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Posted 4/23/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery | Saws

For those of you who chisel out all your waste when dovetailing, this post is not for you. Please move along. There's nothing to see here.

OK, now that we're alone: Have you ever been confused about which frame saw you should use to remove the waste between your pins and tails? I have. For years I used a coping saw and was blissfully happy.

Then I took an advanced dovetail class with maestro Rob Cosman and he made a strong case that a fret saw was superior because you could remove the waste in one fell swoop. So, like any good monkey, I bought a fret saw and did it that way for many years.

A fret saw's thin blade drops into the kerf left by a dovetail saw. Then you just turn and saw.

Here are the results left by the fret saw.

But fret saws aren't perfect. Almost all of them require some tuning. You need to file some serrations in the pads that clamp the blade, otherwise it's all stroke, stroke, sproing! Oh and the blades tend to break a lot. Or bend.

And fret saws are slower. I use 11.5 tpi scrollsaw blades and it takes about 30 strokes to get through the waste between my typical tails in hardwood.

If you want to see a good video on how to tune up a fretsaw, check out Rob Cosman's site. He shows you how to hot rod the handle and bend the blade for the best performance.

About Coping Saws
What I like about coping saws is that they cut faster. I use an 18 tpi blade from Tools for Working Wood. (I think they're made by Olson.) The blades cut wicked fast thanks to their deeper gullets. It takes me 12 to 14 strokes to remove the waste between tails.

Coping saws require two swooping passes to remove the waste. Drop the teeth in your kerf and make swoop one.

Come back and make swoop two. Sometimes you have to rotate the blade to do this.

The other thing I like about the coping saw is that its throat is deeper (5" vs. 2-3/4" on the fret saw), which allows me to handle some drawers without turning the blade. Also, the blades are far more robust and almost never come loose. I'm quite partial to the German-made Olson coping saw. It's about $12 and beats the pants off the stuff at the home centers.

The major downside to the coping saw is that you have to remove the waste in two passes instead of one. Because the coping saw's blade is thick, it usually won't drop down into the kerf left by your dovetail saw (unless you saw dovetails with a chainsaw). So you make two swooping passes to clear the waste.

After the last couple weeks of constant dovetailing (hence all the dovetail posts – sorry about that), I think I'm going to put my fret saw away for a while. In other words, I'm going to stop fretting and just cope (sorry about that as well).

— Christopher Schwarz

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Comments [19]

Planing a Dovetailed Box

Posted 4/22/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Handplanes | Joinery

There are lots of people who will show you how to handplane the edge of a board. A few less who will show you how to really flatten the wide face of a board. A smaller number will show you how to flatten a glued-up panel (stay tuned – that tutorial is already written) and even fewer who will demonstrate how to plane an assembled carcase.

After lunch I dressed a small dovetailed box I'm building and took some photos along the way. Have a minute? Get the alcohol!

Really, get the alcohol. A dovetailed carcase has a lot of end grain, so moistening the end grain with denatured alcohol will make the work easier.

Set up a planing platform for your carcase. Big carcasses can be sleeved over the end of your bench. Small carcasses and drawers can be worked on a platform that's clamped to your bench.

As with all aspects of hand work, everything begins with stock selection. I try to pick boards with the straightest grain so I can plane them in both directions – from the ends and into the middle of the carcase. This avoids blowing out the end grain of the pins and tails.

If the board has a pronounced grain direction (which stops me from planing both directions) I'll use a plane with a high pitch to do all the smoothing work – this also allows me to work from the ends and into the middle. High-angle planes can ignore grain direction. And, despite what you've read, you can plane end grain with them. Sharpness fixes almost anything.

Trim the Pins
I trim the pins with a sharp block plane. The reason I prefer a block plane is that it's quite narrow, so I can work in small areas without planing away stuff I want to keep. You can skew the blade to make the cut easier. And don't forget the alcohol. Work from the end toward the middle – but just trim the end grain, not the face grain.

With the pins trimmed on both ends of one face of my carcase, I need to make a decision. If I'm going to attach moulding to the carcase, I want to ensure those areas are dead flat. (Bending moulding = no fun.) I'm attaching base moulding around this box so I trued its lower section with a jointer plane. Note that I start the plane at the end, work into the middle and lift off in the middle.

Check your work with a straightedge to make sure you're not creating a hill in the middle of your panel. If you are, work the center only until you get it flat.

Smooth the Face
Then use a smoothing plane to dress the face. Start from the ends and work to the middle, lifting at the end of the stroke. At the moment your joints' baselines disappear, you're done.

One difficulty people have here is with boards that have a pronounced grain direction. Here's how I deal with it: Plane "with the grain" on the carcase face for the majority of the panel. Lift off only at the very end.

Then come back and dress the other direction with a high-angle plane, working only a short distance. That way if you have to scrape, it will only be a small area. Now plane the other side of the carcase using these same techniques.

Trim the Tails
Now trim the end grain of the tail boards. Moisten the end grain with alcohol and work from top to bottom (or bottom to top). This prevents you from having any blowout on your tailboards. When the tails have been trimmed, grab the jointer plane and smoothing plane and work from the ends and into the middle again, just like you did on the other two faces.

Note: There are other ways to tackle this job. You can plane a small chamfer on all four corners and plane straight through on all four faces of your carcase. This is faster but risky. If your chamfer isn't big enough, you're toast. You also can fetch the belt sander or random-orbit sander. But you wouldn't be reading this blog entry if you sleep with your sander.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Comments [7]

Dovetailing, Eyetailing and Guttailing

Posted 4/20/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Chisels | Joinery | Saws

The hardest thing about dovetailing isn't the sawing or the chiseling or the layout.

It's the seeing.

I don’t think I can teach anyone to see, but I can show you where to look. Developing your eye – plus your ability to sense the perpendicular – will do more for your dovetailing skills than any jig, square, knife or saw.

Like everything with dovetailing, it all begins at the baseline – the thin scratch across the grain that determines the limits of the joint. When you remove the waste between the tails and the pins, a frequent error is to leave too much material behind, which prevents the joint from closing.

You need to be able to glance at the joint and sense immediately if the baselines on the front and back of your workpiece line up without any waste between them. Ian Kirby and other woodworking instructors recommend using a small square to probe the joint and look for humps and bumps.

I have never had much luck with the small square approach. If I have to probe a joint, I'll do it with the long side of a chisel and see if the tool rocks back and forth on anything. Then I use the same chisel to tease out the garbage.

But it's rare that I ever do that. Instead, I hold the board up to eye level and take a quick look. After enough dovetails, you'll see it and know exactly what to do.

And the truth is, I rarely have to do much to my baselines except chase some little bits of junk in the corners. And that's because I have a good sense of the perpendicular. We're all born with it, but it's like a muscle. You need to work at it.

When I'm chiseling out the waste between my tails and pins I hold the chisel at 90° to the work and stand to the side of the tool to ensure it's at 90°. Again, other woodworking authors recommend you use a square or even a block of wood clamped to your baseline as a reminder. But this is really a "Use the Force Luke" moment. You know 90°. Just position yourself so you can see it.

(Quick side note: The more hand work you do, the more you'll find this comes in handy for boring and mortising especially.)

The other time this sense of 90° comes in handy is when you are sawing your pins out and the waste blocks on the ends of your tail boards. A pencil line or knife line is handy, but the real guide is your gut. You'll know when things are going wrong, even if the line is covered in dust.

Once you start developing these two skills you'll find that you can put your winding sticks away when processing boards with your handplanes. Your sense of square will show you the high spots in a board at a glance.

This blog post is not brought to you by the High Times beauty pageant. Promise.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [7]

English Dovetailed Drawers

Posted 4/17/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

While my dad was sleeping off the flu in February, I was plundering his drawers. The man has an English chest problem like I have a hammer problem. I pulled out all the drawers of his six or seven 19th-century chests of drawers and gave a close look at their construction details.

One of the features I quite liked was the way that some of them dealt with the groove plowed in the sides and drawer front that capture's the drawer bottom. There are lots of ways to deal with the groove so it's not visible on the outside of the drawer.

• You can use drawer slips instead of a groove.
• You can bury the groove in a half-tail in the drawer's side.
• You can, with care, bury the groove in a full tail in the drawer side.
• You can skip the groove and use a plywood bottom and cleats.
• And on and on.

Many of the drawers in my dad's house use what we moderns would call a finger joint at the bottom of the drawer side. It's essentially a half-tail with a 0° slope. It's easy to cut using hand tools, looks pretty good and avoids having a big half-tail at the bottom of the drawer side. Click here to see a photo I took at my dad's.

I used this layout in a couple drawers that I built yesterday and I like it. The only trick comes when you are transferring the tail layout to your pin board. The groove plowed in the finger joint prevents you from getting your knife against the pin board.

So instead, I just used the wall of the groove and a square to strike the knife line on the pin board. It worked fine. There are some other details to my dad's drawers that I'll discuss in future posts. Right now I have to go help shoot a magazine cover.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Comments [7]

Blue Spruce Mallet: A New Favorite

Posted 4/16/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

The last few weeks I've been doing lots of hand joinery, and in that short period of time I have completely fallen for my Blue Spruce Toolworks mallet.

It's the perfect weight (1 lb.) and size (8-1/2" long). It's beautifully finished. It's perfectly balanced. But what is really astonishing about the mallet is how it can take a beating without getting beat up.

Most wooden mallets (round or square) become dogmeat in short order – no matter what sort of wood you use. The Blue Spruce sidesteps that problem by using an acrylic-infused head. Every pore is filled with plastic, yet the mallet feels like wood to your hands and responds like wood when you hit something. That is, it doesn't bounce like a rubber mallet, which should be reserved only for circus clowns.

I've had this Blue Spruce mallet since February, have been using it just about every day and have yet to make a dent in it. It still looks as good as when I got it out of the box. Yes, it is more expensive than the mallets in the $2 bin at Home Depot that smell like a possum's underarm. Yes, you can turn your own for less. Or you can send Dave Jeske at Blue Spruce 80 of your hard earned American dollars and get the most well-designed and durable wooden mallet I've ever used.

Don't just take my word. After messing with my mallet, both Senior Editor Glen D. Huey and Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick bought them. Megan bought a blue one. (The vacuum process that adds the acrylic can also be used to infuse the wood with dye.) Glen got a red one (Psst. Don't tell Glen but some people think it looks a little... uh.. pink.)

I think this plastic technology could be used in other woodworking tools. Blue Spruce already uses it in handles for bench chisels. It would be great for the handles of mortise chisels – those receive a whooping. It also could be used in the totes for saws and planes – these are notoriously fragile. How about a wooden try square made from it? (I assume the acrylic reduces or eliminates the expansion and contraction process.) Hammer handles?

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [27]

Now I Click, Snap and Curse Much Less

Posted 4/15/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery | Marking and Measuring

In the shop, my mechanical pencil is as important as my eyeglasses. I use a mechanical pencil with a 0.5mm lead to darken in my knife lines when cutting dovetails, tenons or other joinery.

I like the really thin lead because I can usually drop it into a knife line and – with just light pressure – the lead will mark only the right and left sides of the knife line. That makes it easier to split my pencil line when sawing.

I know you are beginning to think I have an engineering background. Really, I’m not all that fussy.

While I like my mechanical pencils, I’ve always hated three things about them: the pencil mechanism itself, the lead and the eraser. Oh, and the pocket clip is flimsy, too.

I generally buy the Pentel pencils, which are the top of the line here in Kentucky. Their mechanisms tend to jam; I get about six months out of a pencil. The eraser is as effective as a gummy bear. The lead breaks too easily.

But heck, that’s what you get, right?

Today I was at Staples looking to replace my latest ex-Pentels when I noticed something I’d never seen before: “Super Hi-Polymer Lead,” which is supposed to be 25 percent stronger. (Stronger than what? Stinky cheese?)

I picked up a pack of the stuff with my new soon-to-be-dead pencils and used it to mark half-blind dovetails all afternoon. You know what? It really is stronger than the regular lead. I didn’t snap a single lead through six sets of dovetails. That is a record.

So if you’re a mechanical pencil dweeb like me, check out the Hi-Polymer stuff next time you need a refill. Hey, now I only hate two things about my mechanical pencils.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [23]

Handplanes and Dovetails

Posted 4/14/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Handplanes | Joinery

When most people think about cutting dovetails, they think: handsaws. However, there’s more to dovetailing than sawing. You also need to be mindful of your handplanes when you’re dovetailing. They can create gaps or help prevent them.

This week I’m dovetailing a bunch of drawers and smallish boxes, so my planes are heavy on my mind.

If I remove any material from the inside of this pin board, the joint will become gap-tacular.

First, let’s talk about how handplanes can cause gaps. If you cut your pins and tails for your box and then plane all the inside surfaces, then you are asking for trouble. Planing the inside surfaces of your pin boards will make you look like a crap-tacular sawyer.

Don’t get it? Think about it for a minute: The interior surface of your pin board contains the wide triangles that fit into your tail board. Every stroke of your handplane on the interior of your pin board makes the joint looser and looser by removing the widest part of the joint (the same advice holds true for the belt-sander crowd).

You can, however, plane the interior surfaces of your tail boards with little consequence. The more planing you do, the more trimming you will have to do after assembly, but this is really no big deal.

So how do you avoid this problem? Plane the interiors of all your surfaces before you cut your joinery. This is a good idea for many reasons. First, planing helps remove any twist or bow in your stock, which makes joinery easier. And second, it prevents your joints from getting looser as you refine their surfaces.

For casework, here’s how I do it: First, I dress all the long-grain surfaces with a jointer plane. Then I cut the joinery. Assemble the carcase. Trim the proud nubs. Smooth plane the exterior. Be done with it.

When cutting a cross-grain rabbet, first draw the tool backwards so the nicker can define the shoulder. This results in cleaner cuts (and is historically accurate, thank you Peter Nicholson).

Here's the completed rabbet. It's less than 1/32" and a bit more than 1/64". It's all you need.

Now that we know that handplanes have an evil side, how can we use them to tighten our dovetails? Use a moving fillister plane to cut a shallow rabbet on the inside of each tail board.

This shallow rabbet is the width of your stock’s thickness (use a 3/4”-wide rabbet for 3/4”-thick stock). And the rabbet is less than 1/32” deep. What does this rabbet do? It makes transferring your marks from your tail board to your pin board (or vice-versa) much easier. The mating board nests right into the rabbet so you don’t have to fuss around with lining things up on the baseline.

Senior Editor Glen D. Huey showed me this trick in 2002. He was using it to line up pieces of differing thicknesses, but the rabbet also made transferring the marks from one board to another almost foolproof.

I use a moving fillister plane to cut the shallow rabbets. A true moving fillister has a depth stop and fence to regulate the depth and width of the cut – plus it has a nicker that scores the cross grain ahead of the cut. This reduces tearing.

This shallow rabbet, which is used by other dovetailers such as Rob Cosman, is completely worth the effort to make it. It takes just a few strokes with your plane and prevents an endless cycle of fussing and adjusting.

The Veritas Skew Rabbet Plane meets all the criteria to make this cut, as does the Philly Planes moving fillister plane and vintage moving fillisters. The Lie-Nielsen Skew Block Plane (with nicker) is lacking only a depth stop (you have to count the shavings and be careful if you use it for this purpose).

Next week: How a hammer can tighten up your dovetails.

— Christopher Schwarz

Here I'm pushing the rabbet against my pin board. This makes transferring the shape of the tails a can't miss affair.

Comments [11]

How I Use a Plow Plane

Posted 4/10/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Handplanes | Joinery

Plow planes are some of the easiest joinery planes to use – once you know a few tricks to getting good results. I struggled with the tools until Don McConnell (now a planemaker at Clark & Williams) set me straight years ago with one simple piece of advice:

"Each hand should have a separate job," he said. "One hand holds the fence. The other pushes the tool forward."

Before that point, both of my hands were engaged in job sharing. My hand on the fence was also pushing forward. My hand on the tote was twisting the tool to keep the fence tight on the work.

Here are the other things I've learned about gripping a plow plane over the years:

1. It's a bit like sawing. The hand that holds the tote (or the stock) should be directly lined up with the cut and should swing free. Sometimes this means getting your body over the work (a low bench is helpful here). If your forearm is not in line with the skate of the tool, it's gonna be a roughie.

2. It's a bit like jointing an edge. For my fence hand, I wrap the web between my thumb and index finger around the stems (sometimes called posts) of the tool. I reach my fingers around the fence and touch the work and the front edge of the bench if possible. My thumb is pressing down. If you joint edges of boards by hand, you'll recognize this hand position immediately.

Workholding: Keep it Simple
There are lots of ways to hold your work for plowing. If your end vise and dogs are positioned near the front edge of the bench, you can usually pinch things directly between dogs. You also can use a sticking board, which is a little shelf that holds your work.

Or you can do what I do: Clamp a batten to the benchtop to brace the edge of your workpiece. And plow into the tip of a holdfast. This is very quick for plowing drawer parts – there's no clamping and unclamping and you can work with a bunch of different lengths easily.

Set the Fence
Set your plow's fence so it is parallel to the skate and the desired distance from your cutter. The most common cut I make is a 1/4"-wide groove that's 1/4" from the fence. Conveniently, the brass section on my folding rule is exactly 1/4" long, so it’s easy to set things at a glance.

Begin at the End
You can use a plow plane like a bench plane and make full strokes that run from the near end to the far end. But I have found this to be sometimes troublesome. Sometimes the cutter will follow the grain in the board and the tool's fence will drift away from the work. The results are ugly.

Instead, I start at the far end of the board and make short cuts. Each succeeding cut gets a little longer until I am making full-length cuts. The advantage to this is that if your plane wanders, it will only be for a short distance and the next cut will correct the error.

After you are making full-length cuts there's little danger of the tool wandering.

The shavings should be fairly thick – you don't want to do this all day. These shavings are .015" thick. I could probably go a little thicker in pine.

Results and Then…
When the tool stops cutting, you stop stroking. The edges of the groove might be a little furry – that's typical even for the best work. That's why I wait to smooth plane my pieces after I have grooved them. That removes the fur. Here's what the groove looks like when I'm done.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [7]

Those People Had Knives

Posted 4/7/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery | Reader Questions

Milford Brown writes: Since you are interested in the older hand-powered woodworking, I wonder what, if anything, you know about the history of marking knife use?

I recently had occasion to dismantle an old pine blanket chest (because of extensive powderpost beetle damage in the sapwood edges of its top and bottom boards) that had been assembled with the later-style cut nails, and had hinges attached with screws that had no point, but with the top of the head showing circular machining marks, which from what I could find, dates it to somewhere after 1837.

I found also that in places such as rabbets for corner joints and cuts to inset the hinges and the small inner compartment, the necessary lines had been cut rather deeply with a knife.

