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It’s funny how the most exquisite things in life come from the simplest surroundings.

It’s Thursday night in a small scratch of a town called Cornelius about 40 miles out from Portland, Ore. We pull into a small industrial park that’s right on the railroad tracks. It’s the kind of place where at least one of the tenants customizes cars (a fact that is confirmed later in the evening with a primordial muffler blast).

Mike Wenzloff, sawmaker, has worked that entire day building saws, but he has cheerfully agreed to give me and some woodworking students an evening tour of his new sawmaking facility. He’s also been smoking a mess of barbecue for us.

Wenzloff leads us through a couple small rooms at the front of his unit that are stuffed with boxes. The first one is filled with boxes of vintage tools. The second one is stacked with cardboard boxes for his saws. The third room is the production floor.

I’ve seen a lot of factories filled with robots, CNC lathes and machines that can make 1,000 nails a minute. But that didn’t prepare me for the 19th-century sight behind door No. 3. For the operation that is Wenzloff & Sons uses basic equipment found in home workshops, small vintage saw-making machines and a few custom-built motorized jigs to turn out work of immense utility and beauty.

The brass backs are slotted on a small heavily modified machine you could find at Harbor Freight. The wood is cut and milled on Jet machines intended for a small hobby shop. And the steel is processed using an astonishing amount of handwork – from the hand-cranked retoother to the sanding bench, where each handsaw gets an hour of sanding to remove the marks left by the taper-grinding process.

Scattered around these small machines are the bits and pieces that make up a Wenzloff & Sons saw. There’s a box of beech handles for panel saws. A pile of folded brass backs for immense 18th-century-style tenon saws. A wall of expensive and wildly figured boards propped up like suspects in a line-up against the 1970s-looking paneling in the garage bay.

And then there’s Wenzloff and two of his three sons, who are furiously trying to beat down a waiting list that is more than 4,000 saws long. They refuse to raise their prices. They refuse to cut corners. And Wenzloff is surprisingly open about that fact that he is behind and how much he hates that fact.

He walks us through the factory and explains how everything is done. No secrets (except for the taper-grinding machine in his shed by his house). He even gives a quick saw-filing demonstration to one of the students who is interested in learning it.

Making a saw begins with Swedish steel that is toothed and filed on vintage Foley equipment, which is no longer made. The teeth are then hand-set and hand-filed.

If the saw has a brass back it is either folded over for the old-school 18th-century saws or it’s slotted on a machine with a plywood jig that Wenzloff built himself. The backs are then chamfered on a small attachment to a Wilton sanding station and then sanded smooth on a belt sander.

The handles are cut to shape on a band saw, shaped using router bits and then rasped and sanded by hand. The brass nuts and bolts that hold everything together are added after all the holes have been pierced with a drill press. Then the handles are sanded and finished and the whole package is shipped out the door.

Despite the immense backlog of orders, Wenzloff and his sons seem relaxed, even jovial as they show us around their facility. Maybe they’re just good-natured folks. Or maybe they know that they are doing excellent work that just cannot be rushed.

Wenzloff poses for some photos from the students, shakes everyone’s hand and packs us up for our drive back to Portland under the most astonishing moon I’ve seen in a decade. Wenzloff waves good-bye and then heads back into his shop to clean up and prepare for another day of saw-making.

— Christopher Schwarz, with all photos by Narayan Nayar

Last night I pursued one of our naughty cats into my oldest daughter's closet, where I saw something that was just shocking.

It was a … well, it's difficult to describe. Imagine a blanket chest without a lid. What form of furniture is that? A feed trough? In any case, it was chest-like. And it had some Southwest touches. The top edge had a cut-out that looked like stair steps. And that same detail was repeated in the plinth.

It was built using white pine. The corners were joined with finger joints. Large ones. Let's call them "elephantine thumb joints." And it had a water-based topcoat on it. I know this because the grain was clearly raised.

