Woodworking Magazine Weblog

We have completed work on Issue 9 – our first ever issue for subscribers – and we are just about to send the issue to the printer. That issue will mail out to subscribers (boy that is nice to type!) on the week of March 3.

To give you a small taste of the issue, you can now download the digital eDrawings of two versions of the cover project – a Gustav Stickley Tabouret.

This interactive 3D illustration can be opened and manipulated using a free program from eDrawings that is available both for the PC and Mac. Even if you’ve never used a CAD program before, I think you’ll find an eDrawing easy to use.

With the help of the eDrawings you can rotate the projects around, make parts transparent and move parts around to examine the joinery. It’s an excellent way to figure out how a project goes together before you start cutting.

These eDrawings were prepared by Louis Bois, a draughtsman and good friend of Woodworking Magazine. He also prepared all the construction drawings for the tabourets that will appear in Issue 9.

Tabouret-Corbel-Assy.zip (11.84 KB)

Tabouret-Trumpet-Assy.zip (11.99 KB)

— Christopher Schwarz

Legacy Planeworks officially opened its doors on Tuesday and began selling kits that allow a home woodworker with no metalworking experience to build an English-style shoulder plane with naval brass sides, a steel sole and an exotic wood infill.

The company currently offers two sizes of shoulder planes – 1" wide and 3/4" wide – with prices starting at $425. And two more infill kits are on the drawing board: a chariot plane and a Norris-style A6 smoothing plane with a mechanical blade adjuster, says Marty Sivar, one of the owners of the company.

The kits have been in development for many months, Sivar says, and the parts are so finely machined that you can literally snap the metal dovetails in place when you take the parts out of the box.

"We wanted to offer a refined kit," Sivar said today in a phone interview, "not something you had to spend hours prepping the parts for assembly and cleaning them up."

The kits come with all the metal components you need (even the drill bits for boring the wood components). The home planemaker will need a ball pien hammer, a steel plate (or anvil) and a handful of files to complete the project, Sivar says. Legacy Planeworks also sells all the files required for planemaking on its web site: legacyplanes.com.

Some woodworkers might remember the kits that were sold by Shepherd Tool, a Canadian company run by two partners outside Toronto. After Shepherd's early success with its first Spiers-style smoothing plane kits, the company ran into some rocky times and shuttered its doors in early 2006 with a crowd of angry customers who were upset about a variety of problems, from not being able to get technical questions answered, kits that were missing parts, and credit cards that were charged with merchandise never shipped.

Sivar was one of those angry customers of Shepherd, and he said he and his partner, Ernie Barber, have set out to make sure that Legacy Planeworks is everything that Shepherd Tool was not.

Sivar says that the company's web site will not sell you a kit unless there are more than two in stock, and that every order will be shipped within two or three days of it being placed. Plus, Sivar says that Legacy now has plenty of kits on hand to sell right away (one of them is heading for our office for a full review, by the way).

The kit components for a Legacy shoulder plane (both photos courtesy of Legacy Planeworks).

Every kit has a money-back guarantee and includes a 52-page instruction manual that includes many step photos that will walk the planemaker through the process. The manual, Sivar says, has taken a long time to develop and has been through many revisions to make the instructions as complete and foolproof as possible.

"I think our customers will be very satisfied from the minute they open the box," Sivar says.

Sivar has experience both as a woodworker and a metalworker. He started his career as a machinist and then went into the military. After a short stint as a corporate pilot, Sivar completed some marketing and management training and went to work for a petro-chemical company, where he is now an area manager and nearing retirement. Barber works in law enforcement and is an accomplished woodworker and carver who specializes in 18th-century furniture.

Sivar says all the plane components are going to be professionally made by other metalworking companies to Legacy's specifications; that will leave Sivar and Barber to focus on working with current customers and developing future products.

Personally, I'm quite pleased to see someone getting back into this business. I built several of the Shepherd kits, including a couple smoothing planes, a chariot plane, a shoulder plane and a panel plane. Despite the glitches (my kits were missing critical parts, too) the overall experience was fun and you learn a lot about plane mechanics by building one of the tools.

I think it's especially encouraging that Legacy has started out offering just the shoulder plane kit. Of all the kits I built, that one was the easiest to complete and will likely give would-be planemakers a good taste of the process.

