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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).

Add this to your favorites: George Walker has launched a new blog on furniture design that will supplement his column that will appear in every issue of Popular Woodworking starting with the February 2010 edition. Both the column and the blog are called "Design Matters."

Walker is the host of the excellent DVD "Unlocking the Secrets of Traditional Design," a short and information-packed introduction to the world of using simple proportions to draw pleasing furniture.

We were so impressed with Walker after meeting him that we asked him to write a regular column for Popular Woodworking. He agreed. We also suggested that a blog might be a good way to amplify his points in his columns. And he agreed again.

Walker's first post, "Good Eye," suggests why people tend to like frame-and-panel doors with a bottom rail that is wider than the top rail. It's definitely worth reading.

— Christopher Schwarz

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.

After 21 seasons, "The New Yankee Workshop" is closing its doors, and its much-beloved host, Norm Abram, is going to focus on his personal projects and PBS's "This Old House," according to Russ Morash, executive producer and director of "The New Yankee Workshop."

"Norm has done this for 20 years, and he thought it time to step back and do a little less," Morash said in a phone interview. "And because the show was so tied to him, we didn't want to replace him."

There has been lots of speculation among fans of the show and the woodworking press that the show was looking for someone to take the reins when Abram left. But Morash said he didn't think that would be a good idea.

"Comparisons would be inevitable (between Abram and a new host)," Morash said.

The decision to stop production of new episodes of "The New Yankee Workshop" was a mutual decision between Morash Associates Inc. and WGBH Boston, Morash said. But that doesn't mean that "The New Yankee Workshop" is gone forever.

A spokesman from WGBH declined on Tuesday to comment on the matter.

The show's web site, newyankee.com, will continue to operate. And Morash foresees putting shows or segments from the show on the Internet in a "You Tube-like situation" so future generations could enjoy and learn from Abram.

Morash also noted that Abram may some day change his mind and want to crank up "The New Yankee Workshop" again.

"Who can predict the future?" Morash said. "He may want to do this again."

In the meantime, Abram will continue to work on "This Old House," and his own personal projects, both building furniture and improving his house.

When asked why Abram chose to stop working on "The New Yankee Workshop" instead of "This Old House," Morash laughed.

"'This Old House' is a much easier deal," he said. "Norm actually had to work on 'The New Yankee Workshop.' It was a lot of work. And I certainly respect his decision to step back."

With the loss of new woodworking programming from "The New Yankee Workshop," many bloggers and woodworking writers are wondering if the craft itself is on the decline or if TV woodworking shows are no longer viable.

"My own view is that broadcast is dead," Morash said. "That's my personal take on it. Newspapers are dead. And print is dying. The only hope is the Internet. And it's my hope that you'll see lots  of Norm on the Internet in the future."

And what about the craft itself? Is that swirling around the drain?

"No. There is a fundamental human need to build," Morash said. "People will always want to polish their craftsmanship."

The other question is what's going to happen to the shop itself, which is stocked with all manner of machines and hand tools. Morash said he's personally looking forward to some free time so he can build a few things in the shop. As for the long-term plans for the shop, Morash suggested that the shop could be put on display at the Smithsonian.

"It could be like Julia Child's kitchen," Morash said, "which I'm told is one of the most popular exhibits there. Who wouldn't want to visit Norm's shop?"

— Christopher Schwarz

Toolmaker Ron Hock has a new book coming out soon and a new blog – both deal with sharpening. I had the privilege of reading the draft of the book, "The Perfect Edge" (Popular Woodworking Books) earlier this year. I think Ron has broken some new ground, especially on the topic of abrasives.

This month I'm finishing up work on a new book called "The Joiner and Cabinet Maker" that is a bit unusual. You can read full details about it on my personal web site, but the quick over-the-back-fence summary is this:

Don Williams is like a shark in a clown suit. He'll bite you in half while you are laughing.

During his presentation at Woodworking in America last weekend, I am quite sure that he destroyed the assumptions about pre-industrial woodworking of many of us in the room. And he did it with jokes, amazing slides and a smooth delivery.

Southern furniture has always fascinated me, most likely because I've spent the vast majority of my life eating grits below the Mason-Dixon line.

For many years, Southern furniture was unknown or ignored until organizations such as the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts opened its doors. Of course, Southerners have always known about their furniture, but we've always been a little ashamed of it, as much of it was produced with abhorrent slave labor.

This is just a quick reminder that the pre-sale price of $27.99 for our new “Handplane Essentials” book ends Friday night. After Friday the price will be $34.99 and the book will not be discounted again from us until January 2010.

Also good to know: This book is shipped free anywhere in the United States.

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.

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.

Separating Shaker furniture from Shaker ideals has risks. The resulting design can have awkward details. Or the overall look can get wedged somewhere between contemporary studio furniture and country-style stuff you might find at a shopping mall.

Shaker furniture is not just a lack of ornament. It is a diverse collection of works by more than 250 cabinetmakers in 18 communities spread across a wide swath of early America. Yes, there are rules and ideals that course through all pieces made by the brethren, but there is diversity within as well.

Look around your neighborhood. The next time you see a truck belonging to a contractor or cabinetmaker, there’s a good chance that the company uses a handplane in its logo.

Though the image of a plane is the mark of the craftsman, there are few craftsmen who really know how to use the tool. Has this knowledge been lost? Are the tools simply obsolete?

The truth is that neither statement is true. The handplane is the most advanced and cunning wood-cutting tool ever invented, and it has yet to be surpassed by anything with a power cord. After World War II, handplanes began to disappear from shops because we traded speed for skill and expediency for quality.

"And tho' the Mechanicks be, by some, accounted Ignoble and Scandalous yet it is very well known, that many Gentlemen in this Nation, of Good Rank and high Quality, are conversant in Handy-Works…"

If you are interested in the early development of Western woodworking – including joinery, turning and carpentry – here is some important news. Joesph Moxon's complete 1703 "Mechanick Exercises: Or the Doctrine of Handy-Works" is now available again for the first time in about a decade.

Gary Roberts of Toolemera Press has spent the last few years restoring and digitizing an original 1703 edition of this landmark work and now offers the book for sale on CD.

The book is a fully featured pdf, which means you can search it by keyword and skip easily to certain sections with bookmarks.

Before Mike Wenzloff became a professional sawmaker, he was a furniture maker. Before that he was in graphic design. Before that? An almost-minister. And before that? Fetus? Nope. Logger.

The 1830s marked one of the pivotal moments in the history of American furniture. As the country took its first steps toward industrializing, tastes in everything – from architecture to clothing to design – took a turn for the radical.

In fact, some historians say that this moment is when our world transformed from a culture based on wood to one based on metal (and later synthetics).

The newest DVD from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, "Unlocking the Secrets of Traditional Design," is the most information-packed, lucid and mind-expanding 68 minutes of woodworking footage I've ever watched.

Using simple images, dividers and basic ideas, George Walker delivers a compelling crash course in how to develop furniture designs using basic shapes (squares, circles and rectangles), simple ratios and concepts such as symmetry, contrast and punctuation.

After being in and out of print during the last several years, David Finck's "Making & Mastering Wood Planes" is finally available for sale again directly from the author.

This 192-page, full-color book isn't just for the person who wants to build handplanes based on the designs of James Krenov. I read this book when it first came out and was impressed by how much Finck focused on the mechanics of the tools – things that apply to planes no matter what materials they are made of.

Robert Giovannetti – aka The Tattooed Woodworker – has just posted a lengthy and insightful interview with Thomas Lie-Nielsen, the founder of Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. I've known Thomas for a long time and I learned quite a few things from the article.

You'll get answers to these interesting questions:

1. Why the company stopped making the No. 9 miter plane in bronze.
2. What are the new tools on the immediate horizon for the company.
3. Which tool in his line-up is "the most underrated."

Check it out here. It's a good read.

— Christopher Schwarz


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• Like hand tools? Read all our online articles on hand work HERE.
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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

Here at Woodworking Magazine, we plan each issue in the same way we build furniture – to last forever.

Every issue is filled with techniques that have been tested by our own hands and by time. Every project has classic lines so they'll look as good in 100 years as they do today.

And so you can keep this information forever, we bind the issues into a handsome hardbound edition that will protect and preserve these articles for years to come. We're just about to receive our newest book, which contains Issues 8 through 12, and we're offering a special pre-order discount.

If you order the "Woodworking Magazine Hardbound Edition, Vol. II," by April 30, the price is only $19.99. That's 20 percent off the regular price of $24.99. To get the 20 percent discount, use this coupon code: WWMGV220.

The 192-page book contains issues 8 through 12 exactly as published. The text and photos are printed on paper that's heavy and bright. The book is hardbound with a red cloth cover with the magazine's name stamped in gold. Plus, there's a full-color dust jacket.

Here are some of the highlights from these five issues:

• The Holtzapffel Workbench. This 19th-century cabinetmaker's workbench features a wooden twin-screw face vise and a quick-release end vise. It is an ideal bench for dovetailing and building furniture.

• How to Use a Handsaw. Most people have difficulty sawing because they are using the wrong tool and the wrong technique. We explain the differences among the saws and the 10 techniques we use for accurate sawing.

• Better Ways to Build a Chest. When people build chests, they usually make it harder than it has to be. We explain a traditional technique to build chests that requires less wood, less work and less fussing.

• Test of Sliding Bevel Gauges. Most bevel gauges stink because they don't lock down hard enough. We review new and vintage bevel gauges and find the ones that work best.

Be sure to order before April 30 to get the discounted price. To get the 20 percent discount, use this coupon code: WWMGV220. Click here to order.