The joiners that Joseph Moxon ("Mechanick Exercises") wrote about had pin-style marking gauges that followed an edge, but in either the original or your easy-to-read version, I didn't see anything about how other cuts were marked. According to the Wikipedia article on pencils, various writing sticks with graphite cores were available long before this chest, but its maker, as many now, preferred a knife. Web-searching for marking knives located a variety of modern products, such as the ones you wrote about, but I didn't find anything in the way of history. Did you?

Milford,

You're right that Moxon, a 17th-century source, doesn't mention a marking knife. He discusses the pricker, which seems to be an awl-like tool used for marking joints.

The earliest image of a marking knife that I'm aware of is from Joseph Smith's "Explanation or Key to the Various Manufactories of Sheffield" (shown above). It's a circa 1801 source. The striking knife shown there was the dominant form for many years – you can still find examples being made today that look like this (though I don't recommend the modern version).

I browsed through Andre Roubo's books this morning and couldn't find a marking knife (if someone else has found one, let me know). I did find a "la point a tracer," which translates as "scriber." Roubo's description says it is a round steel tool with a handle that comes to a peak. Sounds awl-ish to me.

I'll check my other books at home. If you know something, fess up in the comments.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [8]

Real Joinery Surfaces

Posted 4/7/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery | Saws

While teaching a class on handsawing a couple years ago, one student lost his cool. He was cutting a tenon for his sawbench, and he strayed over the line and the result looked rough to him. He grunted, threw his saw down with a clatter and stomped away from the bench.

The classroom got real quiet. This student was a big fella – he probably had 100 pounds of muscle on me, a ZZ Top beard and a short fuse. As he angled toward the classroom door to leave, I wasn’t sure what to do.

So I picked up one of his uncut legs, marked out the joint he needed and sawed it out without saying a word. I didn’t do it like when I teach (history, blah, blah, joke, blah, technical detail, blah, sidebar, blah, blah) where it takes 20 minutes to make a tenon. Instead, I cut it like I do it at home with the radio on. One tenon. One minute.

I left the tenon on the bench and walked away. I was a bit freaked about what would happen next. I was out of ideas. The other students walked up to see my work.

“I get it now,” one student said. “That’s what it looks like – from start to finish. That’s what the joint looks like at the end. That’s what I needed.”

The big guy came over for a look, too. I got him a new workpiece to replace his ruined one. The rest of the day went smoothly.

It’s easy to get intimidated by hand joinery. We expect it to look like router-cut joinery, or some trumped-up bit of fakery by photographers. The truth is that in some cases hand joinery looks better when compared to joints made by power tools and worse in others.

In my work, for example, I don’t go for slick end-grain surfaces. What’s the use? They offer little gluing strength. I focus on the getting the gluing surfaces flat and smooth. And I try to get the fit as close as I can.

But don’t we all? What does this really look like?

Now that we have a macro lens at the magazine, I’ve started taking photos of things that our lenses couldn’t show before, such as close-ups of joinery surfaces.

Here’s what a casework dovetail looks like that I cut two weeks ago. It’s for a sideboard for the Summer 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine.

In the first shot above you can see how things are pretty clean, but nothing like a router-cut surface. I cut that rabbet on one of the faces of the piece to make it easier to lay out the mating socket.

In the second shot, this is how things looked right before I knocked the dovetail home. Yes, the end grain looks rough. Yes, that’s some junk in the corners. I could pare it with a chisel, but why bother?

And third, you can see the end result. The fit is OK around the dovetail – nothing like you see on a magazine cover. There's a gap at the back shoulder I could slip a playing card into. But the joint is tight at the front shoulder, which is all that will ever show. I am done and ready to move to the other side of this joint.

I hope this helps you – like my frustrated mountain man student – to relax a bit when it comes to sawing joints.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Comments [13]

Cheating at Jointing Edges

Posted 4/6/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Handplanes | Joinery

When I glue up panels from several narrow boards, I use my jointer plane to dress all the mating edges. While our power jointer is fairly well tuned, it's rarely perfect – we have a busy shop. So I find it easier to dress my edges by hand than to fuss with the powered jointer.

My jointer plane has a cambered iron, which allows me to correct an out-of-square edge. (I'll cover this in a future blog post after I pick up some Kevlar undergarments to protect me from the flak.)

Until I mastered using a cambered iron in my jointer plane, I used to use a straight iron and a jointer plane fence to dress my edges. I still use a jointer plane fence on occasion when I only have one or two chances at getting an edge dead-nuts square.

There are two kinds of commercial jointer plane fences. The more common one now is the Veritas Jointer Fence, which attaches to the plane with two rare earth magnets and a post that wedges the whole thing on your plane's sidewall. This fence works with almost any bench plane, though I usually use it with a plane the size of a jack or a jointer (14" to 22" long).

The other kind of fence is like the discontinued Stanley No. 386. This fence attaches to the plane using thumbscrews. The nice thing about the No. 386 is that you can set it for a wide range of angles and it has a knob that I find useful for the edge-jointing process. The other nice thing about the No. 386 is that I can use it with a cambered iron because the fence is under the sole of the tool. The fence centers the plane over a typical edge, where the cambered iron is basically straight. (You can do this with the Veritas fence by adding a wooden block to the fence.)

The No. 386 can be tough to find in the wild. St. James Bay Tool Co. makes one that is similar, but I haven't tried it.

How to Joint Edges With a Fence
Just like with using a power jointer, there is some technique involved in using a jointer plane fence.

Things to watch: The cutter has to be sticking out of the tool dead square. This is why I learned to use a curved iron in my jointer plane – it's actually a more forgiving setup than using a straight iron.

Second: Use your dominant hand to push the plane forward and your off-hand to control the fence. With your off-hand, use your thumb to push the toe down against the edge and use your fingers to push the fence against the face of your board.

Third: What you have to understand about handplanes is that the tool's cutter sticks out below the sole of the tool. As a result, the tool takes a slightly heavier cut at the beginning of the pass when only part of the plane is on the edge.

Last week I tried to measure this by edge jointing a 30"-long board and then measuring the shaving's thickness at five points along its length. At the beginning of the cut (toe engaged only) my cuts were consistently .0055" thick. In the middle and end of the cut the shaving was .005" thick.

That is not much difference. But it can add up. After several strokes the edge develops a gentle curve to it. And that's no good for gluing.

So here's what I do: First remove some of the middle section of the edge. I start the cut a few inches in from the end of the board, and I end the cut a few inches from the end. I'll usually take two passes like this. (This is similar to what David Charlesworth does, though I believe he continues to make passes until the plane stops cutting.)

Then I take a pass all the way through the edge. If I get one perfect unbroken shaving, I'll test the edge with a straightedge or the board's mating edge. If the edge is perfect or is a little hollow in the middle, I'll get the glue and the clamps. If the edge still bulges, I'll remove another shaving in the middle.

One more thing: Some woodworkers poo-poo the jointer plane fence. As Senior Editor Bob Lang might say: "You might as well show up on the job site wearing a dress."

Well since today is "National Tartan Day," I think you can get away with it.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Comments [17]

Tighten Up a Loose Hammer Head

Posted 4/3/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

I noticed the head on my trusty Hamilton hammer was loose last weekend as I was driving a bunch of nails (good thing I have an extra hammer or two). This morning I decided to do something about it.

Conventional wisdom is that the head works loose because of the shock that the tool is subjected to daily. Sounds conventional. Sounds wise. But R. Bruce Hoadley, author of "Understanding Wood," claims otherwise. He says it is the continuous cycle of seasonal expansion and contraction that results in the handle shrinking out.

In either case, the fix is the same in my shop. First I probe around in the head to find an area of the handle that I'm certain is wood. I'm going to be driving a chisel down there, so I don't want any metallic surprises.

The adze eye here is 1/2" wide, so I need a wedge that is that same width.

Make a Wedge
I tighten up my heads with wooden wedges. You can buy metal ones at the store, but I have lots of wood. I scrounged up a piece of 1/2"-thick maple (ash, oak or hickory are all good choices as well). Then I crosscut off a piece about 3/4" long.

I created the wedge on the band saw. I have a little sled that presents the wood to the blade at 7° (you can set your saw's miter gauge and attach an auxiliary fence if you like). You cut one end of your stock, flip it and cut the other. The result is a wedge with a 14° taper. Make a bunch of wedges and find the one that comes to the finest point.

Chisel Down
Fetch a 1/2"-wide chisel. Not the nice one; the other one that belongs to your neighbor. Secure your hammer with clamps or in a vise and drive the chisel as deeply as you can into the adze eye. Don't be shy here.

Remove the chisel, turn it around and drive it in again. When you are done, this is about what it should look like.

Glue and Wedge
Apply glue to the chiseled slot in your handle and on both faces of the wedge. (I use yellow glue.) Drive the wedge in as deeply as you can.

This is why you need two hammers in your shop. This is exactly what got me in trouble in the first place. (See "Daddy has a hammer problem" for details.)

Wait for the glue to cure and trim the excess with a chisel or saw. Now you're ready for another beating.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [1]

Plow Planes: Metal vs. Wood

Posted 4/2/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Handplanes | Joinery

In my kindergarten class, someone was snitching cookies from the lunchboxes of the rest of the class. (Spoiler alert: It was the fat kid.) While the teacher's investigation was ongoing, she gave us a speech that I still remember.

"I once had a student who stole cookies," she said. "Then he stole lunch money. Then he stole money from his parent's wallets…."

Long pause. "Then he robbed a gas station."

If you are still in the "smoothing plane" (stealing cookies) stage of your slide into handtools, let me give you a peek at some of bad deeds you'll be committing against your family's checkbook in the years ahead. First stop: plow planes.

Plow planes make grooves in the edges and faces of stock, which is great for frame-and-panel work. They also can be adjusted to make the tongue on a tongue-and-groove joint. And they are great for wasting away stock when you are making decorative moulding with moulding planes.

There are many different kids of plow planes, but I think there really are two families: the wooden plows and the metal plows. And their differences are in more than the raw materials used to make them.

Because that's the most obvious difference, however, let's start there.

Metal vs. Wooden Bodies
If you're buying a used plow, the metal ones are usually in better shape than the wooden ones. And the metal ones can usually be resurrected a little more easily. That's because the wooden body of a plow can warp (very difficult to fix), and the wooden wedge that secures the iron can be frozen in its mortise or can be so modified that it is useless.

That said, I always prefer a wooden grip on a plane, so the metal grips aren't my favorite. Heck I've thought about wrapping some friction tape around the handles to improve the feedback.

Where the Shavings Go
In use, the biggest difference for me is where each tool's shavings go. On the metal plows, the shavings eject into the fence and the user's hand. This is annoying because many times the shavings bunch up like a wad of toilet paper in the fence and you have to stop your work and clear things out.

On the wooden plows, the shavings are ejected away from the user and onto the benchtop. I have yet to find a disadvantage to this way of work – except that you have to sweep off your bench once in a while.

About that Fence
The fence on a metal plow is usually secured with two thumbscrews. Because of the tight tolerances when the tool is made, it's usually simple for the user to get the fence parallel to the tool's skate – a critical detail.

With wooden plows, it's all over the map. Fences can be fantastic or one step above semi-adjustable firewood. The bridle mechanism on my D.L. Barrett & Sons plow is perfection. It's better than a metal plow. One thumbscrew locks everything, and it's always parallel to the skate.

However, most of the wooden plows you'll find have two wooden screws that adjust the fence (or sometimes wedges do the job). With the two wooden screws, it's a bit more of a hassle to get things parallel. Plus, sometimes these screws are damaged beyond saving.

Different Depth Stops
On a metal plow, the depth stop is on the side of the skate that is opposite the fence. On the wooden plow, the depth stop is between the fence and skate. I haven't found either to be troublesome, but you do have to pay attention to your work. You don’t want to waste away part of the wood that you are going to need your depth stop to contact on a later cut.

I work with both tools and find that they both do everything a woodworker needs. The choice of tool comes down to:

• How much you can spend
• What is available in your area
• How much work you want to put into the tool
• And which form makes you drive by Texaco stations that aren't on your way home.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [6]

Canadians: The New Monkeys

Posted 4/1/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

Despite the fact that monkeys were as rare as hen's teeth in the mountains of Arkansas, the highest praise for intelligence there was to be called a "clever monkey."

To wit: "When Clem saw the Law, he slammed on brakes. That clever monkey got out of a speeding ticket by saying he was trying to stomp a sweat bee."

But I digress. This month I'm reviewing new drawbore pins from four manufacturers for the Summer 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine. One of the new entrants to the field is Lee Valley – its drawbore pins will be available in the next couple weeks at a special introductory price ($49 a pair).

When company officials sent me a couple for evaluation, they also sent a disassembled one so I could see how it was made (and presumably to keep me from sawing apart their pre-production models). It is cool. Monkey cool.

The stainless steel shaft passes entirely through the octagonal bubinga handle. And the tool is capped at the top with a strike button. Though you normally don't need to strike drawbore pins, some people do.

The metal shaft is barbed to grab onto the inside of the handle. And it has a rubberish O-ring. Company officials were quick to point out the function of the O-ring. It is not a shock absorber (like leather between the bolster and handle of a chisel). Instead, it is an assembly aid at the factory.

The handles are epoxied on. When the cap is screwed in place, there is enough vacuum pressure to cause the epoxy to squirt out the bottom of the handle. Hence, the O-ring to seal things up.

The engineering is extremely clever, all-in-all. And though I won't say which of the new tools I prefer (you'll have to read the Summer 2009 issue for that), I will say that I favor the Lee Valley's handle.

It should come as no surprise that around the office, one of the highest praises for intelligence is: "Clever Canadians."

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [7]

Strapped Hammer Tries Not to Kill You

Posted 3/20/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

Blacksmith David Maydole was the SawStop of the 19th century.

Sometimes hammerheads would fly loose from their handles on the job site. This could be troublesome or deadly because occasionally the steel head would strike a fleshy one (the steel usually wins this competition).

So there were many efforts to improve how the tool's head affixes to the handle. One early and successful method was to add metal straps that kept the head and handle together. Sometimes these straps were forged from the hammerhead itself. Sometimes they were added separately. In either case, the straps were then riveted through the wooden handle.

This worked (lots of strapped hammers survive). But there are disadvantages. These tools require more labor to make. Plus, replacing the handle is inconvenient because of the rivet.

Then, as legend has it, blacksmith David Maydole of Norwich, N.Y., began experimenting with metal and the shape of the hammer's head. Hammerheads that are too soft get deformed. Heads that are too hard will split. Maydole found a happy medium: the hammer's interior was soft and the exterior was hard – like a lobster.

But that's not what made Maydole famous. History remembers Maydole because of the hole he made in the hammerhead. He made the hole longer, adding a metal neck below the head, which is the form that is familiar to all of us today. And he shaped the hole like one found in an adze: At the top the hole is wider and it gets narrower at the neck. Once this hole is wedged up, the handle is much more secure.

The joint is not, however, bulletproof. I have had several Maydoles that had loose heads. I have not, however, had one fly off the handle. (That is allegedly where the expression comes from.)

When Maydole's hammers were first sold in 1840, carpenters were delighted.

"(H)e could hammer away with confidence, and without fear of seeing the head of his hammer leap into the next field unless stopped by a comrade's head," according to the 1873 account "A Captain of Industry."

I've got lots of these so-called adze-eye hammers. Plus I have some earlier ones with a straight hole (including one that flew off on a backstroke – very exciting). But I've never owned a strapped hammer.

I remedied that omission last week by purchasing the hammer in the photo above and have been using it on a side project that has hundreds of nails. The strapped hammers I've seen tend to have longer handles – this one is no exception. And many of them have an interesting and elegant swelling at the base of the handle (this one does not).

How does it work? Like a rock on a stick. That's my highest praise.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Comments [3]

Wonderful Wedgies With Cut Nails

Posted 3/16/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

Some of the best workholding ideas rely on simple wedging action. This weekend I stumbled onto one more great wedging trick using cut nails.

This might be old hat for you. If so, forgive my waste of bandwidth (which should be the motto of my blog).

I’m creating some wide panels from narrow boards using an early woodworking technique of nailing cross-stretchers across the joints of the panel. There’s no glue involved in this panel. And no Bessey K-bodies, either.

The technique calls for placing your boards on your bench and securing them edge-to-edge by nailing into your bench around the perimeter of the panel. Then you nail the cross-stretchers down to the panel and clench them.

As you probably know, cut nails taper along two of their edges. The other two edges are parallel. When you build furniture you orient the taper so the tapered edges of the nail bite into the end grain of your top board. This reduces the chance of your work splitting.

So when I nailed into my bench using this principle, two things happened. First, Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick exclaimed: “Oh my! What are you doing?” I just cracked a wicked grin.

And second, the edges of the panel came together OK.

I thought about this for a minute, then I pulled two of the nails out of my benchtop and oriented them so the tapers bit into the edge grain – both of my panel and the workbench.

Then my joints closed up so tightly I could plane the entire panel and the pieces didn’t slip. Dang. The slight wedging action of the nails was surprisingly effective (and no, it didn’t split the top of my 4"-thick benchtop).

If you are interested in learning more about the history and use of cut nails, I wrote a lengthy story about building furniture with hammer and nails in issue five (Spring 2006) of Woodworking Magazine.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [10]

The Case for Rendered Animal Collagen

Posted 3/11/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

The most stressful glue-up of my life was assembling my tool chest in 1998. The main carcase had 120 mating surfaces that had to be glued. Foolishly, I chose yellow glue as the adhesive.

As a result, another editor and I spent an hour furiously beating and clamping the chest together. In the end, there were a few gaps we couldn't close because the yellow glue had set – luckily it was nothing milk paint couldn't fix.

These days I'm smarter about glue. When I started building chairs years ago, I was introduced to liquid hide glue, and boy has that changed the way I work. I think I have an extra inch of stomach lining thanks to liquid hide glue (and no, that's not because I drank some).

The liquid hide glue is almost as simple to use as yellow glue (warming it up a little in a water bath helps it flow). It's reversible. Let me say that again: It's reversible! Once I stuck a chair leg in the wrong socket. All it took was a little heat and moisture and the leg came right out. Easy-peasy.

Liquid hide glue also cleans up nicely with water, doesn't smell bad and gives you a long open time for complex assemblies. If my shop is warm (65° F or so) I can manipulate my parts for 45 minutes or more before things start to get hairy.

I normally use Old Brown Glue. It's non-toxic (the manufacturer lets his dogs eat it!). But I've also used the Titebond product with good results.

I still use yellow glue – just not for everything. When I'm gluing up lots of panels, for example, I like the way yellow glue sets up quickly and doesn't need a lot of clamping time. This frees up clamps and lets me work faster. Ditto that when building jigs and fixtures or planting mouldings on a carcase – I want a glue that sets up fast.

I'll also choose a yellow glue that is water-resistant for projects that might have to endure a soaking.