I had built this monstrosity right after college and apparently had done a good job of blocking its existence from my memory. It had been a gift for my wife, as I now recall, and it was the "payoff" for me buying a Skil cordless drill, which lasted about a year in my shop.

In retrospect, I wish I'd thrown this project out with the drill.

(And why did I need a cordless drill? To screw together the finger joints of course. I didn't have enough clamps at the time to do it right. Or I didn't know better.)

The whole experience was like bumping into an old friend at the store who hasn't aged well. After getting over the denial that I had built this Franken-trough, I considered hauling it to the curb this morning. Friday is garbage day here. But then I saw something that changed my mind.

My daughter was using it like a corral to store her collectible Breyer horses. They were lined up in there in their tack and other very expensive accessories. It was evident that this abomination of a project still had an important job to do for my daughter. And so I decided to delay its date with the curb.

The good news here is that if you simply persevere you will get better. This morning I set my coffee down on the lid of the blanket chest that is on the cover of Issue 10 of Woodworking Magazine. It also has finger joints at the corners, but that is where the similarities to its crazy grandma locked in the upstairs closet end. The joints are airtight (even without the help of Phillips screws). The miters on the plinth are just so. The finish is nice and smooth.

The bad news here is that craftsmanship is always a moving target. In another 15 years, this new blanket chest might be stuffed in a closet somewhere in the house, and its replacement might be in our living room. This morning it's hard for me to visualize what the new one would look like, but that uncharted territory is one of the things that gets me in the shop almost every day.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. I just couldn't bear to take a photo of the original project. There already is enough ugliness on the Internet, don't you think?

When it comes to dovetailing, I’ve never really had a dog in the fight between dovetailers who cut the pins first and those who cut the tails first. I was first taught to cut my tails first, though I’m also comfortable cutting the pins first (I spent a whole year cutting pins first so I understand its advantages).

But as I get older, I guess I’m getting more set in my ways and am officially entrenched with the tails-first crowd. Why? Well I guess it’s because of the tools I use and processes I have chosen through the years that make my choice inevitable.

Reason 1: Gang cutting. I like cutting two sets of tails simultaneously for drawers. This is impossible to do (well) if you cut pins-first.

Reason 2: I own a narrow-bladed knife. One of the big advantages of cutting pins-first is that you have a lot of room to navigate when you transfer your marks to the tail board. I have a very narrow-bladed knife, so sneaking it between the tails is no hassle for me. If I didn’t have this tool, I’d probably be a pins-first person.

Reason 3: I rabbet my boards before cutting the tails. Years ago, Glen D. Huey showed me a trick where you rabbet the inside face of your tails to make transferring the marks to the pin board easier. The shallow rabbet (about 1/8") gives you enormous precision in aligning your pieces. Glen is a pins-first guy, and the system works with pins-first dovetailing. But I think it really shines with tails-first because you can clamp your pin board in a vise and really apply pressure with the tail board.

Reason 4: Gravitational forces. This one is a subtle argument, and I don’t expect it to sway many people, but it is a strong one for me. I think it’s easier to cut a true vertical line than it is to cut a true line at an angle. This is because of the way gravity tugs at the heavy back of the saw. This little detail makes cutting tails-first easier for me. Here’s how:

When you cut any dovetail, the first half of the joint is the pattern for the second. So your first part doesn’t have to be precise when it comes to its angles. It just needs to be clean and neat. If you cut your tails first, that means your first cuts are angled. If you don’t have to be precise with these cuts, then you have one less thing to worry about with this part of the joint. All you really need to worry about is being straight. The actual angle is incidental. Heck I use a pencil alone to mark out my tails.

When it comes to the second part of the joint, it must be an exact complement of the first. Accuracy counts a great deal. When you cut tails-first, that means your second cut is pins. And pins are straight up and down. And straight up and down is easier to do perfectly. Well, straight is easier is for me at least.

