Woodworking Magazine Weblog

Since we first visited in May 2009, the staff of the magazine has witnessed some amazing progress in the restoration of the Meeting House at the White Water Shaker Village, which is west of our offices in Cincinnati.

As many of you know, we are trying to help a bit here, as well. We've completed reproductions of three furniture projects from the White Water collection, which we have donated to the nonprofit organization that is restoring the village.

Memo to Human Resources
Re: Throwing Axes by the Dumpster

Dear Sir or Madam,

As an employee of F+W Media Inc., I applaud the recent addition of yoga mats and treadmills to our exercise room. The sweet smell of sweat masks the odor of burned microwave popcorn and over-nuked fish from the adjacent cafeteria. And I think we could all use more exercise.

To that end, I propose we set up an axe-throwing range behind the dumpster near the Popular Woodworking Magazine shop. I will be happy to provide, at no charge, double-bitted axes, a stump target and training for the employees.

QUESTION: Although I am not in the woodworking trades, my son is. And last year I offered to pay his tuition at Peter Follansbee's workshop in North Carolina on riven-oak wood boxes. I showed him all the purty pictures on Peter's blog chattering all the while about how cool is this? Boards are split, not sawn, the wood is green, blah blah blah.

He looked at me like I had a third eye in the middle of my head and said, "Are you F!@#$%^ crazy? Why would anyone do all that with hand tools when power tools are available?"

Roy Underhill has asked me to appear on "The Woodwright's Shop" during the show's upcoming 30th season. (Note to self: You can now stop squealing like a little girl.)

Between now and the time we tape the show sometime this summer or fall, there's lots I have to do to prepare. Shave my back, attempt to stop looking like a frightened lab animal while appearing on television and – oh yes – decide on something to talk about.

I swore a blood oath I would never write about the "nib" on a saw – the ornamental protrusion found at the toe of some old saws. And I won't break that oath.

I will, however, attempt to amuse you with some scribbling about a saw's "nipple."

"A craftsman is one who understands his tools and uses them with skill and honesty. It does not matter whether his tool is a chisel or a planing machine, it is the work that he does with it that counts and you today can be as good a workman in the carpenter's craft as any who ever lived if you will learn to know your tools and to use them well."

— Thomas E. Hibben

When it comes to learning woodworking, sometimes it's nice to treat yourself like a child.

While researching old tool chests for a future project I kept stumbling over a book in people's bibliographies: "The Carpenter's Tool Chest" (J.B. Lippincott) by Thomas Hibben. On a lark, I picked up a copy last week, even though it kept showing up as a piece of non-fiction for juveniles.

The book is indeed for children. The Junior Literary Guild recommended it for boys and girls age 9 to 11 when the book came out in 1933. But as soon as I opened the book I was sucked into it and spent the weekend devouring its contents.

"The Carpenter's Tool Chest" is designed to introduce children to the world of hand work, and Hibben explains exactly what each tool is used for in simple terms. But what really hooked me was the way that Hibben explained the craft and tool development from pre-history to the early 20th century.

The book opens with a series of delightful plates that trace the history of each form of tool from its earliest known forms to the modern day. The simple hand illustrations by Hibben (his father was an artist) are obviously based on photos and illustrations from earlier works. You'll see Andre Roubo's try square in there as well as some familiar pieces that are obviously from Joseph Moxon, plus some that are taken from works of art.

And though there is no bibliography to the book that will allow you to track down all his sources, the plates are still great fun to look at. His two plates on saws show the parallel development of frame saws and our English/Dutch-style saws, and how both Eastern and Western cultures used both forms of saws. The evolution of the hammer and gouge are also particularly interesting.

After illustrating and explaining the functions of all the tools, he takes a stroll through history that starts in the Stone Age and explains the woodworking tools that were in use then. Then he walks through the Bronze Age, Iron Age, Middle Ages and Renaissance. There are hundreds of illustrations and fun facts (such as why the use of adhesives were banned by governments for a time in the Middle Ages).

Woodworking scholars will discount this book because of some of its notable errors – he calls a marking gauge a "measuring gauge," and his drawing of an eggbeater drill shows a tool that would work only in M.C. Escher's dimension. And new scholarship would poke some holes in his timeline.

But still, what a cool book. The original is beautifully printed on nice heavy stock. It's great fun to read. And it puts our craft in a historical perspective that I think a lot of us don't think much about. The history of humanity and wood are as intertwined as the kudzu that tangles the farms of the South.

Hibben himself is an interesting character (read more about him at the Bear Alley blog). Born in Indianapolis, he studied architecture and engineering and had a fascinating life overseas until he was cut down by a heart attack.

I won't say this book is a must-read tome for woodworkers, but if you stumble across a copy in a used bookstore, it's definitely worth picking up. My copy is going into the hands of my 8-year-old daughter.

— Christopher Schwarz

This blog post is long overdue.

Late last year I purchased volumes 1-60 of "The Chronicle" on DVD from the Early American Industries Association, of which I am a card-carrying member. "The Chronicle" is the association's quarterly journal, and if you love traditional tools and history, then this DVD is like a giant black hole of your free time.

Matt Vanderlist, a pioneering blogger, podcaster and advocate for the stretchy pants industry, has launched a new podcast called "The Spoken Wood" that I think deserves some space on your iPod.

Here's the idea: Take one part of the NPR program "This American Life," mix in some of the country's woodworking bloggers and make it free for everyone. Vanderlist has enlisted several woodworking bloggers, including Kari Hultman of The Village Carpenter, Tom Iovino of Tom's Workbench and me to contribute.

Lots of readers have asked what the new magazine will look like when it hits the newsstands in April 2010. Art director Linda Watts has been working hard on the design, and we have been tweaking our project selection.

We think you'll be pleased.

Earlier I posted some thumbnails of some of the layouts, such as the one above, but now we're ready to take the veil off our cover project for the next issue. Download the pdf below to take a gander.

— Christopher Schwarz

NEW_PWM.pdf (1.08 MB)

Shooting the photo for the cover of a magazine is as unpredictable as my second girlfriend, Kym Harper.

Every time I bend over in the shop, I feel like I'm being just a little disemboweled.

By that, I means that all the important stuff – 6" rule, pencil, tape measure, small square – goes spilling onto the floor. And I get the nastiest knot in my stomach when I see all these expensive and easily damaged items crash to the concrete floor.

Today most of the magazine's staff spent the day with Ron Herman, a seventh-generation housewright in Columbus, Ohio, who has spent the last 29 years building, remodeling and restoring homes and historic sites – in many cases using only traditional tools.

His small shop north of the city is one of the wonders of the Western world. Amongst the machinery (much of it converted from a line-shaft system) are more hand tools than your eye can possibly take in. If this were a tool collection, it would be stupendous. The fact that Herman sets up all these tools and uses them is mind-blowing.

Herman spoke on handsaws at out last Woodworking in America Conference. But he knows about a lot more than saws.

I'm still trying to process all my notes and photos for a future article. Herman can talk. And his shop is a feast for the camera. In the meantime, I've pulled out a few good quotes from my notebook and some of the photos I took during our visit.

We've added a wish list function to our store, which allows you to select products you would like to have and share the list without having to drop odd hints, such as leaving photos of author Ron Hock in the bathroom.

And if you fill out a wish list by Nov. 30, you will be entered in a drawing in which we'll select two lucky people who will win everything on their wish lists – up to $500. The winners will be announced in our Weekly Wood News newsletter.

If you want to get started, just click here.

At the risk of enraging the powerful pen-turning cabal, I gotta say that I've never been enthralled by making pens or bottle stoppers on my lathe.

Life would be easier if I did embrace my mini-lathe, especially at Christmas. Instead I end up building furniture for the people I love. One year I made cutting boards with a Spirograph-like router design. Other years I've built Shaker boxes (too many to count).

Congratulations to Randy Klein and his family for their portrayal of Norm Abram at all phases of his life, from a small mischievous boy up to a full-grown bearded woman (just kidding about that, Mr. Abram).

In honor of "International Dress Like Norm Day" (the official celebration begins tomorrow), a fair number of us dressed like our favorite television woodworker.

Because of the short notice, neither Megan Fitzpatrick nor Bob Lang had time to grow proper beards. But they are bearded on the inside, I promise you.

Don't forget to send in a photo of yourself dressed like Norm Abram and send it to me by midnight Monday, Nov. 2, at chris.schwarz@fwmedia.com. The person who sends in the best photo (as determined by our staff), will win a great prize. What's the prize? We're still working on that.

— Christopher Schwarz

We were all bummed about news last week that "The New Yankee Workshop" was ceasing production. And, in case you've forgotten, this Saturday is Halloween.

I think you see where this is going.

When woodworking magazines publish plans for a reproduction of an antique, we show you the details you need to construct a facsimile. We give you part sizes, joinery details and tips on how to perform the major operations in a modern shop.

But rarely do we give you the social, communal and historical context of a piece. We never try to investigate the original maker's intentions, or discuss his or her relationship to the neighbors, family or village.

If you liked the video of me walking up a wall, you might enjoy this alternative treatment sent in by a reader who we like to call "Cheeseburger, No Meat."

If you are offended by references to my bum, or to masked avengers, then please do not click on the video.

— Christopher Schwarz

If you haven't seen it, Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick is on the cover of the November 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking with her new laminated veneer lumber (LVL) bench. When I proposed this cover, some of the people in our circulation department were sure I had been drinking lacquer thinner.

In my book, there is one rule for buying vintage tools: Buy them from someone who will take them them back if the tool stinks.

That rule keeps me on my toes on eBay, at auctions, flea markets and at garage sales. If I can't completely inspect, disassemble and use a tool before I buy it, I really want a money-back guarantee.

I never got to meet James Krenov, and so last week I hesitated to write anything about his death. But as I drove home on Friday afternoon I forgot to turn on the stereo in my car, and my mind drifted to a long weekend in 2006 when I was sure I knew the man.

In the history of measuring equipment, there is one blunder so awful that it makes me twitter (old-school twitter) like a smack-addled squirrel every time I encounter it.

It's a 6" steel rule that I acquired in 1997. The numbers are engraved and filled in. The markings are nice and fine. And there are four scales: eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds and sixty-fourths.

What's not to like?

My wife, Lucy, is fearful that her four cats are going to get trapped inside the walls of our house. And it's my job, as a woodworker, to prevent this from happening.

Before you think I should have her committed to the Cat Rancher Institute for Disturbed Females, let me explain.

I was worried this would happen. Some of the entrants to our contest to build a tool from an Altoids tin built tools that actually worked. Sigh. Woodworkers are so practical.

