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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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When I first got serious about woodworking after college, I remember reading a dire warning in a woodworking book about working with pine:

“If you work with pine, be sure to purchase your material, mill it, cut it and assemble the entire project all in a single day. If you let pine sit overnight, it will warp and be unusable.”

At the time, the warning flummoxed me. Sure, the pine from our home center tended to cup a bit if left to its own devices. But the pine I'd salvaged from my home’s 100-year-old floor was the most righteous and stable stuff I’d ever laid hands on.

Since those early days, I have had lots of experience with pine. Thousands of board feet of all sorts of species have passed under my hands: yellow pine, sugar pine, some wacky junk from Sweden, and (this week) Eastern white pine.

All of the species have their charms. The yellow pine is tough like maple but is difficult to saw. The sugar pine is lightweight and stable but splintery. The Swedish stuff reminds me of some exchange students at my high school. And the Eastern white pine cuts and planes beautifully.

Here’s the truth: What I have found is that pine is stable when it’s properly dried and at equilibrium with its environment. Pine’s bad rap comes from the fact that it’s usually sold a little wet at the lumberyard. As it dries, it moves. Also, I've found that construction-grade pine is prone to suffer from drying defects, such as case-hardening, which also besmirches its name.

The hard data from the U.S. Forestry Service backs all this up. The government’s “dimensional change coefficient” figures for hardwoods and softwoods predict how much a species will move when the humidity changes.

Most of the pines are more stable than typical domestic hardwoods. Eastern white pine and sugar pine, for example, move less in service than all the typical domestic hardwoods: maple, cherry, oak, walnut, alder, beech, birch, hickory and ash. And quartersawn Eastern white pine barely moves at all, according to our government. It’s like the MDF of the softwood world. A theoretical 12"-wide quartersawn board would move about .009" when its moisture content changed by one percentage point. That ain’t much.

The pine in our shop this week is a joy. When we brought it in, the moisture meter readings indicated it was actually a little drier than the rest of the wood in our shop. And so I knew what to do: Cut the stuff to length and let it soak up a bit of moisture. It moved a bit. And now it’s tamed.

— Christopher Schwarz

When pine goes bad. Here's a piece of yellow pine that was brought in right from the lumberyard and planed to 3/4" thick. Overnight, it cupped like this. Of course, this could be a novel way to make a coopered door....

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Our shop is thick with the sweet odor of Eastern white pine this week as I’m milling about 70 board feet of the stuff for the next issue of Woodworking Magazine. The smell (Megan Fitzpatrick would say “redolence”) is worlds better than the funky fish and burned popcorn smell that wafts daily from our cafeteria.

But with that great smell comes great mystery.

In the first batch of Eastern white pine we brought into the shop, the sapwood was streaked throughout almost the entire load. The streaks are gray-blue and end abruptly at the pine's darker heartwood.

The streaks brought on a little debate in the shop. Some of us think the streaks are mineral deposits that the trees got into. I suspect a fungus among us. After doing some poking around the U.S. Forest Service web site, I suspect we have some trees that were attacked by fungus. The Forest Service says the fungus attack could have come after a beetle infestation. Check it out here.

The staining doesn't appear to have compromised the strength of the wood, so I'm going to use the stained pieces on the inside of the 18th-century dry sink I'm building this week.

But the stain marks did make more work for Senior Editor Glen D. Huey. He's the one who scored the pine for us. To get us some clear wood for the exterior of the piece, he ended up having to go back to his (super secret) source and climb over another seven stacks of wood to find what we needed. As a bonus, he found a couple boards that were 16" wide in the rough. He's a good guy to have around.

— Christopher Schwarz

Getting all the bits of hardware to match on a project is a critical detail for me. I go to great lengths to ensure the hinges, pulls and other assorted metal bits look like they came from the same family.

For example, for the blanket chest on the cover of the Summer 2008 issue I wanted to get the brown steel stays to match the black iron chest hinges. I ended up painting the steel stays black, then lacquering them and rubbing them out until they looked like the powdery black iron.

This might seem excessive, but every time anyone (even my kids) opens the chest for the first time, they comment on the cool hardware. It's definitely worth it.

One of the biggest problems with getting your hardware to match is dealing with shiny brass. I really dislike the way it looks for some reason. So I usually end up aging all the brass bits until they look like they have seen about 100 years of use.

Here's how I do it. First I strip any lacquer off the hinges. I'll pour a little bit of lacquer thinner into a Mason jar, drop the hardware in and shake the jar for a few minutes. Usually the thinner gets a little tinge of color (sometimes green).

