Woodworking Magazine Blog

I've been involved in hundreds of professional photography shoots in my journalism career, and each one is ridiculous in its own way.

Yesterday we shot the image for my forthcoming book, "Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use," which is scheduled to come out in early October. So at 7 a.m., I began cleaning up the shop, which was a wreck as a result of our struggle to finish up the August issue of Popular Woodworking. I pulled the bench out from the wall and began the archaeological dig through the mountain of shaving and sawdust (ah yes, something from the Creole Table Era, circa 2006).

Then Al Parrish, our staff photographer, came in to survey the scene. He didn't like the fact that the bank of windows on the right side of the bench didn't have a tool rack and you could see the cars in our parking lot. "Can we build a tool rack?" he asked.

Today? No.

So we put some of the parts from my sideboard project in the window to obscure the Chevy pickup truck. Then the designers came in. I braced myself because designers have asked for some pretty ridiculous things of me over the years. They had one change: Designer Terri Woesner went over to my broom, picked it up and walked to my bench.

What? Not clean enough?

Terri pushed the broom into the pile of shavings and dust and then artfully sprayed the mess across our shop floor. Then she walked around the bench, positioning the shavings in a thoughtful manner, using the bristles of broom to place them.

Then Al went to work. The image above was shot with our shop lights turned off (which is how I work anyway) and one strobe positioned off to the right of the frame. He also did a little work on the image in Photoshop. Anyone notice what he changed on the bench?

— Christopher Schwarz

It's curious that many of the people I know who are professional finishers and refinishers are also connoisseurs of drink. Whenever I spray finish – particularly lacquer – I always get an unusual craving for a beer. Perhaps it's simply the act of replacing one toxin for another. Or perhaps it is the drink of victory.

Either way, I spent a few hours this weekend completing my work on the Creole Table and drank a fine porter with my dinner to celebrate.

To get to the finish line (sorry for that) with this project, here is what had to be done:

First, I needed to clean up some serious and troublesome tear-out on the top. While the walnut I used on the table's base was quite mild and easy to work, the boards for the tabletop made me wish for a wide-belt sander. No matter what I did (high-angle plane, scraper, sandpaper) a couple areas of the tabletop refused to behave. One of the back corners in particular remained quite scaly, even after a serious work-over.

I tried scraping it one way. Then the other. Then the sandpaper. Then shellac (to stiffen the fibers) and some more scraping. Then the pirate-esque cursing, which of course didn't help anything. When I got the table surfaces looking as good as I could after an hour of work, I applied a coat of amber shellac to warm things up. Even though this walnut is air-dried and unsteamed,  I think that walnut can look a bit cool in cast with just a clear finish.

So on Saturday I applied some shellac and today I applied two coats of M.L. Campbell's Magnalac lacquer. I love this stuff. No matter what the humidity or my mood, the Magnalac is as forgiving of my every inadequacy as my spouse.

Is the day too humid? The stuff lays out flat. Bone-dry day? Same results. Is the coat too thin? It still works fine. In 10 years of working with the stuff, it has blushed on me only once. I've sprayed it with a variety of high- and low-pressure equipment and have always been impressed with Magnalac's versatility.

And boy is it fast. I sprayed the first coat at 10 a.m. this morning. Then I sprayed the second coat at 10:30 a.m. I took a quick shower and put a third coat on the tabletop (for grins) at 11:15 a.m. And now it looks perfect. I know that the purists out there really like the shellac and other hand-applied finishes. But I like to spray modern lacquer. Always have; always will.

But as I raised a glass this evening to cleanse one toxin with another, a dark thought passed briefly through my head: Now that the Creole Table is built and finished, it's time for the real work to begin. I have to write it up, prepare the drawings and get the sucker published.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

Hand-tool work can be confusing and frustrating when you follow the power-tool rules. Today offered a good example: I was working on finishing up the transitions between the aprons and legs of the Creole Table. After sawing them out, I had to first remove the bulk of the waste with a chisel, then follow it up with a rasp, a little sanding and then some scraping.

While working on the first corner I was having trouble seeing where the rasp was cutting in particular. The problem was that our shop at the magazine is too well lit. We have enormous windows on two walls and banks and banks of fluorescent fixtures in the drop ceiling overhead.  Plus task lighting at the benches. It's like our photographer, Al Parrish, always says: "There's too much light. I can't see what I'm doing."

So I took two steps backward and flipped off all of the overhead lights in the shop. With only the daylight coming in the windows, the rasp work was much easier. I could see every mark left by every tool in high relief. Same went for the marks left by the chisel, sandpaper and scrapers. They all were much more evident with side-lighting alone. Lots of omni-directional light eliminates the shadows that clue us into how we're progressing.