We're also practical. And so the winner of our contest is Tom Bier, who built a working router plane from an Altoids tin. The tool is impossibly clever – you open the lid to store the iron and thumbscrew. Heck I'd buy one.

One of the coolest woodworking things I’ve seen is where a guy named Mike Burton made some awesome scrapers for cleaning up crown moulding using – ready? – table spoons.

A second cool thing: John Sindelar’s tool collection, which is worth more than the GNP of several Latin American countries. Burton, a professional woodworker, and Sindelar, a farmer and cabinetmaker, have simply let their freak flags fly.

Drayton Hall in Charleston, S.C., is a time capsule of architecture and joinery. It also is a mighty beautiful place to get killed.

The first time I visited this antebellum plantation on the Ashley River I was a completely stupid tourist. I landed at the Charleston airport in near-hurricane conditions. My dad picked me up in his truck and we ate lunch at a restaurant that no longer exists.

Then, as the wind began to howl, we made the trek up Ashley River Road to this astonishingly untouched plantation. We pulled up to the gate. The wind sounded like Andre the giant was using our truck to play in a jug band.

When I was in Charleston, S.C., last week one of the tour guides said something about cabinetmaker Thomas Elfe that stuck with me.

"Most of his work is buried in the ground."

One of the primary jobs of early joiners and cabinetmakers was building coffins, and these projects have always fascinated me. Frank Klausz built plenty of coffins in his native Hungary. Chinese woodworkers make coffins out of one single log, like a dugout canoe. And they're illegal.

“Charlestonians thought of themselves as Englishmen who happened to be living in America, and naturally did everything possible to emulate the life of London society.”
— E. Milby Burton, "Charleston Furniture 1700-1825"

Thomas Elfe (1719-1775) was likely the most successful cabinetmaker in colonial Charlestown. One estimate put his personal worth at more than 6,200 English pounds, a sizable fortune for a woodworker.

His shop on King Street in Charleston produced thousands of pieces for the well-monied classes of this wealthy city. A contemporary of Thomas Chippendale (1718-1779), Elfe’s work was heavily influenced by Chippendale’s “The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director,” though the pieces I’ve seen of Elfe’s work also show distinct Southern American touches.

Last week Andrew Lunn of Eccentric Toolworks announced he was going to remove some of the decorative details on his saws and pass the savings onto his customers.

This week we got our first look at what the new saws will look like.

I need to correct a grave error.

In January I published a list of my favorite woodworking writers, but I neglected to include my all-time dearest – probably because her work should be shipped in a plain brown wrapper.

Instead of calling myself a woodworker, I am now considering the title "outsider artist."

Now before you stop reading this entry and resume watching videos of funny monkeys, hear me out for a bit. Whenever I'm at a dinner party with strangers and they find out I'm a woodworker, there is usually one of two reactions.

1. They ask if I could please come over to their house this weekend to build them a new closet, kitchen island, deck or addition to their home.

2. They ask if I enjoy my job at the mall scrollsawing letters all day to make plaques for kids' rooms.

I have tried to explain how I design and build furniture, but I might as well be telling them that I make scented candles from reclaimed earwax. They don't understand why anyone would make something (furniture) that is so cheaply available from Ikea.

I'm just about ready to assemble a drawer, so my daughter Katy lays down her saw and heads to the pickle bucket below the drill press. She dumps the cool water down the drain outside the shop door and refills the bucket with hot.

"The two great truths in the world are the Bible and Grecian architecture."
— Nicholas Biddle (1786 – 1844), president of the Second Bank of the United States

Among some historians of furniture and architecture there is a line in the sand where everything built before 1830 was great and everything built after that was on the downhill slide to McMansions filled with Value City pressboard termite-barf.

You can now read our account of our visit to White Water Shaker Village on our web site in full. I'll warn you, however, that words and photos do not describe what this place is like. (It's like the old expression, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.")

On Wednesday morning the entire staff of the magazine crowded around a handmade door in an early 19th-century structure as our guide fiddled with a padlock on the door. A couple clicks later the door swung open and it sounded like everyone breathed in simultaneously.

During the next few weeks, there will be a much-deserved outpouring of praise for Sam Maloof, his work and the indelible mark he left on the craft. As a writer, I’ve never been good at writing these kinds of stories. Maybe that’s because I’ve always thought the bigger picture was made up of thousands of small pictures.

So instead of simply telling you that Sam Maloof was one of the greatest woodworkers of this generation (and he was), I’m going to tell you about chicken tacos instead.

Anyone who has spent more than five minutes with me knows that I am obsessed with food – almost as much as I’m obsessed with woodworking. Both of my parents cook (my mom has run a number of restaurants), and I spend every evening in the kitchen or exploring restaurants in Cincinnati.

So if you are going to be in town this weekend for the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event and travel on your stomach, here’s a short list, based mostly on proximity to our offices or stuff that interests me.

If only we had 1,000 more teachers like Trevor Smith, I think the future of woodworking would be safe and sound.

Smith, a physics teacher at Troy High School in Michigan and an avid woodworker, manages to weave the craft into his curriculum in surprising ways. And after spending a day with Smith and his students, I think that what the world needs is more boomerangs.

All of the students in Smith's Physics II classes make functional boomerangs to learn the principles of airfoils and flight. They make them using high-density plywood, a band saw, a spindle sander and a few files and rasps.

Most of these high school kids have never had any woodshop experience. Smith surveys his students about their woodshop experience, and when he asks if they know what files are for, the most common answer is: fingernails.

But after a few weeks in the shop, the students are like pros. We spent a morning session with a class in the school's woodshop where Smith's students refined their boomerangs with files and sanding. They ran the band saw and spindle sanders like shop rats. I was even amused to see how several of them had mastered clamping with handscrews (something that even old pros struggle with).

Then the students took their boomerangs out onto the field after lunch and threw them for about an hour. Most of them worked remarkably well.

But the best part of the whole project was how enthusiastic the students were about the project. Many of them decorated their boomerangs, and Smith says they carry them around in their backpacks and even trade and sell the things.

Near the end of the school day, one student brought three boomerangs into the classroom; two of them were completed and one still needed work.

That was the one her father was making. Her dad had gotten so excited about the project that he wanted to make one.

"That happens all the time," Smith says. "The kids are so enthusiastic about their boomerangs that the parents or the grandparents start making them, too."

I must have seen about 50 boomerangs on Thursday, but I definitely had a favorite. It was made by Will Schwarz, who plays on the football team at Troy High School. He said his nickname on the field is "The Schwarz," and so he gave his boomerang the same name.

We'll be publishing a complete story on Smith, plus plans for boomerangs, in the October 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking, which goes on sale Sept. 1.

— Christopher Schwarz

Everybody has a list of woodworking books they enjoy and a stack of woodworking books that they never should have bought (anything with "Krenovian birdhouses" in the title). And most woodworkers have a list of woodworking books that they wish would get published someday.

That is not what we are writing about today. Below are the books that should never see the light of day. Or are simply ridiculous. Joel Moskowitz, the founder of Tools for Working Wood, came up with 11 sample titles below. Have a look:

"The Complete Guide To Honing Guides"
"Woodworking and Intellectual Property Law for Forum Posters"
"Lost in a Tool Tray - The Search for the Hidden Marking Knife"
"Seven Excuses for not Finishing Your Kitchen Cabinets"
"Tool Purchase Budgeting"
"Interesting Uses for Rarely Used Tools"
"101 Party Suggestions for those 'I've Finished a Project' Parties"
"Popular Woodworking's Guide to the Writings of Chris Schwarz"
"How to Increase Productivity When You Have Internet Access At Work"
"How to Make Your Own Folding Chairs"
"A Price Guide to Lie-Nielsen Boxes and Packing Materials"

Of course, Joel's list prodded me to make up my own. I don't know if I can top that "price guide" book. That one almost made me soil myself. Here goes:

"$10 Bed Rocks and Unicorns that Poop Rainbows"
"Make Your Own BBQ Grill -- From Wood!"
"Craft Fair Crap"
"Still More Craft Fair Crap"
"'Nice Crotch!' and 600 Other Naughty-sounding Woodworking Terms"
"How to Murder Trees and Make Stuff With Their Flesh"
"Plywood Silhouettes of Famous French Monarchs"
"I Hate Tools That Cost More than $1 (And the People Who Buy Them)"
"How to Make $40,000 a Year at Woodworking" (Oops, this actually is a real book!)

OK humorous woodworkers. Here's your chance. Leave the title of your most ridiculous imaginary book in the comments below. By the way, this is all a joke. So if you're going to leave an angry comment, I'm going to roll my eyes.

— Christopher Schwarz

It’s hard to fathom, but if I’d made a slightly different guess one summer before 10th grade, then I might have ended up taking portraits of your kid’s baseball team.

When I was a boy, I had a few passions that drove me to distraction. I loved building stuff and wanted to be an architect. Every day I messed with my blocks, my Legos and my sketchpad of house designs. I also was consumed with photography. I had my own darkroom, I took classes at the local college and I was head photographer at my school paper.

For several years, it looked like I was headed into the photography trade. And so I was taken in by a local portrait studio to work in the lab. It was an apprenticeship. I and another boy spent our first weeks there cleaning the lab. We washed the owner’s car (with kerosene!), we emptied the stop bath tank. We tended the garbage. We sorted portraits into envelopes.

After proving we could empty the trash without turning on a light (very important in a lab), we were trusted to load the film into the processing machines and make contact prints. And this is where I looked like a god. I had a darkroom at home and could do all the lab stuff quickly and unerringly.

The other apprentice struggled with the hand and technical skills. But he was good looking, good natured and quick with a joke. I did my best work by myself and in the dark.

One day, the head photographer at the studio took us both outside on a sunny day. He handed us each a Hasselblad, the expensive medium-format camera the studio used to take its portraits. It didn’t have a built-in light meter. The photographer told each of us to set our camera's shutter speed and f-stop to take a photo of him in front of a tree.

We had to divine the right setting for the environment and hand the camera back to him. The person who got it right would be apprenticed to him for the next year to learn the trade in the field and the studio. The loser would have to stay in the lab for the summer and then his job would end.

It was a long summer alone in the dark lab. And when I began high school the next year (as pale as typing paper) I took a job with a fish market (ensuring that I would never get a date with a girl with a sense of smell) and I decided that I should start writing for the school newspaper, as well as take photos.

That choice led me into journalism – another trade and another test. That test also took three months, and I passed (barely, I might add).

What does this have to do with woodworking? Plenty. I’ve been reading about the trades a lot lately and have been wondering about the tests that moved an apprentice to a journeyman to a master. I met a German master a few years ago in Las Vegas who told me about the tests he had to pass to achieve each of these levels of competency. To become a journeyman, he had to build a certain piece of furniture in a certain amount of time.

