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The stuff I write about Stanley's metallic scrub planes always gets me in trouble with the people who use the tool to dress the faces of rough lumber. You can find my stories here and here. You can find the floggings on any of the forum sites (just search under "Schwarz"+"pin-headed mouth-breather").

In any case, I think it's lovely if you use one of these planes to dress the faces of your lumber. But I really like using it for edges, a use that seems to be supported by some documents and chats I've had with an older union carpenter. The tool is a tracheid-chomping monster on edges, a fact that I was reminded of yesterday.

I was faced with making a panel out of some Eastern white pine for an upcoming story in Popular Woodworking on gluing up panels. The long edges of the boards were really waney. I was going to have to remove 1" of width on each edge to get to the good material. So I marked out my scribe lines with a panel gauge, grabbed my scrub plane (instead of a hatchet or drawknife – other good options) and went to work.

Using short, choppy strokes, I could hog off more than 1/16" in a pass. Each edge took less time than Lucinda Williams took to sing me one of her new songs off of "Little Honey." Within about 12 minutes, all four edges were done and ready for the jointer plane.

Sure, I could have used the Powermatic 66, but I don't like missing a minute of Lucinda.

— Christopher "numb as a flounder" Schwarz

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Sometimes the best innovations are so simple it's a wonder that they aren't everywhere. This week, Mike Siemsen of Chisago City, Minn., sent me an e-mail about his new workbench that opened my head like a can opener.

Siemsen, who runs Mike Siemsen's School of Woodworking, recently completed building a very close copy of Peter Nicholson's workbench featured in the early 19th-century classic: "The Mechanic's Companion, Or, The Elements and Practice of Carpentry," which you can download for free from Google.

Siemsen developed the workbench with the input of period woodworker Dean Jansa. (Remember this marking gauge he built for Popular Woodworking? Let's all encourage Dean to write more.) The bench developed by Siemsen and Jansa looks a lot like Nicholson's – with one small upgrade that is amazingly useful.

The bench has a small gap between its two top boards. Look through the gap and you can see the transverse bearers that support the top. This gap allows you to do some really cool things with your planes and saws. By dropping a batten into the gap and onto the transverse bearers you can plane across the grain of a board (called traversing). Wedge the board against the planing stop plus a batten in the gap and you can work diagonally. You also can use the batten as a bench hook for sawing. And you can use the gap to store tools.

Is there precedence for this? Yes. George Ellis's Planing Board (which I describe here) uses wedges in the same manner. And a Nicholson-style workbench shown in Audel's "Carpenters Guide" shows a bench with a loose top. You could easily see how the gap could have been exploited….

In any case, it works. Check it out here and on his blog.

— Christopher Schwarz

Here you can see how you can use a batten in the gap to work across the grain.

Here the batten is used with the planing stop to work in a more diagonal fashion.

Here it's a bench hook for sawing.

And here the gap is used for tool storage. Next week we'll show how it makes julienne fries.

It’s funny what you can accomplish when you’re ignorant. No one told me I couldn’t cut joinery with a hacksaw, which has fine teeth and little set. But that’s exactly what I used to do -- until I took a class in hand joinery and learned all about backsaws.

Same thing goes for scraping. For years I used a card scraper on pine until I read somewhere that you can’t scrape softwoods.

You can scrape softwoods, such as pine, with a sharp scraper, a light touch and a slightly different angle of attack. When I scrape hardwoods, my card scraper is usually about 65° from the surface of the wood. When I scrape softwoods, I increase that angle slightly until two things happen: I get curls instead of dust and the grain stops looking fuzzy.

Other lies:
• Always work “with the grain.”
• Curved edges cannot make flat surfaces.
• Grits have no flavor.

— Christopher Schwarz

It’s easy to get grumpy about the way you work in the shop and resist the newfangled features that appear on tools. To be sure, some of these “innovations” are boneheaded (the bench chisels with rasp teeth on the blade spring quickly to mind).