I discard the thinner, dry off the hinges and clean out the jar. Then I drop the hardware back into the jar and add a tablespoon of liquid gun blue (I use Perma Blue made by Birchwood Casey). I shake it around until the brasses and screws are colored. Then I pour the gun blue back into the bottle and pour cold tap water into the jar.

After rinsing the hardware, I'll dry it off and let it sit out awhile. The instructions say you should allow the stuff to cure overnight. I haven't had any problems installing the hardware almost immediately.

I really like the color that gun blue imparts. It's always consistent, never streaky and doesn't look like a dye job.

There are other ways to go about this process. You could install the hinges and wait 100 years. You could use ammonia, which is the process Senior Editor Robert W. Lang uses. And I'm sure there are even more out there. If you have a favorite one that you think is even easier, post a comment below.

— Christopher Schwarz

The back page of the upcoming issue of Woodworking Magazine (which mails to subscribers at the end of November) focuses on wood structure. What’s the difference among ring-porous woods, non-porous woods and diffuse-porous woods (not to mention semi-diffuse/semi-ring porous)? What’s a tracheid? A vessel? What’s meant by earlywood and latewood? And most important, what’s it all mean to a woodworker?

While researching the topic (I know far more about parenchyma cells and fusiform rays than my high-school biology teacher would ever credit), I discovered that cherry and maple are diffuse-porous woods, and therefore ought to take up stain fairly evenly according to the basic structural properties they share with all diffuse-porous species. But if you’ve ever worked with cherry and maple, you know that’s not the case. They can get blotchier than Chris in his Clearasil days.

So what’s the explanation? Our money is on elves. R. Bruce Hoadley doesn’t provide an answer in “Understanding Wood” (our wood technology bible). The Forest Products Laboratory doesn’t have an answer. Our finishing expert Bob Flexner doesn’t have an answer…and neither do any of the several world-renowned wood technologists he’s asked (though apparently, Bob has a scientist in Switzerland looking into it).

Anecdotal evidence points to stress. The explanation goes like this: In the winter, when snow is piled up on tree limbs, they’re bent down under heavy pressure. Or in windy forests, gusts stress limbs in a constant direction. These areas of stress change the grain pattern, and the irregular grain pattern is where the blotching occurs. Uh huh. This apparently has yet to be scientifically proven. Black walnut (another diffuse-porous wood) doesn’t blotch…or when it does, it’s good-looking blotch. Black walnut’s natural range includes western Vermont. I’m pretty sure it snows there.

I still think it’s elves (the fellow pictured above is named Eugene)…but I’m willing to entertain other explanations, should you care to comment below.  

— Megan Fitzpatrick

This weekend we went to a little street fair in downtown Cincinnati to see some art, eat some Belgian waffles and – unbeknownst to us – consider the question of raw material selection in building furniture.

As we made our way through the vendors on Main Street, we heard that the Contemporary Art Center had a booth where kids could build “little furniture.” Katy, my 7-year-old shop helper, tugged at my arm and said she wanted to check it out.

So we strolled to the other end of the fair and found the tent in question. And indeed, there were about 10 kids there making miniature chairs, beds and shelving units using 2” x 2-3/4” Formica samples and masking tape.

There were a lot of boxy Bauhaus chairs made from “Porcelain Grafix” samples and a dollhouse-sized rug made up of Formica samples of “Natural Figured Maple.”

As soon as Katy saw the Formica samples she stopped dead in her tracks. I put my hand on her shoulder and asked if she wanted to give it a try.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” she said, turning back toward the bandstand.

“Why not, honey?” I asked.

“I thought they would be using real wood,” Katy said.

So we skipped the Formica and fabricated some people and dogs from pipe cleaners instead. Looks like I’ve been raising a wood snob without knowing it.

— Christopher Schwarz

"There is something about the outside of a horse...that is good for the inside of a man."
– Attributed to Winston Churchill

Whenever I start on a project, the most curious part is sorting out my pile of rough lumber into piles of finished parts. Selecting for grain, figure and color is as important to me (maybe more) than tight-fitting joints.

So today as I launched into the cover project for the Winter 2008 issue I was amused to find that I stayed in a deep rut that I've been in since I started in the craft. Whenever I select my boards for color and figure, I almost always choose the heart side of a board to face out instead of the bark side.

