Art Deco inspiration. “I love Art Deco design,” writes JoJo Wood. “I have always had a great fondness for it — one of the many reasons I love visiting the States: such inspiring architecture. When Sean & I got married we made our own wedding rings out of old silver spoon handles, with Art Deco designs on them. My Art Deco spoons started with inspiration taken from our wedding rings, and have evolved from there… I take a lot of pictures of cool buildings, amongst other things, to translate into spoon designs.”
In the late 1990s, when JoJo Wood was just a few years old, her parents moved from the county of Essex, northeast of London, to Edale in the Peak District of Derbyshire, between the industrial cities of Sheffield and Manchester. A tiny village in a remote corner of north-central England, Edale attracted hikers, especially during late summer and fall, when its hills were cloaked in purple heather. Many of these visitors also turned out to be interested in another local offering: spoon carving courses taught by JoJo’s parents, Robin and Nicola. When JoJo was about 13, the family moved from a stone cottage “in the middle of nowhere – the last house on the Pennine Way” – to the village center, where they taught their craft in the village hall. “Rob would do all the axing and rough carving, and then Nic would finish them. She has a design background and eye for aesthetics.”
They often roped their daughter into helping. JoJo can’t recall exactly when she started using a knife, but she knows it was when she was “definitely very young. I had quite a short attention span,” she continues, “so I never really made objects. It was mostly swords and spears to fight my brother with.” (That’s her younger brother, Ollie, now 24.) People would come for the courses and stay in the village, carving spoons during the day, then tack on a couple of days to go walking in the hills.
Start them young. Nicola showing JoJo how to work at a shavehorse.
A quick study. JoJo at the shavehorse, working on her own.
Robin’s teaching wasn’t limited to the village hall in Edale. He taught in other parts of England, as well as internationally, and always tried to take the family with him when he traveled. That’s how JoJo came to meet famed Swedish woodcarver Wille Sundqvist, whom many consider one of the fathers of green woodworking, when she was just 8 or 9. While she appreciates the honor of having met Wille in person, she admits that as a kid, “all the talk about knives got boring.” Still, when their hosts brought out knives as gifts for her and her brother, she accepted hers graciously and says “That was my first knife of my own.”
JoJo and Ollie with Wille Sundqvist.
Fast forward a few years. “Every teen-ager goes through a stage where everything their parents do is the least cool and they want nothing to do with it.” So she explored other things. JoJo took the GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education) at 16, then went to what Brits call college – usually what’s known as technical or community college in the States – in Chesterfield to study art. “I struggled a lot with my mental health,” she says, acknowledging a challenge faced by many at the transition to adulthood. As a result, she didn’t get far before dropping out. The following year she tried A-level studies (roughly equivalent to junior and senior high in the States) but dropped out at the start of her second year due to depression and anxiety.
“I was later, in my early 20s, diagnosed as autistic,” she explains. “That probably has a lot to do with my struggling…. This undiagnosed autism made me not fit in very well. It helps me be kinder to myself about some things, because I really struggle in a lot of situations. I remind myself that it’s not my fault; it’s just the way my brain works.”
At 18 or 19 she dropped out the second time. “I spent time in my depression hole,” she continues. While JoJo was growing up, her mother attended graduate school, where she earned a doctorate designing multimedia resources for teaching craft skills. She always spoke about how great it was to go back to university as a mature student. Thanks to her mother’s perspective, JoJo understood that she could return to the world of formal education someday if she needed a qualification. “That was a different opinion,” she says, from the prevailing assumption that anyone who did not complete a degree straight after high school was something of a failure. “It’s kind of sad that that’s how everybody viewed me when I didn’t go to university.”
Weaving a chair seat at Mike Abbott’s, here with “Danish cord,” a paper-based material, in a wavy twill pattern adapted for chair seats from the world of weaving. “I spent a lot of time seat-weaving during my time at Mike’s, and adapted quite a few patterns,” writes JoJo. The chair is a Mike Abbott-designed “lath-back.”
She spent a summer assisting Mike Abbott, who teaches chairmaking in Herefordshire, southwest of Birmingham. “You’d spend a week living in the woods, cooking on wood fires, sitting around the campfire, and you’d make a chair. Assistants help with projects, make tea, and so on. There I spent more time doing woodworking and also my first big teaching, although informally.” After helping people to make chairs and understand how wood “works,” she showed them how to carve spoons in the evenings.
When her dad was organizing the first Spoonfest with his friend Barn, she found herself once again roped in to help. She’d carved a few spoons by that time but “nothing that seriously.” One of her jobs was to put together the festival T-shirt, which had to list the instructors. “They’re all men,” she noted. It struck her as odd – those who’d attended her parents’ courses were fairly evenly mixed by gender. But there didn’t seem to be any women carving spoons professionally at that time, she says. “So…in a fit of feminist stubbornness, [I] decided that by the following year I would be good enough to teach.”
New and improved instructor line-up.
She spent the year practicing, and sure enough, was teaching that following year, 2013. “I was hooked,” she says. “Couldn’t put it down.”
If it seems a stretch to go from a remote village in the countryside of northern England to teaching internationally, all without the benefit of conventional higher education, JoJo’s trajectory is a little easier to comprehend when you go beyond her parents’ example and how they immersed their daughter in craft from her earliest years to consider the passionate interest and ambition her father demonstrated in researching and reviving a branch of woodcraft that might otherwise have been lost to history. Google Robin Wood and you’ll find he has “MBE” (Member of the Order of the British Empire) appended to his name, a great public honor recognizing his contributions to the survival of traditional British craft. For much of his life, Robin has made a living by turning bowls. No ordinary bowls, these; Robin revived the craft of pole-lathe turning last practiced by George Lailey six decades earlier. After Lailey died in 1958, his workshop was moved to the Museum of English Rural Life. Robin studied Lailey’s lathe and tools and reverse-engineered them, in effect teaching himself from scratch. He took his foot-powered lathe with him to craft fairs to demonstrate the process. The power of such an example, as well as the opportunities Robin shared with his family, should not be underestimated.
Going farther afield
Forage your material, in this case birch bark for a canoe.
JoJo at work on the canoe.
Robin and JoJo enjoy the fruits of their labor.
