I wear a shop apron almost every day, and so I’ve always wondered about “apron hooks,” which are shown in R.A. Salaman’s “Dictionary of Woodworking Tools.”
Here’s his entry on aprons that mentions these devices:
Carpenters and other woodworkers traditionally wear a white twill or canvas apron with a large pocket in front. It is fastened around the waist with long tapes tied in front, or with hooks that have decorative ends.
Yup. You read that right: Fancy stuff that is hooked above your buttocks. And yes, one of the hooks shown is a four-leaf clover, indicating you have a lucky butt.
I don’t think I want to know what the heart-shaped hook means.
But I am intrigued by the hooks because some days I can’t tie a bow behind my back.
After writing about the parallel-tip screwdrivers from Grace USA and Lee Valley, I received lots of suggestions about other makers I should check out.
However, in my wanderings through the netherworlds of screwing and unscrewing, I stumbled upon this English-made driver on my own. After getting my hands on it, I can say it’s like the makers were reading my mind. It’s called the Elemen’tary No. 1 Screwdriver, and here is why it makes most screwdrivers look as intoxicating as a Shirley Temple.
1. It has a wooden handle that is turned in the shape of a vintage turnscrew. So it won’t roll off your bench thanks to the flats. And it fits my hand like a baseball glove.
2. The finish on the beech handle is oil. It’s tactile, like the finish on the Grace drivers. Not slippery like a plastic screwdriver.
3. The screwdriver chuck has an O-ring that grips your standard bits, even snapping them in place. Many of these bits have a small groove that receive the O-ring. That’s nice. However….
4. The Elemen’tary driver also has a screw chuck that locks the bits in better than any other magnet or O-ring. This small knurled knob allows you to secure your bit so it won’t pull out of the tool. If you own any four-way screwdriver, you know how this is one of their major downsides.
The Elemen’tary driver includes six bits, though it will use almost any standard bit. This driver is going on the road with me this year and will replace five screwdrivers I carry to adjust tools and drive slot-head and Phillips screws.
While the bits that come with this driver are good, I upgraded mine by substituting ground gunsmith bits from Brownell’s. More on that in a future post.
I have only one quibble with this tool. (Don’t I always have quibbles?) Like all drivers, I think this one doesn’t need to be so long. This driver could easily lose 1” or 1-1/2” and be ideal. With woodworking, we almost never say: This screwdriver is too short. Usually the lament is: This driver is too long to get inside the cabinet.
Yes, I know that there is a stubby version of this tool.
You can purchase this tool from several sources. I bought mine from Hand-Eye Supply for $35.
With the stool’s hardware mechanism working fine, this morning I made a set of three stool legs from mahogany left over from a run of Roorkhee chairs in 2012.
My design for the legs was inspired by the foot of an original 1898 Roorkhee, which is essentially a slightly flattened bead. I also added four grooves that straddle the holes through the legs and turned a gradual taper from these holes down to the ankle.
The fun part of the job was finishing the legs on the lathe. With the lathe spinning, I rubbed on some beeswax from farmer beekeeper and woodworker Will Myers (thanks Will!). Then, with the lathe still spinning, I used Roubo’s polissoir to burnish the mahogany and drive the wax into the wood’s pores. A final polish with some rough cotton cloth (an empty bag of grits) produced the final sheen.
I don’t know if it’s a non-non to use a polissoir on a spinning lathe, but it sure made short work of the finishing process.
For the seat, Ty Black is cutting out some of my “oiled latigo” leather I bought for a Roorkhee chair for a customer. That leather is from Wicket & Craig and has the shop nickname of the “sex machine leather.” It’s impossibly buttery and beautiful.
On Friday, I hope we’ll get the second prototype assembled – after I age the hardware.
— Christopher Schwarz
Oh, One More Thing…
During the last 10 years, the most common question I’m asked (aside from, “What wood should I use for my workbench?” Answer here.) is, “How do you manage to write, edit, build and teach as much as you do?”
I know that most people are paying me a compliment with the question. With others, the implication is that I don’t build all the projects I show here. Or that I sub-contract out the construction or finishing. Or that I am just really skilled in making photo-realistic images.
Here’s the deal: I went to journalism school and cut my teeth at a newspaper where we wrote 400 to 500 original pieces a year. I can write a blog entry, such as this one, in about 15 to 30 minutes without much forethought. It just comes out – like water from a well or crap from a porta-potty, depending on how you like my work.
