This morning we skipped the 20th century entirely.

We invited a few dozen readers to the White Water Shaker Village, a 19th-century colony in rural Hamilton County that is being restored by volunteers. And we invited Freud Tools to the event to show off some of their newest tooling. Freud, never a company for half-measures, sent a huge mobile workshop on the back of a diesel truck.

Dang.

So we spent the morning touring the 19th-century buildings, learning about carbide tooling in the 21st century and trying to resist the doughnut mountain that Senior Editor Glen D. Huey brought to the event. Like any good history book, let's start at the beginning.

The progress on the Meeting House at White Water has come along nicely since our last visit out there. The poplar wainscotting is making its way all around the main room on the first floor. And the volunteer organization, Friends of White Water Shaker Village, is just about to enter an ambitious stage of the project: replacing the replacement windows with double-hung sash windows that look like the original.

All the readers received personalized tours and they were allowed to roam about the Meeting House, the adjacent dwelling and the barn freely. Also, they put the original 13'-long bench in the Meeting House – the bench that I'm going to be building a couple copies of this week. (Really. It will really be this week. I say that to myself in the mirror every morning.)

Senior Editor Robert W. Lang and I went over the bench together a little bit, looking for anything I missed when making my construction drawing for the reproductions. We both think the bench has a simple oil finish on it based on some visual clues.

Outside the Meeting House, Freud showed off its tooling and answered the endless stream of questions from the readers. I am one of the worst people when it comes to asking questions. I've learned a lot about tooling in the last 13 years at the magazine, but I always like picking the brains of people who live and breathe tooling.

And, as always, I picked up a couple really good tips from Kevin Kauffunger, Freud's Northeast woodworking specialist.

Here's the first one: Taking really light finishing passes with your tooling will greatly shorten its lifespan. Yup. You know what I'm talking about: When you take one final pass with a router bit to just cleanup the slight bumps and ridges left from your ham-handedness on an earlier pass.

The problem with this technique is that it really heats up the tooling. When you take a good pass and remove 1/16" of material, for example, the chips heat up. And as they are sucked away, that takes heat away from the cutters.

When you take a really light pass, you aren't generating any chips. So that's not taking heat away from the tooling. Plus, you are rubbing the finished profile against the tooling, and this generates heat as well.

How do you avoid this problem? Plan to make your final pass to remove 1/16" or 1/32". And keep your feed rate up (which also keeps heat from getting out of control).

So the real trick is planning your passes to end up with one good pass on your work.

"You can rush to mediocrity," Kauffunger said. "Or you can pre-plan for success."

I spent more than an hour in the Freud van and learned more about tooling in that time than I have all year by reading and attending shows. Thanks Freud.

This coming week, watch the blog for details on building the White Water bench. I think it might be the only project where the two indispensable tools are a European jointer/planer and a big honking ripsaw.

— Christopher Schwarz

At the Lie-Nielsen event we had in our offices in May, I gave away hammers. A lot of hammers. (No, this isn't the "making amends" portion of a 12-step program. Aw crap, I just offended all the addicts. Sorry addicts.)

Instead, I wanted to share the joys of cross-peen hammers. Think of it as giving away the first rock of crack for free. (Sorry to my readers who are hubba pigeons!)

During the last few weeks, however, my hammer collection has ballooned again, and it has me thinking a lot about the shape of their handles. One of the hammers that made it into my hands is a strapped C&S upholsterers hammer. It's a beautiful specimen that no collector would want because it was "cleaned" by a previous owner.

What's interesting about this hammer is the handle. Like many early strapped hammers, this one has a beautiful swelling (Megan, can I really write that?) at the base. As a result, when you pick up the tool, your hand automatically slides down the handle to grasp the swelling (no really, HR is gonna have my head on a stick). The problem with this form (for me, at least) is that it is not really comfortable to  choke up on the hammer to take light taps. The handle is a little thin there.

Today, a too-kind reader sent me a Soviet-era hammer still sealed in the packaging. The hammer is labeled as the "Stankoimport" brand, which I'm sure is a noble name in Russian. The hammer is wonderfully graphic, rugged and has a bright red (naturally) section at the bottom. The handle is basically rectangular in cross section, and we all agreed that it wasn't very comfortable. Ah, the price of revolution.

The most common hammer handle shape is the one on our shop's Plumb hammer (which also is red, like the blood of patriots, I suppose). It's ovaloid in cross section at its base and evolves into something with a few chamfers at it goes into the head. This is the handle shape I used for many years, from the time I was a boy really. And I thought it was the best.