To become a master he had to first design a certain piece of furniture, then build it in a certain amount of time.

I would love to see photos and drawings of some of these “test” projects. Wouldn’t they make a cool article for the magazine? If you have some, drop me a line.

— Christopher Schwarz

For all the girls I’ve maimed before: I’m sorry.

Though I have fairly good hand skills, my feet skills on the dance floor are murderous. When I dance, most people look for a wooden spoon in order to help me through my grand mal seizure.

So it should come as no surprise that woodworking machines powered by feet should be a challenge for me. I first started working on treadle machines when I took a chairmaking class in Canada. We turned all the spindles on a springpole lathe. And it took me an entire day to get the rhythm to actually work a chunk of ash into something round.

This week I went to visit Roy Underhill and he let me work on two of his foot-powered machines: a Graves treadle-powered table saw and a treadle grindstone.

The saw is something special. I want one, though it’s doubtful I’d ever be able to get my feets on one. You pump the treadle, which turns a flywheel, which spins the blade. You adjust the height of the blade by raising and lowering the table. You make crosscuts with a miter gauge in a miter slot.

Rips are a little different. One person turns a crank (included!) to spin the blade. A second person guides the stuff through the blade. There is a rip fence that locks into a second slot.

Roy Underhill had no problem crosscutting stuff time after time. The blade never slowed. The cuts were clean. His rhythm was slow and steady.

For me, it was like a spastic weasel pumping a Nordic Trac. Too fast. And then the thing stalled. After a few tries… it got worse.

Underhill kept saying, “It took me a whole day to get the hang of it.”

Liar.

Then we went out and played with his treadle-powered grindstone. Underhill sharpened a chisel in about a minute. Then he let me try – in front of the entire hamlet of Pittsboro, N.C. Again, my feet kept getting tangled up in themselves. I couldn’t get more than two seconds of grinding before my legs looked like something at the Auntie Anne’s pretzel counter.

Underhill kept saying, “I need to tighten up those pedals. That would make it easier.”

Again, Underhill is an excellent liar.

I think I should stick with hand tools. Foot tools are just beyond me.

— Christopher Schwarz

I was about 12' up in the rafters of a barn, climbing on the biggest mountain of Eastern white pine I've ever seen. Then I saw it above me: a monster 5/4 board that was at least 20" wide.

And it was on the top of the stack of lumber – easy pickings. But then my joy turned quickly to revulsion.

While building projects often seems like an adventure, hunting the wood can sometimes feel like a movie – sometimes it's "Raiders of the Lost Ark," sometimes it's "Drugstore Cowboy" and other times it's "Dumb and Dumber."

I've been in a barn full of walnut that was ruled by legions of swooping bats and twitchy raccoons. I've met guys in their garages in the dead of night to trade cash for cambium. And I've bought wood from a professional cabinetmaker who sold me all his curly maple for half price. ("I hate it when I get curly wood. Ugly," he said.)

So there I was with both hands on that big pine board when I saw that some mammal had left me a heaping organic present in the middle of this monster board.

I called down to Senior Editor Glen Huey at the bottom of the stack. "Aw man, there's a big pile of poo on this board."

"I hate it when there's dog crap on the wood," Glen replied.

"Glen," I asked. "How in the world could a dog possibly get up here?"

Glen replied, "OK, how big is the pile?"

"Too big." I took another look and carefully shifted the plank aside to get the board below it.

All in all, it was well worth the trip out to the barn. I ended up with some boards that were wider than 15" – and one that was 17-1/2". And it's nice stuff – not at all crappy.

— Christopher Schwarz


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Our tale starts at Mike Ditka's restaurant in Chicago during a tool show. Someone at our table had just spilled red wine on Bill Krier (editor of WOOD magazine) and the place was swirling with waiters trying pat him down and clean up the mess.

That's when the guy across the table caught my eye and lowered his voice. "Say, have you ever heard about the tool vault at Stanley?" he asked.

The guy had been a product manager at Stanley several years before and he said that Stanley had a vault where they kept one new-in-the-box item of everything the company had produced. I said he was pulling my leg. He swore it was true.

Imagine, he said, a new No. 1 plane in the box, still fresh from the factory floor. New 750 chisels still in the wrappers. Even the much-hated fiberboard planes had to be worth something if they had never touched fiberboard, right?

During the last 10 years, I've made a few inquires at Stanley and sent interns to check out the story. Nobody knew what I was talking about.

Fast-forward to a few years later when our magazine staff is hosting a dinner with some officials from Porter-Cable and Delta Machinery. Somehow the topic came up about how there are all these great woodshops on military bases.

One of the Delta guys said the military was a good customer. In fact, they had bought hundreds of table saws, sealed them up and buried them in the desert. Why? In the event of a nuclear holocaust, there would be functioning table saws that could be used to rebuild the country.

Believe it?

And our last "Tale from the Wood" for the week comes from reader Bill Taggart:

In my previous career, I used to travel a lot all over the continental United States. I was at a Cracker Barrel somewhere out in the Midwest one time and saw a couple of pretty nice tools on the wall.  I called the manager over and asked him if I might buy them.  He said that they had people ask that once in a while, but they weren't allowed to sell them because they belonged to the restaurant. Then he said words that, to this day, make me feel more than slightly nauseated.

He said that Cracker Barrel corporate had people whose job it was to seek out and find all the artifacts on display in the restaurants.  He said they had a big warehouse in Kentucky with about 10,000 items in it that they used to stock the restaurants.

He did say that some things were reproductions, though.  I think those are mostly the advertising signs and such.  But you can tell that the tools are mostly the real deal.

Next time I go to a Cracker Barrel I'm taking my Milwaukee impact driver. Think anyone will notice?

— Christopher Schwarz

Traditional striking knives have almost disappeared. Except for Adam Cherubini's article on them in the April 2005 issue of Popular Woodworking, you'll find little written about them in this century.

Perhaps it's because they look like an eye injury waiting to happen.

After working with one for about four years, I've become quite fond of it. It seems a simple thing – so simple that I've made several striking knives from spade bits. My spade-bit knives work OK, but they are missing details that make my original knife much better.

I don't know who made my knife. It's stamped "1876" on one side and "London" on the other. The rest of the maker's mark is too faint to make out. Whoever manufactured it knew what they were doing. Here are my three favorite things about it:

The Curvy Bits: Where the knife goes from flat to round it has two curves. If you pinch those curves with your thumb and forefinger, your middle finger presses the blade against your try square with surprising force. Also, the round bit of the knife has a swelling that pushes your fingers into just the right place.

The Fulcrum: The knife balances on its swelling, which raises the pointy bit into the air about 1/4". This makes it very easy to pick the knife up off the bench. Sounds minor, but it's not.

The Pointy Bit: It's more than an awl. I use it all the time for cleaning waste out of mortises, clearing shavings from the mouths of planes and marking where hardware is going to go.

And, for the record, I still have both of my eyes and no scratches on my eyeglasses because of it. To download a drawing of my knife, click below.

StrikingKnife.pdf (285.11 KB)

— Christopher Schwarz

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A drawing of Jim Tolpin on the job from "Jim Tolpin's Woodworking Wit & Wisdom."

I remember binding my first book when I was about 10 (it was an illustrated guide to the military vehicles in World War II) on my workbench out in the shop. So I've been a writer for about as long as I've been a woodworker.

Plus, for about six years, I wrote copy that described the products for the WoodWorker's Book Club, so I got to read just about every woodworking book published.

As a result, I have some real favorites when it comes to the craft of writing about the craft of woodworking. If you like good verbiage, here are a few writers who you might want to check out.

Jonathan Binzen: Though I've never met the fellow, sometimes I feel like a skin stalker. I read everything he writes, whether it's for Woodwork magazine or Fine Woodworking, even if I'm not interested in the topic. Hands down, Binzen writes the best profiles of woodworkers. He gets great details. He teases narrative out of difficult subjects. He obviously loves woodworking. Look through your copies of these magazines and I think you'll agree. And check out "Arts & Crafts Furniture," the book he wrote with Kevin Rodel. It's a great read.

Jim Tolpin: Without his book "Measure Twice, Cut Once," I think I'd still be a hopeless hack. Tolpin's gift is that he can explain complex ideas (such as proportioning furniture) with an economy of words. And he has a gift for memorable phrases. He once described the lever cap of his block plane like it was a "worry stone in his hand." Also, "The Toolbox Book" is essential (and fun) reading. My copy is just about to fall apart.

Scott Landis: To me Landis is like one of the so-called "New Journalists," like Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson. Landis seems to throw himself into his writing almost obsessively (read "The Workbench Book" if you don't believe me). And his enthusiasm is contagious. Plus, with Landis, no detail seems too small. I like that.

Anthony Guidice: What happened to Guidice? He seems to have disappeared, and that's too bad. When I first read "The Seven Essentials of Woodworking" I howled in disbelief. I didn't agree with half the stuff in the book. Yet is was written in such a convincing and powerful way that I consumed every word and recommend the book to beginners. It gets you fired up. Also, Guidice wrote the best interview ever with Frank Klausz, in Woodwork magazine.

Graham Blackburn: I've always liked the way Blackburn weaves history, shop practice and personal narrative into his books and articles. Plus, I've always been jealous that he can draw. You can get a great dose of his style of writing from "Traditional Woodworking Handtools."

By the way, my first publishing effort didn't go so well. I remember presenting my little bound book to my parents that evening. They looked it over. They looked at each other. Then I think it was my dad who said: "Have you ever thought about becoming a lawyer?"

— Christopher Schwarz

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As a woodworking blogger, I try not to "overshare" when it comes to personal information. I try not to talk about my exotic skin lesions, what I had for breakfast and the wide array of annoying personal habits of my co-workers.

But today is a sad day here in the shop. It's time to let go of the "woobie."

The woobie is actually a rag (there, I said it) that has been soaked with the lubricating juices of many plants, animals and petroleums. For more than a decade, the woobie has wiped down every tool when I put it away. It has wiped every plane sole to make it easier to push. It has cleaned off every edge after sharpening.

But today I think the woobie goes in the garbage.

Here's the problem: I think the woobie has been contaminated by some sort of abrasive grit. Here's the evidence: My handplane edges are deteriorating more rapidly.

One of the indicators that it's time to resharpen a plane iron is when the shaving from the plane's mouth isn't intact across its width. It comes out as several smaller ribbons. What's happened to the iron is it has suffered small nicks or fractures in its edge that prevent it from taking a full-width shaving. Plus, it leaves little plane tracks behind at these fractures.