— Christopher Schwarz

If you'd like to do a little time traveling on your lunch hour today, I've got just the ticket. Head over to Gary Robert's Toolemera Press site and download (for free) "Charles Hayward Looks Back To The Seamy Side."

No, you won't get in trouble with your boss or your spouse. It's very much rated G.

These articles from 1981 and 1982 are Charles Hayward's recollections of shop life in England before 1914. Hayward, the legendary woodworking editor and author, wrote and illustrated many of the classic texts that still serve me today, including "Woodwork Joints" and "Tools for Woodwork." (Both are out of print but available used.)

But before he became an author, Hayward was an apprentice and a professional cabinetmaker in a colorful shop that built new furniture, performed repairs and made new furniture look like really old furniture (yes, that's a nice way of saying he made fakes).

The shop was populated by all manner of amusing characters, which Hayward describes in great detail. Plus there's a drunken girl fight, dangerous machine shops and snooty butlers.

It's a fun piece to read and probably will make you glad that:

1. You were not born as Pongo the shop boy.

2. That you do woodworking as a hobby, and not as a career in 1914 England.

Download the article (in pdf format) by clicking here.

— Christopher Schwarz


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

Robert Giovannetti of the Cherry Creek Woodworks blog (the guy with the Lie-Nielsen tattoo and a Schwarz-sized bench fetish) has done a nice interview with Ron Hock of Hock Tools.

Despite Ron's youthful appearance, I consider him to be one of the grandfathers of the recent explosion of custom toolmakers. Ron started his business by making plane blades for James Krenov's students. Then it grew into providing replacement blades for Stanley planes. In fact, one of the first things I did after I bought my first Stanley jack plane was to buy a Hock blade. It's good stuff.

In any case, you can learn lots about how Ron got started in the business and why he does what he does over at Cherry Creek. It's definitely worth a visit.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

Editor’s note: Joel Moskowitz is the owner of ToolsforWorkingWood.com, a long-time woodworker, tool collector and book collector. He has the largest woodworking library I’ve ever encountered. During the last few weeks, the magazine’s staff has been asking people for their lists of favorite woodworking books. The results have been very interesting – we’ve even encountered a few books we’re not aware of.

Below is Joel’s list. Well, actually a couple lists. Joel’s an over-achiever.

— Christopher Schwarz

Woodworking Books in Print

Here are some book lists. I know the second I send this off, I will think of other titles that should be included. It’s hard to limit yourself to 10 or 20 “Must Have Titles” on anything. Because I love books, I have hundreds of books in my collection. Some are a learning experience on every page, some are useless but popular in their day, and others are beautiful to look at, but turgid to read. The books listed below are at least a good place for anyone to start. I prefer information that isn’t dumbed down, so my favorites mostly are books that try to talk to me like an adult, expect I’m not an idiot and are comprehensive in professional technique.

This first list is of stuff in print that we mostly stock at ToolsforWorkingWood.com and I recommend to everyone.

"Whittling and Woodcarving" by E. J. Tangerman. My first book on woodworking and still one of my favorites. Best of all: Lots of the samples of carving come from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and are still on exhibit.

"The Encyclopedia of Furniture Making" by Ernest Joyce. I have an older edition but it’s a great overall resource on different approaches to making furniture the modern way. Great for figuring out the details of a design; that is, how to do stuff.

"Woodcarving Tools, Materials & Equipment (New Edition), Vol. 1" by Chris Pye. Pye is a great writer and a master carver. The book is a wonderful read, inspiring and systematic.

"The Marquetry Course" by Jack Metcalfe and John Apps. The best book on learning marquetry that’s in print at the moment.

"Modern Practical Joinery" by George Ellis. I recommend this book for anyone doing restoration on architectural woodworking. Not as good as Hasluck, but at least it’s in print.

"Modern Cabinet Work" by Percy A. Wells & John Hooper. A recent reprint; it’s not as good as Bernard Jones, but it’s worth having.

"Dictionary of Woodworking Tools" by R. A. Salaman. Anyone who is even remotely interested in tools should have this book.

"Illustrated Cabinetmaking" by Bill Hylton. A (relatively) new book. I think the drawings are great and it covers a lot of modern-built stuff.

"Japanese Woodworking Tools" by Toshio Odate. The only book on Japanese tools in English worth having. It’s a classic. It explains tons of stuff, and I’ve had a hardcover edition since it came out.

"How to Construct Rietveld Furniture" by Reter Drijver and Johannes Niemeijer. If you like modern furniture that’s easy to build, you can’t go wrong here. It features 1920s modern furniture from the original drawings of a great designer. Simple, classic stuff. The stuff is a lot more comfortable than it looks.

Out of Print and Odd Books

The following books are out of print or expensive, but I think they are some of the best around for their respective subjects. I’ve left off a lot of favorites that are better known, such as Andre Roubo’s works, and included books that I found important to me – even if they’re not directly woodworking related. (I could generate another, different list: the most important books in the history of woodworking. And another list: the most important books on historical woodworking practice.)

"Building the Georgian City" by James Ayres. A tour-de-force that puts the entire construction and woodworking of the period in context.

"China at Work" by Rudolf P. Hommel. Really interesting from an anthropological point of view.

"The Complete Woodworker, Vol. 1" and "The Practical Woodworker, Vol. 2" by Bernard Jones. Probably the best books on hand tool practice out there. A recent reprint is out of print, but easy to get. Volume 1 is essential. Volume 2 is nice to have.

"Notes from the Turning Shop" and "Further Notes from the Turning Shop" by Bill Jones. Fun-to-read books that are very inspiring and can teach you a lot about getting stuff done. Jones is the last of the professional ivory turners and knows what he is doing.

"The Woodwright’s Shop" by Roy Underhill. Roy was a big inspiration for me.

"Marquetry" by Pierre Ramond. A fabulous book on marquetry. Not a great book for beginners, but it features tons of how-to details on advanced subjects.

"Watchmaking" by George Daniels. One of the best books on craft ever written. It makes you want to build a watch.

"Carpentry and Joinery" by Paul Hasluck. The best book ever written on architectural woodworking.

"Woodwork Joints," "Tools for Woodwork," "Carpentry for Beginners," "Cabinetry for Beginners," "Antique or Fake?" and "English Period Furniture" by Charles H. Hayward. Everything by Hayward is worth reading. These books are the core of everything you need to know about woodworking.

"Adventures in Wood Finishing" by George Frank. Well, it doesn’t really belong on this list but I enjoy reading and rereading this book all the time.

"Memories of a Sheffield Toolmaker" by Ashley Iles. Interesting historically, and especially inspirational and helpful if you are yourself starting a small business.

"The Museum of Early American Tools," "A Reverence for Wood," and "Diary of an Early American Boy" by Eric Sloane. These books were very informative and helped kick off my interest in history and woodworking when I was a boy, and they’re still engaging today. Wonderfully illustrated.

"In Praise Of Shadows" by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. I first read this book when I was in my 20s and thought it xenophobic, but when I met Toshio Odate many years later he said I should reread it. I did, and I think it is one of the greatest written appreciations of craft and how it calms our lives that there is.

— Joel Moskowitz

Nothing is more fundamental to woodworking than the wood itself, however even professional cabinetmakers struggle with understanding how wood works and how to make it work for them. In the Spring 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine, we we show you how the way that a tree grows in the woods directly affects the way we design and build furniture. And understanding wood is the first step to building projects that look better, last longer and are easier to build. For more information and to purchase your copy, click here.

— Megan Fitzpatrick, managing editor

Sometimes patience pays. Back in 2002, the Taschen publishing company released "The Woodbook" – a ridiculously priced and gorgeous book filled with photos of 354 American species of trees that showed you the end grain, the quartersawn grain and the plainsawn grain of each type.

If my memory serves, the book was about $80 to $100 – now it fetches $200 on the secondary market. No matter how cool the book was, I wasn't going to buy it at that price. Senior Editor David Thiel got his hands on one (somehow), so I was able to enjoy it vicariously as long as I handled it with latex gloves (not included).

"The Woodbook" was actually a reprint of "The American Woods" (1888-1913) by Romeyn Beck Hough. The original version had actual veneer slices of each species on every page and was in 14 volumes. It is, naturally, very rare. So finding the original was also out of the question.

On Friday, this story got a happy ending. Taschen has reprinted the book yet again, improved the typography and lowered the price. It is now named "The Wood Book" (that extra space comes at no extra charge). And the list price is $39.99, but you can find it for sale for a shade more than $25.

This version is also a lot easier to read. The 2002 edition had black pages and the letters were in gold. You read that right. Perhaps you weren't actually supposed to read the descriptions; the only way you really could read it at all was to try to get the light to reflect off the letters just right.

The new 2007 edition has white paper with black letters. So not only can you read the text (which comes in English, French and German), but you also can see the drawings of the leaves of each species as well.

My two gripes with this book are the way the species are organized and the lack of technical data. It's inconvenient to find a species you are looking for unless you know its Latin name. Then you have to find it in the index to find the page number. But that's a quibble. As to the data in the book, most other sources contain more information on the physical attributes of the wood.

But the photos make up for any deficiencies in the text. They are gorgeous. Sharp. Detailed. And in color.

— Christopher Schwarz

"Ye Cabinet-makers! Brave workers in wood,
As you work for the ladies, your work must be good
And Joiners and Carpenters, far off and near,
Stick close to your trades, and you've nothing to fear."