But other ideas are great, and you just have to give them a chance.

This month, I embraced two innovations that I resisted for a decade. I actively mocked these features on tools in both public and private. I went out of my way to avoid buying them. I rolled my eyes when I saw them on tools in other woodworker’s shops. Now I see my error.

1. Lasers on miter saws. We’ve had a dozen laser-guided miter saws in our shop, and they never did anything for me. But after we installed a version with two lasers – one laser on each side of the kerf – in our miter saw’s stand did I swallow the bait. I stopped marking out all my cuts with a try square. I simply laid my tape on the work and lined the laser up with the marks on the tape.

2. Integrated lights on drill/drivers. My first router, an inherited 1970s Craftsman, had a light on it. But the openings in the base were so tiny that it was like peering into a really well-lit shadowbox, which was shooting chips at you. But somehow an impact driver ended up on my bench with an integrated light. I love it. While working inside cabinets I can now use both my eyes and my fingertips to get screws in their holes. It’s much easier and faster with a light showing the way.

Egads. What could be next? Taiwanese moulding planes? Belt sanders? Chardonnay?

— Christopher Schwarz

The August 2000 issue of Popular Woodworking is one of my favorites. On the cover is a secretary that Troy Sexton built that was the result of a lot of hard work by the entire staff. We worked with Troy during almost an entire year to pull together the story about his excellent design.

So you can imagine my dismay when the magazine went out to subscribers, and my phone started ringing off the hook with angry readers on the other end of the line.

“Where,” they would ask, “is the story on wainscoting?”

It seems that as we were carefully massaging the story on the secretary we had messed up the cover. The top headline on the cover was “Wainscotting in a Weekend.” Only there was no story about wainscotting in the issue. We had removed it and then forgotten to change the cover.

Grrr.

It seems that we spend most of our days at the magazine making our own mistakes and cleaning up the mistakes of others. That is the job description that should be on my business card (if I had business cards – long story).

Some of my mistakes are mistakes of omission. For example, for the last 12 months I have been meaning to write a review of the shoulder plane kit produced by Legacy Toolworks. It’s a gorgeous kit and looks about 10 times better than the shoulder plane kit I’d built from Shepherd Tool years ago. But I overbooked myself this year and haven’t started the kit. And now Legacy has announced it is closing its doors. If I had been able to review the kit, perhaps that could have helped them.

Other mistakes are what we call in Arkansas: “Getting bit by the dumb-a**.” This is where you do something so stupid that the tale should begin with, “Hold my beer while I….” Such as when I told 200,000 readers to run the router the wrong way to cut a rabbet on a door frame. I didn’t mean to do it, I just got turned around and never caught my error.

So it should come as no surprise that toolmakers also make mistakes. Most readers probably think that the tools that come into our shop have been carefully tested and tuned by the manufacturers to make sure they are perfect. Based on how many goofed-up tools I’ve seen in 13 years, I doubt that’s the case.

And in fact, I take it as a mark of the toolmakers’ honesty that they send us one right off the warehouse floor.

Here’s a small sample of some of the stuff we’ve seen:

DeWalt: The company makes good tools, but we had a jigsaw come into the shop where the blade clamping mechanism failed. It went click, click, and then the blade dropped out like a rotten tooth. When DeWalt introduced its first hybrid table saw, the first rip fence we got was twisted. So was the second. The third replacement was fine.

Delta: When Delta introduced its C-arm drum sander, we were all excited in the shop. We set it up, plugged it in and cranked the puppy up. It spun up and then spun down forever. The motor burned out after three seconds.

Harbor Freight: It might sound too easy to pick on this discount seller. But they sell tools and people buy them. So here goes: When we tested the company’s plunge router, the collet failed. The bit slipped out and flew out. That was one of the days that I wished we had some Depends in the first aid kit.

Black & Decker: Here’s every tool marketer’s worst nightmare. Black & Decker sent us its new cordless tape measure. Now let’s ignore for a moment the possibility that you do not need an electric tape measure. So Senior Editor David Thiel takes it out of the box in front of the entire staff and demonstrates how it works. The tape extends about a foot and then dies forever.