Several years ago, however, a friend sent me a Hamilton hammer (above) that has an octagonal handle. This is, hands down, my favorite hammer handle. The flats on the front and back of the octagon are small (about 3/8" wide). The four chamfers that are 45° are about 1/2" wide. And the two wide flat areas that are parallel to the cheeks of the head are 3/4" wide. The octagonal shape extends up the handle about 6-1/2" where the shape becomes more ovaloid at the neck.

If I had to have one hammer for nails, this 16-oz. hammer would be the one. If I had to have one hammer for crushing in the skulls of the aristocracy, I'd say: "Fetch me my Stankoimport!"

— Christopher Schwarz

Drawing on his almost four decades of experiential knowledge as well as historic evidence dating back thousands of years, in “Hide Glue: Historical & Practical Applications” author Stephen A. Shepherd provides an in-depth look at the history, chemistry and techniques for making and using hide glues – as well as compelling reasons to do so.

The historical information is of particular interest to me. I was fascinated to learn, for example, that the Neanderthal artists of Lascaux used hide glue to help secure their paintings to the cave walls, and that a circa 1500 B.C. Egyptian mural depicts a glue pot on a fire. Shepherd also recounts a fairly detailed history of the hide glue industry in America.

A chapter on chemistry and physics reveals the technical reasons why hide glue works, and Shepherd provides specifications for those adventurous few who might wish to prepare their own glue from hides of all sorts (rabbit skin hide glue is the right stuff for metallic leafing and some book binding). But for woodworkers, the practical value of this book is in the techniques sections. Shepherd covers everything from the various forms of glue pots to brushes – including how to make your own by pounding the ends of a length of cane. And of course, he digs deep into hot hide glue preparation and use for joinery, veneering and more, as well as creative methods of clamping (proper clamping pressure is, he writes, paramount in achieving a good hide glue glue-up).

So why use hot hide glue when there are so many adhesives available that require no special equipment or preparation time (and have longer open times)? Beyond tradition, the best argument for hide glue is its reversibility. With a little water and heat, a hide-glue joint can be taken apart for repair, and reglued – without having to clean away all the old glue. Plus, the glue is inexpensive, ecologically sound, doesn’t interfere with finishes as do yellow glue and other modern adhesives, and it’s a lot easier to clean up. In short, Shepherd argues that hot hide glue is as good – if not better – than modern glues, and has many advantages.

“Hide Glue: Historical & Practical Applications” is a useful and informative book, especially for anyone interested in restoration work and traditional approaches to woodworking. It’s available from Tools for Working Wood ($19.95).

And a final note: Shepherd writes that Shakespeare mentions hide glue – and I’m mortified to admit I can’t find the reference (heck – I even read through "King John" last night!). If anyone knows, drop me a line.

– Megan Fitzpatrick, managing editor

Whenever I demonstrate handsawing, someone usually asks this question: "Should you saw right on the knife line or next to your line?"

I answer: "It depends. Usually I split the knife line."

They usually respond with something like: "Yeah, and I'm a Chinese jet pilot."

So I show them. And now that we have a cool new macro lens at the magazine, I can show you, too. Above is the shoulder of a dovetail joint I cut this morning. The knife line at the edges was made with a cutting gauge.

I am not showing off. This is easy to do with a sharp saw and a little practice. Not years. Not months. It takes just a couple days, really.

Here's my advice: Practice. Don't practice on a real project. (There's a reason that surgeons practice on cadavers.) Practice on scrap. After a few hours of work you'll find it easy to follow a line. After a few more you'll cleave a knife line in twain.

Other sawing advice can be found in my treatise on sawing in the Spring 2008 issue.

— Christopher Schwarz


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Last year I got to tour one of the Lee Valley Tools warehouses in Ottawa, Ontario. No wait, don't leave just yet. A Lee Valley warehouse is like the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory.

Yes, there are huge metal racks filled with bins for garden equipment, tools and Painters' Pyramids. But the Lee family also has a tendency to pick up odd items and preserve them in the warehouse. Example: an entire old-school hardware store – packed up and stored in boxes. There were entire pallets of odd-shaped metal parts or leftover factory stock of very old screws that Leonard Lee or his son Robin picked up while on an adventure.

Sometimes these finds end up in the catalog (remember the awesome French knives a few years ago, or the bronze hinges?). Other times, the items just sit and wait for the right purpose.

As Robin Lee was showing a group of us around his newest warehouse, his hand reached into a waist-high bin and pulled out a tidily wrapped cardboard box.

These were Swiss horseshoe nails, he explained. Every nail was perfectly formed and shiny. (Would you expect anything less from the Swiss?) And he had hundreds of these boxes.