JoJo stayed in Herefordshire during her early 20s. By that point she was teaching internationally; one year she taught courses in England, France, Germany and Sweden, in addition to the United States, where she was one of the instructors at the first Greenwood Fest in Plymouth, Mass. She’d visited the States a couple of years before with her dad; they spent a few weeks with Jarrod Dahl in Wisconsin, building a birch bark canoe, an experience she describes as “amazing! Really cool.” They also traveled to a spoon gathering in Milan, a tiny town “in the middle-of-nowhere Minnesota and to Northhouse, where Robin taught a course. Peter Follansbee took that course. “In the evenings we did spoon carving,” JoJo goes on. “Peter’s spoon carving background is from the Swedish bent-branch world; at Northhouse, he was carving from a straight piece of wood. “I probably said something fairly unflattering – I can show you a better way to do that.” Instead of being insulted, he was impressed, she says. “We got on great.” So when he was organizing Greenwood Fest, he invited her to teach spoon carving.
Faceted backs of spoons.
The spoon carving world is quite a small one, JoJo says, though it’s getting bigger. “Everybody seems to know everybody. We were all on Facebook and Instagram, posting about our various things.”
“I’ve been very lucky. I grew up around amazing craftspeople and have been lucky to get to know everybody. A lot of the woodworking community is dominated by old men. When people are looking to book some people to change the demographics a bit, I bring the age significantly down. And I don’t have a beard, which is a change,” she laughs – “ticking two boxes at once!”
JoJo in instructor mode with a student named Julie, before “Spoon Day” in 2019.
Pathcarvers: enhancing mental health through making
With her partner, Sean, she operates Pathcarvers in Birmingham, where she moved in 2017. Pathcarvers teaches woodcarving as a way to help people with mental and physical health challenges – “a tool for positive social change.” Through Pathcarvers, they set up events that give people access to craft. “The act of making is intrinsically human,” JoJo points out. “A lot of people don’t have creative outlets that can really help. Jobs are becoming more screen-oriented. People get home and put the telly on or Netflix because we’re so tired. Making is something that can be beneficial in so many ways.”
They work with groups as well as individuals, bringing together people from diverse backgrounds. “You sit down and do some carving. It helps you talk about things. You have to concentrate on that sharp thing in your hand because you don’t want to hurt yourself. It gives you space to quiet your brain down.”
When she was teaching elsewhere, she says, she’d notice that there always came a point where “everybody goes silent because they’re so focused on what they’re doing. The world disappears. At the end of the course, they’ve got this thing in their hands that they’ve made. They can go away and use that in their kitchen and be reminded of this experience. So many people never get to experience that. They don’t even know it’s an option. Pathcarvers is about making this as accessible as we can, and making it affordable. With craft courses there are endless [opportunities] to go away in the woods, but there’s not that much in the cities. [Thanks to Pathcarvers], people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford to do it can do it.”
They are a social enterprise (known in the United States as a non-profit). Until now, they’ve been self-funded. Course fees have made it possible for them to subsidize training for those who can’t pay. After woodworker, author and lawyerKieran Binnie took his life in April 2021, Christopher Schwarz, Megan Fitzpatrick and Rachel Moss (Kieran’s spouse) wanted to do something to memorialize him and create a positive legacy. “He’d brought so much to so many people in his life,” JoJo comments, “and we wanted to continue that. Kieran lived in Birmingham, too. It seemed a good fit. He, too, thought about community.” Chris and Megan put her and Sean in touch with Rachel Moss, Kieran’s wife. “It’s been really amazing, the amount of support,” JoJo says of the contributions brought in following a post about Pathcarvers and the Kieran Binnie Memorial Fund for Craft. The fund will enable them to do more work free of charge, and to work with other organizations to help people with their mental health.
With his black leather nose and beautiful eyes, Oscar reminded me of the puppies that often appeared on boxes of chocolates in England in the early 1980s.
Editor’s note: If you ever meet me at a dinner party and ask me what sort of books we publish, I’ll give you a two-word answer: hard ones.
When John and I founded Lost Art Press in 2007, we knew that the world didn’t need another book of router tricks, or plans for the same generic semi-Shaker furniture pieces we’ve seen a dozen times.
Most woodworkers love a good challenge, especially if it opens their minds or trains their hands to do new things. So for the last 14 years, we have tried to offer books that no one else would publish.
Gather together the best writing on handwork in the 20th century from Charles H. Hayward (a seven-year project)? We are up for it.
Publish a book about animal companions in the workshop? Plus the life lessons they offer? By one of our favorite woodworking authors who is fighting pancreatic cancer? Whew. Yes. We’re here for that.
“Shop Tails” by Nancy R. Hiller is our most unlikely woodworking book, but it is also one of my favorites. (I’ve never designed a woodworking book while actively sobbing.) Nancy’s clear-eyed and unflinching prose about the craft, the work, her non-human companions and death are something you won’t find anywhere else.
I think this book will make you look at the world, the work on your bench and the cat at your feet all anew. It might not show you how to make a crazy coping sled for your router, but who needs that, anyway?
Whenever someone at Farmstead Furniture asked what type of dog Oscar was, my boss replied “a Hearthrugger.” He was a large black dog with wavy hair that gave his lanky frame the appearance of at least 50 percent more than his highest-ever weight of 45 pounds. Spread out on the floor, he bore a striking resemblance to a sumptuous long-haired animal skin rug, the kind that lends a primal edge to a crackling log fire, leaving you all the cozier for knowing that you are not on a patch of frozen ground beneath the stars.
I was able to take Oscar with me to work at Farmstead because at 27, I had finally earned my driver’s license. I bought a used Ford Escort van through a classified ad in the local newspaper. For years, I had resisted the pressure to learn how to drive, daunted by a vehicle’s potential to kill. Many of my school friends in London had learned to drive at 17, an age when I wondered why I should learn to drive when public transportation was so readily available, not to mention that there was no way I’d be able to afford a car in the foreseeable future. Instead, I decided to let circumstances dictate when it was my time to learn to drive, and even considered going my entire life without driving a car, as Grandma Stepha had.
My resistance to driving lasted well after I left London. When I was 19, my boyfriend, Patrick, and I moved to the burg of Friday Bridge in Cambridgeshire, where my mother and stepfather had bought an old schoolhouse that came with an attached cottage, the former schoolmaster’s home. We moved into the simple brick cottage – two rooms upstairs, two rooms downstairs – and my stepfather built a small addition for a kitchen and bathroom. I got a job at a metal-casting factory that summer and rode my bike to work. After signing up for City & Guilds furniture-making classes at the community college in Wisbech, four miles away, I rode my bike to and from school in all weather. I did the same at my first cabinetmaking job, when I went to work for Raymond Green shortly after my City & Guilds training.