What about other adhesives? Hot hide glue? Polyurethane? Epoxy? Plastic resin? I've used them all and sometimes I do break them out for certain applications. But for most of my work, which is building new pieces of furniture, liquid hide glue and yellow glue get used the most.

Maybe some day I'll get even smarter and get one of these.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [30]

When All Your Problems Look Like Hammers…

Posted 3/5/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

Some day I expect one of my little girls to tell a school counselor (between sobs): "Daddy has a hammer problem."

My, ahem, problem started innocently enough years ago. I got interested in David Maydole, the father of the legendary adze-eye hammer. I read James Parton's 1884 article about Maydole and thought: Wouldn't it be cool to own one of his hammers?

So I bought one off eBay for $20. It had a cool bull's eye cast into its face. Its handle was worlds better than the rubber-wrapped hammer-shaped object I'd had since childhood. I even think that Maydole drove nails a little faster. So I bought a 16-ounce Maydole for my shop at home.

Fast forward about five years. I'm looking for a plane at the bottom of my tool chest. I pull out a few hammers. Then a few more. Then a big Cheney. My bench has a heap of hammers on it. How many dang hammers have I bought?

Fourteen, as it turns out. And probably another seven at home (I can't bear to count).

You don't need this many hammers. However, I do think you need more than one. If someone put a nail gun in my mouth and made me choose my three essential hammers for making furniture, here would be my list:

1. A 16-ounce hammer for all-purpose nail whacking.

2. A Warrington-style hammer with a cross-peen/pein/pane. I use this hammer to tweak the lateral adjustment on my metal-bodied handplanes. I use the cross-peen/pein/pane to start short brads. And I use the striking face to finish small brads.

3. A plane-adjusting hammer. I have one from Chester Toolworks. It has a brass face and a wooden face (Lee Valley makes one like this). I use this tool for adjusting my wooden-bodied planes. The brass face is for tapping the iron. The wooden face is for tapping the stock and the wedge.

If you are similarly afflicted, I warn you there is little hope. Lie-Nielsen Toolworks just started making Warrington-style hammers. I ordered all three, however I don't remember how that happened. It's a bit of a blur.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [21]

English Chests in Charleston, S.C.

Posted 2/26/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

This week I’m at my father’s house in Charleston, S.C., to get my USRDA of grits, tasso and shrimp. Whenever I visit the Holy City, I always make sure to pack comfortable shoes and a tape measure – I never know what I’ll find.

This morning I’ve been poring over my father’s small collection of English chests. Most of them he purchased from dealers on King Street a few blocks away. When I helped him pick these chests out, I was always looking for the ones that displayed the best craftsmanship. These well-made chests, however, weren’t always the best-looking chests. So usually he purchased a chest that looked really good and was passable in the craftsmanship department. Funny, he doesn’t take me with him to shop for antiques anymore.

One of the chests in father’s dining room is similar to a piece I’ll be building at home this year. The chest is circa 1810, according a friend of my father who deals in Early American architecture and furnishings. It has some interesting details from the woodworking side of things.

The chest is a typical size: 39-1/8" high, 37-5/8" long and 19-1/4" deep with four graduated drawers: 5-1/4", 6-3/4", 7-3/4" and 8-3/4". The entire chest is pine that has been veneered with mahogany.

The top is an interesting construction. The front 4-1/2" of the top is 7/8" thick. The rest is 3/4" thick. I assume that the 7/8" piece is edge-glued to the 3/4" piece – at least that’s the way it looks.

As always, the drawers are interesting. The sides and back are all 3/8"-thick material. The front is 3/4" pine veneered with mahogany (with some string inlay). Each drawer has a tail at its bottom edge that is straight instead of sloped. This straight tail houses the groove for the drawer’s bottom. Like all my dad’s English chests, the bottom of the drawer sides have been reinforced with small strips of wood to effectively double the thickness of the drawer side under the bottom.

The drawers in this chest run on solid dividers – no web frames in this chest. The back is four wide boards of pine in a rabbet. No shiplaps or grooves as far as I can tell – the backs have shrunk a bit, and you can see between them.

I really like the flowing lines of the plinth (they are repeated on the sides) and want to trace them before I leave. I’ll have to keep my eye peeled for some wide butcher’s paper in town.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [12]

About Drawer Slips

Posted 2/22/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

There are so many ways to construct a drawer that someone could write an entire book on the variations across time and cultures. I’d buy it. One curious drawer detail that I quite like is to house a drawer’s bottom in slips.

Drawer slips are narrow pieces of wood that are grooved to accept the drawer bottom. The slips are glued to the drawer sides (and sometimes the drawer front). Why would you do such a thing?

• Dovetail layout is cleaner: Because you don’t have to sink a groove in the drawer sides, you don’t have to use a half-tail at the bottom of the drawer side or risk a bad split by putting a whole tail close to the bottom edge. You can use any layout you please. The slips handle the groove.

• They look nice. This is probably the reason I like them. It adds an extra level of detail to the drawer bottom. Most people probably won’t notice, but I do.

• They make the drawer easier to use. You can fish coins and the like easily out of the drawer because of the beveled edge on the slip. Some people say they make the drawers easier to clean and dust. But I don’t dust much.

There is some debate about whether each drawer requires three slips or only two. Some account have slips attached to the sides and drawer front – the slips are mitered at the corners. Other accounts have slips attached to the sides only and a groove in the drawer front.

In some accounts, drawer slips are a mark of quality work. David Denning in “The Art and Craft of Cabinet-making” (Pitman, page 186) says that joiners typically grooved their drawer sides. Cabinetmakers typically used slips.

— Christopher Schwarz

Here you can see the symmetrical dovetail layout, which I like. Drawer slips make this easy.

Here's a close shot of some slip material before it is installed. Note the bevel on the corner.

This is what the underside of the drawer looks like with slips. My slips are mitered. The slip attached to the drawer front is cherry.

And here's what they look like from the rear of the drawer.

Comments [44]

More Hammer Tricks

Posted 2/12/2009 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

You can do fancy things with a hammer and the right nails. And lately, I've been doing a lot of practicing with cut nails for a series of projects I'm working on that feature nails (including the dry sink in the next issue of Woodworking Magazine).

The more I learn about nails, the more I find out there are lots of interesting things you do with them. You probably have heard about "clinching" (sometimes spelled "clenching") nails. This is when the tip of the nail passes entirely through both of your workpieces. Then you use your hammer to bend the nail's tip over and back into the work.

You see lots of this in boat building and in old work, especially where battens have been attached to doors.

Some people can't quite visualize this, and so I was happy to find the illustration above in "Exercises in Woodworking," a late 19th-century book that I need to do a full blog entry on. It's quite cool. You can download the whole book at Google Books.

I've found the trick to clinching nails is to have the nail's head resting on a piece of steel plate or some small anvil. It makes it much easier to turn over the tip.

While I was browsing this book, I also found a description of how to swing a hammer to encourage floorboards or backboards to mate together tightly along their edges. I've done this before (by accident), but I didn't know exactly what was going on inside. The illustration (figure 5 above) shows it brilliantly.

"Fig. 5 illustrates a peculiar drawn blow of the hammer. Starting at d, it follows the direction of the broken line in its course; the effect of which is to bend the nail in such a manner that it forces the board a close up to c, as shown at f. This blow is practiced in nailing floors and in clinching wrought nails."

Or you can try finding this device….

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [10]

Rob Cosman's 3-1/2 Minute Dovetail Video

Posted 10/25/2008 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

After watching Frank Klausz cut a set of dovetails in three minutes using a special bowsaw blade (see the video here in our video section), Rob Cosman decided to show that it can be done by cutting the tails first. (Frank cuts his pins first.)

For those who don't know Cosman, he has produced a series of great videos on hand joinery and has a new companion book on dovetailing that we highly recommend. It's spiral bound for the shop and is the best book I've ever read on cutting this traditional joint. You can read more about his videos, book and tools at RobCosman.com.

— Christopher Schwarz

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• 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.

Comments [12]

Impressive New Knife From Czech Edge

Posted 9/2/2008 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

I'm passionate about cooking, but I don't get excited about cooking equipment. I've got decent cookware, questionable Far East knives bought from an infomercial and (somehow) enough silicone basting brushes for the whole neighborhood. Want one?

But when it comes to marking knives for woodworking, I'm tough to please. Exhibit A is over at WKfinetools.com. I've probably had about a dozen marking knives pass through my hands during the last decade, and none has pleased me as much as the small knife from Blue Spruce Toolworks.

It's the only knife that does everything I ask from a knife, from marking out skinny dovetails to making a coarse cutline for a crosscut handsaw. And I've written over and over how much I like it – perhaps to the point where you're wondering if Dave Jeske at Blue Spruce is padding my secret account in the Cayman Islands.

So a few weeks ago, I got a small box from Steve Quehl, who runs the Woodcraft store outside Atlanta. In it was a new knife made by Bob Zajicek of Czeck Edge. It's called the Kerf Kadet, and Steve offered to loan it to me to test in the shop.

I used it to mark out the joints on a Gustav Stickley plant stand I built last month, and today I spent some time marking out dovetails with it. And I can safely tell you that Steve is not getting this knife back. The most he can hope for is a check to reimburse him.

The knife is similar in some ways to the Blue Spruce knife, but it has some significant differences that are worth noting. The Czech Edge blade is a bit narrower (5/16" compared to 23/64") and shorter past the ferrule (1-5/16" compared to 1-1/2"). With those statistics, both knives will do most standard joint-marking chores.

Where the knives differ is in the handle and ferrule (the metallic transition from the blade to the wood). The Blue Spruce uses a smooth two-piece ferrule. The Czeck Edge uses a single machined bronze ferrule with three grooves turned into it. The grooves are not decorative. When you pinch the knife at the ferrule, the grooves improve your grip on the knife. I was surprised how much I liked the feel.

The wooden part of each tool's handle is also different. The Blue Spruce has a somewhat vase-like shape that opens up at the ferrule. When I grip the Blue Spruce, I put my fingers behind this area, which prevents my fingers from slipping off the knife when I add downward pressure.

The Czeck Edge has more of a pencil-like shape and is lighter in the hand. Both are comfortable in my hands.

How about fit and finish? It's impossible to beat Blue Spruce on this point, but the Czeck Edge is in a tie for first place. The knife is flawless. Crisp and smooth with a perfect transition from wood to metal. It's what you would hope for in your own work. One other nice touch: The Czeck Edge knives come with blade guards for storing the knife. And the price? It's fair: $37.95 to $41.95 depending on the wood you select.

I'm eager to put the Czeck Edge Kerf Kadet to some more use. Lucky for me I have a shop here at the magazine and a shop at home. So I really don't have to choose favorites.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [9]

The Question of Through-tenons

Posted 8/19/2008 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

For the next issue of Woodworking Magazine, we’re investigating the best way to make through-tenons – a hallmark of early American furniture, Arts & Crafts pieces and people who like to show off.

I’ve spent a good deal of energy investigating the joint personally. When I started collecting Arts & Crafts furniture in 1990, I quickly became attuned to spotting the joint in pieces for my collection.

Even better, I had a mentor with an incredible collection. Owen Riley was a photographer at the newspaper where I worked, and he had been collecting Arts & Crafts furniture for many years. His entire apartment was stuffed to the gills with the stuff. And he took great pains to teach me the difference between the makers – I can spot an L & J.G. tusk tenon over a Gustav Stickley tusk tenon from across a room.

And so I’ve always had a realistic view of how this joint appears in real-deal furniture that now costs five or six figures.

Here’s the real truth: The craftsmanship is all over the place. Take a look at the photo above. That’s a through-tenon on a signed Gustav Stickley slipper rocker from my collection. All the through-tenons on the piece look exactly like this. Clearly, they were made with some sort of boring tool, perhaps a drill press or perhaps some form of spindle machine. Heck you can still see some torn grain on the surface of the joint that indicates the rotation of the cutter.

No effort was made to square up the ends of the joint. No effort was made to round over the tenon to match the radiused mortise. There’s just a gap that’s plainly visible on the outside surfaces of the leg.

I always like to compare that joint to the through-tenons on my Charles Stickley arm chair. Charles was one of the “lesser” Stickley brothers, and the craftsmanship and style of his work is often derided by modern writers. The through-tenons on his chair are perfect, as good as any high-class modern work in a gallery.

There’s no consistency by maker. Roycroft through-tenons? Raggy. Limbert through-tenons? Not bad except for a couple overcuts – probably from a saw.

So what’s the pattern? Visibility. The more visible the joint, the more likely that the maker went to great lengths to make it tidy. That seems like it should be obvious, but that has not been my experience with modern work (especially my own).

My inclination is to make the suckers perfect. Why? Because I often have other woodworkers snooping around my house, pulling out my drawers, turning over my tables and the like.

So how do you make these joints spot-on? I’ve used several methods, which we’ll be exploring in the issue. For long and skinny joints, it’s hard to beat a highly-tuned hollow-chisel mortiser (though I’m going to try). For squarish joints, it’s hard to beat a template and a router.

And, in the end, it’s hard to beat wedging, which can expand a tenon into a loosely fit joint. Or, if you’ve had a bad day, putty and a dark dark stain…..

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [3]

When Design and Craftsmanship Don't Meet

Posted 8/13/2008 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

Whenever John Economaki of Bridge City Tools teaches classes about furniture design, he always asks his students a question that seems to have no good answer.

The question goes something like this: Would you rather have a piece of furniture with great lines but so-so craftsmanship, or a somewhat dumpy-looking project with perfect and crisp joinery throughout?

You'll have to read to the bottom of this entry to find out how John's students answer the question. Me? I've been struggling with the question all week.

I'm just now applying the first coat of color to a Gustav Stickley plant stand for the next issue of Woodworking Magazine, and I've been beating myself up all week over this piece and my workmanship on it.

The project itself is straightforward and is all familiar ground for me. Whenever I work on a project like this, I try to stretch myself by focusing on some detail to see if I can make it more refined and crisp than before.

For this project, I focused on the curves, and I went to great lengths to get the swoops just right on the aprons and stretchers. And for the most part, I was pleased with how they came out.

And that's when the tenons for the top rails came and bit me on the hinder.

During the final assembly I clamped everything up, drove in the tusk tenons at the bottom of the plant stand and walked away for about eight hours. When I removed the clamps, everything looked good for about a half an hour. Then two of the tenons at the top of the plant stand began to separate at their shoulders. Each one opened up about .006". I think the tusk tenons are pulling them apart. Something was a little bit off in the assembly and there wasn't any good way to turn back.

So I spent an hour on Tuesday morning feeding white oak shavings from my jointer plane into these gaps in an effort to obscure them. After forcing the glue-covered shavings into the gaps with tweezers, things looked better. But they sure as heck weren't "according to Hoyle."

I have to have this project done by Monday, and I have an involved finishing schedule ahead, so I grabbed the stain today and went to work. As the color went on, two things happened: One, I could see my mistakes just as well. You can't fill gaps with stain. Well, I sure can't.

And second, I became smitten with the genius of Gustav Stickley, who designed this plant stand. As the color went on I began to see how the overall piece would begin to look. I stopped seeing the individual components.

So to answer John Economaki's question, I think I prefer a project with beautiful lines to a project with perfect craftsmanship. I want both. Maybe next time.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Here's how John's students answer the question: He told me that virtually everyone he's taught says they would prefer the perfectly joined clunky one.

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Four Reasons for Tails-first Dovetails

Posted 7/7/2008 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

When it comes to dovetailing, I’ve never really had a dog in the fight between dovetailers who cut the pins first and those who cut the tails first. I was first taught to cut my tails first, though I’m also comfortable cutting the pins first (I spent a whole year cutting pins first so I understand its advantages).

But as I get older, I guess I’m getting more set in my ways and am officially entrenched with the tails-first crowd. Why? Well I guess it’s because of the tools I use and processes I have chosen through the years that make my choice inevitable.

Reason 1: Gang cutting. I like cutting two sets of tails simultaneously for drawers. This is impossible to do (well) if you cut pins-first.

Reason 2: I own a narrow-bladed knife. One of the big advantages of cutting pins-first is that you have a lot of room to navigate when you transfer your marks to the tail board. I have a very narrow-bladed knife, so sneaking it between the tails is no hassle for me. If I didn’t have this tool, I’d probably be a pins-first person.

Reason 3: I rabbet my boards before cutting the tails. Years ago, Glen D. Huey showed me a trick where you rabbet the inside face of your tails to make transferring the marks to the pin board easier. The shallow rabbet (about 1/8") gives you enormous precision in aligning your pieces. Glen is a pins-first guy, and the system works with pins-first dovetailing. But I think it really shines with tails-first because you can clamp your pin board in a vise and really apply pressure with the tail board.

Reason 4: Gravitational forces. This one is a subtle argument, and I don’t expect it to sway many people, but it is a strong one for me. I think it’s easier to cut a true vertical line than it is to cut a true line at an angle. This is because of the way gravity tugs at the heavy back of the saw. This little detail makes cutting tails-first easier for me. Here’s how:

When you cut any dovetail, the first half of the joint is the pattern for the second. So your first part doesn’t have to be precise when it comes to its angles. It just needs to be clean and neat. If you cut your tails first, that means your first cuts are angled. If you don’t have to be precise with these cuts, then you have one less thing to worry about with this part of the joint. All you really need to worry about is being straight. The actual angle is incidental. Heck I use a pencil alone to mark out my tails.

When it comes to the second part of the joint, it must be an exact complement of the first. Accuracy counts a great deal. When you cut tails-first, that means your second cut is pins. And pins are straight up and down. And straight up and down is easier to do perfectly. Well, straight is easier is for me at least.

If you reverse the process and cut the pins-first, the second part is making the angled tails. And I think those lines are harder to track because gravity isn’t on your side.

Of course, if you do this stuff every day, all this becomes moot. You just do it the way you do it. And you ignore the gravitational prattling of a magazine editor.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [18]

Try Monogamy: L.S. Starrett Combination Squares

Posted 6/30/2008 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

One of the best recommendations I’ve ever received in the world of hand tools came from a power-tool user who has 660-volt three-phase pumping through his veins.

It’s 1996, and I’m a newly minted managing editor at Popular Woodworking. David Thiel, then an associate editor at the magazine, has been assigned to give me a tour of the workshop and check me out on the machines.

I’ve been woodworking on my back porch seriously for a few years and am comfortable on a table saw, radial-arm saw and a band saw, but I’ve never seen a drum sander, spray booth or shaper. I know I came off like a hayseed because I was dumbfounded by the sheer volume of cast iron and steel now at my disposal.

At the end of the tour, David showed me his work area and made a generous offer: Until I got set up in the shop I could use any of the hand tools hanging in his tool cabinets above his bench.

Several weeks later I’m in the shop building my first serious project for the magazine (an Arts & Crafts project from the Byrdcliffe Colony) and I need a combination square to mark out some joinery before I cut it on the table saw. I snatch one of the squares above his bench and go to work.