Also important: I don’t watch TV, don’t like sports, don’t have a lot of friends and don’t have any other hobbies besides woodworking and listening to music while woodworking. Considering how much time I devote to the craft, I actually should be a lot better and a lot faster.
Let’s say, for example, that you really like the taste of armadillo meat.
You love it poached, pan-fried and in a white wine sauce. Your taste buds can tell when one had nibbled on some acorns.
But let’s also say that at the zoo, you can’t distinguish a live armadillo from a peacock.
I know, that seems crazy. But when it comes to trees, most woodworkers can’t tell the difference between red oak and white, an ash from a birch, and on and on. Most woodworkers – no lie – are lucky if they can distinguish between a tree and an ornamental tree-bush thing.
Is this important? I think so.
Red oak’s end grain.
Trees have always been this continent’s greatest natural resource. And our close relationship with trees separate us from almost every other culture on the planet. The North American civilization was built on trees. They are the backbone of our homes. Their abundance is the reason that woodworking is so popular here. They are still one of our biggest exports and one of our greatest resources.
And that is why my kids can tell the difference between a maple and an oak and a freaky osage orange (the brain tree). If you know a little about the black cherry, the sugar pine or the hardy catalpa, then working with that species is more gratifying and awe-inspiring. You’ll know when you have a piece of wood on your bench that grew quickly, or struggled in rocky soil. You’ll be able to identify when some unscrupulous lumber merchant has sold you reaction wood from the branches of a tree. You’ll see knots and other structures in a whole new light – not as a defect necessarily, but as part of the tree that you can work with or work around.
This week, we have put the finishing touches on Christian Becksvoort’s first book with Lost Art Press titled “With the Grain: A Craftsman’s Guide to Understanding Wood.” This book is the foundation for a long relationship with our raw material.
To be sure, this book is 100-percent practical. There’s no swooning over grain patterns in its 144 pages. Instead, it is an examination of the material from a furniture-maker’s perspective. And Becksvoort has three important lessons:
1. Know the trees around you and know that they can be used to build furniture.
2. Understand how wood moves and how to use the simple formulas and charts that can tell you exactly how the stock on your bench will change with the seasons.
3. How to build your projects so they allow the wood to move without splitting the wood or destroying your joinery.
All this is told in a concise, clear and direct manner – illustrated with hundreds of photos and line drawings. If you have ever wondered about the relationship between the trees in your neighborhood and the wood you use to build furniture, I think you will appreciate this book and the way it links everything together.
“With the Grain” is available for $25 with free domestic shipping (until Feb. 20) from our store.
For those of us with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge about traditional American tools and furniture, there is one name that makes us all tip our hats: Charles F. Hummel of Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library.
Hummel’s impressive career as a champion for American decorative arts – as a scholar, lecturer and author – are the shoulders that many furniture-makers, researchers and historians have stood upon for the last five decades.
You can read a brief synopsis of Hummel’s achievements here at Winterthur’s web site.
For hand-tool woodworkers, Hummel was one of the first to eschew romantic prose about craftsmanship and rely on scholarship as he documented the history of the Dominy workshop in his groundbreaking book “With Hammer in Hand.”
This book, more than any other before it, sketched a portrait of an early American hand-tool shop as a business and not as a quaint and faded painting of days gone by. Hummel pored over the ledgers of the Dominy family and had access to the entire shop (it was moved to Winterthur and is now on display) plus many Dominy pieces, which are also on display at Winterthur. (Psst, go visit Winterthur.)
So I was delighted and simultaneously terrified to see that Mr. Hummel had written a review of “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” by Jennie Alexander and Peter Follansbee for the latest edition of “American Furniture,” the annual publication of the Chipstone Foundation that is edited by Luke Beckerdite.
In his review, Hummel praised “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” throughout the long-form review: “To this reviewer, Alexander and Follansbee’s collaboration results in one of the best ‘how-to-do-it’ books of the last and present century.”
Hummel goes on to state that the book is ideal for woodworkers and that: “The authors also do a great service to collectors of furniture, historians of material culture and of technology, and furniture scholars…. Their book deserves to be on the shelves of everyone interested in nonmachine-made woodwork.”
I could not agree more. “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” is a true labor of love that required decades of work, the construction of innumerable joint stools and trips all over the world to complete. We were honored to publish this book and are gratified by Mr Hummel’s review.
The first edition of “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” is available in our store and from the other fine retailers who stock our books.
For those of us with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge about traditional American tools and furniture, there is one name that makes us all tip our hats: Charles F. Hummel of Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library.