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

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

If you want to get started, just click here.

What are woodworkers wishing for this year? Here are the top 10 most-requested items.

1. "Handplane Essentials"
2. Popular Woodworking 2000-2007 on CD
3. "Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use"
4. "The Perfect Edge"
5. "Made By Hand"
6. "The Best of Christopher Schwarz" on CD
7. "The Best of Shops & Workbenches" on CD
8. "Hand Tool Essentials"
9. "The Best of Arts & Crafts" on CD
10. "Turning Basics for Furniture Makers" on DVD

And because we are twisted in the head, here are the 10 least-requested items. Poor chickadee.

1. What's Cookin? Plan
2. Treasure This Plan
3. Woodworking Magazine Issue 14
4. Popular Woodworking October 2007
5. Project: Clips N' Things
6. Project: Box in a Box
7. Project: Chickadee Cottage
8. Popular Woodworking October 2006
9. Project: American Kestral Sanctuary
10. Adirondack Chair and Footstool Woodworking Plan

Be sure to make your list before Nov. 30 to enter our contest.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

This year I'm enlisting the whole family to make woodblock stamps and custom stationery. I think it's a stroke of genius – sort of like the washcloth dispenser cabinet I invented. (I'm still waiting to make a million off that one.)

So this weekend, my daughter Katy and I headed down to the shop for a couple hours to putz around with my idea. I printed out a sample design on the laser writer – I chose dividers from Joseph Moxon's "Mechanick Exercises." Then I stuck it down to the face grain of some scrap cherry and started carving away at the waste using my grandfather's small-scale carving tools and a couple knives. Katy worked on one, too.

Within 20 minutes I had the stamp shown above. Then we went to Staples and bought 100 blank invitations for about $20 (look for these in the "Shotgun Wedding" department). And a pad of gel ink for $5 that was good for 100,000 impression (yeah, right).

After some experiments, we found we got the best results working with a piece of leather (we used a tool roll) underneath the paper. In about 10 minutes we stamped 20 cards and matching envelopes.

Here's our plan: For each deserving person, I'm going to carve the initial of their last name into a 2" x 2" stamp. The kids will stamp their hearts out and we'll all bundle up the stationery in a ribbon and put them in a box with their wooden stamp and a stamp pad.

Total cost per person: about $12 plus a couple hours of work.

That sounds a lot better than building a few bookcases, a gross of Shaker boxes or eleventy-billion pens.

— Christopher Schwarz

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).

The Kleins won via universal acclaim for several reasons: Convincing an entire family to do something this crazy, and the looks on the kids' faces. We suspect the kids are all up to no good and we're glad to see safety glass on the whole lot.

The Kleins win a "New Yankee Workshop" coffee mug that is autographed by Norm Abram himself. Abram signed the mug for Publisher Steve Shanesy. Randy Klein has three choices: keep the mug as-is, rub off Steve's name or Randy can change his name to "Steve." We're also going to throw in a two-year subscription to either Popular Woodworking or Woodworking Magazine – just because we can.

We've posted some of our other favorites in a Flickr slideshow, which you can view here. Below are some of our favorite runners-up:

OK, we're suckers for kids dressed like Norm.

Three generations of Norm! Excellent.

This footwear isn't so good for the shop – no steel toes.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

I think you see where this is going.

By the power vested in me by the Radio Shack Battery Club, I declare Saturday to be "International Dress Like Norm Day." This is the time to break out your flannel shirts, your tool belt, your safety glasses, your fake beard.

In honor of Norm Abram, we're asking all his fans to dress like the man, take a photo of yourself in costume and send it to me by midnight Monday, Nov. 2, at chris.schwarz@fwmedia.com. The person who sends in the best photo (as determined by our staff), will win a great prize. What is the prize, you ask? Well, it's one of two things. We have to dig through our archives to see if we still have them. But rest assured that if you like "The New Yankee Workshop" then you are going to want this prize.

Visit this blog later this week for more details on this point.

I'm encouraging/ordering the entire staff of the magazine to observe this important date (we're celebrating IDLND on Friday). However, some of us who shall remain nameless, are going to have to go shopping for flannel and safety glasses.

— 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.

So as a woodworker, it was both alarming and thrilling to read Robert Tarule's 2004 book, "The Artisan of Ipswich" (The Johns Hopkins University Press). This slim volume tries to capture the essence of everything important to 17th-century joiner Thomas Dennis as he built a chest for a client one November in his shop.

In this remarkable book, Tarule, a professional joiner, historian and former curator at Plimoth Plantation, takes a bird's eye view of one example of Dennis's work – a 47"-long lift-lid chest in oak with beautiful low-relief carvings. He begins the book with a bit of personal history to explain what led him down the curious path to reproducing 17th-century pieces for a living.

With his bona-fides established, Tarule begins to spin the tale of Ipswich, Mass., from its first mention in the historical texts to the time that Thomas Dennis settled there from England. Tarule's insights into Colonial Massachusetts are surprising (if you had a particularly sanitized view of Colonial history from school, as I seem to).