When I started work at Farmstead in 1986, a few years after that first cabinetmaking job, Oscar and I were living in a row house in Cambridge with three strangers. Two of my fellow tenants, Mel and Paul, quickly became friends. By this time Patrick and I had married, then divorced.
Each day I rode my bike to the train station, put it in the baggage car and rattled along until we reached the country station closest to the workshop, then retrieved the bike and rode the rest of the way. Anyone who lived in England in the mid-1980s will know that back then, sunny days were few and far between. No matter the season, most days were chilly, beneath an overcast sky – character-forming, and it certainly made the occasional sunny day all the more worthy of wonder. Riding a 10-speed bicycle through the dark in lashing December rain only to wait on the wind-swept platform for the train back to Cambridge did nothing to bolster my spirits. It was finally time to learn how to drive.
I inquired with a driving school and found a teacher who would cram the instruction into a single week. Now I just had to arrange for time off from work. My bosses wouldn’t give me a week off but agreed to let me take driving lessons for half of each weekday, so that’s what I did. I’d heard stories about the difficulty of passing the driving test on the first try. I really needed to get this thing done, so I took every chance to practice. And it wasn’t as though I had to force myself; I found I loved the process of driving, the way I could turn my will to go from A to B into action through a gear stick, steering wheel and pedals. (Nearly all English vehicles back then came with manual transmission.) The car became an extension of my body. To my relief, I passed the test on the first try. Now I could take Oscar with me to work instead of leaving him in my room at home. A few years old and safely beyond the destructiveness of puppyhood, Oscar was well-behaved. He stayed by my bench most of the day while I worked, leaving briefly at lunchtime to hunt for dropped bits of ham sandwich or breadcrumbs off a fellow worker’s Scotch egg.
He was the best kind of dog – affectionate, loyal, attentive. He loved to chase a ball but was equally glad to take off across a Fenland field in pursuit of a jet from the nearby Royal Air Force base. As a pup he’d been endlessly curious. He loved to snuggle and play. When thwarted, his need for attention occasionally turned to damage, as when he pulled the copy of Ernest Joyce’s “The Technique of Furniture Making” that I had borrowed from the Isle of Ely College library off the bookcase at home and tore its 495 pages into a paper puzzle, wolfing down a chunk of the spine and chewing the top right inch and a half of the clothbound cover. Aside from making me pay for a replacement copy, the people at the library wanted me to return the original. I persuaded them to let me keep it and spent hours piecing the pages back together with cellotape that has since turned yellow-brown. Oscar and I were together for 13 years. Then I let him go in a moment I will always regret. What follows is his story.
In the summer of 1980, several years before I worked at Farmstead, I was close to completing my coursework in furniture making, when our neighbor’s red setter, Sherry, gave birth to a litter of pups. My mother’s bearded collie, Alistair, was the father; he’d escaped from the backyard of their house in Friday Bridge and run across the road when Sherry was in heat. Alistair wasn’t alone in wandering the ’hood; a compact, light-brown, smooth-coated dog named Sniffer was quite the lad and likely had many a litter to his name. But there was little doubt these had come from Alistair – the doghouse was squirming with red and black puppies, not a brown or smooth-haired one among them.
We hadn’t had a dog since Sidney and Phoebe. Now that I was an adult and nearly finished with my training, I longed for a dog of my own. I felt a sense of obligation to our neighbor, given that my mother’s dog was responsible for the pups. They spilled out in a clambering mass, falling over each other to meet the visitor. A few moments later, a tiny black face with intense brown eyes and a rumpled moustache poked out, peering around to assess conditions. That was my dog: the loner, the shy boy, the cautious one. I reached inside the opening and pulled him out the rest of the way.Oscar loved to run. Unfortunately, I did not know how to train him. I had an ordinary collar and lead, not the kind that would have discouraged a dog from pulling; he would lean so hard into our path that I could scarcely contain him. It was exasperating. I yanked his leash angrily, too ignorant to know how ineffective (not to mention dangerous) my correction might be.
Patrick and I were married in 1981. By then, we were both working for my first cabinetmaking boss, Raymond Green, building kitchens in a frigid old horse-stable-turned-workshop. A couple of years later, we moved to the industrial town of Reading. By then I was ready for a change – not just a new location, but a new line of work. Although I’d learned a lot from Raymond about the business of cabinetmaking, as well as new techniques, I felt emotionally and physically beaten down by my two-plus years of professional woodworking. The work had become depressingly monotonous and repetitive. I wanted to make a living in a more social setting, ideally an office.
At first we stayed with Patrick’s mother at her council flat in Bracknell, on Reading’s outskirts. She doted on Oscar and spoiled him like a grandson. She always had a box of Good Boy Choc Drops on hand, and after a few tries, loved to take him out for walks. He slept in the guest room with us and stayed home with her while we looked for work.
I’d answered an ad for a clerk position in the travel office at the students’ union of Reading University. What clinched the hire was my happy guess at the capital of Yugoslavia, as it was then known: Belgrade. I could not believe my luck in getting the job; I would be working in an office with several women, all of us under 35. The office was not in a freezing barn, but a comfortable building. The position involved selling tickets to professors who were going on book tours around the United States and agricultural students flying home to Dakar or Denpasar. Those were the days of hand-written airline tickets on paper and bookings made over the phone. There was a lot to learn, and I found all of it a welcome challenge.
My mother’s mother, Esse, had always said she wanted to help me buy a house and make a home. Reading looked and felt like home, so one day I made a very expensive transatlantic collect call from a pay phone and asked if she would help us buy a row house about a mile-and-a-half from the office where I worked. A basic two-up, two-down with a tiny kitchen and bath in a lean-to addition at the back, the house was one away from the precipice at the end of Edgehill Street, which was aptly named. The neighborhood was still decidedly working class, so it was affordable, even to people like us who made close to minimum wage. I comforted myself with the observation that the house at the end would go over the hill before ours did. Esse was ill with pancreatic cancer at the time, so my grandfather flew over by himself to look at the house, gave us the down payment (around ₤5,000) and co-signed for the loan. I was ecstatic and have never stopped being grateful for that help.