This makes sense. Hand tools were developed to be used in shops that were dimly lit. And early workbenches are typically pictured in front of a window (check out the Dominy bench at Winterthur and the Andre Felibien illustrations of an early workshop in "Principes de l'architecture").

But in the world of power tools, bright lights are helpful for most tasks. You don't want anything dangerous and finger chewing lurking in a dark area. So light it up.

With the lights out, the work proceeded quickly and all of the transitions were cut smoothly (and I saved my company a few cents on its light bill).



I also had a little time to finally glue up the top for the Creole Table. This was my second attempt – the first was thwarted by unruly wood that was in tension. After surfacing all the boards for the top, I edge-jointed them on our Bridgewood jointer and noticed immediately that the machine was sniping the boards. Somehow the outfeed table had dropped below the cutterhead. Adjusting this part of our machine is a touchy operation, so instead of spending an hour futzing with it I reached for my jointer plane and trued up all three joint lines in about five minutes and then sprung all the joints by making stopped cuts in the center of each edge. The joints in the top closed up with one clamp across the center.

That was too easy. I felt guilty, so I added a couple more clamps. Then I scooted off to a barbecue restaurant with my family where I ate entirely too much brisket and bread pudding. More guilt (and pressure).

— Christopher Schwarz

My favorite part of woodworking is the anti-climax. This is the point where you do something risky, but you're so prepared for it that the actual act is just a slight thing: brief and easy and boring. This week my climatic anti-climax was cutting the transition between the legs and aprons.

After putting off the task for a week, I finally figured out how to keep the tiny piece of end grain attached to the leg as I sawed the vast majority of it away with a coping saw. My solution was to glue a thin backing board behind the eight fragile areas with the boards' grain oriented in such a way that it would stiffen everything up.

As I glued those backing boards in on Saturday I thought, "Maybe this is overkill. Maybe I should just grab my saw and teach those aprons a lesson."

But by that point the glue was out, half the backing boards were in and I had to rush off to meet friends for dinner.

So when Monday came around I took up my coping saw and went to work. Point one in my favor: I had marked the cut on the inside and outside of the piece so it was easy to follow the line. Point two: I had loaded my Olson coping saw with some sweet 15 tpi coping saw blades from Tools for Working Wood. These blades are head and shoulders above the home-center dreck, which always come with a nasty burr and poorly shaped teeth. (I really should review these new blades for the magazine because they are excellent.)

And point three: I am so glad I glued those eight blocks in behind the aprons. After I sawed out the aprons I began chiseling the waste to its final shape. The end grain flaked off the legs like dry skin after a nasty sunburn. The backing boards held the delicate parts in place brilliantly.

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

I continue to get a letter about every other day about the Roubo-style workbench I built for the Autumn 2005 issue. I've been trying not to clog up the weblog with too much Roubo stuff, but as the glue dries on the web frame in the Creole Table this morning, I thought I should bring up some interesting points from readers and discuss a few modifications I've made since I built the bench a year ago.

Robert W. Mustain pointed out to me that I neglected to discuss how to configure the workbench for left-handed woodworkers (which make up about 13 percent of the population, according to some estimates). A "Sinister Roubo" would need everything reversed, of course. Put the crochet and leg vise on the right side of the bench. Same goes for the planning stop: Put it on the right.

A common question among first-time bench builders is why the accessories are configured the way they are. Why is the bench vise (or crochet) traditionally on the left side of the bench for right-handers? They typically think that having the vise on the right side of the bench would make it more convenient for sawing off stock.

The reason the vise is traditionally on the left is for edge-jointing. You want to plane into the vise and sometimes even brace your boards against the vise's screws or bars. It just makes sense from a physics point of view, really. Think about the alternative: If you clamp the tail end of the board and then plane away from the vise, you could pull the board out of the vise.



Next question: Reader Tim Brun asked if I'd added any more dog holes to my bench than those shown on the illustration in the magazine. The answer is yes. My biggest frustration with planing on the bench has been when I want to work cross grain, such as when I work rough stock with a fore plane. I've used holdfasts and battens to brace the work at the back edge of the bench; and while that works, sometimes I really just want to clamp stuff between dogs. So I added a line of 3/4" holes (10 of 'em) in line with the planing stop (which is 6" from the front edge of the bench). The holes are 3-3/4" on center. The first hole begins 31" in from the left end of the bench. Having them in line with the planing stop allows me to clamp a board 52" long between the stop and a Veritas Wonder Dog.

