A mock-up of the two-part cover for the book with navy blue cloth on the spine over a wheat-colored tweed on the boards.
John and I have decided to make significant changes to the manufacturing specifications of the letterpress version of “Roman Workbenches.” So much so that I’ve taken the unprecedented step of deleting my post from Jan. 29 to avoid confusion.
After much research, we’ve decided to offer “Roman Workbenches” fully bound with a two-part cloth cover, sewn binding, heavy endsheets and headbands. The binding will easily meet (and likely exceed) what we offer on typical Lost Art Press Books.
The price (including domestic shipping) will be $87 – still less than the $100 we promised. The book will go on sale at noon Eastern time on Sunday, Feb. 5. There will be 500 copies available.
Why make the change to the binding? Well, once I started pricing sewing and taping the binding, it was only a little bit more money to simply complete the binding. So John and I decided to go all the way (with the book binding).
If you are like me and really really want to bind your own book, we will have some unbound book blocks and will put those up for sale once the 500 are bound. I suspect the price for the unbound book blocks will be $77 (I know, it’s not a big savings; hence, our decision).
I am sorry (and a bit embarrassed) at this change. We try not to alter manufacturing specs like this in midstream. But I know it’s the correct thing to do.
See you Sunday (I hope, or we will flush away many thousands of American dollars).
As some of you will recall, I last reported from Ecuador back in August, when I showed you the workbench that I had completed. Since then…nothing. What happened? Well, as it turned out, a variety of events and situations conspired to the extent that I ended up with virtually no time to do any actual woodworking. I did get started on a project, but wasn’t able to finish before we had to leave.
You will at least be happy to know that the bench found a good home in the workshop of the architect friend who earlier pointed me in the direction of wood merchants in my neighborhood.
And I did learn a few things along the way:
Lesson 1 – Colorado (aka Lyptus®, Eucalyptus grandis x urophylla) is not a hand tool-friendly wood.
Lyptus is very hard, about the same as hard maple or the very hardest of white oaks. And it has interlocked grain, which tears out readily no matter which direction you try to plane it in (even cross grain!). I eventually figured out how to plane it: with my plane set to a 60° cutting angle and taking extremely thin shavings, I was able to achieve a surface that could later be sanded smooth. But removing 1/16″ of tearout a thousandth at a time is not my idea of fun.
The wood reminds me of sapele, which is similarly hard and also has interlocked grain, although it’s more brittle and doesn’t tear out quite as much. Like sapele, it’s very difficult to get a decent finish without a considerable amount of sanding.
Lesson 2 – At some point, a baggage handler will drop your tool case very, very hard.
The damage shown here occurred when the lever cap knob of my Veritas low-angle jack plane punched through the bottom of the tray from below. Given that when the trays are stacked together there is at most 1/2″ of play before the knob contacts the tray bottom, I don’t want to think about how far the case must have fallen in order for this amount of destruction to occur. Fortunately, it appears that all of the tools are okay.
Lesson 3 – An outdoor woodworking shop in Tumbaco may not be the best idea.
This one was completely unexpected, and it’s the fault of these guys:
Volcán Antisana (5,704 m/18,714 ft) on a rare sunny afternoon; one of many volcanoes visible from the vicinity of Quito, Antisana is located about 40 km/25 mi from where we lived in Tumbaco.
The soil in Ecuador is virtually all volcanic ash, in some places hundreds of feet deep. Very fine, very abrasive volcanic ash. Add to that the fact that the climate in Tumbaco is dry, and afternoons are usually windy, and you begin to see the problem. I would finish up one day and come back the next to find everything covered by a clearly visible layer of ash. Ash that wreaked havoc on my tool edges.
The ash ends up indoors, too. We had a housekeeper that came to clean every week, and still the pile-up of dust near windows and doors was impressive.
I’ll have more to write about our adventures in Ecuador (plus a couple of weeks in Peru) soon, so stay tuned. But for now, I have some pent-up woodworking to attend to.
The funny thing is that it was my mad obsession with acquiring woodworking stuff that helped me find a balanced approach to the craft. You see, I became as obsessed with acquiring woodworking books as I was with the tools. I’ve always been a voracious reader, so consuming books on woodworking and tools was natural. (And add to that the fact that I was freelancing at the time as a contributing editor for the WoodWorkers’ Book Club newsletter. That job was a five-year-long force-fed diet of woodworking writing.)
Read enough modern woodworking books, and you might just want to gouge out your eyes with a melon baller. They are all so similar and shallow and filled with idiosyncratic information. I can’t tell you how many times I read the following phrase: “This might not be the right way to do this, but it works for me.”
Something inside my head made me wonder about that “right way” the author rejected.
It just so happened that at about that same time I had a short phone conversation with Graham Blackburn, one of my woodworking heroes. I had a few of Blackburn’s books from the 1970s, and I knew he had a command of woodworking history. So I interviewed him about the origin of the word “jack” in “jack plane” for a short piece I was writing for the magazine.
We then started talking about saws.
During the conversation, Blackburn said I could find the answer to one of my questions in the book “Grimshaw on Saws.”
Huh? I replied.
I’ll never forget what he said next: “You don’t have a copy of Grimshaw, and you’re an editor at a woodworking magazine? Hmmm.”
I was ashamed. So ashamed that I went down to Cincinnati’s public library that weekend to check out Robert Grimshaw’s 1882 treatise on saws. It was sitting on the shelf next to a bunch of other old woodworking books I’d never heard of. I wondered which of those books were also “required reading” in Blackburn’s world. I checked out as many of those cloth-bound books as the library would let me. I went home. I started reading, and I haven’t stopped.