That was a Friday afternoon. I remember that because I was compelled to drive up to our local tool supplier Saturday morning to buy my own L.S. Starrett 12" combination square. I didn’t care what the price was. I didn’t care how far I had to drive across town with a squealing 1-year-old in the back seat to get it. I just knew that after an afternoon of working with David’s square that I had to have one for myself.

After a few more weeks I bought a 6" version for $25 at a local antiques market.

During the last 12 years, I’ve had a variety of marking and measuring tools try to shake that Starrett from my toolbox. The magazine’s staff tested all the squares on the market in the late 1990s and somehow the General version ended up on my bench. It’s a nice square, and on the outside would appear to be every bit as good as the Starrett, but something is missing. The blade in the Starrett just moves a bit more sweetly and the engraved markings are just a bit crisper.

As I got more into traditional hand work, I considered trading in my Starrett for a traditional try square (perhaps a wooden one). After all, combination squares were built originally for machinists, not woodworkers. But after dabbling with the old-Testament gear, I fled back into the arms of Starrett. It’s just too darn perfect and useful.

I keep the 6" version tucked into my shop apron and use it for laying out and measuring joinery. The 12" one hangs above my bench and comes into play any time I need to keep two measurements locked in (which is typical) or the joinery is beyond the range of the 6" tool.

It’s almost impossible to overstate my affection for this tool. If I had a family crest, I’d put it on there. If I’m buried with one tool, this will probably be the one I ask my wife to tuck into the pocket of my last suit.

But I probably won’t want to be buried with this square. Instead, I plan to hang it on the wall of my shop in plain view in the hopes that one of my children will pick the thing up when they need a tool for a quick measurement. Perhaps the same bolt of lightning will strike them.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [2]

A Knife That Never Needs Sharpening? We’ll See!

Posted 5/24/2008 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

When I first opened the package, I assumed that the tool inside was a prototype that had a plastic blade. That happens occasionally here at the magazine when a manufacturer wants our opinion on a tool’s ergonomics before they crank up production.

But no, the white chunk of stuff at the end of the Gladstone Tools marking knife actually was the working blade. And this was no prototype.

The spear point of this 8”-long knife is ceramic. Ceramax 80, to be precise, a material you can find in a variety of industrial and home applications, including some kitchen knives.

According to the manufacturer, the knife is second in hardness only to diamond and “will never need sharpening.”

That is quite a claim, and so I immediately put the knife to work today to see how it performed. The ceramic blade is a spear-point shape that is about 1/8” thick. It has the same general shape as the now-discontinued Veritas marking knife we reviewed a few years ago.

The knife’s edges don’t feel as keen as a freshly sharpened steel knife, but the tool does lay down a fine line with little effort. It also offers the same feedback to the user as a steel knife as it makes its mark. I thought the Gladstone might feel a bit gummy (like a stainless tool), but perhaps I was just getting over the shock that it wasn’t a chunk of white plastic.

The handle that was shipped to me is not the same shape as shown on the Gladstone Tools web site. This knife has two pronounced flats that prevent the tool from rolling on the bench (always nice) and has a thin neck for your middle finger while marking joints.

The padouk handle (it’s also available in zebrawood) is well finished. It’s not as nicely turned and finished as the Blue Spruce knives, but it is nicer than most manufactured knives I’ve used. The price is $29.95 for the padouk and $31.95 for the zebrawood – those are fair prices for a nice piece of work like this.

Will the edge hold up? I sure hope so. Gladstone Tools is run by a man that many of us simply know as “Manny,” who runs Manny’s Woodworkers Place in Lexington, Ky. When I was first taking woodworking classes, I and my fellow students would hang out at Manny’s place and drool over the amazing selection of books (still the best, even today) and hand tools. Manny was always patient with us as we would fondle the Japanese chisels but purchase a small set of brad points.

Though Manny carried a few machines and power tools, the majority of his inventory has always been hand tools, including many hard-to-find things. When I first started woodworking seriously, it was Manny’s place that made a huge impression on me. I thought all furniture making used both hand and power tools. (A rude awakening was to follow.)

If you purchase this knife, add a comment below after you use it for a while and let me know how it held up. I’ll use it exclusively for a while and report back as well.

If Manny has come up with a way to ensure that I have one less tool to sharpen, that’s a pretty amazing accomplishment.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [0]

Essential Joinery Plane: The Moving Fillister

Posted 5/1/2008 in All Weblog Posts | Handplanes | Joinery

As woodworkers dive into handwork, they usually start with a block plane, then the bench planes, the saws and the joinery planes.

Joinery planes – such as plow planes, router planes, shoulder planes and rabbeting planes – are some of the easiest planes to set up and use. Their irons are straighforward to sharpen (no curves needed), and because the tool doesn’t produce a show surface, you don’t need to be a maniac about the keenness of your cutting edges.

One of the most essential joinery planes is the moving fillister. It cuts a rabbet either across the grain or with the grain. And it can make a rabbet of almost any size thanks to its adjustable fence.

Moving fillisters are different than other planes in the rabbeting family in that its fence is adjustable (planes with a fixed fence are called standing fillisters), plus it can work across the grain because it has retractable nickers (planes without the nickers are just plain old rabbet planes).

The iron Stanley No. 78 is the most common vintage version of this tool, however I’m not fond of the form. The fence wobbles because of the way it is attached to the body, so the plane does a poor job in hard woods (in my experience). Record, by the way, fixed this problem with its metal version of this plane, though it’s a tough tool to find in North America.

This really is a case where the wooden versions of a plane are superior. Wooden-stock moving fillisters are fairly common in the secondary market, though they usually require some rehabbing to be usable. So what do you do?

You could ask Clark & Williams to make you one – they showed me an excellent moving fillister they make a couple years ago. You could buy an ECE from toolsforworkingwood.com. Or you could buy a new traditional one from Philip Edwards at Philly Planes in England.

Philip’s planes are excellent. I recently reviewed his miter plane plus a plane designed for raising panels for drawer bottoms. They both work like a charm. So it’s very exciting to me (and a good sign for hand work in general) that there is a new moving fillister on the market from Philip’s shop.

We’ve ordered one for our shop here, and I will offer a full report once it arrives. Until then, however, if you need a moving fillister, I can recommend Philip’s planes highly.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Want to learn more about joinery planes? Then definitely pick up a copy of “The Wooden Plane” by John M. Whelan.

Comments [9]

Figuring Out Finger Joints

Posted 4/24/2008 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

For me, finger joints have always been the nerdy, square cousin to the dovetail.

Finger joints are immensely strong when glued properly. But they are usually used by beginning woodworkers in places where a dovetail would be more appropriate, such as on a piece of 18th-century casework.

Add to that the fact that finger joints are tricky or dangerous to make on wide boards (without a commercial jig) plus the fact that gluing them with yellow glue is stressful, and it's a wonder that anyone uses them at all.

And so we decided to tackle finger joints for the Summer 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine, which will be shipping to subscribers next month. It took us a few months to really pin them down (pun intended), but I think we nailed it (and no, cut nails are not involved).

Here's a small taste of some of the problems of the joint we solved after three months of testing in our shop:

Appearance: Finger joints are a product of the machine age. Using them in styles before circa 1900 is just wrong to the eye. So consider the joint for more contemporary pieces only.

Cutting them Accurately: Right now there are basically two different ways to cut the joint: A shop-made jig for the table saw for narrow boards, and using a router jig that costs several hundred dollars for wide boards. We set out to develop a simple and safe shop-made jig that could handle both wide and narrow boards. Senior Editor Robert W. Lang had a stroke of genius on this and solved the problem forever (in my opinion).

Gluing Them Easily: You can assemble small boxes with finger joints fairly easily when using yellow glue. But at a certain point, you hit the wall because the glue sets up before you can close all the joints. So the solution would seem to be a slow-setting glue. Well, that's one way to go about it. But we found an easier and faster way that is super-strong (see the photo of Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick's boot on a sample joint). In the end, it took an anvil to bust up our sample joints.

Also in the Summer 2008 Issue
The finger joint is just one of the major themes running through the issue. Here are some of the other stories you can look for in the coming issue:

Building a Better Chest: Most woodworkers build chests using the most convoluted and fussy assembly imaginable. After reviewing hundreds of historical models, we settle on a method for building a chest that looks more complex at first glance, but actually saves an immense amount of shop time, requires less fussing around and allows more design flexibility.

Crackle Finishing: Many woodworkers who try a crackle finish have inconsistent results. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. And predicting how much it's going to crackle is almost impossible. Senior Editor Glen D. Huey cracks the code of crackle finish and finds out that the easiest and most predictable way to do it is also the simplest.

Trimming End Grain: When you have to cut back some end grain so it's flush with some face grain, it's always an opportunity to mess up the project. We show you two (actually three) methods for doing it right every time with a block plane, sander and pencil eraser.

And one more thing about the Summer 2008 issue: This issue is going to be mailed out to subscribers in a protective plastic bag, which will reduce the chances that the postal service will mangle it. If the plastic bag works for you, let us know so we can encourage our manufacturing division to continue using it.

And if you're not a subscriber, you can easily remedy that here.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [16]

Bevel-out or Bevel-in? Good Question

Posted 4/9/2008 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery | Reader Questions

If you haven't surmised it yet, one of the themes running through the Spring 2008 issue is the fact that accurate sawing has a lot more to do with accurate chisel work than anything else. When you cut a tenon shoulder, it's the chisel that cuts the part of the joint that shows – the saw just removes the waste below.

Several readers have picked up on this theme, and they've also pointed out (politely, I might add) what looks like a contradiction in my instructions about chiseling.

In the article on the Stickley Tabourets, I'm chiseling the joint line for the half-lap joint with the bevel of the chisel facing away from the waste (you can see this on page 10). A few pages later (page 19) I'm chiseling the shoulder for a tenon with the bevel of the chisel facing into the waste.

Have I finally taken one too many sips of La Fin Du Monde?

Perhaps, but I did have a good reason for what I did – I just didn't have the room in the issue to explain it. So here goes:

When you deepen a knife line by striking it with a chisel, there are two important things to consider. First is what shape the resulting knife line will be, and second is how much the chisel will shift when you rap its handle with a mallet.

The first part is easy to understand. Chisels are wedge-shaped. They have a flat face and a bevel. So when you knock the tool straight down into your work it makes a "V"-shaped cut that is a photocopy of this shape. One side of the V is straight up and down. The other side of the V is sloped.

The second part also has to do with the fact that chisels are wedges. When you drive a chisel with a mallet, it doesn't want to travel straight down in a line that's parallel to the flat face of the chisel. Instead, it wants to travel at an angle that is halfway between the bevel and the flat face. So if you have a 20° bevel on your chisel (as I do in the paring chisel shown in the articles), the chisel doesn't want to travel at 90° (straight down), it wants to move at 80°. (This assumes you have wood pushing back equally on the bevel and the face of the chisel.)

This is why when you are chiseling out your waste between dovetails that the chisel is always trying to move toward (and even cross) your baseline.

Whew. With all that on the table, I can now explain why I did what I did.

When chiseling a tenon shoulder, the shape of the line created by the chisel is critical. I want it perfectly square so it will close tight with the stile. So I chisel the joint with the bevel facing the waste. If this so happens to shrink the overall length of the tenoned part by 1/128", I can live with that. I want the joint to be tight more than I care about its final length.

When chiseling a half-lap joint, my considerations are different. This isn't a show joint, so I just want it to be tight and structural. The shoulder line isn't as critical. That's why I chisel with the bevel facing away from the waste. The chisel will then drift into the waste a tad. So when I saw the joint, the notch made by the chisel will encourage the saw to cut a half-lap that is just a tad tight. Then I can plane the piece's mate to get a perfect fit.

This might be a little fussy for you. If so, I apologize. A chisel seems so simple (it's a steel and wooden corndog!), but it actually is a subtle instrument (like a corndog with chorizo inside). Play around with the tool. Try it with the bevel out and then with the bevel in. And let us know what you discover.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [9]

My First Pair of Pantyhose

Posted 3/25/2008 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery | Saws

I'm always looking for little tricks to improve dovetailing, especially the part I dislike: transferring the tails' locations to the pin board.

Sawmaker Mike Wenzloff stumbled across this interesting short entry in William Fairham’s book “Woodwork Joints, How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used” (available for free download here at the most awesome Project Gutenberg). After describing how some woodworkers use a knife or a saw to transfer the marks, Fairham writes:

“Other workers prefer a pounce-bag instead of a saw. A pounce-bag consists of a piece of fairly open woven muslin filled with a mixture of French chalk and finely-powdered whiting; the muslin is tied up with a piece of thin twine like the mouth of a flour sack. All that is necessary is to place the timber in position and bang the bag on the top of the saw-cuts, when sufficient powder will pass through the bag and down the saw kerf to mark the exact positions of the lines.”

So it was off to the store to buy some pantyhose.

But first, we had to find whiting and French chalk. The French chalk was fairly easy – it's essentially powered talc. You can find it at the fabric stores where it is used for marking cloth. Or you can go to the pharmacy and buy baby powder, which is talc and fragrance (essence du hinder l'enfant).

Whiting was harder for us to find. It is calcium carbonate (ground chalk) and is used in preparing artist paints these days. After a couple of clueless looks and pointless phone calls, Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick found some at an artist supply store.

And then the muslin. Surprisingly, we're a yard short on muslin in the workshop right now. So Megan suggested I buy pantyhose for the bag. I balked a bit. So she picked out a nice pair of L'eggs Everyday knee-highs (color: nude with a sheer toe), paid the man and we were off to the races.

Now before I ruined a nice new pair of knee-highs, I decided to try some other fabrics. First up: some old surgical rags that former Senior Editor David Thiel brought into the shop about 10 years ago. It actually was too coarse and the powder went flying.

Then I tried an athletic sock (I use them to transport my block planes to shows and classes). Bingo. It deposited a fine dusting of powder when I whacked the sock on the dovetails.

As I was experimenting with the different whacking forces and whacking vectors, I cleaned off the pin board after each whack with a little water and a rag. And that water seemed to make the powder even easier to see.

Then I tried marking some knife lines and just whacking those (seeing knife lines in walnut is really hard for me). That worked, too. The resulting pins were easy to see and to saw. I'm going to have to experiment with the technique some more, but it's another thing to tuck into your bag of tricks (or your nude, sheer-toe knee-highs).

— Christopher Schwarz

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Building a Better Chest

Posted 2/25/2008 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

There is something deep inside our DNA that ties us to the chest as a form of furniture. First off, how many other kinds of furniture do we have that are named after critical parts of our own bodies? We are all, in essence, “chests on stands.” The feet give way to the legs. The legs are attached to the waist. And the waist supports the chest itself.

Also, few forms of furniture evoke such strong emotional response in both men and women. Whenever I mention among acquaintances that I’m building a chest, the women (sorry to generalize) always seem far more interested in this work than they are in my table-, chair- or cabinet-building enterprises.

“Is it a blanket chest?” is the first question. And that’s usually followed by, “Is this for you or will you sell it?”

Men react differently, though equally with emotion. “Is it a tool chest?” they ask. “And what will happen to your old tool chest?”

So with our species’s strong attraction to the chest, it’s surprising how many of them are designed so poorly. This became evident as I reviewed about a dozen plans for chests from the last 100 years that I dug up from my library.

Unlike the “chest on stand” that I mentioned above, most chests are low-slung affairs with three major components. The plinth, sometimes called the base, the waist moulding and the chest itself.

The plinth is almost always wider and deeper than the chest above. And the waist mould provides the transition between these two separate assemblies. It is this transition point between plinth and chest where many woodworkers make the construction far too fussy, complex and apt to fail.

Perhaps the most difficult way to build a chest goes something like this: Build the chest proper. Take your four plinth pieces and mould their long, top edges. Then wrap the four (sometimes three) plinth pieces around the chest, joining them at the corners. Finally, cope the mouldings at the corners so the moulding profiles wraps seamlessly around the chest.

If you’ve ever built a chest this way, I don’t need to tell you why it’s a bear to pull it off. First, fitting the plinth pieces around the chest requires persnickety layout. The joints have to be dead-on, or your plinth won’t sleeve nicely over the chest. Also, the exterior of your chest has to be completely true and the assembly dead-square, otherwise, you’ll have ugly gaps between the plinth and chest proper. Finally, it’s quite trying to execute the moulding at the corners of the plinth because you are moulding end grain with rasps, files and chisels.

One improvement over this form is to sleeve the plinth over the chest and then to miter and nail moulding into the transition. This is better, but it still requires a lot of fussy layout and fussy fitting of the chest to the plinth.

The third method looks like more labor than these other two methods, but it’s not. You assemble the plinth and chest assemblies separately. Then you add either a web frame or just a couple runners into the top of the plinth. It’s best to sink the web frame or runners into rabbets in the plinth.

Then you attach the chest to the plinth with screws and wrap the transition with moulding that is a wee bit wide. Finally, trim the moulding flush to the plinth with a plane.

I’ve built chests all three ways, and I can tell you that even though the third method requires more wood and one extra assembly, it is easier to fit all the parts and a faster way of building a chest.

The next issue of Woodworking Magazine (Summer 2008) will focus on building chests, both with and without plinths. The only thing we haven’t been able to answer in our research on this topic is if the chests we’re building will end up holding tools or plushy things.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Updated Review: Veritas Bevel Setter

Posted 2/18/2008 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

Some tools are like high school girlfriends. It’s all hot and heavy and kissy-kissy for the first few weeks, and then things cool off and you wonder what you were thinking. Other tools are like good spouses. The relationship gets better with time, even when you are both a little worn around the edges.

I’m happy to say that the Veritas Bevel Setter is more like a spouse than a girlfriend. (I don’t expect that blurb will show up in any advertisements.) When I first reviewed the tool, I was quite taken with it and its cleverness. The Bevel Setter lets you set or draw angles with much more accuracy than a child’s protractor or even a machinist’s protractor. It allows you to transfer angles more easily than with the other bevel-setting devices on the market that merely have the angles engraved on them. Plus, its small size allows you to get into tight spaces.

And now, a couple years after first getting the tool, I couldn’t imagine not picking it up during a project. As my work has become more angular and curvular (yes Megan, I know that’s not a word) I find that I always need a device that can measure any angle, transfer the angle to a piece of work, or even transfer the angle to my sliding T-bevel with zero errors. Plus, the sucker is so easy to dial in that even if you discard one setting, it’s simple to get it again.

The real genius in the device is its metal fence, which locks down tightly (and stays there) with a brass thumbscrew. The underside of the fence has a couple little grippy feet that make the fence stick to the steel plate like a magnet.

Finally, the thing is a darn-decent ruler in a pinch and can substitute for a small combination square when laying out the position of drawer hardware, for example.

