My chest has become dirty, dinged and faded from daily use. I love it.
You weren’t supposed to build the tool chest in “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” It’s a metaphor. A conceit. A Trojan something or another.
I did my homework before I built it. I still have all that research piled into folders upstairs. But when I started writing the book, the physical chest became less important than the ideas it represents.
So it’s not perfect. It’s a prototype. When I build a chest today for customers or a class, here’s what I do differently.
Install the lower skirt before attaching the bottom boards. This allows me to clamp the living pee out of the skirt where it meets the carcase. The result: Fewer gaps between the carcase and the lower skirt. If I still have a sliver of a gap, I’ll miter a 3/16” bead around the skirt.
Here’s the existing 45° profile. It looks fine and is plenty strong. But I prefer the look of a steeper slope.
Change the profile on the skirts. I use a 45° bevel, which is fine. After messing about, I prefer a bevel that is 1” high and leaves a 1/8” flat at the top. (The exact angle depends on the the thickness of your stock. Don’t worry about the exact angle.)
Here’s where the chain liberated itself from the carcase. Good riddance.
Nix the chain for the lid stay. More on that in an upcoming article with Brian Clites, our moderator.
Here you can see the tool rack and the lower runners that stop at the sawtill.
Reconfigure the sawtill and runners. OK, this is complicated to explain and I’ll be brief. My chest had a hinged panel between the sawtill and the lower tray. It acted as a door to the lower section of the chest and as a stop for the lower tray. In traditional chests, the panel was a shelf to put the stuff you needed every day in the shop – your apron, hat etc. In use, I hated it. It really got in the way of my work. So I removed it. And that is why the runners for the lower tray stop at the sawtill. Don’t imitate me. Make the runners for all the trays run the full depth of the chest.
I still have the panel – it’s a nice piece of work. This morning I put it in place so you could see how it works. It looks nice but makes working out of the chest more difficult.
Add tool racks. I like a tool rack pierced with 1/2” holes on 1-1/8” centers. My favorite one is on the front wall of the chest.
I’ve had about 100 people suggest other changes, from making the dust seal surround the lid on four sides and hinging the seal (not a bad idea), to adding a tissue dispenser (a bad idea). Feel free to discuss these amongst yourselves in our fetal forum.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. When I return from England next month, one of the things on my list is to update the complete list of tools in my chest and post it here. And to get the “Anarchist Tool Chest” T-shirt live in our store. So stay tuned.
We’re making progress on the Lost Art Press forum.
Chris found us a platform, called Muut. It is cutting-edge and looks pretty slick. Muut also has some invisible features that appealed to us, such as its infinite archiving of posts (nothing can be edited or deleted, except by me, after you post it), and its broader safeguards towards user integrity.
John worked like a bear last week to get the platform fully embedded into the site. Thanks to his efforts, you will be able to post to the forum simply by logging in with your existing LAP store credentials. The forum is already embedded in the product page for each book. And eventually links to the most relevant discussions will also be integrated into our blog posts.
We have tentatively scheduled the forum’s full beta release for Monday, Sept. 14. On that date, Chris, John and I will respond real-time to all questions LAP. Kind of like a Reddit-style AMA discussion within the new forum itself. More details to come.
Why do you still have to wait a few more weeks? Well, even though everything has gone smoothly so far, I am not quite ready to jump full-in. There are some technical kinks I’m still working out, some more CSS to embed, and some things I don’t like about Muut that their coders are helping me with. (For example, I’m obsessively organized, but Muut is designed to be automatically indexed and automatically categorized – my worst nightmare!)
I also anticipate some unforeseen glitches. In other words, I know there are knots hidden underneath the face grain. Will you help start planing it for me? You can use a limited preview of the forum here. For the preview, I have disabled all of the categories and sub-categories save the channels on “Workbenches” and “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” If you check it out now you can get in early on the conversations. Send me your impressions.
Finally, use of the forum (and of the LAP site more broadly) will henceforth be governed by a set of rules. (Cue the tomato-throwing.) Most of you already follow these previously unspoken guidelines. But the demise of past woodworking forums spurred us to put these in print. And I will enforce them vigorously. (I already deleted three posts on the blog in the past day – did you notice, you otherwise-nice people making jokes about the blind and deaf? Oh, and I deleted one of Chris’s comments, too. Sorry Chris – rules are rules.)
