Recently a new crop of Tite-Mark ripoffs have entered the market. They’re half the price of the real thing, have folksy American brand names and are made in Taiwan.
The easy knee-jerk reaction is to blame the Far East for these rip-off products. But I can assure you that Chinese and Taiwanese factories are not the first ones to blame. In my years of covering the Asian tool manufacturing market I learned how these products get made.
A North American or European person seeks to rip off a product and make money by pirating someone else’s intellectual property.
They send an original tool to one of the many Far East companies that specialize in tools and ask if the object can be made for $20 or some crazy low price.
The factory says yes and makes it.
(The final step is an important one) We buy it.
If I were still a woodworking journalist, I’d buy some of these copycat products and examine the way they were made to prove my point. But these days I don’t want to give these guys even one measly sale.
So honestly, if you care about the future of domestic hand-tool manufacturing in North America, don’t support these clowns. Otherwise, Godspeed to Walmart.
During the last few months we have released a lot of material, including two books, a chore coat and the return of five T-shirt designs. We never intended all these new products to come out at once (with more in the wings).
This happened because we don’t operate like a typical publishing business that releases books timed with the seasons of the year. Instead, we release books when there is nothing more we can do to them to make them better. As a result, we have both dry spells and this current deluge of excellent material, including our latest book.
We have just sent off “Cut & Dried: A Woodworker’s Guide to Timber Technology” by Richard Jones to the printer, and it is scheduled to ship in mid to late May. This book was a massive undertaking by Richard, who sought to explain everything a serious woodworker needs to know about wood in language and terms intended for the artisan.
There are, of course, lots of excellent scientific papers and tomes available that explain wood as a construction material. Most of these resources are written for wood scientists. Others are written for project managers at large construction firms. Still others are aimed at the large cabinetshop that deals with sheet goods almost exclusively.
“Cut & Dried” is not like that. Richard has spent his entire adult life as a professional woodworker in the U.K. and the U.S., and has worked at the highest levels of craftsmanship. His goal with “Cut & Dried” was to explain an extremely complex and technical topic – wood technology – in terms that any serious woodworker could easily grasp. And he skipped the stuff for making buildings, bridges and plywood boxes.
This book is massive – 9″ x 12″, hardbound, with 336 pages on heavy coated stock. The entire book is in full color with a full-color dust jacket. As a result, this book is $65, a price that includes domestic shipping.
If you order during this pre-publication period, you will receive an instant pdf download of the book, which is searchable and (of course) portable. After the book is released, the pdf will cost $32.50.
“Cut & Dried” is intended to become a reference for any shop that deals with solid wood. It is carefully organized so you can find the answers to problems at the bench, or questions at the drafting table.
Here is the detailed Table of Contents, which makes that point better than any blog entry from me:
As always, all our books are produced entirely in the U.S., using the highest-quality materials. Our books’ signatures are sewn for longevity – we don’t offer glued-together pages spit out by a print-on-demand copier. We work with printing plants that care deeply about the survival of the printed word in this age of cheap information.
One more point: We keep our books in print as long as authors are willing to do so. Every standard book we’ve released in the last 11 years is still in print. So even if you can’t afford “Cut & Dried” today, it will be here in 18 months (unlike a traditional publisher) for you to purchase at that time.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Numerous retailers, including Lee Valley Tools and Classic Hand Tools in the U.K. have expressed interest in selling this title. So look to those retailers if you are in Canada or the U.K.
The following is a description of the break room at the military museum where I worked as a carpenter’s assistant in 1987.
Part of the farewell card I made for my colleagues when I left.
By far the best thing about the job was the break room, where about a dozen of us from different departments gathered each morning around half-past 10, then for lunch at one, and again, later on, for tea. An industrial-size kettle sat on the stove; a roster indicated who would be in charge of making tea before the others arrived. On my first day, George told me how much tea to throw in the pot and how high to pour the water when the kettle boiled. There was always a bottle of milk in the fridge and a bowl of sugar nearby.
The men would stroll in, pour themselves a cup of tea, and take their customary places. Aside from two younger fellows, most of them appeared to be in their 50s or 60s and coasting toward retirement. The break room sped them on their way like one of those moving sidewalks at the airport.
Most of them were married. Their wives packed their lunches, wrapping sandwiches in neat paper or plastic bags, tucking in a packet of crisps alongside some radishes or carrots from the garden. They’d pop in some other little treat — a couple of chocolate digestives, a small container of fruit cocktail, a slice of leftover Madeira cake from a picnic with the grandkids. It seemed clear that most of these men were well cared for and well trained. And because they were expected to behave themselves at home, they leapt at the chance to have some fun with the 27-year-old temp.–Excerpted from Making Things Work
Bulrush seat for a Voysey two heart chair, one of the builds in the book I’m writing about English Arts and Crafts furniture for Popular Woodworking, scheduled for publication in May 2018. Cathryn Peters wove the seat earlier this year, so the rush still has its beautiful fresh colors. Photo by James Davis, Ruef Design www.ruef.com
When most people stop at a fast food restaurant, they run in and out without so much as a glance at the surrounding landscape – and that’s if they get out of their car at all; a high percentage place their order in the drive-through and sit there idling until they’re at the head of the line.