— from "Mechanics' Song" by Absalom Aimwell

I'm fascinated by Roman handplanes. Ever since I stumbled on the form while reading W.L. Goodman's "The History of Woodworking Tools" I've wondered a lot about the tools and their unusual grips. A couple years ago I even built a Roman-style plane (check the links here and here).

So when the December 2008 issue of The Chronicle showed up on my doorstep yesterday I was immediately sucked into an article about 15 of these planes, most of them discovered quite recently. The article, by Derek A. Long, shows that Roman planes were more diverse than we thought. He shows planes with wooden soles instead of the traditional metal. Plus, tools with different grips and shapes. And there are lots of photos to puzzle over.

As a result, I wasn't much help with the kids' homework last night.

There was lots in that issue that encouraged bad parenting. There's an interesting article about the mechanics' societies in early America and the cool certificates they issued their members (membership could be quite expensive – a week's wage). These certificates were embellished with symbols of the trades, including a beehive for industriousness, Archimedes for the combination of the intellectual and the practical, and plumb squares to represent (at times) the balance between commerce and the service to the community.

These societies could even have their own songs (quoted above).

You can subscribe to The Chronicle by joining the Early American Industries Association (called the EAIA for short) for just $35 a year. If you are interested in traditional tools, the EAIA and the Mid-West Tool Collectors Association are the two best organizations to join. Their publications are excellent. And the research they support helps illuminate the past.

Now if you'll excuse me I need to start composing a Woodworking Magazine song. Anyone know a word that rhymes with "magazine?"

— Christopher Schwarz

You can now watch the segment on Lie-Nielsen Toolworks on “The Martha Stewart Show” on the program’s web site.

The 4:41 segment is surprisingly detailed and technical. And, of course, it looks good too. You get to see some really cool stuff, including the plane bodies being milled, the metal screws being cut and the front knobs being turned. The segment also shows you Lie-Nielsen’s heat-treating operation and some glimpses of the cryogenic treatment they use on the company’s A2 blades.

All in all, it’s well worth a visit. Check it out here. On the right side of the screen, scroll over. The Lie-Nielsen video is in the second group.

— Christopher Schwarz

Though most of you will be watching anyway, set your TiVo to record the Martha Stewart show at 10 a.m. (EST) Thursday, Jan. 15. That's because in addition to all the great winter skin-care tips from Sue Ciminelli, the show pays a visit to Lie-Nielsen Toolworks in Warren, Maine.

Don't believe me? Visit the show's guide here and look under the tab for Thursday. You'll get to see (in addition to some good-looking cheeses) Thomas Lie-Nielsen planing a board and being interviewed about his tools.

If you miss the show, it should get archived. I'll keep you posted.

This is tragic news for me actually. It means Glen Huey and I are going to have to skip "Beverly Hillbillies" tomorrow.

— Christopher Schwarz

When The Chronicle shows up in my mailbox, I know that my evening is shot. I take the magazine to our sunroom after dinner, settle down in my Morris chair and pretty much read the whole thing.

The Chronicle is the quarterly magazine of the Early American Industries Assc., a non-profit organization founded 72 years ago to understand early technology in the home, farm and workshop. Each issue explores the physical world of handcraft, though it is by no means a hand-tool-only publication. Machinery looms large in the history of early American industry.

What you get in each issue is a heavy dose of hard-to-find information on tools and processes that are in danger of vanishing, like quarrying granite or harvesting ice. And because our country was built mostly from wood with woodworking tools, there is always a strong woodworking undercurrent that runs through the publication.

In the new issue, which I just received last week, there are fantastic articles exploring the crooked knife (essentially a beautiful Native American drawknife), how to read tool marks on old furniture (axes vs. adzes vs. froes and so on), and a detailed exploration of the Stanley 620 hand drill.

How do you get The Chronicle? By joining the Early American Industries Assc. It's just $35 a year and opens up a world of tool information for you. In addition to The Chronicle magazine, you also get the organization's newsletter, the opportunity to attend their annual meetings (always in a cool place), the Eastfield Summer Workshop (usually on traditional skills) or take a European tool tour.

If you pick up your tools (hand or power) and understand that they are a connection to our past, I know you'll enjoy reading The Chronicle. You can join today by visiting their web site at eaiainfo.org.

— Christopher Schwarz

Normally when a book publishing company sends out a copy of its newest book, the marketing people will include a transcript of a short interview with the author that discusses the book. This is so that a lazy writer can quote the interview without having to actually do the interview.

What, you didn't know this? Well that's because these canned interviews are about 97 percent worthless. And any writer who quotes from them will be ritually shunned at the next gathering of media professionals (usually held at a stinky bar).

Not so with the interview that accompanied Roy Underhill's new book, "The Woodwright's Guide: Working Wood with Wedge & Edge" (UNC Press). The folks at the University of North Carolina Press conducted a fairly amusing interview with St. Roy. And so we're reprinting it here in its entirety for you to enjoy.

By the way, in case you missed it, check out the review I wrote of Underhill's new book for the blog last week.

— Christopher Schwarz

Q: How does The Woodwright’s Guide differ from other books in the Woodwright’s series?
A: The Woodwright’s Guide is an environmentally organized guide to woodcraft. It starts in the forest with felling the tree and ends with the final finishing in the workshop. My other books have followed a similar path, but this is the most comprehensive guide in the series, benefiting from thirty years of experience. It is also my first line-illustrated book with brilliant drawings by my daughter Eleanor. Her drawings, done from my photographs, give clarity to the ideas but retain the specificity of the places and the real people who do this wonderful work.

Q: How did your collaboration with daughter, Eleanor, come about?
A: Both my daughters, Eleanor and Rachel, worked with me on television and traveled with me to museums around the world. When it came time for the new book, I was looking at thirty years of photography of tools and techniques. Having Eleanor make drawings from the photos gave us both consistency and specificity.

Actually both daughters worked on the book. Eleanor did the drawings, and the ones that needed retouching went to Rachel. Both my daughters grew up surrounded by wood and tools, and it’s wonderful that we can still work together!

Q: Are there any special features of this book you’d like readers to be aware of?
A: The Woodwright’s Guide is a book with grain—just like wood. You can work it with your left-brain intellect, following the ideas in the text like a wedge following a split. You can also engage your right brain by grasping the “gestalt” captured in the illustrations. You can also put both the brain and hands to work because in the back of the book I have plans for workbenches, screw-cutting engines, and treadle lathes. I only regret that we weren’t able to include a few Band-Aids with each copy—but that’s in the works.

Q: What is the meaning of the book’s subtitle, Working Wood with Wedge and Edge?
A: The thread of “wedge and edge” runs through the entire book. A blade meeting wood either splits it as a wedge or cuts it as an edge. Wedge and edge consciousness in your woodworking gives meaning to the feedback through the tool handle, guiding your decisions with every move. Wedge and edge means honest woodworking that engages both the grain and the brain.

Q: What do you hope this book will impart to your many readers and fans?
A: I hope everyone can share the sense of wonder at the complexity and beauty of our connection to tools and wood. Our language, our culture, our ways of thinking, all evolved with the tools in our ancestors’ hands. Artisanship in wood is part of every human’s legacy, so let’s honor it.

And it’s not just nostalgia. We know that biodiversity is important to us. Well, so is techno-diversity. We can value heirloom technology just as we value heirloom tomatoes. It may not be commercial, but it sure tastes better!

Q: What led you to give up power tools and devote yourself to a career of working exclusively with hand tools?
A: During the back to the land movement of the 1970s I was homesteading in the New Mexico mountains, struggling to live off the grid. A chance encounter with a tool collector’s trove of treadle-powered tools made me realize that an advanced technology of non-electric machines had once flourished and then been abandoned. This was during the energy crisis of the 1970s and the deep significance of sustainable technology hit many of us like a trip hammer (a water-powered trip hammer, of course).

Q: What about woodworkers who blend the use of power tools with hand tools? Is this book also for them?
A: Curiosity is the ultimate power tool. If you work with wood, or just live on a planet where people work with wood, this is the book for you. That’s because The Woodwright’s Guide cuts deep, both into the way wood works, and into the history of the way we work it. So, if you’re trying to do better at a single task of joinery, this book brings you the observations of a thousand years. And, if you’re curious about our enduring relationship with the natural world, The Woodwright’s Guide will give you a sharper axe to hew your own insights.

Q: What have you been up to since your last Woodwright’s book, published in 1996, and how has it influenced this volume?
A: Shooting the PBS series The Woodwright’s Shop gives me the chance to travel and meet craftsmen and women from all over the world. It’s astounding the extraordinary depth of knowledge so many people have about specific areas of the craft. But it’s the stories I appreciate the most. From woodcarver Nora Hall, I heard stories of her father’s carving shop during the Nazi occupation of Holland. Even the work-worn log cabins and ground-down tools preserved at the Museum of Appalachia tell stories—stories of life and hard work in America’s “wooden age.”

Q: What or who have been the major inspirations during your career?
A: Working at Colonial Williamsburg (in spite of the fife and drum parades) was my university of hand craft. The master craftsmen at Colonial Williamsburg are people at the top of their art. It was a constant struggle for me to live up to their high standards of historical research, craftsmanship, and aesthetic sensibility. Still, it was a great place for me, a generalist, to be. If I needed to know something about wheel wrighting, blacksmithing, cooperage, or any of the trades that built our civilization, all I had to do was walk down the street and ask one of the master craftsmen. As Francis Bacon put it, this was a place where “Many ingenious practizes in all trades . . . shall fall under the consideration of one man’s mind.”

