Recently, Owen Madden started a book club, and he wants you to join.
A professional cabinetmaker from upstate New York, Madden works as shop foreman at Rowan Woodwork.
“At our shop, we have a monthly meetup, and I get to meet some of the most talented woodworkers and artists,” Madden says. “Most of the conversations anchor around something learned from a book, at which point I write down that book and add it to the endless queue. I found that the best nuggets of information come from the discussion and innovation around the text. Naturally, I wanted to create a more organized space for these conversations so I could garner as much as possible.”
Madden, whose past work ranges from historical preservation and replication to modern architectural millwork, says he enjoys the community aspect of woodworking, trading stories and techniques about the craft.
We at Lost Art Press love Madden’s idea and hope to support the club in the future with virtual visits from some of our authors during meetings.
“The first book was selfish,” Madden says. “Nancy is a hero of mine, and I find that book relates to anyone who wants to make great, lasting things that connect to the people we make them for.”
Here’s how the club works:
Madden will set up monthly meetings to discuss each book. Longer books may require a couple of meetings.
“I would love to have everyone involved in some sort of conversation, be it on Zoom, Discord or even in-person splinter groups in their own community,” Madden says. “It’s still so new the structure will probably build as we have some meetings.”
You can learn more about The Woodworker’s Book Club here. You can follow the club on Instagram here. And you can join the club’s Discord change here.
As for the next book?
“After this one, I’m going to do a poll and see,” Madden says. “I also think it would be cool if the guest moderator picked the next month’s book. It’s all fluid and new still, so we will just see what works and what doesn’t.”
Nancy Hiller’s forthcoming book of essays, “Shop Tails,” (hopefully out later this fall) is a companion book to her first book of essays, “Making Things Work.” In “Making Things Work,” Nancy shares her life story as a series of vignettes, each with a lesson about craft, business and personal relationships, all centered on cabinetmaking in some form.
While cabinetmaking is central to “Shop Tails” simply because a) Nancy is a cabinetmaker and b) many of the animals featured live in her home and shop, the essays in this book aren’t all about cabinetmaking – or the business of, or the art of, or the joy of. If “Shop Tails” were a carousel, woodworking would be the center pole. It’s always there, but it’s the wildly painted horses moving up and down and the amusing characters sitting on each that have your attention.
At first, Nancy wondered if we’d even publish it. And I suppose, if you look at our catalog of books, it can feel “off brand.” But we had no hesitation. As Chris recently said to me, “LAP isn’t one thing. And it will be different tomorrow.”
It’s certainly not necessary to know an artist to appreciate their art. But I do believe doing so can add depth. Sometimes curiosity’s reward is intimacy coupled with better understanding, especially when considering a person’s background, even in terms of craft. So if you enjoy reading our Meet the Author series or Nancy Hiller’s Little Acorns, or if books like Trent Preszler’s “Little and Often” (William Morrow) are on your nightstand, you’ll likely enjoy Nancy’s latest offering.
This, from Edith Sarra, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Indiana University-Bloomington, after reading “Shop Tails”: “It’s hard to describe these essays without lapsing into the kinds of qualifiers that usually sound (but definitely are not, in this case) overblown: breathtaking, searing, hilarious, intricate, and above all else – wild and original, like nothing else I’ve read (and I read a lot of memoiristic narrative, across three languages, and many centuries).”
And now, an excerpt from Chapter 15, “Warring Parties (2011-2017),” with a good mix of cabinetmaking and memoir.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
About a year after Winnie died, I was ready to get another dog and fantasizing about a trip to the animal shelter. At the time, I was working on a job that involved refacing and modifying the kitchen cabinets in a newly built house. The place had been built on spec, so the builder had been careful about where he invested resources. The kitchen had a modified galley layout – base cabinets and uppers against the back wall, stove in the center and a capacious pantry unit on one end, all facing a big island of matching cabinetry that housed the sink, dishwasher and one of those pull-out-then-pull-up mixer stands I’ve always considered a stupid waste of space – and never more so than in a small kitchen such as this one. The cabinets had been built by a local shop. They were perfectly well made, but nothing that I would call craft. The carcases themselves were functional and made to cutting-edge standards, with undermount drawer slides and so on; it was the parts you could see – the doors, drawers and end panels – that were the problem.
