – might I say “infected” – by their cleverness and soundness of construction.
Campaign furniture was meant to endure a mobile existence and do it with a bit of grace. To be sure, we are a more mobile society now than we were 200 years ago and sorely need furniture that is easy to move. And if you have bought any furniture in the last 50 years, you also know that most factory furniture is doomed to self-destruct within a few years.
We need campaign furniture more than ever before. Fill your house with it, and the ideals it embodies – sturdiness, simplicity and beauty – might just seep into the unconscious minds of your children or grandchildren as it did for me.