Q: You wrote your first Woodwright’s Book in 1981, over 25 years ago. Have you seen a resurgence in interest in hand-crafted woodworking during this period? Have attitudes changed? Has working with hand-tools gone in and out of style, according to larger trends in popular culture?
A: The cycle of high tech and high touch goes back hundreds of years. The first hand-craft, how-to book in English, Mechanick Exercises, or the Doctrine of Handiworks, was published in 1678. Even then, they were as much concerned with the virtues of “vanishing” hand craft as they were in getting the job done.

Now, of course, we are at a technical crossroads, and it’s good to have a back-up in case the big machine breaks down or runs out of gas. And if you’re going to have a hobby, it might as well be ethical. It seems counterproductive to make a nice wooden cradle for your grandchildren if you choose to make the planet uninhabitable in the process.

But even without the green issue, making things directly with our hands goes to the full depth of our humanity. We’ll never be done with it. Making something gives us the same kind of primal happiness we feel when we encounter a berry bush loaded with ripe fruit. Just as the old hunter-gatherer still resides in each of us, so too does the ancient hand craftsman.  

Q: How does the work you do and the way you do it connect to a larger philosophy of life?
A: It’s a mission. With the gross failure of the intellectual class, it has fallen to the craftsman to expose the hidden power inequities of society. Subversive woodworking has to take the lead, helping people make a choice between mindless consumerism and conscious craftsmanship. Just say “NO” to power tools! Let’s take a bite outta Norm!

Q: Why do you think your many fans have coined the nickname “St. Roy” to describe their devotion to you?
A: I’ve cut myself so many times on the television program that I remind folks of unfortunate martyrs like St. Sebastian. He met his fate on the receiving end of arrows, and St. Simon has an even more distressing history with the saw. I have the chisel. 

In my own defense, however, my TV director kept yelling “Cut!” and I was just trying to oblige.

One of the biggest struggles with learning hand tools is finding instructions that make sense. Many modern hand tool teachers have taught themselves to saw, plane and chop. And while their idiosyncratic techniques might work, they also can be inefficient.

You can go back to the original published sources, such as Joseph Moxon's "Mechanick Exercises," but the instructions there assume you are a denizen of the 17th century. So when you try to learn about using the hatchet, these are the instructions:

"The hatchet marked L, in plate 4. Its use is so well known (even to the most un-intelligent) that I need not use many words on it, yet this much I will say: Its use is to hew the irregularities off such pieces of stuff which may be sooner hewn than sawn."

Then there's Roy Underhill, host of PBS's "The Woodwright's Shop" and author of six books on the craft. He is one of the few people I've ever met who can bridge the gap between the hand craft of the pre-industrialized world and today. He reads Andre Roubo's works in the original French. But he carries a Macintosh laptop, codes his own animations and is on television.

This summer while I was teaching at the Northwest Woodworking Studio in Portland, Ore., Underhill and I overlapped by a couple days – he was teaching a class in making a lathe the weekend before my class on handsawing began. While we were chatting, he handed me a loose-bound copy of his latest book "The Woodwright's Guide: Working Wood with Wedge & Edge" (UNC Press).

During the following week, I devoured the entire tome during my free evenings with the company of a few great Portland beers.

I own all of Underhill's books. They are dog-eared second-hand affairs I picked up after finishing college that I have carried with me from town to town. I laugh out loud every time I read "The Debate of the Carpenter's Tools" in "The Woodwright's Work Book." (Yes, I am aware this is a problem and there is help available.)

So it is no small thing when I say that Underhill's new book (his first in 12 years) is his best. For starters, this book uses illustrations (by his daughter Eleanor Underhill) instead of photographs. This lends an air of consistency to the work and also allows you to focus on what is important in each image (instead of wandering over to look at the chisels on his bench in a photo).

The narrative of the book is just as clear. It begins in the forest with a description of a tree being cut down by a faller. Then you follow the tree as it passes into the village in the hands of the cleaver and countryman, the hewer, the log builder, the sawyer, the frame carpenter, the joiner, turner and cabinetmaker.

Each profession brings new skills into the narrative, but they are all joined by the fact that they manipulate the wood by splitting it or shearing it (by wedge or by edge). You clearly see how edge angles (simple geometry!) flow throughout and unite all the professions.

And, as you might expect, the prose itself is enlightening, literate and amusing. As Underhill writes about the qualities of wood:

“Like age on a man, water makes wood softer, heavier and fatter – but not taller.”

Unlike his previous books, however, "The Woodwright's Guide" is focused entirely on technique. Good thing, because that is what is sorely missing from the space between our ears. We can all find plans for a tool tote, bench or cabinet to build. But figuring out how to make a rule joint with moulding planes is beyond the grasp of most.

Underhill's other great strength is his ability to explain extremely complex ideas in a way that makes it feel like you've suddenly achieved Buddhist enlightenment. In this book, Underhill's explanation of how to determine and mark out compound angles for the splay of a sawhorse was worth the price of admission. I went around for several days after that in a giddy haze at finally – finally – understanding it. (The beer also assisted this warm and fuzzy feeling.)

And whatever you do, don't miss the book's short but hilarious and thoughtful conclusion titled "A Great Wheel." I refuse to spoil it in any way by even giving you a hint.

The book is not available yet, but you can pre-order it from a variety of sources, including direct from the publisher.

— Christopher Schwarz

Andre Roubo's 18th century five-volume masterwork on woodworking, "L'Art du Menuisier," needs to be translated to English. The little snippets I've picked up here and there are tantalizing and useful even to modern-day woodworkers.

As some of you might know, I've been working with Bjenk Ellefsen, a French-speaking reader, to begin translating the volume on carpentry and construction, but it has been slow-going for us (what with day jobs, families and woodworking hobbies to nurture).

To my great surprise, I recently was contacted by Jack Metcalfe – a practicing marqueteur living in Leeds, England – who has been working on translating the volume on marquetry with the help of a retired Scottish school teacher, Ms. Beatrix Wickens. She has completed the initial translation of that volume and they are now sorting out the technical language to polish the language. (The photo above is of one of their translation sessions together.)

The plan is eventually to publish this volume (and others) as a public service for the woodworking community. Here's where you can help. We need to find someone who has copies of the Roubo volumes that are more than 70 years old in order to reproduce the images from the books and comply with a variety of copyright laws.

If you have a first or second edition of Roubo, or if you know someone who does, could you contact us? While the commercial aspects of a project like this are minor for all involved, you would be doing a great service to the modern woodworkers in helping to bring this translation back into print.

You can contact Jack directly through his web site: the-marquetry-course.net

— Christopher Schwarz

Good news: One of the best books on making chairs is now back in print and available at a reasonable price.

"The Chairmaker's Workshop" by Drew Langsner has been selling for ghastly prices ($200 or more) on the secondary market ever since the original publisher allowed this book to lapse out of print.

"The Chairmaker's Workshop" is a must-have 304-page book for anyone who wants to build Windsor or post-and-rung style chairs. Langsner, who runs The Country Workshops school in Marshall, N.C., has done an outstanding job of collecting his decades of chair-building experience into one book.

My personal copy is dog-eared and coffee stained. Some of the chapters I read more than 10 times as I made my first forays into building stick Windsor chairs. Without this book (and a couple classes), I'm not sure I would have had the confidence to build a chair on my own.

There are great chapters on setting up your tools (or making your own), setting up shop, processing wood and shaping it using traditional methods. For me, the heart of the book is the plans and instructions Langser offers for the 11 chairs featured in the book.

So once you pick out a form that you are interested in, you can fully explore how that form is built and learn all the skills particular to a Windsor chair or a post-and-rung chair (they're very different forms).

This book is clearly a labor of love. Every single page is packed with detail, the kind that comes from personal experience. There are hundreds of line drawings and photographs of every step in the process.

Unlike the original edition, this one is made using a "print on demand" process. The paper is not as glossy, and all the photos are in black and white (the original had both color and black-and-white photos). Langsner also noted that he updated some of the photos and drawings and made some necessary corrections.

To help promote the book, Langsner is also giving away a package of enlarged plans for all 11 chairs (which normally sells for $16.95) to everyone who buys "The Chairmaker's Workshop." This offer is only while supplies last.

Langsner sells "The Chairmaker's Workshop" directly for $50 plus shipping and handling. You can get more information on the book through the school's web site countryworkshops.org or you can order it by calling 828-656-2280.

Be warned: Chairmaking books are tricky. They go in and out of print worse than any other kind of woodworking book out there (just try to find a copy of Michael Dunbar's book on Windsor chairs). If you think you'll ever want to get into chairbuilding, secure your copy now for that day.

— Christopher Schwarz

Good books on hand work are hard to find, and after I recommended Robert Wearing's "The Essential Woodworker" in 2007, copies became difficult to find at a reasonable price. I swear I don't have a secret stash of these books I like, though it would be a nifty way to make some cash on the side.

If you cannot get Wearing's excellent book, I have a great alternative: Charles H. Hayward's "Carpentry for Beginners" (Emerson Books). This little jewel slipped under my radar for many years because of the title. Carpentry? Why would I want a book about building a coal hutch?

Well as it turns out, we moderns are a bunch of unskilled dufuses (or should that be that dufi? I forget). What a mid-century Briton considers carpentry is more like what we would consider fine furniture building. (And what we call carpentry must be one notch above flint knives and bear skins, I suppose).

"Carpentry for Beginners" is an excellent book for building basic hand skills. Hayward covers it all, from basic sharpening to flattening a board, mortising, basic dovetailing, half-laps and even case construction. The book is entirely focused on hand work because it is assumed that the home carpenter wouldn't have any machines lurking in the scullery.