The things I learned from the old books were different than what I expected to learn. I actually expected the shop practices to be different – you know, they had different ways of cutting a mortise, a tenon and a dovetail. But really, not much has changed in the way that steel (usually) defeats wood.
While there are a wide variety of ways to perform every standard operation, the pre-Industrial craftsman didn’t seem to have secret tricks as much as he had lots of opportunities to practice and become swift.
Instead, what surprised me was the small set of tools that were prescribed for a person who wanted to become a joiner or a cabinetmaker.
Joseph Moxon, the earliest English chronicler of woodworking, describes 44 kinds of tools necessary for joinery in “Mechanick Exercises” (1678). For some of these tools, you’d need several in different sizes (such as chisels), but for many of the tools that he described, a joiner would need only one (a workbench, axe, fore plane etc.).
Randle Holme’s “Academie of Armory” (Book III, 1688) has approximately 46 different joinery tools explained in his encyclopedia. An exact number is hard to pin down because some of the tools are discussed twice(for example, mallets, smoothing planes and hatchets) and some tools seem shared with the carpentry trade.
Academy of Sanity. Randle Holme’s 1688 book outlined a small tool kit that could be used for building lots of furniture forms.
If we jump forward more than 150 years, not too much has changed. The list of tools required by the rural joiner in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” (1839) isn’t all that much different from the tool list described by Moxon and Holme. “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” gives a significant description to about 40 tools used by a young apprentice during his climb to journeyman.
As the Industrial Revolution begins to crank out mass-manufactured tools, the basic list of tools recommended for basic joinery starts to expand. There are more kinds of boring bits available, new kinds of metallic planes (such as blocks, shoulders and routers), plus some new saws, including the coping saw.
By the 20th century, the basic list of tools for joiners stands at about 63, according to books by Charles Hayward, the traditionally trained dean of workshop writers. Still, when I looked at Hayward’s list it seemed rather paltry compared to what was in my shop. (See this book’s appendix for a comparison of these tool lists.)
At first, I attributed these short lists of essential tools to three things:
• Everything in the pre-Industrial age would have been more expensive because it was made by hand.
• The general level of economic prosperity was lower.
• Technological innovation had yet to produce the fantastic new tools shown in the modern catalogs.
After a year of burrowing deeper than our Kenton County moles, I’ve decided to attend a few events this year to see old friends, repay some favors and do some research during side trips. The following is a list of places where you can hurl rotten garbage at me without coming to my home.
Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event, Braxton Brewing, Covington, Ky. March 10-11, 2017
We’ll have the Lost Art Press storefront open on one of the two days (probably Saturday). And will be organizing a barbecue/beer/Hammerschlager event at Rhinegeist Brewing across the river. Details to come. If you attended last year’s event at Braxton then you know it was a hoot – probably the biggest Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event I’ve been to.
Handworks, Amana, Iowa May 19-20, 2017
Handworks is the S%^&. Period. End of story. Get there by any means possible. We will be there with books and tools. This year I promise not to die.
Dictum classes in Germany Build a Sawbench, June 12-14 Build a Mallet and a Marking Gauge, June 15-16
These are the only two classes I’m teaching in 2017. Heck they might be the only classes I teach for the next decade. I owe the good people at Dictum a huge personal favor. These two classes are my way of repaying them. If you’ve never taken a class at their Niederalteich location, I highly recommend it. Many of my favorite stories begin with the line: “We were at the gasthaus in Niederalteich when Brian….” The classes are taught in English. The eating is in German.
Lie-Nielsen Open House July 7-8
I have so many friends who attend this event that it’s difficult for me to skip it. The Open House is always a wonderful weekend of food, woodworking and axe throwing. Bring your family and they’ll enjoy it as well.
European Woodworking Shop Sept. 16-17
Again, this is one of the few events that one simply cannot miss. The Cressing Temple barns inspire woodworking awe (and regular awe). There are always lots of fun makers, tool dealers and English-types at this well-organized show. And the food! I’ll be there.
Please note that this blog entry does not mark my return to public touring and teaching. This is probably too much activity already, and next year I will burrow in deeper.
With the impending release of the standard edition of “With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture,” we have received lots of questions about the deluxe edition of this book. We don’t know many details at this moment, but here’s everything I know.
The design process for the deluxe edition of “Roubo on Furniture” will begin shortly. Designer Wesley Tanner created both the standard and deluxe editions of “Roubo on Marquetry” – and he designed the standard edition of “Roubo on Furniture.”
The deluxe “Roubo on Furniture” will look and feel the same as the deluxe “Roubo on Marquetry.” Same paper, same binding, same slipcase. We likely will use the same printing press and bindery. So it will be as stunning as the deluxe “Roubo on Marquetry,” which was named one of the 50 “Books of the Year” in 2013 by the Design Observer.
Here’s what’s going to be different: the thickness of the book (it’s almost twice as long as “Roubo on Marquetry”) and the way we will handle pre-publication orders.
Once we get a feel for how many pages the deluxe edition will be, we will be able to set a price – I’m going to guess that it’s going to be be about $475. Then we will open up pre-publication ordering for both domestic and international customers. Everyone who orders a book will get a book (and will get their name listed in the book as a “subscriber.”) After taking pre-publication orders for a month or so, we will close down ordering and go to press. We might print a few dozen extras for ourselves and family, but we are not going to stock this book in our online store after the pre-ordering period.
Then, when the book is done, we’ll mail them out in a custom cardboard (repeat: cardboard) box to protect the book during shipment.
The books will not be numbered or autographed. In 2013 we had many people request that we have all the authors sign the marquetry book. We simply cannot do that. We are not in the business of creating collectibles. Apologies.
So now you know everything I know. We’ll get to work on the deluxe edition and update you when we have more information.
With the impending release of the standard edition of “