Metabo: Cordless drills aren’t supposed to shoot flames out the back are they?

Lobo: When we tested its edge sander the sheet metal base flexed like tin foil. You would turn the machine on, and the thing would do the twist like Chubby Checker.

Powermatic: Yes, even Powermatic. An early version of its benchtop mortiser had a flaw in the piece of metal that joined the motor to the arm mechanism. The gears on the interior stripped out. So when you pulled the arm, the motor never moved.

Tools for Working Wood: The Ray Iles mortising chisels are great, but one of my students at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking snapped the tip off one when working in poplar. I heard it from across the room. It turned out that a few of the tools had been made from A2 instead of D2. It did make for an amusing day as everyone crowded around the chisel like the victim of a car accident.

Lie-Nielsen Toolworks: I had a narrow iron shoulder plane that was an early production run. The bronze grip wouldn’t stay in place when you retracted the iron. When I turned the screw, the plane disassembled itself in my hands.

Veritas: An early version of the Veritas cabinet scraper (an adaptation of the No. 80) would clog after a few passes like Crystal Gayle’s shower’s drain. The company has since fixed that problem and the tool works great.

Stanley Tools: During a test of jack planes, we had a tool that simply would not function. It was like it was haunted. If you snugged up the frog screw to where you thought it should be, you couldn’t adjust the iron. If you loosened the frog screw so you could adjust the iron, the thing would chatter and shake like a Vega going 56 mph. We never figured that one out.

Wenzloff & Sons: While teaching a sawing class at Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking, one student’s carcase saw was misbehaving. It was tearing out the shoulders of his tenons something fierce. At first I though it was user error. Turns out the saw was filed for rip when it was supposed to be crosscut.

Let me conclude by saying that mistakes slip out the door for every toolmaker (and magazine editor). We’ve never heard of any toolmaker with zero returns. The real test of a toolmaker (and editor) is how you deal with the mistakes when they occur.

We published the “Wainscotting in a Weekend” story in the following issue and have not made an error on the cover since that day. And almost all of the toolmakers above are known for cheerfully replacing any defective unit and then correcting the problem.

And that’s one of the reasons we’re all still in business.

— Christopher Schwarz

Yesterday I finished up work on the dry sink that is the cover project for the Spring 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine (Issue 13). As always, the finishing part of the project was as much an adventure as designing and building it.

The project is made from Eastern white pine, so we knew that coloring it with a pigment or dye would result in blotching. My first gut feeling was to paint the thing – I've seen a lot of painted dry sinks. But paint would hide all the nice wood selection and joinery, so we opted to first try something else.

First we experimented with tea stains (yes, made from tea) and made some sample boards. Then we added some orange dye to the tea. Then we switched gears and tried adding dye to an oil/varnish blend. No dice.

So we fell back on our pumpkin pine finish from a few issues ago. It involves a stain controller, a maple stain and shellac. The test boards looked good, so on Monday I added the stain controller in the early morning. That evening I added the maple stain. Yuck.

The result looked good in places and blotchy in others. The stain controller didn't seem to work consistently over the entire piece.

So Senior Editor Glen D. Huey brought in a can of Olde Century Colors "Yankee Blue." I swallowed hard (being a cracker-loving Southerner) and applied two coats. Now I'm happy.

The experience reminded me of a column I wrote for our Autumn 2006 issue, which discussed the role of paint in furniture-making. So I thought this would be a good time to reprint it here.

— Christopher Schwarz

“Many of the things I make are not treated in any way afterwards, because
nothing that I can put on them will enhance the beauty of the natural wood.”

— James Krenov, "A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” (Linden)

The second Welsh stick chair I ever built was made using both traditional methods and traditional materials. That meant elm for the seat, white oak for the legs and the arm bow, and ash for the spindles.