If you reverse the process and cut the pins-first, the second part is making the angled tails. And I think those lines are harder to track because gravity isn’t on your side.

Of course, if you do this stuff every day, all this becomes moot. You just do it the way you do it. And you ignore the gravitational prattling of a magazine editor.

— Christopher Schwarz

Good books on hand work are hard to find, and after I recommended Robert Wearing's "The Essential Woodworker" in 2007, copies became difficult to find at a reasonable price. I swear I don't have a secret stash of these books I like, though it would be a nifty way to make some cash on the side.

If you cannot get Wearing's excellent book, I have a great alternative: Charles H. Hayward's "Carpentry for Beginners" (Emerson Books). This little jewel slipped under my radar for many years because of the title. Carpentry? Why would I want a book about building a coal hutch?

Well as it turns out, we moderns are a bunch of unskilled dufuses (or should that be that dufi? I forget). What a mid-century Briton considers carpentry is more like what we would consider fine furniture building. (And what we call carpentry must be one notch above flint knives and bear skins, I suppose).

"Carpentry for Beginners" is an excellent book for building basic hand skills. Hayward covers it all, from basic sharpening to flattening a board, mortising, basic dovetailing, half-laps and even case construction. The book is entirely focused on hand work because it is assumed that the home carpenter wouldn't have any machines lurking in the scullery.

What I think is brilliant about the book (and I hope to steal for my own future efforts) is how Hayward first teaches you the basic strokes: sawing, chiseling, boring, planing, marking, testing. Then he shows you how to combine these basic skills into dealing with real-life assemblies. There are entire chapters on "How to Make a Door," "How to Make a Box" and "How to Make a Drawer."

Then these are followed by informative single-page illustrations that walk you through many of the basic joints.

That's the first 109 pages; the rest of the book is a walk through your swinging uncle's house. Hayward shows you how to build swanky item after swanky item for your pad, including a television chair and some Danish un-modern tables. You can probably skip these chapters, except for the section on building a tool chest and workbench trestles.

Where do I find out-of-print books such as this? Try:

bookfinder.com

abebooks.com

alibris.com

powells.com  

Now I'm off to troll these sites to buy up 100 copies of Graham Blackburn's old books for next week's blog entry.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Click here to read about other books I've recommended.

One of the best recommendations I’ve ever received in the world of hand tools came from a power-tool user who has 660-volt three-phase pumping through his veins.

It’s 1996, and I’m a newly minted managing editor at Popular Woodworking. David Thiel, then an associate editor at the magazine, has been assigned to give me a tour of the workshop and check me out on the machines.

I’ve been woodworking on my back porch seriously for a few years and am comfortable on a table saw, radial-arm saw and a band saw, but I’ve never seen a drum sander, spray booth or shaper. I know I came off like a hayseed because I was dumbfounded by the sheer volume of cast iron and steel now at my disposal.

At the end of the tour, David showed me his work area and made a generous offer: Until I got set up in the shop I could use any of the hand tools hanging in his tool cabinets above his bench.

Several weeks later I’m in the shop building my first serious project for the magazine (an Arts & Crafts project from the Byrdcliffe Colony) and I need a combination square to mark out some joinery before I cut it on the table saw. I snatch one of the squares above his bench and go to work.

That was a Friday afternoon. I remember that because I was compelled to drive up to our local tool supplier Saturday morning to buy my own L.S. Starrett 12" combination square. I didn’t care what the price was. I didn’t care how far I had to drive across town with a squealing 1-year-old in the back seat to get it. I just knew that after an afternoon of working with David’s square that I had to have one for myself.

After a few more weeks I bought a 6" version for $25 at a local antiques market.

During the last 12 years, I’ve had a variety of marking and measuring tools try to shake that Starrett from my toolbox. The magazine’s staff tested all the squares on the market in the late 1990s and somehow the General version ended up on my bench. It’s a nice square, and on the outside would appear to be every bit as good as the Starrett, but something is missing. The blade in the Starrett just moves a bit more sweetly and the engraved markings are just a bit crisper.