What you quickly realize is that one of the most important things in 17th-century America was access to wood – for fuel, tanning, fences, construction, cooperage, wheewrighting and joinery. In fact, wood turns out to be a sort of currency among the artisans. And the right to cut wood was the source of lawsuits, fines and revenge.

And so Tarule delves deeply into the topic of wood (oak, in particular). He contrasts how it grew and was managed in the coppices in England with its forms in the New World. And then he weaves the dendrology into the fabric of Ipswich society, explaining all the town's economic needs in terms of the wood.

As a joiner, Dennis needed particular kinds of wood for his work. So Tarule takes us into Dennis's head as he searches the forest for the trees he needs, and he and a helper split the wood and as he prepares it for the chest (now in the hands of the Ipswich Historical Society).

Tarule obviously spent many hours studying this chest to try to tease out Dennis's intentions. He uses every dimension, every knot and every stray tool mark to suss out how this chest was built and the mental processes Dennis employed to design the chest and organize the material to build it.

Because Tarule himself works this way (see his work at his Heart of the Wood web site), you can see that Tarule has faced the same decisions as he rived out the panels he needed for his own chests. And so the voice that Tarule gives to Dennis rings entirely true to me.

For the skilled woodworker, this book won't teach you anything about how to cut a tenon or a mortise, but it will show you how to change your methods to match the goals of a 17th-century joiner. The book won't give you precise part sizes that you can plug into your rip fence on your table saw, but it will show you how to use your material at hand to make adjustments as you go, and to sort out what is important and what is not.

But most of all, "The Artisan of Ipswich" will give you a deep appreciation for the work of 17th-century joiners and to see their pieces in a new light.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

You don't put women on the cover of a woodworking magazine, they said. You need a bearded, 55-year-old guy with a $7 haircut and Milwaukee's Best beer gut.

Despite the objections, I argued that it was Megan's bench, the bench was the cover story and so it was Megan who was going on the cover.

We sent that issue to the printer and a couple weeks later, we received the October 2009 issue of Woodworker's Journal.

With a woman on the cover. And a plywood project.

Megan's response: "Aw crap, they beat us to the punch."

"Nope," I countered. "It doesn't count. She's not depicted as the woodworker. She is the 'fantasy spouse' who is merely enjoying the project."

Then today my copy of British Woodworking showed up. Here it is:

This PG-13 sculpture is made from Baltic birch plywood by Peter Rolfe. OK you randy Brits. When it comes to putting a woman and plywood on the cover, you win this round.

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

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

How can you tell in the store if a chisel is too soft to hold a good edge? How can you tell if all the moving parts of a plane and its sole will work together to do good work?

There are lots of really good sellers on the Internet who will take your money back, so don't be afraid to ask about it. Here are my three favorites in the United States:

Brass City Records and Tools: Walt Quadrato runs a Connecticut storefront that sells records and tools. He manages to find tremendous tools as he haunts the markets of New England in the wee hours of the morning. And because he's a woodworker, he knows what makes a tool a user and what makes a tool a plane-shaped doorstop.

Walt also is a prince of a guy and isn't out to make a fast buck. I bought a Stanley Everlasting chisel from him years ago and have become a regular customer. If I ever need a tool, I just call Walt and ask if he's got it. He usually does.

And if you have a scraper plane problem, then you already know Walt. He's in the support group you attend every week.

SYDNAS SLOOT (aka Sanford Moss): Don't let the unusual name fool you (it's actually "Sandys Tools" spelled backward). Sanford sells tools part time, but he always digs up good users at fair prices, and he turns up some occasional collectible gems.

His site is also the single-best source of information on braces on the Internet. Sanford always ships things fast and is just great to deal with.

Olde River Hard Goods: If you like the really old stuff, you need to get to know Tony Seo. He digs up cool stuff (his passion seems to be the 18th-century stuff). And unless it's a real collectible, Tony will restore the tools he finds back to usable condition (removing surface rust, tightening hammer handles and the like). Most of the stuff he sells is on eBay as a "Buy It Now" option.

Let's just say that Tony was very happy to help me out with my hammer problem. And when I needed a real old-school holdfast to examine and use, Tony was the man.

As I said, there are lots of other great sellers on the Internet. This is by no means a comprehensive list – but these are the three guys who get most of my vintage tool dollars.

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

That February we had hosted a meeting of many of the makers of modern hand tools, from Veritas to Wayne Anderson to Robert Baker to Bridge City to Lie-Nielsen Toolworks (you can read about it in the August 2006 issue of Popular Woodworking). Blademaker Ron Hock attended – he was one of the pioneers of the recent renaissance of toolmaking – and he brought along a plane that Krenov had made for him.

Krenov's plane was an interesting contrast to the astounding feats of brass, bronze and steel that these toolmakers had brought along with them. Krenov's plane was made from an exotic wood, but that was the most exotic thing about it.

It was band sawn to shape – and from the looks of the toolmarks it was done quickly and accurately. The final shape of the tool's wooden body looked like it was created by a knife, with clean facets on the corners. It was comforting to hold.

