This coming week I'm starting to build a pair of close reproductions of the White Water Shaker Meeting House benches. Earlier this summer I measured the original bench, which is in a building near the Meeting House. When I'm done with these reproductions, we're donating the benches to the Friends of White Water Shaker Village, which is restoring the village, and Hamilton County, Ohio, which owns it.

The joinery in the benches is extraordinarily simple. It's all nails and glue. But these benches have been a massive woodworking challenge, even though I have yet to put a single tool to wood.

The reason I've been tearing out my hair (don't worry, I have plenty left) these last few weeks is that we've had trouble finding the walnut for this project. The original bench is 13'-1/4" long and 12-1/4" deep. Its top is one board and is pretty darn clear of knots.

Finding the right boards has required us to call in favors from all our friends. Last week, we finally hit paydirt. Chuck Bender at Acanthus Workshop found us a couple boards that we're going to bring back with us on our truck when we return from Woodworking in America in Valley Forge, Pa., next month. That will be enough for one bench at least.

Also, Dr. David Bryant, an avid woodworker and turner who owns a band-saw mill, donated three enormous planks of walnut to the cause. These planks arrived on Thursday and they are beautiful stuff. The nice detail here is that the walnut was cut locally, within about 15 miles of the White Water Shaker Village, and air-dried.

Of course, once we get all the wood in-house, I face some additional challenges. Our shop isn't set up to deal with 13'-long lumber – we're going to have to move some machines around. And our jointer is a 12"-wide model, which is 3/4" too narrow to deal with the top.

Of course, I considered surfacing it by hand, but my bench is only 8' long, so I'm going to have to rig up some sort of support system to keep the wood firmly down on the benchtop as I plane away.

The good news is that I'm also building a 4'-long version for publication in Woodworking Magazine. That short version, at least, should be a cinch.

— Christopher Schwarz

Woodworkers are like the undertakers of the tree world. We dissect the living tissue and prepare it (some might say mummify it) for its trip to the afterlife as a highboy or napkin basket.

Personally, I've always been a bit embarrassed that I don't know what the different species look like in the wild. And except for the species that thrive in this growing region, I couldn't tell you where in North America certain species grow. Where does juniper thrive? Heck if I know.

I've resolved to become better acquainted with our woodland friends before I rend them limb from limb.

Recently, a reader who is a forester sent me a book and a couple links that were extremely helpful when identifying trees. "Trees of North America" (St. Martin's Press) is a compact book that is easy to use. For every species, "Trees of North America" shows you on a map where it grows, explains a little bit about how to identify the tree in the wild and – most helpful – offers you color drawings of the tree, its bark, its leaves and fruit it might bear.

While you might think that photographs of the features of each species would be more useful, after using the book this week I prefer the drawings. A slightly stylized representation of the tree helps you focus on what is important in identifying it, instead of the background or other things that could be going on in the photo.

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.

Growing up in Arkansas, it seemed we had two kinds of wood: yellow pine and pine that was yellow.

I didn't really start to understand the crazy diversity of lumber available until my grandfather let me play with his collection of veneer samples from Constantine & Son. The store, founded in 1812, used to sell samples of 50 different woods. Each was 1/28" thick, 4" wide and 6" long.

That's where I saw prima vera for the first time, plus limba, benge and locust. It's where I fell in love with English oak and pearwood. For me, these wood samples were as good as staring at an atlas of the world (one of my other hobbies as solitary kid). The woods were from all over the world, and I'd wonder about the places they came from.

I still have that set from Constantine; it's on my desk this afternoon.  

Now furniture maker Gerald Curry offers a set of 46 American woods that is even more useful and interesting. The Wood Smart kit comes with 46 blocks measuring 1/2" x 3" x 6" in a well-fitted cardboard box.

I like these samples because you can actually see the end grain of the wood and have a chance to see how the wood looks when it is both quartered and rift-sawn.

Also cool: Each sample includes information you should know before building with that species, including its specific gravity (which is its weight compared to water), plus how much radial and tangential shrinkage you can expect from the species.

The lid of the box explains how to calculate all of these things for areas of the country that are dry and those that are humid.

Of course, the coolest thing is browsing through the species and looking at ones you aren't familiar with. I had the Wood Smart box open in the office during the last couple days and it's almost irresistible.