What I think is brilliant about the book (and I hope to steal for my own future efforts) is how Hayward first teaches you the basic strokes: sawing, chiseling, boring, planing, marking, testing. Then he shows you how to combine these basic skills into dealing with real-life assemblies. There are entire chapters on "How to Make a Door," "How to Make a Box" and "How to Make a Drawer."

Then these are followed by informative single-page illustrations that walk you through many of the basic joints.

That's the first 109 pages; the rest of the book is a walk through your swinging uncle's house. Hayward shows you how to build swanky item after swanky item for your pad, including a television chair and some Danish un-modern tables. You can probably skip these chapters, except for the section on building a tool chest and workbench trestles.

Where do I find out-of-print books such as this? Try:

bookfinder.com

abebooks.com

alibris.com

powells.com  

Now I'm off to troll these sites to buy up 100 copies of Graham Blackburn's old books for next week's blog entry.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Click here to read about other books I've recommended.

Most of you know how much I like Andre Roubo's "L'Art du Menuisier" – probably the best and most complete books on woodworking from the 18th century. Heck, I've even considered taking up my French studies again just to be able to read it (more on that later).

However, getting copies of Roubo in this country has been nothing less than frustrating. I got a couple modern reprints through a bookstore in Quebec. And several French web sites carry them (with ghastly hoops to jump through to get them into this country). And all of my efforts to get a reliable and reasonable source in North America have proved fruitless.

Until today.

Thanks entirely to Joel Moskowitz at Tools for Working Wood, reprints of all five volumes of Roubo are now available for sale. These books are immense fun to page through, even if you don't read French. That's because the plates – hundreds and hundreds of glorious line drawings – will teach you more about furniture, marquetry and hand tools than I can. Plus you likely will be inspired to build one of Roubo's benches once you see them in use throughout the book. That's what sold me.

The volumes sell for $70 to $90, which sounds like a lot, but it's worth it. When I was importing these from Canada, that's about what I ended up paying (maybe a bit more once you included international fees). These books will be with you forever, and who knows how long they'll be available.

The other news is that we have some more exciting news about Roubo that we'll be announcing on my personal blog this weekend, LostArtPress.com. This is a personal project that I and another woodworker have been slaving over for a while. So do drop by LostArtPress.com this weekend and check it out. I think you'll be glad you did.

— Christopher Schwarz

As of today, we have made two important changes at Woodworking Magazine: We are now going to publish four issues a year (instead of two), and we are now offering subscriptions by mail.

If you'd like to take a moment here and enter your subscription (four issues for $19.96 in the United States; $24.96 in Canada), you can click here.

Other than that, nothing else is changing about the magazine. And I do mean nothing. We will accept no outside advertising. We will publish the magazine on the same high-quality paper. We will continue to review the materials and equipment that no other magazine seems to discuss. And we will continue to investigate all the methods of working wood by hand and by power.

Even today, while we are frantically trying to answer customer calls and e-mails about the new subscriptions, Senior Editor Bob Lang and I have been working on the side on a technique for Issue 10 – Summer 2008 – that is going to change the way you think about finger joints.

So today, I have a statement, a request and a gift for you. First the statement: Thank you. All of you. If it weren't for the readers of this blog and the letters you have sent to me and my boss, we would not be offering subscriptions today.

Now the request: If you know any woodworking friends who might enjoy the magazine, would you mind dropping them a line? We have a Tell a Friend page that makes it easy – don't worry we won't sell or rent out anyone's e-mail address. Want to send a gift subscription to a fellow woodworker? Click here (Note: Right now this page works for U.S. gifts only. Sorry.)

And the gift: below is the editor's column I wrote for the Spring 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine – the first issue that will mail to subscribers. I hope you like it.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Several of you have asked about digital subscriptions for the magazine. We'll be experimenting with a pilot program later this year. Details, as always, will be posted here.

The Back Roads Are Better

“The significant problems we face
cannot be solved at the same level
of thinking we were at when
we created them.”
– Albert Einstein, (1879-1955)


The story of the magazine you’re holding begins with a car ride through the back roads of Ohio in 2002 and a small disagreement.

Publisher Steve Shanesy and I were driving to West Virginia to a woodworking show and we were at odds about the route to take. I’d mapped out a path on the interstate, but Steve had other ideas. His finger traced a twisty path on my atlas that relied on small towns and two-lane roads.

This, I thought, was going to be a long trip.

As we forged into the wilds of Ohio, the conversation turned to how frustrating it can be to teach yourself to build furniture. Without formal training, many of us tend to develop our skills to match the project at hand.

For example, if we want to build a dovetailed blanket chest, we decide it’s time to learn to cut dovetails, even if we’ve never picked up a dovetail saw or used a dovetail jig. And so we buy a bunch of tools, chew up a lot of good wood and end up with something that is OK, but took twice as long as it should have.

There are better ways to learn the craft.

First you need to learn how handsaws work, how to pick the right tool and how to hold it. Then you start by sawing a board in half, cutting some tenons and half-lap joints and learning exactly where the kerf of each of your saws will fall so you can split a knife line.

If all those tasks sound difficult, you’ve probably never done them. Cutting simple joints with a sharp saw is easy and satisfying work. You just have to know where to begin. And once you begin in the right place, the path is easy to follow.

It’s like being on an interstate instead of poking through the back woods, I reminded Steve (who smirked at my remark).

As we drove on, we tried to figure out what we could do to help beginning woodworkers learn the craft in an orderly way, and to help intermediate woodworkers fill in the astonishing gaps in their knowledge because they are self-taught. So Steve and I decided to start this magazine. And after more than a year of thinking and plotting, we published our first experimental issue in early 2004 with the help of the entire staff of Popular Woodworking, the magazine that is our day job, for a lack of better words. We published Woodworking Magazine without a dime of marketing money. Without fanfare. Without additional staff. We wanted to see if the woodworking community would support a magazine that had no advertisements, that focused on building important skills, and that featured projects that are highly refined yet simple in their construction.

This is not the way most companies launch a magazine. Usually you start with a bang. You try to grow your circulation to a ridiculous level to get the attention of advertisers. You lose money for a long time in the hopes of it paying off big in the end.

I’m proud to say that Woodworking Magazine started life in 2004 by making a modest amount of money thanks to a passionate group of supporters. And we have continued to make money and grow slowly during the last three years, even though we’ve only been publishing twice a year (another thing that’s never done in this industry).

But now, thanks to you, we are ready to move into the next phase. With this issue, we are now a quarterly magazine, and we are now happy to sell you a subscription (call 800-283-3542 in the United States and Canada or visit our subscription page).

It has been a bit of a twisty path for all of us these last few years, but we’ve ended up in the right place at the right time. It is a lot like that fateful trip I took with Steve in 2002. Despite all our trekking on the back roads, despite all the four-way stops in tiny towns, we made it to our destination in West Virginia and shaved nearly 45 minutes off the time it would have taken us on the interstate.

Steve had been down this road before.

— Christopher Schwarz

In my family we have a saying, "German humor is no laughing matter."

The things that I find hilarious often evoke much eye-rolling around the family dinner table from both the children and my spouse. (Like she should talk. The most hilarious thing in my wife's pantheon of humor is a dog behind the wheel of an automobile.)

So when I point you to Jeff Skiver's blog, I want to warn you first. While I almost soiled myself as I read about his alleged deeds heading up a Weebelo troop, you might just shake your head as you clear the cache and history of your Internet browser.

Skiver wrote a column for the back page of Popular Woodworking's December 2007 issue, and if I had my way, he would own that real estate in our magazine. He's a funny guy, especially for someone in the automotive business, which is generally not fertile ground for anything hilarious (save the AMC Pacer and the Gremlin).

So with that caveat, I encourage you to add the blog "Skiving Off" to your list of woodworking blogs. And do post some comments on his blog so that he feels suitably adored.

— Christopher Schwarz

Our warehouse in Wisconsin reported today that our shipment of Woodworking Magazine hardbound editions have arrived and will ship out immediately. So for all of you who have ordered the book already, you should be receiving it shortly in the mail.

And if you are still considering ordering the book, you should know that we sold out more than half of the press run already and don’t have plans for a second printing. There's no pressure, of course. We’ll sell them all, regardless. Also good to know: Our special offer of free shipping on this book ends on Sept. 21. Until that date, you can order it for $30 from our back issues store. After that, it's $34.95.

In case you missed our announcement about the book, check out the earlier blog entry I posted. I think you’ll find that the printing quality of this book is first-rate. The typography and photo reproduction looks even crisper than the original issues; plus the paper is brighter and the binding is quite secure.

Work has begun on issue nine of Woodworking Magazine. The theme of the issue? Sawing of all sorts (no surprises here). But what might be surprising are the conclusions we’re reaching and some of the tricks we’ve dug up. Not all sawing has to be done with saws….

— Christopher Schwarz

Get Free Shipping if You Order before Sept. 21

Every issue of Woodworking Magazine is designed without an "expiration date" – we strive to make the instructions and projects that we write to be just as good in 20 years as they are today. To ensure the magazine will endure, we've just published a hardbound book containing the first seven issues, including issues that have long been sold out and unavailable.

These are the complete issues, just as they appeared in the magazine, and they are printed on paper that is even heavier and brighter than the originals. The book's 252 pages are bound in red cloth, stamped with gold foil and covered with a nice glossy dust jacket that features the Roubo workbench on the cover.