Each morning I got up early and took Oscar for a long walk, then had breakfast and walked to work. Sometimes I took him with me. My co-workers loved him, and Bronwen, especially, always made a fuss over him. Oscar couldn’t get enough. A few years later Patrick and I moved to the old cathedral town of Saffron Walden in Essex, where our marriage fell apart. There, Gregor, a classmate during our training as furniture makers, took over from Bronwen as Oscar’s favorite friend. He took Oscar for walks to Audley End Park and sneaked him the odd treat from the fish and chip shop. Gregor would occasionally drive over in his jeep and pick us up. One day he parked the jeep in front of the house where Patrick and I had lived and Oscar refused to get out. He sat there, eyes forward, as if to say You can’t make me get out. There has been too much disruption of late, and I’m staying put. I’m going wherever you go.
I moved back to the States in the summer of 1987. My sister had moved back several years before, and my mother and stepfather had followed; they were living in the house where we’d lived with our father before our family split up. It would make an ideal place to land and make a plan.
My mother with her German shepherd, Zak, and Oscar.
I’d visited New England the previous winter. I knew I wanted to be in the Northeast – if I had to leave England, it would be for a part of North America that looked and felt as close to England as I could find. I’d rented a car on that trip and first explored the Hudson Valley, then gone as far as western Massachusetts, where, after a long expanse of no towns, I came upon what appeared to be a semi-abandoned industrial town, North Adams, which had had a thriving mill industry thanks to its location on the Hoosic River but now seemed more like a beautiful mirage full of 19th-century houses with turrets, fretwork and other elaborate architectural details. I might not have a particular place in mind, not to mention a job, but New England would be my general destination.
I sold some of my possessions, gave a lot of others away, then had the rest shipped with a moving company, to be held at the Port of New York until I had a place to live. My friend Edward was going to America with me.After putting Oscar in the officially mandated crate, I said goodbye at Heathrow, praying he would survive the eight-hour flight in the hold.
At Miami International Airport, Edward and I went through baggage claim and customs. I spotted Oscar across the hall. No sooner had he glimpsed me than he let out a heartbreaking, groggy howl, still under the influence of the sedative he’d had for the ride. But the most rewarding reunion came when my mother picked us up and took us home. She and my stepfather still had Alistair, Oscar’s father; they’d brought him when they moved from England. When the two dogs saw each other for the first time in years, they sniffed each other tentatively. Then, all of a sudden, there was a frenzy of perked-up ears and wagging tails. It was enough to bring tears to my eyes.
I bought a used two-door Ford Escort car, and after several days, Edward and I set off with Oscar on the drive north. We stayed in motels that allowed dogs, and finally stopped in South Hadley, just outside of Amherst, Massachusetts, where I signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a house. Edward found a job in Worcester and moved there. I applied for office jobs but was turned down for every one. While looking through job ads in a local paper I came across one for furniture makers at a business in Vermont. By this time I’d had my fill of rejection; perhaps I should give my own trade another chance, instead of trying to fit my square peg into another round hole. I called. The people seemed genuinely nice. We set up a meeting.
I drove up with Oscar for a visit. The company had arranged for me to stay at a bed-and-breakfast. Before the interview I was so nervous that I bought a package of cookies and ate the entire box, diverting a few from my mouth to Oscar’s. It was comforting to have an ally on this journey away from a home that was not yet home.
I took the job gratefully when they offered. Oscar and I moved to Montpelier, Vermont, the closest sizable town to the shop, where I rented a small apartment in a depressing house with stained shag carpet and fake wood paneling on the walls. Oscar and I were together. We would make it work. …
Spot the dog. Oscar in a field of lupines on a day trip to Idaho.
The OG Anarchist’s Tool Chest in front of a few of its spawn.
It sounds like hyperbole, but “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” (ATC) has changed my life twice – not as much as it changed Christopher Schwarz’s and John Hoffman’s – but it has been integral to my discovering what I love to do, and allowing me to (bonus!) make a living from it.
I vividly recall copy editing ATC before it was first released. I was managing editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine at the time, and it was during a Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event at our office and shop, April 16-17, 2011, two days before the book had to go to the printer. I did a shit job of copy editing. There were tons of people around and it was loud – plus I was either interrupted every 10 minutes or so, or I got up to check out a handplane, saw, marking knife, marking gauge …. If you have that wheat-colored first edition, please accept my apologies for the many missed items (thankfully, Chris has long forgiven me). On the other hand, congrats: You have a collector’s item; the book is now in its 13th printing, and celebrated its 10th anniversary this summer.
It’s the book that allowed Chris – less than two months later – to announce he was leaving his job as editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine (PWM); Lost Art Press would become his full-time job (along with teaching as many as three classes every month, writing for PWM as a contributing editor, building furniture on commission…it exhausts me to look at his summer 2011 schedule).
So the first way ATC changed my life was that I was no longer working every day with a guy I greatly admired, and who had taught me most of what I knew about hand-tool woodworking. I lost my lunch buddy – a guy who made me love woodworking enough to rethink my long-term goal to teach college-level Shakespeare. It wasn’t as much fun without him. And it turned into a lot less fun when I got his former job in December of 2012, and no longer had much time for woodworking thanks to employee reviews, EBITDA discussions, management meetings, etc. It was certainly rewarding and I’m honored to have had that job for five years. But fun? Not so much.
When I got let go in December 2017, undergirding my fear was massive relief. I was too fearful to ever quit a corporate job with a steady paycheck and health insurance, no matter how many headaches I had by the end. My first call was to Chris, who took me to lunch and gave me a hangover. The day after, I started moving my stuff into his shop, and scheduled some woodworking classes – among them, “Build The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” (I’m awfully glad Chris was tired of teaching it!). Chris’s success with that book (and others) afforded me a soft place to land, and saved me from ever again attending a corporate meeting that doesn’t occur with either a drink or fried chicken (or both) in hand. Thank you, Chris.
But even if it doesn’t get you a plate full of fried chicken, ATC is the book you should have if you’re interested in hand-tool woodworking, why we make things, or need a tool chest (or all three).
– Fitz
“‘The Anarchist’s Tool Chest’ is divided into three sections:
“1. A deep discussion of the 48 core tools that will help readers select a tool that is well-made – regardless of brand name or if it’s vintage or new. This book doesn’t deal with brands of tools. Instead it teaches you to evaluate a well-made tool, no matter when or where it was manufactured. There also is a list of the 24 “good-to-have” tools you can add to your kit once you have your core working set.
“2. A thorough discussion of tool chests, plus plans and step-by-step instructions for building one. The book shows you how to design a chest around your tools and how to perform all the common operations for building it. Plus, there are complete construction drawings for the chest I built for myself.