The device ($33.50 from Lee Valley Tools) is available in both metric and Imperial measurements. For some reason, I ended up with the metric version in my toolbox, but it doesn’t seem to bother me. That fact, however, is a bit bothersome. I worry that the metric system will worm its way into my life. But then, that’s basically what happened with my wife.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [19]

Questions on Glue, Nails and Drawbores

Posted 11/14/2007 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery | Reader Questions

Adrian Mariano writes: I just watched your DVD ("Forgotten Hand Tools" from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks) in which you advocate the use of nails and drawbores to overcome the flaws in the glue. And there were a couple things I was wondering about.

One is the question of glue longevity. If I glue together a tabletop with hide glue will it fall apart in 100 years? Two hundred? Or do glue joints only fail if they are stressed? (Presumably the side-grain-to-side-grain joint of a tabletop creates very little stress in the joint.) I haven't heard of people, say, putting together tabletops using sliding dovetails to ensure strength.

Answer: Any good glue joint can last centuries. Its life will be shortened by moisture, heat and stress. Moisture on a tabletop is a common factor. Heat can be. And tabletop joints are stressed at the ends by the migration of moisture through the end grain -- that's why antique tops split on the ends typically.

Breadboard ends and cross-battens are typical and historically correct methods of helping to keep a top together.

Question No. 2: Why are nails better than screws? I haven't tried to use nails in cabinetry, but I've tried to use them in carpentry and my experience has led me to hate nails and to use screws instead whenever possible. They bend over, they split the work (sometimes even with a pilot hold), and hammering them in can be very loud, and it subjects the work to stresses, possibly causing parts to move or shift. Maybe a screw head is harder to hide than a nail head. But is there some other reason to prefer nails?

Answer: Hmmm. I don't consider nails to be better than screws for all occasions. But there are some advantages to using nails at times. Nails will bend to accommodate wood movement. Screws won't bend. They'll split the work. Nails are smaller and can be used in places that screws would be ugly (nailing on face frames and moulding). They are inserted faster than screws (removing them sure is slower!). And they can be historically correct in pieces, which can be important to some woodworkers (such as myself).

Question No. 3: Another thing I was wondering about is that I saw an article a few months ago (which, alas, I have not been able to find again). This was an article by Bob Flexner on furniture repair and restoration in which he claims that the use of metal fasteners guarantees problems down the road, and I recall that he said pinning a mortise-and-tenon joint would cause it to split eventually. He seems almost directly in opposition to the use of nails and the drawbore, and justifies his position based on the types of damage he sees in old furniture. Do you have any thoughts on how to reconcile this with your claims in the DVD?

Answer: Bob is one of the people I highly respect in this business. He also comes at this problem from a restorer's viewpoint. It's more difficult for him to disassemble a joint pinned with a mechanical fastener, be it a wooden or metal one. His comment was aimed also at people who nail a loose joint instead of disassembling it and regluing. That is indeed bad practice.

I don't think a pinned joint guarantees joint failure at all. I have seen pinned joints that are 400 years old and are completely sound. Drawboring is a sound practice for certain kinds of applications where mechanical strength is key or you are working under unusual conditions (wet wood, long spans and no clamps) or you are striving for historical accuracy.

-- Christopher Schwarz

Comments [8]

First Look: Cover Project for the March 2008 Issue

Posted 10/28/2007 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

This weekend I put the finishing touches on two Stickley tabourets; and while the little tables turned out to my satisfaction, the construction process proved quite vexing considering there are only nine pieces of wood in each.

The theme of Issue 9 is sawing – understanding sawtooth technology and how to use that knowledge in your work with both hand and power tools. So when I started building these tables I resolved to build one table with the joints sawn by hand and the other with the joints cut by machine.

And that turned out to be harder than I expected.

Though I am comfortable doing all of the necessary operations by both hand and machine, I kept running into situations where sticking to the hand tools or sticking to the power tools was a dumb choice.

For example: The cross stretchers beneath the tabletops are joined to the legs with a single lap dovetail joint. This is an easy joint to cut by hand: Saw the tail, saw out the socket, then remove the waste with a chisel and a router plane.

But when it came to doing this operation by machine it just ticked me off. I cut the shoulders of the dovetail with a dado stack in my table saw at the same time I cut the tenons. That was fairly efficient. Then I cut the dovetail shape on the band saw. Still OK. Then it came time to waste away the dovetail socket in the top of the 1-1/2"-square leg. I picked up the shop’s trim router and contemplated the platform jig I was going to have to build to do this with the router. I shook my head, put the router down and got my dovetail saw. I was done in 10 minutes.

Similarly, when it came time to mortise the legs I used my hollow-chisel mortiser for the power-tool version of the table. My mortiser is always set up with a 1/4" chisel that’s perfectly parallel to the machine’s fence. So when it came time to mortise the legs by hand I faced the same struggle. My mortiser was all set up and I could be done in five minutes. Or I could mortise the legs by hand, which would take a little longer and had the risk of me splitting the leg or wandering left or right. So I used the machine.

These little struggles reminded me of how I don’t understand how some people can work exclusively with hand tools or with machines. I know it can be done and done quite well, but just not by me.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [12]

Beware of Plans in Woodworking Publications

Posted 10/24/2007 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

This week I'm getting ready to build a Shaker firewood box for the I Can Do That column in our sister publication, Popular Woodworking. I really like building projects for this column because you're limited to hand-held tools and a Workmate to do the job. Plus the projects are fast and – if I do my job right – look pretty good in the end.

In fact, what's crazy about building projects for this column is that it takes longer to research the project than it does to build it. Here's the story.

I've always wanted to build the Shaker firewood box from the Pleasant Hill community in Kentucky. Not that we have a working fireplace. (Ask my wife about that sometime if you'd like a good laugh. All you have to say is "father-in-law," "smoke-filled house," and "husband streaking through the house carrying burning logs.")

The Pleasant Hill box has a couple nice curves that remind me of other rural Kentucky pieces I've seen in my 14 years here, yet it still looks Shaker. To build the project, my first step was to consult Ejner Handberg's "Measured Drawings of Shaker Furniture & Woodenware" (Berkshire House) and his drawings of the box.

Now, I really like Handberg's books on the Shakers. He made his drawings based on the real pieces that passed through his shop (sometimes for repair). But the more I get to know Handberg's drawings, the more I've begun to think that he perhaps smudged some of the details. It wouldn't surprise me if it were on purpose – counterfeit furniture is big business.

So I knew that Handberg's drawing shouldn't be taken as gospel. So earlier this fall I took another a trip to Pleasant Hill to see some alpacas and get a gander at the firewood box first-hand. Plus I wanted to record the color of the finish as best I could.

As I expected, the drawing is different, especially in one critical piece: the protruding rail that runs across the front of the box. Handberg drew it square in section, when the original clearly is relieved on its underside to fit over the curve on the sides. I like the original. Plus, the profile on the lid to the kindling box on the top is different.

In short, I'm glad I checked.

Really, there is nothing like seeing an original piece before you build it. Plans and photos can take you only so far. And sometimes, seeing the original can change your mind about a piece. For example, I've always liked the clocks that came out of the Dominy workshop in New York, and I've looked them over many times in the 1968 classic "With Hammer in Hand." But I've never felt compelled to build one. The grainy black-and-white photos show off the lines of the pieces, but don't really serve to inspire me.

A couple weeks ago I got to visit the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum in Delaware, where the Dominy shop was moved years ago. I went to Winterthur to see the shop, but I was stunned by the clocks. Not by the ornate tall clocks. I'm not big on ornate.

But the last recorded clock made by the Dominy shop in 1824 grabbed me by the throat and I decided I had to build this clock. And soon. I'm hoping to publish plans for the clock in a future issue of Woodworking Magazine, but here's a word to the wise: You might want to check out the original for yourself before you build it based off my plans. Woodworking publications are not to be trusted.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [1]

Marking Knives: Stuff They Never Teach You

Posted 10/9/2007 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

Sometimes your woodworking improves like a slow and steady climb up a mountain. Sometimes, however, you get to ride the elevator.

When I first started woodworking, I used a carpenter’s pencil I sharpened with a knife. Then I traded up to a mechanical pencil, which never needed sharpening. Then one day I found my old X-Acto knife in my desk drawer. All through college I had worked as a production artist for a printing company, and I’d held onto my pica pole, a roll of 4-point adhesive tape and my beloved X-Acto.

This knife, I thought, might just be a mechanical pencil that never needed lead.

That day my woodworking skills took a much-needed lurch forward. Hand work, in particular, is much easier to manage with a knife line that never smudges, changes in thickness or is offset from the point you intended.

After a few years of woodworking with my X-Acto, I discovered spear-point, single bevel marking knives, such as the Blue Spruce knife shown in the photo above. Though some woodworkers would disagree, this form is ideal for marking joints for hand-cutting. The flat side rides the shape of the piece you want to mimic. The knife marks its location with zero offset.

But no one ever showed me how to use a marking knife. And sometimes it would follow the grain instead of the path I had set for it. Then one day, I realized what I was doing wrong. I was moving the knife too fast and with far too much pressure. Once I slowed down and took three light passes (in place of one heavy pass), my accuracy took another leap forward.

So slow down, and take it easy.

One final tip for those who have failing eyesight: Don’t throw away that mechanical pencil. If you need to add some makeup to a knife line, run that mechanical pencil down the knife line, then run an eraser over the pencil line. You’ll end up with a knife line filled with just enough lead to see it.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [8]

In the End, End Grain Bites

Posted 9/27/2007 in All Weblog Posts | Handplanes | Joinery

Whenever I get into some serious handwork, I always try to boil down the processes so that I can 1) remember it myself and 2) occasionally explain it to others (including a couple children who are slack-jawed with boredom).

Today as I was cleaning up the half-lap joints for the Stickley 603 tabouret on my workbench, I was reminded of one of the guiding principles: Don't work the end grain unless you have to. End grain is unruly. It is usually confined to small surfaces that are hard to work accurately. And working it poorly will rip out chunks of precious face grain as well.

This is why I don't own any side-rabbet planes. In all my years of working wood, I have honestly never encountered a situation where I had to have those tools and no other tool would do. (Boy they look cool, though.) If a dado is too skimpy, I'll thin the mating shelf's face grain instead. The face grain is so much easier to plane, my tools don't have to be as sharp, my work is less at risk and it is another chance to remove tear-out in the shelf.

So when I was fitting the first half-lap shown in the photo above, I cut my shoulders just a hair tight. So I took two swipes of the edge of the mating piece. Perfect fit.

One side item: In the magazine world, we're supposed to ignore our competitors. It's a time-honored tradition. We're supposed to pretend they don't exist so that readers don't flee our product in droves. So with that in mind, I'm actively ignoring an interesting new workbench plan in the newest issue of Woodsmith magazine (No. 173). I suggest you also ignore their quite excellent and robust plans for a wagon vise (what they call a tail vise in the book) in that issue.

– Christopher Schwarz

Comments [11]

Issue 9: Gustav Stickley Tabourets Built Two Ways

Posted 9/26/2007 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

"But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools."
— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), "Walden"

When I started building furniture on my back porch after college, I was sure of only one thing: I didn't want to use a radial-arm saw.

My aversion to the machine had nothing to do with safety, accuracy, philosophy or shop space. Instead, I despised the radial-arm saw because I spent one long hot summer as a slave to that machine at the Therma-Tru door factory in Arkansas.

I worked on the assembly line that built the fire doors. It was my job to crosscut the internal rails and stiles that were then skinned with the exterior metal (in a pleasing Colonial look!). The radial-arm saw was right next to the furnace that baked on some sort of coating (you know, I never asked what that stuff was).

No matter how fast I cut, I could never keep up. And the workers on the line were always reaching for the stile I had just put down. After a few weeks of this, the radial-arm saw and I became enemies and we remain so to this day.

For me, woodworking is about balancing the role of the hand and the machine. But there is more than one balancing point. And that's the theme of Issue 9 of Woodworking Magazine, which we are beginning to work on. The cover project is an adaptation of the Gustav Stickley No. 603 tabouret shown in Robert W. Lang's "Shop Drawings for Craftsman Furniture."

I picked an Arts & Crafts project for the issue because the best examples of this furniture style incorporate both machine- and hand-work. Right now I'm building two of these tables. One table is being built with machines carrying most of the load, including joinery. With the other table, hand tools will have the upper hand.

This isn't just about substituting a tenon saw for a 40-tooth flat-tooth rip blade. There are differences in the way you lay out your work and move through the construction process. The resulting tables should look identical, though you can be the judge of that (assuming you purchase the issue).

I have other aversions in addition to the radial-arm saw, including broasted chicken, glazed doughnuts and bagging ice. All those aversions were the result of a hot summer working in a gas station. But those stories are for another kind of blog.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [6]

Tool Review: Two Better Beaters

Posted 9/17/2007 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

I enjoy a good beating. Chopping dovetails or mortises is almost as pleasurable as sawing or planing. So, as you can imagine, I'm picky about my mallet.

For years I tried to make myself like the traditional round mallet used in carving and cabinetmaking. But I couldn't grow to enjoy using it. I'd be more likely to pick up a hammer than a round mallet when it came to chopping time.

So I abandoned the round one and have since been trying out a variety of mallets that are wooden or both wood and metal. I bought a couple English mallets that have a brass head that's filled with wooden striking surfaces. These are good, but replacing the wood when it expired was no fun.

So I've settled on two mallets that I really like. One is the Veritas Cabinetmaker's Mallet, which I've had since the company started making them. It's well-balanced and heavy enough (1 lb. 5 oz.) to get the job done. The head is brass and the wooden inserts are 1-1/2" in diameter, so you can cut them using a hole saw and pop them in (I'm about to replace one of my faces with a synthetic material that toolmaker Paul Hamler sent me. Don't know what it is, but he swears by it).

The handle is, I believe, ash. I stripped the finish off of it and applied a little oil and wax so it suits my hand better. This was the only mallet I used – until May.

That's when one of my students, Dante DiIanni, handed me one of the mallets he was developing for sale through his woodworking supplies store, Di Legno Woodshop Supply. It looks like a smallish beech carpenter's mallet you might see in a typical woodworking catalog. I've never cared much for this form because they were so lightweight that I ended up getting a sore forearm.

But Dante's mallets are different. He soaks them in linseed oil for a long time. This greatly increases the weight of the mallets, and gives them a nice feel in the hand. The mallet I tried is listed as approximately 22 oz., but mine weighs 19 oz., according to our postal scale. The mallet is 13" long overall with a 2-3/8" x 4-5/8" head. So it's a nice small size – you're in not going to smack yourself in the head and you can get into fairly tight places.

All the right edges are chamfered (I like chamfers), and there's a nice leather wrist strap, which is great for hanging the mallet over the bench (or keeping it on your wrist should your palm become separated from the handle during a wild swing).

I like this mallet. And so does Senior Editor Glen D. Huey, who has been chopping out about 100 dovetails for the cabinet base on his workbench. The mallet packs a ton of punch for its size and is a good fit in your hand. The mallet comes in four sizes between 18 oz. ($22.95) up to 32 oz. ($29.95). The 22 oz. model we tested is $24.95. you can order one from the Di Legno web site or by calling 877-208-4298.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [6]

Festool Domino: The Six-month Report

Posted 8/28/2007 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

This weekend we gave away our antique Arts & Crafts sideboard to some friends who have just bought a house and I installed the new Gustav Stickley 802 sideboard I’d built with the help of Harvey Ellis’s pen and German technology.

Like every other woodworking magazine, we’ve been heavily testing the Festool Domino since it arrived in early December. Senior Editor Glen Huey has built a number of traditional American projects using it. Senior Editor Robert Lang has been building a massive credenza that will go behind his workbench (it’s a long story, ask him). And Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick has even had her turn with the machine and is in the middle of building a medicine cabinet and mirror with the Domino.

And for my part, I’ve fiddled around with the thing quite a bit. I built a few picture frames for some artwork that has been languishing around the house. And I’ve built a couple cabinet doors. But my first real test of the machine was this summer as I built a Stickley 802 sideboard between bouts of traveling and teaching.

This was my first complex piece of casework with the Domino, and I was eager to get familiar with the machine but also cautious that I’d muck up a lot of good cherry in the name of trying out the new thing.

I’ll spare you any suspense: The Domino works as advertised. And considering its immense promise, that is an impressive feat. In competent hands, the Domino is capable of cutting joints with jaw-dropping speed and impressive strength. But note the qualifier: “In competent hands….” The Domino is only as smart as its user.

As I put the sideboard together, I was curious how much faster it would be to use this machine compared to cutting traditional mortise-and-tenon joints. Glen Huey estimates that the Domino is capable of trimming about 25 percent off the shop time of a typical casework project. As I put the base of the sideboard together, I thought Glen was dead-on right. The Domino moved effortlessly through the project. It cut offset joints with immense precision and little math. It made joints that were tighter than any biscuit joints. And because of the inherent holding ability of the ribbed beech Dominos, I had to use few clamps to get everything together.

With the case assembled, I braced the sideboard against my bench and used a jointer plane to remove a few shavings from the rear apron to get it flush to the legs.

Then the project went limp, like my youngest sister’s arm when she broke it while playing in our driveway. The Domino joints in the front apron had failed. But why?

I’d forgotten a cardinal rule of tenon design: A tenon should be two-thirds the width of the stock it emerges from. Because the Dominos were so tight and so dead-on, I’d used two of them in each joint in the front rail. I should have used three.

So I pulled apart the front of the carcase and cut additional joints. (Note: Try cutting mortises on a half-assembled carcase with a hollow-chisel mortiser. The portability of the Domino is one of its oft-overlooked wonders.) Then it was glue, clamps and an impatient and fitful evening. The next day I picked up at the same place I’d gone wrong. This time the Dominos held, which was absolutely no surprise at all.

This week I’m gearing up for some more furniture projects. My youngest daughter needs some bookshelves, and the friends with the new (read: empty) house need some shelves as well. And our living room has never had a decent coffee table. Ah, and the campaign chest I’ve been doodling is starting to tug at me.

And the Domino figures prominently in many of those plans.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [0]

Dovetail Details: A Note from David Charlesworth

Posted 6/28/2007 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

Editor's note: I know that some of you are having difficulty posting comments on occasion. Sometimes, the captcha function rejects your code on the first try. When this happens, it takes you back to the blog entry, but your comment is still unposted and at the bottom of the page. If you enter your code again, that will send the comment. Our technical people are working on the issue. My apologies.

David Charlesworth tried to post the following comment last night that related to our discussion on dovetailing. There are a couple good tips in here for you. Two additional items: I now owe David a couple Belgian beers. And whatever you do, do not read his blog entry about our attempts to move my Nicholson Workbench. Don't visit his site, don't click on "blog" and don't click on "Return from USA"

— Chris

Failed to get my comment onto your blog ~:-(#

You are spot on as usual. Deep crisply cut shoulder lines are a revelation to nearly all the students on my dovetailing courses. Most of them don't have functional cutting gauges and do not mark nearly deep enough.

