As woodworkers dive into handwork, they usually start with a block plane, then the bench planes, the saws and the joinery planes.
Joinery planes – such as plow planes, router planes, shoulder planes and rabbeting planes – are some of the easiest planes to set up and use. Their irons are straighforward to sharpen (no curves needed), and because the tool doesn’t produce a show surface, you don’t need to be a maniac about the keenness of your cutting edges.
One of the most essential joinery planes is the moving fillister. It cuts a rabbet either across the grain or with the grain. And it can make a rabbet of almost any size thanks to its adjustable fence.
Moving fillisters are different than other planes in the rabbeting family in that its fence is adjustable (planes with a fixed fence are called standing fillisters), plus it can work across the grain because it has retractable nickers (planes without the nickers are just plain old rabbet planes).
The iron Stanley No. 78 is the most common vintage version of this tool, however I’m not fond of the form. The fence wobbles because of the way it is attached to the body, so the plane does a poor job in hard woods (in my experience). Record, by the way, fixed this problem with its metal version of this plane, though it’s a tough tool to find in North America.
This really is a case where the wooden versions of a plane are superior. Wooden-stock moving fillisters are fairly common in the secondary market, though they usually require some rehabbing to be usable. So what do you do?
You could ask Clark & Williams to make you one – they showed me an excellent moving fillister they make a couple years ago. You could buy an ECE from toolsforworkingwood.com. Or you could buy a new traditional one from Philip Edwards at Philly Planes in England.
Philip’s planes are excellent. I recently reviewed his miter plane plus a plane designed for raising panels for drawer bottoms. They both work like a charm. So it’s very exciting to me (and a good sign for hand work in general) that there is a new moving fillister on the market from Philip’s shop.
We’ve ordered one for our shop here, and I will offer a full report once it arrives. Until then, however, if you need a moving fillister, I can recommend Philip’s planes highly.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Want to learn more about joinery planes? Then definitely pick up a copy of “The Wooden Plane” by John M. Whelan.
For me, finger joints have always been the nerdy, square cousin to the dovetail.
Finger joints are immensely strong when glued properly. But they are usually used by beginning woodworkers in places where a dovetail would be more appropriate, such as on a piece of 18th-century casework.
Add to that the fact that finger joints are tricky or dangerous to make on wide boards (without a commercial jig) plus the fact that gluing them with yellow glue is stressful, and it's a wonder that anyone uses them at all.
And so we decided to tackle finger joints for the Summer 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine, which will be shipping to subscribers next month. It took us a few months to really pin them down (pun intended), but I think we nailed it (and no, cut nails are not involved).
Here's a small taste of some of the problems of the joint we solved after three months of testing in our shop:
Appearance: Finger joints are a product of the machine age. Using them in styles before circa 1900 is just wrong to the eye. So consider the joint for more contemporary pieces only.
Cutting them Accurately: Right now there are basically two different ways to cut the joint: A shop-made jig for the table saw for narrow boards, and using a router jig that costs several hundred dollars for wide boards. We set out to develop a simple and safe shop-made jig that could handle both wide and narrow boards. Senior Editor Robert W. Lang had a stroke of genius on this and solved the problem forever (in my opinion).
Gluing Them Easily: You can assemble small boxes with finger joints fairly easily when using yellow glue. But at a certain point, you hit the wall because the glue sets up before you can close all the joints. So the solution would seem to be a slow-setting glue. Well, that's one way to go about it. But we found an easier and faster way that is super-strong (see the photo of Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick's boot on a sample joint). In the end, it took an anvil to bust up our sample joints. 
Also in the Summer 2008 Issue
The finger joint is just one of the major themes running through the issue. Here are some of the other stories you can look for in the coming issue:
Building a Better Chest: Most woodworkers build chests using the most convoluted and fussy assembly imaginable. After reviewing hundreds of historical models, we settle on a method for building a chest that looks more complex at first glance, but actually saves an immense amount of shop time, requires less fussing around and allows more design flexibility.
Crackle Finishing: Many woodworkers who try a crackle finish have inconsistent results. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. And predicting how much it's going to crackle is almost impossible. Senior Editor Glen D. Huey cracks the code of crackle finish and finds out that the easiest and most predictable way to do it is also the simplest.
Trimming End Grain: When you have to cut back some end grain so it's flush with some face grain, it's always an opportunity to mess up the project. We show you two (actually three) methods for doing it right every time with a block plane, sander and pencil eraser.
And one more thing about the Summer 2008 issue: This issue is going to be mailed out to subscribers in a protective plastic bag, which will reduce the chances that the postal service will mangle it. If the plastic bag works for you, let us know so we can encourage our manufacturing division to continue using it.
And if you're not a subscriber, you can easily remedy that here. — Christopher Schwarz
If you haven't surmised it yet, one of the themes running through the Spring 2008 issue is the fact that accurate sawing has a lot more to do with accurate chisel work than anything else. When you cut a tenon shoulder, it's the chisel that cuts the part of the joint that shows – the saw just removes the waste below.
Several readers have picked up on this theme, and they've also pointed out (politely, I might add) what looks like a contradiction in my instructions about chiseling.
In the article on the Stickley Tabourets, I'm chiseling the joint line for the half-lap joint with the bevel of the chisel facing away from the waste (you can see this on page 10). A few pages later (page 19) I'm chiseling the shoulder for a tenon with the bevel of the chisel facing into the waste.
Have I finally taken one too many sips of La Fin Du Monde?
Perhaps, but I did have a good reason for what I did – I just didn't have the room in the issue to explain it. So here goes:
When you deepen a knife line by striking it with a chisel, there are two important things to consider. First is what shape the resulting knife line will be, and second is how much the chisel will shift when you rap its handle with a mallet.
The first part is easy to understand. Chisels are wedge-shaped. They have a flat face and a bevel. So when you knock the tool straight down into your work it makes a "V"-shaped cut that is a photocopy of this shape. One side of the V is straight up and down. The other side of the V is sloped. 
The second part also has to do with the fact that chisels are wedges. When you drive a chisel with a mallet, it doesn't want to travel straight down in a line that's parallel to the flat face of the chisel. Instead, it wants to travel at an angle that is halfway between the bevel and the flat face. So if you have a 20° bevel on your chisel (as I do in the paring chisel shown in the articles), the chisel doesn't want to travel at 90° (straight down), it wants to move at 80°. (This assumes you have wood pushing back equally on the bevel and the face of the chisel.)
This is why when you are chiseling out your waste between dovetails that the chisel is always trying to move toward (and even cross) your baseline.
Whew. With all that on the table, I can now explain why I did what I did.
When chiseling a tenon shoulder, the shape of the line created by the chisel is critical. I want it perfectly square so it will close tight with the stile. So I chisel the joint with the bevel facing the waste. If this so happens to shrink the overall length of the tenoned part by 1/128", I can live with that. I want the joint to be tight more than I care about its final length.
When chiseling a half-lap joint, my considerations are different. This isn't a show joint, so I just want it to be tight and structural. The shoulder line isn't as critical. That's why I chisel with the bevel facing away from the waste. The chisel will then drift into the waste a tad. So when I saw the joint, the notch made by the chisel will encourage the saw to cut a half-lap that is just a tad tight. Then I can plane the piece's mate to get a perfect fit.
