Woodworking Magazine Weblog

When I was first learning to use a handplane, I was both intimidated and skeptical of some of the claims made by the "handplane gods."

The gods claimed they could plane any species of wood, with any grain direction and with any sort of figure in the wood without the wood tearing out. So what was the secret of the gods?

Sometimes it was the tool (usually an infill plane, but sometimes a Bedrock that had spent some time in a peyote hut in New Mexico getting in touch with its inner frog). Or sometimes it was their sharpening skill and waterstones (#100,000-grit stones, or perhaps the trail of split hydrogen atoms they left in their wake.) Sometimes the secret was their skill – they could plane any board with a piece of tin foil taped to a Monchhichi doll.

But I was skeptical, because these boasts were never accompanied by photographic evidence.

So here's a bit of truth about my own work. I've been handplaning boards for more than 15 years now, and I still fight and struggle with tear-out, even in some domestic species. Usually, the way I deal with tear-out is to choose my wood with extra care and stay away from boards that are going to give me trouble. Careful planning makes for easy planing.

After that, I must say that I have the most success in removing tear-out by using a plane with an iron pitched at a high angle (usually 60° to 62° – whatever my honing guide can manage).

This week I'm building a blanket chest for the Summer 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine, and the wood is some kicking tiger maple that I bought from a fellow woodworker's private stash. While machining all the boards, the grain tore out in some critical spots.

Then I flattened all the boards and assembled panels with my jointer plane. It was freshly sharpened, pitched at 45° and set for a fairly light cut – .003" or .004" I'd say. The tear-out didn't recede much, but I didn't panic.

That's because I have a plane with a 62° angle of attack that is for just this purpose. The one shown on my bench is the Veritas Bevel-up Smoothing Plane, but don't take that as an endorsement of that single brand. I have a Lie-Nielsen version at home (the low-angle jack) set up identically. And I can even get this 62° angle on a standard old-school handplane by honing a back-bevel on the iron.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that it's not the tool as much as it is the angle.

The photos show the results of the high-pitch plane. The tear-out took about eight passes to remove with the tool set to take an extremely thin shaving. I don't think I've entered the realm of the handplaning gods, but when you have small victories like this, it sure makes you feel like one.

— Christopher Schwarz

The most common question I’m asked these days (right behind “Could you please get me some chocolate raisins at Trader Joe’s?”) is this one: “What is your dream workbench?”

It’s a fine question. And when Craig Stevens at Woodworkers Resource asked me the question for this podcast interview, I stumbled around and answered that it would be something like a Roubo Workbench (a French design), with the workholding of a Holtzapffel Workbench (designed by a German living in England).

A bit of a Euro-mash workbench, I suppose.

Well today, woodworker James Oliver of Vancouver Island, B.C., sent me a photo of that exact workbench, which he has recently completed building. The bench is 112" long, 27" wide and 32" high (James reports that he’s 5'7" tall). The majority of the bench is structural fir; the vises and sliding deadman are ribbon-figured African mahogany.

The twin-screw vise is even larger than mine – 25-1/4" between centers. And the jaws are lined with saddle leather. And my favorite detail is the little oil cup on the left side (made from walnut) – Andre Roubo would love it (if he were alive and had a broadband connection).

The bench took about a week to build. James builds furniture for Coastal Carvings fine art gallery using only solid stock, no plywood or veneers.

I think James’s bench is an excellent design. Bravo.

— Christopher Schwarz

One of the best things about building old-style workbenches (like Andre Roubo's bench above) is that there are little lessons you learn by using them. At times, you learn the lesson unconsciously and it takes a couple years for you to even learn that you learned it.

This morning I was flattening the panels for the blanket chest I’m building for the Summer 2008 issue by planing them directly across the grain — what Joseph Moxon calls “traversing” in his book the “Mechanick Exercises.”

So I’m minding my own beeswax while traversing, and I notice something I’ve been doing for a while without really thinking. While traversing, I wedge my left foot under the stretcher, and I use that foot to help pull my body back on the return stroke.

So I paused and I pulled my left foot out from under the stretcher and tried planing with both feet planted on the floor instead. That felt a lot like working. So I wedged my foot back under the stretcher and returned to work.