As I got more into traditional hand work, I considered trading in my Starrett for a traditional try square (perhaps a wooden one). After all, combination squares were built originally for machinists, not woodworkers. But after dabbling with the old-Testament gear, I fled back into the arms of Starrett. It’s just too darn perfect and useful.

I keep the 6" version tucked into my shop apron and use it for laying out and measuring joinery. The 12" one hangs above my bench and comes into play any time I need to keep two measurements locked in (which is typical) or the joinery is beyond the range of the 6" tool.

It’s almost impossible to overstate my affection for this tool. If I had a family crest, I’d put it on there. If I’m buried with one tool, this will probably be the one I ask my wife to tuck into the pocket of my last suit.

But I probably won’t want to be buried with this square. Instead, I plan to hang it on the wall of my shop in plain view in the hopes that one of my children will pick the thing up when they need a tool for a quick measurement. Perhaps the same bolt of lightning will strike them.

— Christopher Schwarz

Today I'm abandoning a prototype design I've been working on this week between bouts of tending our gerund farm. I'd like to have a Viking funeral for this little end table, but I'm sure the fire inspector would scowl.

Despite the failed design, the experience hasn't been a total loss. While Senior Editor Robert W. Lang wasn't looking, I snitched his Bosch I-Driver, which I've been using all week. You see, I'm in the market for a new cordless drill. My 12-volt tools are more than five years old and feel like they weigh a ton compared to the newest generation of tools.

The I-Driver, what Bosch calls the PS10-2, is just about everything I want in a cordless tool. Where to start? The sucker is built like a tank. Everything is tightly constructed on this tool; many low-priced drills feel like they are going to fall apart on you (and we've had several flame out on us over the years as well).

Second: I love the pivoting head. The chuck pivots 90°, which allows you to get into places that no other drill will go. The low-profile chuck also aids in making this the sneakiest drill I've ever used. The chuck accepts ¼" hex-shank tooling, which some will see as a downside, but I consider it a minor inconvenience for the low profile.

What else? The tool goes and goes. Yes, it's only 10.8 volts, but it took me a long time to drain the battery – and these batteries are a couple years old and have lots of cycles on them. Other plusses: It has a fine clutch (not all right-angle dills do, which is stupid). Plus, the oversized trigger allows you to use two fingers, so your control of the speed is greatly enhanced.

I think I've found my next drill. Sure, it's not going to easily spin 1/16" twist bits, but that's what I have my Millers Falls eggbeater drill for, right?

And now to see if we have any gasoline in the shop. I have a prototype to deal with.

— Christopher Schwarz

Lately I've been planing stuff that has been a lot nastier than your typical run-of-the-mill cherry, oak and walnut. First Senior Editor Glen D. Huey tried to torture me by bringing in some curly maple for the blanket chest on cover the Summer 2008 issue.

Then I built the cover project for the Fall 2008 issue from some walnut that should have been on the burn pile. Honestly, I had to go through about twice as much material as usual to find enough wood to build this 18th-century wall cabinet.

Then, this weekend I had to plane some rowy mahogany while teaching at Kelly Mehler's School of Woodworking. Kelly had prepared mahogany pieces for the project that the students built (a Shaker utensil tray). And a lot of that was rowy – which is when the wood has rope-like bands of grain through it where the grain reverses in each rope.

The tool that has kept me away from the wide belt sander these last few months has been my little Wayne Anderson smoothing plane. I've had this tool for more than two years now and have published an article on its long-term performance in the most recent edition of Popular Woodworking, the August 2008 issue.

Below is the text of that article, plus a link to download a pdf slideshow presentation that shows the evolution of this form of plane using pictures supplied by Wayne himself. Enjoy.