“3. There also is a brief dip into the philosophy of craft, and I gently make the case that all woodworkers are “aesthetic anarchists.” — Christopher Schwarz
Below is an excerpt from Chapter 1.
Academy of Sanity. Randle Holme’s 1688 book outlined a small tool kit that could be used for building lots of furniture forms.
The Good Books
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.
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.
But all that was just denial kicking in.
Judging from the descriptions of the nature of work before mass production ruled the earth, there were two things going on that were related, but that are easy for moderns to miss. One, artisans didn’t require as many tools because the basic skill level was higher. Descriptions of hand work support this fully. (Don’t believe me? Read Moxon’s description of making an eight-sided frame in section 19. Try to build one yourself that way – I did – then let’s chat. If that doesn’t convince you, then read André Roubo’s descriptions of Boulle work – then go back to making woven stretchy potholders.)
Also, the structure of the economy in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries was different – it was still basically a pre-Capitalist culture. Large portions of the population were self-employed. Modern consumerism – for better or for worse – had yet to take hold.
To be sure, there were early craftsmen with huge tool sets. There are always going to be a few tool whores in the guild. (I’m looking at you, Duncan Phyfe.) But tool inventories and other published accounts indicate that the pre-Industrial woodworker could use fewer tools to make furniture that was equal to or better than what we make today.
But here’s the other thing that’s important: Their tools were different. To the uneducated eye, the tools of the 17th and 18th centuries look crude. But have you ever examined an 18th-century moulding plane that wasn’t dogmeat? I have. They are refined to a level that exceeds many modern tools. Everything extraneous has been taken away. Everything necessary is right where you need it and is easy to manipulate.
I have a few early tools, including one particular strapped hammer for the upholstery trade, and I simply cannot imagine how any aspect of the tool could be improved. It is utter simplicity, yet it has a graphic beauty that surpasses everything I’ve seen from the Victorians.
After reading enough accounts of early tool sets, it began to sink in that I didn’t need as many tools to build the furniture on my long to-do list. But then I found out that you can’t buy a chili dog without the bun.
Once the idea of a smaller tool set took hold in my brain, the logic and beauty of its surrounding pre-Industrial economy became as beautiful as my early strapped hammer.
Derek (right) and his business partner, Nick, posing for some promo pics for a magazine article circa1996. “I was best man at his wedding,” notes Derek. “We were just reminiscing the other day.”
Most woodworkers familiar with Derek Jones know him as longtime editor of the UK periodical Furniture & Cabinetmaking, a position he held for ten years. Those who follow Derek on Instagram will also know him as a maker of hardwood marking gauges and occasional instructor of furniture making and French polishing, most notably at Robinson House Studio in southeast England. But few of those who aren’t personally close to Derek are aware that, had he not gone into woodworking, he might well have become a chef.
There are many parallels between the kitchen and the workshop, he notes. Both are workspaces filled with dedicated tools, many of them sharp. Both require a commitment to cultivate deep, embodied knowledge of materials and processes while keeping your wits about you lest you curdle a custard or find you’ve created a drawer shaped like the letter Z.
Derek’s culinary interest sprang from his experience as a teenager, when he worked in pubs and restaurants managed by his father, but his dad advised him not to go into the hospitality field because of its “unsociable hours.” He chuckles at his dad’s caveat today; being a self-employed woodworker often comes with similar encroachments on what might otherwise be personal time.
After Derek left school at the age of 17, he took off for the south of France, where he spent a couple of years. There he developed an interest in French peasant food – “good, wholesome stuff,” such as a casserole he still makes today with pork belly or sausage (“quite robust sausage, such as chorizo”), butter beans, cabbage, mushrooms and leeks. “The cabbage goes on last. As soon as it goes to a vibrant green, out it comes, and you’ve got this steaming-hot plate of goodness. It’s heaven. I’d eat it all day every day,” though the rest of his family – his longtime partner, Tracey, and younger daughter, Mahli, who still lives at home – don’t share his enthusiasm for the dish.
“Me and my mum somewhere in the south of France in 1984.”
While in France he worked in bars, restaurants and camp sites – and also as a tour guide on coaches (buses, in the States) bound for Monaco and St. Tropez: “You’d have this little script you’d read out” while pointing out landmarks.
The mansion block in Widley Road, Maida Vale, London W9, where Derek was born in 1964.
Derek was born in greater Paddington, West London, in 1964. His mother has always been a dancer; she spent years on stage as a chorus girl in theaters on London’s West End. Early on, his father worked in property management for a private landlord who had mansion blocks around Maida Vale, north of Paddington. The family left London for Brighton, a city on the coast in southeast England, when Derek was still young. His parents split when he was 10 or 11.
Derek had this “battered and bruised 6-string on loan… [I]t looked like [*&^] but sounded better than any acoustic I’ve played.”
That was when his father got into the business of managing pubs and restaurants. Today, management is widely considered a hardcore skill taught by business schools. But Derek understands that what really makes a good manager is the ability to relate to other people – to understand what matters to them, and provide it in the most satisfying way. Far from being primarily a number cruncher, Derek says, “my dad’s a wandering minstrel, really. Very congenial,” which made him invaluable to the owners of pubs and restaurants where he worked. He’d optimize each operation, then turn it over to other managers. Derek lived with his mother and worked part-time for his dad.
Derek’s father on Derek’s 21st birthday, in one of the restaurants he managed. “Hardly ever saw him without a shirt and tie,” says Derek. “We celebrated his 90th last month and he’s just as dapper now.”
Derek on his 21st birthday.
Today, Derek and Tracey live in the port town of Newhaven, about 12 miles east of Brighton. When they started to look for a place to buy, they couldn’t find anything in Lewes (pronounced “Lewis”), where they were living at the time. But in Newhaven, which Derek calls “the poor relation to Brighton,” they found a 1930s house with a garden and parking for two cars. He has a “tiny little shed” in back that serves as a shop. He insulated the structure, added electrical wiring and moved in his Roubo bench, along with hand tools, a drill press, router and Festool Domino. It’s a set-up that works well; while his “little workshop” is at the end of the garden, he has access to a full suite of tools “at the school.”
Derek with his eldest daughter circa 1990. He was doing more French polishing than furniture making back then, which is how he came to meet Paul Richardson.