I've noticed that my smoothing plane iron at work is now deteriorating much more rapidly than my smoothing plane at home (which is where I keep "son of woobie").

More evidence: When I was teaching at Kelly Mehler's School of Woodworking in September I left my woobie at home. And after crouching and whimpering in the corner a bit because of my forgetfulness, I noticed that my edges were lasting a long time again, even though I was loaning my planes to the students.

Hmmm. The woobie sees a lot of abrasive when it wipes off my tools from sharpening. And it sits by the drill press, where there are metal filings and other nastiness. The woobie could be the source of the problem. Embedded grit could be scratching the irons when I wipe them off.

I could launder the woobie, but I want to stay married. So here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to put the woobie at the bottom of my now-empty garbage can, start a new woobie and monitor the longevity of my plane irons. If my edges improve I'll let the woobie go to the dump with the next load of trash.

And judging by how quickly we move here, that should be about Christmas.

— Christopher Schwarz

Last week I bought a toothing plane from a Midwestern tool collector. I've always wanted one of these tools, and this one is particularly nice.

Toothing planes are lot like scraping planes: The iron is vertical. What's different is that toothing plane has a serrated cutting edge – instead of a smooth edge with a tiny hook, like on a scraper plane.

Toothing planes can be used in a couple different ways. Some people use them to flatten a board's surface. The vertical pitch of the iron prevents tearing in gnarly woods, and the serrated teeth allow you to take a fairly big bite.

Other craftsmen use a toothing plane for traditional veneering jobs with hide glue. The toothing plane would prepare the substrate – flattening it and giving it some "tooth" – before you apply the adhesive and the veneer.

I'll probably use this tool for both of these sorts of jobs – they're handy and simple tools. This one was probably made by the craftsman, and the maker was likely German. The "horn" at the toe is a feature of many European planes.

Oh, there's one other feature of the plane I like:

I wish I had a good story about the origin of this tool, but I don't. The tool collector who bought it acquired it during a tool swap meet. So there's no cool history to share – just the mystery of me wondering what sort of work the other "C SCHWARZ" did.

— Christopher Schwarz

When we started Woodworking Magazine, one of the things we definitely wanted to include as part of the fabric of the publication were quotations about the craft that made us laugh or think.

And when we launched our first issue in March 2004, there was no doubt or discussion about what quote would be emblazoned at the top of the first page:

Brown, who died June 1, is in my estimation the most influential writer on handwork of this generation. His columns in Britain’s Good Woodworking magazine inspired thousands of woodworkers to attempt or even completely embrace handwork.

His columns were short epistles on topics philosophical, mundane or both. He might offer a recipe for bacon in one column, offer plans for a workbench in another and in a third comment on the sad state of woodworking where we have traded skill for speed.

Brown was at times crotchety in tone, other times apologetic (to turners in particular); but he was always the spokesman for anyone who wanted to take hammer in hand and try to build something – either fantastic or mundane – using hand tools.

Brown himself was a boatbuilder who was made obsolete by fiberglass watercraft. After spotting a primitive Welsh chair in a shop in Lampeter, as Brown put it: “It was like a vision. I had never seen anything that had made so instant an impression on me.”

And so he built a Welsh stick chair like the one from his vision. He began selling them. He began writing about them. “Welsh Stick Chairs” was published in 1990. It’s a short volume, but is one of my prize possessions. In it, Brown gives a concise history of the Celts and their furniture. Then a short history of his love for the craft. The remainder of the book is photos of Brown in action, building what he calls a “cardigan chair.”

I first encountered his column in Good Woodworking in the mid-1990s. Brown had begun writing for the magazine during issue 13, I believe, which was the November 1993 issue. It was called “The John Brown Column,” and discussed mostly chairmaking, but with all hand tools. His run of columns there ended 32 issues later with a condemnation of power machinery in June 1996.

After a year of respite, Brown returned to the pages of Good Woodworking in issue 58 and continued for a couple more years. The last column I have of his is from December 1998. He continued as a chairmaker for awhile but during the last decade, Brown turned his attention to studying art.

"The John Brown Column" – sometimes titled "The Anarchist Woodworker" – was so inspiring to me, it’s difficult to quantify. I think it’s best said that if I had to have only one hero in woodworking, it would be Chairman Brown.

Not only did his writing encourage my hand-work skills, he also inspired me as a chairmaker to the point where I even ventured into the Canadian wilderness to take a class in Welsh chairmaking from David Fleming, a Cobden, Ontario, chairmaker who is Welsh.

All this detail above might make me sounds a bit like a stalker, but I never met John Brown. It was one of my primary goals for the coming years, which I can now bitterly cross off my to-do list. My plan was to ask if we could reprint his columns in book form so they could receive the wide audience they deserve. That project might be in limbo now, but perhaps his heirs will be willing.

If you can get a copy of “Welsh Stick Chairs,” you certainly will get the flavor of his writing and wit. And if I have any luck, perhaps you’ll also get to read his columns and then understand the loss the world of handwork has suffered this week.

— Christopher Schwarz

In high school and college, I spent most of my summers working in factories.

I spent two summers in a liquor factory (I'll never drink straight tequila again – it's what we used to clean the concrete floors). Another summer was in a factory that made folding tables – the kind you see at church picnics with the fake walnut wood grain. The highlight there was working alongside a guy named (honest now) Meatfart, who communicated in grunts and sounds that he could make using his internal organs.

And then I spent one long summer building and staining exterior doors at Therma-Tru door company – my first woodworking job.

If you've ever worked in a factory, you know there's a caste system. If you haven't worked in a factory, then read the rest of this paragraph: At the top of the caste are the people "in the office." These are the secretaries, corporate managers and other people who make cameo appearances on the shop floor, usually to deliver bad news (you're fired) or to be wolf-whistled at by the unwashed.

Below the office types are the people who run the maintenance shed, the forklift drivers and the floor managers. These are usually people who started out as grunts on the shop floor and worked their entire lives for the privilege of wrangling the grunts on the floor.

Below that rung are the grunts, who are the backbone, hands and legs of the operation. And believe or not there are people below the grunts: the temps. And that was my lot in life. If you had to fetch a loose part from inside a running machine, you told a temp to do it. If the job was messy, hot or near Meatfart, it was a temp job.

Being a temp convinced me to stay in college if but for one reason: To work "in the office." I had no idea what happened in "the office," but it didn't involve 50-pound bags of sugar, being someone's pillow during break time or having to use a restroom that would make a Roman bath look like a private garden spot (10 holes, two sinks, zero loitering).

It's been almost 20 years since I punched a time clock in a factory. But the funny thing is that now I do everything I can to escape the office and get onto the shop floor here at the magazine. I love the noise, the dust, the heavy lifting. Heck, I like taking out the garbage and fishing unknown objects out of the dust collector.

The only things missing are a few wolf whistles and some organic offgassing and I'd by 18 all over again.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Who is now headed back to the shop to build a blanket chest for the Summer 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine.

Adam Cherubini, who writes the Arts & Mysteries column for Popular Woodworking, ends up making a lot of his own tools to satisfy his 18th-century urges.

The handsaws you see in the photos of his work? Those aren’t Kenyon-style saws from Wenzloff & Sons. Those are saws that Adam made himself. Same with his wooden try squares and his fore plane (which actually is a Franken-plane from several donor tools).

So it should come as no surprise that Adam makes his own brushes for finishing. Recently he and I were talking about the process while we were at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool show in Philadelphia. The show was winding down and people were starting to pack up, but Adam was fired up about horsehair.

He’d made some brushes that he used to finish his standing desk, which has been the topic of his Arts & Mysteries column this year. The hair he had procured had come from a horse’s mane, and it had been a bit expensive.

As he discussed the details of the follicles and how he bundled them for the brush, his voice started to trail off a bit.

Have you ever seen one of those old cartoons where one character (such as a chickenhawk) starts to gaze hungrily at another (such as Foghorn Leghorn)? And then Foghorn mutates into an enormous steaming and juicy chicken leg?

Well that’s the weird vibe I was getting from Adam. He was staring at my hair, which was particularly long and scruffy that month.

“You know,” he said, reaching up, “your hair is just about the right coarseness for a brush….”

Now, Adam is a couple inches taller than I am. And he has the advantage of some extra mass and living in New Jersey. Simply put: Adam could probably scalp me with his “The Plane My Brother Is” with ease – if he could catch me. I do run 30 miles a week.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Shameless plug: You can buy signed, deluxe versions of my new book on workbenches at my personal site, LostArtPress.com.

In my home life, my passion for furniture design is a bit like a subscription to Playboy magazine. I keep all my books about woodworking and furniture in my office. I pore over them at night when the kids are asleep. And I don’t drone on about joinery or 18th-century workshop practices at dinner.

It’s not that I’m actively concealing the stuff. It’s just that my kids’ days are filled with so much activity and learning already, that there is little time to talk much about furniture. I’ve also been waiting for the day to arrive when they are old enough to build furniture in the shop with me.

That day arrived on Saturday.

This weekend we all drove down to Harrodsburg, Ky., for the state’s first-ever Alpaca festival. My two girls like a goofy-looking animal as much as any kid. And so the 100-mile trek to see this cousin to the camel seemed worth it. The festival was held on the grounds of Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill – one of my all-time favorite places on earth. The setting, the buildings, the furniture and the food are a balanced meal for any furniture junkie.

I figured that the last thing the kids would want to do would be to tour buildings and workshops, but that was OK by me. Saturday was for the alpacas, which hum when they are distressed. So we heard a lot of alpaca humming, chased some wild turkeys, saw a sheep being sheared in 4 minutes, made felted soap and bought finger puppets.

After some lunch, we had an hour before we had to head back home, and I thought I’d sneak off to the Centre Family Dwelling to take some photos of the firewood box there, which I’m building for the “I Can Do That” column in the February issue of Popular Woodworking. I told the girls they could go pet some more alpacas or come with me into the building. Surprisingly, everyone wanted to go with me.

After an hour in the Centre Family Dwelling, we almost had to drag the girls out of there. They were both bewitched by the building itself and the objects inside. They wanted to see every room, look at all the tables and chairs and learn about all the displays. They marveled at the acoustics in the meeting halls. They pointed out unusual dovetail joints on a seed box (I guess I’ve been droning on at dinner more than I thought).

Maddy, my 11-year-old, pointed out pieces that she thought I should build for the magazine. Katy, the 6-year-old, was fascinated by the system of pegs on the walls (she also is quite the cleaner, so that’s understandable).

Then they discovered the continuous banisters that run from the ground floor to the third. They immediately knew what a technical challenge it was. They asked to borrow my camera so they could take pictures of things that interested them (they took about 50). Katy’s photo of the peg system is at the top of this entry.