In the coming weeks, I'll post photos of the new kit and my progress building it.

— Christopher Schwarz

Last year while I was teaching a sawing class in Michigan, one of the students brought along a dovetail saw he had purchased almost 10 years earlier but had never used. When I spied it on his workbench, I snatched it.

It looked like the classic Lie-Nielsen Toolworks dovetail saw, but there was something different about it. When I took it out of its package, I had my answer. This was a mint Independence Tool dovetail saw that was made before Lie-Nielsen purchased the company in September 1998.

Holding this pristine little saw was a little like driving a 1948 Porsche 356. This was the saw that changed everything for hand tool woodworkers. And it started with a friendship between an Army officer and a software developer that was struck up during early days of the Internet.

The story of Independence Tool isn't well-known among woodworkers, and so I gave one of its founders a phone call to chat about the early days of the market for premium Western-style saws, which has blossomed in the last 10 years.

The primordial stew for the story begins with an Internet listserv called "oldtools" (it's still around and thriving – I'm a mostly lurking member). Oldtools is an e-mail based discussion group that started in 1995 where the members chat about hand tools and hand work – anything meat-powered that cuts wood, really.

Two of the founding members were Pete Taran, then an Army officer in Maryland, and Patrick Leach, then a Boston software developer. They struck up a friendship through the oldtools list, Taran said, and that led to a discussion of quitting their day jobs and starting a tool-making company.

"Patrick was burned out," Taran said. "And I was ready to leave the Army."

The question was: What tool should they make? Taran said they had to pick a tool that didn't require a lot of heavy metal-working machinery to make. While Taran had some machine training in his background, it wasn't like he had a fully-equipped metal shop at home.

Coincidentally, Leach had just purchased a nice Groves & Sons dovetail saw that had beautiful lines.

"I was the resident engineer," Taran said. "So I sort of deconstructed the saw and figured out how we could make it. We made a prototype."

Leach and Taran showed off the prototype at an old tool sale in March 1996. Everyone who looked at the saw said they would buy one, Taran said. So they bought a couple machines and got to work on nights and weekends (they kept their day jobs at first). Taran was in charge of production of the tools. Leach was in charge of sales, marketing and the company's web site. (An early flyer for the company is pictured above. Click on the image to see it full-size.)

(While little Internet start-ups like this are now common, Taran points out that it was quite rare in 1996 to start a company that was little more than a web site and a couple guys working from home.)

By the end of 1996, Taran had made 500 saws.

"The word spread like wildfire," Taran said. "We couldn't keep up with demand."

Dovetail maestro Frank Klausz ordered one off of the Independence Tool web site, and Taran delivered it to him personally.

"Frank Klausz is the quintessential perfectionist," Taran said. "He became our biggest supporter."

With craftsmen like Klausz and others speaking out for the saw, the catalog companies began to call, but Taran said they resisted getting into the wholesale business. Eventually they sold their saws (both a dovetail saw and a carcase saw) through Highland Hardware in Atlanta, Ga., but the rest of the sales were direct to the customer.

After two years, Taran said that he had made about 2,000 saws. He had figured out how to outsource some of the parts (such as the brass backs and the special split nuts that attach the blade to the handle). But Taran said his relationship with Leach was strained by the work. Taran bought out Leach's part of the business, but that wasn't the cure-all.

"It became drudgery after two years," Taran said. "I looked at my life and said, 'This is fun, but I don't want to do this the rest of my life.' "

Plus, he had a sweet job offer on the table from a former superior officer who was working in the private sector. Taran said he put out some feelers about selling the business. One of those feelers made it to Thomas Lie-Nielsen through Clarence Blanchard, owner of the Fine Tool Journal.

Lie-Nielsen bought Independence Tool in September 1998 and has greatly expanded the line of saws to include tenon saws, gent's saws and a variety of saws with different filings and tooth counts.

"He's taken it and run with it," Taran said.

The original Independence Tool saws and the Lie-Nielsen versions are in many ways identical. The tooth configuration is the same. The length and depth of the blade are virtually identical. The brass back has the same crisp bevels. But the handles are different. The Lie-Nielsen handles have crisp details – a product of machine manufacturing. The Independence Tool saw has rounder edges throughout, a product of all the hand work that Taran put into the saws.

Though some people would disagree (one way or the other) I found both to be quite comfortable and wouldn't say that one was markedly superior to the other. But dovetail saws are a personal thing, so it's a bit beside the point.

Australian woodworker and writer Derek Cohen has done a nice side-by-side comparison of the two tools on the WKFineTools.com site if you'd like to read more and see some photos.

It's now been 10 years since the saw business was sold to Lie-Nielsen, and both Taran and Leach still have a hand in world of hand tools. Leach buys and sells some of the finer vintage British and American hand tools through his site at Supertool.com. (Be sure to subscribe to his monthly e-mail newsletter. It's filled with hundreds of excellent tools and photos – plus Leach happens to be a great writer.)

While you're at the Supertool site, visit the "Blood & Gore" section of the site – it's required reading for handtool geeks-in-training.

And Taran is now a Six Sigma Master Black Belt and a Cleveland-based corporate consultant who helps weed out inefficient processes in companies. He also runs the excellent VintageSaws.com site. He sells hand saws and back saws (all of which are sharpened and ready to go). And he has posted a great series of articles he wrote for The Fine Tool Journal on selecting, cleaning  and sharpening saws. They are in the Library section of the site.

And Taran said he may someday make some more saws, perhaps if only for himself. You see, Taran said he doesn't even own one of his own production saws from his Independence Tool days, though he does own the prototype he built.

"And I probably have parts for 50 or 60 saws still lying around," Taran said. "Some day I should dig those out and make a nice set of saws – just for me."

Coming soon: We take a close look at the Independence Tool prototype, on loan from Pete Taran.

— Christopher Schwarz

The venerable rasp-making company Auriou plans to reopen its factory in France this summer after being shuttered by a labor dispute, officials said. The closing of the company resulted in a purchasing frenzy of the rasps by woodworkers that continues to this day – one Auriou flat rasp sold for $600 on eBay today.

The new Auriou will be a smaller company that will focus on making tools for the woodworking and stone-working market, according to Mike Hancock of Classic Hand Tools in the United Kingdom. After the factory begins production, there are plans to begin exporting the rasps to the United States, Hancock wrote in an e-mail.

Hancock was part of a small group of investors that purchased the machinery and tooling from the Auriou factory when it was auctioned off. Michel Auriou, who ran the factory, will be the technical and workshop manager for the new company, according to Hancock.

In addition to the machinery and tooling, Hancock's company also purchased a selection of finished rasps and rifflers during the auction that he will be selling beginning on Monday, Feb. 11. To get a list of the tools (mostly rifflers) send an e-mail to sales@classichandtools.co.uk and ask for the "rasps & riffler list."

— Christopher Schwarz

On the cover of "Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use" there are a couple low sawhorse-gizmos parked beneath my French-style workbench that look like Munchkins from the Lollipop Guild could have used them to build the set for the "Wizard of Oz."

Those are Japanese sawing trestles that I built five or six years ago based on plans from Toshio Odate's "Japanese Woodworking Tools: Their Tradition, Spirit, and Use." I built the trestles to do some hands-on research on Japanese sawing methods after several people had mentioned that Japanese saws weren't designed to be used at a high Western-style workbench.

After I built the trestles, I pushed my current bench aside and started sawing on the floor of our shop. To make joinery crosscuts, you place the work across the trestles and kneel on a mat (I used a moving blanket). To make rips, such as a tenon cheek, you prop the work up on the trestle, stand on the work and cut the cheek. (See the photo.)

I have to agree that the Japanese saws did cut more efficiently this way, especially the ryoba. But you do have to be in better shape than a typical Western woodworker. That's because you are the woodworking vise. Your weight and your muscles immobilize the work as you saw. Plus, you have to tune your sense of balance a little finer.

After I finished with that experiment, I kept the trestles around because they're quite handy. I use them primarily for assembling things on my benchtop. With my work resting on the trestles I can easily clamp all around the work and under it.

My trestles are cherry and made from 2"-thick stock – I built them entirely by hand from some stock we had harvested from a co-worker's back yard. Also, just for fun, I built them without glue or metal fasteners – I remembered something about that detail from college when I studied the Shinto religion. You don't want to mess with the kami. It was a fun afternoon project. The trestles are 16" long and 6" high. If I had to make them again, I'd probably make them 18" or 20" long – sometimes they are a bit small to hold casework.

— Christopher Schwarz

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