“The school” he’s referring to is the London Design & Engineering University Technical College, which operates in partnership with the University of East London Design and Technical College. Although Derek’s teaching currently focuses on engineering, rather than woodworking, his career as an instructor grew out of a venture when he was working as editor of Furniture & Cabinetmaking. In 2014 Derek arranged to bring Chris Schwarz to the U.K. to deliver two classes, the Anarchist’s Toolchest and Dutch Toolchest, at Warwickshire College. The classes were structured to allow young students to take part in sessions that would otherwise be beyond their means. The pieces made by the instructor were filled with hand tools donated by makers from both sides of the pond, including Lee Valley, Sterling Tool Works, Bad Axe, Texas Heritage Tool Works, Walke Moore Tools and Karl Holtey. The fully equipped chests were then auctioned off with the proceeds going back to the host college to support their full-time students. The following year the lineup included Roy Underhill, Tom Fidgen, Peter Follansbee and David Barron and covered two locations over two weeks.
An attendee at one of these classes, Geoffrey Fowler, approached Derek to run and teach at a similar event at a school he was planning to build in London. Derek wasn’t enthusiastic, in part because he was working full-time as editor of the magazine, but the two of them struck up a friendship. Instead of organizing more such classes and events, Derek offered his services to spec out the woodworking shops with tools and equipment that reflected those found in a professional shop. Changes at the magazine coincided with circumstances at the school which meant that Derek was able “come and lend a hand” for one day a week. He’d stand back and watch instructors who, he says, were doing a fine job of teaching but hadn’t necessarily had much, if any, experience in commercial work – i.e., earning a living from work in the field, as distinct from delivering what we know today as “content.” “D’you know what?” he wanted to say; “that’s not actually how we do it commercially.” He realized that he had real-world experience he could contribute to the curriculum. One thing led to another, and before long he was doing a lot more teaching.
Gradually, his teaching shifted to the subject of engineering: the principles of marking things out and making components to fit. The methodology is similar, whether you’re working in wood or metal, and these days he’s teaching more metalwork than woodwork. “It’s not a huge leap, is it, really?” he asks. “We’re still taking small amounts of material off. The vocabulary is very similar; the necessary skills to be able to generate drawings that other people can read, they’re identical.” And even though it’s 2021, he’s still teaching students to draw by hand. “They hate it!” he says. “But I won’t let them go anywhere near software until they can draw on paper. It’s the same with hand tools. I don’t let them go anywhere near a machine unless they can use a file and a saw.” Here he takes a moment to share an anecdote about a student who recently asked if he could use “the long metal sandpaper,” to which Derek replied, “You mean the file?”
Early days
20 Church Street, Brighton. This is where Derek worked as a “Saturday boy” from the age of 15, then on and off for the next four years. “I still have lunch with my old boss, John Hartnett, now,” he adds.
Derek got his start in the trade as a “Saturday boy” around the age of 15, when he had a job restoring antiques. In those relatively dark days, restoration meant stripping, followed by French polishing; there was still scant respect for the patina that develops with use. He also learned to repair furniture, which entailed replicating parts. “I don’t think there’s a better training ground…than to take things apart to find out how all the parts go together,” he remarks. “You learn about joints intimately. You learn about proportions – without realizing you’re soaking up all this information.” His boss, John, taught him to look closely at the subtle differences between Victorian and Georgian furniture. You’d expect Georgian, being older, to be more clunky, he thinks. But it was just the opposite. Anyone familiar with the history of furniture will appreciate why.
“An early morning window cleaning round financed the purchase of a lot of my tools in the early ’80s,” Derek writes. “That’s my mate Steve’s dad’s Morris Marina.” (A Morris Marina is a make and model of car.)
On completion of his “French Sabbatical” in his later teens, Derek returned to John’s emporium to complete his training as a cabinetmaker, supplementing his income with an early-morning window cleaning round in the city center so he could save up money to buy woodworking tools. He got his own shop, a garage behind Hove Station, at “the posher end of Brighton,” and restored pieces to ship by the container-load to the North American market. Brighton is full of antique dealers, he notes, and he was constantly hunting through secondhand shops and auctions for pieces with potential. The city was also home to a thriving furniture making trade; in one square mile he could find French polishers, upholsterers, gilders, carvers and more – all the areas of specialization that make up the traditional furniture industry. An American dealer purchased everything Derek made or had bought for resale, then arranged to receive the container when it reached the United States.
“The first workshop I shared with Paul Richardson and Anthony Bailey early ’90s. It was a wooden hut built for temporary hospital accommodation during the war. Boiling hot in the summer, freezing in the winter.” (Note the v-shapred arm supporting a sliding table on the tablesaw, a standard feature in English shops in the early 1980s.)
After a couple of years, the booming interest in “brown furniture,” as Victorian, Georgian and Regency furniture is often disparagingly known, waned. So Derek turned to smaller items, producing one-off pieces and sometimes replicating others, such as when he bought a pair of chairs and made two more to match, then sold them as a set.
Derek and his Corolla outside his workshop behind Hove station.(Someone pick up that crisp packet, please.)
Derek says he loved this van. The business was A & D because A appears first in the Yellow Pages. “All that antiquing in the ’80s came in handy in the ’90s” is Derek’s understated caption for this grand set of bedroom furniture.
Reception desks were the bread and butter of Derek’s work in the ’90s
In his late 20s Derek embarked on a two-year degree in 3-D design at Northbrook College in the coastal town of Worthing. After graduating, he rented workshop space, this time with a couple of other craftspersons, Paul Richardson (who became editor of The Woodworker magazine and would go on to launch Furniture & Cabinetmaking magazine) and Anthony Bailey (editor of Woodworking Crafts magazine). By now he’d expanded his knowledge from period to contemporary furniture, in addition to having learned to draw and design. He built up the business, which grew to seven people. They built conference tables and other high-end office furniture for corporate clients based in London, such as the Bank of Canada. But “two events you’d never think would impact a rural Sussex shop” dealt his business a critical blow – first, 9/11, then the Enron scandal. Both events “just wiped our business out,” he says – their work was for the kind of clients who’d been based in the Twin Towers and operated internationally. And after Enron, shareholders became a lot more cautious about how the businesses they invested in were spending money.
A boardroom table for the KPMG and Microsoft headquarters, installed in the mid ’90s.
“It was a disaster,” he remembers. To stay afloat, he and his partners had to turn on a dime. But pivot they did, this time to the custom kitchen market, a potentially lucrative business at a time when property values were rising dramatically, particularly in the south of England. Here, though, Derek found, “clients faff about over the color, the handles, everything. All the successful bespoke kitchen makers had a swanky brochure and showroom.” He and his partners couldn’t effectively break into the market, so they sold their business.