Did Roubo design this workbench with this little detail in mind? Likely, no. But the stretcher’s location has always been curious to me – it’s only 5" off the floor. Other benches I’ve worked on (and constructed) put the stretcher considerably higher off the floor. If you have a low stretcher, give this a try and let me know what you think.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

If you aren’t yet completely saturated with information on workbenches, then get comfortable and read on. Craig Stevens at the Woodworkers Resource has just released an hour-long interview of me about my book, my work at the magazine and the craft in general.

The interview is in mp3 format (it’s about 55mb) and can be streamed from most internet browsers. You can even save it to your hard drive and load it on an iPod. You can read more about the interview and start streaming it here – but be sure to check out the rest of the excellent site, which includes video, Craig’s blog, a newsletter and an eBook of strategies for teaching woodworking to kids.

Craig conducted the interview on Jan. 13 while I was in my shop working some frustrating bookcases made from sub-standard plywood (that long national nightmare is almost at an end, by the way). During our chat we discussed:

• How I got interested (read: freakishly obsessed) with the topic of workbenches.
• What a typical workday is like at Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine.
• My favorite workbench (which doesn’t exist as of yet).
• The types of furniture and projects I build at home.
• A little bit about the future of my Lost Art Press web site.

Craig did a great job with the interview and kept it casual yet highly focused (I have a tendency to blather; just ask my kids). So thanks to Craig and I hope you like the interview.

— Christopher Schwarz

I have a "saw problem." There, I said it.

And because I have too many saws in my shop at home and at work, I also have too many saws that have loose saw nuts. They loosen up with use and with seasonal contraction and expansion. Many of my late-model saws can be tightened up with a regular straight screwdriver. But early saws have what are called "split nuts," where the nut has two slots instead of one.

The bad news is that these nuts come in different sizes. So the solution is usually to take several old screwdrivers and grind them into the profiles you need. I have a drawer of these modified drivers.

The good news is that Gramercy Tools has a new split-nut driver that takes up very little space because it chucks into any standard ¼" driver (shown but not included), such as a 4-in-1 screwdriver. This split-nut driver fits the Gramercy dovetail saw (naturally), but it also fits my Lie-Nielsen saws with split nuts and a good chunk of my vintage saws, such as my beloved Garlick & Sons sash saw.

It doesn't fit my Wenzloff & Sons saws, however, so I'm going to have to keep some of the custom drivers in my drawer.

If you are wondering if this driver will work for your saws, here are the specs: the head of the driver is .435" wide. Each of the two tips is .118" wide and .042" thick.

The driver works brilliantly and is something I've never seen before in catalogs or at the flea markets. At $8.95, it is an excellent little accessory that I highly recommend and is available from Tools for Working Wood.

— Christopher Schwarz

Memory is a funny thing, especially in my family. But I swear that during my last days as a college undergrad there was a car dealership in Chicago that offered a special deal to its customers.

Buy a car and get a Yugo for just $1.

If there is a Yugo of the woodworking world, it has to be the Stanley planes that are called “the transitionals.” These poor suckers have a wooden body with a metal Bailey-style adjustment mechanism that works a bit like an Australian toilet (that is, they spin backwards than what we are accustomed to).

Most modern woodworkers first encounter these planes through Patrick Leach’s venerable web site “Patrick Leach’s Blood & Gore.” This site offers commentary on almost every plane made by Stanley. Tool collectors print out every page of this enormous site. They put the pages in a three-ring binder. They live by the advice, which is, for the most part, totally dead on the money.

For example, Leach contends that the Bed Rock series of planes are overrated (bingo). He laments the fiberboard planes (fair enough, but so do small children, invalids and lunatics). And he mocks the No. 55 (which deserves it). But he also runs down the No. 6, a plane that I find quite useful. And he advocates the ritual burning of almost all the transitional planes. He even has photos!

Let me be the first person to say that the transitional planes aren’t perfect. Many of the defects he points out are dead-on. But some of these tools have some distinct advantages that, when realized, are impressive. Here’s my take.

Downside: The adjustment knob is too puny.

The transitional planes are excellent for some jobs, and are fairly worthless for others. You just have to think about it for a minute. Personally, I think the transitional planes that are jointer planes and fore planes are outstanding. I’m not so fond, however, of the many transitionals that are smoothing planes.

Let’s take a look at the way these planes work for a minute and I think you’ll see where I’m coming from.

In essence, these planes marry a Bailey-style blade adjuster with a wooden body. The advantages of this sort of tool are:

1. The sole is tremendously easy to true compared to a metal plane.
2. The tool is lightweight, thanks to the wooden body.
3. You can purchase enormously long and accurate jointer planes (up to 30") in this form because the wood is so inexpensive.
4. You can dial in your shaving thickness with great accuracy thanks to the patented Bailey adjuster.
5. You get the same sweet wood-on-wood feel as you would when working with a traditional wooden plane.