Hock left the plane with me for a couple weeks to test-drive it, and that is where the real surprises began. I expected the plane to work well, of course. A sharp, well-bedded blade in a 2x4 can sing. But I was amused to find out how Krenov had tuned the tool.

The chipbreaker was made from some cast-off piece of metal that was painted red I think and was ground by hand and a little rough. The bed of the plane was shimmed with blue painter's tape to close up the mouth. The blade was a Hock (naturally), and Krenov had written an "H" on the plane's wedge in what I assume was a black Sharpie marker – "H" for "Hock" perhaps?

In any case, the plane worked brilliantly, as well as any of the exotic infills or high-end production planes I've ever used. I used the tool on some of the nasty boards that I keep lying around. These boards aren't for building stuff – I try never to build stuff with nasty interlocked grain – but for testing the limits of tools. Krenov's plane handled the wood with aplomb. And at that moment I felt I'd had a nice conversation with the man who wrote "A Cabinetmaker's Notebook."

I was a bit sad to send the tool back to Ron, and I planned to purchase one of Krenov's planes – planemaking was one of the things that sustained his spirit when his eyesight failed. But I never got around to contacting him. So chalk up another regret.

What I am left with, however, are his delightful books. Like many woodworkers, I was captivated by the ideas inside them. And as a writer, I was struck by his prose. Here was a guy writing woodworking books that contained little in the way of how-to information, the stock-in-trade of people like me. Instead he explored his long relationship with the material and the tools he used to shape it to his liking.

Few woodworking writers have ever managed to capture, bottle and distribute that impossibly compelling but difficult-to-explain relationship that all artisans have with their raw material. That was James Krenov's gift to us all.

So I'd like to end this entry with my favorite quote from James Krenov, from page 93 his book "With Wakened Hands."

“The understanding eye sees the maker's fingerprints. They are evident in every detail … Leave Fingerprints.”

Look carefully, and I think you'll see Krenov's fingerprints almost everywhere on our craft.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

What's not to like?

Well, the rule doesn't start on zero. Nor does it end at 6". The rule is actually 6-3/4" long and has about 3/8" of blank steel at both the end and the beginning. To add insult to idiocy, it actually looks like the first mark starts at 1/8" because the 1/8" is actually printed under what is supposed to be zero.

Who would commit such a crime against the legacy of Pharaoh Djoser?

We would, actually. When I started work here in 1996 we owned a magazine called Woodworker, which we were closing down. As the powers that be were trying to save the struggling magazine, they came up with all manner of ideas to get more subscribers.

One of their great ideas was to give away a 6" rule as a reward for subscribing. And this is what the marketing department came up with. Is it any wonder that the magazine folded?

After Woodworker closed, we had hundreds of these rules in the warehouse and tried to pawn them off on the unsuspecting public every year when we had a warehouse sale to get rid of damaged, overstocked or returned books. In 1996 we sold the rules for $1 each. The next year, they were 50 cents. Then they were "free with purchase."

And we still had some left when we closed our warehouse years later.

Why post this grievous error? Two reasons: To let you know that even though magazine editors act like a bunch of know-it-alls, we can get whacked by the idiot stick at times. Also, as a way of making amends, to offer you your money back (50 cents) to anyone who acquired one of these rules and wants to be done with it. Drop me a line if you have one of these in your drawer.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

Right after graduating college, the plumbing in our apartment bathroom melted down. So we went to work "French style" (rustically unshaven and unbathed) while the plumber took apart our pipes.

When I returned home, the plumbing was fixed, but our tabby had disappeared. I looked outside. No cat. After calling for her I could hear her meowing, but she was nowhere to be found. Eventually I unscrewed the plumbing access door next to the shower and found the tabby amongst the pipes – she had sneaked in while the plumber was working.

Years passed. My wife's nightmares about the incident faded. We bought an old house. After a couple years the drain in the upstairs bathroom disintegrated, so when my oldest daughter took a bath it started raining in the dining room.

To fix the problem, the plumber had to cut an access hole to get to the pipes. When he left, the daily rainfall had stopped in the dining room, but there was an 8" square hole in the bathroom wall.

This time two cats disappeared. I think one made a nest in there. My wife stopped cutting the pills in half.

We rescued the cats and taped up the hole. I vowed to make an access door that matched the bathroom's décor. After all, it would take just a few hours to build with my woodworking skills.

That was 11 years ago. And I have yet to begin the project.

Why do I hate home improvement projects? After all, I'm going to use the same tools. Plus wood, glue and finish. What's not to like?

During a focus group years ago, one woodworker explained it so perfectly that it has stuck with me to this day.

It's like oats, he said. "I hate oatmeal," he explained. "And I have to eat it every day for my health. But I love oatmeal cookies."

This morning I took pity on my poor spouse, measured the dang hole and made a SketchUp drawing of the door. I have just enough cherry left over from my last project to make this access panel.

I guess I like the smell of oatmeal better than I like the smell of rotting cat carcasses trapped in the walls. But it's a bit of a tossup.

— 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.

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

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

Here's Tom's account of the construction of the tool:

"I never would have come up with this if I didn't have a box on my desk with one of Lee Valley's small router plane blades in it. I was just going to punch a couple holes in the tin and ziptie the blade in place, but then I realized it wouldn't take much to make it functional.

