Woodworking Magazine Weblog

The best hand drills ever made came out of the Millers Falls factory in the first half of the 20th century. While many people used these drills for boring holes in metal, the tools proved remarkably adept at becoming the first generation of cordless drills for woodworking.

These drills are today called eggbeater drills because of the way the drive mechanism works. The main gear turns either one or two pinions on the tool’s shaft to turn the chuck backward or forward – just like an old kitchen eggbeater.

My favorite eggbeater drills are the Nos. 2, 2A and 5 made by Millers Falls. These drills were made to an astonishingly high degree of precision, and are easily comparable to tools manufactured today by Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, Veritas, Wenzloff & Sons, Adria or Gramercy.

The eggbeater drills are fairly common at flea markets, but they are also usually in dogmeat shape. The gears are rusted. The bearings are gummed up. The wood knobs are dried out and cracked. The frames have lost all their paint.

But now Wiktor Kuc, the owner of WKTools.com and WKFineTools.com, is restoring and selling these drills on his website and on eBay. He recently sent me a Millers Falls No. 5 that he has restored, and I am just stunned by the quality of the restoration.

This tool looks better than any example of a Millers Falls I’ve ever seen. It looks good no matter how close you examine it. Inside the chuck. At the seam between the ferrule and the handle. Where the pinions mesh with the main gear.

Kuc says he’s been restoring these kinds of drills for a year. He’s been learning the best way to disassemble and clean the tools, how to apply principles from jewelers to polish the metalwork, and how to deal with the dried-out wood.

“I started doing this for myself,” Kuc says. “I love to restore old tools. I read Herb Keane’s book (‘Restoring Antique Tools’) and it blew my roof off. I had to learn to do that.”

Since he started restoring drills (and some braces), Kuc’s resurrected more than 130 Millers Falls drills, 30 Goodell-Pratt drills and a number of braces.

He takes all the drills apart as much as possible, strips them clean and then rebuilds them so they look and work perfectly. The ones he can restore to their full glory Kuc sells on his web site after four to five coats of paint and refinishing everything. The drills that he cannot get perfect he sells on eBay at a reduced price, though they are functionally perfect.

The perfect drills cost between $60 and $110, depending on their rarity. On eBay, the current crop of drills cost between $50 and $90. Are they worth it? Absolutely. If you want a cordless drill that will never run out of juice (until you run out of juice) an eggbeater like this is ideal for any toolbox.

These tools have small chucks that are great for furniture-scale twists and brad-point bits. I use hand drills all the time when making pilot holes, especially for screws or nails.

And one more thing: If you already have a Millers Falls drill, Kuc also sells reproduction parts for these drills that are usually missing, such as the side knobs and the bits that are stored in the handles.

Millers Falls drills are very common, so if you don’t want a restored one you’ll be able to find them at garage sales, flea markets and eBay (they are not scarce by any measure). But if you want the best – a tool that looks as good as it works, check out Kuc’s selection. Highly recommended by me (and banned by wivesagainstschwarz.com).

— 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

One of my (many) blind spots in woodworking is Japanese tools and shop practices. Sure, I’ve read Toshio Odate’s excellent autobiography, plus “The Genius of Japanese Carpentry.” And I drool with great regularity on the Japan Woodworker catalog.

But I understand Japanese shop practices as much as I understand all the acronyms my 12-year-old daughter uses when texting. DFLA!

So I’m always eager to learn about Japanese woodworking from people who have studied and practiced it in Japan. One of those people is Harrelson Stanley, the owner of JapaneseTools.com and the man who brought Shapton waterstones to American shores.

Stanley completed the furniture program at the premier North Bennett Street School as a very young man and then went off to Japan to study the traditional lacquering and woodworking trades. He came back to this country with a Japanese wife and a deep desire to spread the traditional Japanese practices among Western woodworkers.

This weekend at the Northeastern Woodworkers Association's annual show, Stanley was demonstrating his new Sharp Skate honing guide, teaching people to sharpen edge tools and helping people learn to wield a handplane on his Japanese bench.

The bench consists of two trestle-style sawhorses that are topped with one massive slab of a top. Except for the teak planing stop, all the bench’s parts are made using Port Orford Cedar, Stanley says, a durable and strong member of the cypress family that grows in the Pacific Northwest.

This particular bench was built by James Blauvelt, a Connecticut cabinetmaker, joiner and carpenter who runs the company Bluefield Joiners. But is this bench typical of what would be found in a Japanese workshop?

“Actually, it’s a little too nice,” Stanley says. “In a Japanese shop they would use something more makeshift.”

Harrelson Stanley demonstrates how the notch in the top is used to true a plane's sole.

Here are some of the critical dimensions: The trestles are made from 3-1/2” x 3-1/2” stock throughout, with an overall height of 23-3/4” from the floor to the top of each sawhorse. The top is 3-1/2” thick, 10-1/4” wide and 8’ long. The working height of the benchtop is 27-1/2”, which is fairly low by modern Western standards.

The slab rests on the sawhorses and is held in place by a single cleat below the top that fits against the top of one of the sawhorses. Gravity and the force of the work keeps the top in place.

The top is considerably narrower than the sawhorses, which prompted me to ask why. Is that where stock was placed before or after it was worked? Not really, Stanley says. Typically, the Japanese woodworker would place a thin board across the two trestles and place the tools he or she needed on that board. Because this board is thin, it typically kept the tools out of the way of the work.

Another interesting feature of the benchtop is a triangular notch cut into the slab up near the planing stop. This notch holds Japanese planes with their soles facing up so the craftsman can dress the tool’s wooden sole with another plane.

As I was taking a few photos of the bench, one of Stanley’s daughters, Abby, demonstrated her planing skills on a piece of Port Orford Cedar (that wasn’t part of the workbench). After taking a couple warm-up passes, she pulled off a beautiful shaving that was almost entirely full width and full length. And, as you can see, the bench wasn’t too high for her.

— Christopher Schwarz

A few years ago, I attended the Woodworkers Showcase show in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and I was amazed. It was the most perfect woodworking show I had ever attended. Why? Because of four things.

1. The free classes and seminars were extraordinary. That year I learned more about cold-bending from Jere Osgood and furniture design from Garrett Hack in a single day than I'd learned by reading (too many) books.

2. An amazing display of furniture, turnings and other objects (even a canoe!) that were built by the members of the club who put on the show, the Northeastern Woodworker's Association.

3. Hands-on displays and demonstrations of jigs, fixtures, carving and sash-making that were ongoing the entire weekend.

4. And, of course, booths and booths of vendors selling new equipment and vintage tools.

And amazingly, admission for all this was just $7 for adults.

This year, I was asked to demonstrate at the Woodworkers Showcase – a huge honor – on April 5 and 6. It's this coming weekend at the Saratoga Springs City Center. Click here for information on the event.

I'll be demonstrating the scraper sharpening technique I developed after plumbing the historical record, and I'll be showing off the three kinds of handsaw cuts that I discuss in the newest issue of Woodworking Magazine.

In addition to my demonstrations, you can also catch demos from chip-carver Wayne Barton, box-maker and instructor Doug Stowe (ask him about Sloyd if you see him) and Peter Korn, who runs the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship and is a talented woodworker. Plus, there will be demonstrations from members of the club on every topic imaginable, from marquetry to miniatures to turning to rustic furniture construction.

When I'm not teaching, I'll be in a booth selling a few books, magazines and DVDs. If you're at the show, do stop by and say hello.

If you live anywhere in the northeast, this is a show that shouldn't be missed. People drive from all over the eastern seaboard to attend the Woodworkers Showcase. It's worth it (heck – I flew up from Cincinnati when I first attended).

Hope to see you there.

— Christopher Schwarz

The last place I ever expected to stumble on Andre Roubo’s handiwork was next to an Art Deco radio and underneath some old water jugs. But on Saturday, I walked into an antiques store in Ottawa, Canada, and there was a worn but functional Roubo-style workbench perched patiently under a window.

OK, let me back up a minute: I was in Canada (actually, as I write this I still am in Canada) to judge a tool-making contest for Wood Central. The judging was held in the corporate boardroom at Lee Valley Tools, and at one point Robin Lee, the president of the company, and Doug, one of Robin’s old-tool conspirators, took me aside.

“Do you want to see a Roubo workbench?” Robin asked.

My reply was something along the lines of what bears do when in they have natural urges in the woods. So after we wrapped up the judging for the day, we headed out to the antiques store. We opened the front door, and it was sitting right there – underneath some metalware, stoneware and an old sled.

So I dropped to my knees and (I know you think the next word is “prayed”) poked around the undercarriage of the bench. I can’t say how old this bench is, but I can give you some interesting details about its construction and dimensions.

Overall, this Canadian Roubo is 8' 8-1/2" long, 17" deep and 28-3/4" high. The top is 2-3/8” thick and the consensus among the group is the top is pine. There is no planing stop evident in the top, but there is lots of evidence of holdfast holes that were plugged. The top is made of two pieces. A very wide front piece and a narrow piece at the back that is joined with a square-shaped spline.