If you're not familiar with Woodworking Magazine, you're probably wondering why we're making such a fuss about it. Here's the deal: Woodworking Magazine is different than other woodworking magazines. We seek to challenge the conventional wisdom of the craft to find the most accurate, fast and straightforward way to perform an operation, whether it's cutting dados or making cherry look 100 years old. Our staff tests dozens of techniques in our shop in Cincinnati to find the ones worth using in your shop.

We publish projects that are historical classics, from the 18th-century Roubo workbench to a Gustav Stickley Magazine Stand to a Shaker Tall Cabinet from the Enfield Community. These are pieces of furniture that have earned their status as classics.

And even the way we review tools is different. We don't review table saws (there are enough table saw reviews already). We review the tools and items that we consider critical to good work: 6" rulers, hinges, marking knives, moisture meters, combination squares and the like.

Plus, we accept no outside advertising. Our interior pages are black-and-white. And we're not afraid to blend the use of hand and power tools to get good results.

This book is about to arrive in our warehouse, and we are making a special offer for readers who order the book before midnight on Friday, Sept. 21. If you order before that date, the book is $30 and we'll pay the shipping and handling. Orders placed after that will be $30 plus $4.95 shipping and handling.

This book will not be available in stores. You can order on our secure web site or call toll-free 800-258-0929 and ask for item# WWCMP7A.

— Christopher Schwarz
editor, Woodworking Magazine and Popular Woodworking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

Our corporate web site experts encourage us to write as briefly as possible when speaking to an Internet audience. So with that in mind, here is my review of David Charlesworth’s new book, “A Guide to Hand Tools and Methods” (Guild of Master Craftsman).

It’s a fantastic book. Really worth buying. And it ties up all the loose ends from his first two books on furniture making.

So with that out of the way, here is the giant footnote to the above review.

I first met David Charlesworth during his first visit to the United States about four years ago. He touched down in the cornfields of central Indiana to teach a class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking and then shoot his first video on sharpening with Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. It was a hot spring, and David was still tired from traveling but was happy to go to dinner with Tom Lie-Nielsen, Mario Rodriguez and me.

After some searching, we ended up at Texas Roadhouse, a Western-themed chain restaurant where they eat peanuts and throw the shells on the floor. I ordered a beer. Thomas ordered a gin and tonic, I believe. David asked for the wine list.

Somehow we didn’t get hassled that night, and David plunged into the menu with surprising gusto, ordering the “rattlesnake bites,” which are deep-fried jalapeno peppers and cheese with a Cajun horseradish sauce for dipping. That is not your typical Devon, England, fare.

David’s willingness to fearlessly try new things is one of the traits of his work as a woodworker, teacher and writer during the last 30 years. He mixes a deep drive for precision woodworking with a self-confessed laziness (which I think is a bit of a stretch). The most famous example of the result of this approach was “the ruler trick,” a way of preparing the unbeveled face of a plane iron with the help of a ruler. It removes hours of tedious labor and produces a spectacular edge.

I purchased David’s first two books (“David Charlesworth's Furniture-Making Techniques” volume one and two), before I met him. I’d pored over them because they were so different than every other book on hand work. He went into far more detail on preparing and using tools than any other source I could find. His techniques were simple, but they required great discipline and attention to detail. They didn’t rely on years of training your hand and eye, just a willingness to pay close attention.

David’s third book continues in this same vein. Like the first two books, “A Guide to Hand Tools and Methods” is a collection of his columns from Furniture and Cabinetmaking magazine. So the book hops around from topic to topic a bit. There are four chapters on tuning planes, three on spokeshaves but one on chisels. However, when read with the other three books, “A Guide to Hand Tools and Methods” feels much more like a cohesive whole.

It fills in many small details that are important to accurate work, such as the chapter on how to true waterstones. His chapters on marking and paring dovetails will help many woodworkers who have been bewildered by the varying approaches available. And there are chapters on little bits of cleverness that Charlesworth has developed, such as an ingenious adjuster for a spokeshave designed by Brian Boggs, and how to alter a marking gauge to use a pencil in place of a pin.

With all three books now in print, I wish that they could be combined and re-organized into one consistent volume so you could get all of the sharpening techniques in one place, all the plane tuning articles in one place, all the sawing advice in one place. Perhaps some day.

Until then, “A Guide to Hand Tools and Methods” is really worth buying. And it is a worthy successor to his first two books on furniture making.

And as I read the last chapter in the book last month, I started wondering where David would go next with his teaching and writing. Would he apply his same insight to  preparing other tools that vex woodworkers, such as profiles of moulding planes or carving tools. Would he delve more into the vast unexplored area of design? Or the equally vast forgotten realm of traditional casework?

I don’t know, but I would be willing to take him along to a square dance in a barn to chat with him and find out.

— Christopher Schwarz

Editor's note: Every few days I’m asked for a bibliography of the essential books for a woodworker who is interested in working with hand tools. I often dash off a list of books that are at the top of mind. Usually it’s five or six core titles with a few oddball ones thrown in that are probably the result of my diet.

So I’ve decided to codify this list and explain a bit of reasoning behind my choices. The first few books are home runs, things that shouldn’t be out of print ever (but sometimes are). One more thing: These aren’t books for a hand-tool purist. I blend machinery for the coarse operations with hand tools for the truing and finishing tasks. My reading list reflects this sensibility.

“The Essential Woodworker” by Robert Wearing

As Robert Wearing eases you into his book during the introduction, you will be both encouraged and alarmed. “The Essential Woodworker” is indeed a book on hand-tool basics and covers all the basic furniture-making tasks necessary to build tables, cabinets, doors and drawers. That’s the encouraging part.

What is alarming is that the stuff in “The Essential Woodworker” is material that is rarely covered in magazines, books or classes. In other words: This book is a good part of a nutritious diet in a world of Snickers bars.

“The Essential Woodworker” begins with a chapter on basic operations: sharpening, planing, sawing and boring. Wearing teaches his techniques mostly with hundreds of simple and clear line drawings, though there are a few black-and-white photos scattered throughout.

With the basic skills wrapped up, Wearing launches into a chapter on building tables and stools. Good choice. Tables are an excellent project for beginners. As Wearing introduces each essential skill, he shows you how to accomplish each task at the bench. This information is like a slice of fried gold. This book is the one that taught me how to clamp up a table base to my bench to work the aprons. It showed me how to size door parts without measuring. It taught me a better way to make hinge mortises that I still use today.

After mastering the table, Wearing moves onto basic carcase construction, with particular emphasis on dovetailing the carcase components and fabricating backs that are far more interesting than what you read about in most books. In other words, there is detail here that you just don’t find elsewhere.

Then Wearing finishes up with designing, building and fitting drawers. By the end of the book’s 160 pages I think I’d learned as much from this book as I’d learned from 10 other books purporting to “essential” for the hand-tool woodworker.

Are there any downsides to the book? Well, I think you can skip the parts about doweling carcases together, that’s a technique that I don’t cotton to (for all the effort required in doweling, I’d just dovetail it).

“The Essential Woodworker” is widely available. In addition to Amazon, check bookfinder.com, abebooks.com, powells.com and alibris.com to find a copy. I paid $8 for mine, you shouldn’t have to pay too much more.

— Christopher Schwarz

American furniture of the 18th century has always been something I’ve liked OK but I’ve never become a nut about, like Brussels sprouts, Cheney hammers and classical music. This week I’ve been consuming a couple books about 18th-century furniture that have long been on my list of things I’ve been meaning to read.

Until this point, my favorite books on the topic were Wallace Nutting’s "A Furniture Treasury" (Macmillian) and "American Furniture of the 18th Century" by Jeffrey Greene. Nutting’s book, though flawed, is fantastic for designing furniture because it offers hundreds of pages of photos of old pieces (for example, there are 77 pages devoted to low chests of drawers). Greene’s book is great because it marries woodworking technique, history, the tools and design.

The two books I’m reading now are similar. Albert Sack’s "Fine Points of Furniture" (Crown) is a visual lesson of what is ugly and beautiful in pieces of early American furniture and consists of nearly 300 pages of photos and commentary. "The Cabinetmaker’s Treasury" (Macmillan) by F.E. Hoard and A.W. Marlow is more like Greene’s book, though it was published in 1952. "The Cabinetmaker’s Treasury" consists of a discussion of techniques and offers plans for many pieces of early American furniture.

My copy of "The Cabinetmaker’s Treasury" was a gift from our art director, Linda Watts, who picked it up at a book sale in Dayton, Ohio. I think I was the first or second person to open it because it’s perfect in every way. And on first reading, I was delighted by the drawings and text.

But then I started really picking apart the construction details shown in the book. I think that misters Hoard and Marlow must have had some stock in the 3"-long screw market because that is the primary way they join everything (except the chairs). No dados. No sliding dovetails. Fewer mortise-and-tenon joints than I would prefer. The lowboys in the book are all screwed together. Screw the web frames together. Then screw the web frames to the sides. Don’t forget to screw the partitions!

So bottom line: It’s an OK book for a couple bucks.

"The Fine Points of Furniture" seems a bit of a gimmick at first. Sack shows photos of three different pieces of furniture. They’re all the same form (chest on chest, for example). But one is labeled a "good" design, one is labeled "better" and the other as "best." Then he offers some commentary under each photo explaining why.

Sack insults the piece labeled as "good" designs, and I was getting a complex at first because I kind of liked the "good" designs. They were usually simpler and less ornamented. Sack reserved "better" and "best" for pieces with elaborate carving, vigorous turnings and aggressive lines.

But after 300 pages of the stuff, I began to see things Sack’s way. The "good" designs started to look clunky and less refined. I was exercising my eye for 18th-century design. It’s still a bit sore, but going down to work on an Arts & Crafts sideboard should give it a chance to relax.