The nails looked familiar to me. And because I took an interest in them, Robin gave me a box. It was a fun time getting them through U.S. Customs. ("Yes sir, Swiss horseshoe nails. No, I'm not a farrier. No, I have no idea what else they could be used for.")

When I got home, I realized that these nails looked a lot like ancient Roman nails, which were the forerunner of the classic cut nail of the 18th and 19th centuries. Roman nails have a square shank and taper on all four edges to a point. Some were shaped very similarly to these farrier's nails. Other have a head that was obviously designed to be proud of the surface. Cut nails have a rectangular shank and taper on only two edges.

I toyed with the idea of using the horseshoe nails in the 18th-century dry sink I recently finished building, but my experiments with the nails made me think twice. Because the Roman-style nails taper on all four sides, they have an even greater tendency to split the work. I tried a variety of pilot holes, but all I got were lots and lots of splits.

Perhaps the nails were better used in wetter wood, which would be more plastic. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong. I do know one thing: These nails hold like crazy. I had a heck of a time pulling them out, even from a badly split board.

In the end, I didn't feel sorry for myself that I couldn't figure it out. But I sure feel sorry for the Swiss horses.

— Christopher Schwarz

Pint-sized router planes see a lot of use in my shop. Instead of using a trim router, I always prefer to cut mortises for hinges with a chisel and a router plane. So as soon as Veritas and Lie-Nielsen started making small router planes based loosely on the Stanley No. 271 about 18 months ago, I was first in line.

I now have many hours on both tools – I've sharpened each one about seven or eight times. And I have developed some firm likes and dislikes about each tool. The next paragraph is a spoiler, so if you like a little suspense when reading blogs, skip it.

Neither router plane is perfect. But nor is there one clear winner in the category. If I could combine the best of both tools (the Lie-Veritas?) I think it would be the router plane of my dreams. Here's the lowdown on each tool.

The Veritas Small Router Plane
First the good: This plane has a closed throat and is quite compact. The closed throat allows you to work on the edges of boards without any danger of the tool tipping. The downside to a closed throat is you sacrifice a little visibility – it's a tad more difficult to see where you are cutting.

The compact size is a big plus with the Veritas. The tool is 3-1/4" at its widest, and that is an asset when you are cutting hinge mortises inside assembled casework. Sometimes larger router planes are too big and ram into the top or bottom of your case. This little guy sneaks in everywhere I ask it to go. The fit and finish is excellent, as is the knurled brass locking knob. The iron is durable.

The downside: I don't care for the round shank that the iron is mounted to. No matter how tightly I secure the locking knob, the shank can shift if you take a big bite of wood with the plane. When the shank slips, usually the blade height doesn't change, but the iron rotates left or right. You can rotate it back, but there is the danger of changing your blade's projection. So take light cuts.

Lie-Nielsen Small Router Plane
The good: The blade-locking mechanism is incredibly solid and the iron never slips. The iron is mounted to a square shank, so there's no chance that the iron can rotate during heavy use. Plus, I quite like the fact that the blade-locking knob can be turned with a straight screwdriver. The knob is small, so this is a big plus.

I also like the curved fingerholds on the body. These are comfortable and feel right when you are skewing the tool into a hinge mortise. Plus, they give the tool a little sex appeal. The fit and finish on this tool is also excellent. The iron is quite durable.

The downside: The tool has an open throat. The almost 3/4"-wide open section on the sole makes the tool unsuitable for work on narrow edges, such as cleaning up the ends of haunches in frame-and-panel work. If your work consists of a lot of work on edges, this isn't the tool for you.

Bottom line: I think the perfect plane for my work would be a router plane that had a closed throat, a compact size, curved fingerholds and an iron that had a square shank. Perhaps there's a vintage tool out there that meets these criteria, but I don't plan to start scouring eBay any time soon. Having both these tools covers all my needs.

— Christopher Schwarz


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Few modern people understand drawboring as intimately as John Alexander , the author of “Build a Chair From a Tree.” He and his students have drawbored more than 1,000 joints (with only six failures) during his classes on chairmaking.

In 1996, Alexander and Peter Follansbee, the joiner at Plimoth Plantation, published an article in a Chipstone publication about the 17th century workshop of John Savell in Braintree, Mass. This small shop turned out some important work that still survives. And Alexander and Follansbee examine it from a woodworker’s perspective, discussing 17th century stock preparation and joinery. The article is copiously illustrated with many eye-opening photos (check out the one that shows the nailed dovetails especially).

The complete text is an excellent read and is available free on Chipstone’s website.

— Christopher Schwarz