The joint is at the exact point where the rear legs pierce the top of the workbench. The rear legs are slanted (as you can see in the photo) and join the top with the exact joint that Roubo shows in his landmark 18th century woodworking book – it’s basically a through-dovetail combined with a through-tenon.

The front legs are joined to the top using this same joint. All the legs are 3" x 3" and look to be some sort of oak. The legs join the stretchers of the bench about 4" from the floor and each joint is pegged with through-pegs.

To plane long boards, there is a long stile that runs from the benchtop to the stretcher at about the midpoint of the bench’s front. The stile is pierced by numerous small holes for pegs that will support boards on edge. The far right leg is also pierced by a couple holes, though these holes were larger in diameter than those on the stile – perhaps they were for holdfasts.

The single drawer in the bench pulled right out. Inside was one small till and sliding tracks for at least two more (which were not in the drawer).

The leg vise (in the face vise position) was traditional in structure. The vise screw was wooden and quite worn (though it still worked). The nut at the rear of the jaws was detached and needed to be reattached.

The leg vise had a parallel guide that pierced the rear jaw, though its pin was long gone. The leg vise’s position on the top was quite interesting. The top cantilevered off the bench’s base on the bench’s left side by 24". On the right, only by 4". The leg vise was roughly centered on the cantilever. The lower part of the vise’s rear jaw was secured to the front leg with a strap of metal.

Overall, the bench was incredibly sturdy and showed evidence of heavy use and age. One of the members of our party asked if someone could have faked the bench or aged a newer example to look old.

While that’s always a possibility with antiques, the bench was selling for $2,000 Canadian, so if it was faked, the faker wasn’t going to be getting rich off this bench – it’s a lot of wood and there were a lot of wear marks that would have to be faked.

After about a half an hour of me making geeky statements (“Look you can see how the shell bit tore out the grain as it pierced the leg!”) I could tell it was time to go. All the members of our scouting party were standing around looking at me like my kids do when I’m on a lunatic woodworking speech.

There’s more bench news from this trip. While Lee and I were eating breakfast Saturday with Ellis Wallentine (from Wood Central) and Clarence Blanchard (a fellow judge from The Fine Tool Journal), Lee said two words between mouthfuls of eggs that has me sketching wildly this evening: “furniture” and “workbench.” More on this later topic next month.

— Christopher Schwarz, who this weekend picked up tips on teasing people on the Internet from Robin Lee, master taunter.

I've never fully understood how the U.S. Postal Service works – beyond the fact that you put an envelope in a slot here and it arrives somewhere else. This week, I don't expect any enlightenment on that mystery.

The Spring 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine mailed out from St. Cloud, Minn., on March 17. I received my copy at my Kentucky home on Monday. Readers in New Mexico and Virginia have also gotten it, but readers in Indiana (and Australia) have not.

So the bottom line is that the magazine is still in transit to places both near and far. We're grateful for your patience with our first issue; I think you'll find it worth the wait. And if there turns out to be a problem with your subscription in the end, we'll definitely make it right.

To that end, I spent this morning enhancing one of the articles in the Spring 2008 Issue called "Understanding Western Backsaws." I converted it to a pdf and added some bookmarks and interesting external links to the story.

So to tide you over until your copy arrives in the mail, please click the link below to download the article.

Also, here is the publication schedule for the rest of 2008. After shifting around some dates, our manufacturing department has now cast these in stone (as opposed to Jell-O).

Summer 2008 issue: Starts mailing to subscribers the week of May 5.
Fall 2008 issue: Starts mailing to subscribers the week of July 14.
Winter 2008 issue: Starts mailing to subscribers the week of Nov. 24.

Kind regards,
Christopher Schwarz, editor

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

I want to take a minute here to apologize to many of our new subscribers who have not received the first issue of their subscription to Woodworking Magazine, but they have received a bill for the subscription.

We hit a couple rough spots with this first mailing, and I promise you I am doing everything I can to ensure it never happens again.

Bottom line: Issue 9 went out in the mail on Monday, March 17. If you live in the United States, you should have your copy by March 24. International orders should take a bit longer.

If you'd like to read the gory details, here they are, short and sweet: The magazine was supposed to mail from the printer during the week of March 3. Our printer, however, received the wrong mailing labels. Meanwhile, the bills went out in the mail (on time). And now we have confused and frustrated would-be readers.