The disadvantages are:
1. Closing up the mouth of this tool is a stupid exercise in shimming under the blade with cardboard.
2. The tote and knob are poorly attached to the plane (most are wobbly).
3. The blade-adjustment mechanism works opposite of the same adjuster on a Stanley metal plane – you spin the wheel counter-clockwise to extend the blade.
4. The blade-adjustment wheel is too puny.

If you carefully sort through these advantages and disadvantages you’ll see why these planes make excellent jointers and fore planes. First, the soles are easy to true – far easier than truing the sole of a metal plane. When I fixed up my first jack plane, I spent days (yes, days) lapping the sole to dead flat. I want those days back.

When I flatten the sole of a transitional plane, I set my power jointer to the lightest cut I can manage and make a pass on the plane’s sole. Then it’s dead-flat and done. When readers ask me how to flatten the sole of a metal jointer plane, I’m at a total loss. I’ve never been able to manage it to my satisfaction. I just make the sole worse, turning it into an iron banana.

With a fore plane and a jointer plane, the mouth aperture is fairly unimportant. So the fact that it gets larger as you true the sole is immaterial. However, it’s this problem that makes the transitionals troublesome as smoothing planes. You can stupidly adjust the plane’s frog forward to close up the smoother’s mouth, but that just makes the iron chatter because the wooden bed and the iron bed that hold the iron are then out of alignment. The best way to close up the mouth on a transitional is by patching the mouth with an extra piece of wood.

Downside: The metal frog and wooden bed are two separate pieces. Close the mouth (or open it) and you'll make chatter, not shavings.

The light weight of these planes makes them excellent jointer and fore planes. They are easy to wield, even if you have the arms of a little girl (of which I am guilty).

And you don’t have to create a perfect surface with these two classes of tools – that’s the job of the smoothing plane. So if you have a jointer plane iron with a few pits in it that leaves a few plane tracks behind, then so be it. The smoothing plane (or Fein sander, or Timesaver wide-beltsander, or the abject blindness of your loved ones) will fix that.

But here is why you really should buy these planes. They are dirt, dirt cheap. The No. 32 shown in these photos was $35, and I overpaid. You can get transitionals really cheap. In fact, some tool dealers think they are too lame to even sell them.

Some people give them away like Yugos.

— Christopher Schwarz

Reader Michael Holcomb writes: I'm writing to ask your advice about an old Pennsylvania cabinet maker's workbench I was lucky enough to buy a couple of years ago. It came from the shop of a Berks County, Penn., cabinet maker and has many of the features of the line drawing in Eric Sloane's book on early American tools. It's massive: The top is just shy of 9' and is made of two planks of 3" chestnut (I think). It has a leg vise on one end, an end vise on the other, and a board jack which slides the entire length of the front. I sent photos to a friend, Ernie Conover, who thought its construction techniques might date it to the 1830s. 

My question is, should I do anything to plane and resurface the top, which has the normal nicks, dings, holes and abrasions from almost two centuries of use? There is slight warpage on one end of one of the planks, but otherwise the surface is certainly usable, due mainly to its substantial construction and weight. Would I destroy its historical value by planing the surface? Or is it better just left alone?

Answer: It's a good question that deserves some consideration and debate.

Here's my take: If you are going to use the bench for hand work, then you don't have much of a choice. You should flatten the top. Otherwise, handplaning will be impossible. I find that once the top goes out of flat by .006" or so, then my work tends to spring on the top unacceptably.

I take flattening to be routine maintenance for a piece that is in service -- like waxing the top of a dining table that is in use in your home.

While I'm sure there are some workbenches that are truly "museum pieces" (such as the Dominy bench at Winterthur), most benches should be put to use in workshops so they avoid a worse fate -- being used as houseplant holders or decorative accents by sellers of antiques. Maybe someday there will be a "workbench museum" and I'll change my tune. Until then, do your best to bring this bench back to life.

— Christopher Schwarz

As of today, we have made two important changes at Woodworking Magazine: We are now going to publish four issues a year (instead of two), and we are now offering subscriptions by mail.

If you'd like to take a moment here and enter your subscription (four issues for $19.96 in the United States; $24.96 in Canada), you can click here.