"There's a small piece of brass to hold the blade and a piece of mdf to support the can.  And since I'm not going to tear off the lid, and the mdf is big enough I thought I might as well cut out notches for the blade and setscrew and have a self-contained router, right?  The brass and mdf are epoxied into the can so it's pretty solid. The wood shavings in the last photo were cut with this actual router plane."

Tom wins the unbound printer proofs to my new book “Handplane Essentials." When he sells them on eBay, likely he will be able to send his kids to college with the proceeds (it should cover about four minutes of tuition).

There were some other great entries that we'd like to show you. Take a look:

Ethan Sincox made this sliding bevel gauge, which won our hearts as the best-looking tool of the bunch. Heck I've seen bevel gauges that were made out of flimsier raw materials.

Roger Savatteri built this working drilling jig for making perfectly plumb holes. The bushing is held in place with a resin infill. And the resin is etched with alignment lines so you can position the thing on your work.

Steve Spear sent us several "tools" he made – but the best one by far was the always-dead-on digital bevel reader.

Kevin Hurbanis also sent us a photo of a working tool: This is a working offset gauge for scribing lines parallel to an edge. Pretty clever.

Rob Hanson of Evenfall Studios makes shooting boards for sale, so he naturally built a shooting board using one of the really big Altoids tins. Yes, that's a honking piece of ebony on there.

Kevin Bosse built a light-duty woodworking vise. Sweet!

Chris Bowyer built this handsome marking gauge.  Fill this box with resin or MDF and I bet it would work, too.

And James Quinlivan sent us this one, which I have titled, simply: "Screw Bad Breath."

Thanks to everyone who entered!

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

I never thought, “Man, that Mike Burton is one cheap chicken-scratcher.” Nor did I think, “John Sindelar is one rich yuppie fool.”

I’ve never understood those extremes, which is why I love my $9 Zona saw and my $900 Wayne Anderson smoother and use them both on almost every project.

Recently we’ve been having some fun on this blog on this topic. Sawmaker Andrew Lunn is removing some of the decorative details from his saws to lower the price. As a joke, I made a saw from an Altoids tin and posted photos of it saying it was the new cheaper Lunn saw.

Some people were not amused.

However, Matt Hodgson, a custom planemaker with Gabardi & Son Toolworks, was. He got into the spirit of things and made a bullnose plane from an Altoids tin. I was drinking some coffee when I opened his e-mail and almost scorched my nostril hairs with hot Italian roast.

For the record, Matt makes *much* nicer infill planes. I’ve borrowed one for a couple months to review. Check out his web site for details.

After seeing his “plane,” it gave me an idea. A perfectly stupid and dumb idea. Let’s have a toolmaking contest with Altoids tins! Yes, I used an exclamation mark, so you know that I’ve consumed a beer (a rye-based IPA, actually).

Here are the official rules: This contest is not valid for the terminally closed-minded or uptight. Make a “tool” using an Altoids tin. Take a photo of it. Send it to me (chris.schwarz@fwmedia.com) before midnight July 31, 2009.

The winner will receive a one-of-a-kind prize: The unbound printer proofs to my new book “Handplane Essentials.” I’ll sign them in a bodily fluid if you like. Wipe them with Woobie II, whatever you want to ensure the package is worth more when you sell the proofs on eBay.

This is a readable book! By that, I mean you can actually turn the pages! There’s a hardbound cover and the printed signatures of the complete book. They’re just not all glued together. It’s a great conversation piece, and suitable for burning by any of the local chapters of Wives Against Schwarz.

So save that next Altoids tin (or ask Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick for one of her eleventy-billion ones). Make a tool. And amuse the rest of us.

— Christopher Schwarz

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.

And one of our former illustrators, John McCormick, tried to go into business selling inexpensive pine coffins that functioned as bookshelves up until the time you needed them for your earthly remains.

And today the New York Times published an interesting story about the rise of home funerals and featured the work of a Maine woodworker who builds coffins that double as almost Ikea-like bookshelves. (Honestly, the bookshelves built by our illustrator years ago were uber-creepy. "Yes, I decorated this room in the Early Elvira Style.")

As I get older, however, the idea of building my own coffin appeals to me. I couldn't imagine paying $6,000 for a commercially-made highboy while I'm alive, so why should I ask my family to shell out those big bucks for a coffin after I'm gone?

Of course, I know what my wife will say.

"You'll never have it done in time."

— Christopher Schwarz

“Charlestonians thought of themselves as Englishmen who happened to be living in America, and naturally did everything possible to emulate the life of London society.”

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

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

Since I started visiting Charleston in 1993, I’ve read a lot about Elfe, seen his work in museums and read “Thomas Elfe Cabinetmaker.” But I’ve never visited his house on Queen Street, a circa 1760 Georgian house which is open for tours only two hours per day on Monday through Friday. My schedule and the house’s schedule have just never matched up.