The clients had been referred to me by one of their colleagues. Martha said they were happy with the basic cabinets, but there was something she couldn’t stand about their looks. As soon as I arrived for a first meeting, I knew what it was: The cabinets were “walnut,” which in this case meant maple-veneered MDF with a semi-opaque medium-dark-brown finish. Martha’s eyes were used to real wood.
By way of illustration, I pointed to the cutting board by the sink. “This is walnut,” I said. I didn’t criticize the cabinets; I simply explained that the builder had probably chosen them because they were well made and more affordable than they would have been with walnut faces. She listed the details she wanted to have changed and I put together a proposal, which she and her husband accepted. The scope of work included removing the mixer stand, which I took to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore; refacing the cabinet end panels, including those on the island; making new doors and drawer faces; and switching out the vaguely Craftsman-style brackets supporting the overhang of the island counter with more modern brackets in welded metal. I was especially keen to replace the glazed doors at the top of the cabinets along the wall; instead of making them with rails and stiles, the original cabinetmakers had simply cut out a rectangular opening in each blank of MDF, probably with a CNC router, and left the inside corners round. In place of glass bead, they’d fastened the glass in the rabbet with flexible “glass bead” in “walnut.” Ouch.
I refaced the cabinets with custom-veneered panels that I cut to size, edged and fitted by hand. I made new glazed doors out of solid walnut with mortise-and-tenon joints, proper rabbets and wooden glass bead. Then I took them to a locally owned fabricator, Heitink Veneers, to have them faced with sequence-matched offcuts from the rest of the doors and drawer faces so the grain would run continuously from the tops of those doors through the ones below.
Late in the day, I was still dreaming about getting a dog when Mark texted me that he had a surprise waiting at home. “Is it a dog?” I asked. He refused to say. If it was a dog, that would certainly be a wild coincidence. As I pulled into the parking area at the top of the driveway that evening, a young cream-colored dog with rusty speckles on her legs ran down the hill from the house, barking ferociously, convinced that she was guarding Mark and Jonas from an intruder. “Henny!” I cried, the name inspired on the spur of the moment by her spots, which reminded me of a speckled hen. “It’s OK! I live here. I’m not going to harm your men.”
Mark told me how she came to be there. He’d been on his way home, driving along a favorite back road, when he reached a three-way intersection. The dog was standing there while two other drivers, who had each pulled over, were discussing what to do. “I’ll take her,” said Mark. He picked her up and held her in his arms. “She smelled like a baby,” he remembers; she was perfectly clean and well fed, not the condition you’d expect in a stray. Like Lucy, she appeared to be a cross between a pit bull and a Lab.
We reported her to the shelter, certain her owners must be looking for her, but no one ever called. So she joined our household.
I often took Henny to my shop, where she dreamed of playing with Louis. In typical feline form, he refused to acknowledge her presence. She’d lie down on the floor in disappointment and chew wood scraps to console herself. When I delivered pieces of work downtown, I took her with me in the truck. She sat in the front seat and napped, waiting for my return. Though quick to bark in defense of her family, she was exceptionally ingratiating toward one person: Mark. She’d laid her claim on him the day he brought her home. With the utmost delicacy, she would crawl, not jump, into his lap, and gaze adoringly into his eyes. She grudgingly acknowledged that I was the one who shared his bed.
I have been stuck in a little too deep on peasant furniture and have forgotten to announce this: I am presenting at Colonial Williamsburg’s 26th annual “Working Wood in the 18th Century” conference Jan. 25-28.
This year’s theme is “By the Book,” and it will focus on the relationship between the printed word and woodworking. I was asked to give a presentation on the history of woodworking books (one of my favorite topics), and I’ll also do a demonstration on using M. Hulot’s workbench for chairmaking operations.
Hulot’s bench is so ubiquitous among chairmakers that even Chester Cornett in Eastern Kentucky worked on one. And it is still used today.