Even in the legs for this project, which are predominantly bastard grain, have the heartwood facing out in three of the four. I know that I read somewhere that there are other woodworkers who do this, too. But I am at a loss for a good explanation, as is my wood bible: "Understanding Wood" by Bruce Hoadley.

The consistency should come as no surprise. Heart-side wood and bark-side wood can reflect light in different ways. So if you obeyed you shop teacher and glued up a panel using boards that had alternating growth rings (heart-side to bark-side to heart-side etc.) you could end up with a top that has a striped look, especially once the finish is on it.

But that doesn't explain why I always choose the heart side. If anyone has a good explanation, I'd like to hear it in the comments below.

The project itself is a Gustav Stickley plant stand with a tile top. The project doesn't appear in any of the catalogs that I own, but I've stumbled over a few signed examples since I started collecting in 1990.

I enjoy projects like this because they don't use a lot of wood, but they contain lots of fun challenges. For starters: tusk tenons, weirdo offset and intersecting mortises, and incorporating a standard floor tile into the design. And there are some nice gentle curves.

And so I'll end with another horse-related quote that applies to woodworking and the challenges ahead in this small plant stand.

"It is not enough for a man to know how to ride; he must know how to fall."
– Mexican Proverb

— Christopher Schwarz

The last time I completely lost my composure, a piece of office equipment almost died.

This was in 1995, when I was running a start-up newspaper in Frankfort, Ky., and was sleeping under my desk some nights. Our company was broke, I had just spent an hour cleaning the bathrooms and our automatic paper-folding machine decided to clog because the humidity was a couple points too high.

After the machine ruined hundreds of valuable pieces of mail, I freaked. I grabbed a broken table leg (why we had a broken table leg in the newsroom is a mystery to me) and beat the machine senseless in front of the entire staff. Then I took a walk.

Last night, I was looking around my workshop for another spare table leg.

Let me back up for a moment. I'm building a fairly large shelving unit for a local couple and am now sanding all the components before finishing and final assembly (the photos here are of the finishing sample boards I'm preparing).

Against my better judgment, I bought some Far East red oak plywood from the home center for the shelves. It looked OK in the store, but it has been a nightmare. The surface veneer is woefully thin. Typically, I can dress plywood with a handplane and make four or five passes before I'm in danger of cutting through the veneer. But not this stuff. The veneer seems as thin as notebook paper. And so I decided to sand it to be safe.

I started sanding with #150-grit – typically a good place to start with quality plywood. But not this stuff. The machining marks on the surface veneers are so pronounced that I had to start with #120-grit. That's a mite aggressive for thin veneer, so I hunched over the work while sanding so I could keep a sharp eye on the veneer in case I started to cut through it.

That's when I noticed the veneer lifting in a few places, like a blister about to pop. Either this is a new development, or I didn't notice it (I'm guessing the former). So I couldn't power sand these blisters.

So after four hours of power sanding and hand-sanding, I'm now about halfway done with the project. But I am completely done with cheap plywood.

Believe me, I don't blame Far East manufacturing for this (so please don't bash an entire nation or culture if you leave a comment). Someone in our country ordered the plywood be made like this. Someone at the home center agreed to stock it. And I was stupid enough to buy it. I blame myself and no one else.

But it's just a good thing that all my table legs are still attached to tables, or I'd be sanding out quite a few big dents in these shelves.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

Question: When is your book on workbenches coming out? I read the    excerpts in your magazine this weekend and decided to purchase it before I attempt a bench of my own, I can’t wait. I have acquired some Southern Yellow Pine that I intend to use on my bench (it's fire-rated 2 x 12 x 8’). It has been in my climate-controlled garage for about three months. The last time I used construction grade (non-rated) SYP she moved all over the place once cut. What do you recommend?
 
— Andy Scott

Answer: Southern Yellow Pine moves a lot as it dries, but once it’s dry, it is quite stable. How stable? Download the pdf below that explains how to figure wood movement for a variety of species.

Here’s what I do when I use yellow pine in any project:

1. Crosscut and rip everything to close size. Moisture migrates through the end grain, so cutting it close to size will make it dry faster.

2. Use a moisture meter to check your progress. Some SYP comes nearly dry (9 percent moisture content (MC)). I’ve seen some boards at 17 percent MC. It usually takes a few months for things to equalize with big projects such as this. Patience pays.

3. Only surface the wood for one assembly at a time. Work rapidly. When you glue up the top, clear the day. Surface and rip all the stock and glue it that day. When you glue up the legs, use the same strategy. It takes more time, but it really pays off.