Today I finally got to take a tour while I sent the rest of my family to the city market to buy T-shirts and llama-shaped key chains. The reason the house has such unusual hours is because it’s still the residence of Bill Ward, who owns the house and runs the tour.

The house is unusual because it sits about 30 feet off Queen Street, an unusually deep setback. Ward explained that the person who bought the house in 1968 when it was in a derelict state jacked it up and moved it back from the edge of Queen.

Other than that unusual point, the house is remarkably well-preserved. The four original rooms of the house are completely outfitted with the original cypress woodwork and nine-over-nine windows. To add to the Colonial effect, Ward turns off all the modern lighting (which I didn’t see much evidence of) and lights candles and relies on the natural light filtering in from the street during the tour. This enhances the tour, but makes interior photos impossible (I refuse to use flashes, sorry, but you can see photos here).

Ward has outfitted the house with original American, English and European antiques from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, including a modern reproduction of one of Elfe’s stacking chests made by a cabinetmaker at Colonial Williamsburg.

While Ward patiently answered the occasionally inane questions from the rest of the tourists (“What do you mean, it’s ‘Chippendale?’ ”), I took the opportunity to examine the woodwork throughout carefully. All four rooms of the house have fireplaces that are surrounded by beautiful cypress frame-and-panel mantles with extensive built-ins.

All the house's remaining doors are original with beautiful hardware and bold fields on the door’s panels. The rooms also feature wainscoting below a chair rail – all in all it’s a joiner’s paradise. Ward said that this wasn’t Elfe’s final house; a later house burned down.

What I also really like about these house tours is that you can get a bit of history that has been unfiltered by Disney or some modern interpreter. Elfe quite fits the American ideal of an entrepreneur. He was trained in England and came to the Colonies to seek his fortune. But he was a Tory, loyal to the crown, and owned a good number of slaves. Ward says that Elfe owned 10 slaves that worked in his shops and another 50 that worked at a farm that Elfe owned.

After the Revolution began, Elfe was deceased, but he had passed his tools and possessions to his son Thomas Elfe Jr., also a cabinet maker and carpenter. His family was punished by the new government, exiled from Charleston for a time and the estate heavily taxed.

Today I think that Elfe’s work is sorely underappreciated. Search the Internet a bit and I think you’ll agree that pieces from his shop are at the top of the heap. And there is lots of research ahead. One of his account books survives, which has been an invaluable source of data for scholars. But appreciation for Elfe himself isn’t on the scale it should be.

Witness the comments Ward made as we were wrapping up the tour. We were standing in his reproduction kitchen, which cleverly conceals the appliances, when I asked him if he knew this was Thomas Elfe’s house when he and his wife purchased it.

“No, not really,” he said. “My wife was from Charleston and we were looking for an appropriate period house to buy to house our antiques. We didn’t know who Thomas Elfe was.”

— Christopher Schwarz

A view of the modern back porch and kitchen. The original kitchen burned.

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

This week we got our first look at what the new saws will look like. Though Lunn has suffered some brutal (and unwarranted) criticism for his prices, I think it will be quieted by these new saws.

Shown is the new dovetail saw, which features a super-thin .010" sawplate with hand-filed fine teeth and a folded steel back that is 3/8" wide. The handle is turned rock maple.

Instead of hand-etching the blade, Lunn has developed a new process, which produces extremely crisp work, as you can see from the photo below.

How does it cut? Brilliantly, as you can tell by the dovetails shown in the photo. Contact Lunn for pricing, but do realize that customers are requested to supply their own Altoids tin and file handle.

— Christopher Schwarz

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.

If you are Canadian, then you can probably guess who I am talking about: Mag Ruffman. She was the host of the "Anything I Can Do" show in Canada that featured wistful, gauzy shots of Ruffman driving through the country, taunting the viewer with ribald puns and sawing through boards in a romantic barn while working behind a Veritas workbench.

Oh, and she also played Olivia Dale in "Road to Avonlea," which ran for seven seasons on television.

Though some might say that technically Ruffman is a home-improvement writer, I say to that: But her writing is so titillating. Recently I read a selection of her book "How Hard Can it Be?" out loud in the office, which is why I'm now scheduled for some sensitivity training with our human resources department.

That book is truly one of the funniest books I own. It might be the only home-improvement/woodworking book with a nude bath scene (and thank goodness, really. I'm not sure we're ready as a society to see Norm Abram buck naked. Well, I know I'm not).

Here's a quick G-rated excerpt about building rustic furniture from her book.

You can start creating your own romantic idyll with a few twigs and 2 x 4s. In fact, this is a great project for those new to woodworking because it's "rustic," meaning that even if your results fall somewhere between monstrous and butt ugly, you still rock.

If people criticize your garden screen, laugh mockingly, and say, "It's rustic, man. It's a choice." Then try limping a little when you walk away, so they realize that things haven't always been this easy for you.

Ruffman's work on Canadian television actually was our inspiration behind our "I Can Do That" column in Popular Woodworking, which features projects you can build with hand-held tools and no workshop. And in fact, I put Ruffman on the cover of Popular Woodworking in February 2002.