A consistently thin final cut, with freshly sharpened chisels is another. This reduces the wedging and bruising action of the bevel. Particularly important on your softer pines and poplar. Therefore I like to mark a penultimate cut line, with a knife and set square. Could be another gauge setting of course.

Another point which was made to me recently, was that the surface cut by the gauge is square, so subsequent slight undercut with chopping will not cause gaping when the joint is planed up externally. Win win all the way.

Secret mitered dovetail requires three gauge settings which is why I like to tune $10 beech gauges. Pages 14,15 &16 of book 1. If my time was charged for this work it might bring the cost close to Tite-Mark price!

There is lots about this on my chisel use dvd, bet you several Belgian beers you haven't watched it yet.....?

— David

Comments [0]

The Permanent Collection: “Woodwork Joints”

Posted 6/27/2007 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery | Required Reading

Contemporary writing on woodworking, of which I am woefully guilty, always seeks to make the craft as simple as possible. We try to make the joints easy, quick and straightforward. We tend to promote furniture designs that have straight lines and wide appeal.

But if you’ve never studied any book on joinery that’s more than 50 years old, you’re in for a rude shock. Joinery and case construction was far more complex and demanding before World War II than it is today.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Charles H. Hayward’s seminal work: “Woodwork Joints.” First published in 1950, Hayward’s masterwork was a survey of the different kinds of joints and how they are used to produce casework. When I first encountered this book (thanks to Don McConnell of Clark & Williams fame), I was struck by how many variants there were of seemingly simple joints, such as the mortise-and-tenon.

And at the time I was bewildered by the complexity of some of these joints. Many of them seemed like they would be exceedingly difficult to produce, such as all the door joints that incorporated mitered stuck moulding into the rails and stiles.

But after a few years of working with this book by my side, I came to realize that a fair amount of the complexity was the result of me trying to graft a power-tool perspective onto a hand-tool operation. Once I started looking at the tasks from the perspective of the chisel or the plane, most of these joints were no more than cutting to a line.

(There is an exception – the fox-wedged tenon still scares the snot out of me. You only get one shot to assemble this blind wedged-tenon joint.)

Beginning woodworkers will be well-served by the first sections of Hayward’s book, which discuss how to design, lay out and cut basic edge joints, tenons and dovetails with remarkable clarity. Hayward’s line drawings of workshop practices have yet to be equaled.

Advanced woodworkers will revel in the same clarity that Hayward offers on some of wilder joints, such as three-way mitered tenon joints, mitered secret dovetails, proper rule joints, knuckle joints and joinery for bow-front frame-and-panel assemblies.

This book, my 1954 edition published by Evans Brothers Ltd., will be one of the things I scoop up (in addition to my daughters) if our house ever catches fire. I’ll leave the modern paperback versions of the book (including the edition from Sterling) to the flames. Though I’m glad that some modern publishers have kept the book in print, the reproduction quality of the photos and line drawings is poor indeed when compared to the early editions. It’s worth paying the extra money to find a bookseller in England, I’m sorry to say.

In addition to “Woodwork Joints,” Hayward has many other excellent books, some of which are in the “permanent collection,” but this book is my favorite of his. Look for it at all the usual places: addall.com, bookfinder.com, abebooks.com, powells.com, Amazon.com or through your local crusty and cranky used book seller.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [14]

Dovetail Detail: Keeping Your Baseline

Posted 6/25/2007 in | All Weblog Posts | Joinery

In general, I write about the best way to cut dovetails as much as I write about choosing the best religion. That is, not much. One of the reasons I avoid the topic of dovetails is that it gets far too much ink already.

One retired carpenter told me that cutting dovetails probably gets more ink than anything else in woodworking, followed by resawing on the band saw, tuning up your table saw and building the ultimate router table. Ugh, just typing that list of story topics makes me queasy.

The other reason I avoid the topic of dovetails is that I think the real “secret” to a good joint is so boring that readers would fall asleep if they had to read about it. Get your Red Bull energy drinks at the ready because here it is: Pick a method (they all work). Choose a set of tools (they are all valid). Cut the joint using those techniques and those tools and refuse to vary. Refuse to try much of anything new. Refuse to take shortcuts.

And then, according to a brilliant Chinese saying: “Practice 30 more years.”

I’m not a flashy dovetailer. I don’t use radical angles. I don’t cut really tiny pins. I don’t do fancy spacing to add “visual excitement.” I lay out the joint to make it easy to cut for my set of tools.

And after 14 years of practice (I’m almost halfway there!) here’s what I get: I almost never, ever have to pare the walls of the joint. My joints assemble with a little pounding of my fist on the first try. They are always tight enough that I don’t cringe when other woodworkers pull out my drawers. I never have to fill gaps with shims.

As I’ve worked, I’ve found a few tiny revelations that help me get better results with less fuss. I’m going to show you one of them tonight.

One of my biggest frustrations when dovetailing used to be crossing the baseline when chopping out the waste between my pins and tails with a chisel. You can’t just put the chisel in your baseline and pound down. The chisel will angle back and cross the baseline.

I don’t have this problem anymore, courtesy of my cutting gauge (I now use the Tite-Mark gauge from Glen-Drake Toolworks, before that I had a Japanese cutting gauge. They are the same tool, in essence.) After I lay out my tails or pins, I score the baseline in the waste areas deeply with the cutting gauge. Then I cut the joint.

After I chop close to my baseline with a chisel, I place the chisel tip in the baseline and flick the waste off. The deep score left by my cutting gauge leaves a small 1/32" rabbet of waste below the baseline (see the photo at top for what this looks like -- it's subtle). Then I can drop my chisel tip right against the baseline and pound down. About 99 percent of the time, I make a perfect and flat cut across the waste. About 1 percent of the time I undercut the joint. But that undercut is no big deal because the undercut occurs inside the joint where no one will see. The baseline is preserved in all cases.

Should you try this? I’ll leave that to you. If you use a cutting gauge and have trouble with crossing your baselines, I think it's worth a try. But don’t rush out and buy a Tite-Mark if you are using a different kind of gauge and are pleased with it (this message is brought to you by WivesAgainstSchwarz.com).

There actually is one how-to story on the dovetail that I’m eager to write, but it’s the dovetail story that hasn’t ever been written (to my knowledge). It’s on the list of stories for upcoming issues of Woodworking Magazine, right after sawing, clamping and chiseling.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [7]

Cross About Cross-grain Construction

Posted 5/11/2007 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

Today is "Blasphemy Friday."

I'm preparing the panels to start assembling this Gustav Stickley No. 802 sideboard and wondering if my project is going to self-destruct after a couple years. Here's the problem: The sides of this piece have the grain running vertically. Yet the grain in the stretchers near the floor runs horizontally.

It sounds like a recipe for disaster: The side panel will shrink with the seasons, and the tenon shoulder facing the floor will open up. Then the panel will expand in the wet months, and the tenon shoulder facing the ceiling will open up.

One way around this problem would be to rotate the side panels so the grain runs horizontally. But that would look funny to me – not like the original piece at all (shown above). Another solution would be to steal a trick from the Hall Brothers, the craftsmen who built the furniture for Charles and Henry Greene. They would build pieces with a two-step mortise – so the shoulder of the tenon would be buried 1/8" in the leg.

This seems fussy and excessive to me, and I've never seen any evidence of this on any piece of the hundreds of Arts & Crafts piece I've examined (I used to collect the stuff back when it was all flea-market grade).

So Senior Editor Bob Lang and I put our heads together and figured up how much a 13"-wide black cherry (Prunus serotina) panel would change in width during a 3-percent change in moisture content: about 1/16" to 7/64". Then I looked at the bending characteristics of cherry. The legs will flex a bit between the stretcher and the panel.

And then I remembered another project I'd built like this in 2002: A Harvey Ellis-designed magazine stand that's in my home. It has exactly the same problem (perhaps Ellis didn't believe in wood movement). The stretcher in this project is as tight as the day it was made. No gaps. And the mahogany I used for that project moves about the same amount as cherry.

So I'm going to build the No. 802 with the cross-grain construction and see if I get spanked.

(By the way, the smaller photo of the sideboard is of the other Stickley No. 802, the one owned by my photographer friend. Note how the curved stretcher and double-tapered legs shown in the picture at the top change this piece for the better.)

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [17]

Wedged Tenon v. Drawboring

Posted 11/20/2006 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery | Reader Questions

Question: Looking over the current and past issues of Woodworking Magazine, I see how drawboring or wedging a mortise and tenon joint will improve the strength and fit of the joint. But is there a reason to pick either drawboring or wedging over the other technique in terms of the strength or durability of the joint?

The only advantage I can think of so far is that it might be easier to disassemble a drawbored joint.

— Wilbur Pan

Answer: I'm not aware of any studies that compare the relative strengths of these two joints. For me, they both fit into the category of "stronger than typically required."

And that is probably why both joints show up frequently in chairs, which are the most-abused category of furniture.

I think that choosing one joint over the other depends on your materials, your tools at hand, the fit of the components and your desire for being able to disassemble the joint.

Materials: I would choose drawboring if my wood was a little wet and hadn't reached equilibrium with my shop. Drawboring will keep things tighter as the wood dries and shrinks. I would choose wedging if my material was less stout than oak (say, cherry or walnut). Drawboring is more likely to result in a split during assembly.

A drawbore joint, split open for your inspection.

Tools: I would choose drawboring if I had a set of drawbore pins. I don't like drawboring without them in typical frame construction -- though you can do it with small hole offsets. I would choose wedging if I had a band saw. Nothing makes wedges faster than a band saw and the wedge sled we showed in the magazine. Also, I would choose wedging if I had lots of clamps; I would choose drawboring if I didn't.

The Fit of Your Components: Drawboring is more accommodating to a joint that isn't as perfect. It will draw up tenon shoulders tightly more than wedging will. Wedging a through-tenon requires particular attention to the way the tenon and mortise fit.

A wedged through-tenon. Note that this is but one way to wedge this joint.

Reversibility: I actually think that a wedged joint (with hide glue) is more reversible than a drawbored joint. If you drill out a drawbore pin, you are generally going to make it so that the joint cannot be reassembled in the same way without some serious fussing. I know some people have assembled their drawbored joints without glue and then knocked out their pins later. I haven't had much luck with this, but I've only tried it a couple times. Early accounts of wedging recommended that the craftsman glue only the wedges when assembling the joint -- no other glue in the mortise. So with a little steam and heat, the wedges could be worked loose to repair the joint.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [2]

The 18th-century Tool Crib at Home Depot

Posted 10/10/2006 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

I'm a big fan of cut nails. They hold far better that modern wire nails and they really have the right look when it comes to building reproduction furniture, which is why I don't use square-drive brass screws when installing reproduction hinges.

However, cut nails can sometimes be difficult to find. Tremont Nail is an excellent source of the full line of cut nails. The company ships orders promptly, though it can take a week to get your goods. If I need them a bit faster I can usually get a bag of the common sizes and configurations from my local Rockler – a 40-minute drive from my house.

So last week, Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick and I were at the local Lowe's and Home Depot picking out some wood for our "I Can Do That" column in Popular Woodworking. The column is a blast for us to put together each issue. Here are the rules: You build a project and can use only hand-held power tools (jigsaw, miter saw, pocket hole jig) and – here's the kicker – we only use raw materials from the home centers. No mail order. No secret stashes of wood or special hardware. It's all off the rack.

So I really wanted some cut nails for a project we're working on for the February 2007 issue. So we're rooting around in the fastener section and lo and behold, I see them. Grip Rite Hard Cut Masonry Nails (or, as the box also indicates, "clavos cortados para albanileria"). They are honest-to-goodness cut nails and are available in 8d (2-1/2") and 6d (2") lengths. They're too big for finery, but for large-scale nailing, they're perfect. Grip Rite also makes a Hard Cut Flooring Nail that is a traditional cut nail that you might want to look for in your area.

After doing some research, I did dig up a few differences you should be aware of. The masonry nails have a smooth surface finish, whereas many of the Tremont nails (such as the most excellent fine finish nail) have a rough surface. Tremont says the rough surface gives the nail some more grip.

The other difference is that the masonry nails are made from high-carbon steel and are hardened. The fine finish cut nails are low-carbon steel and are not hard. This difference has advantages and disadvantages. You're much less likely to bend the masonry nail when driving it. But you also can't clench the masonry nail, which is when you bend the tip as it emerges out the other side back into the work. The fine finish nails clench readily.

So I walked away from the home center well-pleased with my find. Now if I could only find pod augers at Home Depot, I'd be really happy.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [5]

A Better Marking Gauge

Posted 8/31/2006 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

If you do any work at all with hand tools, a good marking gauge is an essential piece of equipment. It is the tool that guides all your other tools: It marks your baselines when dovetailing, your mortises for chopping, your tenons for sawing, your boards' thicknesses when planing.

I've tried a lot of marking gauges, everything from the least expensive Crown or Marples to the works of art fashioned by Colen Clenton. All have their advantages and disadvantages. And for the most part, I've settled on using the Tite-Mark, which technically is a cutting gauge.

Several months ago, reader Dean Jansa sent me a gauge that he built that is based on the tools found in Benjamin Seaton's tool chest, an 18th century English kit of tools that has survived nearly intact for 200 years.

This homemade gauge, sometimes called a "French gauge," is a revelation. It is functionally so superior to other wooden gauges that it's a wonder it's not made today. Here's a quick overview of why this gauge kicks the snot out of other tools:

1. It allows exquisite one-handed operation. Most gauges (but not all) require two hands to manipulate. One hand positions the head while the other hand tightens a screw to lock the head. And your third hand holds the board. This French gauge has a wedge that passes through the head that does all the work. When your hand finds the right setting, you press the wedge with your thumb and you're done.

2. The French gauge is remarkably comfortable to hold. See the bevel on the underside of the gauge's head? Your index finger goes there, and that allows you superior control when rolling the gauge to get the right kind of mark. And the rounded section of the gauge only adds to the comfort.

3. The shape of the pin allows you to make accurate and precise lines. Most commercial gauges have a cone-shaped pin. That's all wrong and most woodworkers refile the pin. This pin (made from a drill bit) is shaped more like a knife.

There's more, but I don't want to spoil it for you. Dean has written up instructions for making and using this gauge for a story in our December issue of Popular Woodworking, our sister publication. You can build the gauge in a weekend. What you'll get in return is a lifetime of less frustration.

– Christopher Schwarz

Comments [2]

Creole Table: Judge, Joinery & Executioner

Posted 6/3/2006 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

One of the best things about going to an exhibit of new or antique furniture is getting to examine the joinery – closely and from the inside of the piece. I will pull every drawer out (if allowed), stick my head in a carcase and send my fingers probing into the darkest voids.

I'm deeply interested in how the level of the joinery matches up with the level of the design of the piece. I've seen stunning and elaborate designs that have what I would consider unacceptable gaps, misalignments and poorly scaled joinery components. And I've seen boring pieces that exhibit a seamless fit that is beyond my efforts.

I think I do this because I'm constantly trying to appraise my skills, not only as a designer but as a joiner.

So when I began building the Creole Table, I promised myself I would write this post. Turnabout is fair play.

The photo above is a composite of all my hand-cut dovetails for the drawer. The photos have had no significant alteration. In fact, the only change I made to them was to apply "unsharp mask" and to bump up the contrast so that the flaws would be in higher relief.

This is not the best set of dovetails I've ever cut, but nor is it my worst. This is what I get without too much fussing. (I also hope to post photos of all the tenon shoulders next week if I can. Those joints are really quite good and quite boring to look at, however.)

Here you can see my No. 1 flaw as a dovetailer: I struggle when it comes to paring my baselines. In the first two photos on the left you can see the gaps where the tails hit the end grain of the pin board. Of course, these were my warm-up dovetails (always start at the back), and this is the back of the drawer. So I'm disappointed with the gaps, but I'll rarely see them.

The two middle photos show the tail side of the same through-dovetail joint. While I'm happy with the overall fit, you can see how I chipped out some of the tail when I was planing the joints flush. Idiot.

And the last two images show the joints at the front of the drawer. Again, the baselines aren't perfect, especially on the last image. And I know what cased my problem: I undercut the baseline on the inside of the joint in an effort to ease the fit of the joint at assembly. The joints looked good at assembly, but when I planed the drawer to fit the carcase, I planed down to the area I undercut. Dotard.

So the lesson here is to watch my baselines next time. Of course, I've been saying that mantra for years.

Today I got to make a couple sample boards and I have my finishing strategy set: I'm going to apply a couple coats of Indian amber shellac and then spray on a couple coats of lacquer using my HVLP system in my driveway. Though I really like the color of shellac, I struggle with getting the sheen right because I don't like glossy finishes (and shellac is glossy only, as far as I can tell).

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [3]

Creole Table: Closing in On Cooking this Crawdad

Posted 5/31/2006 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

Like most home woodworkers, my dang day job tends to get in the way of my woodworking. Despite the fact that our magazine's woodshop is exactly seven paces from my desk, getting in there has been a monumental struggle. Gerunds, appositives and dangling participles have all conspired to keep me chained to this keyboard.

But there has been progress: During the weekend, I did get some time to dovetail the drawer. I almost always cut my dovetails by hand, and that's not because I'm some kind of hand-joinery snob, I just find that my head is ill-equipped to deal with router-based dovetail jigs. In fact, the only one I've ever been able to master (mentally) has been the Keller Jig.

I've fought with many of the classic router dovetail jigs, with the notable exception of the Leigh Jig. I find myself incapable of adjusting them to get the results I want: tight, perfectly aligned dovetails. If I had to build entire kitchens, I feel sure that I'd find a way to set up a jig and router and leave it that way in perpetuity so I could bang out standard drawers quickly. But for my work, every drawer is different. So cutting the joints by hand is honestly time-efficient at my bench. Plus, I've been cutting dovetails by hand for 15 years now. There's nothing intimidating about it – but I can sure remember being freaked out about the prospect of cutting the joint.

I got over this anxiety after I vowed to cut one set of dovetails every day for a month. On the first day of the month I milled all my stock for the self-improvement plan – about four boards that were 5" wide and 36" long. After dinner each night, I went down to the shop and did two things: First, I closely examined the set of dovetails I had cut the night before and tried to diagnose what went wrong or what could have been done to improve the fit. Then I tried to cut the next set of dovetails with my analysis in mind.

This bit of self-examination turned out to be as valuable as the practice I got in cutting and chiseling to a line. Too often it's too easy to hide or forget about our mistakes. It's much better to stare them straight in the face for a while.

After I assembled the joint, I'd cut that corner free, scrawl the date on it and place it on a shelf in my shop. After a couple weeks, my joints were consistently tighter. By the third week, my routine started to feel… routine. And by the fourth week I was fooling around with spacing the tails differently and increasing my speed.