Here are some other modifications: This morning I added leather linings to the faces of my leg vise on the advice from a reader. I was at Michael's craft store last night picking up some hemp twine (for a future weblog post) and I noticed the overpriced leather scrap section. A one-pound bag of scraps cost $5.99. Or I could buy a single piece of Tandy-brand leather that would fit perfectly for $5.99. I bought the Tandy leather. I was going to cut up some shoes or an old purse that belonged to my spouse, but I hadn't got the guts up to ask: "Honey, do you really use this purse anymore?" So $5.99 avoided that conversation.

The leather is an experiment. I think the leg vise holds just fine as it is. But the reader said I'd be amazed. So here goes. I used yellow glue to apply the leather, and I almost forgot to put a sheet of plastic between the leather pieces as I closed the vise. The glue-squeeze-out would likely have glued the whole thing together shut.

One final mod to the leg vise: I kept snapping the 3/8"-diameter oaken pivot pins at the foot of the vise. In hindsight, perhaps I should have used ½"-diameter stock. I switched to a 3/8" steel pin nine months ago and everything is working swimmingly.

The glue in the web frame should be dry now. Back to the shop.

— Christopher Schwarz

The first time I build any project, there are always surprises – even when things are going well. For this Creole Table, it was a fortunately/unfortunately thing all week.

Fortunately, the cabriole legs were a cinch. The leg profile we extracted from the auction photo is easy to cut on the band saw and simple to clean up with the Shinto rasp, a file and a scraper. They came out smooth and curvy with minimal effort.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to beef up the tenons on the next version of this table, which will introduce some complications to construction. I was already planning on reinforcing the leg-to-apron joints with triangular blocks, so the prototype will be sturdy. But I really want the tenons wider and longer than I have them now.



Fortunately, the apron shape was a cinch to cut, rout and shape. I thought the tight corners would be a bear to clean up by hand, but some quick chisel work made them all perfect in less than an hour. I also got to use the chisel-to-the-shoulder technique from Adam Cherubini.

Unfortunately, fitting the tenon shoulders to the legs took a lot of fiddling. Fitting any tenon with a 7"-wide shoulder is tricky, but try it with an emerging (and unsympathetic) curve on your leg. I spent almost two hours tuning up the eight joints for the base.

Fortunately, the side assemblies went together just fine this afternoon and are resting comfortably on my bench for the weekend. Tomorrow I'm off to the Marc Adams School of Woodworking to pinch hit as an assistant in a weekend class with Thomas Lie-Nielsen. Thomas's planned assistant has a baby on the way (and me, I'm done in that department), so I get to help out with sharpening and plane tuning.

On Monday I should have the base together. Then I'll tell you about how unfortunate it was that my stock for the top curled up like a potato chip.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

The Shinto "Saw-Rasp" has always been a curious thing to me. I first spotted it years ago hanging on the wall of our local Rockler store in the sandpaper section. It looks like (and probably is) a series of 10 hacksaw blades that have been bent and riveted together. It looked so unfamiliar to me – not a rasp, not a saw – that I never had the urge to try it.

But then I saw how furnituremaker Glen Huey uses the tool on his cabriole legs and decided to try the Shinto out on the legs for the Creole Table. I'm glad I did. The Shinto has turned out to be one of the most pleasant surprises of the project.

There are two parts to the Shinto: the blade and the handle. The blade is about 10-3/8" long, 1-1/8" wide and vaguely boat-shaped. One side of the blade has coarse teeth (11 tpi) and the other side has fine teeth (about 25 tpi). The handle ingeniously grips the blade by hooking over the rivets that pass through the blade. And then you lock the blade by turning a screw up by the hot-dog-looking handle.

The handle is nicely finished, much better than what you'd expect, actually. But you don't need the handle assembly. In fact, I think this tool works better without the handle attached (and you can save some money as a result; more on that later).

The Shinto is an "intermediate" shaping tool – what I would call a "medium" tool in the "coarse, medium and fine" classification system I use for most tools. It is best used after the coarse shaping of the band saw, jigsaw or turning saw. The rasp's long length allows you to true a curved surface up and remove the coarse marks from the saw blade. But it won't produce a ready-to-finish surface at the end, even with the fine teeth. After shaping the legs with the band saw and Shinto, I took them to their finished state with a cabinet file and a little scraping (files and scrapers are classic "fine" tools).

The Shinto is as fast at shaping as any traditional rasp I've used, and it leaves a remarkably nice surface for a hacksaw-based tool. One of the reasons it's so fast in use is because you have both teeth immediately available to you when you use the tool without the handle – just flip the blade over and go to town.

