Our first “Question Time” livestream is at 11 a.m. (Eastern) Saturday. We’ll broadcast here from the shop and answer the questions you sent in beforehand.
Megan Fitzpatrick estimates we received 125 questions. Yikes.
She’s been answering directly the ones that are narrowly focused. And if we don’t get to your question during the live session, we’ll try to address it on the blog in the coming weeks.
If you aren’t able to watch us live, we’ll post the Q&A session along with the questions (and timecodes) so you can sort the wheat from the chaff.
You will be able to watch the livestream here. Above is a window where it also will be broadcasting. And we’ll post another portal on the blog on Saturday morning.
Why are we doing this? We like to experiment with new technology to help expand the woodworking community. For example, we experimented with Instagram and now reach 114,000 people, many of them beginners. That’s a success, and so we put effort into it every week. Other experiments, such as a forum, didn’t take off and so we snuffed them out.
My hope is that we will do a livestream every month. Some might be bench demonstrations, some will be Q&A, and I hope that some of them will be interviews with our authors. If we do a good job and attract an audience, we’ll put more effort and time into it.
There won’t be ads or sponsors. We won’t be selling you a multi-level awl program. No animals will be harmed, though we hope Bean the three-legged shop cat will bless us with a cameo.
This is a post about the cover of the forthcoming book, “Guerrilla Chairmaking.” Though there is no release date for the book yet, the cover is done. Rudy Everts has written a blog entry on how he made a relief carving for the cover of the book. And no, it’s not a gorilla hammering in a chair leg “à la John Brown” with a cigarette hanging from his mouth.
When Chris asked me if I could make a relief carving for the cover of his upcoming book, “Guerrilla Chairmaking,” I was extremely excited and a bit nervous. Having one of my carvings photographed and printed on a book cover is something I never dreamed of, and I am very honored.
After I got the measurements of the book from Chris, I ordered some linden roughly that size. I wanted to carve the relief as close as possible to its final printed size. If you enlarge a small picture of a relief carving it becomes a blurry mess. Better to carve it a little oversized and shrink it for the print to makes the details crisp.
Planning the Carving
We started by deciding what chair to use. We considered the painted version of Chris’ Darvel chairs as well as the ones with a natural oil finish.
Darvel, three-quarter view. This is the picture we picked for the cover.
The orientation of the chair was an important point to consider. The beautiful head-on chair print by Molly Brown that adorns the cover of Good Work was still fresh in my memory, and I figured a relief carving would be the most striking in three-quarter orientation. We eventually agreed to use the three-quarter Darvel in natural finish.
Carving the Chair
Relief carving a chair with an undercarriage was something I had previously avoided. The middle stretchers are carved in end grain and I was afraid they would be too fragile. Not wanting to start off with an impossible task, I decided to carve a quick sketch of the undercarriage on a piece of scrap linden scrap.
Undercarriage sketch
This little sketch came in handy during the carving process. I could see exactly how deep I had to remove the wood and what leg should go in front of which stretcher. I discovered that the end grain of the stretchers is not that fragile, as it is fully supported by the background.
Undercarriage of the carving roughly done
In retrospect I wish I had made a sketch for the seat, sticks and arm too because that was actually where the most difficult part of the carving ended up being. It’s funny how you can be intimidated by the wrong thing sometimes.
Saddling the Seat
The saddling of the seat, making the spindle deck and the edges of the seat were the hardest part of the carving to get right.
Saddling the seat.
The deepest part of the carving is only about 5mm (3/16” deep) so there is not a lot of playroom for errors.
I carved the sticks with a V-tool initially, but I was unhappy with them. I then used a wide chisel for the short sticks and a 60mm (2-3/8″) wide plane blade to make them perfectly straight.
Making the sticks straight
I used horizontal raking light in a pitch-black room to catch any errors. Note how shallow the carving is.
Once the seat was saddled and the sticks were nice and straight, the crest was a breeze to carve.
Crest done, carving done. Except for the back….
The Back of the Carving
I usually like it when something is present on the back of a carving. Too many times I have turned over a carving only to find nothing there. Or worse, a generic stamp, indicating it was mass-produced. I had gotten a lot of practice relief carving the chair, so why not relief carve something small on the back as well?
The back of the carving.
The Lost Art Press dividers were a beautiful thing to relief-carve. And in my opinion they really finish the carving.
— Rudy Everts. See his work and read his blog at underhatchet.com
For the tool nerds among us (that includes me) I will list the knives and gouges I used for this carving: The #5/12mm was used for all the background removal. Two Cherries straight carving knife 3363 for all the stop cuts. A #9/11mm for hollowing out the seat. Bench chisels, 22mm and 32mm, and a 60mm plane blade for making the sticks straight. A #3/06mm and #3/10mm for smoothing the background (used upside down to make the sticks round). A #2/2mm, #2/10mm and #2/4mm were essential in clearing the tiny cavities between the sticks, together with the #1/3mm and #1/5mm. Besides these main tools, I also used specialty tools in hard-to-reach areas, like a long bent straight-edge 1.5mm chisel. I used a small glass scraper to smooth the sticks.