She built us a potty cabinet (that matches her mouth…), and it is the single most entertaining story we have published in the magazine since I started work here in 1996. Reader response was tremendous. I received letters from readers who said they read the thing out loud to their entire family multiple times. I've tried to get Ruffman back in our pages a couple times, but our schedules haven't worked out.

So Mag, if you're out there and want some work, if your poutine funds are running low, drop me a line.

In the meantime, I highly recommend you pick up a copy of "How Hard Can it Be?" from a bookseller and check out her ToolGirl.com blog, which features some of her older projects and details on what she's building, fixing or writing about these days.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

But on Thursday, I had a revelation.

That's when our family took a quick trip to New York City and paid a visit to the American Folk Art Museum. Ever since Lucy and I visited Howard Finster's Paradise Gardens in 1990, we've filled our house (and basement and attic) with this sort of stuff. The academics call it "outsider art," and the typical outsider artist is:

1. Completely self-taught
2. Driven by an unchecked passion to make things (Finster made 46,000 pieces in his lifetime)
3. Sometimes reluctant to sell his or her work
4. A little bit nuts

While I was wandering around the American Folk Art Museum, I began to get a very weird feeling in the pit of my stomach. In the museum's "Folk Art Revealed" exhibit, which runs through Oct. 18, one wall features a number of typical Shaker oval boxes. Two steps away, there is a small chest that is obviously a product of Pennsylvania's German community that features a couple painted figures on horses.

Then you turn around and there is a chest of drawers that is grain painted to look like it is made out of mahogany. To your right is a stepback cupboard filled with homemade pottery.

Downstairs is an exhibit devoted to Ulysses Davis, a Georgia barber who liked to carve things and then display his works in his shop. He produced an entire collection of carved busts of the presidents. It's nice work.

It's then that I realized that most of us qualify as outsider artists. We're self-taught, driven to make things from wood for ourselves and, yes, a little bit cracked for doing so.

So stop bathing, let your hair grow long and get yourself a beard (or grow out that armpit hair). Speak in circular riddles.

No one will ever ask you to build them a deck again.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

She drops the liquid hide glue bottle into the bucket then comes over to the bench, where I'm paring out the last little bit of the floor of my half-blind dovetails. I'm using a fishtail chisel, which she's never seen before, so Katy asks if she can give it a try. I show her how I hold the tool to wiggle it into the acute corners, then I put the tool in her hands.

After a couple shavings we knock the drawer side into the dovetail sockets. It fits fine, so Katy shakes the glue bottle and fetches the deadblow mallet. I hold the drawer front and Katy paints the sockets with hide glue using an artist's paintbrush I've owned since college.

I show her how I drive the joint together with a block of wood by spreading out the blows all along the joint line. Two taps. Move the mallet. After the first joint is home, Katy takes over gluing and assembly. We put the assembled drawer on the table saw and check it for square. We press the corners of the assembly against the rip fence until the box is square.

Then Katy goes back to the small bench I've rigged up for her and lines up the two handplanes on the end of the bench. She asks when she can start cleaning up the shop.

It's at that moment that I realize I'm living in a book. It feels a bit like the time I visited Graceland and descended the stairwell to Elvis's basement. Both walls are completely mirrored and the thousand reflections of your every move are both familiar and disorienting.

A New Book Project
Since January, I've been working on my next book project during nights and weekends. Joel Moskowitz (of Tools for Working Wood) and I are expanding a curious book that was first published in 1839. It is one of a series of short hardbacks written to introduce young people to the basic knowledge needed for a trade, such as baking, coopering, printing or joinery.

What’s amazing about this particular little book is that it is an engaging work of fiction that tells the tale of young Thomas, a lad who is apprenticed to a joiner's shop in a rural English town. Thomas begins his apprenticeship by sweeping the shop, managing the hide glue pots and observing the journeymen.

Then, thanks to a plot twist, Thomas is tasked to build a rough box for a customer who is leaving on a journey that same day. The book follows Thomas every step of the way, from stock selection through construction and finally to delivery, when Thomas brings along an envelope of cut nails for the customer so he can secure the lid shut before his trip.

Thomas goes on to build a schoolbox (which will be in the Autumn 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine) and finally a large chest of drawers, all the while picking up different joinery skills and the right attitude to become a competent and trusted journeyman.

It's an idyllic tale, and likely a bit sugar-coated compared to the reality of an apprentice's life in early 19th-century England. But that detail aside, the book is extraordinary. Not only is it fun to read, but if you build the three projects shown in its pages, you will get an excellent course in working wood with hand tools.

And so with Katy's help, I have been constructing these three projects by following the instructions in the book. And though I haven't told Katy much about the story, she is naturally falling into the role of young Thomas.

She has been working alongside me through most of the chest of drawers. When I don't need her help, she's off doing her own thing – trying out the different saws, messing with the planes and asking me questions. Such as this one she asked on father's day:

"Dad, when I grow up, do you think I'll be a woodworker?"

Well Katy, I think you already are.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

Jonathan Hale, the author of "The Old Way of Seeing" (one of my favorite books), explores this idea in a thoughtful way. Before 1830, carpenters and woodworkers viewed geometry as a world of secrets that teaches us to "trace the chain" of truths. After 1830, geometry became a set of rigid rules that a builder should follow to produce a design that was correct.