I also really like its price. The Shinto with the handle is $25.99. But I recommend you skip the handle and just buy the blade and save about $10. Our Rockler retail outlet sells the replacement blade for about $16, though I cannot find the replacement handle for sale on Rockler's website. However, Highland Hardware will sell you just the blade for $15.99.

As a couple readers have pointed out, there also is a version of this tool that has a handle on the blade and looks more like a traditional rasp. It's available in 9" and 11" lengths from Japan Woodworker. Of course, buying the blade alone is still the best value.

The "Shinto" name is curious to me. In college I took a fair number of classes on Western and Asian religions, including several classes on Buddhism and Shinto, the two religions that are intertwined into Japanese culture. In my studies, we learned that the Shinto religion considers all natural objects to have their own spirit, which should be revered. So, my professor said, a Shinto shrine or other structure wouldn't use any nails or metal in its construction because that would be offensive to the kami (or spirit) of the tree.

I wonder what the kami in my legs thinks about the Shinto hacksaw tool that chewed it up pretty good last week.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

There is a downside to buying lumber from a guy's garage.  Retail, the 12/4 walnut and 8/4 walnut I scored from the garage would have cost me more than $400. I paid $90. But there was another bill about to come due on that wood.

This afternoon I took a break from editing manuscripts and decided to surface all the walnut for the Creole Table's aprons and top. I had to resaw the 8/4 plank on the Laguna to get the aprons and so I took a close look at the saw's set up. The guides looked good. The blade was positioned just right on the wheels. And a milk run (no wood) indicated everything was humming.

So I made a test cut on one of the fall-off pieces. Groan. The 5/8" blade was so dull it wouldn't resaw a wet baguette. So I remove the blade, put on a slightly fresher one and then – joy – go to a meeting on the third floor to discuss some magazine business.

Meeting adjourned. I follow the trail of fine walnut dust I left behind me to find my way back to the shop and fire up the saw with the newer blade. It cuts. Joy.

So I start resawing all the parts. Then I get to the piece that will have the front and back apron. About one-quarter through the cut, sparks fly everywhere. Are the guides misaligned? I stop the saw, inspect the rig and it checks out fine. I start sawing again and there are no problems.

When I open the two planks up on my bench, I see the problem. It looks like there's a big old cut nail running right through the kerf line. I can see the head clearly, and the shank is buried in the work.

But something is not right.  

If that's the head of the nail, then the nail would have to have been driven from something that was inside the tree. I get the pliers and an old awl. Ten seconds later I dig out the culprit, which turns out to be chicken McNugget-shaped, not nail-shaped. It looks to me like a bullet. The "wound" in the tree is what looked like a shank of a nail.

I inspect the band saw blade. It looks good. Deciding that I had more luck than brains, I go home for a beer.

— Christopher Schwarz

Our magazine's workshop is an odd duck. In some ways it's equipped better than some commercial shops (with our eleventy-billion new routers) I've been in, but it lacks sorely in other ways (no spray booth). While we have a wide variety of tools that pass through our hands for testing (many of which never get written about – we're picky) we also have a core set of machines that almost never gets changed.

Since the day I walked in the door here, we've had the same Powermatic 66 cabinet saw. We've changed lots of things about the saw, mostly relating to its crosscutting functions, but the only real maintenance we've ever had to perform on it is cleaning the worm gears and replacing the arbor bearing and assembly late last year.

We've had a couple powered jointers, but for the last five or six years, we've had a Bridgewood 12" jointer. A couple years ago, one of the other editors and I disassembled the jointer and installed an aftermarket spiral carbide cutterhead. It was a nightmare operation, really, but the machine is now working quite well, except the dang fence. The fence doesn't want to seem to hold at 90° to the table. I've been tweaking it these last couple weeks (maintenance never ends), and I think I'm closing in on a solution.

We've had three power planers – right now we have a Yorkcraft 20" model. All of the machines are connected to a central cyclone system from Oneida and controlled by EcoGates, which are blast gates designed to open and close automatically. However, because of some additional wiring we had to do to satisfy the county building inspector, they had a finicky early life in our shop. Robert Lang, one of the other editors, has a particularly intimate (perhaps too intimate) knowledge of the EcoGates as a result.

A Laguna 18" band saw handles the heavy resawing. Love the saw; not love to the old Euro guides – we should replace those. We also have a Oneway lathe (sweet), Grizzly spindle/disk sander (also sweet) and Performax drum sander in the permanent collection. Pretty much everything other tool we have gets swapped out, which is a blessing and a curse.