Other than that, nothing else is changing about the magazine. And I do mean nothing. We will accept no outside advertising. We will publish the magazine on the same high-quality paper. We will continue to review the materials and equipment that no other magazine seems to discuss. And we will continue to investigate all the methods of working wood by hand and by power.

Even today, while we are frantically trying to answer customer calls and e-mails about the new subscriptions, Senior Editor Bob Lang and I have been working on the side on a technique for Issue 10 – Summer 2008 – that is going to change the way you think about finger joints.

So today, I have a statement, a request and a gift for you. First the statement: Thank you. All of you. If it weren't for the readers of this blog and the letters you have sent to me and my boss, we would not be offering subscriptions today.

Now the request: If you know any woodworking friends who might enjoy the magazine, would you mind dropping them a line? We have a Tell a Friend page that makes it easy – don't worry we won't sell or rent out anyone's e-mail address. Want to send a gift subscription to a fellow woodworker? Click here (Note: Right now this page works for U.S. gifts only. Sorry.)

And the gift: below is the editor's column I wrote for the Spring 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine – the first issue that will mail to subscribers. I hope you like it.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Several of you have asked about digital subscriptions for the magazine. We'll be experimenting with a pilot program later this year. Details, as always, will be posted here.

The Back Roads Are Better

“The significant problems we face
cannot be solved at the same level
of thinking we were at when
we created them.”
– Albert Einstein, (1879-1955)


The story of the magazine you’re holding begins with a car ride through the back roads of Ohio in 2002 and a small disagreement.

Publisher Steve Shanesy and I were driving to West Virginia to a woodworking show and we were at odds about the route to take. I’d mapped out a path on the interstate, but Steve had other ideas. His finger traced a twisty path on my atlas that relied on small towns and two-lane roads.

This, I thought, was going to be a long trip.

As we forged into the wilds of Ohio, the conversation turned to how frustrating it can be to teach yourself to build furniture. Without formal training, many of us tend to develop our skills to match the project at hand.

For example, if we want to build a dovetailed blanket chest, we decide it’s time to learn to cut dovetails, even if we’ve never picked up a dovetail saw or used a dovetail jig. And so we buy a bunch of tools, chew up a lot of good wood and end up with something that is OK, but took twice as long as it should have.

There are better ways to learn the craft.

First you need to learn how handsaws work, how to pick the right tool and how to hold it. Then you start by sawing a board in half, cutting some tenons and half-lap joints and learning exactly where the kerf of each of your saws will fall so you can split a knife line.

If all those tasks sound difficult, you’ve probably never done them. Cutting simple joints with a sharp saw is easy and satisfying work. You just have to know where to begin. And once you begin in the right place, the path is easy to follow.

It’s like being on an interstate instead of poking through the back woods, I reminded Steve (who smirked at my remark).

As we drove on, we tried to figure out what we could do to help beginning woodworkers learn the craft in an orderly way, and to help intermediate woodworkers fill in the astonishing gaps in their knowledge because they are self-taught. So Steve and I decided to start this magazine. And after more than a year of thinking and plotting, we published our first experimental issue in early 2004 with the help of the entire staff of Popular Woodworking, the magazine that is our day job, for a lack of better words. We published Woodworking Magazine without a dime of marketing money. Without fanfare. Without additional staff. We wanted to see if the woodworking community would support a magazine that had no advertisements, that focused on building important skills, and that featured projects that are highly refined yet simple in their construction.

This is not the way most companies launch a magazine. Usually you start with a bang. You try to grow your circulation to a ridiculous level to get the attention of advertisers. You lose money for a long time in the hopes of it paying off big in the end.

I’m proud to say that Woodworking Magazine started life in 2004 by making a modest amount of money thanks to a passionate group of supporters. And we have continued to make money and grow slowly during the last three years, even though we’ve only been publishing twice a year (another thing that’s never done in this industry).

But now, thanks to you, we are ready to move into the next phase. With this issue, we are now a quarterly magazine, and we are now happy to sell you a subscription (call 800-283-3542 in the United States and Canada or visit our subscription page).

It has been a bit of a twisty path for all of us these last few years, but we’ve ended up in the right place at the right time. It is a lot like that fateful trip I took with Steve in 2002. Despite all our trekking on the back roads, despite all the four-way stops in tiny towns, we made it to our destination in West Virginia and shaved nearly 45 minutes off the time it would have taken us on the interstate.

Steve had been down this road before.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz