Lost Art Press: Chris Schwarz

The waitress rushed up to me at the cash register with a desperate look in her eye. In defense, I held out a $6 tip, but she ignored it and fixed me in her gaze.

“Will you sign a placemat? Or a napkin?” she asked. “Do you have something you could sign?”

I shook my head and started walking to the exit.

“Sign anything,” she said. “The cooks will be so disappointed if you don’t.”

This was the final and odd scene of my four-day odyssey at the Woodworking in America show in Berea, Ky., where 350 hand-tool woodworkers got together during Nov. 14-16, to talk about tools, techniques and history.

The show itself was great fun, and I’ll be posting lots of photos and stories on my blog at Woodworking Magazine (one of the organizers of the show). But for the readers of the Lost Art Press blog, I saved this particular tale. It begins about an hour before getting rushed by the waitress.

After four days on my feet and 12 hours (total) of sleep during that period, I packed up our rented Ryder with all the workbenches, grinders and clamps we’d brought to the Woodworking in America show. Senior Editor Glen Huey climbed into the passenger seat of the truck and we drove north to get some lunch with some of the other magazine editors and John Hoffman, the other half of Lost Art Press.

We met at the Richmond, Ky., Steak 'n Shake, and our party of five snagged a window seat and started looking at the menus.

Our waitress took our drink order and when she returned, she asked: “Are you guys the Oakridge Boys?”

To which Hoffman immediately answers: “Yes.”

I start laughing and tell her that no, we’re not the country/gospel quartet. But she is undaunted.

“The cooks up there in the red ties say you are the Oakridge Boys,” she said, pointing to the rear corner of the store. I look back to see two young guys with enormous smiles on their faces looking right at me.

I point to Associate Editor Drew DePenning at the end of the table.

“He’s 23,” I explain. “He would have been a fetus when the Oakridge Boys were popular.”

She gives me a quizzical look but takes our food order. Glen Huey is chuckling so hard he’s having trouble ordering. Senior Editor Robert Lang is his typical placid and inscrutable self.

After the waitress walks away, I start singing the base vocal to “Elvira” and try to get Bob to join in. He smiles, but he won’t take the bait.

We eat. And as we try to leave, I’m ambushed by the waitress, who insists that I’m the band’s manager. “Don’t you have some posters or CDs you could sign for us?” She chases us to the door.

We all scurry to our cars. I fetch my laptop from Hoffman’s Honda and head back to the Ryder truck.

“Crap!” Hoffman says. “I locked my keys in my car.”

Hoffman calls a locksmith, who promises to be there in 10 minutes. We stand there for a minute and realize it is too cold to wait outside.

“I guess you gotta go back into the Steak 'n Shake,” I said.

“Oh no,” Hoffman said, shaking his head.

But then he turns and heads back into the arms of fame.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. After I got home, I looked up a photo of the Oakridge boys and busted out laughing. I can see it: John Hoffman is Joe Bonsall. Glen Huey is Duane Allen. Robert Lang is a better-coiffed William Lee Golden. And I’m Richard Sterban. And Drew? Just another 23-year-old gospel/country fetus, I guess.  

Years ago, we performed a year-long survey at Popular Woodworking to find out what sort of projects appealed to our readers. We were interested in what furniture styles they liked, but we were also interested in what furniture forms (tables, bookshelves etc.) that they most liked to build.

So in every issue we asked the readers to rate which projects they liked. After a year of data, we were shocked at some of the results.

Here was the wildest finding: Our readers really liked and needed plans for over-the-potty cabinets.

It’s easy to turn your nose up at this pedestrian form of furniture. Heck there’s never been a woodworking book titled “Best Dang Potty-Cabinet Plans” or a juried exhibition of studio furniture makers titled “Fine Cabinetry in the Can: Poetry and Motion.”

But maybe there should be.

One of the first projects I was ever really excited about personally was a potty cabinet. I thought it was a million-dollar idea when I came up with it. It’s a simple but fine-looking wall cabinet with delicate rails and stiles. The real cool thing about it is that the bottom of the cabinet dispenses washrags like a tissue box. And the interior guts of the cabinet are clever – the washrags never come spilling out when you open the door. And it has a cool handmade wooden hinge.

My co-workers still mock that cabinet (which is why it’s never been published), though my wife and kids use it every day. I know I still have the router pattern for the opening in the bottom of the cabinet (that took some doing to figure out). And now that I’m editor….

In any case, last week I finished up a new bathroom cabinet for our master bathroom. This was the last piece of built-in furniture I’d planned on building for our home’s addition, which was a project we started on seven years ago.

Because this project was for me, I was free to design it without worrying about co-workers or readers. So I could add details I liked, such as the divided lights in the door, which are just slightly recessed from the face of the door. And I could snitch details from other projects of mine without looking like a Johnny one-note – the top cap of the cabinet is stolen directly from my tool cabinet at work.

I built the cabinet using offcuts from the shop at work. The best part of the project was finding perfectly quartersawn stock lurking in the knottiest and nastiest board in the shop.

For my family, the best part of the project was that I designed it to hold six (six!) rolls of toilet paper, plus toiletries.

Here’s a TP design tip: Design your cabinet around the 5” dimension. A 5” x 5” x 5” space will do a good job of holding a decent-size roll (no promises on the super-jumbo-mondo rolls of paper).

If you’re interested in a simple construction drawing, you can download a pdf below.

Master_Bath_Cabinet.pdf (15.26 KB)

Maybe there is actually a book on this somewhere. Let me first see what Moxon says about potty cabinets….

— Christopher Schwarz

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I have spent almost a year or so using only the Nicholson bench.  I am very fortunate to have both the Nicholson and the first bench that Chris made titled “The $175 Bench”.  The $175 bench is similar to the Roubo in that the legs are flush with the top which is thick and stiff and there is no apron.  I have kept a piece of hardboard on the top of the $175 Bench which turned it into an assembly table. 

 

Some thoughts on the different benches: 

 

Nicholson: First the length of the Nicholson is awesome.  In the first picture I have 21 items on it which all fit on the 8 foot top. The ability of a bench this long is that you can move different parts of your project forward at the same time or in my case work many different projects at once and not get any done!

 

Vises on the Nicholson:  These are great.  The wagon vise combined with the length of the bench make working the face or edge of board a breeze.  I move the dog where I need it and put the other dog in one of the two holes in the wagon vise and I am good.  I have also used the apron and leg vise to hold a piece that would have been two tippy in the wagon vise set up.  The holes in the apron were perfect for getting the board to the right height.

 

The leg vise has also been smashing!  It has a bit of leather on the inside of the vise and grips like a pit bull on a hobo.  It has been a superior means to hold work over the traditional face vise on the $175 bench especially since it is placed on an angle which allows the work to reach the ground without hitting the vise screw.

 

That said, the one major issue I have experienced with the Nicholson is the inability to use my holdfasts.  I am the proud owner of two holdfasts from Phil Koontz.  These are perfect and work extremely well.  It seems that the thickness of the top does not allow the holdfast to work.  I am not sure if another type of holdfast would work or not.  Since the Nicholson doesn’t have holes in the top like the other bench, I have tried to work around this with varying degrees of success.  The only other complaint I have is that the apron does not allow any clamping to the top and requires me to reach underneath it to push up the bench dogs.  I have also noticed that hammering anything is best done over the legs of the bench, whereas anywhere on the top of the $175 bench works fine.

 

Yesterday I unveiled the $175 bench from underneath its hardboard coffin.  I needed to put a card scraper to a thin piece of wood.  The ends were mitered and I knew the bench dogs would dent the ends if I squeezed them in the wagon vise.  Instead I used a piece of scrap and with a thrill I hammered my holdfast.  I did one side then switched it around.  This was awesome!  I also had the joyous feeling of putting my hands under the top without bending over.  That was so nice I felt an urge for a cigarette!

 

I think I have the perfect setup with the two benches.  I am going to keep the Nicholson against the wall which I have found to be an “ok” thing to do.  I like the ability to move around a project and have definitely had a time or two where I was in a physically challenging position because of the limitations that were caused by the bench being against the wall.  I would like to know if anyone else has been using their bench against a wall and have had problems with this configuration.

-John

 

When I first became intrigued by hand-tool woodworking, I kept encountering people who said things such as: “Yes, but Moxon says jointer planes should have their cutters sharpened straight across – not curved.”

“Moxon says you should cut mortises this way.”

“Moxon says you should test a handsaw by bending it.”

As Jan Brady of “The Brady Bunch” might say: Moxon. Moxon. Moxon!

At the time, I figured I should really try to take a woodworking class with Joseph Moxon. He seemed to have the ear of the entire woodworking hand-tool community. As I soon found out, however, Moxon has been dead since 1691. Not even the long arm of Marc Adams would be able to get that guy to teach a class. Nor would Marc want to. Moxon was a printer and globe-maker by trade. Not a woodworker.

What Moxon did, however, was remarkable. He published the first ever English-language account of woodworking shop practice. He covered tools, techniques and general shop practice in a series of pamphlets titled “The Art of Joinery,” which were later combined with accounts he wrote about other trades into the seminal “Mechanick Exercises.”

So I snagged a reprinted copy of “Mechanick Exercises” and read it several times. It was slow-going. The English language of the 17th century transposed the letter “f” for the letter “s.” So the sentence “…so shall the bounds of your mortise be struck” reads as “fo fhall the bounds of your Mortefs be ftruck.” Plus the sentence structure of the time can be a maze for the modern mind.

Fourteen months ago, I began to update the text of the chapters that comprise “The Art of Joinery.” I cleaned up the transpositions, shortened the run-on sentences without changing the meanings, and I added notes in the text to help the reader. I split up Moxon’s plates so the drawing of the paring chisel is with the text about the paring chisel.

Then I added my own plain-spoken explanation of Moxon’s original text, which can be bedeviling at times. I tried to explain what was going on in each section of “The Art of Joinery,” and I illustrated Moxon’s techniques with more than 40 photos.

It’s not an academic book by any means – I’ll leave that to the people with more college degrees. The text I added is from the perspective of a modern woodworker seeking to understand historical shop practice and find techniques to make life easier. And I did indeed find some good stuff in Moxon, from using a fore plane properly to using spit to sharpen.

I’ve put it all in a 96-page book that is now at the printer in Maryland. This will be a hardbound 6” x 9” book with a linen cover and embossed letters. The interior pages will be Smythe sewn – meaning the pages will be sewn together instead of simply glued. The entire book will be in old-fashioned black and white.

The book will be $17 and will be available here at Lost Art Press and through a select few woodworking retailers. It will not be available through mass-market channels. All copies sold through the Lost Art Press web site will be signed, of course.

As soon as the book arrives in house later this fall, we’ll update the site.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Guess what?  I finally got my Wenzloff & Sons, Seaton tennon saw and it was worth the wait!  This is the 19” inch monster.  When I first tried this saw it felt too tippy to use.  Chris explained that this is an advantage that helps you saw plumb.  The reason is that you can use the tippy-ness of the saw to tell you when you are plumb.  When you balance the saw on the work, not tipping one side or other, the saw is plumb!  It is simple physics.  All you have to do is move it to and fro to get a perfect cut.  I know that there is a story floating around that Newton discovered gravity by watching an apple fall, but I don’t believe it.   It’s more likely that a woodworker already knew this because of his saw and told Newton about it.   

 

Anyway, I have been practicing Chris’s sawing technique for sawing tennons.  I marked out a couple of tennons and started to saw.  In the first picture below you can see how I have the work clamped in the vise.  This way I can advance on two lines at once.  The important thing is to stop when you hit the shoulder line.  The picture shows where I stopped sawing.  Flip the work around in the vise and do the same technique on the other side stopping in the same place.  The result is that both sides are cut down to the shoulder lines with a “hump” remaining in the middle of the work.

 

Now to saw the hump, clamp the work in the vertical position and roll the saw horizontal advancing down the hump (see the second picture).  The third picture is the result.  The tennon is ok.  You can see there is some of the line left on one side and nothing on the opposite side.  This problem is caused by our bodies.  To explain, if you extend your arm away from your body it is easy to roll your palm down.  When sawing I have noticed that us right hander’s push the saw plate out as we slightly and inadvertently roll our palms down.  This problem shows as the cut travels away from the line or across the line, depending on which side of the tennon I am sawing.  I think being aware of this tendency will help correct it.  I have done six cuts so I think another 94 and I might actually make something.