For our machinery, we either paid cash for it or swapped advertising space in Popular Woodworking. There's no free lunch there, I'm afraid. Our shop equipment might seem like a fantasy to some home woodworkers, but I would like to add a few caveats. One: We generally have four or five people who work on this equipment. And two: We operate under some serious deadline pressure when building furniture for the magazine. As a result, we sometimes feel like we've just barely got the tools to handle our work. Case-in-point: Working in my shop at home is much nicer because I can always get time on the table saw, I don't have to clean out the overfilled dust collection bin before I start work and the tools are set up like I like them – not someone else.

There are other really odd things about our shop worth noting. It's actually as much a photo studio as it is a woodshop. The bulbs in the ceiling are all a certain color temperature for our digital photography setup. The walls are painted in a hue that makes it easy for our graphic designer to tweak the background using Photoshop. And just try finding the right wrench for your router. Senior Editor David Thiel spent half a day yesterday sorting all our router wrenches and collets. I think he's got us squared away now.

So most of my early work on the Creole Table uses these heavy-duty machines. After the walnut acclimated to our shop's humidity level, I broke it down into manageable chunks using our DeWalt 12" miter saw (we swap this tool out with other brands occasionally). Then it was off to the jointer and planer to get these chunks to thickness. Usually I like to get my stock as close to finished size as possible before processing it with the jointer and planer. This usually involves the band saw and table saw. I can generally get much better yield in my thickness if my 2-1/4"-wide legs are taken from 3"-wide stock instead of cutting them from 12"-wide stock, for example.

For the Creole Table, I was going to have to first tweak the slabs before ripping the legs from them. The problem was that the grain – though nicely rift-sawn – was running at an angle. The grain wasn't parallel to the edges of the board. So the first step was to make one long edge of the board parallel to the grain. So I had to mark an angled line on the face grain. Marking walnut can be tough – it's such a dark wood. We tried five or six solutions. Next week I share the best one we found.

— Christopher Schwarz

One common question we get from readers is what happens to the tools we test and the projects we build. The assumption, I think, is that we live a life of free wood, free tools and the free time to combine those things into free furniture.

I wish.

Most of the tools and completed projects are sold to the employees of F+W Publications Inc., our parent company. And then the money is sent to the manufacturer of the tool, in the case of tools we borrowed, or into our shop account, in the case of tools that we purchased outright from the manufacturer. The shop account allows us to buy glue, rags (so many blinking rags) and band saw blades and screws.

The projects we sell are a good bargain for the corporate employees – the projects are priced to cover the materials and just a little overhead. As a result, the furniture is sold using a lottery system.

Me and my fellow woodworking editors are allowed to keep a piece we built if we follow a few rules. We have to buy the materials and spend a fair amount of our off-hours (nights and weekends) working on the project. And we can't abuse the privilege. It sounds a mite murky, I know, but it's worked out fairly well during the last nine years I've been here.

For the Creole Table, I planned to keep the prototype for myself, perhaps even sell it to make some money to buy an upgraded table saw guard for my home shop. So I had to buy the materials myself. It was time to kick into miser mode.

When we build for the company, we'll usually buy our wood from Paxton or Frank Miller Lumber. They always stock what we need and can get it to us quickly, which is always an asset. The wood is always kiln-dried, graded, predictable and sometimes even surfaced for us. As a result, it's more expensive than if we go off the reservation, so to speak.

During the last nine years, I've developed a network of people who sell me wood for my personal use. Some are woodworkers. Some are farmers. Some sell wood as a side business. And though we're completely up-front about explaining all the techniques and tools we use, we still keep our wood sources close to the chest.

My best source of wood is a guy – let's call him Donnie -- who is a woodworker who sells some wood on the side out of his garage. He's a voracious builder himself and has a sizable appetite for lumber and very good instincts for buying it. And sometimes he sells me some extra stock he has. Please don't ask me for his phone number.

The legs for the Creole Leg needed to be monstrously thick to start, which was probably the biggest downside to the project. We try to pick projects that use stock that isn't too difficult to find or odd-sized. On that point, this project has two strikes against it: the legs and the aprons. The aprons are going to finish up a bit narrower than 8". I wish that were 6" so that a common 6" powered jointer could handle them.

With that in mind, I e-mail Donnie and I'm in luck. He has a couple walnut boards he'd part with. We agree to meet at lunch. Sometimes hunting for the right wood takes weeks. Sometimes it falls in your lap. Ten minutes after pulling into his driveway, I'm the proud owner of two big walnut slabs and $90 poorer. The walnut goes into our wood rack to acclimate to the humidity in our shop – I'm going to give it five weeks or so.

Meanwhile, I need to make some templates for the table and find the best way to mark the walnut for all the curves ahead. A stack of black PostIt notes turns out to offer the solution to that problem.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was time to hunt through Donnie's garage.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Christopher Schwarz