This might be a little fussy for you. If so, I apologize. A chisel seems so simple (it's a steel and wooden corndog!), but it actually is a subtle instrument (like a corndog with chorizo inside). Play around with the tool. Try it with the bevel out and then with the bevel in. And let us know what you discover.
— Christopher Schwarz
I'm always looking for little tricks to improve dovetailing, especially the part I dislike: transferring the tails' locations to the pin board.
Sawmaker Mike Wenzloff stumbled across this interesting short entry in William Fairham’s book “Woodwork Joints, How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used” (available for free download here at the most awesome Project Gutenberg). After describing how some woodworkers use a knife or a saw to transfer the marks, Fairham writes:
“Other workers prefer a pounce-bag instead of a saw. A pounce-bag consists of a piece of fairly open woven muslin filled with a mixture of French chalk and finely-powdered whiting; the muslin is tied up with a piece of thin twine like the mouth of a flour sack. All that is necessary is to place the timber in position and bang the bag on the top of the saw-cuts, when sufficient powder will pass through the bag and down the saw kerf to mark the exact positions of the lines.”
So it was off to the store to buy some pantyhose.
But first, we had to find whiting and French chalk. The French chalk was fairly easy – it's essentially powered talc. You can find it at the fabric stores where it is used for marking cloth. Or you can go to the pharmacy and buy baby powder, which is talc and fragrance (essence du hinder l'enfant).
Whiting was harder for us to find. It is calcium carbonate (ground chalk) and is used in preparing artist paints these days. After a couple of clueless looks and pointless phone calls, Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick found some at an artist supply store.
And then the muslin. Surprisingly, we're a yard short on muslin in the workshop right now. So Megan suggested I buy pantyhose for the bag. I balked a bit. So she picked out a nice pair of L'eggs Everyday knee-highs (color: nude with a sheer toe), paid the man and we were off to the races.
Now before I ruined a nice new pair of knee-highs, I decided to try some other fabrics. First up: some old surgical rags that former Senior Editor David Thiel brought into the shop about 10 years ago. It actually was too coarse and the powder went flying.
Then I tried an athletic sock (I use them to transport my block planes to shows and classes). Bingo. It deposited a fine dusting of powder when I whacked the sock on the dovetails.
As I was experimenting with the different whacking forces and whacking vectors, I cleaned off the pin board after each whack with a little water and a rag. And that water seemed to make the powder even easier to see.
Then I tried marking some knife lines and just whacking those (seeing knife lines in walnut is really hard for me). That worked, too. The resulting pins were easy to see and to saw. I'm going to have to experiment with the technique some more, but it's another thing to tuck into your bag of tricks (or your nude, sheer-toe knee-highs).
— Christopher Schwarz
There is something deep inside our DNA that ties us to the chest as a form of furniture. First off, how many other kinds of furniture do we have that are named after critical parts of our own bodies? We are all, in essence, “chests on stands.” The feet give way to the legs. The legs are attached to the waist. And the waist supports the chest itself.
Also, few forms of furniture evoke such strong emotional response in both men and women. Whenever I mention among acquaintances that I’m building a chest, the women (sorry to generalize) always seem far more interested in this work than they are in my table-, chair- or cabinet-building enterprises.
“Is it a blanket chest?” is the first question. And that’s usually followed by, “Is this for you or will you sell it?”
Men react differently, though equally with emotion. “Is it a tool chest?” they ask. “And what will happen to your old tool chest?”
So with our species’s strong attraction to the chest, it’s surprising how many of them are designed so poorly. This became evident as I reviewed about a dozen plans for chests from the last 100 years that I dug up from my library.
Unlike the “chest on stand” that I mentioned above, most chests are low-slung affairs with three major components. The plinth, sometimes called the base, the waist moulding and the chest itself.
The plinth is almost always wider and deeper than the chest above. And the waist mould provides the transition between these two separate assemblies. It is this transition point between plinth and chest where many woodworkers make the construction far too fussy, complex and apt to fail.
Perhaps the most difficult way to build a chest goes something like this: Build the chest proper. Take your four plinth pieces and mould their long, top edges. Then wrap the four (sometimes three) plinth pieces around the chest, joining them at the corners. Finally, cope the mouldings at the corners so the moulding profiles wraps seamlessly around the chest.
If you’ve ever built a chest this way, I don’t need to tell you why it’s a bear to pull it off. First, fitting the plinth pieces around the chest requires persnickety layout. The joints have to be dead-on, or your plinth won’t sleeve nicely over the chest. Also, the exterior of your chest has to be completely true and the assembly dead-square, otherwise, you’ll have ugly gaps between the plinth and chest proper. Finally, it’s quite trying to execute the moulding at the corners of the plinth because you are moulding end grain with rasps, files and chisels.
One improvement over this form is to sleeve the plinth over the chest and then to miter and nail moulding into the transition. This is better, but it still requires a lot of fussy layout and fussy fitting of the chest to the plinth.
The third method looks like more labor than these other two methods, but it’s not. You assemble the plinth and chest assemblies separately. Then you add either a web frame or just a couple runners into the top of the plinth. It’s best to sink the web frame or runners into rabbets in the plinth.
Then you attach the chest to the plinth with screws and wrap the transition with moulding that is a wee bit wide. Finally, trim the moulding flush to the plinth with a plane.
I’ve built chests all three ways, and I can tell you that even though the third method requires more wood and one extra assembly, it is easier to fit all the parts and a faster way of building a chest.
The next issue of Woodworking Magazine (Summer 2008) will focus on building chests, both with and without plinths. The only thing we haven’t been able to answer in our research on this topic is if the chests we’re building will end up holding tools or plushy things.
— Christopher Schwarz
Some tools are like high school girlfriends. It’s all hot and heavy and kissy-kissy for the first few weeks, and then things cool off and you wonder what you were thinking. Other tools are like good spouses. The relationship gets better with time, even when you are both a little worn around the edges.
I’m happy to say that the Veritas Bevel Setter is more like a spouse than a girlfriend. (I don’t expect that blurb will show up in any advertisements.) When I first reviewed the tool, I was quite taken with it and its cleverness. The Bevel Setter lets you set or draw angles with much more accuracy than a child’s protractor or even a machinist’s protractor. It allows you to transfer angles more easily than with the other bevel-setting devices on the market that merely have the angles engraved on them. Plus, its small size allows you to get into tight spaces.
And now, a couple years after first getting the tool, I couldn’t imagine not picking it up during a project. As my work has become more angular and curvular (yes Megan, I know that’s not a word) I find that I always need a device that can measure any angle, transfer the angle to a piece of work, or even transfer the angle to my sliding T-bevel with zero errors. Plus, the sucker is so easy to dial in that even if you discard one setting, it’s simple to get it again.
The real genius in the device is its metal fence, which locks down tightly (and stays there) with a brass thumbscrew. The underside of the fence has a couple little grippy feet that make the fence stick to the steel plate like a magnet.
Finally, the thing is a darn-decent ruler in a pinch and can substitute for a small combination square when laying out the position of drawer hardware, for example.
The device ($33.50 from Lee Valley Tools) is available in both metric and Imperial measurements. For some reason, I ended up with the metric version in my toolbox, but it doesn’t seem to bother me. That fact, however, is a bit bothersome. I worry that the metric system will worm its way into my life. But then, that’s basically what happened with my wife.
— Christopher Schwarz
Adrian Mariano writes: I just watched your DVD ("Forgotten Hand Tools" from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks) in which you advocate the use of nails and drawbores to overcome the flaws in the glue. And there were a couple things I was wondering about.
One is the question of glue longevity. If I glue together a tabletop with hide glue will it fall apart in 100 years? Two hundred? Or do glue joints only fail if they are stressed? (Presumably the side-grain-to-side-grain joint of a tabletop creates very little stress in the joint.) I haven't heard of people, say, putting together tabletops using sliding dovetails to ensure strength.
Answer: Any good glue joint can last centuries. Its life will be shortened by moisture, heat and stress. Moisture on a tabletop is a common factor. Heat can be. And tabletop joints are stressed at the ends by the migration of moisture through the end grain -- that's why antique tops split on the ends typically.
Breadboard ends and cross-battens are typical and historically correct methods of helping to keep a top together.
Question No. 2: Why are nails better than screws? I haven't tried to use nails in cabinetry, but I've tried to use them in carpentry and my experience has led me to hate nails and to use screws instead whenever possible. They bend over, they split the work (sometimes even with a pilot hold), and hammering them in can be very loud, and it subjects the work to stresses, possibly causing parts to move or shift. Maybe a screw head is harder to hide than a nail head. But is there some other reason to prefer nails?
Answer: Hmmm. I don't consider nails to be better than screws for all occasions. But there are some advantages to using nails at times. Nails will bend to accommodate wood movement. Screws won't bend. They'll split the work. Nails are smaller and can be used in places that screws would be ugly (nailing on face frames and moulding). They are inserted faster than screws (removing them sure is slower!). And they can be historically correct in pieces, which can be important to some woodworkers (such as myself).
Question No. 3: Another thing I was wondering about is that I saw an article a few months ago (which, alas, I have not been able to find again). This was an article by Bob Flexner on furniture repair and restoration in which he claims that the use of metal fasteners guarantees problems down the road, and I recall that he said pinning a mortise-and-tenon joint would cause it to split eventually. He seems almost directly in opposition to the use of nails and the drawbore, and justifies his position based on the types of damage he sees in old furniture. Do you have any thoughts on how to reconcile this with your claims in the DVD?
Answer: Bob is one of the people I highly respect in this business. He also comes at this problem from a restorer's viewpoint. It's more difficult for him to disassemble a joint pinned with a mechanical fastener, be it a wooden or metal one. His comment was aimed also at people who nail a loose joint instead of disassembling it and regluing. That is indeed bad practice.
I don't think a pinned joint guarantees joint failure at all. I have seen pinned joints that are 400 years old and are completely sound. Drawboring is a sound practice for certain kinds of applications where mechanical strength is key or you are working under unusual conditions (wet wood, long spans and no clamps) or you are striving for historical accuracy.
-- Christopher Schwarz
This weekend I put the finishing touches on two Stickley tabourets; and while the little tables turned out to my satisfaction, the construction process proved quite vexing considering there are only nine pieces of wood in each.
The theme of Issue 9 is sawing – understanding sawtooth technology and how to use that knowledge in your work with both hand and power tools. So when I started building these tables I resolved to build one table with the joints sawn by hand and the other with the joints cut by machine.
And that turned out to be harder than I expected.
Though I am comfortable doing all of the necessary operations by both hand and machine, I kept running into situations where sticking to the hand tools or sticking to the power tools was a dumb choice.
For example: The cross stretchers beneath the tabletops are joined to the legs with a single lap dovetail joint. This is an easy joint to cut by hand: Saw the tail, saw out the socket, then remove the waste with a chisel and a router plane.
But when it came to doing this operation by machine it just ticked me off. I cut the shoulders of the dovetail with a dado stack in my table saw at the same time I cut the tenons. That was fairly efficient. Then I cut the dovetail shape on the band saw. Still OK. Then it came time to waste away the dovetail socket in the top of the 1-1/2"-square leg. I picked up the shop’s trim router and contemplated the platform jig I was going to have to build to do this with the router. I shook my head, put the router down and got my dovetail saw. I was done in 10 minutes.
Similarly, when it came time to mortise the legs I used my hollow-chisel mortiser for the power-tool version of the table. My mortiser is always set up with a 1/4" chisel that’s perfectly parallel to the machine’s fence. So when it came time to mortise the legs by hand I faced the same struggle. My mortiser was all set up and I could be done in five minutes. Or I could mortise the legs by hand, which would take a little longer and had the risk of me splitting the leg or wandering left or right. So I used the machine.
These little struggles reminded me of how I don’t understand how some people can work exclusively with hand tools or with machines. I know it can be done and done quite well, but just not by me.
— Christopher Schwarz
This week I'm getting ready to build a Shaker firewood box for the I Can Do That column in our sister publication, Popular Woodworking. I really like building projects for this column because you're limited to hand-held tools and a Workmate to do the job. Plus the projects are fast and – if I do my job right – look pretty good in the end.
In fact, what's crazy about building projects for this column is that it takes longer to research the project than it does to build it. Here's the story.
I've always wanted to build the Shaker firewood box from the Pleasant Hill community in Kentucky. Not that we have a working fireplace. (Ask my wife about that sometime if you'd like a good laugh. All you have to say is "father-in-law," "smoke-filled house," and "husband streaking through the house carrying burning logs.")
The Pleasant Hill box has a couple nice curves that remind me of other rural Kentucky pieces I've seen in my 14 years here, yet it still looks Shaker. To build the project, my first step was to consult Ejner Handberg's "Measured Drawings of Shaker Furniture & Woodenware" (Berkshire House) and his drawings of the box.
Now, I really like Handberg's books on the Shakers. He made his drawings based on the real pieces that passed through his shop (sometimes for repair). But the more I get to know Handberg's drawings, the more I've begun to think that he perhaps smudged some of the details. It wouldn't surprise me if it were on purpose – counterfeit furniture is big business.
So I knew that Handberg's drawing shouldn't be taken as gospel. So earlier this fall I took another a trip to Pleasant Hill to see some alpacas and get a gander at the firewood box first-hand. Plus I wanted to record the color of the finish as best I could.
As I expected, the drawing is different, especially in one critical piece: the protruding rail that runs across the front of the box. Handberg drew it square in section, when the original clearly is relieved on its underside to fit over the curve on the sides. I like the original. Plus, the profile on the lid to the kindling box on the top is different.
In short, I'm glad I checked.
Really, there is nothing like seeing an original piece before you build it. Plans and photos can take you only so far. And sometimes, seeing the original can change your mind about a piece. For example, I've always liked the clocks that came out of the Dominy workshop in New York, and I've looked them over many times in the 1968 classic "With Hammer in Hand." But I've never felt compelled to build one. The grainy black-and-white photos show off the lines of the pieces, but don't really serve to inspire me.
A couple weeks ago I got to visit the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum in Delaware, where the Dominy shop was moved years ago. I went to Winterthur to see the shop, but I was stunned by the clocks. Not by the ornate tall clocks. I'm not big on ornate.
But the last recorded clock made by the Dominy shop in 1824 grabbed me by the throat and I decided I had to build this clock. And soon. I'm hoping to publish plans for the clock in a future issue of Woodworking Magazine, but here's a word to the wise: You might want to check out the original for yourself before you build it based off my plans. Woodworking publications are not to be trusted.
— Christopher Schwarz 
Sometimes your woodworking improves like a slow and steady climb up a mountain. Sometimes, however, you get to ride the elevator.
When I first started woodworking, I used a carpenter’s pencil I sharpened with a knife. Then I traded up to a mechanical pencil, which never needed sharpening. Then one day I found my old X-Acto knife in my desk drawer. All through college I had worked as a production artist for a printing company, and I’d held onto my pica pole, a roll of 4-point adhesive tape and my beloved X-Acto.
This knife, I thought, might just be a mechanical pencil that never needed lead.
That day my woodworking skills took a much-needed lurch forward. Hand work, in particular, is much easier to manage with a knife line that never smudges, changes in thickness or is offset from the point you intended.
After a few years of woodworking with my X-Acto, I discovered spear-point, single bevel marking knives, such as the Blue Spruce knife shown in the photo above. Though some woodworkers would disagree, this form is ideal for marking joints for hand-cutting. The flat side rides the shape of the piece you want to mimic. The knife marks its location with zero offset.
But no one ever showed me how to use a marking knife. And sometimes it would follow the grain instead of the path I had set for it. Then one day, I realized what I was doing wrong. I was moving the knife too fast and with far too much pressure. Once I slowed down and took three light passes (in place of one heavy pass), my accuracy took another leap forward.
So slow down, and take it easy.
One final tip for those who have failing eyesight: Don’t throw away that mechanical pencil. If you need to add some makeup to a knife line, run that mechanical pencil down the knife line, then run an eraser over the pencil line. You’ll end up with a knife line filled with just enough lead to see it.
— Christopher Schwarz
Whenever I get into some serious handwork, I always try to boil down the processes so that I can 1) remember it myself and 2) occasionally explain it to others (including a couple children who are slack-jawed with boredom).
Today as I was cleaning up the half-lap joints for the Stickley 603 tabouret on my workbench, I was reminded of one of the guiding principles: Don't work the end grain unless you have to. End grain is unruly. It is usually confined to small surfaces that are hard to work accurately. And working it poorly will rip out chunks of precious face grain as well.
This is why I don't own any side-rabbet planes. In all my years of working wood, I have honestly never encountered a situation where I had to have those tools and no other tool would do. (Boy they look cool, though.) If a dado is too skimpy, I'll thin the mating shelf's face grain instead. The face grain is so much easier to plane, my tools don't have to be as sharp, my work is less at risk and it is another chance to remove tear-out in the shelf.
So when I was fitting the first half-lap shown in the photo above, I cut my shoulders just a hair tight. So I took two swipes of the edge of the mating piece. Perfect fit.
One side item: In the magazine world, we're supposed to ignore our competitors. It's a time-honored tradition. We're supposed to pretend they don't exist so that readers don't flee our product in droves. So with that in mind, I'm actively ignoring an interesting new workbench plan in the newest issue of Woodsmith magazine (No. 173). I suggest you also ignore their quite excellent and robust plans for a wagon vise (what they call a tail vise in the book) in that issue.
– Christopher Schwarz
"But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools."
— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), "Walden"
When I started building furniture on my back porch after college, I was sure of only one thing: I didn't want to use a radial-arm saw.
My aversion to the machine had nothing to do with safety, accuracy, philosophy or shop space. Instead, I despised the radial-arm saw because I spent one long hot summer as a slave to that machine at the Therma-Tru door factory in Arkansas.
I worked on the assembly line that built the fire doors. It was my job to crosscut the internal rails and stiles that were then skinned with the exterior metal (in a pleasing Colonial look!). The radial-arm saw was right next to the furnace that baked on some sort of coating (you know, I never asked what that stuff was).
No matter how fast I cut, I could never keep up. And the workers on the line were always reaching for the stile I had just put down. After a few weeks of this, the radial-arm saw and I became enemies and we remain so to this day.
For me, woodworking is about balancing the role of the hand and the machine. But there is more than one balancing point. And that's the theme of Issue 9 of Woodworking Magazine, which we are beginning to work on. The cover project is an adaptation of the Gustav Stickley No. 603 tabouret shown in Robert W. Lang's "Shop Drawings for Craftsman Furniture."
I picked an Arts & Crafts project for the issue because the best examples of this furniture style incorporate both machine- and hand-work. Right now I'm building two of these tables. One table is being built with machines carrying most of the load, including joinery. With the other table, hand tools will have the upper hand.
This isn't just about substituting a tenon saw for a 40-tooth flat-tooth rip blade. There are differences in the way you lay out your work and move through the construction process. The resulting tables should look identical, though you can be the judge of that (assuming you purchase the issue).
I have other aversions in addition to the radial-arm saw, including broasted chicken, glazed doughnuts and bagging ice. All those aversions were the result of a hot summer working in a gas station. But those stories are for another kind of blog.
— Christopher Schwarz
I enjoy a good beating. Chopping dovetails or mortises is almost as pleasurable as sawing or planing. So, as you can imagine, I'm picky about my mallet.
For years I tried to make myself like the traditional round mallet used in carving and cabinetmaking. But I couldn't grow to enjoy using it. I'd be more likely to pick up a hammer than a round mallet when it came to chopping time.
So I abandoned the round one and have since been trying out a variety of mallets that are wooden or both wood and metal. I bought a couple English mallets that have a brass head that's filled with wooden striking surfaces. These are good, but replacing the wood when it expired was no fun.
So I've settled on two mallets that I really like. One is the Veritas Cabinetmaker's Mallet, which I've had since the company started making them. It's well-balanced and heavy enough (1 lb. 5 oz.) to get the job done. The head is brass and the wooden inserts are 1-1/2" in diameter, so you can cut them using a hole saw and pop them in (I'm about to replace one of my faces with a synthetic material that toolmaker Paul Hamler sent me. Don't know what it is, but he swears by it).
The handle is, I believe, ash. I stripped the finish off of it and applied a little oil and wax so it suits my hand better. This was the only mallet I used – until May.
That's when one of my students, Dante DiIanni, handed me one of the mallets he was developing for sale through his woodworking supplies store, Di Legno Woodshop Supply. It looks like a smallish beech carpenter's mallet you might see in a typical woodworking catalog. I've never cared much for this form because they were so lightweight that I ended up getting a sore forearm.
But
Dante's mallets are different. He soaks them in linseed oil for a long
time. This greatly increases the weight of the mallets, and gives them a
nice feel in the hand. The mallet I tried is listed as approximately 22
oz., but mine weighs 19 oz., according to our postal scale. The mallet
is 13" long overall with a 2-3/8" x 4-5/8" head. So it's a nice small
size – you're in not going to smack yourself in the head and you can
get into fairly tight places.
All the right edges are chamfered (I like chamfers), and there's a nice leather wrist strap, which is great for hanging the mallet over the bench (or keeping it on your wrist should your palm become separated from the handle during a wild swing).
I like this mallet. And so does Senior Editor Glen D. Huey, who has been chopping out about 100 dovetails for the cabinet base on his workbench. The mallet packs a ton of punch for its size and is a good fit in your hand. The mallet comes in four sizes between 18 oz. ($22.95) up to 32 oz. ($29.95). The 22 oz. model we tested is $24.95. you can order one from the Di Legno web site or by calling 877-208-4298.
— Christopher Schwarz
This weekend we gave away our antique Arts & Crafts sideboard to some friends who have just bought a house and I installed the new Gustav Stickley 802 sideboard I’d built with the help of Harvey Ellis’s pen and German technology.
Like every other woodworking magazine, we’ve been heavily testing the Festool Domino since it arrived in early December. Senior Editor Glen Huey has built a number of traditional American projects using it. Senior Editor Robert Lang has been building a massive credenza that will go behind his workbench (it’s a long story, ask him). And Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick has even had her turn with the machine and is in the middle of building a medicine cabinet and mirror with the Domino.
And for my part, I’ve fiddled around with the thing quite a bit. I built a few picture frames for some artwork that has been languishing around the house. And I’ve built a couple cabinet doors. But my first real test of the machine was this summer as I built a Stickley 802 sideboard between bouts of traveling and teaching.
This was my first complex piece of casework with the Domino, and I was eager to get familiar with the machine but also cautious that I’d muck up a lot of good cherry in the name of trying out the new thing.
I’ll spare you any suspense: The Domino works as advertised. And considering its immense promise, that is an impressive feat. In competent hands, the Domino is capable of cutting joints with jaw-dropping speed and impressive strength. But note the qualifier: “In competent hands….” The Domino is only as smart as its user.
As I put the sideboard together, I was curious how much faster it would be to use this machine compared to cutting traditional mortise-and-tenon joints. Glen Huey estimates that the Domino is capable of trimming about 25 percent off the shop time of a typical casework project. As I put the base of the sideboard together, I thought Glen was dead-on right. The Domino moved effortlessly through the project. It cut offset joints with immense precision and little math. It made joints that were tighter than any biscuit joints. And because of the inherent holding ability of the ribbed beech Dominos, I had to use few clamps to get everything together.
With the case assembled, I braced the sideboard against my bench and used a jointer plane to remove a few shavings from the rear apron to get it flush to the legs.
Then the project went limp, like my youngest sister’s arm when she broke it while playing in our driveway. The Domino joints in the front apron had failed. But why?
I’d forgotten a cardinal rule of tenon design: A tenon should be two-thirds the width of the stock it emerges from. Because the Dominos were so tight and so dead-on, I’d used two of them in each joint in the front rail. I should have used three.
So I pulled apart the front of the carcase and cut additional joints. (Note: Try cutting mortises on a half-assembled carcase with a hollow-chisel mortiser. The portability of the Domino is one of its oft-overlooked wonders.) Then it was glue, clamps and an impatient and fitful evening. The next day I picked up at the same place I’d gone wrong. This time the Dominos held, which was absolutely no surprise at all.
This week I’m gearing up for some more furniture projects. My youngest daughter needs some bookshelves, and the friends with the new (read: empty) house need some shelves as well. And our living room has never had a decent coffee table. Ah, and the campaign chest I’ve been doodling is starting to tug at me.
And the Domino figures prominently in many of those plans.
— Christopher Schwarz
Editor's note: I know that some of you are having difficulty posting comments on occasion. Sometimes, the captcha function rejects your code on the first try. When this happens, it takes you back to the blog entry, but your comment is still unposted and at the bottom of the page. If you enter your code again, that will send the comment. Our technical people are working on the issue. My apologies.
David Charlesworth tried to post the following comment last night that related to our discussion on dovetailing. There are a couple good tips in here for you. Two additional items: I now owe David a couple Belgian beers. And whatever you do, do not read his blog entry about our attempts to move my Nicholson Workbench. Don't visit his site, don't click on "blog" and don't click on "Return from USA"
— Chris
Failed to get my comment onto your blog ~:-(#
You are spot on as usual. Deep crisply cut shoulder lines are a revelation to nearly all the students on my dovetailing courses. Most of them don't have functional cutting gauges and do not mark nearly deep enough.
A consistently thin final cut, with freshly sharpened chisels is another. This reduces the wedging and bruising action of the bevel. Particularly important on your softer pines and poplar. Therefore I like to mark a penultimate cut line, with a knife and set square. Could be another gauge setting of course.
Another point which was made to me recently, was that the surface cut by the gauge is square, so subsequent slight undercut with chopping will not cause gaping when the joint is planed up externally. Win win all the way.
Secret mitered dovetail requires three gauge settings which is why I like to tune $10 beech gauges. Pages 14,15 &16 of book 1. If my time was charged for this work it might bring the cost close to Tite-Mark price!
There is lots about this on my chisel use dvd, bet you several Belgian beers you haven't watched it yet.....?
— David
Contemporary writing on woodworking, of which I am woefully guilty, always seeks to make the craft as simple as possible. We try to make the joints easy, quick and straightforward. We tend to promote furniture designs that have straight lines and wide appeal.
But if you’ve never studied any book on joinery that’s more than 50 years old, you’re in for a rude shock. Joinery and case construction was far more complex and demanding before World War II than it is today.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Charles H. Hayward’s seminal work: “Woodwork Joints.” First published in 1950, Hayward’s masterwork was a survey of the different kinds of joints and how they are used to produce casework. When I first encountered this book (thanks to Don McConnell of Clark & Williams fame), I was struck by how many variants there were of seemingly simple joints, such as the mortise-and-tenon.
And at the time I was bewildered by the complexity of some of these joints. Many of them seemed like they would be exceedingly difficult to produce, such as all the door joints that incorporated mitered stuck moulding into the rails and stiles.
But after a few years of working with this book by my side, I came to realize that a fair amount of the complexity was the result of me trying to graft a power-tool perspective onto a hand-tool operation. Once I started looking at the tasks from the perspective of the chisel or the plane, most of these joints were no more than cutting to a line.
(There is an exception – the fox-wedged tenon still scares the snot out of me. You only get one shot to assemble this blind wedged-tenon joint.)
Beginning woodworkers will be well-served by the first sections of Hayward’s book, which discuss how to design, lay out and cut basic edge joints, tenons and dovetails with remarkable clarity. Hayward’s line drawings of workshop practices have yet to be equaled.
Advanced woodworkers will revel in the same clarity that Hayward offers on some of wilder joints, such as three-way mitered tenon joints, mitered secret dovetails, proper rule joints, knuckle joints and joinery for bow-front frame-and-panel assemblies.
This book, my 1954 edition published by Evans Brothers Ltd., will be one of the things I scoop up (in addition to my daughters) if our house ever catches fire. I’ll leave the modern paperback versions of the book (including the edition from Sterling) to the flames. Though I’m glad that some modern publishers have kept the book in print, the reproduction quality of the photos and line drawings is poor indeed when compared to the early editions. It’s worth paying the extra money to find a bookseller in England, I’m sorry to say.
In addition to “Woodwork Joints,” Hayward has many other excellent books, some of which are in the “permanent collection,” but this book is my favorite of his. Look for it at all the usual places: addall.com, bookfinder.com, abebooks.com, powells.com, Amazon.com or through your local crusty and cranky used book seller.
— Christopher Schwarz
In general, I write about the best way to cut dovetails as much as I write about choosing the best religion. That is, not much. One of the reasons I avoid the topic of dovetails is that it gets far too much ink already.
One retired carpenter told me that cutting dovetails probably gets more ink than anything else in woodworking, followed by resawing on the band saw, tuning up your table saw and building the ultimate router table. Ugh, just typing that list of story topics makes me queasy.
The other reason I avoid the topic of dovetails is that I think the real “secret” to a good joint is so boring that readers would fall asleep if they had to read about it. Get your Red Bull energy drinks at the ready because here it is: Pick a method (they all work). Choose a set of tools (they are all valid). Cut the joint using those techniques and those tools and refuse to vary. Refuse to try much of anything new. Refuse to take shortcuts.
And then, according to a brilliant Chinese saying: “Practice 30 more years.”
I’m not a flashy dovetailer. I don’t use radical angles. I don’t cut really tiny pins. I don’t do fancy spacing to add “visual excitement.” I lay out the joint to make it easy to cut for my set of tools.
And after 14 years of practice (I’m almost halfway there!) here’s what I get: I almost never, ever have to pare the walls of the joint. My joints assemble with a little pounding of my fist on the first try. They are always tight enough that I don’t cringe when other woodworkers pull out my drawers. I never have to fill gaps with shims.
As I’ve worked, I’ve found a few tiny revelations that help me get better results with less fuss. I’m going to show you one of them tonight.
One of my biggest frustrations when dovetailing used to be crossing the baseline when chopping out the waste between my pins and tails with a chisel. You can’t just put the chisel in your baseline and pound down. The chisel will angle back and cross the baseline.
I don’t have this problem anymore, courtesy of my cutting gauge (I now use the Tite-Mark gauge from Glen-Drake Toolworks, before that I had a Japanese cutting gauge. They are the same tool, in essence.) After I lay out my tails or pins, I score the baseline in the waste areas deeply with the cutting gauge. Then I cut the joint.
After I chop close to my baseline with a chisel, I place the chisel tip in the baseline and flick the waste off. The deep score left by my cutting gauge leaves a small 1/32" rabbet of waste below the baseline (see the photo at top for what this looks like -- it's subtle). Then I can drop my chisel tip right against the baseline and pound down. About 99 percent of the time, I make a perfect and flat cut across the waste. About 1 percent of the time I undercut the joint. But that undercut is no big deal because the undercut occurs inside the joint where no one will see. The baseline is preserved in all cases.
Should you try this? I’ll leave that to you. If you use a cutting gauge and have trouble with crossing your baselines, I think it's worth a try. But don’t rush out and buy a Tite-Mark if you are using a different kind of gauge and are pleased with it (this message is brought to you by WivesAgainstSchwarz.com).
There actually is one how-to story on the dovetail that I’m eager to write, but it’s the dovetail story that hasn’t ever been written (to my knowledge). It’s on the list of stories for upcoming issues of Woodworking Magazine, right after sawing, clamping and chiseling.
— Christopher Schwarz 
Today is "Blasphemy Friday."
I'm preparing the panels to start assembling this Gustav Stickley No. 802 sideboard and wondering if my project is going to self-destruct after a couple years. Here's the problem: The sides of this piece have the grain running vertically. Yet the grain in the stretchers near the floor runs horizontally.
It sounds like a recipe for disaster: The side panel will shrink with the seasons, and the tenon shoulder facing the floor will open up. Then the panel will expand in the wet months, and the tenon shoulder facing the ceiling will open up.
One way around this problem would be to rotate the side panels so the grain runs horizontally. But that would look funny to me – not like the original piece at all (shown above). Another solution would be to steal a trick from the Hall Brothers, the craftsmen who built the furniture for Charles and Henry Greene. They would build pieces with a two-step mortise – so the shoulder of the tenon would be buried 1/8" in the leg.
This seems fussy and excessive to me, and I've never seen any evidence of this on any piece of the hundreds of Arts & Crafts piece I've examined (I used to collect the stuff back when it was all flea-market grade).
So Senior Editor Bob Lang and I put our heads together and figured up how much a 13"-wide black cherry (Prunus serotina) panel would change in width during a 3-percent change in moisture content: about 1/16" to 7/64". Then I looked at the bending characteristics of cherry. The legs will flex a bit between the stretcher and the panel.
And then I remembered another project I'd built like this in 2002: A Harvey Ellis-designed magazine stand that's in my home. It has exactly the same problem (perhaps Ellis didn't believe in wood movement). The stretcher in this project is as tight as the day it was made. No gaps. And the mahogany I used for that project moves about the same amount as cherry.
So I'm going to build the No. 802 with the cross-grain construction and see if I get spanked.
(By the way, the smaller photo of the sideboard is of the other Stickley No. 802, the one owned by my photographer friend. Note how the curved stretcher and double-tapered legs shown in the picture at the top change this piece for the better.)
— Christopher Schwarz
 Question: Looking over the current and past issues of Woodworking Magazine , I see how drawboring or wedging a mortise and tenon joint will improve the strength and fit of the joint. But is there a reason to pick either drawboring or wedging over the other technique in terms of the strength or durability of the joint?
The only advantage I can think of so far is that it might be easier to disassemble a drawbored joint.
— Wilbur PanAnswer: I'm not aware of any studies that compare the relative strengths of these two joints. For me, they both fit into the category of "stronger than typically required." And that is probably why both joints show up frequently in chairs, which are the most-abused category of furniture. I think that choosing one joint over the other depends on your materials, your tools at hand, the fit of the components and your desire for being able to disassemble the joint. Materials: I would choose drawboring if my wood was a little wet and hadn't reached equilibrium with my shop. Drawboring will keep things tighter as the wood dries and shrinks. I would choose wedging if my material was less stout than oak (say, cherry or walnut). Drawboring is more likely to result in a split during assembly.  A drawbore joint, split open for your inspection.Tools: I would choose drawboring if I had a set of drawbore pins. I don't like drawboring without them in typical frame construction -- though you can do it with small hole offsets. I would choose wedging if I had a band saw. Nothing makes wedges faster than a band saw and the wedge sled we showed in the magazine. Also, I would choose wedging if I had lots of clamps; I would choose drawboring if I didn't. The Fit of Your Components: Drawboring is more accommodating to a joint that isn't as perfect. It will draw up tenon shoulders tightly more than wedging will. Wedging a through-tenon requires particular attention to the way the tenon and mortise fit.  A wedged through-tenon. Note that this is but one way to wedge this joint.
Reversibility: I actually think that a wedged joint (with hide glue) is more reversible than a drawbored joint. If you drill out a drawbore pin, you are generally going to make it so that the joint cannot be reassembled in the same way without some serious fussing. I know some people have assembled their drawbored joints without glue and then knocked out their pins later. I haven't had much luck with this, but I've only tried it a couple times. Early accounts of wedging recommended that the craftsman glue only the wedges when assembling the joint -- no other glue in the mortise. So with a little steam and heat, the wedges could be worked loose to repair the joint. — Christopher Schwarz
I'm a big fan of cut nails. They hold far better that modern wire nails and they really have the right look when it comes to building reproduction furniture, which is why I don't use square-drive brass screws when installing reproduction hinges.
However, cut nails can sometimes be difficult to find. Tremont Nail is an excellent source of the full line of cut nails. The company ships orders promptly, though it can take a week to get your goods. If I need them a bit faster I can usually get a bag of the common sizes and configurations from my local Rockler – a 40-minute drive from my house.
So last week, Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick and I were at the local Lowe's and Home Depot picking out some wood for our "I Can Do That" column in Popular Woodworking. The column is a blast for us to put together each issue. Here are the rules: You build a project and can use only hand-held power tools (jigsaw, miter saw, pocket hole jig) and – here's the kicker – we only use raw materials from the home centers. No mail order. No secret stashes of wood or special hardware. It's all off the rack.
So I really wanted some cut nails for a project we're working on for the February 2007 issue. So we're rooting around in the fastener section and lo and behold, I see them. Grip Rite Hard Cut Masonry Nails (or, as the box also indicates, "clavos cortados para albanileria"). They are honest-to-goodness cut nails and are available in 8d (2-1/2") and 6d (2") lengths. They're too big for finery, but for large-scale nailing, they're perfect. Grip Rite also makes a Hard Cut Flooring Nail that is a traditional cut nail that you might want to look for in your area.
After doing some research, I did dig up a few differences you should be aware of. The masonry nails have a smooth surface finish, whereas many of the Tremont nails (such as the most excellent fine finish nail) have a rough surface. Tremont says the rough surface gives the nail some more grip.
The other difference is that the masonry nails are made from high-carbon steel and are hardened. The fine finish cut nails are low-carbon steel and are not hard. This difference has advantages and disadvantages. You're much less likely to bend the masonry nail when driving it. But you also can't clench the masonry nail, which is when you bend the tip as it emerges out the other side back into the work. The fine finish nails clench readily.
So I walked away from the home center well-pleased with my find. Now if I could only find pod augers at Home Depot, I'd be really happy.
— Christopher Schwarz
If you do any work at all with hand tools, a good marking gauge is an essential piece of equipment. It is the tool that guides all your other tools: It marks your baselines when dovetailing, your mortises for chopping, your tenons for sawing, your boards' thicknesses when planing.
I've tried a lot of marking gauges, everything from the least expensive Crown or Marples to the works of art fashioned by Colen Clenton. All have their advantages and disadvantages. And for the most part, I've settled on using the Tite-Mark, which technically is a cutting gauge.
Several months ago, reader Dean Jansa sent me a gauge that he built that is based on the tools found in Benjamin Seaton's tool chest, an 18th century English kit of tools that has survived nearly intact for 200 years.
This homemade gauge, sometimes called a "French gauge," is a revelation. It is functionally so superior to other wooden gauges that it's a wonder it's not made today. Here's a quick overview of why this gauge kicks the snot out of other tools:
1. It allows exquisite one-handed operation. Most gauges (but not all) require two hands to manipulate. One hand positions the head while the other hand tightens a screw to lock the head. And your third hand holds the board. This French gauge has a wedge that passes through the head that does all the work. When your hand finds the right setting, you press the wedge with your thumb and you're done.
2. The French gauge is remarkably comfortable to hold. See the bevel on the underside of the gauge's head? Your index finger goes there, and that allows you superior control when rolling the gauge to get the right kind of mark. And the rounded section of the gauge only adds to the comfort.
3. The shape of the pin allows you to make accurate and precise lines. Most commercial gauges have a cone-shaped pin. That's all wrong and most woodworkers refile the pin. This pin (made from a drill bit) is shaped more like a knife.
There's more, but I don't want to spoil it for you. Dean has written up instructions for making and using this gauge for a story in our December issue of Popular Woodworking, our sister publication. You can build the gauge in a weekend. What you'll get in return is a lifetime of less frustration.
– Christopher Schwarz
One of the best things about going to an exhibit of new or antique furniture is getting to examine the joinery – closely and from the inside of the piece. I will pull every drawer out (if allowed), stick my head in a carcase and send my fingers probing into the darkest voids.
I'm deeply interested in how the level of the joinery matches up with the level of the design of the piece. I've seen stunning and elaborate designs that have what I would consider unacceptable gaps, misalignments and poorly scaled joinery components. And I've seen boring pieces that exhibit a seamless fit that is beyond my efforts.
I think I do this because I'm constantly trying to appraise my skills, not only as a designer but as a joiner.
So when I began building the Creole Table, I promised myself I would write this post. Turnabout is fair play.
The photo above is a composite of all my hand-cut dovetails for the drawer. The photos have had no significant alteration. In fact, the only change I made to them was to apply "unsharp mask" and to bump up the contrast so that the flaws would be in higher relief.
This is not the best set of dovetails I've ever cut, but nor is it my worst. This is what I get without too much fussing. (I also hope to post photos of all the tenon shoulders next week if I can. Those joints are really quite good and quite boring to look at, however.)
Here you can see my No. 1 flaw as a dovetailer: I struggle when it comes to paring my baselines. In the first two photos on the left you can see the gaps where the tails hit the end grain of the pin board. Of course, these were my warm-up dovetails (always start at the back), and this is the back of the drawer. So I'm disappointed with the gaps, but I'll rarely see them.
The two middle photos show the tail side of the same through-dovetail joint. While I'm happy with the overall fit, you can see how I chipped out some of the tail when I was planing the joints flush. Idiot.
And the last two images show the joints at the front of the drawer. Again, the baselines aren't perfect, especially on the last image. And I know what cased my problem: I undercut the baseline on the inside of the joint in an effort to ease the fit of the joint at assembly. The joints looked good at assembly, but when I planed the drawer to fit the carcase, I planed down to the area I undercut. Dotard.
So the lesson here is to watch my baselines next time. Of course, I've been saying that mantra for years.
Today I got to make a couple sample boards and I have my finishing strategy set: I'm going to apply a couple coats of Indian amber shellac and then spray on a couple coats of lacquer using my HVLP system in my driveway. Though I really like the color of shellac, I struggle with getting the sheen right because I don't like glossy finishes (and shellac is glossy only, as far as I can tell).
— Christopher Schwarz
Like most home woodworkers, my dang day job tends to get in the way of my woodworking. Despite the fact that our magazine's woodshop is exactly seven paces from my desk, getting in there has been a monumental struggle. Gerunds, appositives and dangling participles have all conspired to keep me chained to this keyboard.
But there has been progress: During the weekend, I did get some time to dovetail the drawer. I almost always cut my dovetails by hand, and that's not because I'm some kind of hand-joinery snob, I just find that my head is ill-equipped to deal with router-based dovetail jigs. In fact, the only one I've ever been able to master (mentally) has been the Keller Jig.
I've fought with many of the classic router dovetail jigs, with the notable exception of the Leigh Jig. I find myself incapable of adjusting them to get the results I want: tight, perfectly aligned dovetails. If I had to build entire kitchens, I feel sure that I'd find a way to set up a jig and router and leave it that way in perpetuity so I could bang out standard drawers quickly. But for my work, every drawer is different. So cutting the joints by hand is honestly time-efficient at my bench. Plus, I've been cutting dovetails by hand for 15 years now. There's nothing intimidating about it – but I can sure remember being freaked out about the prospect of cutting the joint.
I got over this anxiety after I vowed to cut one set of dovetails every day for a month. On the first day of the month I milled all my stock for the self-improvement plan – about four boards that were 5" wide and 36" long. After dinner each night, I went down to the shop and did two things: First, I closely examined the set of dovetails I had cut the night before and tried to diagnose what went wrong or what could have been done to improve the fit. Then I tried to cut the next set of dovetails with my analysis in mind.
This bit of self-examination turned out to be as valuable as the practice I got in cutting and chiseling to a line. Too often it's too easy to hide or forget about our mistakes. It's much better to stare them straight in the face for a while.
After I assembled the joint, I'd cut that corner free, scrawl the date on it and place it on a shelf in my shop. After a couple weeks, my joints were consistently tighter. By the third week, my routine started to feel… routine. And by the fourth week I was fooling around with spacing the tails differently and increasing my speed.