Then the two girls pulled themselves up into one of the deep window wells and looked out over the rolling hills of Central Kentucky, which look the same as they did in the early 19th century when the building was built.

“We could live here dad,” Maddy says. “I could look out this window forever.”

Sometimes I forget about the power that furniture and architectural design has, even over people who don’t immerse themselves in it. On Saturday, the long-gone brothers and sisters of that vanished order reached across almost two centuries of time and planted a seed in the minds of my girls.

Next stop: To the shop to build a wagon for their toy horses to pull. It’s time.

— Christopher Schwarz

Yesterday I was at a local auto body shop, poring over an El Camino in the back room and struggling mightily to see what was 6” from my eyes.

Let me back up a minute: I’m having a mid-life crisis. And the way it is manifesting itself is in a most foolish enterprise: Restoring a 1968 Volkwagen Karmann Ghia. These cars have beautiful Italian lines, pokey 1,500cc air-cooled engines and a tendency to rust out from the inside (as mine is).

So I took it to a guy who specializes in restoring cars and we go over the details of the job. What he will do. What I will do. And how many visits I’m going to have to make to the plasma donation center to pay for it all.

Then he asks, “What chrome do you want replaced?”

“The chrome looks fine,” I say. “Leave it.”

I can tell that he’s trying to stuff down an urge. He shakes his head and takes me to the back room with the El Camino. He shows off the beautiful two-tone paint and then points to the chrome strip that traces the top of the truck’s bed.

“See,” he says. “This dull chrome looks horrible next to this paint job. I hate it.”

I cannot for the life of me see what he’s talking about. The chrome looks fine; it’s not flaking a bit. After a few minutes of examination, I realize that this is a lot like learning the craft of woodworking and furniture design. Most beginners (and non-woodworkers) are blind to the palette of grain and color match that most of us struggle with. The things that we work so hard to achieve (tight reveals on door and drawers, for example) are lost to most.

Even when I point these details out to people on a piece, I can tell that most of them don’t see it. As soon as their eyes move to another piece of furniture, the lesson I tried to teach them on the first piece is completely gone. They simply cannot see the details until they have tried to achieve them in their own shops or have had them pointed out 10,000 times by another woodworker (sorry about that, Lucy).

That same evening I drove home with some friends from a bourbon tasting and we discussed some bookshelves I will design and build for them this fall. To begin, I ask what furniture styles they like. And I list a few.

Silence.

I probe a little shallower. Do they like antiques? Contemporary furniture? What furniture catalogs do they like? Where would they like to buy furniture if they could afford anything?

“It’s hard to say” is the response.

OK, it’s time to hit the books. I assemble a stack of furniture books and catalogs and ask them to page through them and put a sticky note on anything they like. A style. A color. A detail. A shape.

While I wait for them to do their homework, I’m going to do mine. I’ve been paging through Malcolm Bobbit’s book “Karmann Ghia: Coupe & Cabriolet” to stare at acres of chrome. So far, I still don't see it.

— Christopher Schwarz

Reminder: We’ve just published a hardbound book of the first seven issues of Woodworking Magazine. Shipping is free through Sept. 21, 2007. Click here for details.

Sometimes I wonder if morticians can tell a lot about a person’s character by the body left on the slab. Do fine lines around the mouth indicate an easygoing person who always smiled perhaps?

I ask this because woodworkers – myself included – know a lot more about trees when they are dead, dried and cut to ribbons than they know about trees when they are living. We can tell the difference between soft maple and hard maple the instant we put it to the tools. But most woodworkers are hard-pressed to identify a species in the wild.

We know little about how the species grow. Or where they grow. Or what their leaves or fruit looks like.

I’ve always wanted to be able to identify species around the neighborhood, and I used to carry around a book that showed each species' canopy, leaves and fruit. I can pick out the obvious ones (silver maples, sycamores, willows and the like). But on others I am hopeless.

Today my friend John Hoffman and I were loading up several hundred pounds of concrete pavers for my mom (and 20 bags of mulch). As we were snaking the pickup truck down a steep hill in the yard, Hoffman looked up and said, “White oak. Round like the white man’s bullets.”

Huh?

“And there. Pointed like the red man’s arrows,” he said. “Red oak.” I stopped the truck mid-hill and asked what he was jabbering about. It turns out that Hoffman’s wife, Sharon, has been taking classes on naturalism given by the state of Indiana and was taught that little trick about differentiating the oaks. The white oaks have rounded lobes on the leaves, like a bullet. The red oaks have pointed lobes, like an arrowhead. Brilliant.

So this afternoon I took a walk into a forest preserve next to my mother’s property. This stretch of untouched land was always off-limits to us as kids, but recently it was opened to the public with a hiking trail. There’s an imposing sign on the property next to the preserve that reads: Lord Lanto. Plus a bunch of signs about trespassing and security cameras. I’ve always wondered about Lord Lanto and thought I might be able to catch a glimpse of his land (or perhaps the lord) at long last by taking a walk through the preserve.

No luck. No Lord Lanto. But I did find some nice white oak and red oak leaves. But still I struggled with the other species. I think I saw some walnut. If I could get a saw and kill the sucker I could tell you for sure.

— Christopher Schwarz

The Connecticut road the next morning.

As I sprint down the gravel driveway at my mother’s house, the lights begin to dim and I begin to wonder if a 10 p.m. three-mile run in semi-rural Connecticut was a good idea.

I’ve made this run so many times since I was 11 years old that I push on. I’m fueled partly by the intense memory of this road, partly by the two glasses of red wine at dinner and partly by the fact that I’ve been sitting on my backside for more than 13 hours in a drive in my wife’s mini-van to get to Old Lyme, Conn.

I’m on the way to Maine this week to shoot a DVD (this one on using a workbench, natch) and to do a seminar on Saturday on workbench design at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. But for the next couple days I’m at my mother’s house, which also was my grandparent’s house. It’s where I learned to use a table saw and a band saw. It’s where I spent summers in my grandfather’s workshop, which is now empty except for a few boxes.

After a half mile, I look up and can barely separate the sky from the canopy of trees. Streetlights are few. Lights from the homes are infrequent, and I can see the median of the road as a slightly brighter line stretching ahead. I follow that line.

Almost 20 years ago, my grandfather walked this same road, just as he did every morning on his way to pick up the newspaper at the Laysville convenience store. But on that morning in the late 1980s, my grandfather had a stroke in this driveway, incapacitating him for the last years of his life. It took away his ability to walk, work in the shop and say more than three things: “Yes!” (which meant “no”), “No!” (which usually meant “yes”) and “love you” (which I hope wasn’t an antonym).

And now it’s dark on the driveway, like I’m in a sensory deprivation tank. The dim line marking the median is gone. I press on, and I look for the median using my feet instead of my eyes. I chuckle for a moment because this is all a bit like work in the shop. You need to use senses other than your sight. Your sense of touch, in particular, lets you know how a handplane is working, if a chisel is sharp, if the surface of your wood is free of plane tracks or planer snipe. Your hearing lets you know if your band saw is aligned, if your table saw is in trouble. (Yes, everything can be a blog entry about woodworking.)

I’m feeling my way across Sill Lane with my feet when I find the yellow center line. I can’t see a dang thing, but I know I’m running full-tilt down the center of the road and headed in the right direction. I laugh out loud and run the next two miles without seeing anything, navigating entirely by my feet.

Then I feel a brush of some brush on my legs and then my left shoulder slams into a tree trunk. I’ve lost my line. So much for navigating using your other senses. Next time I’ll run when there’s daylight.

— Christopher Schwarz

During the last several months I’ve gotten several e-mails, phone calls and comments from people who aren’t readers. Instead these communiqués are from the wives of our readers, who are about 95 percent male.

These are not friendly conversations.

They go something like this: “My husband buys every tool you recommend. Whenever your magazine comes out or you post something on your blog, my husband buys it. For the sake of our bank account, please die.”

Well, that last sentence is hyperbolic (I’m from the South, what do you expect?). But the rest of the sentiment is accurate. One woman said that my writing had cost her $12,000 last year and $9,000 so far this year. And here I thought my writing cost people $19.96 a year for a seven-issue subscription.

Now I actually feel pretty bad about this recent development. As a writer (who is married to a writer), I’ve always lived modestly. I drive a six-year-old bare-bones Honda. Many of my clothes are hand-me-downs from my father, a man with excellent taste. Heck, I started building furniture because we couldn’t afford the antiques we wanted.

But I’ve never developed a taste for cheap tools. My first table saw was a 1970s-era Craftsman (price: free). I spent as much time adjusting the lame fence as I did ripping with it. My first chisels and planes were the Popular Mechanics brand (yes, I see the irony), and the edges folded like tin foil whenever they were asked to cut anything other than pine. I could go on and on with this list.

Poor-quality tools stink. So I began acquiring high-quality vintage tools and machines (an Atlas drill press, Swan chisels, Stanley Type 11 handplanes). These were (and still are) great tools. But they took a lot of work to bring back to life. Metalwork. Filings. Grease. Pressing bearing. I found that I don’t like metalworking nearly as much as woodworking.

So I bought a Delta Unisaw. I bought nice Japanese chisels and saws from Lee Valley Tools. I bought a Lie-Nielsen plane. Each purchase hurt the bank account; but on the plus side, I’ve never had to replace any of these tools. And I suspect I never will. Every time I turn on my table saw, it works as advertised. Every time I cut a dovetail, the only errors are caused by my own ineptness. And every time I go to plane a board, the results are completely predictable.

But these arguments don’t work well with the spouses. I’ve tried. So I apologize to them. I try to untangle myself from the conversation. And I furiously hope that each of you will build something spectacular with these tools. Nothing defuses the expense of the means like the beauty of the results.

— Christopher Schwarz

This weekend I got a chance to show off the Holtzapffel workbench at the Sindelar Tool Meet, talk to a bunch of tool collectors and buy some tools I've been coveting for too long.

But the absolute highlight of the entire event was a brush with greatness.

You see, I got to meet "the boy."

OK, some background for the uninitiated: Tool dealer Patrick Leach has been selling tools on the Internet for as long as I've been buying them. Every month, Leach sends out an e-mail newsletter that is (hands-down) the best-written tool newsletter in the business. His tools for sale are always the cream of the crop and his descriptions are oft hilarious.

(By the way, Leach is also the founder of the Blood & Gore web site, the best online reference on Stanley planes, and started Independence Tool with Pete Taran, which made the dovetail saw that Lie-Nielsen now sells. That saw launched the premium handsaw market.)

Anyway, one of my favorite parts of Leach's newsletter is that he has a "Tool of the Month," which is usually the most unusual, minty or rarest tool on offer. And every month, one of the photos that shows the tool features Leach's son holding the tool.

As I've been getting this newsletter for years, I've watched the child grow up, and Leach always peppers the tool's description with some comment about "the boy" or the "tool youth." For example: "Fresh from stuffing his mouth with Oreos while playing with his toy motorcycle, the tool youth wasn’t too happy to pose with this one, the much coveted #164 low angle smooth plane…."

So on Saturday afternoon I took a moment away from my demonstrating at John Sindelar's event to browse some of the tool dealer's tables. I was looking at a small router plane when I glanced up. Now it's rare for me to be speechless (just ask the magazine's staff), but I saw The Boy and all I could do was stutter: "Uhhhh, it's….uhhhh… The Boy!"

He and his father were set up right by the entrance to the building that houses the collection. Leach was working the crowd, cracking jokes and making deals. The Boy was helping out, arranging the tools and tending to the tool bargains that were arrayed on the blue plastic tarp off to the side.

"The best tools are back over here," The Boy called out to the crowd.

I obeyed him and went to have a look. I snatched up a brass router plane made by a patternmaker and an accessory for my brace that would allow it to accept small round-shank bits. The Boy was right.

I wanted to say something like, "I've known you since you were just a wee lad holding an ebony plow plane in a bouncy seat." But that sounded stupid. And I'm sure that it would seem creepy if I started talking to The Boy, and so I just admired him from afar. If you've ever wondered about it, The Boy is a good kid. He helped Leach the entire weekend and was one of the most well-behaved elementary-school kids I've met.



A smallish router plane by Paul Hamler. Yes, I ordered one..

Other highlights: Getting to meet toolmakers Paul Hamler and Jim Leamy. Konrad Sauer from Sauer & Steiner was there as well. I know Konrad quite well and we spent our evenings trying to find a decent beer (we looked a lot, but that's another story for another kind of blog). I did learn that Konrad has a profound weakness for powdered sugar doughnuts. John Sindelar, the host of this incredible event, bought about 3,000 doughnuts for the event. No lie. Konrad ate his fair share.

— Christopher Schwarz

“It will be necessary that I teach them how to choose their tools that are made by Smiths, that they may use them more with ease and delight, and make both quicker and neater Work with them.”

Few people in the world of hand tools rouse people as much as John Economaki, the founder of Bridge City Tool Works. He has a passionate customer base that keeps its collective lip buttoned on the Internet, and a vocal chorus of critics that doesn’t.

Critics charge that his tools are too expensive, that some of his tool designs are too specialized to one segment of the craft and that his marketing copy tries too hard. So when you meet him, you expect Economaki to be rich, snobbish and overly proud of his product.

During the last 16 months, I’ve become acquainted with Economaki. And the more I talk to him, the less I understand the critics. He is, unlike many people who make tools in this world, one of us. He was a woodworker, an industrial arts teacher and a professional furniture maker before he started making tools.

He is, like many toolmakers, struggling to remain profitable, he’s quite earthy and he’s the biggest critic of his own designs.

“Ah, you see this,” he said today about one of the parts of one of his planes, “this is a design flaw. I should have put a magnet in there so it would stay in place as you tighten the lever cap.”

This week, Economaki is in our shop here in Cincinnati to show us some of his newest designs, share thoughts on CAD software and give a presentation to a group of our readers. Today, Economaki and our staff spent the day in the shop, working with his tools, chatting about woodworking and discussing the state of toolmaking in this country.

Time with Economaki makes my head hurt. It’s common to start on a conversation about try squares that shifts to tricks to determine accuracy using a cylinder of steel to biographies of Albert Einstein to the legacy of Sam Maloof. All that happened in about three stoplights while in my car on the way to his hotel.

But the most interesting thing about the day was getting to spend time with his tools. They are as much about design as they are about function (kind of like fine furniture, don’t you think?). He admits that freely and says his tools aren’t for everyone. As to the criticism that the tools are “too expensive,” you don’t feel that way after you use the tools and understand a bit how they are made (entirely in the United States).

I’ll admit, some of his tools don’t appeal to my eye or the way I work, such as the Japanese saws. But other tools of his have a remarkable pull.

When Bridge City started making the SS-2 Saddle Square, I ordered it as soon as I saw it and have never regretted it. The tool has been in every shop apron that I’ve worn to shreds while working at the magazine, and I carry it to every show.

The Saddle Square is functional, yes, but it also delights me. It pushes me to work better. And as its brass surface has become scratched, tarnished and worn over the years, my woodworking has become tighter, lighter and easier.

And that’s worth something.

— Christopher Schwarz

Whenever I attempt to teach a bit of woodworking I say things that don’t come out quite right. Things like: “Sharpening is perhaps the most fundamental of hand skills.” Or: “Handsawing is the most fundamental of joinery skills.” Also: “Design is the most blah, blah skill.” And finally: “I think it’s time for a group hug.”

When I say these things, what I’m really trying to say is that there’s a basic skill beneath all the other high-level skills. But it’s not sharpening, sawing, planing or design.

It’s seeing.

This past weekend I was at the Sterling Heights, Mich., Woodcraft store to teach two one-day classes. One class on planing and the other on sawing. So inevitably I made some grandiose sweeping statements like the ones above. But as I got into the down-and-dirty part of teaching these skills, I kept running into the problem of myopia.

Sharpening isn’t about rubbing tools on abrasive as much as it is knowing when to stop rubbing the tool on the abrasive. And the way you know when to stop is by observing the cutting edge.

Planing isn’t about making shavings, it’s about seeing the resulting surface you are leaving. Is it flat, true and free of tear-out? And sawing is about muscle memory, but it’s also about seeing a line and following it with your saw using subtle hand pressure.

The good news is that teaching one-on-one is the absolute best place to give the gift of sight. I don’t know how many frustrating and circular phone conversations I’ve had with woodworkers who are trying to teach themselves to sharpen, plane or saw. They struggle longer than necessary because they don’t know when they have a sharp saw, a flat board or a correctly cut tenon.

But when you can get that in-person feedback and observe what a really sharp edge, flat board and perfect sawcut looks like, your skills advance in great strides. I was amazed at how quickly all of the students caught on once the scales fell from their eyes and they could see the scratches, gaps of light and miscuts.

What I didn’t really have the heart to say is that seeing is a blessing as well as a curse. Once you can see the scratches, you will work like heck to remove them. You won’t settle for bowed stock. And you will correct miscuts. And learning to do those things quickly takes time and effort.

And there’s one more curse. It’s even worse, and it deals with design. Once you can truly see good design, you will never be able to walk into a furniture store or neighbor’s house without the occasional wince.

— Christopher Schwarz

When I first started working at Popular Woodworking magazine, we’d sometimes have summer interns help out, and they were almost always female and working on a staff that was (at the time) almost entirely male. We didn’t think anything of it, really. All magazines need people with writing and editing skills to research some weird narrow specialty.

And the interns didn’t think anything of the gender disparity, as far as I could tell. But the other people in our publishing company always asked our interns questions such as:

“What’s it like being down there with all that testosterone?”

Or, my favorite, “Don’t you ever get tired of all those men talking about sports?”

The truth of the matter is that there isn’t much sports talk in the office. In fact, some (female) employees used to run an NCAA bracket in our building. We woodworkers would play along, chip in a dollar each and fill out the brackets. Our picks were always, without fail, the worst of the bunch.

I’ve never gotten a taste for following college or pro sports, and I’m always surprised by how few woodworkers I meet seem to be rabid sports fans. One exception is Deneb Puchalski, who works for Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, teaches at Kelly Mehler’s school and is an excellent woodworker. One late night we were in a bar in Vegas (don’t ask) and started talking about sports and woodworking. I asked him why he liked sports.

He said he liked the math involved, the statistics and following the small details. There’s a little science, a little drama. He said he liked to see how those statistics created a bigger picture and you could see patterns.

But, I pointed out, I get the same stimulation from woodworking. I enjoy the math. I relish the small details of a project that I assemble into a bigger piece of finished furniture. There’s science (engineering and chemistry), and more than enough drama. And don’t get me started about the patterns.

I’ll never forget his response. Deneb took a swig of Fat Tire beer and grinned.

“Yeah, but can you drink a beer while woodworking?”

Score one for organized sporting events.

— Christopher Schwarz

An excerpt from the Spring 2007 issue of Woodworking Magazine, available on the newsstands now.

My boss, Steve Shanesy, held up a dial caliper to make his point about precision woodworking. “If you can work to 1", then you can work to 11⁄64", or to .005" or to whatever,” he said. “Those are all just arbitrary numbers, and you can work to any of them.”

I allowed Steve’s admonition to become ingrained in my heart and hands that day. I bought a dial caliper. And for years I used that caliper as my sixth sense in the shop and experienced every aspect of my joinery through its steel jaws.

In many ways, the caliper pushed me to become a better woodworker. It showed me how closely each of my tenons fit. It pointed out every joinery flaw and forced me to find ways to work that were more precise and repeatable.

But the dial caliper can be a cruel master.

It measures things that are difficult – sometimes impossible – to do anything about. Let’s say your boards come out of the planer and they are .004" thicker than what you wanted. What do you do? For years I struggled to get a sensitive touch with the adjustment wheels on my heavy machines. I succeeded, but I could never live up to the expectations of my caliper.

Then one day I was at a woodworking show in Canada and there was an old-timer there who was selling old folding rulers. They were beautiful things with brass corner joints. Some of the scales were made of ivory. Most were boxwood. Naturally, I checked the price tag on one. I don’t remember the price, but I do remember what was scrawled next to it: “French inches.” French inches? What the heck are those?

Before the French invented the metric system (yes, something else to blame the French for) and then formally adopted it in 1799, there were competing systems of measurement that would vary by region. The French pouce (inch) was a little shorter than the inch we use today, about 7 percent shorter.

Until that moment, in my mind there were only the metric and imperial systems. The idea that there were other ways to measure things in the world of furniture was confusing. And so I began to realize that all measurement systems are arbitrary. I eyed my caliper warily and wondered if life might be better if I switched to the metric system, where I could divide anything by 10.

But, as it turned out, archaic measurement systems aren’t arbitrary. As I read more, I discovered the Japanese shaku, an archaic unit of measurement still used today by temple carpenters. The shaku, developed independently of our system, is 11.93" long. The ancient Egyptian foot measures 12.25". And many of the measurements that eventually evolved into the imperial system were based on the human body, such as the cubit – the distance between an average-sized man’s finger and elbow.
And because our furniture is supposed to fit our bodies, it makes sense that our measurement systems should spring from there.

But what about the ancients and their way of working? Would they mock the caliper? Well, it turns out that tiny units are nothing new, either. The Indus Valley civilization (2,600 B.C.) had measurement units that were less than .07". So while we desire to have our measurement systems reflect our bodies, we also need to quantify – measure – anything we can see or feel. Hence, the caliper.

In the end, I’ve concluded that for me, calipers are like another important ancient invention: beer. Both must be used sparingly – or I’ll never get anything done.

I always shoot for tight-fitting joints instead of hitting an arbitrary number on a caliper. I strive for beauty to the eye rather than on-the-nose tenon lengths.

But how do you get there? How do you teach yourself to make furniture without someone looking over your shoulder at the critical first stages of learning the craft? You need an unyielding master who can point out the things you haven’t yet trained your eye to see. You need a master you can someday outgrow or even exceed.

In the modern home workshop that master just might be a dial caliper.

— Christopher Schwarz

Tonight I attempted to make my first serious loaf of bread, and I learned something about woodworking benches.

Now, I don’t like to talk much about my life outside the magazine. It’s fairly dull, I can assure you, and it would be (even more) boring to read about than what’s on the blog now. But here’s an important detail: I’m just as passionate about cooking as I am about woodworking. Both are in my blood – my mother has run or cheffed for several restaurants and catering businesses; plus my father, uncle and grandfather were all woodworkers, carpenters or boatbuilders in their spare time.

This year I’ve been trying to improve my baking skills. And bread – traditional yeast, water, salt and flour – is at the top of my list. So for the last couple days I’ve been working hard in the kitchen – between bouts of editing and writing – and for dinner tonight, I served my first scratch loaf.

It looked beautiful. Smelled perfect. Was crispy on the outside and moist and tender on the inside. But it was not good bread. My poor family choked down one piece each (butter is an excellent lubricant). I stuck it out through three pieces.

I still don’t know what the heck went wrong. I’ve been studying for weeks. I practiced with several quick breaks (foccacia and Irish soda bread – both victories). But the simplest yeast bread is just not in my grasp yet.

So what does this have to do with workbenches? Glad you asked. This perfect loaf reminded me a lot of the workbenches I see in shops all over the country. They are beautiful. They look exactly like what we expect a bench to look like – classic Platonic realism.

But when we try to use them, one of two things happens. We immediately realize the bench’s shortcomings and either try to fix them or we turn our backs on them (and get a refund.) This is exactly like what my daughter Maddy did this evening. She took one bite of my bread, one huge gulp of milk and went back to the flounder.

Or we assume that this is the way all workbenches are. That our frustrations with it are caused by our own lack of skills or knowledge. That perhaps we need to just keep plugging away at it and then we’ll finally get it.

This is me in a nutshell. I ate three pieces of that mass of weird-tasting flour. And I’ve also worked for years with workbenches that have held me back.  

I’m not saying I have all of the answers here – not for bread and not for benches. But I do know that to really make progress on bread, I’m going to have to do what I did to build a better workbench. I’m going to have to look outside of my own experience. I’m going to have to admit that I cannot fix this myself and consult someone who can.

For workbenches, I started reading and listening to people who seemed on the fringes of modern woodworking. For bread, I’m going to head downtown to a tiny flour-covered bakery in the early morning and start asking questions.

— Christopher Schwarz

It’s about 7:30 a.m. on a Wednesday, and I am severely deprived of caffeine as I follow Thomas Lie-Nielsen through the narrow passages of his tool factory in Warren, Maine. He moves so quickly up and down the steps that I’m always five paces behind, despite my longer legs. Tom flings open a door on the second floor and unwraps his scarf and coat in one fluid motion.

Tom has invited me to attend one of his company’s weekly staff meetings, where he hands out paychecks and talks shop with the employees of Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. I catch up with him a few beats later and he’s already sorting through papers on a desk.

But even before this early morning meeting with all the employees, Tom holds another meeting with a few key employees in this bullpen that serves as the office for him and several other employees. They briefly look over some production numbers, discuss the health of a few machines and then head to the shop floor. The all-employee meeting is held in an area directly behind the Lie-Nielsen showroom where employees heat-treat the blades and assemble the planes before shipping them out.

At this early hour the sky above Warren is dark and so are the halls of the toolworks. But as I step onto the shop floor I squint. My eyes adjust to the bright lights above and then I see it. Something that is completely startling.

No, it’s not the company’s No. 4-1/2 anniversary plane in bronze. It’s the people in the room. There are dozens of them standing around the boxes filled with castings and lever caps and chipbreakers. Tom is moving around the room handing out a stack of paychecks, calling out each person by name and chatting with them briefly.

Within a few moments all of the employees are performing stretching exercises and Tom is sketching out the news of the day. One of the new machines has some bearings that need replacing. The numbers from the West Coast woodworking shows are in. The block plane group has been making its production numbers regularly this week.

The employees clap at the news, except for a group standing near me. It’s the block plane group, and then it dawns on me. I’m just a bit amazed that there could be a group of people who make block planes. In fact, it’s amazing that there are so many people in this world who all build hand tools in this post-handwork, post-industrial country.

I’ve had this feeling before, mind you. A few years ago I toured the Veritas manufacturing facility in Ottawa, Ontario, and was struck dumb at how many people were engaged in building hand tools. I followed Rob Lee around the Veritas plant and warehouse for more than two hours and we still didn’t see it all.

It’s experiences like this that give me real hope for the future of craftsmanship on this continent. In order for woodworking in North America to survive, there needs to be a steady supply of good quality new tools (both with a power cord and without) available to the public. Without those new tools, the craft is destined to become just a quaint sideshow at living history museums and on television.

It’s actually somewhat of a miracle that we still work wood at all. It is, after all, more expensive to build a piece of furniture from scratch (in hours, tools and time) than it is to buy a piece of furniture from a discount furniture outlet. But still we persevere. All of us.

Mark Swanson, Lie-Nielsen’s patternmaker, chatted with me for a moment as the early morning meeting geared up. Then he said: “You better do your stretches, too.”

So I did. And I’m glad to be a part of this.

— Christopher Schwarz

Editor’s Post Script: The reason I was at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks this week was to shoot footage for two new DVDs – one on card scrapers (surprise) and the other on how to use handplanes when building carcase furniture. There is no word on release dates – I guess that depends on how many foul words they have to edit out of my footage. But if you do choose to buy the DVDs, remember that all my proceeds go to benefit the Early American Industries Association, one of my favorite old tool groups.

Since the day I started wearing pants with pockets I've carried a knife. From elementary school in Arkansas to college in Chicago to writing about plane crashes in South Carolina, the only thing that has remained the same has been the presence of a slim blade of steel.

So it should come as no surprise that I carry a knife in my shop apron. What is surprising is how essential it has become to my woodworking, as important as a block plane, combination square or tape measure.

I bought this Swedish shop knife 10 years ago from Lee Valley Tools. I recall that it cost a bit more back then, but perhaps that's because they now sell it with a plastic sheath. That's a shame because the leather sheath is very well made and embossed with geometric patterns – the only decoration on this simple, stout tool.

Its details of the Erik Frost knife are what set it apart. The tang extends all the way through the birch handle, ending with a small black nub at the butt. And the knife is laminated from both mild and hardened high-carbon steel. The construction and materials allow you to strike this knife with a mallet or hammer and never worry about the handle splitting or the 2"-long blade deforming.

No other tool I own splits drawbore pins as well as this knife as a result of its toughness.

I sharpen the knife constantly. It takes a fine edge and is the tool I use to shape the ends of drawbore pins, to chamfer a through-tenon, to taper a wedge before it gets knocked home. I use it as a scraper, holding it vertically on the work with two hands – one hand on the stock and one at the tip of the knife.

The act of sharpening a knife is not precious, like a plane iron or chisel. I use a diamond hone from DMT that looks a bit like a butterfly knife itself. Occasionally I'll stone it with a fine-grit stone, but I actually like the knife to have a little tooth to it.

I sanded the handle smooth several years ago as the wood began to look beat up. And now, as I examine it this afternoon, I can see clearly the marks of hundreds of jobs on the yellowed surface. Despite the fact that birch has a closed grain, the handle is impregnated with grit through-and-through. There's a dab of epoxy in the shape of a fingerprint on one side. Small dents and creases are everywhere.

It's like looking closely at your face in the mirror one day and finally seeing that it's not the same face that started back at you at 16. The handle could probably use another sanding, like my face could probably use some dermabrasion (were I a pretty boy).

But no, I think it's just fine as it is.

– Christopher Schwarz

For a nearly vanished religious sect that peaked in the 19th century, the Shakers have an astonishing grip on the modern imagination.

In the woodworking world, Shaker furniture always ranks in the top three most popular furniture styles (the other two are Arts & Crafts and country – whatever the heck that is). And in furniture stores, they’ll label almost anything “Shaker” to sell it.

Personally, I always had a respect for the Shaker’s design aesthetic, but I didn’t have much of an appreciation for the lifestyle of the brothers and sisters who produced this extraordinary work.

After all, it was a celibate, highly regimented and (generally) alcohol-free subculture. And let’s just say that most career journalists are the anti-Shakers.

But during Christmas I visited the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill outside Harrodsburg, Ky., and the scales fell from my eyes in a single twirling, pounding full-throated moment.

Late in the afternoon of my visit, I attended a demonstration of traditional Shaker hymns performed in the Centre Family Dwelling, an imposing and impressive edifice to communal life.

I sat on a low bench in the dining area while a lone woman dressed in traditional Shaker garb performed an a cappella selection of hymns. Surprisingly, not all of the hymns were about Christmas; most of them were about the act of work.

And during the hymn about sweeping (yes, sweeping) the performer twirled as she sang, and her feet pounded the wooden floor of the hall in perfect time as the only percussion to her rousing chorus.

As her voice reflected off the high mullioned windows her pounding two-step reverberated through my feet, I could finally catch a glimpse of what attracted thousands of people to Shaker life in the 18th and 19th centuries.

For the disillusioned and disaffected of any era, such a display of vigor and beauty would surely be intoxicating. It was for me.

Celebrating the act of menial work, finding joy in something as mundane as sweeping, finally opened my eyes to Shaker life.

For what we do in our workshops each weekend is similar to what the Shakers strove for every moment of each day. Home woodworkers take an activity that was seen as a hard way of making a living and have turned it into a source of immense joy. We find satisfaction in fitting a door, planing a board, tweaking an assembly.

Many of us relish sharpening our tools or tuning up our machines to perform the work with more precision. We lavish attention on our workshops to make them tidy and efficient.