The following is our draft of the new Terms of Service for participating in the Lost Art Press community:
Welcome to the digital home of Lost Art Press (LAP). We strive to treat you as a guest in our house. We ask that you behave accordingly. Therefore, your use of the LAP web site is contingent upon the following Terms of Service:
Use of the forum is governed solely by the owners of LAP. The forum moderator(s) will delete any post that violates the following rules. Repeat violations will result in the deletion and deactivation of your LAP account.
This is a woodworking forum. Only woodworking will be discussed.
No political, religious or social commentary of any sort. This restriction includes users’ quotations, signature lines and avatars. If it’s not woodworking, don’t post it.
No sexist, racist or hateful language.
No bullying, harassment or intimidation. LAP welcomes woodworkers of all skill levels. If you don’t have anything helpful to say, don’t say anything.
No solicitation, advertising, self-promotion or spamming. Links to external websites are permitted only if they are directly relevant to a discussion.
No profanity.
No anonymous posts. To ensure integrity, users must login to their Lost Art Press account in order to post to the forum. If you do not already have a LAP account, you can create one here for free. We will not share your name or personal information with any third parties. Fake or duplicate LAP accounts will be deleted.
When in doubt, see Rule No. 1.
– Brian Clites, your forum moderator and author of TheWoodProf.com
Chris might have promised not to get too far into the “This Old House” mode as he works on the cool old building he plans to turn into the Lost Art Press Bat Cave. I however made no such promise, and my neighbor recently gave me a couple of pallets of old roof tiles as a contribution to renovating my own Bat Cave/barn (with real bats! but no belfry, which doesn’t seem fair or appropriate, somehow).
The tiles are hung on laths nailed across the rafters. The ergot, or the little hook, to the left, is used to hold the tile on the laths. In this one, you could probably get a good fingerprint or two of the fingers of the child or woman that formed it.
When you receive a few thousand old roof tiles as a gift, on the condition that you do not leave the pallets full of tiles decorating your neighbor’s yard for any length of time, you get out the wheelbarrow and decorously start to move them to adorn your own.
The tiles were made from clay deposits down the hill along the river Cher that runs through my village. The clay was pressed into molds and then left in the sun to dry enough to be fired, and during that time various kinds of marks made their way into the fresh clay. So to relieve the tedium of sorting and moving the tiles, it is fun, as part of making sure they are still sound and fit to be re-used, to inspect what was the sunny-side-up, which goes down when they are installed on the roof.
You get dog prints, cat prints, small birds, big birds, various other types of beasts, even children. There was the one with the number 1786 written on the back, which either means it was the 1786th tile of that production run, or that it was made in 1786. I figure that 220 years is pretty good for a hunk of terra-cotta exposed to the weather in all seasons, and if the tiles are sound, they will last for plenty more.
But the other day, I found a real puzzler, which lead me into a Felibien-esque journey back in time.
“Sante lu Douice” it read as I turned it over.
“Santé” means healthy or in good equilibrium. But there is also the trace of an “i,” after the “a,” which would make it “Sainté” – sainted or blessed.
“Douice” does not exist, as such, in French, but a few minutes rummaging around turned up a couple of books from the 17th century where I saw it as an alternate spelling of “douce,” or possibly “doulce,” meaning pleasant, agreeable, moderate, sweet.
“Lu” is a puzzler, the past tense of “lire” (to read), which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in context. But there is the word “lieu,” which means place, which makes perfect sense.
“Healthy pleasant place” or “Blessed pleasant place” would be exactly what one might expect from somebody wanting to bless the house upon which they were installing a new roof.
Of course it could also mean “Falling off the roof is bad for your health.”
Asking around online and in the neighborhood, the inscription mostly got a Gallic shrug. The writing is obviously a benediction, but as to the specifics, the thoughts ranged from “Who knows?” to an old non-standard spelling, or in the local patois?
There are perhaps 50 more or less regional languages in France, the patois, and they could vary even from village to village. They are based largely on the ancient north vs. south, Langue d’Oil vs. Langue d’Oc language divide in France, with Basque, Breton, Germanic, Catalan and others scattered around the edges. Some of them developed a literature and more or less complete dictionaries, but in the French heartland, they were mostly the spoken dialects, with educated people, publicly anyway, speaking and writing in French. One of the gratifying signs, as I was learning French, was the increasing frequency with which I began to understand conversation around me. One of the surprising things was how often, in more isolated and rural areas, I realized that the French people around me were not in fact speaking French.
In the 1780s the locals speaking patois as their first language would have been a large majority. So it is easy to see how a word in popular inscriptions like this could be misspelled, or a word like “lieu” could end up rendered phonetically as “lu.”