More than a decade ago, Christopher Schwarz built the “Skansen Bench” as an “I Can Do That” project for Popular Woodworking Magazine; this link will take you to it on the PW site. Skansen, located in Stockholm on the island Djurgården, was the first open-air museum in Sweden. The bench itself is modeled after one from the Älvros Farmstead (a group of buildings from the 16th and 17th centuries that are now part of the museum); Chris saw it in the book “Making Swedish Country Furniture & Household Things” (1990, Hartley & Marks)
The Skansen Bench is a sitting bench, and for years was alongside the dining room wall in Chris and Lucy’s former house. I remember dropping my purse on it just about every visit. Upstairs here, it served as a sort of hall table for a while, then as seating.
But since 2010, he’s built quite a few more low benches specifically as workbenches, including the Saalburg bench and Herculaneum bench that are included in “Ingenious Mechanicks.” So you’d think that when he needed a low bench to demonstrate working on them for Colonial Williamsburg’s Working Wood in the 18th Century conference, he’d have one handy.
But no.
The Herculaneum bench now lives in upstate New York.
The Saalburg bench is on loan in central Ohio.
So, Chris combined workholding from both of the low benches from “Ingenious Mechanicks” on the Skansen bench. I’m betting he keeps the new-model Skansen in the shop; he’s been using it a lot to shave chair spindles while sitting (that’s what the stepped block insert is for – the one most people in the conference were asking about).
So now you know the sources behind the Swedish Roman low workbench. (If you decide to make one, do check with your home’s other occupants before summarily cutting into a seating bench and liberating it to your shop. We cannot be responsible for the consequences.)
I had a few requests for plans for the cutler’s stool I built during Colonial Williamsburg’s “Working Wood in the 18th Century” conference over the weekend.
The Sheffield stool was a common sight in the factories and workshops of the tool-making city. And while the stools are rarely identical, they are similar enough to suggest they were made to a common plan. This version is a typical one, but without the incised rings on the legs.
An undated photo from the Marples factory, Sheffield.
My version is made from a single board of 8/4 red oak and is about 20” tall when finished. Here’s the cutting list:
1 Seat 1.75” x 10.25” x 18.5” 3 Legs 1.75” diameter x 22”
I shaved the legs round with a jack plane and then cut a 1.5” diameter x 2.25” long tenon on one end of each leg. I used a hollow auger in a brace and bit. I then used a tenon saw to cut a kerf in the end of the tenon for the wedge.
Saw the seat to shape and lay out the location of the mortises on the underside of the seat. The sightlines for the front legs intersect the location of the mortise for the rear leg, as shown on the drawing. Set a sliding bevel to 18° (the resultant angle). Drill all three legs using the sliding bevel as a guide. I used a 1.5” diameter “Scotch eye” auger, with a broomstick as the bar.
Then use a jack plane or a drawknife to bevel all the corners of the seat, adding comfort. Cut some oak wedges for assembly. Mine are 1.5” wide, and 2” long. The included angle of the wedge is about 2°.
Assemble the stool with hide glue, driving the wedges into the kerfs. You can then saw the legs so the seat is level to the floor. When the glue is dry, cut the protruding tenons and wedges flush with the seat. Do any “make pretty” that is necessary for a shop stool. Add a finish if you like. I used a beeswax and organic linseed oil paste.
We have opened pre-publication ordering for “The Woodworker’s Pocket Book,” which is currently at the printer and is expected to ship in March. This important reference book is $13 and is built to withstand daily use in a hand-tool shop.
This book has been a long-time coming, and I think you’ll be thrilled with the thing.
We also have just restocked on bandanas. These are green, feature a new design from Tom Bonamici and – most importantly – come from a new maker. One Feather Press in East Nashville cuts, sews, prints and washes these bandanas all by hand in a shed. And they are printed on both sides.
‘The Woodworker’s Pocket Book,’ edited by Charles H. Hayward “The Woodworker’s Pocket Book” is small – just 4” x 6-1/2” – but it contains 112 pages of critical woodworking information for the hand-tool woodworker.
Edited by the great Charles H. Hayward and published in 1949, “The Woodworker’s Pocket Book” is a guide to everything from finishing recipes to drawing ellipses to choosing the correct screw or nail.
We own several versions of this book, as it was regularly updated and republished. After reading through all of the versions, we decided to reprint the original edition (with permission, of course). This edition is packed with drawings from Hayward and doesn’t deal much with the metric system, sharpening high-speed steel sawblades or pulley sizes for your machines. In other words, it’s for the woodworker who likes working by hand using fractions, inches and feet.
Also appealing to us is the small size of the book – it literally fits in your back pocket. We recommend keeping it in your tool chest or tool cabinet. It belongs in the shop and is more like a tool than a book.
To ensure the book’s long life, we made sure this book is designed for a shop environment. All our books’ signatures are sewn and taped for durability. We wrapped this one in high-density boards and picked a durable paper that improves on the original’s paper.
Like all our books, “The Woodworker’s Pocket Book” is printed in the United States.
You can read a complete index of the book’s contents here.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. I’m sorry there is no PDF of this book available. We were not able to acquire the electronic rights to the material.