Also Lost Art Press-related, Whitney B. Miller, author of “Henry Boyd’s Freedom Bed” will present a talk on Henry Boyd and the development of his life story into a children’s book.
Of course, the conference schedule is packed with demonstrations by top-notch woodworkers and carpenters, and I am excited to be able to sit in on many of the presentations. Check out the list here. I’m particularly excited to see Harold Caldwell, Mary Herbert and Shelby Christensen’s presentation on Joseph Moxon’s techniques in his section on carpentry.
In-person registration for the event closes tomorrow at midnight. So make a decision in the clutch and make the trip if you can. Register here.
If you register or already registered, please leave a comment below. If there are enough Lost Art Press readers going, perhaps we can organize a happy hour or a meet-up during the conference.
I hope to see you there. This is my first visit to Colonial Williamsburg (really!), so be gentle.
Editor’s note: The third edition of “Cut & Dried” should arrive in February. You can sign up to be notified when it arrives here. In this post, author Richard Jones explains his update to Chapter 6.
Rombald’s Moor: The opening image to Chapter 6.
In 2021, I decided I ought to update “Cut & Dried,” and the third reprint of it at the end of 2024 was a good opportunity to do so. For a long time I had been aware of two ways to determine wood moisture content, i.e., the “dry basis” (db) and the “wet basis” (wb). In Section 6.6 Measuring Wood Moisture Content in the already printed book, I emphasised we woodworkers use only wood’s dry weight as the base weight to assess wood moisture content. This dry basis methodology wasn’t actually named in the book and nor was the alternative wet basis methodology named or described except the wet basis was hinted at in an exchange I had with a furniture student at the end of page 76 and into page 77.
However, since the last printing of “Cut & Dried” in 2019, things have evolved and environmental issues are ever more pressing. The drive is on to reduce carbon emissions, reduce particulates and pollutants etc. I am not here to proselytise on these issues but burning biomass fuel in the form of logs, wood chips, pellets etc. is one potential source of particulates and pollution. Many people and organisations around the world burn biomass fuel for heating homes, cooking, industrial boilers etc., and burning wet fuel is both inefficient and pollutant. The U.K. government, for example, created legislation to regulate the supply of biomass fuel, including setting the maximum moisture content levels for biomass fuel suppliers, and putting in place organisations to verify that such suppliers meet required government standards.
Crucially the authorised method of determining wood moisture content in the biomass fuel sector is the wet basis. It’s the case that the biomass fuel sector might be considered peripheral to us woodworkers with our focus on making things out of wood, and where we want to know its moisture content, but the biomass fuel sector, like use, require felled trees, so there is an environmental impact which deserves some discussion in “Cut & Dried.”
To illustrate the difference between dry basis and wet basis calculations for wood moisture content I’m including some text from the latest iteration of section 6.6 of “Cut & Dried,” but modified slightly for this blog post’s purposes.
A learner approached me with the following figures for a piece of wood both before and after oven-drying:
Wet Weight = 20 grammes
Oven-Dry Weight = 15 grammes
This learner questioned the calculated moisture content result. Using the formula already provided she calculated: ((20 – 15) / 15) X 100 = 33.3%MCdb. This learner, in trying to grasp the basis of the calculation, changed the formula to calculate thus: ((WW – ODW) / WW) X 100 giving the sum ((20 – 15) / 20) X 100 = 25%wb. We discussed the different results, i.e., 33.3 percent and 25 percent, and it is easy to mentally visualise a 5 gramme weight loss is a quarter of the 20 gramme wet weight of the sample, i.e., 25 percent. Similarly, it’s quickly apparent that a 5 gramme weight gain is one third (33.3 percent) of 15 grammes, the sample’s oven-dry weight. As soon as the learner understood the base line for the dry basis calculation is the dry weight of the wood, not the pre-dried wet weight, all was clear to her. She was then able to comprehend how, using the dry basis methodology of assessing wood moisture content wood MC figures such as 100 percent or greater were possible, e.g., wet weight, 200 grammes and oven-dry weight of 100 grammes.
This learner’s confusion had led her to unknowingly stumble upon the methodology for assessing wood moisture content referred to earlier, i.e., the “wet basis” (Forestry Commission, 2011). To calculate the wood moisture content percentage on the wet basis (wb) the formula given by The Forestry Commission (2011, p5) is:
“The MCwb = (the weight of water in a sample/ total initial weight of the sample) X 100.” MCwb as indicated earlier, means Moisture Content Wet Basis. Results are expressed as a percentage.
Further reading, if so desired, can be found at the following links:
This gorgeous book (we can say that without being braggadocious because we replicated the design from the Swedish original) teaches you techniques for cutting triangle chips, fingernail cuts, lines and letters — plus you’ll learn what kind of wood, knives and tools you need to get started, and techniques for painting your finished work. You’ll find 15 projects, from simple decorations on knife handles and signs to more demanding objects such as boxes and combs.
In addition to providing practical knowledge, “Karvsnitt” opens a window into older slöjd and folk art, and provides fascinating in-depth descriptions of the traditional meanings of different patterns and symbols.
“Blåudd” (Blue chip) has two ridge borders with single-sided triangle chips and a X-shaped border with fire-eyes in between. “Rödkryss” (Red cross) has an X-shaped border with lines running through each cross, which are cut before the three-sided triangle chips. Spoon carvers: Top left Jarrod Dahl; top right Derek Sanderson, with a kolrosed braid pattern. The rest are made by the author.
The spoons you carve will be too beautiful to stash away in some box. They deserve to be displayed on the wall! This spoon rack has many names. In Sweden, it comes in local variations, such as the spoon chair, spoon bar, spoon tree, spoon shelf, spoon rack and spoon hedge. It might be fun to check the archives of your local museum to see what it was called and how both the shape and pattern have been designed where you live.
Level of difficulty: intermediate Tools: Froe, maul, axe, drawknife, sheath knife, fine-toothed Japanese saw, chisel 18mm (11/16″), small wooden mallet, chip carving knife. Material: Straight-grained birch.
Method Split out a piece of straight-grained birch, ~40 x 4 x 2 cm (15-3/4″ x 1-9/16″ x 13/16″). Carve it smooth and evenly thick in the shaving horse or plane it with a smooth plane on a workbench. Cut a wide bevel on the front side, on both top and bottom. Space the spoon holes evenly on the side facing the wall. They should be 25mm (1″) wide. The wall between each hole should be 10–12mm (~3/8″). Saw cuts 12mm (1/2″) deep. Hollow out the gaps with a chisel. Place the blank against a flat board that can take marks from the chisel. To avoid unexpected tear-out, remove half the material with the first cut before turning the blank and clean-cutting in line with the depth mark from the other side. Carve the sides of the spoon holes and drill holes for screws or nails about 20mm (13/16″) from the end grain. Clean-carve all the sawn surfaces.
Sketch the pattern. Divide the front into rectangular sections and mark them with crosses. Draw single-sided triangle chips a short distance from the centerline of each cross to create a flat surface of about 2mm (1/16″) in the shape of a cross or X-shaped cross. If you feel confident, you can also cut them directly, without sketching. Leave about 1mm (1/32″) of flat surface toward the sides.
The long V-shaped grooves can also be cut with a small V-tool, but the chip carving knife creates a deeper blackness in the bottom of the cut.
Where the crosses meet, a ridge is formed between them, creating a fire-eye. It’s most practical to make all the cuts with the same angle along the entire border at once. Start with all the 90° angles and finish with the 30° angles. More detailed descriptions can be found in the chapter on cutting techniques. Paint and wax, then hang your spoon rack in the kitchen. Warning! Daily use of wooden spoons with carved patterns can lead to a lifelong addiction.
Detail on a mangle board from Nord-Trøndelag, Norway. The white cowrie shell is a small porcelain-like shell from the Indian Ocean that has been used to decorate harnesses for draft animals. Its shape was an exotic feature in folk culture and was often painted or incorporated into patterns. Here, the border consists of elliptical grooves, known as vesicae piscis, and three-sided triangle chips combined with V-shaped grooves.
Editor’s Note: One of these days, I’d like to try making the hanging tool rack for the ATC or DTC a la this project from Jögge – can’t see why it wouldn’t work!