By the way, you can get "Fine Points of Furniture" for a song. The revised edition "The New Fine Points of Furniture" is ghastly expensive. If there's anyone out there who has both, I'd love to hear a comparision of the two versions.

— Christopher Schwarz

If you’re interested in reading detailed stories about modern toolmakers, their wares and how they fare in the shop, I have some good news. Clarence Blanchard, the owner of the Fine Tool Journal, has graciously allowed me to post articles I’ve written about modern hand tools for his publication during the last few years on the Internet. And Wiktor Kuc, the host of WKFineTools.com, has generously agreed to host the articles on his site.

Right now on WKFineTools.com you will find the complete text to four articles I’ve written for the Fine Tool Journal during the last few years, and there are eight more that will be posted in the coming year. These articles are unlike what I’ve written for Popular Woodworking magazine and Woodworking Magazine. These articles are sometimes quite lengthy, a bit geeky and are aimed at the hand-tool enthusiast.

Here’s what you’ll find on WKFineTools.com right now, and a taste of what is to come:

• Veritas Router Plane Review: I compare the new Veritas router plane to the vintage Stanley No. 71. The Veritas sure looks different, but is it any better? What’s with those canted knobs? And why is the depth adjustment on the Veritas so much more involved? And is the accessory fence worth buying?

• Chairmaking Tools: A look at some of the tools that are indispensable to my (meager) chairmaking efforts. Two mallets that can really drive a leg home (John Brown style!), plus a comparison of the Veritas an Lie-Nielsen spokeshaves.

• Ray Iles Mortisers: Everyone loves the new Ray Iles mortising chisels – me included. I had one of the first sets off the boat and take a look at the tool. How did it come to life? Why is it so dang effective in hardwoods? And what’s with the unusual sharpening angles?

• The Curious Scrub Plane: This is a controversial article in some quarters. I compare the Veritas and Lie-Nielsen scrub planes and posit a few crackpot theories about scrub planes in general. If you want to send me hate mail on this article, the line forms to your left.

• There are also shorter articles there from me on Blue Spruce Toolworks marking knife and drawboring.

Here are some of the articles I hope Wiktor Kuc will be posting in the coming months:

• Blue Spruce Toolworks: A detailed look at Dave Jeske’s operation. He’s bigger than you think. And he’s making tools for other custom toolmakers on the West Coast.

• Clifton Planes: I have years of experience with these English-made Bedrock bench planes and tell you what I’ve found out during the last five years – warts and all.

• Gauges & Squares: Find out which layout tools I find useful and which are expensive junk.

• Miter Planes: Joel Moskowitz and a dead Frenchman help us unravel some of the mysteries of the oddly-named miter plane.

And there’s more to come. With any luck, Wiktor will post these and the Fine Tool Journal Articles I’m writing for upcoming issues, including a feature on Philip Marcou’s S20A smoothing plane and the Bridge City Tools VP60 – a variable pitch bench plane.

If you don’t want to wait for Wiktor, I can wholeheartedly recommend you take out a subscription to the Fine Tool Journal. Not only will you get to read my brand of drivel, but also lots of other interesting pieces about old tools, their history and the stories behind the men who made them.

Plus then there’s the real bonus that comes with a Fine Tool Journal subscription: the publication offers a large quantity of old tools for sale at reasonable prices to readers in every issue. Please do check it out.

— Christopher Schwarz

Before I knew Bob, one of our senior editors here at Popular Woodworking, I knew him as Robert W. Lang, the author of two landmark books I owned that were chock full of shop drawings of Craftsman furniture. Those dog-eared books (and two more he's published on Craftsman interiors and inlay) were books that I gladly plunked down my own money on. They are books that I built three projects from. They were books that I referred to almost every week as I was teasing out a detail on a piece of Arts & Crafts furniture. I was a fan.

However, when Bob gave me a copy of his latest book, "Shop Drawings for Greene & Greene Furniture," which just hit the streets this week, I was a bit reluctant to write a review. I've watched Bob slave over these drawings. When we all went to Las Vegas for a woodworking show last year, Bob slogged off through the desert after the show to spend time in Southern California researching pieces for this book. He's been agonizing over the details in the drawings for the 23 pieces shown in the books. It has been a difficult project. I'm admittedly biased because I've watched the guy push himself hard to research, write and draw this book on his own time (It's being published by a competing publisher, not Popular Woodworking Books).

But when I cracked open his book and started reading it, my hesitation disappeared. This is a landmark book and deserves your attention. If you have even a passing interest in the work of Charles and Henry Greene (and their builders, John and Peter Hall), you will be thrilled with the projects in this book. The Greenes, architects working in California during the Arts & Crafts heyday, were two of the most talented designers in the 20th century, though their pens produced only about 400 pieces of furniture.

I've seen a fair number of the pieces that Lang has chosen for this book – either in photographs or in person – and I think he's accomplished what few other people in our profession can do: These shop drawings capture the true spirit of the Greenes without dumbing anything down. The furniture of the Greenes was subtle and full of detail, and Lang does the pieces justice.

These drawings are the missing link for the craftsman. There are countless books about the Ultimate Bungalows produced by the Greene brothers with sumptuous photos, sketchy dimensional details and highly romanticized copy. And there is great affection among woodworkers to produce these pieces, which are well-suited for the home woodworker in their construction details and joinery methods.

But until now, there was no easy way to go about building any of these works without a trip to California, looking both ways for the museum guards and ducking under the ropes with a tape measure.

The projects chosen for "Shop Drawings for Greene & Greene Furniture" are an excellent cross-section of the Greene's work and represent pieces of varying difficulty. Beginning woodworkers can cut their teeth on the Gamble Mirror, the Blacker Medicine Cabinet and the Thorsen Plant Stand. As you learn the vernacular of the style (the mortise-and-tenon joints are particularly unusual), you'll build confidence to tackle the stately Robinson Dining Table, the Gamble Kitchen Cabinets (I will build these someday) and the Blacker Hall Seat (ditto on this).

The Blacker Hall Seat, a masterpiece of design, detail and craftsmanship.


Then you can give the Gamble Chiffonier a shot before you leave this earth. It combines all of the details of the Greene Brothers – cloudlifts, proud-finger-jointed drawers, inlay – into an astonishing package.

This is not really a how-to book. Lang provides some important details on construction techniques he's used to reproduce some of the important details. And he gives a workman-like history of the work of the Greene and Hall brothers. And Lang explores some of the nagging work-method mysteries that remain about the work, such as why the Halls built their drawers the way they did. These details add to the corpus of knowledge about these four brothers, rather than just hyping it.

However, if the complete shop drawings aren't enough for you and you'd like enlarged shop drawings with full-size details, Lang sells those as well on his website.

The book will soon be available everywhere, but I urge you to buy it directly from Bob. He has it in stock right now, he gets a bigger cut when he sells the book directly, and I hear his son, Hunter, also gets $1 for every book he packs up and mails.

You can purchase "Shop Drawings for Greene & Greene Furniture" for $22.95 at craftsmanplans.com or by sending an e-mail to info@craftsmanplans.com or calling 513-531-2690 x 1327.

— Christopher Schwarz

For the last three years, I’ve been writing a column on modern hand tools for the Fine Tool Journal, an excellent quarterly publication out of Pownal, Maine. The Journal is a thick slice of hand tool heaven with articles about long-forgotten ways of working, vanished corporate tool-making empires, vintage power machinery and old tools for sale.

Editor Clarence Blanchard and his staff also run Brown Auction Services, and so the Fine Tool Journal includes listings of auction items and tools you can buy with just a phone call or e-mail. The prices are quite reasonable.

For my part, I write reviews of modern tools and profiles of their makers. And now, Clarence has graciously agreed to allow me to post the older articles on WKFineTools.com, an online hand-tool magazine run by the industrious Wiktor Kuc.

If you haven’t been a visitor to WKFineTools or the OldToolsShop.com site (its sister site), visit now and bookmark it. There is a wealth of writing there. People sharing their experiences with hand tools, old catalogs of tools you can download for free, some plans for projects, plus links to other valuable resources for the hand-tool user.

This week, Wiktor has posted my story about scrub planes. This article compares the two modern versions available: The Lie-Nielsen and the Veritas. But that part of the article isn’t what gets people’s blood boiling. It’s the theory of mine that scrub planes are more of a carpentry tool than they are for fine furniture-making. I’ve discussed that theory a bit here on the weblog, but this is the full-on crackpot theory.

Many thanks to Wiktor and Clarence for allowing us to republish these stories. We have about 10 more in the works right now for the coming weeks, including in-depth profiles of saw maker Mike Wenzloff and Konrad Sauer, the planemaker behind Sauer & Steiner. So check back.

— Christopher Schwarz

So I like my wagon vise quite a bit and have been giving it a nice workout during the last week or so. I think it's a keeper. (And good thing, considering the massive chasm in the benchtop.) So to finish off the vise, I bought a nice little European-style backplate for the vise's end cap from Whitechapel Ltd. Hardware – nice stuff, by the way.

I think I must be hanging around planemaker Wayne Anderson a bit too much. It's not like me to embellish my benches with unnecessary finery.

As I was nailing the plate in place, I couldn't help reflecting on an excellent piece I just read in The New Atlantis called "Shop Class as Soulcraft" by Matthew B. Crawford. It is one of the most thoughtful pieces of writing about the decline of craftsmanship and the rise of industrial capitalism I've ever read. Crawford is a woodworker, former motorcycle repairman, former electrical contractor and a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Material Culture at the University of Virginia.