Derek calls this “a Regency-esque chaise.” It was part of a suite of furniture for a villa in Portugal.
One of Derek’s kitchen jobs.
Another kitchen.
And…third time’s a charm.
Furniture & Cabinetmaking
This time, Derek turned to drawing and drafting. “I was a freelancer, carrying out site surveys for high-end bespoke fit-outs [installations, in the U.S.], drawing up designs and running the project.” Every now and then he’d rent space in a workshop run by Marc Fish of Robinson House Studio in Newhaven, to build the odd project. Marc showed him a copy of Furniture & Cabinetmaking magazine. “I was horrified,” Derek says. “Good grief, what’s going on here?” he wondered; nothing in the publication related to his real-world experience. “Everything seemed so twee and out of step with current trends and processes. I was used to having my work represented in a magazine format where the style, layout and content compl[e]mented each other. Woodworking magazines at that time were lacking in all respects.” Marc mentioned that the publishers were on the hunt for a new editor. Derek briefly considered applying, then dismissed the idea. A year later the publishers were still looking for an editor, so he applied. “I’d never written anything longer than a postcard before then,” he adds. He told them that while he had no background in publishing, he knew the topic well. Between his appointment to the post and starting at the magazine, Paul Richardson, the founder of F&C and onetime bench mate, had been killed in a traffic accident. “Paul had moved away from F&C by this time to launch several other titles. We hadn’t spoken in years but I was really looking forward to working with him again. It wasn’t to be, though, and as we hadn’t exactly parted on good terms. I felt that maybe I owed him one last favor to restore his creation back to its former self.”
This stationery box by Derek was featured on the cover of The Woodworker in 1995. It was one of the first of a few articles hehad published in that long-running periodical.
He ended up staying in that position for ten years. Throughout that time, the world of print publishing was in trouble. Circulation was in decline; the length of the magazine was getting shorter. When he first took the job as editor, Derek and his colleagues had access to a workshop the publishers provided, which allowed them to generate significant content of their own, but after about 6 years the publishers decided to pay outsiders to produce content instead. The decision grated on Derek. “If you’re teaching, it feels wrong to be teaching a subject you’re not actively pursuing. I teach, and I make stuff. If you’re editing a woodworking magazine, not to be doing any woodworking is just wrong.” In addition, as a seasoned professional woodworker, Derek knew that writing an article and getting the photos and other illustrations took a lot of time, and what the publishers were willing to pay professional woodworkers was far from fair compensation. He had a hard time breaking the low rate to woodworkers who were interested in writing for the magazine – so hard that this challenge, above all others, finally convinced him to change course, which is how he came to his current teaching position.
Marking gauges and cricket tables
Marking gauges.
Derek started making marking gauges when he was editor at Furniture & Cabinetmaking. During his professional career he’d always made things in batches, so he did the same with marking gauges, gradually developing processes that minimized the need for handwork, which took far more time. “I’m at that point now where I’ve refined them and can do a batch of 20 or 30 quite quickly,” he says. “Quickly is a relative term, I rarely have consistent back-to-back days to work on any project these days so I don’t really count the hours. As long as it’s quicker than the time before, I know I’m making progress.” Finishing is the slowest part. “I start off using a couple brush coats of diluted shellac, not to fill the grain (although that’s a happy coincidence), but to raise it so that when I apply a shop-made hard wax paste, the surface is dead smooth. I aim to have the best finish with the least amount of product. It’s a long way from my French polishing background but something I probably wouldn’t have thought about without that knowledge.” He figures once he’s got the process so streamlined that it’s profitable, he’ll lose interest.
Cricket table.
His current focus outside of teaching engineering is on cricket tables. Having started out with antiques in the laissez-faire Wild West that was England in the 1980s, he understood that the cognoscenti looked down on Victorian furniture, much of which had been manufactured in factories for a mass market. Back then, the pieces of greatest interest were Georgian (dating from the early 18th through early-19th centuries) and Regency (a short period in the early-19th century that followed directly afterward). But “you could take Victorian furniture and convert it with different hardware to change its style.” Sic transit gloria mundi. He apologizes for the deceit but acknowledges “that was the market.”
No one here but us crickets.
At the time, he had no interest in anything earlier than Georgian furniture. So it should come as no surprise that years later, when he saw Peter Follansbee and others making traditional English furniture from the 17th century, “I thought it was a bit wacky, not proper.” His opinion about these earlier furniture forms changed when he went to an auction a few years ago and saw “a cute little table” – symmetrical from one angle, but not from others. It was “so different to anything usually on my radar, it stuck out.” He loved it – and put in a maximum bid of £90. It eventually went to another bidder for £900. So began his obsession with the cricket table.
Along with marking gauges, cricket tables have been the focus of his production ever since. Explaining their development, he says “they go right back to being stick tables, and at some point they go over to being joined furniture.” He started with a couple that were “quite rough” but kept at it, learning from each one. The clamps we use today didn’t exist when cricket tables were originally made, he points out, but the tables still hold together. “That blows my mind.” These days he’s perfecting the techniques and familiarizing himself with the geometry. “I spent so many years making square boxes. You suddenly think, oh my god, I’ve got to make something that’s 60 degrees!”
His interest in cricket tables led to a book contract with Lost Art Press. He anticipates it will likely be published early in 2023.
These days Derek teaches engineering in London four days a week. On Fridays he works from home – grading, planning lessons, etc. – “terribly dull stuff that goes with being a teacher.” He spends most weekends and evenings on the book, though the last couple of weeks he’s been making some chopping boards, a tray, cutlery inserts and spice racks for a bespoke kitchen company, stuff he calls “bread and butter work.”
I asked Derek what advice he’d give to a would-be furniture maker. “I’d probably advise them to have an interest in something niche,” he replied. “If you’re doing something niche, it’s a small market, but the people in it will be loyal and tend to value what you can deliver, because they find it hard to find people who do what you can do.”
Many of Derek’s clients come to him because they can’t find anyone else to do what he does well, or within their time frame, a situation that helps make it possible for him to charge what he needs to for his work. Three of his customers have been with him for 30 years; they even stayed with him through a strange period during the late ’80s when he chucked woodworking for a job at Gatwick Airport, where he worked in the Dispatch Office coordinating the turnround of civil aircraft and calculating optimal weight and balance so that planes could take off when they reached the end of the runway. But even that professional diversion contributes to what he does now – it taught him about timekeeping, which is essential in the business of aviation.