Two more, the top another benediction invoking “St. Clement pa pe”, or Pope St. Clement I. The second tile, slightly smaller than the rest and made with different clay, was apparently made “A BLERE” (in Bleré) a town a couple of miles down the river.
Graham Robb, in his book “The Discovery of France,” has a good account of the history of the patois, along with in this context a perfect anecdote.
He says that nobody knows why the divide between the Langue d’Oil and Langue d’Oc falls where it does. It does not consistently follow any natural or historic boundaries. Is it perhaps a general Roman as opposed to Burgundian influence, or something more ancient? But there is one way to tell where the line runs.
South of the line, the tiled roofs of vernacular buildings have a slope of about 30° and are covered with canal, or Roman, tiles. North of the line, the slope is much steeper, around 45°, and the roofs are covered with flat tiles, like these.
The old barn – late 1600s, probably, roof in split chestnut lathes at least 90 years old. Needs work.The track of a wading bird. Could be some kind of small heron, but it looks more like a moorhen.The top could be a weasel of some kind, but more probably a cat because in the the first two tracks there is no sign of a weasel’s claws, but in the third, the very fine and sharp retractable claws of a cat coming out for the pounce. In the second a dog is turning around and overprinting in the wet clay, perhaps wondering “Why is that guy yelling at me again?”
— Brian Anderson. Anderson is translating Andre Felibien’s “Des Principes de l’Architecture, de la Sculpture, de la Peinture, et des Autres Arts qui en Dépendent.”
“He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.”
— “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” by Susanna Clarke
Warning: This is one of those blog entries that will make some of you wonder why you bother visiting here. You might just want to skip this entry and go play with your safety gear, micrometers and “Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition.”
As I’m waiting for the epoxy to harden on the half-scale model of a chair shown above, I’ve poured myself a stiff drink and am raising a toast to Jonathan Strange.
Strange is a magician in my favorite contemporary novel: “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” by Susanna Clarke. I’ve been quite obsessed with this book since it came out in 2004. It is, and I do not say this lightly, the most finely crafted piece of fiction I’ve read as an adult. Every footnote is pure genius. And it reeks of a work that has been finely combed over like the garden at Versailles.
(Oh, and If I ever get a tattoo, it will be the silhouette of the raven in the book. Also: I am just as likely to get a tattoo as I am to start vaping my own ear wax.)
So Strange, the radical magician in the book, figures out that to do really interesting magic, one needs to be somewhat mad. The insane kind of mad; not the Lumberjocks sort of mad. As Strange is quite sane at first, he gins up all sorts of ways to induce madness. In the end, it involves cats (naturally) and drinking something awful.
And that describes my ideal writing and design process.
“I’m not going to a party; I’m a writer.” That’s what I tell the nice people at the liquor store when I arrive at the register with two boxes of wine and four six packs of potent beer. The wine is for my wife (also a writer); the beer is for me.
Lucy and I very rarely get drunk. The last time I got drunk was by accident (Note to self: Never drink casually with the Irish.) But Lucy and I do have a drink with dinner and then we have a drink after dinner. Then we write and talk and write.
I know that some odd souls are fantastic writers and designers when they are dead sober. I am not. I find that a drink helps. As does fatigue, stress, incredibly loud music and stupid external constraints.
Why? Who cares why. Feel free to make up a theory. I’d rather just use these tools that have worked (since 1986) to write and design stuff at 5 p.m. that seems out of my league at 11 a.m. And with these tools I don’t have to bifurcate my private parts (thank you, Mayan civilization) or vape my boogers.
So I say to the Stone Saison in my glass tonight: Bring on the madness.
Both Kaare Klint, the father of Danish Modern furniture, and Thomas Jefferson, the father of awesomeness, had a similar idea about storing books.
Put them in individual boxes that suit their sizes. Stack the boxes on top of one another.
This was how Jefferson’s entire library (which later became the Library of Congress) was arranged. In fact, the books were transported from Monticello to Washington, D.C., by merely nailing a board on front of each unit and putting it in a carriage.
In Klint’s 1924 design for I.C.T. Levinsen, he stacked up boxes and then clad them in another carcase with tapered sides. The lower units were 19-1/2” tall and they became smaller with each unit above – 17”-7/32”, 15”-1/4”, 13-1/2” and 12” at the top.
As someone who built a recreation of the Monticello bookcases, I can tell you this: It makes for a fantastic bookcase that consumes a lot of material. I can only imagine adding the tapered sides would complicate construction and add material.
Still, they are cool.
— Christopher Schwarz
Images of Klint’s work are from Gorm Harkaer’s excellent monograph on Kaare Klint.