It's a stunning article. Sit down with a cool drink this evening and take it in.

— Christopher Schwarz

Sometimes the best woodworking books don't have a single word of advice on how to cut a joint, build a cabinet or rub out a finish. Instead they are the kind of book that will pry your eyes open to see how our craft is connected to history, culture and the fabric of modern society.

"Oak: The Frame of Civilization" by William Bryant Logan is a sweeping and breathless series of vignettes that examine the relationship between oak trees and man, from a fen in Cambridgeshire to the tanner's stinking vat of hen dung to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. It is a narrative that ranges from deeply personal, such as Logan's experience tasting acorn jelly ("like touching a slug") to intensely historical, such as an examination of coppice woodworking in early Europe.

At first, woodworkers might not see how this historical examination of the oak's place in history is important to those of us who regularly saw, split and hew it to make chairs, cabinets and the like. But after a few chapters it becomes clear that we are part of this extensive root system that the oak has made through our daily lives. The oak is the ultimate provider, from the acorns that fed people in Europe and North America to the barrels that provide our wine, the tannins that preserve our leather, the ships that explored our world and the building blocks of the walls of our greatest structures, such as Westminster Hall. In fact, oak's role in civilization cannot be overstated.

And now oak provides one more gift to the home woodworker: joy in the work with our hands. Man almost destroyed the world of ships and charcoal and barrels that was built by oak and replaced it with metal, oil and plastic. But we and the survival of our craft are evidence that oak has not lost its grip on the world.

Highly recommended reading.

— Christopher Schwarz

Two more volumes of Roubo's masterwork on the woodworking trades have trickled into my hands. I'm still missing two volumes I really want, and I'm probably going to have to buck up and just order them straight from France (a couple helpful French-speaking readers have pointed me to a site that sells all the volumes).

Until those arrive, I've been poring over the Roubo volumes on carriage building and garden woodworking. Both are chock-full of engravings of tools, benches, projects, jigs and procedures. One interesting nugget of information has been the illustration of the bench for the carriage trade. The bench is almost exactly like the benches shown throughout the three volumes I now have, but the vise is interesting.

It looks like a twin-screw vise at first, but then when you look at it again, it's actually more like an inside-out leg vise turned on its side. I know of no modern equivalent. After studying the drawing a bit here's how I think it works: The screw on the right controls the pressure you apply like the screw on any vise. The assembly on the left acts like a pivot. You move the metal pin (I assume it's metal) in a hole in the metal bar (item A) that juts out the left side of the vise's jaw. You pick a hole that will position the left side of the jaw based on the thickness of the work being clamped. You place the jaw so it's just a bit closer to the benchtop than the thickness of the work. When you then turn the screw, the work will become wedged.

Assuming that we all work with pretty standard thicknesses of wood, the vise could be pretty effective. However, I'd hate to be the guy who walked up to the bench without keeping a sharp eye on that metal bar.

(Ah, and the odd headline on this entry? That's the Babelfish translation of the French bookstore's description of the Roubo books. I've been called a lot of things, but never a "woody one.")

— Christopher Schwarz

With all the woodworking books and magazines out there, it's a bit surprising that we need any more. But we do. Nearly every woodworking book and magazine that gets published eventually crosses my desk, and I'm always amazed at the vast amount of homogeneity within the covers. The techniques and tools used are similar. In some ways, it's like the authors all went to the same school – or maybe they're simply all reading the same books.

It's not that these authors are using the wrong techniques or tools or joints – quite the opposite. The advice in the books is generally sound; it's just narrow. You can learn a lot about woodworking by exploring books that were published before you were born.

A fantastic place to begin is George Ellis's "Modern Practical Joinery". For $15 (or less if you buy it used) you can explore the vast world of machine and hand-tool woodworking that existed just as shops were beginning to mechanize. Ellis extols the virtues of the labor-saving machines and an affection for the fine work possible with hand tools. But more importantly, Ellis's enormous book explores the vast and interesting world of joinery for cabinets and house fittings. There are joints in here you've probably never seen (really good and solid ones). Ellis explores aspects of joinery and construction that are rarely covered in today's texts – such as scaling the components of many joints. I cannot recommend this book enough. And we're lucky the sucker is still in print.

Which brings me to my next little adventure. For about a year I've been after a copy of Andre Roubo's "L'Art du Menuisier," the book that inspired me to build the workbench in Issue 4. Sure it's in French – and I probably won't be able to read it even with my translation dictionary. But the plates are illuminating.

But finding a copy hasn't been easy. Vintage copies cost thousands. There is a reprint, which I believe is published in France. I haven't been able to find a U.S. bookseller that carries it, but I did find one in Quebec at Archambault. So I ordered it months ago. It was out of stock. I waited. No luck.

Then yesterday I received an email in French. My MasterCard had been charged and the book was on its way, with a tracking number. As of today, it had departed Quebec and was headed toward Kentucky. It looks like my own copy of Roubo might finally arrive. They have the text in three volumes; and the price? Much less than thousands.

There are, of course, a lot of other books that should be available (such as many books by Charles Hayward), but we'll save that for another day.

— Christopher Schwarz

Securing large pieces of work to the front face of your workbench is always a challenge. A face vise can hold one corner of large work, but the other end is free to swing about. This can be unacceptable when sawing dovetails, cutting hinge mortises on the edge of a door or simply planing (or sanding) the edge on a long board.

Traditional benches have a sliding board jack (like the one on the Roubo-style bench we built), and other benches have a wide apron pierced with lots of holes. In both cases a wooden peg goes into the holes to support the work from below. This peg helps, but it doesn't hold the work tight against the bench. An F-style clamp is the usual solution – clamp the work to the jack or the apron.

In 1915, Stanley patented a bench bracket that combines the support of a wooden peg with the holding power of an F-style clamp. It was manufactured as the Stanley No. 203 (also the number used for a Stanley block plane, by the way). And this item turns up pretty regularly at flea markets and on eBay. I bought a couple of them recently to try them out on the Roubo bench jack to see if they were indeed useful.

The Stanley No. 203 works best in a 1"-diameter hole in an apron or bench jack that is 7/8" thick. Use thicker stock and the No. 203 won't grab. Use thinner and the bracket will not create a square ledge for your work. That was my first problem with the No. 203, my material ended up being a little under 7/8", so the clamp head came in at an angle to my boards. As a result, sometimes, the head would dent the work on one edge.

The promising hole in the bracket....

While staring at the bracket, I noticed a small hole at the bottom of the device. It looked like there could be some sleeve of metal inside it. Could this small hole be used in some way to square the bracket in its hole? With no answers coming to mind, I decided to ask the U.S. Government. Patented devices have nice drawings and sometimes instruction-like information on file at the U.S. Patent Office. However, the interface to search there isn't the friendliest.

However, there's help. The Directory of American Tool and Machinery Patents (DATAMP for short) makes looking up patented old tools easy. The DATAMP is run by volunteers from the OldWWMachines and OldTools mailing lists. You can search patents very easily here. Type the patent date (usually cast into the tool) into the search engine. If you know the patent number, that will work, too. There are other ways to search the 30,000 patents in the Advanced Search function.

I typed in the patent date (03-16-1915) and I immediately had beautiful drawings of the No. 203, plus drawings of a similar bracket that may not have been made commercially, and two pages of details on how the bracket works. The small hole at the bottom of the bracket is for a nail, according to the application, "to steady the lower end of the clamp…." Hmmm, that's not my problem. So I made a little shim and am going to epoxy that to the bracket tonight. That should fix it. And the material in the hole that I thought could be a sleeve? Just junk.

— Christopher Schwarz

This week I'm trying to pry my way inside the heads of the Shakers. After years of building the furniture, it's remarkable how little I know about the people themselves. So I've been plowing through "The Shaker World" by John T. Kirk. The book is a real eye-opener because it discusses the whole Shaker experience and ties the believers into the world at large – instead of isolating them like lab specimens.

The book has helped me reconcile something that's been nagging me for years. Have you ever seen the Shaker drying racks? They are almost ridiculously fragile and seem at total odds with the rugged dovetails and pinned mortise-and-tenon joints that mark many of their case pieces.

Kirk explains this fragility as part of the ying and yang of the Shaker life. Because they were isolated and had highly regulated behavior (they had rules about how many people could sleep to a bed), the Shakers could create objects of immense grace and fragility and ensure that the objects would be handled by the believers with care.

For example, they had rules about how to walk on the carpets: "When brethren or sisters go up or down stairs they should not slip their feet on the carpet, but take them up and set them down plumb, so as not to wear out the carpets unnecessarily." And then there are more rules about how to make a turn on the carpet. (My children would not have fared well in the Shaker communities.)

Yet the Shakers also prized rugged construction. Their farm implements and some of the furniture was decidedly overbuilt at times. Kirk explains this proclivity as necessary for the rural life of the believers.

In addition to reading "The Shaker World," I'm now experimenting with finishes for the next cover project for the magazine. The Shakers prized both paint and varnish, and I'm trying to come up with a finishing schedule for this first version of the cabinet (an adaptation of a cabinet from the Enfield, Connecticut, colony) that looks right and is true to the Shaker tradition. Last night I was applying a base coat of linseed oil to the latch for the cabinet (shown above). The latch turns on a dowel that pierces the entire latch and is wedged in place. There's nothing precious or fragile there – so perhaps I'm not quite all the way inside their heads just yet.

— Christopher Schwarz

An icon of the woodworking world discusses his life and work and displays his amazing cantankerous wit during an amazing and detailed 2004 interview.