Since that month, my dovetail anxiety has evaporated. I just do it and know that the joints will be dang tight. One caveat: I always cut the joints for the back of a drawer first in case I need a warm-up.

My only regret with the joints on this particular drawer is that I should have spaced the tails a little closer together. They look a little too regular, like I used a jig.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [8]

Chicken Creole Table

Posted 5/6/2006 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

Some projects play along nicely; others tend to fight you all the way. The Creole Table is shaping up to be a bit of a raging Cajun. My goal this week was to complete the top of the table and cut the curved transitions between the apron and cabriole legs.

The walnut for the top came from the same tree as the rest of the table. It entered our shop as 12/4 stock, dry (as far as our Wagner moisture meter could tell) and beautifully clear. The stock ended up as thin, twisted and dumped unceremoniously at the end of my bench.

For some reason, that particular part of the walnut had a lot of tension. All of the other sections of the board that were resawn came out nice and true. The stock for the top sprang like a spring. Because it was so thick, I thought I could still eek out enough thickness. No dice. Just a lot of frustrating work on the jointer and planer.

So I took the easy drive to Paxton's lumberyard to see what they had in their racks. It was going to cost me dearly, but it would be done. Again, no luck. The racks were almost empty, though the Paxton guys said they were going to restock the next day. So I dropped a line to Donnie, my dealer. He still had some walnut left to sell and was coming home early the next day for his daughter's soccer practice.

We met in his garage. I picked over the walnut in his rack, but it all looked a bit wonky. Did I want some nice curly sassafras instead? After making some discouraging noises, Donnie took pity on me and took me to his basement shop to peruse his personal stash. I picked out four perfect-looking boards and scurried back to the shop to cut them close to size so they'd acclimate to our shop's humidity faster. I put the moisture meter on them and my heart sank – everything was between 13 percent and 16 percent (the rest of the table is at 8 percent).

So my top is now on hold as I wait for the moisture to migrate out of my walnut.

So I turned back to the aprons. I've been putting off finishing the cut of the curve between the leg and apron. I keep telling myself that I'm waiting to get the base as sturdy and stable as possible (add the corner blocks; add the web frame; wait for the glue in the mortises to reach full strength). But the truth is I'm just a big piece of flightless poultry. The curve is really visible and is – in the end – just a smidge of end grain glued to the legs.

I actually glued this area when assembling the base. (First I sized the end grain with glue, waited a minute, then applied more yellow glue). And I clamped it firmly. But I'm still not confident. Every evening on my run and every morning over coffee I've been toying with this cut in my mind. I've got about five different strategies for sawing it out that would stress the end grain as little as possible.

This morning the solution came to me. I'm going to glue a small walnut block behind each of the eight transitions – a block that's only about 1/8" thick x 3/16" wide. There would be some cross-grain gluing issues, but I don't think wood movement will be a problem with such a small piece. And the long grain that's glued to both the apron and the leg will stiffen everything up as I go to town with a turning saw.

Of course, the entire table is on hold now. I'm off on Sunday to the Marc Adams School of Woodworking to teach a week-long class on blending hand and power tools. I might get to post a couple weblog entries during the week, but them I might just sleep instead.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [0]

Creole Table: Safe, Sound and Not a Bit Sorry

Posted 4/19/2006 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

One of the big challenges in building a project for publication is to come up with techniques that use common tools and skills to produce results that others can replicate using the same tools and techniques. It's a bit like being a scientist, but without the sexy lab coats, pocket protectors and slide rules.

These cabriole legs are a prime example of this challenge. The legs themselves are easier than most cabriole legs because we've done the grunt work of finding the fair curve and developing patterns for you, plus they don't require a lot of freeform shaping to get them looking good. These particular legs do have one quirk, however.

The tops of many cabriole leg are square in section, obviously. With many cabriole legs the curvy part sticks out from the line of the apron with the traditional "knee" shape we're all familiar with. These legs are different. They curve in, which gives the table a delicate, perching look. This means that the mortises on the legs are going to be on an inside surface of the leg blank. That's a bit tricky because you want your joinery surfaces as clean and straight and true as possible.

My first inclination was to cut the entire leg shape with a band saw and then true the joinery surfaces with a plane. So I cut a couple test legs using sappy walnut to try this procedure out. I wasn't happy with the results. I could get an acceptable joinery surface, but it took more hand skills than I liked, and it was too easy to get the entire leg out of square at the top, which could be frustrating at assembly time.

The other option was to cut the square sections of the legs using a table saw and a series of stopped cuts and then finish up the cuts with a hand saw or band saw. Generally, I hate stopped cuts on the table saw because they can feel a bit unsafe to some people. (And I really hate plunge cutting on the table saw and won't do it myself.)

So I tried the stop cuts on a test piece. The procedure allowed me to leave the splitter in place and use our basket guard (which is removed for the photo – honest). Plus, instead of removing the piece with the sawblade running I simple turned the saw off after each stopped cut. After the blade ran down, I removed the piece from the cut. The results looked good and the procedure felt safe.

I still needed to finish up the cut – the curvature of the saw's blade prohibited me from cutting the waste free. I could use the band saw to do this, or I could take a break from the machines and get out a handsaw. Handsaw it is.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [1]

Creole Table Update: Cutting Blind

Posted 4/17/2006 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

I like working with walnut, but I hate marking it. Its dark color makes pencil lines disappear. And its open grain hide knife lines as well. Dovetailing is a particular problem for me. Part of this is personal – my vision is quite poor; I'm legally blind without my glasses on. But even if I had perfect vision (like eagle-eyed Senior Editor David Thiel) walnut would still be a problem.

One of the perks of this job is that you can take an afternoon to try to crack a nut like this, spend $30 of the company's money and try out a variety of solutions – all in the name of helping our readers.

The first stop was the Staples store to pick up some Pilot P-500 gel pens with the extra fine (0.5 mm) tip. These have been recommended by other woodworkers. I tried the P-500 once a couple years ago, remember being impressed and then I lost the pen. The nice think about the gel ink is that it seems to be like gel stain in that it doesn't absorb into the wood as much, making a blotchy mess. It makes a nice fine line if you make your mark swiftly and lightly. I wish they sold it in white ink, however.

One of the other editors recalled a former employee here who would write notes to fellow employees on black PostIts with white or silver gel ink. Hmmmm. A little searching turned up the right pen: the Sakura Gelly Roll pen. The editor called around to the local art stores and they were all sold out of the white ink version. A dead end? Of course not.

On a lark I went to our local art supplies store (let me say that woodworkers have nothing on artists when it comes to pricey and specialized tools). They had a display for the Sakura Gelly Roll pens and were indeed out of the white ink. So I bought a bright yellow one and a silver one ($1.19 each at our local store). Out of the corner of my eye I saw another Sakura display in the "wall of pens." They have another brand "Pen-touch," which is more expensive ($2.38), but it is offered in white and has a pretty fine point (0.7 mm).

We also found a Sharpie Poster-Paint pen in our company's office supply catalog.

Here's what I concluded: The yellow gel stinks. It was less visible than a pencil line. That one is going to my kids to play with. The silver Sakura Gelly Roll was better than the yellow. You could see the line especially well if you caught its reflection in the light. Of course, you can sometimes do that trick with a pencil line on walnut. The Sharpie was big and white. Too big, really.

The best of the bunch was the Sakura Pen-Touch. When wielded with a light touch, like a calligraphy pen, it would lay down a nice thin line that was brilliantly visible. It might not be the marking solution for dovetails, but for cutting cabriole legs and basic pattern work, it's a good solution.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [9]

Behind the Ink-stained Curtain

Posted 4/12/2006 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

I always enjoy tours of tool factories to see people (or robots) make things that are useful to my work. How a company can harness hundreds of minds and hands and mechanical pincers to produce things is fascinating, and every tour is surprising and different.

In that spirit, I've decided to draw back the curtain on one of our future projects for Woodworking Magazine so you can get a glimpse of how we put together a single project for publication. It is my sincere hope that this does not end up resembling Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle."

Every article that gets published is the smallest germ of the sometimes-twisty and always-lengthy process that proceeds it. These weblog entries will be the raw, unedited and likely somewhat embarrassing tale of what we're calling The Creole Table.

It begins with the mailman. About two months ago, the April 2006 issue of Early American Life showed up in my mailbox at home. It's one of the many sources I scour for project ideas – not that we really need ideas for stuff we want to build. But we constantly search for ideas because we're looking for projects that illustrate several ideas and techniques and tools that we want to explore in a particular issue. As you might have noticed, each issue of the magazine has some converging undercurrents flowing through it. That's actually planned. Honest.

On page 16 of Early American Life, I hit paydirt. There was a photo of a late 18th-century Louisiana Creole side table in walnut with French-style cabriole legs and a gorgeously curved apron. Despite the fact that the table was trying to put on aristocratic airs, it was undeniably a more rural American piece. It had energy. It was simple and honest. It had fetched $54,625 at a recent auction. And it taught two important skills we've been itching to explore: template routing and compound curve-cutting.

The template routing offered by the piece was elementary but would produce some very professional results. And the cabriole leg is a far, far simple form found more on French pieces than on American ones. American cabrioles, such as those on Queen Anne furniture, curve out from the apron and can have carved feet. These curved in. No carving.

I showed the piece to the other editors, and we agreed to build a prototype and see if it was worth building for real. So the next step was to get a good drawing and some even better walnut.

For the drawing, we'll usually sketch up a prototype in VectorWorks, a CAD program that works on Macs (most publishing houses are all-Apple). But if you've ever made a cabriole leg you know that getting a fair leg is an enormous challenge. My 3D CAD modeling skills are limited (OK, almost non-existent), so I called on John Hutchinson, a Columbus, Ohio, architect and woodworker who does our technical illustrations for Popular Woodworking. I think we're one of his hobbies. John is a wiz in Autodesk, the professional gold standard in CAD. Within a week he had whipped up full-size templates of all the curved parts based on a scaled scan of the original piece.

First the good news: the table would require little material and the leg shape was remarkably simple. Bad news: The leg stock would have to be 2-1/4" thick. While we could make the legs by laminating some thin stock, that would be a high-wire act to get the glue line right on the corner of the leg.

It was time to hunt through Donnie's garage.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [4]

Our Infinite Power to Forget

Posted 4/3/2006 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

After finishing college, two of my closest friends joined the Peace Corps and were posted to rural Morocco. But within a year they were back in the United States: 20 pounds lighter, two shades paler and singularly disillusioned.

Their job in Morocco could be boiled down to one simple lesson for the villagers: Do not use the bathroom in the same place where you get your drinking water. It's an important lesson that surely the villagers had grasped at one time in their history. How could something so fundamental be lost to an entire village?

Knowing that humans can forget this lesson, it comes as no surprise when the same thing happens in woodworking. We've lost things – fundamentals that can make the work easier or faster.

Today I got a call from a reader who read our recent article on hammers and cut nails. He liked the article OK, but said I had neglected to mention the single most important lesson he had been taught by the old-timers about handling a hammer: Never touch the striking face.

Huh? Well the theory goes that the oil from your finger will lubricate the striking face and make your hammer much more prone to glance off the nail's head and onto your work or your finger. In fact, the reader continued, you should rough up the face of the tool on a rock or concrete. This simple step, he said, greatly improved his skill as a young carpenter.

So this afternoon I drove a bunch of nails using the smooth face of my prized Hamilton hammer. Then I went out to our loading dock/smoking lounge and proceeded to rub the tool's face vigorously against the concrete. I figured at the very least that I'd bring a little wry amusement to the company's smokers. (It did.)

Then I took the hammer back into the shop and drove some more nails. It did make a measurable difference with the cut nails – the hammer felt "stickier" for lack of a better word, or like it had a little magnet in it. It made even more of a difference when driving wire nails, which have a smoother head than the cut nails do.

I haven't been able to find this tip in any of my old books – though "Mechanik Exercises" by Joseph Moxon says that carpenters would play tricks on apprentices by dipping their nail heads in ear wax. Yes, it really does say that.

Of course, my high school health textbook didn't have a chapter on how I shouldn't drink from the toilet, either.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [4]

Tenons Rule! So Here Are the Rules on Tenons

Posted 3/31/2006 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

In China, 2005 was the year of the rooster. In our shop, 2005 was the year of the anvil. We built a guillotine out of framing material and dropped anvils of three weights on joints to see how they fail.

We learned a few things. First: You can get paid for doing juvenile stuff with anvils. Second: Modern PVA glues (yellow glue) are a lot stronger in end grain applications than woodworking wisdom suggests. And third: How you size the parts of your joint (thickness, width and length) has a lot to do with how sturdy it ultimately is.

Nowhere was this more evident than with the venerable mortise-and-tenon joint. Changing the thickness of a part of the joint, such as the mortise wall, could greatly weaken or strengthen the joint under the crush of the anvil.

There are some well-worn rules about how to scale a mortise-and-tenon joint, and they are worth thinking about the next time you lay out a tenon. Let's take a look:

Tenon thickness: This one gets debated a lot, and with good reason. Traditional texts say the tenon's thickness should be one-third the thickness of the stock being mortised (an important distinction). So if you are joining two pieces of 3/4"material for a door, the tenon should be ¼" thick. If you are joining a 7/8"-thick apron to a 1-1/2"-thick table leg, the tenon should be 1/2" thick.

Some modern texts say the tenon should be one-half the thickness being mortised – not one-third. My opinion is that this difference relates to the tools being used. If you mortise by hand, with chisels, the one-third rules makes more sense in my experience. Using a 3/8"-wide mortise chisel on 3/4"-thick material invites destruction in many cabinet woods.

But if you've ever used a hollow-chisel mortiser, then you've probably been amazed at the difference in performance between the 1/4" chisels and the 3/8" chisels. The 1/4" chisel gets clogged up much more easily because its escapement is much small. Plus, the hollow-chisel mortiser doesn't put the kind of lateral strain on your work that hand-mortising does. So a 3/8"-wide mortise works with machines.

Tenon length: The general rule is that the minimum tenon length is five times its thickness. So a 1/4"-thick tenon should be 1-1/4" long. Of course, if you look at antique furniture, you see this "rule" violated – or maybe the furniture was made before they made the rule. Longer through-tenons are the rule of the day in much 19th and 18th century work. These are wedged tenons, generally. Check out George Ellis's "Modern Practical Joinery" for a trip through the land of the through-tenon. Personally, I try to follow the "five times the thickness" rule for most cabinetwork. But when I'm building something that will encounter more wracking forces (such as a dining table), I go long.

Tenon width: This one is more complex. The rule in Ellis's book is two-fold. First, make the tenon one-half the width of the rail you're cutting it on (a 2"-wide rail would get a 1"-wide tenon). Second: If that tenon's width would be greater than six times its thickness, then you should split it into two (or more tenons). Example: You want to cut a 1/4"-thick tenon on a 6"-wide rail. Ellis's rule says that your tenon should be 3" wide. But a 3"-wide tenon is greater than 1-1/2", which is six times the tenon thickness. So you have to break that tenon into two 1-1/2"-wide tenons.

Is your head swimming yet?

This rule seemed odd to me at first. The tenons it made seemed too narrow in width, which would allow the corners of your to frame warp (or cast) over time. But when you look at Ellis's illustrations, it makes sense. He shows all his tenons with a short haunch that runs the entire width of the work. Ah!

And what about double mortises, such as when you join a narrow drawer rail to a leg in a chest of drawers? This drawer rail is usually somewhat squarish and stout, and it doesn't follow the rules laid out above – you don't need a double tenon.

Some sources seem to suggest that the double tenon can be made for convenience. You might not have a 1/2" mortising chisel for that 1-1/2" drawer rail. But you have a 1/4" mortising chisel (of course you do!). So making two ¼" mortises that are set by the tool are easier to make than a 1/2" mortise that you would have to make with an odd-size chisel. (It's a theory – not much more than that.)

All this math and theory and contradiction is enough to make you want to smash something, with an anvil.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [3]

Trestle Tables: The Shape of a Tree
And the Engineering of a Skyscraper

Posted 3/25/2006 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

Trestle tables have always looked notoriously spindly and rickety to my eye. Compared to a traditional apron table, there's just not much material there. Add to the fact that they are normally quite lengthy, and it seems like you have a recipe for a wobbly mealtime.

But after inspecting a fair number of historical examples from the mid-1800s at Pleasant Hill, Ky., I started to reconsider the form. In December, I built a fairly large example based on proportions from a Shaker version – though the form itself is much older.

I eschewed some of the more modern joinery available, such as incorporating bed bolts. And I built the base using Southern yellow pine, an inexpensive construction timber. The first surprise: There's very little wood needed for the design. I built the base using only three 2 x 12 x 8'. And I had a good deal of wood left over. My bill for the wood: $33.

Since December, my spouse, two daughters and two cats have given the table a thorough workout. And though the table weighs very little, it's remarkably stable and sturdy. After staring at the thing for hours now, two things are apparent: First, the whole thing works like an I-beam in a skyscraper. The top, ends, ribs and the stretcher beneath the top all tie together to provide remarkable rigidity. This I-beam form prevents the top from sagging and racking along the length of the table.

But what about racking forces across the width of the top – like when you push away from the dinner table? The end assemblies seem slight, as they're made from 3" x 3" sections. It turns out that these ends are like the trees they came from. The foot is like the root structure. The leg is the trunk. The top brace is the branches. If you do a good enough job of tying these together in a tree-like fashion, the result is quite sturdy.

Yesterday I started building another trestle base for the autumn issue of Woodworking Magazine. After snooping around in some dusty books, we developed a clever way to build the base with a minimum of effort and the maximum strength.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [0]

Miller Dowels: A Reluctant Affair

Posted 3/20/2006 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

I get called a Luddite all the time for my affection for hand tools (Recent quip from spouse: "You know, we own a blender for a good reason"). I certainly don't consider myself anti-technology – I just bristle at "inventions" that solve "problems" that don't actually exist.

So it should come as no surprise that I resisted Miller Dowels at first. I was at first curious, but wary. Then I began flirting with them a bit here and there when I made some low Toshio Odate-inspired saw trestles and wanted to honor the Shinto aversion to metal fasteners (no, I don't have a therapist on speed dial).

And now, I simply give up. I love these things and use them all the time for the oddball joinery. They have saved my bacon on so many occasions, especially with chairmaking. When I wanted to reinforce a back slat to the arm bow, there was absolutely no other joinery that would be as reliable, quick and sturdy. Plus they're great for something that has to occasionally be knocked down – I used them to attach the shelf on my Roubo-style workbench without glue. I wouldn't knock the joints apart all day and night, but boy do they do a great job of gripping "just enough" without glue.

And with glue, they're even more sound. We've got all three sizes of the drill bits here in our shop (1X, 2X and the Mini-X). I use the Mini-X the most for chairmaking and reinforcing tenons (usually from the inside). And they are 100 percent Luddite-compatible in my book. I use the Miller Dowel bit in my North Bros. brace with great success. And I have even drawbored a few joints with the white oak dowels (they also offer nine other species).