If you have a bill and checked the status of your subscription on-line and it says "suspended," please ignore that. It's a poor choice of words on our part and we're working to fix that. It means that your payment is "pending."

Thanks everyone for your patience as we get this horse out of the gate. The next issue will go smoother.

— Christopher Schwarz

There are still spaces left for a week-long summer course in handsawing at the Northwest Woodworking School in Portland, Ore. It is the only class I'm teaching this year that has not sold out.

During the five days of instruction I'll be diving deeply into saws and joinery – weaving together the historical facts about the art that I've dug up with the hands-on exercises I've been practicing since I picked up my first handsaw at age 8.

Unlike my other weekend classes on sawing, I'll be covering the entire gamut of the craft, from breaking down rough stock with an 8-point crosscut handsaw to cutting dovetails that are tight and made with a minimum of fuss. (I've actually just posted a blog entry on dovetail cutting angles on my personal blog that you might find interesting.)

The other interesting aspect of this course is we explore the joinery planes that are used in conjunction with handsaws to make perfect – and I mean perfect – hand-cut tenons, half-laps, dados, notches and sliding dovetails. (In other words, you'll finally learn what your router plane is really good for.)

Plus, we'll be building two projects: a traditional English sawbench for your shop and a hand-dovetailed silverware tray for your family.

The class runs from July 14 to 18 and costs $725 plus the materials for the sawbench and silverware tray. You can read more information about the class at the Northwest Woodworking Studio's web site. Or you can drop me a line via e-mail if you have any questions.

Hope you can join us. If you'd like to see photos of past classes I've taught on sawing, check out this link to a weekend class I taught recently at Kelly Mehler's School of Woodworking and a one-day seminar at the Woodcraft in Sterling Heights, Mich. Also, there's a short podcast about the class at Matt's Basement Workshop you can listen to. Matt Vanderlist, the host of the shop, was one of the students in the Woodcraft show. (He made some wicked-tight half-laps.)

— Christopher Schwarz

One of my favorite things about the Holtzapffel Workbench I built for Issue 8 of Woodworking Magazine is the monster twin-screw vise with wooden vise screws. The wooden screws move the vise's chop quickly, engage the work firmly and are quite durable.

Plus, they're wood. And I like wood.

Now there's a new source of wooden vise screws that I can heartily recommend after inspecting the finished product this weekend. Woodworker Joe Comunale of Romeo, Mich., has started a new business called BigWoodVise.com to sell vise screws, nuts and handles for woodworking benches.

While I was teaching a couple classes at the Sterling Heights, Mich., Woodcraft, Joe stopped by the store to show me the screws, which he has been selling for some time to friends and fellow woodworkers in the Detroit area.

The screws are as nice as I have seen on any bench. The threads are crisp, with no visible chipping or tear-out along their entire lengths. The hub, which is the large end piece on the end of the screw, is finished as well as any piece of furniture. One style of hub that Joe makes, which he calls the "Classic" style, has crisp black lines burned into the hub.

The screws he sells come with the matching nut, the handle and round ball-shaped caps for the ends of the handle. The two nuts I tried moved smoothly and rapidly on the screws and showed very little slop in the mechanism. Joe says he wants to tighten up the fit of the nuts on the thread, but I think they're great as-is.

His vise screws attach to your vise's wooden chop with a garter system. Garter systems confuse many woodworkers who have never seen them, but they are really quite simple. The job of the garter is to secure the chop to the screw so that the chop will move out when you retract the screws.

The garter itself is a small piece of wood that is mortised into the chop of your vise and held in place with friction. One end of the garter nests into a groove in the screw.

The 2"-diameter, 2 threads-per-inch screws from BigWoodVise.com are made from ash. The handles I inspected were made from maple.

Joe has just launched his web site recently and is having a "March Madness" sale that ends March 31. So if you are in the market for vise screws, you might want to place your order soon. The "Classic" vise screw, nut and handle are on sale for $99 for each set this month – the regular price is $150 for each set.

This business is a side job for Joe, who is a mechanical engineer, but he plans to keep several screws in stock and promises (at most) a four-week delivery time. He also is happy to do custom work if you have something special in mind. Contact Joe at joe@BigWoodVise.com for details.

So if you're tired of getting grease marks on your work from your metal-screw vise, or you are building a bench with an old-school look, then definitely check out these screws from BigWoodVise.com. I don't have any plans for building another bench (where would I put it?), but if I do, I'm definitely going to buy a set of these screws myself.

— Christopher Schwarz