In Hale's view, the early builder chose harmony over symmetry. The modern builder reversed that relationship.

What happened in 1830? That's when the Greek Revival style of architecture swept the nation – this country's first national building style. Suddenly, new buildings (even humble ones) had Greek porticos with massive columns. Architecture had become a performance, according to Hale.

American society was also going through enormous changes. Clothing was becoming more prudish, as were attitudes toward sex and alcohol. Though America was still rural, the country was beginning to become urban and industrialized.

The same changes applied to furniture, according to Wallace Nutting, the author of the three-volume "Furniture Treasury." He challenged anyone to show him a piece of well-designed furniture built after 1840. For any piece of furniture since then, Nutting said he could produce one that was both better and older.

"Is it likely that anyone can think of anything new and good?" Nutting wrote. "It may be new, but it looks as if born in the infernal regions to plague the glimpses of the moon. Nobody in a hundred years has brought forth anything new except monstrosities, or at least inelegancies, weak shapes, or mongrels.”

Here at Woodworking Magazine, we have been investigating this tumultuous time in the history of furniture, architecture and society. And though you're probably reading this and thinking "What does this have to do with me and my workshop?" I hope you will bear with us.

— Christopher Schwarz

Illustration at top: A stand 1690-1720 from "Furniture Treasury"

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

The small room behind the door was filled with original Shaker pieces, most of which we'd never seen. An elegantly proportioned chest of drawers with frame-and-panel sides. A small side table. A blanket chest. A dozen chairs.

These were some of the treasures we discovered on a visit to the White Water Shaker Village, a mostly unrestored village about 30 minutes from our office. Tucked into a rural area of Hamilton County, the White Water Village is virtually unknown, both to woodworkers and local residents. But it is made up of 20 intact original buildings, including the trustee's office, a dwelling, the meeting house, three shops and many barns and stables.

The White Water Shakers were active from 1824 to 1916 in a variety of trades, from making brooms, silk, seeds, molasses and honey.

Next week look for a web story about our visit with lots of photos and details of this amazing and almost-unheard-of work-in-progress. Meanwhile, click here to see more photos from our visit.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

In 2002, the magazine’s entire staff flew to Southern California for our biennial trip to the AWFS show, where manufacturers roll out their new products and we soak up the desert weather. That year we decided to tour Maloof’s new compound, which had been moved to make way for a new freeway and had been built into the side of a mountain – just above smog level.

Senior Editor David Thiel made all the arrangements, and the plan was that one of Maloof’s assistants would show us around the place and let us take photos. We were thrilled.

So when Maloof himself greeted us in the parking lot, I was stunned. Dressed in a black turtleneck and blue jeans, he told us that he would love to show us around the place. It was one of my most memorable days on the job.

He introduced us to all his shop workers (he called them “the boys”) and looked over the work as it was progressing through the process of being shaped. He showed us stacks of chairs that people had brought him to repair. This is a hilarious malady of all chairmakers, great and small. People bring you hopeless cases and want you to fix them. Surprisingly, Maloof still repaired antique chairs on occasion. He just shrugged his shoulders when asked if he liked doing that.

Then we spent at least 30 minutes examining one of Maloof’s earliest pieces  – a cabinet – that the customer had brought in for some minor repairs. Maloof pointed out all the little mistakes he had made in the piece, both structurally and stylistically. (In other words, he acted just like any other woodworker who was showing off a project.)

Then we toured his home, which was filled with projects from his entire career, including his first project – a cutting board for his mother, I believe. Nothing was off limits. We got under all the pieces, asked too many questions and Maloof just smiled and answered them all.

Then he took us through his wood stash. Maloof had a serious passion for the material and had several barns filled with stuff that was achingly beautiful, clear and wide. All of it was labeled, thick as heck and ready to use.

After a few hours of this, we began to get worried that we were taking up his whole day, so we kept trying to excuse ourselves.

“Nonsense,” he said. “Let’s go to lunch.”

So we all piled into our cars – Maloof brought “the boys” and we headed to a Mexican hole-in-the-wall down the road. Maloof greeted the restaurant employees in Spanish as he walked in, and they gave us a corner table by the window.

“Get the chicken tacos,” he advised. I obeyed.

Over lunch he allowed us to pepper him with questions about the craft, his work, his legacy and fellow woodworkers. He answered every question with a direct answer (a rarity in journalism) – especially the last question: “Can we pick up the check?”

“No,” he replied.

Maloof had nothing to gain from us that day. The man’s legacy was secure and he could have spent the morning doing something more interesting than showing a bunch of jet-lagged, saucer-eyed editors from the Midwest around his place.

But he didn’t. And that small story is why Maloof was – and still remains – one of the most beloved woodworkers I’ve ever met.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

Cincinnati Classics
Within a mile of our offices we have the troika of Cincinnati food: Skyline Chili, LaRosa’s pizza and Graeter’s ice cream. There’s tons written about all three on other web sites. Here, however, is my quick take.