So why is it better than a plain old dowel? The dowel has a tapered fit, and the ribs on the dowels work with modern PVA glues (yellow glue) to add real strength. The glue gets in the ribs, hardens and really stiffens things up around end grain in my experience. Modern technology allows us to make the bit and the dowels precisely enough that the system really really works. Next time you're at a woodworking show, stop by the booth and check out the system. I think it's worth a hard look.

—Christopher Schwarz

Comments [2]

Hubris

Posted 1/17/2006 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery | Personal Favorites

One of my favorite movies as a teen-ager had a scene where a 1940s-era G-man goes to a mystic for help in becoming a superhero. The G-man shows the mystic – named Sombra – a photo of a caped hero and asks for a magic word to become like him.

Without hesitation, Sombra says: "I suggest you dye your underwear and learn to live within your limitations." And that, dear reader, is exactly how I felt late last week as I was finishing up the first prototype for the next issue of Woodworking Magazine.

The project is a classic American trestle table with traditional joinery. And despite the fact that there was nothing "new" about any aspect of this project, it kicked my butt up one side of the shop and down the other. Fitting the through-tenons in the base took more fussing and fitting than was acceptable, and I still had to patch one side of a joint despite a careful fit. The breadboard ends on the top fit perfectly when dry-fit, but after they were pegged, they each moved off the shoulder line enough that I disassembled the whole end and started over.

Those mistakes seemed unavoidable. And then there were the ones where I was overcome by hubris – the worst shop mistakes possible. I got a little cocky when I drawbored the center of one breadboard in an effort to get a seamless joint line. After all my success at drawboring the base (made of Southern yellow pine) I used the same heavy offset in the black cherry top.

That's when the entire breadboard end piece exploded in my hands (I, however, had made an extra breadboard for test cuts, which saved me).

And when I completed the two-board top using some locally cut 18"-wide boards that had been drying in my basement, I used a smoothing plane alone to finish the top. No sandpaper. It looked good until I put the first coat of varnish on. Groan. Out with the sandpaper to blend the toolmarks and remove some localized tear-out.

The point here is that even the simplest operations can be a challenge when you change one fact. In this project, it was the scale of everything. It's one thing to fit a cabinet-scale wedged through-tenon. It's quite another when the tenon is 1" thick, 3-1/2" wide and 3" long. Same goes with the breadboard and the top itself. Fitting a tenon's shoulder that's 3" across is easy compared to a breadboard shoulder that's 30" across. There is a lot less room for error.

But with the table complete, I took stock of the project and have concluded that this trestle table and its joinery are an outstanding lesson in traditional joints. It teaches one of the most important and forgotten joinery techniques around – wedging. I've wedged hundreds of through-tenons, but that's because I've been deeply into chairmaking for a couple years now, and a single chair can have 25 to 30 wedged joints (depending on how nuts you are; I am fairly nuts).

And now that the first table is complete, I know exactly how to modify our stock techniques to make assembly really easy.

Or maybe I should just go to Kroger tonight and get some black vegetable dye for my underwear. It could be the hubris talking.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [4]

A Square Nail and a Round Tool

Posted 12/19/2005 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

One of the themes coursing through the next issue of Woodworking Magazine is rethinking the role of nails in woodworking. And so I've been whacking a lot of cut nails lately and setting them below the surface of my work with a nice nail set. Perhaps the most frustrating part of using cut nails was setting them exactly where I wanted them. But I chalked that frustration up to a lack of skill on my part. After a couple months I became pretty good at setting the nail head right where it should be.

But then last week I was reading Paul N. Hasluck's "The Handyman's Book" and alighted on a drawing on page 133 that had escaped my attention earlier. It was a drawing of a nail set designed for cut nails. The face of this particular nail set was squarish – like the head of the nail itself. All my nail sets have a round tip.

Duh.

So this morning I dug around in my toolbox and pulled out the set of Companion punches that were left over from making drawbore pins in Issue 4. A quick trip to the belt sander produced the profile shown in the photo above. The tip is slightly smaller than the head of the cut fine finish nail from Tremont. (It's about 1/16" x 3/32".) Then I went to work. It only took a few nails to convince me that a square tip is superior for a square-head nail. The tip is much easier to control when you strike the nail set – probably because there is more contact between the nail and the set.

Now I'll also have to grind another punch down for the smaller headless brads I use. I guess this goes to show that sometimes it is the tool that's at fault, and not the operator.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [1]

From Junk to Genius: One More Source for Drawbore Pins

Posted 10/7/2005 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

Thanks to my daughter's fourth-grade class, I've discovered another good source of small-scale drawbore pins for cabinet work. This morning I had to give a small chat about my job at a woodworking magazine to my daughter's class and I decided to bring along some unassembled mortise-and-tenon joints and drawbore them during class as a demonstration.

Right before I left for the school, I realized that I'd left my drawbore pins in our shop at the magazine. I went down to my shop at home to see if I had any drift pins down there that I could press into service. No luck. But my eye alighted on an old Buffalo-brand scratch awl that I'd bought after college and was in the junk bin. The shaft was the right dimension for small-scale work – a little fatter than 1/4". But the pin tapered too sharply at the tip for my taste. (It's a sorry excuse for an awl, really.)

So I picked up a mill file and lengthened the taper on the shaft. I blunted the sharp tip with the file. Time elapsed: five minutes. Then I had to leave for school that instant without even testing it. In class, I gave my little song-and-dance on drawboring, bored a few holes with my eggbeater drill and then put the new drawbore pin to use.

It worked flawlessly. I put the joints together without glue and then had the fourth-grade boys give them a bit of a beating. The joints survived. Next time you're at the flea market, you might want to pick up a couple of hopeless and homeless awls and give this a try yourself. Once I refinish the handle, this tool is getting a promotion out of the junk drawer and onto the wall.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [11]

Mortising With Forstners – The Oft-Skipped Details

Posted 10/6/2005 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

When you are making big mortises, such as those in the Roubo-style Workbench in Issue 4, it's a good idea to bore out as much of the waste as possible. This isn't exclusively a power-tool perspective, either. A fair number of historical texts recommend this with large-scale joints (particularly in timber framing).

When I do this with a drill press, I prefer to use a sharp Forstner bit because it allows me to overlap the holes without the bit wandering or breaking. And it leaves fairly clean mortise cheeks. You see this technique all the time in other woodworking books and magazines. But there are always a couple details left out. What you normally see is the joint bored out and then the craftsman comes back with a chisel and cleans up the waste on the ends and on the mortise cheeks.

I have found this to be more work than necessary and an opportunity to botch the joint by undercutting the mortise cheeks in an effort to square them up. Paring mortise cheeks is a real skill. If you're good at it, then great. If you're like the rest of us, read on.

The trick is to use the Forstner's ability to bore overlapping holes as much as possible. Don't just overlap a little bit. Overlap the holes over and over again until the Forstner bit can move freely left and right in the mortise. This makes the most accurate, square-sided big mortises possible. Here are a few photos:

Once I define both ends of the mortise, I come back and split the difference between the holes. In the case of really big mortises I'll split the difference several times until the holes overlap as shown.

Now clean up the little triangle of waste between the overlaps. Keep boring out these overlapping triangles clinging to the mortise cheeks until the bit will move freely left and right (check for this with the drill press turned off).

This is what the mortise looks like at the end. The bit has cut right to my scribe lines. This mortise is square. All I need to do is chisel out the corners – much faster than having to chisel the cheeks, too.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [14]

Nothing is Arbitrary

Posted 9/10/2005 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

Have you ever wondered why there are specific rules for the sizes of mortise-and-tenon joints? Did you know there are rules? If you consult the 19th and early 20th century texts, they state that tenons should be one-third the thickness of your stock. And that the tenons should be five times as long as they are wide.

So if you were cutting a tenon on 3/4" stock, you would make it 1/4" thick and 1-1/4" long. Is this arbitrary? And why do more modern texts call for tenons that are one-half the thickness of the stock? Recently I've been cutting a lot of mortises by hand to test some mortise chisels. And as I get more comfortable with the chisels, the old rules for this old joint seem to make sense.

For example, when I work in 3/4" stock (especially anything slightly fragile, such as cherry or walnut) a 3/8" mortise chisel will absolutely destroy my work. It's just too much steel plunging into the wood, and the 3/16" walls of the mortise are simply too fragile. When I step down to a 5/16" chisel, things become very manageable in oak and ash, for example, and workable in cherry, walnut and mahogany). And when I step down once more to a ¼" chisel, I pick up serious speed in the harder woods and more control in the softer ones.

So what about that modern rule that has us all cutting 3/8" mortises in 3/4" stock? I'm starting to think that's a machine perspective. Boring a 3/8" mortise with a hollow-chisel mortiser is a simple thing in 3/4" stock. In fact, I find that chip clearance with a 3/8" hollow mortise bit is more efficient than with the 1/4" bit.

And then there's the issue of the tenon's length. Why do we make tenons five times as long as they are wide? Was this to provide more gluing surface with less-reliable hide glues? Perhaps. Was it to ensure more of an interference fit between the tenon and mortise to beef up a sloppy hand-cut joint? Sounds good to me.

I think it also has something to do with drawboring (surprise, surprise). Here's my highly questionable theory: You have to locate the drawbore hole a certain distance in from the edge of the mortise. I like 3/8". Any closer and you risk cracking your stile when you drive in your wooden peg. And if your tenon is any shorter than 1-1/4", then you risk blowing out the grain in the tenon, ruining your mechanical fit. There are probably other valid reasons for the rules that govern this joint. Have a theory? Let me know.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [16]

More on Drawboring – Not Entirely Boring, Either

Posted 9/4/2005 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

One of the curious aspects of investigating drawboring has been the mystery surrounding antique drawbore pins. Almost all of the examples of pins I come across are big – too big for cabinet work, really. They would require a 3/8"-diameter peg, which would be bucky for most furniture. I do have set of boxwood-handles pins that will work with a 5/16"-diameter peg, and they look like drawbore pins shown in early sources.

I don't really have any answers here, but I do have some clues. Charles Hayward's classic "Woodwork Joints" spends a page (page 60) discussing drawboring but notes, "It is mostly used in carpentry and joinery as distinct from cabinet work." If that's true, it might explain why the pins are generally larger – they were being used for larger-scale sash work, entry doors, timber-framing and the like.

But earlier sources dug up by John Alexander seem to indicate that drawboring was indeed used in early American cabinetwork, and I'm told he has a forthcoming book that will discuss this in detail ("Make a Stool from a Tree: An Introduction to 17th Century New England Joinery," to be published jointly by Cambium and Astragal presses). So if early woodworkers didn't use steel drawbore pins to test-fit their joints, what did they use? Henry Mercer's "Ancient Carpenters Tools" is almost silent on the drawbore pin – it's mentioned only in the appendix and no examples of the pins are shown in the photographs. However, there is an intriguing photo on page 78 that shows "hook pins" or "drift hooks." These are tapered wooden pins with a flag-shaped top. Mercer states they were used for "test-pegging wooden framework."

Could early pins have been made of wood? I'm going to need to make some wooden pins from white oak to find out if they'll work, but I suspect they will indeed.

A couple other developments to note: If you're interested in trying out drawboring on a joint, try using a nail set if you don't own a drift pin or drawbore pin. Most nail sets work OK with 1/4"-diameter pegs. They taper a little quickly for my tastes, but they worked fine on a sample joint I tried yesterday.

Also, Joseph Moxon's 17th century text "Mechanick Exercises" specified using the width of a shilling to measure to offset in the holes for drawboring. I've found that an offset somewhere between 1/16" and 3/32" works great. To keep the tradition alive, I've been using a coin to measure my offsets. It turns out that a U.S. nickel is .072" thick (3/32" is .094") and is a very nice offset. A penny is .056" thick – and 1/16" is .063". Close enough! So use a nickel for heavy offsets and a penny for small ones.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [11]

A Red Herring – A Frozen One at That

Posted 9/4/2005 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

I've been doing quite a bit of drawboring lately while building a couple cabinets for the next issue of Woodworking Magazine. And it's given me a chance to try a couple of new tactics, one of which has turned out to be a bit daft.

During a demonstration of drawboring I gave a few weeks ago, one of the woodworkers in the audience offered up a suggestion that seemed intriguing because it might fix one of the cosmetic downsides of the technique. With some drawbored joints, there will be a small gap on one side of the peg. The peg is being bent, of course, so this is understandable. If the wood you're using for your frame is a bit wet, it will shrink around the peg, tighten up and eliminate the gap. But if your frame wood is bone-dry, then you might be left with the gap.

One solution is to dry out your raw material for pegs as much as possible, below the ambient humidity level even. Then form your pegs with his desiccated material and they'll swell. You could do this in the oven – I've done it with chair legs and spindles with success (try 250° for a few hours). But it's a pain. So the idea offered up was to was to keep the peg material in the freezer. Freezers are giant dehumidifiers, right? It seemed worth a try.

So I rived some raw peg material a few weeks ago and stuck it in the freezer in an unsealed freezer bag. Yesterday I pulled it out and immediately drove it through the 5/16" hole in my dowel plate and measured the results. The smallest diameter of the peg was .306". The largest was .316". I marked the exact spot on the peg where I took my readings and have been monitoring the peg all weekend. So far, no change. Nothing. Not even a thou. I'm going to leave the peg here on my desk for a week or so, but right now I think this tip might be a red herring. Maybe I should buy a toaster oven for the shop?

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [13]

Eccentric? Not so Eccentric?

Posted 8/24/2005 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

The historically correct shape of the drawbore pin shown in our Autumn 2005 issue has come into question this week. Joel Moskowitz, a tool historian (correction: and a user) and the owner of Tools for Working Wood, reports that his pins are not a straight taper but are eccentric in cross-section instead ("eccentric" is my word; he calls it an "oblique cone" in his comment below). So one side has no taper. This, he reports, causes the joint to tighten up with the twisting action required as the steel pin is inserted. Interesting!

The drawbore pins I've made over the years have used machinist drift pins from Sears. These have straight tapers – no eccentricity. Intrigued, I went out and examined closely the antique smallish English set in my toolbox (shown above). They have a straight taper. In truth, one of them is bent so you couldn't call it a "straight" taper really. A "crooked" taper perhaps? Also, they are not oval-shaped in any way. I put my dial caliper on them in several locations and found them to be of a consistent diameter as they tapered – cone shaped, really.

When I researched this article I bought four other sets of English pins (really, honey, it's all in the name of journalism). I haven't been able to check these yet as they are loaned out to people in far-off places. But I'm putting out the word today for them to examine them.

Also today, I consulted Paul N. Hasluck's "The Handyman's Book," which has several drawings related to drawboring on page 204. The large drawing of a pin looks like a straight taper to me – of course, you cannot see it in cross-section, which would have been helpful, Paul. One of the drawings, Fig. 634, shows the pin being inserted, and it could be eccentric.

A drawbore pin from Joseph Smith's "Key to Sheffield Manufacturers"

If you own a set of these pins, could you check them out and send me some information on the shape of the steel pin on your set? I'll be happy to post the results here. Also, from a user's point of view, I've been drawboring since 1999 or so with straight tapered pins, and they work great. And John Alexander also recommends drift pins on his site. So my instructions on making your own pins stand, unchanged. I wouldn't give up my shop-made pins for anything.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [14]

Nailing Down the Details

Posted 8/3/2005 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

There is a lot to know about nails. Don't laugh or scoff. I've been digging deep into my library this week and have come up with some stuff that is wild and weird from the world of nails. Here's a taste of stuff I bet you didn't know from Paul N. Hasluck's "Handyman's Book":

• The surface of a nail should be slightly rough – but not barbed. Rough surfaces, such as those you'll find on Tremont cut nails, are ideal. And the rough surface is intentional, not just crude manufacturing. Smooth nails have less holding power, as do barbed nails (which surprised the snot out of me).

• The optimal length of a nail for a joint should be three times the thickness of the thinnest piece. So when nailing 1/2" stock, you need a 1-1/2" nail. This seems long to me, but perhaps we're used to 1-1/4" screws.

• Nails driven across the grain hold 50 percent better than nails driven along the grain (such as into end grain, for example).

• Nails are not well-suited for any joints that are subjected to shock (use screws there instead). When nails are subjected to sudden shock they will hold only one-twelth as well as nails that have had the same pressure applied to them gradually.

• There were lots of kinds of nails that don't exist anymore. Ever seen a double-pointed nail? These were used to secure edge-to-edge joints. I can't find them at my hardware store.

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [11]

Getting Hammered – Properly

Posted 8/1/2005 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery

So many woodworkers resist using hammers, and I suspect it’s because they use one that’s more suited for framing a house or cracking walnuts. In browsing through old tool catalogs, it’s obvious that cabinetmakers in England and Europe preferred a kind of hammer that’s uncommon in hardware stores today.

We've been buying a lot of hammers lately from England, Australia and the flea markets and have been experimenting with different weights, sizes and patterns. One of the most useful patterns we're finding are those that have a cross pane at the back instead of a nail-pulling claw – the claw hammer is the dominant pattern on this continent.

The cross pane is useful for starting nails properly. You can hold the nail up by its head and give it a couple knocks to get it started. Then you turn the hammer around and drive it home. This is an enormous advantage when you use cut nails, which will try to rotate in their holes. And the cross pane is good with brads, which are short and have to be held by their heads anyway.

You can still buy new hammers with a cross pane if you're interested in experimenting with them yourself. Lee Valley Tools sells Warrington pattern hammers from Stanley and less-expensive Asian ones. The Stanley hammers have the properly shaped handles; the Asian ones need a little work to be comfortable (but for the price, they're quite nice).

Of course, the right hammer is best used with the right nail and the right tool to remove your mistakes. And there's one other essential tool that goes with the hammer that most people forget about. The gimlet. More on the gimlet later.

– Christopher Schwarz

Comments [0]

Classic Shaker Side Table: What do the 'Spacers' Do?

Posted 7/25/2005 in All Weblog Posts | Joinery | Reader Questions

Question: I am building the Shaker Side Table (Issue #2). I built the cabinet from the first issue (I used cherry and spalted maple - it came out pretty nice).

The table calls out for two 3/16" x 3/4" x 11" spacers. I have looked and looked and can not find a reference to these spacers anywhere in the article.

— Dale Burley

Answer: The spacers are glued to the inside face of the aprons, just above the lower drawer guides. They fill in the space between the apron and drawer side and make for smoother-moving drawer. It might seem counter-intuitive, but drawers are easier to open if there's less space between the drawer and its cabinet. That's because there's less chance for the drawer to wrack in its opening when you pull it out.

You can see the spacers in place on page 24 of that issue, though the author of that piece called them "drawer guides."

— Christopher Schwarz

Comments [11]

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