My plan was to color the chair with a brown stain that would visually tie these three species together. So after carefully preparing all my parts, making a few test boards using stains and hues that I was familiar with, I colored the chair one Saturday afternoon.

When the stain dried, the chair didn’t look like I had hoped. But I told myself to be patient; a topcoat of clear finish can change the final appearance of a finishing job. And I was right; the chair looked even worse with a topcoat.

Something about the stain color I chose, the wood I picked for the chair or my finishing technique made these three species together look like a visual jumble. The coloring was so inconsistent that my eye would jump around the chair, never sure what was important or where to look next.

So I pored over my books on chairmaking and then slept on the problem. By morning, I knew the answer: Paint the thing. Lots of early furniture was painted, especially Windsor-style chairs that used a variety of species in their construction.

But there was a problem here. A mental problem. Like most woodworkers, painting a piece of furniture was something of a last resort in my head. We woodworkers are supposed to celebrate the grain of the wood and finish it to enhance its swirls and swoops. A coat of paint on furniture is seen as evidence that something is amiss. Maybe we used inferior materials. Perhaps we chose our materials so poorly that the grain selection is ugly. Maybe our joinery is gappy. Or we are incapable of preparing a surface for a stain and topcoat. Or we simply cannot finish.

I hate stripping finish, so I decided to give the paint a try. I purchased a quart of dark Windsor green and some primer. I set to work covering up my misdeeds and pondering where I could stash this chair in my house so my woodworking friends would never see it.

After two coats, the chair looked radically different. Details that had been obscured by the grain or stain color jumped out in sharp relief. During construction, I had carved a small gutter around the perimeter of the seat that – when painted – appeared as a perfect dark line rimming the work. I had spent an hour planing and filing a nice curved chamfer on three edges of the crest rail at the top of the chair. Those chamfers now shined, no longer shying away from attention. And a chamfer on the swooping arm bow looked clearly tied to the chamfers on the crest rail.

But there was more. When I stood back a few steps I could really and truly see the chair. It was like a graphic drawing of a chair. It looked more like a shiny green animal ready to pounce than a jumble of sticks covered in brown goo. It looked like the chair I had seen in my head when I set out to build it. I simply had to cover the wood with two coats of paint to uncover its true form.

Years later now, I’ve found that painting furniture well is a skill that requires careful cultivation. Since painting that first chair, I’ve painted a full set that I’ve built and have been experimenting with different mixes of paint and varnish (to give the paint a luminescence) and different brushing techniques. Painting a chair is as challenging as any hand-applied finish I’ve ever tried.

And now I know the truth: Paint doesn’t obscure mistakes. Instead, paint can reveal the form (good, bad or average) that we sometimes try to hide with flashy joinery, showy wood and shiny finishes. The opaque pigment lays bare our skills as designers of furniture, which is perhaps one of the real reasons we avoid painting the things we build. WM

— Chrisopher Schwarz

There are so many fine Western sawmakers today that it's hard to believe that there were virtually none in 1996 – the year Independence Tool was founded.

New sawmakers are cropping up so quickly that it's tough for me to keep track (and heck, it's my job). I do try to stay on top of the market as best I can, and during the last couple years I've gotten to use saws from almost every maker – thanks to the handsawing classes I've taught in Michigan, Kentucky and Oregon.

I'm telling you all this because I've been working with a dovetail saw these last two weeks that has blown me away. It is, compared to its peers, the first among equals.

The dovetail saw from Andrew Lunn's Eccentric Toolworks is a super-tuned jewel of a saw. It starts easier than any Western saw I've used – much like a Japanese saw. It flies through ½" and ¾" stock with ease. It is extraordinarily balanced. It leaves a whisper of a kerf behind.

And on top of all that, the saw has handmade touches (such as carving on the tote and engraving on the brass back) that make it as nice to look at as it is to use.

The price of all this amazingness? As of Jan. 5, 2009, it's $350.

So who the heck is Andrew Lunn? And where did he come from?