Despite the amount of bronze, iron and beech in my tool cabinet, most woodworkers need only three bench planes: A fore plane to reduce the thickness of boards, a jointer plane to flatten them and a smoothing plane to prepare them for finishing.

That’s in a perfect world. In reality, we work with a material (wood) that is unpredictable, cantankerous and vexing – like my first redheaded girlfriend.

During the last few years, I’ve gradually folded a fourth plane into my  arsenal, and now I cannot imagine working without it.

It’s a small smoothing plane with a steeply pitched iron (a 57° angle of attack), no chipbreaker and a mouth aperture that a gnat would have a hard time squeezing through without damaging his Dipteran hinder.

This is my plane of last resort. When my 50°-pitch smoothing plane leaves nasty torn grain in its wake, I pull out this plane. It doesn’t care if there’s a grain reversal in the board. Or if I’m planing against the grain. Or if the grain is interlocked, curly or worse. When set for a fine cut, this plane almost never fails me.

This plane has become a staple of Wayne Anderson, a custom planemaker in Elk River, Minn. (andersonplanes.com or 763-486-0834). This form of plane started out several years ago with Wayne’s interest in high-angle planes without a chipbreaker. He built this version for writer Kerry Pierce to test for a competing magazine. Then I bought the plane from Wayne. (Despite the fact that it was a used tool, I paid full price.)

Since that time, I’ve fallen head-over-heels for the plane, and Wayne has pushed the tool’s design in new directions for other customers. If you’re not familiar with Wayne’s work, he’s a bit different than other custom makers. He seldom makes the same tool twice.

The profile on the rear of the iron might change. Or the shape of the sidewall or lever cap will morph. But the tool still looks like itself – like a fraternal twin.

As to the function of the tool, you could set up a 6"-long block plane to do the exact same job, but there’s no way the tool will look as good or fit your hand so well.

With this small smoothing plane, the coffin shape of the body lets you squeeze the tool right in the middle by its mouth. And having mastered the tool, I find I can change the depth of cut merely by squeezing and pressing at the center of the tool, or by releasing that pressure. The weight of the plane (2 lbs. 2 oz.) keeps the tool in the cut without chattering (try that with your block plane) even when I use little-girl pressure to control it. The result: Thin shavings; no tearing.

The rear bun is rounded nicely so it feels good against my right palm, and the tall iron keeps my hand right where it should be.

The short sole (about 5-1/2") allows you to plane in areas that longer smoothing planes can’t get to. When I say this I don’t mean tight little spaces inside a cabinet, I mean the small and large hollows that occur on any flat board. A small tool rides the gentle waves of a board where a longer plane skims off the peaks instead. And when you’re trying to get a tabletop looking right (perfect flatness be darned) a short plane is invaluable.

If you’re thinking of investing in one custom plane, this plane would be an excellent addition to any standard lineup. These tools start at $825. Need more convincing? Wayne has provided a slide show of the different forms of this plane during the last few years that you can download below. I’ll warn you, however, it’s dangerous to watch.

WAminis-1.pdf (2.16 MB)

— Christopher Schwarz

What I dislike most about the Summer 2008 issue is the fact that I didn't get to build the Sea Chest that Glen D. Huey constructed. I had designed the entire issue around me getting to build the thing. Then we ran out of time. Or, put more correctly, I had to choose between building and occasionally chewing my food.

So Glen built the Sea Chest and did great job (grumble). During construction, he had to bend the hinges on the sucker to fit the canted sides. We promised a short tutorial on the process and here it is, with photos.

And by the way, the story has a happy ending (for me). I ended up with the Sea Chest gracing my living room as a coffee table. And I experienced some evenings of fine digestion. Win-win!

Manipulating hinges for the sea chest is extremely easy. To begin, use a combination square or small square to strike a line across the back face of the hinge leaf that fits to the chest. The line should be at 3/4” off the barrel (or equal the thickness of your chest back).