Cathryn Peters is different, at least when she visits her local McDonald’s in Cook, Minnesota. Peters doesn’t go there for the burgers. Her treat’s in a marshy spot behind the parking lot: bulrush.
Peters has been weaving seats since the 1970s, when her son was an infant. Thinking that she should have something constructive to do besides caring for the baby, her mother-in-law brought over a seat frame she wanted to have woven, along with rush weaving instructions from a magazine article and a pack of paper fibre rush. (The British spelling is used in the United States to differentiate the artificial paper material from the natural cattails and bulrush).
“My mother-in-law talked me into learning how to weave this seat using the instructions in the magazine article,” Peters says. The payment for the job was a walnut drop-leaf table from her mother-in-law’s home. “I got the better end of that deal for sure,” says Peters, looking back. “The chair seat I did looked horrible! It had a big hole in the center, there were overlapping strands and the gauge of paper rush was too small for the chair frame.”
That first chair seat
In the 40-plus years since then, Peters has woven thousands of seats – some for new chairs, some for chairs undergoing repair, and some she bought for resale. She also weaves traditional baskets in a variety of materials and her signature antler baskets.
Although she has taken a few workshops in basketmaking, Peters is primarily self-taught at weaving seats. In the early years, pre-internet, she was able to get some direction from pamphlets provided by material suppliers. But most of her learning came from trial and error or from taking apart seats that were going to be rewoven to figure out the patterns.
In the mid-1980s The Caner’s Handbook by Bruce Miller and Jim Widess, The Craft of Chair Seat Weaving by George Sterns, and a few other books were published – an immense help to seat weavers across the country. Resources in print and online, many of them written by Peters herself, have proliferated since then.
Peters demonstrating her craft
A high point of Peters’s career came in 2006, when she was awarded a fellowship to study in England with basket maker and seat weaver Olivia Elton Barratt. Barratt was the President of the Basketmakers’ Association (BA) and was also installed that October as Prime Warden of Basketmakers in the Worshipful Company of Basketmakers, a guild in existence since 1569.
During her ten-day fellowship and stay with Barratt, they traveled across the country meeting members of the Basketmakers’ and Seatweavers’ Association, of which Peters has been a member since the early 1990s. Barratt also taught Peters how to weave a bulrush boater’s hat at her home studio. They drove to see the harvesting of bulrush from the River Ouse with Felicity Irons, watch the weaving process of making willow coffins (if I were going to be buried, I would definitely want one of those — how cool!) and hot-air balloon gondolas at Somerset Willows, visit the Coats basketry museum, and to the Musgrove Willows farm to learn how cultured willow is grown and how buff willow and white willow are processed.
Peters weaves seats using a variety of natural and commercially prepared materials: natural bulrush, cattails, paper fibre, cane webbing, strand cane, Danish cord, rawhide, oak, ash and hickory bark splints.
Natural hand-twisted rush seats are woven with the round stalk, stems or strands of the bulrush plant, and cattails with the flat leaves. Both plants are just right for harvest between late August and September, when they have reached maximum height and the ends of the cattail leaves have turned brown. Peters harvests the natural bulrush and cattails from her rural northern Minnesota farm and the surrounding area.
With so many years of experience, Peters can weave a seat in far less time than it would take a beginner. The 15” seat for the hand-twisted bulrush Voysey chair would typically take her from six to eight hours to complete. After a couple of years, the fresh green and gold tones of the natural rush will fade to a nice, warm honey color.
If you’re interested in learning how to weave hole-to-hole cane and over-the-rail cane seats, Peters will be teaching a class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking on the weekend of Sept. 16 and 17, 2017.
For the most part, facsimile editions of historical books don’t do much for me. The printing is muddy. The paper is a measly notch above groundwood (aka newsprint). And the binding is weak. The cover, however, always looks nice so as to trick you into buying the poor manufacturing job within.
If you’ve ever bought a facsimile of Thomas Chippendale’s famous book, then you know what I’m talking about. Some companies do a good job with facsimiles; most do not.
So when we decided to reprint the “Stanley Catalogue No. 34,” we wanted to reproduce the look and feel of the original and make some manufacturing improvements, such as a sewn binding, to ensure our version could outlast floods, dogs and babies.
Our first shipment of “Stanley Catalogue No. 34” arrived smack dab in the middle of Woodworking in America, and I haven’t had much time to look at it. (I had one in the car that I was examining at stoplights; that’s how nuts it has been here.)
So I’m happy to report that this book has exceeded every expectation I had for it. The prepress people managed to make plates that mimicked the original’s crisp drawings and text. The black are black. The screens are real screens – not some moire mess.
Our warehouse is getting an assembly line together during the next week to ship out all the pre-publication orders. So if you placed an order for one, it will be on its way soon.
“Stanley Catalogue No. 34” is $25, which includes shipping in the United States and Canada. Many of our retailers have decided to carry the book, including Lee Valley Tools, Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, Henry Eckert in Australia, Tools for Working Wood in Brooklyn and Classic Hand Tools in the UK. Check out our international ordering page for links.
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So when we decided to reprint the “