He expands on his point. These longstanding customers “never query your price. They’re happy with your lead times. They never question your ability to do stuff. They pay on time. In the commercial world, you send someone an invoice and they pay you in 30 days, maybe 60 days. They may go bust [in which case you may not get paid at all]. You learn the value in those relationships. It’s a business relationship, but it goes deeper. You need to nurture those relationships and those customers because they’re the ones keeping the roof over your head, ultimately.”
Why Lowfat Roubo?
Finally, those familiar with Derek’s Instagram account may wonder why he goes by @lowfatroubo. Here’s the backstory.
When I was at [Furniture & Cabinetmaking], I commissioned a series of articles from David Barron about benches that were scheduled to run back to back. The first was a Scandinavian bench, the second a Roubo. We trailered the Roubo at the end of the first article – standard practice. David submitted his copy and pics on time, then left for the U.S. to attended Handwerks. We subbed the text, paid an illustrator for the plans and started work on the layout. Unfortunately David had sent all low-res images – totally useless for print. He’d erased the high-res files from his camera. With just two weeks in the schedule I decided to ‘reconstruct’ the bench with pine 2x4s (not the solid beech he used). I only intended making a short bench top and maybe two legs just for the photo sequence, but it was going so well I made the full version. The coverline was something like ‘Avoid the heavy lifting and build a Lowfat Roubo.’ About a week after it went on sale, I needed a name for my online accounts in a hurry and liked the sound of Lowfat Roubo. It fits in well with my ethos – trimming down the excess but keeping things authentic.
When the magazine closed the workshop, I brought the bench home, cut a foot off each end and installed it in my home shop. It’s what I work on now. I’ll never part with it.
Screwing around with the vise screw (U.S. spelling) for his Lowfat Roubo.
Editor’s note: Following the success of “The Essential Woodworker” – our second-bestselling time of all time – we worked with Robert Wearing to republish a book filled with some of his best jigs, fixtures and appliances for handwork. During his career, Wearing had published two books of jigs for woodworking (both out of print), that are filled with insanely practical and simple devices.
Just like with “The Essential Woodworker,” we had to recreate the book from scratch – all of the text, photos and drawings had been long lost to the publishing machine. And once again, the royalties to this book went to help Wearing, who was in an assisted-living home, after an incredibly rich and long career.
You can read more about Wearing’s life in this lovely 2017 profile. Shortly after “The Solution at Hand” was published, Wearing died at age 99 (read our obituary here).
The following tools are selections from Chapter 3: Tools, of Robert Wearing’s “The Solution at Hand: Jigs & Fixtures to Make Benchwork Easier,” a hardbound book of our favorite jigs from Wearing’s career. The book covers a wide swath of material, from building workbench appliances for planing, to making handscrews (and many other ingenious clamps), some simple tools that you cannot buy anywhere else, to marking devices that make complex tasks easier.
In all, there are 157 jigs, all of which are illustrated with Wearing’s handmade drawings. The book is designed as more of a reference book than something you read straight through. Already after editing the book, I now find myself returning to it and thinking: I know Wearing had a solution for this problem. And he did.
— Christopher Schwarz
Oil Pad “Park your plane on its side lad.” This is a folk custom dating back to the age of wooden planes. The blades of these planes were firmly held by a tightly hammered in wooden wedge. Following this advice, however, will disturb the lateral setting of an iron plane whose blade is nothing like so firmly held. Instead park the plane on the oil pad made by gluing a strip of carpet to a plane-sized board [Fig. 1, above]. This is a tidy arrangement which both protects the blade and reduces friction. Very little oil is needed.
Beam Compasses This excellent and virtually cost-free tool is shown assembled at Fig. 9 A. In constructing it, first machine an overlength piece of square-section material, say 5/8″ x 5/8″ (16 mm x 16 mm). Cut off five pieces to make respectively, pieces a, b, c and d. All except d are sawn in half. The inside ends of c and d are finished quite square and all other ends are angled. Glue the a pieces to the stem and c and d between the b pieces using a short waxed block cut from the stem as a spacer. Hold the pieces together flat on a piece of polythene sheet. Drill a hole in end B for a pencil or ballpoint, the latter is often better, then drill a small terminal hole of 3 mm (1/8″) and a lateral hole for the clamp screw. A brass roundhead 12 gauge x 1-1/2″ is well suited for the cramp up. Drill halfway at 1/4″ (6 mm). Drill the remaining distance at 1/8″ (3 mm). Saw the slot with a saw having a wide kerf. Screw up and test with the chosen pen or pencil. File off any protruding screw point.
A similar routine is adopted for the sliding point unit. There are several possibilities for the clamping screw. Either put a clear hole halfway through and tap the other half 1/4″ BSW, or metric equivalent. Use a thumbscrew to tighten or make one by soldering a wing nut on to a piece of screwed rod. Or solder a wing nut to a brass woodscrew. Screw in a normal woodscrew first, then replace with the one made up. Or drill clear holes right through and use a 1/4″ (5 mm) coach bolt with wing nut.
The point can be made by grinding up a piece of silver steel of about 3/32″ (3 mm) diameter. Clean up the whole job, lightly sand and finish either with a polyurethane varnish or teak oil.
Fig. 9
Awls Of this large family of tools from the days of handwork, only the bradawl remains in the catalogues. The convenient materials for making awls are tool steel, silver steel (commonly stocked in good tool shops) or old or unwanted screwdrivers.
The bradawl, A, is most used for screw holes and is either filed or ground on both sides and after hardening and tempering is honed to chisel sharpness on the oilstone.
Marking awls, B, are made out of thinner material ground or filed to a long, fine and round point. Small electrical screwdrivers with plastic handles convert easily. This awl is not really suitable for work other than marking as it cannot remove wood.
Fig. 34
The four square awl or small hand reamer, C, is useful in the bigger sizes for enlarging holes and in the smaller sizes for making pilot holes for small screws. It is filed really square in section and after hardening and tempering is carefully honed to give four keen cutting edges. It can be made from either round or square material.
The hooked awl, D, is particularly useful for marking out the second stage in dovetails. A good material for making these is old-fashioned steel knitting needles.
Turned hardwood handles with ferrules are well worth the trouble taken. Fit the blades into the handles by drilling slightly under size, filing the end of the awl to a chisel shape and then driving on in a vice. If the section is big enough the handle and blade can be drilled through and pinned.