Place the scribed hinge leaf into a vise leaving the line about a 1/16” above the jaws. This compensates for rounding the metal as you bend the leaf. Then, grab a stout hammer and relieve your frustrations by pounding over the leaf. Be sure to make the bend toward you or so the barrel is folded away from you as you finish shaping the bend. Keep a hand pulling on the opposite leaf to help bend the leaf (the metal is not that rigid). Keep in mind hitting that hand with a hammer is not much fun, so slide back the leaf a bit.

That leaves the leaf at something near 90º. Due to the cant of the front and back of the chest, it’s necessary to continue the bend a few degrees more. To complete the bending, remove the hinge from the vise, hold the hinge against the vise and add a couple firm hits with my hammer. That should bring the hinge to a match with the chest.

— Christopher Schwarz (with captions by Glen D. Huey)

Anyone who builds furniture while in a wheelchair is up against serious challenges. Not only are the machines and workbenches too high off the floor, getting the wheelchair close enough to the workbench to actually work is a serious problem.

All the workbenches I built for "Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use," are unsuitable for the wheelchair user. The bench's bases won't let a wheelchair user get anywhere near the working surface.

Several wheelchair users have approached me about designing a bench for wheelchair users, but I wasn't sure where to begin. Sjoberg makes this version that is adjustable in height, which is very similar to Jeff Noden's Adjust-a-bench – at least in basic form.

Reader Larry Arnold, a wheelchair user, designed and built this workbench, which is quite stout, passes my kitchen door test and is handsome to boot. Here are some of the statistics:

The base is made using ¼" steel tubing. The legs are 3" square; the other steel rails are 2" x 3". The base weighs 106 lbs.

The top is 2-1/4" thick, 24" wide and 66" long. The top is 29" off the floor and made from Douglas fir. Both the vises are Lee Valley face vises, which Arnold said he chose because they have a low profile under the bench, allowing him clearance to roll under there.

He also has a deadman he bolts to the top, which will allow him to clamp long boards, doors and the like.

"I built it all myself with no help, except for the top which I took to a cabinet shop to run through their wide belt sander," he says. "I have full access under the bench with no restrictions except for the vertical legs. It's going to be so much better than what I have been using, wish I would have built one sooner. I know it's not what you would build for yourself,  but for me in my situation I can't think of much I could add to make it work better for me."

And here's the best news about the bench: Arnold is going to put it into service to build two Shaker-style tables from Issue 2.

Congratulations to Arnold on his new bench.

— Christopher Schwarz

Most of you know how much I like Andre Roubo's "L'Art du Menuisier" – probably the best and most complete books on woodworking from the 18th century. Heck, I've even considered taking up my French studies again just to be able to read it (more on that later).

However, getting copies of Roubo in this country has been nothing less than frustrating. I got a couple modern reprints through a bookstore in Quebec. And several French web sites carry them (with ghastly hoops to jump through to get them into this country). And all of my efforts to get a reliable and reasonable source in North America have proved fruitless.

Until today.

Thanks entirely to Joel Moskowitz at Tools for Working Wood, reprints of all five volumes of Roubo are now available for sale. These books are immense fun to page through, even if you don't read French. That's because the plates – hundreds and hundreds of glorious line drawings – will teach you more about furniture, marquetry and hand tools than I can. Plus you likely will be inspired to build one of Roubo's benches once you see them in use throughout the book. That's what sold me.

The volumes sell for $70 to $90, which sounds like a lot, but it's worth it. When I was importing these from Canada, that's about what I ended up paying (maybe a bit more once you included international fees). These books will be with you forever, and who knows how long they'll be available.

The other news is that we have some more exciting news about Roubo that we'll be announcing on my personal blog this weekend, LostArtPress.com. This is a personal project that I and another woodworker have been slaving over for a while. So do drop by LostArtPress.com this weekend and check it out. I think you'll be glad you did.

— Christopher Schwarz