- John

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What do you think of this clock!  Nice isn’t it.  Yes and no.  Yes that is my house and no I didn’t build it.  This is a Shaker clock built by Glen Huey for Popular Woodworking issue number 163, 08/01/2007.  As a woodworker, I have a strong aversion to purchasing furniture.  When I see a piece of furniture that I like, I say to myself “I can make that and I will be able to justify a new tool”.  The piece goes onto my list of things to build which is presently, six months behind!  So when recently visiting Chris, I noticed this clock that was still sitting in the office.  After some pleading, I was able to take it home. 

Now, when sitting in my favorite chair looking at this piece I feel inspired.  When I look at pieces I have built, I tend to focus on what went wrong.  I say to myself, heck there is that gap that was caused by…or, if I do that next time I won’t make that mistake again…on and on.  When I look at this clock I see what is right.  I notice different things and think “how did he do that”?   I grab that article and find the answer.  I am also inspired by the dimensions and can use the width/height ratios or the size of moldings on the waist or hood to help me design a new piece.  It is nice to see something in my own house that encourages me to get up out of the chair and as Glen says, build something great!

-John

During the last 12 months I've taken on a lot of extra freelance work. The money probably should be going into my children's college fund, but instead I decided to spend a chunk of it on a traditional beech plow plane from D.L. Barrett & Sons in Barrie, Ontario.

Dan Barrett is a 25-year veteran of the trades and has been teaching woodworking and making handplanes for a long time. His sons, Kyle and Jeremy, are both involved in the business. Kyle has been building planes while Jeremy has been doing some machining.

I first stumbled on this family business while judging the toolmaking contest run by WoodCentral and sponsored by Lee Valley Tools. Kyle, who was 18 at the time, built a Mathieson bridle plow plane to enter in the contest. In my opinion, the plane stole the show.

Not only was it stunning to look at, it worked extraordinarily well. Some tools have a break-in period where the user and the tool circle each other like sharks. The results are inconsistent. The adjustments are difficult. The tool feels out of place in your hands.

Not so with this plane. When I picked it up during the contest, it was like I had owned it my entire life. With two taps of a mallet I set the iron and began making a beautiful groove in a maple board in the Lee Valley boardroom where we were judging the contest.

We awarded the plane first place in the craftsmanship division, but in my comments I declared the plane to be the "first among equals."

After the contest I was stunned to learn that the maker was just 18 years old. I sent him an e-mail and asked him to make me a bridle plow. I didn't ask the price because I didn't really care.

A couple weeks ago the Barrett family dropped the finished plane off at my office while they were on their way down to Florida for a vacation. The plane they delivered – my plane – is somehow even better than the one in the contest.

Here you can see the iron, skate and depth stop of the plow plane.

The plane comes with a full set of eight A2 irons (1/8" up to 5/8") and they are gorgeous pieces of work in and of themselves. Perfectly tapered. The faces are all flat.

The plane's stock is a single hunk of quartersawn beech with an exquisitely shaped tote. The fence is also beech with a piece of boxwood attached via a sliding dovetail. The fence slides on two ebony stems and locks down with the metal bridle. This bridle mechanism is, in my opinion, superior to a screw-arm plow. With screw-arm plows it's difficult to get the fence parallel to the skate.

This week I finally got an opportunity to sharpen up the irons and start using the plane. And once again, it's like I've owned this tool forever.

I'll be writing about this plane (and its maker) for the next issue of The Fine Tool Journal, so I don't want to spoil all the surprises. But if you're looking for another maker of fine traditional hand planes, I definitely recommend you consider D.L. Barrett & Sons.

— Christopher Schwarz

Here's a shot of the exquisite bead and astragal on the plane's fence.



The bridle locks the fence squarely to the ebony stems every time.

Once upon a time, after finishing a nice dinner, a couple bottles of wine, some beer, vodka and gin someone said “John don’t you have a bench to move”.  The referenced bench was the 8' long Nicholson English bench built by Christopher Schwarz and made from Southern Yellow Pine. My shop is in the basement which lies on the other side of a tight turn at the bottom of the steps.

Earlier in the evening I had taken out a tape and measured the space.  It seemed to me that there was a “9 foot space” that would allow the 8 foot bench to clear the wall. So we put down our glass, picked up the bench, two in front and two at the other end, and proceeded down the stairs. As we moved closer to the “9 foot space” it got tight, well ok, it got stuck. Being that we all were feeling quite optimistic from the wine, we naturally pushed forward until I heard a noise and Chris say "there goes your wall".  Undeterred we pulled back, shifted the bottom up a bit and pushed again. Yes, another sound and another "there goes your wall". After another number of minutes and another sound I looked up to see my wife laughing hard and holding the video camera. As the concerned and helpful wife that she is, she saw the train wreck before it happened and decided to film it. I wonder if I should search Youtube....

Anyway, I did get the bench to the basement and decided to rip out the offending wall!  There must be a moral to this story but I am not sure what it is.  Maybe it is build a bench that can be taken apart?

Last summer we filmed a new DVD on workbenches. When I say "we" I mean Chris Schwarz, Jeff, AJ and Mandy. I helped as I could, moving benches (three benches were used and rotated through), turning on and off lights, chiseling an area of a workbench and whatever else I could do. I also learned what a "Grip" is. You know when watching the credits at the end of a movie you see the term "Grip".   In order to fix a light issue, AJ came up with the idea to hold a blue cloth behind Chris. It worked and I stood there and gripped the cloth.

Making a woodworking DVD is a lot of work. Many different shots were taken to show something from different angles. There was pausing to wait for the passing of a loud truck, voice overs, changes in the sun glare through the windows, reflections from a camera tripod and other issues. The crew did a great job noticing anything that interfered with the shot or the sound. Then there was the heat.  We had all the windows shut and turned the A/C off because of noise.  When they turned the lights on it felt like putting your hand in front of a roaring fire! 

Now that Chris is done, there will be more hours spent watching the video and selecting the best takes to put on the final DVD. All is all it was a lot of fun for me, and Maine in the Summer is hard to beat. And yes, I went to Lie-Nielsen Toolworks and bought some new tools. I bought two chisels, a 1/2 inch and a 3/8 inch for dovetailing. I have been using Marples blue chip chisels which are great but the sides are quite thick and as Chris has written, the wide chisel sides tend to monkey up the area where the bottom of the tail meets the baseline. So, after trying to save money and avoid buying more tools I splurged on two chisels. If you haven't been to Maine it is a great place to visit and see the Toolworks.

-John 

John completes the Trestle Table

I must admit that I do not like the corbels on Chris’s trestle table.  I don’t like the way the ends look rounded.  Being a smart guy, I just incorporated the width that the corbel adds to the stretcher to get the total width of my version.  My finished stretcher was 7” wide instead of 6” that Chris stated in the plan.  That said I was ready to paint the base and put a finish on the top.

Then I got a chance to speak to Chris and proudly told him my artistic change.  His response caused a pit in my stomach.  He said there was a reason for the 6” width.  It was to avoid hitting your shins on the stretcher when you extended your legs or hitting you knees when you pushed your chair in.  Gee Whiz!  I acted calm and as soon as I hung up the phone I grabbed a chair and shoved myself under the top.  I was ok with the shins test but hit my damn knees on the stretcher.  Yep I only needed an inch more of clearance.

There is a reason for some things in a plan.  I seem to never follow a plan exactly but within a plan there are usually a couple of hidden reasons that may not come clear until a mistake is made.  To remedy my situation I cut a slow curve on the base that reduced the width by an inch at the center of the stretcher and curved out to 7” where it met the leg braces.  You can see in the picture what it looks like.  I put two coats of black paint on the based then two coats of a dark green.  I covered the top in Boiled Linseed Oil and wet sanded it with 600 grit sandpaper.  I then used six coats of an oil based varnish.  Six coats because of the continued difficulty in getting a perfect streak free finish in a top this long.  It is still not right but I threw out the old table and the wife and kids returned from vacation.  Oh well, it can be put on the “to do when I have spare time” list.

-John