Imagine if we brought that same level of care and joy to every activity, even the ones outside the confines of our workshops? This was the thought going through my head last weekend as I hummed a tune and swept my shop, my footfalls tapping in perfect time.

— Christopher Schwarz, from our introduction to our special issue on building Shaker furniture.

I quite enjoy looking at other woodworkers' work, but nothing makes me spit out my coffee faster than reading that a certain project took 300, 600 or even 900 hours of work. It makes me wonder: Are they boasting, admitting their shame or just stating fact?  

If I worked for 600 hours on a single project I would probably be fired (and also be ready to check into a mental hospital). I mean, 600 hours is 15 straight weeks of eight-hour days. To be sure, there are some projects (anything with large amounts of marquetry) that could suck up the hours based on the sheer number of parts. But the projects I'm bemused by generally are quite nice, but not overwhelming in complexity. What I have found from examining work like this is that they are overwhelming in perfection.

This is the part where you can start calling me a hack.

When I build, I log my hours of shoptime on my cutlist. I don't log the time I wait for glue to dry overnight or time waiting for lacquer to set up – just the time I'm in the shop and putting tool to wood. And building for the magazine slows me down – I have to stop and take lots of photos regularly (about half of the photos I take get thrown out for space considerations). So I know what I spend on a table when it comes to time.

For example, the table on the cover of issue No. 2 took me about 20 hours to build the first time. The second and third tables took me 17 hours each, and each table has a hand-cut dovetailed drawer. The Creole Table is shaping up to be a 20-hour project, too.

Part of my time savings is due to the fact that I don't fuss over interior surfaces. All of the interior parts will get trued by a jointer plane (this speeds assembly) but they'll never see a smoothing plane or scraper or sandpaper. I speed the fitting of mortise-and-tenon joints by always undercutting the tenon shoulders so they'll close tight the first time.

And I never do anything until I absolutely have to. I don't assemble a joint until it's do-or-die assembly time. Assembling and disassembling will slow you down and sometimes increase the chance that you'll damage a part. I don't break down a tool setup until I have to (this saves tons of shop time). And I keep many tools set up to do one thing only. My jointer plane is never set up as an oversized smoothing plane – it's always set up like a jointer plane. I don't use my powered jointer for rabbeting or bevels or other things that I have tools for. The powered jointer trues the faces and edges. Period.

Having a complete set of tools helps, obviously. And beginners are going to struggle and spend a lot of time setting and changing tools because of their financial and tool limitations. I understand that and empathize – I was there myself.

The point I'm trying to make is that you shouldn't feel like a hack if you don't spend eleventy-billion hours on a project. You shouldn't feel bad if there's tear-out on the underside of a shelf. The pets and insectoid pests in your home don't much care when they spot it. If you get pleasure from treating every surface like it's a show surface, that's fine; woodworking is more of a hobby than a profession for most. But know that there is also great virtue in getting things done so they can be used and enjoyed.

— Christopher Schwarz

Every evening I have a glass of red wine or two with dinner, clean up the dishes and then run a 5K – on Saturdays and Sundays I run a 10K. The running part keeps me fit, and the wine beforehand keeps it interesting.

Tonight as I was running past the neighborhood pool I picked up a partner, an aged golden Labrador that had been sniffing around the bushes in a gully. When the dog joined my pace I was a bit surprised; he was clearly struggling against some stiff joints. The dog pressed forward and we traded leads, back and forth. After a minute or so three kids came sprinting out of a house, each flying a French blue bedsheet behind and all of them calling the dog's name.

I looked down into the dog's dark eyes as it struggled to keep up with me, torn by the call of the children rushing behind him. And I saw myself not six weeks ago at the WoodWorks show in Ontario, Calif.

I was giving a drawboring demonstration on Saturday afternoon to a small crowd at the show and was pounding a rived peg through my dowel plate. The bench I was using didn't have any dog holes, so I had found (quite oddly, in retrospect) a band saw riser block and was using that to support the dowel plate during the pounding part of the demo.

Wham. The riser block jumped. Wham. I squashed my thumb with the hammer. I bled quite a bit but kept working. One audience member came up unbidden to patch my finger (some woodworkers always carry bandages).

After a couple more sentences, my vision started to turn off, like closing the aperture on a camera lens. I struggled mightily to keep talking about drawboring. My body had other ideas. I sat down and gave up. Everything went black.

In retrospect, it shouldn't have surprised me. I had been working for three weeks without a day off. I had flown to California on little sleep. I'd only had time to eat some oatmeal that morning. No lunch.

Still, the paramedics came. A Snickers bar and glucose tablet in the first aid station fixed me up pretty good. A big Mexican meal and long night's sleep did the rest. But the whole odd experience changed my view of the world and woodworking a bit. I've always been prone to build things solidly. But after that experience in February, I've been diving even deeper into the world of juggernaut joinery. I mean, I'm only going to be here for so long. What I build should last longer.

And though I see myself erring on the side of caution in joinery, I've also felt unabashed to try new and wilder techniques of making the joints – plus inlay, working on my turning and trying a few curved forms from some Creole furniture that would have given me pause in January. I feel a bit reckless on that score.

And that's what I saw in that dog's eyes this evening. He was over his head in racing me, but he poured it on nonetheless and pushed me to sprint faster and faster. But then when his owners called him, he looked up at me.

"Go home," I said. And the animal thought better of the race. He ended his struggle and faded back into the arms and waiting sheets of the laughing children. And I headed home to finish up some through-tenons and sharpen up the cutter in a 5/8" beading plane that had been giving me some real trouble. With any luck I'll be able to maintain this view of the craft and world around me – it's just the right balance of recklessness and caution.

—Christopher Schwarz

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

CHICAGO – After about 60 seconds I'm certain that this feels a bit like a drug deal. I was told to show up at a hardware store on a certain date and at a certain time to see "some amazing stuff" by Slav Jelesijevich, a Chicago-area tool seller who specializes in files, rasps and old tools that are "new in the box" (also called NIB). I'm there a few minutes early and so I poke around the store. It's a very old hardware store with a full selection of tools, but not something you would drive five hours for.

Then Slav shows up and he scoots me toward the back of the store. There's a keypad on a locked door that he has the code to (the store owners trust him implicitly). A few seconds later we are definitely down the legendary rabbit hole. The public area of the hardware store is small compared to the cavern behind and below it. And every square inch is filled with shelves that are stuffed with boxes. Old boxes. Old boxes with old tools in them that have never been used.

There was an entire aisle of rasps and files that no one makes anymore. These were beautiful, precision instruments, each wrapped in brown paper and neatly boxed and stacked on the shelves. There were easily thousands of rasps.

There was an aisle of hammers that haven't been sold new for 20 to 30 years – still with the tags on them and waiting to strike their first nail. Perfect wooden handled screwdrivers that beat the quality of the stuff you find today. Shelves of specialty drill bits. An entire wall of Brown & Sharpe stuff. Metal Kennedy boxes. Two aisles of clamps.

This is where I got a little dizzy.

But it wasn't just hand tools. They had power tools that aren't made anymore that were still in the original boxes, waiting for a sale. Rockwell 14" band saws with cast iron wheels that weighed as much as a car's wheel. Unisaws with 1-1/2 hp motors. An enormous 14" table saw (5 hp, single phase). And the hand power tools were equally impressive. There were routers and trimmers and miter saws and drills that have disappeared from the planet. Beautiful stuff. Like a museum, only you could buy it.

A lot of the stuff is what collectors call "new old stock" or NOS for short. This hardware store has been in business for more than 75 years, and so stuff tended to accumulate. And the previous generation that ran the store had seen fit to buy up a lot of hardware surplus from World War II. On a shelf in one of the offices was a pair of lineman's pliers stamped "Made in Occupied Japan." And when one employee passed away they found an amazing stash of old tool catalogs he had kept during his long career. Those catalogs are a gold mine of information on the tool business.

There was one small price for my tour: That I not disclose the name of the store.

I know, I know you feel cheated. But this small hardware business couldn't handle phone calls from all over the country from people looking for oddball stuff. But if there's something you're looking for, I definitely recommend you give Slav a call (312-455-0430). He knows his way around the store and is very fair with his pricing. And if you're a really good customer, maybe someday you'll get offered a tour of one of the hardware stores he frequents.

— Christopher Schwarz

LAS VEGAS – Wandering around our last day at AWFS – a tool-lover's heaven – you might think I'm a little misty-eyed. But instead, I'm actually a little mad.

After nine years of these shows you start to see patterns emerge – things that lie beneath the surface that are both frustrating and impossible to fix. The first is what I call "photocopying," and it's something that has happened for centuries. This is when manufacturers make a tool that merely looks like the tool they copied. But, like a photocopy, it looks like the original but with the details smudged or missing.

Let me use chisels as an example, though the phenomenon applies to power tools just as well. Garden-variety bevel-edge chisels should be an easy thing to get right. After all, they are simply steel in a stick, right? Apparently not. If you pick up a bevel-edge chisel today, chances are that the bevels on the long sides of the blade will end in a chunky flat area. This chunky flat renders the tool worthless for its intended purpose, which is to sneak the tool into narrow corners (think: dovetails). Pick up a quality antique bevel-edge chisel from the late 19th or early 20th century and you'll typically find the side bevels ground almost all the way down to the backside (sometimes called the face) of the tool.

So I see a lot of photocopying, especially when a new manufacturer comes into the market. It seems they don't fully understand what's important about a tool and just make one that kinda looks like the ones others make. And beginning woodworkers buy them because they don't know what's important, either. And then they get frustrated because the tool doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

The other phenomenon is what I call the "box dot." And this is the consumers' fault. We tend to favor tools that have more features – more bulleted items on the box that extol everything the product does: It slices, dices and alerts you when rabid monkeys are in your neighborhood.

This human tendency will box manufacturers (even the very best ones) into adding features to their products to compete. Do you need all these features? Will you use them regularly? Do you even know if they're important? Again, beginning woodworkers don't know what's important and so I see them pick the tool with more features (even if it costs more) because they "might need that feature someday."

Again, an example: Fancy miter gauges. There are some excellent aftermarket miter gauges out there that will make a perfect dodecahedron every time. How many dodecahedrons have you made this year (or this lifetime)? What most of us need is a miter gauge that makes perfect 90° cuts and will handle a 30" table leg or perhaps 48" in a pinch. But we really like the ones that you can set at any angle perfectly (mine does – so I'm guilty). And if one brand of gauge is missing this feature, it might suffer in the marketplace.

So tonight we go out for our final dinner in Vegas. And as I'm toasting the end of an interesting week, I'll also be thinking hard about what can be done to improve the way we choose tools.

— Christopher Schwarz