Denizens of the discussion groups, such as WoodNet, have seen Lunn's work. And if you were at the Woodworking in America conference, you might have seen some of Lunn's saws in Mike Wenzloff's booth (Wenzloff graciously agreed to host a couple toolmakers in his booth).

But Lunn is not a professional toolmaker. He's a 37-year-old 911 paramedic who lives in Worthington, Ohio, and makes saws in his spare time. He describes himself as "obsessed" with saws, and that's not an overstatement.

His dovetail saws are different than other premium saws in several significant ways. The blade is thinner than any other Western saw I've used at .015" thick. Other saws use steel that is .018" or .020" thick. One criticism of this thin steel is that it will kink more easily if the saw is abused. Perhaps. But I think the saw's blade feels very steady.

The teeth are minimally set – Lunn sets them with a special hammer that he forged himself. As a result, the saw removes very little wood and produces a razor-thin kerf that looks like a kerf from a Japanese saw. This is one of the other factors that makes the saw plunge through wood.

Also different: The saw's rake. Most commercial saws have a consistent rake on every tooth. Relax the rake and the saw is easier to start but slow. Tighten it up and the saw becomes more aggressive but harder to start.

Lunn has relaxed the rake at the toe, which makes the saw easy to start. In the middle of the blade the rake is almost zero, which makes the saw aggressive once you start it. And he's relaxed the rake at the heel as well, which prevents the saw from sticking there. It really works.

A criticism of this filing is that it is going to be a challenge for the user to replicate. Perhaps, but you can always get Lunn to resharpen it.

Another interesting difference is the folded brass back. The back is narrower at the toe than at the heel, which reduces weight at the toe. Also, the saw's blade is "canted," which means it's narrower at the toe than at the heel. Both of these tweaks help give the saw its excellent balance.

And finally, the tote is thicker than those on other saws. When I first picked it up I thought the tote felt too thick (so did Senior Editor Glen D. Huey). But after working with the saw a bit, we changed our minds on that score. It's a very comfortable handle.

The handmade touches only add to the whole package. The saw uses traditional split nuts, with a hand-engraved medallion. The tote itself feels very handmade with no sharp edges for your hand and has the subtle toolmarks of good hand work. The engraving is just cool.

All in all, I'm profoundly impressed and recommend this saw without reservation. Lunn loaned it to us to try, but it's not going back. I am buying this one personally for my shop at home.

To contact Lunn about making a saw for you, visit his web site at Eccentric Toolworks.

To download a chart comparing the saws in our shop right now, click the file below.

Dovetail Saw.pdf (23.5 KB)

— Christopher Schwarz

These last couple weeks I’ve gotten to break in my new Benchcrafted wagon vise while building a dry sink for the next issue of Woodworking Magazine.

The dry sink is enormous (it looked so small on paper). And every surface has passed under a handplane. The wide stock was prepped entirely by hand. The narrower stuff I processed first with a powered jointer and planer – and then handplanes.

I’ve been planing narrow and wide stock on edge, and the faces of wide panels. I’ve been planing with the grain, diagonally and across the grain with a fore plane, jointer plane and smoothing plane. I’ve been planing joinery with a plow plane and a fillister plane. And I’ve been planing mouldings with hollows and rounds and a beading plane.

As a result, I’ve been planing what seems like acres of pine. I’ve filled up the garbage can at the end of my bench twice with shavings.

So I feel confident in saying that the Benchcrafted vise has gotten a good workout with a lot of the tools you’ll find in a shop that blends both power and hand tools. And with each workholding challenge I presented to the Benchcrafted, it swatted them all down with ease.

The vise’s sliding block moves quickly along its threads, so you’re not spinning the wheel endlessly. And you can engage it with both subtlety and enormous force. The vise holds its position when you clamp a panel and want to plane across the grain but don’t want to bow the work – a delicate balancing act that would cause my old hillbilly wagon vise to slip.

And when I wanted to use the vise to really clamp something hard – such as a drawer side – it made the workpiece feel like it was physically attached to the benchtop. Totally solid. It also was robust enough to disassemble joints when used like a spreader clamp (this operation would pull my old vise apart).

So I’m sure you’re thinking: “Great, but is it worth $350?”

For me, absolutely. I spent about $250 to build my bench out of yellow pine, and so the $350 Benchcrafted vise means I still have a bench that works better than any other I’ve worked on in my life for less than half of the scratch I would pay for a high-quality commercial workbench.

Is it better than a traditional tail vise? So far, I think it is. We’ll see if the Benchcrafted sags in use like a tail vise does – only time will tell that. But what I like about the Benchcrafted vise compared to a tail vise is that I don’t have the large “no work” zone you get with a tail vise. You cannot pound or lean on a tail vise or it will quickly sag.

How does it compare to adding a quick-release vise with a big wooden chop? I think it’s a draw. I like having the full support of the Benchcrafted wagon vise, but I also really like the quick-release function of a steel vise. If you don’t have the money for a Benchcrafted vise, a quick-release vise in the end vise position of your workbench is the next best thing.

Some will balk at the price. Fine. This vise isn’t for you. Me? I’m sick of the low-quality vise hardware that has passed through our shop during the last decade. It used to be easy to buy fantastic vises from England and America. But now you are rolling the dice when buying new vises. I’ve seen decent new vises from the emerging economies, but I’ve also seen some stuff that went right back into the box and back to the seller. Junk.

There are no regrets with the Benchcrafted. It is impeccably made, overbuilt like something from the USSR’s space program and flawless in use.

And that’s good enough for me.

— Christopher Schwarz

On Halloween night in 1993 I went to the lumberyard in search of wood to build a sitting bench for our kitchen in Lexington, Ky. Like any good woodworker, I sorted through the entire pile of 1 x 12s to find boards that were straight, flat and looked good.

I was frustrated that night because I couldn't find wood that looked right. It was all too boring, clear and knot-free. Yes, that sentence is correct. There is something about knots that I've always liked.

Stare at them long enough and you'll realize (without the assistance of illegal substances) they look like a tree trapped inside a tree. They are the important intersection between branch and bole. And knots point out that wood is not just a homogenous and bland substance.

Of course, they can be quite ugly and distracting as well.

So I struggle with my knot fetish. One of my favorite places to put them is in drawer bottoms and in cabinet backs. For the most part, they are then hidden by the underwear, socks and books held by the project. But every once is a while, you'll pull out just the right book and the knot will be staring at you, like an unlidded eye.

This dry sink project features a few well-placed knots. Sure, there are some in the back, but there are also two small ones in the left side of the cabinet. One looks like a falling comet to me.

The top has two massive knots that were a real challenge to plane without tearing things out. And though they're quite visible now, I know that whatever is placed on the top of this dry sink will keep them obscured until just the right moment.

— Christopher Schwarz

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I really need to start keeping a list of all the things I use my sawbenches for. Sure, I saw stuff on them. And I stand on them while go-go dancing in the shop to amuse visitors. Those things are obvious. What's not so obvious is how often they get me out of weird jams with my handplanes.

On Monday as I was planing down the face frame of this dry sink, the sawbench was the obvious choice to lend a hand. I wedged it between my bench and the dry sink, and voila. The job was done.

I also plane down table aprons in the same fashion with a sawbench (this particular sawbench was made by craftsman John Wilson; all mine seem to end up in the shops of friends). Frequently, I'll assemble cabinets or glue up panels on them as well.

If you've come up with other good uses for the shop appliance, post them here. Your suggestion might convince another woodworker that they should build a pair.

— Christopher Schwarz

Looking for More Woodworking Information?
• Sign up for our newsletters to get free plans, techniques and reviews HERE.
• Looking for free articles from Woodworking Magazine? Click HERE.
• Like hand tools? Read all our online articles on hand work HERE.
• Want to subscribe to Woodworking Magazine? It's $19.96/year. Click HERE.