I'd never seen slippery elm, catalpa or sweetgum before. And I know that I'll never want to work with coffeetree (which looks like rotary-cut oak plywood). I was surprised by how different black ash is from white ash. And how green that red mulberry is.

The Wood Smart box points out that our domestic American woods are every bit as exotic as the woods across the sea. And as someone who prefers to use domestic woods whenever possible (not for political reasons; it's just my preference), the Wood Smart kit is eye-opening.

You can purchase the Wood Smart box from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks for $130. (Yes, that's about $43/bf, but good luck collecting all these species from your lumberyard.)

— Christopher Schwarz

As a 4-year-old, the woods behind my grandparents' house in Bronxville, N.Y., was both foreboding and magical to me. My grandfather would take me for walks there almost every day during the year my father served in Vietnam. We'd look under rocks, find bird's nests and poke around the underbrush.

I clearly remember one day my grandfather bringing along a saw from his woodshop. And when we reached a certain tree, we stopped and he began sawing a limb off the trunk. He gave no explanation.

After slicing through the limb, he looked at the freshly cut end grain. Then he put this limb on top of a fallen trunk or rock and sawed off a disk about 1" thick. He picked the disk off the forest floor and handed it to me.

I looked at the wood. And the wood looked back at me.
 
Somehow rot or mineral streaks had created a smiley face in the end grain of the disk – two eyes and a perfect grinning mouth. I kept that chunk of wood for years, but I lost it sometime after we moved to Arkansas.

Since then, I've encountered many faces in the boards that have passed under my hands – there's a reason they call it "face grain." For me, wood grain is like puffy clouds; I'm always looking for patterns or meaning.

Turns out, I'm not alone. Reader Chris Burn of Ottawa, Ontario, sent me the photo above of a sheet of veneer that came out of a plant in North Bay, Ontario.

It's pretty cool. But I'm glad that this is a rare occurrence. If every log I cut open was looking at me, I might think twice about firing up the table saw.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. To download the full-resolution photo, click on the link below.

face_veneer_full.jpg (1.74 MB)

Today we glued up two chunks of what will become Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick’s workbench.

For those of you just tuning in, I haven’t broken my vow of workbench chastity. The bench design isn’t new (it’s actually quite old), but the material we’re using is. The whole thing is going to be made out of LVL – laminated veneer lumber. So this is a story about a new material. Really. And it’s Megan’s bench, not mine.

After slicing into the LVL on the table saw I learned some of the finer points of this engineered material. Because of the laminations, there really aren’t any stresses in the planks. It cuts easily, like nice plywood.

I ripped each LVL 2 x 12 into four 2-3/4"-wide strips. Then I jointed the solid-wood faces of each strip. The nice thing about LVL is that the faces are thick enough to withstand a couple passes on the jointer before you cut through the lams – it’s like thick, old-school veneer.

The bad thing about LVL is the seams. Every six feet or so there is a scarf joint where the lams overlap one another. These seams determine the direction you should run the material over the jointer. I jointed one of them in the wrong direction and was rewarded with a big splintery bite at the seam. I’ll never do that again.

The material is fairly consistent. The first plank I sliced up was dimensionally perfect in thickness and width. The second one was not. One end was a little thicker than the other (about 1/16") and the plank had a pronounced crook – but only on one edge. Crazy.

The only other bad thing I have to say about LVL is that because it’s (usually) made from Southern yellow pine, it’s pretty dang splintery. I’m in Detroit tonight for a photo shoot tomorrow and let’s just say I brought some LVL with me for the ride.

We glued up the two slabs with regular Titebond and left them in the clamps overnight. Yellow pine can have a lot of resin, which resists waterborne glues. So Titebond’s resident pointy head (Dale Zimmerman) recommends we leave it clamped for at least five hours. We’ll glue up the remainder of the top on Friday.

How will we flatten it? I’m still working on that. Megan keeps bringing up the fact that Senior Editor Glen D. Huey has a wide-belt sander that can handle a 24" top.

— Christopher Schwarz

After pestering my flu-infested father for three days, he finally felt well enough for us to visit the Angel Oak on John’s Island – which some people consider to be the oldest living thing east of the Rocky Mountains.

It’s a gargantuan live oak (Quercus virginiana) that is estimated to be 1,400 to 1,500 years old. It was a sapling when Arthur was trying to beat back the Saxons in England.

Live oak is an interesting bird. It’s more of an evergreen tree in some ways. There’s a young live oak outside my dad’s front door in Charleston, S.C., and today it still has all its leaves. It doesn’t drop its leaves until the new ones are ready to come in.

The wood is also interesting. It is one of our heaviest native hardwoods (55 pounds per cubic foot when air dried). Like its other oak brethren, it is stiff and strong. The live oak was prized for shipbuilding, however now it’s difficult to find commercially. Heck, I’ve never seen it for sale in any rack.

The Angel Oak (which is named after the plantation it grew on), is like something out of Lord of the Rings. It twists and turns and branches everywhere over a huge area. Branches leave the trunk, dive underground and come up again. Weird. Though the tree isn’t tall (just 65 feet high), it is quite wide (the canopy covers about 17,000 square feet of ground).

When we arrived at the tree it was raining hard, and I expected that we’d be the only ones there. Wrong. Apparently it was Cletus Hour at the Angel Tree. Instead of the quiet reverence I was anticipating, there was a bit of a hoe-down going on beneath the branches. A group of about 10 people were gawking at the tree and screaming at each other: “I love this tree! I loves it!”

Then they got into an interesting debate about whether it would have been better to be under the tree (or not) during Hurricane Hugo. The line of argument was something like: “Uh-huh,” and “No way” and “I LOVES this TREE!”

Then they went to the gift shop. Yes, this tree has its own gift shop.

After the people cleared out, it was more like a cathedral than a roadhouse. The leaves of a live oak don’t look like your typical oak. They are waxy and lozenge-shaped, and there’s something odd about the tree having all its leaves on the last day of February.

During the last 1,400 years some branches have broken off in interesting ways, and my father kept pointing out some faces he could see in the ripples of the bark and broken branches. I saw nothing. I apparently need to take his temperature to see if his brain is cooking.

I knew it was time to go when the rain stopped and a tour bus pulled up. But before we left the tree’s canopy, I had one more task to do. I picked up a cluster of leaves and acorns that had fallen on the ground and stuffed them in my pocket.

The soil of Fort Mitchell, Ky., probably isn’t sandy or warm enough to support a live oak, but stranger things have happened – such as tree living for 1,400 years.

— 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


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.

Poke around enough old woodworking books and two things will happen. You'll become a tremendous bore at parties ("Aye, but I could find no mention of the 'pricker' tool in Nicholson, so I knew the usage had shifted…."), and you'll encounter the word "deal" over and over.

What's deal? It's easy to get the impression that deal is merely an English word for dimensional pine. But if you dig around, it's more complex than that. In one early text the author instructs you to build the project using "pine or deal." Huh?

Let's hit the books.

In my library, the accounts I dug up agree that deal is a plank of pine or spruce that is 9" wide. But they disagree on the thickness. According to Bernard E. Jones's "Practical Woodworker" (10 Speed Press), deal is 9" wide and no more than 4" thick. Charles H. Hayward's "Carpentry for Beginners" agrees that deal is 9" wide, but says the thickness is between 2" and 4". And Paul N. Hasluck's "The Handyman's Book" states that deal is 9" wide and 2-1/2" thick.

What is also helpful to know is that deal is just one word that English books use to describe standard sizes of wood. According to Hayward, here are the others:

Plank: A piece of wood that is 11" wide or wider and 2" to 4" thick.

Batten: A piece of wood that is 5" to 8" wide and 2" to 4" thick.

Board: Anything that is more than 4" wide and less than 2" thick. This term is usually used with floor boards and tongued-and-grooved boards.

Scantling: Small bits that are 2" to 4-1/2" wide and 2" to 4" thick.

Strip: Pieces that are less than 4" wide and less than 2" thick.

But that's not all. There are different kinds of deal. Deal that is Northern pine (Pinus sylvestris) can be called Baltic red deal, Dantzic deal or yellow deal. And Spruce (Picea excelsa) shows up as white deal. And Canadian spruce (Picea nigra) can be called New Brunswick spruce deal.

So there you go. Now you can read the old books and understand that word a little better. And you've enhanced your ability to induce ennui at will.

— Christopher Schwarz


Looking for More Free Woodworking Information?
• Sign up for our newsletters to get free plans, techniques and reviews HERE.
• Like tools? We do! Read our latest tool coverage HERE.
• Looking for free project plans? We have hundreds. Click HERE.
• Learn a new woodworking technique today. Click HERE.
• Want more videos? See all our free videos HERE.
• Check out our selection of half-price woodworking books HERE.
• Get 8 years of Popular Woodworking on one CD. Click HERE.

It's perhaps the ugliest photo of my Roubo-style workbench ever taken, but the image above is a picture of its Southern yellow pine benchtop that's magnified 200x. It looks a bit like the canals of Mars filled with Marshmallow Fluff (sorry, I'm still a bit hungry after lunch).

Isn't it a fascinating and useful photo? Nah. But I have a new toy on my workbench and I had a few minutes to kill before a photo shoot this morning. The new toy is the EyeClops BioniCam, a digital microscope intended for children who like to look at bugs and (most likely) their own boogers.

The EyeClops magnifies things by 100x, 200x and 400x. And when you take a photo it drops the picture on a USB flash drive that you can then put in your computer. I've always wanted a decent digital microscope so I can view sharpened edges for defects and for fun (the threshold for "fun" is fairly low in Southwestern Ohio).

This isn't my dream microscope. But Amazon.com recently discounted the EyeClops to $20 from $80. So I bought one to get SuperSaving shipping on another order. I'm still learning to focus the thing – it's a bit touchy. But it's fun.

My edges look horrifying at 400x. But then so does everything else (freckles, notebook paper, apple skin). In the photo above, I think the white lines are actually film finish – my benchtop has an oil/varnish blend on it.

After I get a little better at using the instrument, I'll post some more photos. I took some cool photos this afternoon of what maple looks like after it has been smooth-planed.

OK, now I gotta get back to work. I have split infinitives to reunite.

— 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

But with that great smell comes great mystery.

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

— Megan Fitzpatrick

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not, honey?” I asked.

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

Huh?

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

WoodMovement.pdf (272.5 KB)

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

I’ve made a fair number of workbenches using Southern yellow pine (sometimes called longleaf pine) and it’s always been a challenge to get tight joints that stay closed after years of abuse and seasonal contraction and expansion.

As I dove deeper into designing this Roubo-style workbench, I realized that gluing up this workbench would be more difficult than any other Southern yellow pine project I’d attempted. Of course, I reached that conclusion while unloading the $230 worth of material from my sadly overloaded Toyota pickup. The resinous surfaces and the weight of the 2 x 12s reminded me of all the difficulties I’d had in the past.

So I decided to see if I could make it easier.

The next morning my first phone call was to Dale Zimmerman at Franklin International, which makes Titebond. I’ve worked with a lot of glue people in the last decade, but Zimmerman has always been they guy who would give it to me straight, even if it didn’t benefit Franklin. For certain applications, he’s even steered me to some products (epoxy and plastic resin glue, for example) that Franklin doesn’t even make.

Here’s the Southern pine gospel according to Dale: He doesn’t consider the wood to be particularly difficult to glue under normal circumstances, but it is denser and more resinous than many of the easy-to-glue pines, such as white pine. Both the density of the wood and the resin work to prevent moisture penetration. And because PVA glues rely on moisture to wick into the wood, this can sometimes be a problem.

After explaining the workbench’s top to Zimmerman (it’s made of 20-something lengths of 1-1/4” x 4 x 8’ pieces) he had some recommendations. The first is to wipe down any resinous areas with some acetone right before gluing up. The acetone would help wipe away the resin temporarily to allow the glue to penetrate. I’d used this trick before on teak, and cocobolo, but I had used lacquer thinner.

Zimmer said lacquer thinner and mineral spirits (another common chemical used this way) were bad ideas. The reason is they evaporate too slowly and will also prevent the glue from penetrating into the wood.

“In this case the cure would be worse than the disease,” Zimmerman said.

Acetone is flammable, so take care with it when using it.

The other suggestion was to keep the top laminations in clamps for far longer than recommended. Most yellow glues recommend you keep the parts clamped for 30 minutes to an hour. But with a heavy-duty glue-up like this one, Zimmerman recommended four hours, especially if any of the pieces were bowed. No matter how carefully you machine your pine, you’re going to have some pieces that warp or bow on you. Gluing these is like gluing up a bent lamination, said. And so it’s perfectly reasonable to keep the project clamped up longer.

For the last two days I’ve been gluing up the top. I have one more joint to go and only one sliver of a gap in 19 of my 8’-long joint lines. Thanks Dale.

— Christopher Schwarz