Since that month, my dovetail anxiety has evaporated. I just do it and know that the joints will be dang tight. One caveat: I always cut the joints for the back of a drawer first in case I need a warm-up.
My only regret with the joints on this particular drawer is that I should have spaced the tails a little closer together. They look a little too regular, like I used a jig.
— Christopher Schwarz
Some projects play along nicely; others tend to fight you all the way. The Creole Table is shaping up to be a bit of a raging Cajun. My goal this week was to complete the top of the table and cut the curved transitions between the apron and cabriole legs.
The walnut for the top came from the same tree as the rest of the table. It entered our shop as 12/4 stock, dry (as far as our Wagner moisture meter could tell) and beautifully clear. The stock ended up as thin, twisted and dumped unceremoniously at the end of my bench.
For some reason, that particular part of the walnut had a lot of tension. All of the other sections of the board that were resawn came out nice and true. The stock for the top sprang like a spring. Because it was so thick, I thought I could still eek out enough thickness. No dice. Just a lot of frustrating work on the jointer and planer.
So I took the easy drive to Paxton's lumberyard to see what they had in their racks. It was going to cost me dearly, but it would be done. Again, no luck. The racks were almost empty, though the Paxton guys said they were going to restock the next day. So I dropped a line to Donnie, my dealer. He still had some walnut left to sell and was coming home early the next day for his daughter's soccer practice.
We met in his garage. I picked over the walnut in his rack, but it all looked a bit wonky. Did I want some nice curly sassafras instead? After making some discouraging noises, Donnie took pity on me and took me to his basement shop to peruse his personal stash. I picked out four perfect-looking boards and scurried back to the shop to cut them close to size so they'd acclimate to our shop's humidity faster. I put the moisture meter on them and my heart sank – everything was between 13 percent and 16 percent (the rest of the table is at 8 percent).
So my top is now on hold as I wait for the moisture to migrate out of my walnut.
So I turned back to the aprons. I've been putting off finishing the cut of the curve between the leg and apron. I keep telling myself that I'm waiting to get the base as sturdy and stable as possible (add the corner blocks; add the web frame; wait for the glue in the mortises to reach full strength). But the truth is I'm just a big piece of flightless poultry. The curve is really visible and is – in the end – just a smidge of end grain glued to the legs.
I actually glued this area when assembling the base. (First I sized the end grain with glue, waited a minute, then applied more yellow glue). And I clamped it firmly. But I'm still not confident. Every evening on my run and every morning over coffee I've been toying with this cut in my mind. I've got about five different strategies for sawing it out that would stress the end grain as little as possible.
This morning the solution came to me. I'm going to glue a small walnut block behind each of the eight transitions – a block that's only about 1/8" thick x 3/16" wide. There would be some cross-grain gluing issues, but I don't think wood movement will be a problem with such a small piece. And the long grain that's glued to both the apron and the leg will stiffen everything up as I go to town with a turning saw.
Of course, the entire table is on hold now. I'm off on Sunday to the Marc Adams School of Woodworking to teach a week-long class on blending hand and power tools. I might get to post a couple weblog entries during the week, but them I might just sleep instead.
— Christopher Schwarz
One of the big challenges in building a project for publication is to come up with techniques that use common tools and skills to produce results that others can replicate using the same tools and techniques. It's a bit like being a scientist, but without the sexy lab coats, pocket protectors and slide rules.
These cabriole legs are a prime example of this challenge. The legs themselves are easier than most cabriole legs because we've done the grunt work of finding the fair curve and developing patterns for you, plus they don't require a lot of freeform shaping to get them looking good. These particular legs do have one quirk, however.
The tops of many cabriole leg are square in section, obviously. With many cabriole legs the curvy part sticks out from the line of the apron with the traditional "knee" shape we're all familiar with. These legs are different. They curve in, which gives the table a delicate, perching look. This means that the mortises on the legs are going to be on an inside surface of the leg blank. That's a bit tricky because you want your joinery surfaces as clean and straight and true as possible.
My first inclination was to cut the entire leg shape with a band saw and then true the joinery surfaces with a plane. So I cut a couple test legs using sappy walnut to try this procedure out. I wasn't happy with the results. I could get an acceptable joinery surface, but it took more hand skills than I liked, and it was too easy to get the entire leg out of square at the top, which could be frustrating at assembly time.
The other option was to cut the square sections of the legs using a table saw and a series of stopped cuts and then finish up the cuts with a hand saw or band saw. Generally, I hate stopped cuts on the table saw because they can feel a bit unsafe to some people. (And I really hate plunge cutting on the table saw and won't do it myself.)
So I tried the stop cuts on a test piece. The procedure allowed me to leave the splitter in place and use our basket guard (which is removed for the photo – honest). Plus, instead of removing the piece with the sawblade running I simple turned the saw off after each stopped cut. After the blade ran down, I removed the piece from the cut. The results looked good and the procedure felt safe.
I still needed to finish up the cut – the curvature of the saw's blade prohibited me from cutting the waste free. I could use the band saw to do this, or I could take a break from the machines and get out a handsaw. Handsaw it is.
— Christopher Schwarz
I like working with walnut, but I hate marking it. Its dark color makes pencil lines disappear. And its open grain hide knife lines as well. Dovetailing is a particular problem for me. Part of this is personal – my vision is quite poor; I'm legally blind without my glasses on. But even if I had perfect vision (like eagle-eyed Senior Editor David Thiel) walnut would still be a problem.
One of the perks of this job is that you can take an afternoon to try to crack a nut like this, spend $30 of the company's money and try out a variety of solutions – all in the name of helping our readers.
The first stop was the Staples store to pick up some Pilot P-500 gel pens with the extra fine (0.5 mm) tip. These have been recommended by other woodworkers. I tried the P-500 once a couple years ago, remember being impressed and then I lost the pen. The nice think about the gel ink is that it seems to be like gel stain in that it doesn't absorb into the wood as much, making a blotchy mess. It makes a nice fine line if you make your mark swiftly and lightly. I wish they sold it in white ink, however.
One of the other editors recalled a former employee here who would write notes to fellow employees on black PostIts with white or silver gel ink. Hmmmm. A little searching turned up the right pen: the Sakura Gelly Roll pen. The editor called around to the local art stores and they were all sold out of the white ink version. A dead end? Of course not.
On a lark I went to our local art supplies store (let me say that woodworkers have nothing on artists when it comes to pricey and specialized tools). They had a display for the Sakura Gelly Roll pens and were indeed out of the white ink. So I bought a bright yellow one and a silver one ($1.19 each at our local store). Out of the corner of my eye I saw another Sakura display in the "wall of pens." They have another brand "Pen-touch," which is more expensive ($2.38), but it is offered in white and has a pretty fine point (0.7 mm).
We also found a Sharpie Poster-Paint pen in our company's office supply catalog.
Here's what I concluded: The yellow gel stinks. It was less visible than a pencil line. That one is going to my kids to play with. The silver Sakura Gelly Roll was better than the yellow. You could see the line especially well if you caught its reflection in the light. Of course, you can sometimes do that trick with a pencil line on walnut. The Sharpie was big and white. Too big, really.
The best of the bunch was the Sakura Pen-Touch. When wielded with a light touch, like a calligraphy pen, it would lay down a nice thin line that was brilliantly visible. It might not be the marking solution for dovetails, but for cutting cabriole legs and basic pattern work, it's a good solution.
— Christopher Schwarz
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