4. When you glue it up, let it sit in the clamps at least five hours. The resins in the wood prevent the water in yellow glue from pentrating as quickly – this tip is from the chemists at Titebond.

On a final note: With Southern Yellow Pine that has been in my shop for a year or so, I can deal with it just like I deal with hardwoods. So it really is about managing the moisture because waiting a year is not a reasonable solution for most woodworkers.

I'm sure there are other good tips that I'm forgetting. If you have one, please leave it in the Comments section below (click on Comments and you'll see how this works).

The book comes out Oct. 10. You can read more about it here.

— Christopher Schwarz

WoodMovement.pdf (272.5 KB)

Amerock's customer service department promptly responded to my question about its new Chinese-made hinges (to the company's credit, they didn't know the query was from a magazine editor and still responded within a few hours). There's good news and bad.

The bad news is that the company is indeed replacing its USA hinges with Chinese-made ones, shown above. And the company acknowledged that there have been some quality-control issues with the early batches. The good news is that Amerock is working on it and want to get it right. So it's still a good idea to check the hardware before you check out – look for tight barrel tolerances and smooth action. If the hinge feels wiggly, you might want to keep looking.

The other good news/bad news item: After seeing the photo, Amerock officials say my hinge is defective and should be returned to Rockler. Of course, the bad news is the hinge is kinda screwed to something already....

— Christopher Schwarz

In the first issue of Woodworking Magazine I wrote a half-page article titled "A Better Hinge" that sang the praises of the Amerock non-mortise hinges, which I have used for many years with great success. But today I'm considering withdrawing that recommendation.

During the summer I bought four of these hinges from my local Rockler for the cover project slated for issue 5. All the hinges were labeled the same, had the same price and were in the same bin at the store. When I unpacked them I noticed that two of them looked a little different. They were branded as Amerock but were labeled as "Made in China." The other two were labeled "Made in USA." Hmmmm.

After some debate, I decided to install both sets and see if there was any difference. It would be a fair test – same cabinet, same-size door, same wood, same installer.

I was not impressed with the Chinese-made hinges. The pin and barrel were unacceptably sloppy – one of them had almost an 1/8" gap between the barrel and the top of the hinge pin. The Chinese hinge wiggled on its pin. The tight tolerances that I loved on the USA Amerocks was gone. The door even has a cheesier feel when you open and shut it.

I've asked Amerock if the company is going to offer both lines of hinges or if it is going to discontinue the USA hinges. When I receive a response, I'll post it here. Until then, you might want to check your hinges before you pay for them and check the tolerances if they read "Made in China."

— Christopher Schwarz

LAS VEGAS – This week I’m in Las Vegas for one of our annual trade show pilgrimages. This show is called AWFS. Mostly, these shows seek to deafen you. One whole floor of this show is devoted to enormous industrial machines (some as big as a school bus but without the yellow paint or screaming children) that can turn wood into product. Plywood goes in one side; a chair comes out the other. That's not an exaggeration; I've seen it.

But if you keep your wits about you here, sometimes you unearth something extremely interesting. Yesterday we were tipped off to a booth that was stranger than anything I've come across at a show.

Tom Frink of Colorado has developed a process of coloring the wood of almost any tree while the tree is still growing in the forest. Using a secret process known to only three people, he adds color to an entire tree (all the way out to the twigs) while it is still alive. It seems crazy, but the samples he and his son showed us were amazing. The wood was colored (any color) all the way through. The only part that didn’t get colored was occasionally the pith in the dead center of the tree.

Frink colored his first Aspen grove in 1964 and has been coloring trees ever since for his own use in his woodworking business. Recently he developed an allergy to wood dust and so he’s trying to find out if there are any commercial opportunities for his process. Hence, his booth at AWFS. The booth showed off some really wild samples. Imagine a maple board that looks spalted, but the spalting is purple. Or it’s green. Think about turned bowls with a bold stripe of red running through the middle. They even had some twigs that they broke open to reveal the colored middle.

Wood turners seem pretty excited about the process in particular. Apparently it’s a non-toxic procedure ("You could drink the stuff," Frink says of the dye) and Frink promotes the fact that you can then use a lot more of the tree if it has this wild coloring throughout. He made and sold jewelry from colored branches, for example. And there’s got to be a use for the sawdust. It looks like colored confetti.

— Christopher Schwarz

Sometimes you have to ignore the instructions on the bottle. What, you didn’t read them? Good.