Skyline: The chili has no beans and is flavored with chocolate and cinnamon. Sounds foul, I know. Either you are going to love it or hate it. I happen to love it. If you want to be like a local, order a three-way (spaghetti, chili and cheese) and a cheese coney. Lipitor not included.

LaRosa’s: This pizza chain is bigger in Cincinnati than the national chains. It’s a provolone-based pizza with a sweet tomato sauce. Toppings are under the cheese. It is an acquired taste, which I have acquired.

Graeter’s: Fantastic ice cream (and pastries). The chip flavors are particularly excellent. Try the mint chip or the black raspberry chip. This is another reason we are so well fed here in the city.

The Road Less Traveled
Dewey’s: This is a gourmet pizza place about a block from our office. I would eat here every day if I could. Great pizza (try the Edgar Allen Poe). Outstanding local beer. And the house salad is tremendous.

Ember’s: This is also a block from our office. It’s one of the city’s top-rated steak and sushi places. A bit fancy, but outstanding food, service and martinis. No one has ever said a bad word about the place.

La Petite Pierre: Though Cincinnati is a German town, we have a deep tradition of French restaurants. This one (in an old house about a mile from our office) is a jewel. It has a small menu that changes daily, but I have never had a bad meal there. It’s family run and beyond good.

Montgomery Inn: This is a famous Cincinnati rib joint about two miles from our office. Don’t bother unless someone else is paying. It’s overrated and overpriced for what you get. If you go, get the Saratoga chips and a Ted’s Red Ale. Then call it a night.

Jeff Ruby’s: This is downtown. And it has, quite simply, the best steak I’ve ever eaten. Bring your wallet and your trophy wife, but be prepared to be amazed. Don’t get kissed by the soul singer who fronts the band. And don’t ask me why I know this.

Nicholson’s: This is a Scottish restaurant across the street from Jeff Ruby’s downtown. Good pub food (the roasted chicken – yum). The best scotch selection in town. Outstanding beer (ask what they have as a cask conditioned ale or get an Edmund Fitzgerald porter on tap).

JeanRo: Also downtown. A lively French bistro. It’s mid-priced, but you can get some good French classics there (coq au vin is always reliable), good Belgian ale, good wine.

Jo An: Are you flying in? This is a Japanese place by the airport that is run by Toyota. This is like being in Japan. There’s a great seasonal menu and the sushi is as good as I’ve had in the U.S.

Hofbrauhaus: This is in the entertainment district in Newport, Ky., right on the river. It’s a short hop. Good German food (especially the handmade sausage and pretzels). Great German beer. Nice beer garden with a glorious view of the downtown skyline. If you don’t end up dancing on the table by the end of the evening, you didn’t do it right.

Mecklenburg Gardens: This is a very old German restaurant by the zoo. It has good German food, but the most incredible beer garden. Ancient vines. A perfect place to spend an afternoon or evening talking with friends.

La Mexicana: This is a Newport restaurant/grocery store. This is the real deal and is not for the faint of heart. Goat tacos. Bring your Spanish and be ready to be happy. And it’s as cheap as dirt.

Shanghai Mama’s: This place is downtown and is open into the wee hours of the morning. They make their own noodles on site. Cheap and tasty and a great place to be at 2 a.m.

Cock and Bull: Another Kentucky pub. This one is in Covington in the old Mainstrasse section. It has the best fish and chips in the city (they’re panko crusted). And a good selection of English beer.

The Pub: This is in Norwood, about five miles from the office. It’s an authentic English pub. (All the fixtures came from England.) Good beer. Good food. Good crowd.

Trio’s: This is a nice-looking place about two blocks from the office. Boring food. Practically pre-chewed.

Blind Lemon: This is my favorite hang-out place in Mount Adams, which is near downtown. Acoustic music in an outdoor garden. The inside is super funky. For adults, not for kids. That means it's not a dance place. Also, Cincinnati is smoke-free (Kentucky is not). So take that into consideration.

Plus there are a bunch of chain restaurants all around the office. Whatever.

Breakfast
First Watch: This is a block from our office and is reliable. Not crazy good, but better than IHOP or Waffle House.

Servatti’s Bakery: These are in several places all around the city. Good German pastry. Good doughnuts.

Greenup Café: My favorite breakfast/brunch place. Outstanding French pasty and hot breakfast. It’s in Covington, Ky., in a quaint old house. It’s worth the drive.

BonBonerie: This French bakery and tea house is about four miles from our office. Everything is from scratch and is butter-tastic. If I lived closer to this place I would be 1) huge and 2) under a restraining order from the place.

Wow. What a long blog entry. I guess I have a bigger problem than I thought.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liar.

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

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

Again, Underhill is an excellent liar.

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Believe it?

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

StrikingKnife.pdf (285.11 KB)

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

But today I think the woobie goes in the garbage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

That day arrived on Saturday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silence.

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

“It’s hard to say” is the response.

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

Huh?

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

The Connecticut road the next morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

These are not friendly conversations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

It’s seeing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Score one for organized sporting events.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

But the dial caliper can be a cruel master.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz