RING ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the grudge match of the century here at the 2015 White Run Rasslin’ Confab. In this corner, in grey trunks and white t-shirt, our reigning champion, 192 pounds of controlled fury, Barn Don! And in the opposite corner, our challenger, Ace “I’m a Load of Gravel” Wheelbarrow. And now over to our broadcast team, Hank Homestead and Bart Bunker. Bart?
HANK HOMESTEAD: Well folks, this is a day that we’ve been anticipating for a while, as our champ is in the final stages of an eighteen month project to get the root cellar rebuilt. He’s looking in fine shape, and the day has been cool with a steady drizzle. It’ll be my delight to call the blow by blow on this match, but first let’s get a comment from or color analyst, Bartholomew Bunker.
BARTHOLOMEW BUNKER: Yes, Hank, it is a perfect day for a heavy physical contest, just cool enough that you feel fine if you are moving around trading blows, and the steady drizzle makes this especially nice.
HANK: The contestants seem well matched today, Bart. How do you see the match unfolding?
BART: Well Hank, as you know the champ is well experienced at rasslin’ with wheelbarrows, at last count he has successfully moved 23, 729 loads of dirt, compost, gravel, and his wife’s favorite birthday present, horse manure. So the odds are with him today.
HANK: Yes that’s true Bart, but this is tricky ground, the pile of gravel being right at the edge of the drop-off down the driveway. Well the bell for the opening round of this eight load bout is just about ready to ring. And here’s the bell. ding-ding-ding HOLY COW! The champ is down! The champ is down! Did you see that one coming, Bart?
BART: Sure didn’t, Hank. Even before the ring of the bell faded, the challenger had thrown the champ down to the ground with a force I’ve never seen before in a North American Wheelbarrow Rasslin’ Association contest. The match only last a half a second or so. Hooo-eee.
BIFF: It looked like Ace tipped a little, then torqued to the ground with the whole load of gravel, with the left handle catching the champ on his leg and throwing him down to the ground like a rag doll. I mean, it was faster than Clay and Liston.
And that is how on Thursday I wound up laying in the mud, in the rain, with a broken hip. The surgery to repair the fractured femur was over at about 2.30 AM Friday, and it has been all unicorns and Skittles ever since.
Once again this year I was able to attend Martin Donnelly’s summer auction at his place in Avoca NY. I have been to many Donnelly Auctions over the years, but these summer ones are always my favorites because the warehouse is being emptied. The sheer quantity of tools is staggering (I think this year there were about 60,000 mostly woodworking tools in 3200 lots being sold in twenty hours of auctioneering!). This is the MJD auction with the highest number of “user” tools while his other auctions have a higher proportion of “collectible” tools.
As with other recent pilgrimages to Donnelly’s, I joined a good fellowship of friends. My old pal MikeM could not make it this year, but I was kept company by “Jersey” JonS, Josh Clark of Hyperkitten, TomD from the Chesapeake Chapter of SAPFM, MartinF from Toledo, and new-to-Donnelly JoshP, with whom I rode, and SharonQ. It was a gas watching Sharon and JoshP being totally overwhelmed by the multiple circus tents of tools.
TomD is already at Lot 200. Only 3,000 lots to go!
JoshP and I arrived late afternoon on Wednesday to begin working or way through the lots, which we resumed the next morning in preparation for the 2PM start.
We also worked in some quality time in the adjacent field with tailgaters offering many tools for sale in a flea market setting. Here is Josh gazing at the first booth we came to on our trek.
I bought a beautiful little Brazilian Rosewood torpedo level to fit into my evolving Studleyesque traveling tool kit (a couple of mother-of-pearl inlays and it will fit in nicely), and a little brass hammer that will be perfect for adjusting plane irons.
I kept finding my gaze returning to a British infill miter plane one of the dealers had. I made a mental note about that one.
One totally unnecessary temptation was this beautiful little Gerstner Tool traveling dentists’ box, complete with dental tools. It would have fit alongside my other Gerstner tool cabinets perfectly, but I am trying to not purchase things I do not “need.” (okay, quit snickering)
JoshP and I were both interested in getting an anvil, of which there were many offered, and sat to begin the bidding. I had a few other items I was going to bid on, and wound up getting a couple of them;
a pair of St. Johnsbury squares very similar to some in Studley’s tool cabinet (though not nearly as nice, yet — they were pretty rough and went really cheap),
and a near complete half-set of hollows-and-rounds. I bid hard on a very nice new Japanese plane but did not get it. No biggie, there were two even nicer new Japanese planes coming up on Saturday.
One of the most fun things about being at an auction with Josh Clark is that aside from being delightful company, he is buying a lot of stuff for his Hyperkitten Tool website inventory, and he is extremely amenable to wheeling and dealing with you on lots that he buys.
That is how I ended the first day with a pair of planes that will be perfect for hollowing out the seats of the Gragg chairs I will be making this coming winter. I had never before seen a compassed toothing plane, and the little hollowing plane is simply perfect for making chair seats. But they were in lots that Josh bought, and I acquired them before they got lost in his Hyperkitten inentory.
I think each of us in our posse made multiple deals with Josh over the course of the weekend.
Thus endeth Day One of the MJD Toolapalooza
Perhaps like many other craftsmen, I am occasionally asked, “What is your favorite tool?” That particular question is essentially unanswerable due to my changing needs from moment to moment, the workpiece itself, my frame of mind, etc. One minute it could be my Raney Nelson petite miter plane, the next it could be an Auriou rasp, Bad Axe dovetail saw, Knew Concepts coping/jewler’s saw, something the wizards at Veritas dreamed up, or an antique or something purpose made by my own hands like some sculpting tools I made from solid ivory.
However, if the question being asked was, “What is your most important tool?” or even better “What is the tool you use the most?” the answer is a bit more measurable, especially when viewed through the lens of my day-to-day life, with a reference data base of several decades. Coming immediately on the heels of my adventures in home improvement in The Heartland, my answer is unambiguous.
Without a doubt the tool I use several times every day, whether I am doing home repair, barn construction, cabinet making, furniture conservation, gunsmithing, chores around the homestead or anything else is my high quality multi-tool. My email pen pal Rob Hanus of The Preparedness Podcast argues for a good quality knife being the most important tool, and I won’t quarrel with him other than to say that a good quality multi-tool has a good knife and a bunch of other good tools as well.
I have long been a fan of multi-tools, and have accumulated a drawer-full of different versions over the past forty years. Of course the gateway drug for multi-tools is the pocket knife (at this point I am not certain you can call yourself a man if you do not carry a pocket knife — if this comment offends you, save your breath as I no longer have to go to sensitivity training, which was pretty much wasted on me anyway…). The very first tool I ever bought myself was a multi-blade Craftsman pocket knife which is still in my bedside box. I cannot recall my first true multi-tool, but it was probably an inexpensive and forgettable indiscretion from my late youth.
I am so committed to the utilitarian elegance of good multi-tools that I have outfitted my wife and both daughters with one, with instructions that they be carried in their purses. I’ll have to check to see if they are following those instructions.
For the past almost fifteen years, that is since the TSA folks confiscated my well-loved and now nearly unobtainable original Leatherman Super Tool at LAX, my tool of choice has been a gunmetal black Victorinox Spirit, which I found to be much better quality than the old Leatherman or any of its descendants since. My Spirit started out as a jet black gun-blued unit but the wear from years of heavy daily use are now giving it some bright and shiny spots.
I try to keep the main blade sharp, not always an easy task given the stuff I sometimes cut, I do keep the secondary, scalloped, knife blade sharp, use the awl, screwdrivers, and file daily, and the bottle opener, saw, and chisel more frequently than you might think.
I bought a newer polished-stainless-steel Victorinox Spirit X unit some years ago, but the second knife blade, a scalloped blade, has been replace by a very nice little pair of scissors. Now I use my original Spirit in my daily blue jeans and leave the newer pretty one for my travel bag. I suspect yet another one will be joining its siblings whenever I find one for the right price.
I just have to remember to put it in the checked luggage next time I fly, which I if get my druthers will be never.
I now had a small but well tuned set of tools to conduct the trim work, perhaps not to Jeff Burks’ standards, but certainly adequate to the task of making our daughter’s rental house habitable.
Toss in the bench-y thing outfitted with two large wood screws to serve as a vise, and we were off to the races.
I made myself a makeshift miter jig and bench hook, and spent a week cutting, finishing and applying trim, trimming door panels so that damaged doors could be reassembled, hanging doors and refitting jambs with new stock grafted in to allow for lock mortises, and replacing missing flooring.
A little glue and some strips of sandpaper combined with scrap quarter-round molding and you have a suitable rasp-like tool for fitting all those pieces of trim together perfectly.
In the end it turned out to be a rewarding time of productivity and bonding as it was the longest stretch of time I’d spent with my beloved Professor Doctor daughter since she left for college eleven years ago. You cannot place a value on that other than to say it was priceless.
I probably could have made some pretty good furniture with the setup. And all it cost was about $60.
Learning to “do without” a full set of tuned up tools was in a sense liberating. It’s not the way I want to work much of the time, but it is a great challenge on occasion, and this was one of these occasions. It made me reflect on Howark Roark’s designing The Courtland, a project he accepted not because of any philanthropy but rather for the mere challenge of the task.
Thus the week spent in The Heartland was especially invigorating and rewarding because we were able to accomplish so much with so little.
As I wrote last time I acquired a minimal toolkit, some of which needed some tuning.
Using the backsplat slab I was able to employ a pack of wet-or-dry sandpaper from my daily trips to the hardware store to get the edge tools sharpened to accomplish whisper thin shavings. Laying various grits of abrasive belt on the slab, or wrapping it with wet-or-dry sandpaper I got to darned near perfect edges.
I first got the bed and sides of the block plane flattened with an 80 grit belt, then used the same set up to establish a cutting angle for the iron.
Moving quickly up the ladder of grits to 600 the result was a superb small plane in about 15 minutes.
The Fat Max chisels took even less time, about two minutes apiece. They started out near-perfect flat on both the backs and the bevel, so a few seconds with each of the 240, 400, and 600 grits resulted in mirror surfaces that worked brilliantly.
I had never done much of the sandpaper sharpening before, but I am absolutely convinced of its utility after this week. I intend to explore this application more in the future, perhaps even fabricating a block for use in my carpenter’s tool kit. I recently discovered my local hardware store in Maryland carried 1500 grit paper and the auto body supplier carries up to 4000 grit, so it might be possible for me to dispense with sharpening stones altogether at some point in the future.
The final tool needing the restorative touch was the unnamed and unmarked, but very sharp, back saw I got at the Goodwill for a couple of bucks. It was rusty and grimy, but mostly it was missing two of the nuts. The blade just flopped in the handle. Another trip to the hardware store resulted in my returning with two new binding posts and a tapered reamer to kiss the holes in the blade allowing for a reassembly and high performance. A little cleaning with abrasive pad and oil completed the process, and it was put to work.
Since the “business” side of the trip through The Heartland was finishing based with my presentation to the Groopshop 2015, I failed to bring even a small woodworking tool kit with me. That oversight will not happen again. From this point on, whenever I am traveling to an unknown location, by that I mean a place where I have not stashed tools or do not know of the inventory of tools, I will carry a bucket o’ tools.
Once on the ground and our daughter’s house I realized that several days of necessary woodworking would commence. After conducting an inventory of tools available from my truck tool kit, my daughter’s car tool kit, and my pocket multi-tool etc., an additional small inventory of tools would be necessary.
I visited the closest ACE Hardware, which at one time was the largest ACE Hardware in the country before being surpassed by some larger ones elsewhere. It was the size of a Wal-mart, and became a daily visit for me. Since I would be fitting a lot of trim, the first two tools we bought were an Irwin brand ryobi saw and a Fat Max set of chisels, along with a plastic triangular speed square and a nail set.
The saw was a perfect fit for my tasks and the “shop” outfitting, and I have been exceedingly impressed with Fat Max chisels to the point that I own two full sets and some additional chisels too. I first bought a set when I was doing some rough carpentry, thinking they would be disposable tools I wouldn’t worry about too much if I hit a nail. Much to my surprise they have turned out to be superb tools, flat and well prepared when they leave the factory. But, they do need to be sharpened and the hardware store was ill-stocked with sharpening stones I would have bought. More about that tomorrow.
We next made a stop at a thrift store, where I bought a back saw ($2) and a block of fake marble back splat (0.50) to use as a sharpening surface. I’ll blog about the saw tomorrow, ditto the block plane we picked up at a yard sale for $2 along with a nice little brace for $3. One final stop at another antique barn yielded a nice pair of very large wood screws for $5 a piece, along with a large box of washed and folded linen feed sacks for 75 cents apiece (darned near perfect finishing rags!) and a sweet Stanley #7C for $15. These last two items were unrelated to the commencement of work at the rental house.
Recently we spent a week helping our daughter get settled into her new home in The Heartland. Originally we were to spend only a couple of days with her, meeting the moving truck and helping to get things arranged in her “turn-key ready” rental house. Well, the first thing was that Mayflower was five days late in getting her stuff there, and 2) that was probably a good thing as the house required a week’s worth of home-improvements to get it ready to live in.
Since I had not brought my remodeler’s tool kit with me, some improvisation was required. Even though there was no real “workshop” in the house there was something akin to a workbench-y thing in the basement, and with a few strategic purchases at the hardware store and some local thrift stores/flea markets, a full range of woodworking undertakings was possible.
While I was not making “fine furniture” I did end up doing a lot of trim work, including patching holes in the hardwood floor, replacing missing moldings, working on window locks, and actually grafting in some new material into the jamb for making the mortise for the back door deadbolt lock.
Along the way I learned, or more truthfully reminded myself, that a fully-equipped workshop with an exquisite workbench with the finest tool set was not required to do a lot of good work.
Next time: the hardware store essentials (new tools).
On my recent jaunt through The Heartland I stopped to visit my old friend RickP in northwest Arkansas, and got to see in person the amazing table Rick researched over a two decade stretch and constructed from around 2010-2013.
The original table, shown above, was excavated from the c. 800 B.C. archaeological site of Gordion, Turkey.
The table is a tour de force of design and fabrication, and one of the most astounding examples of contemporary woodworking I have encountered. While the design might be almost three thousand years old, the fabrication is obviously contemporary, as Rick is gladly still with us and approximately my vintage. The detailing on this table is simply eye-popping.
To me the most compelling overall design feature is the means by which the original builder three millenia ago figured out how to make a four legged table compatible with what was probably an uneven, perhaps even dirt, floor. What they did, both the original maker and Rick, I mean, was to combine two of the legs into one foot, in essence turning the four legged table, which would always be a problem on an uneven floor, into a three legged table, which would never be unsteady.
The original table was constructed of boxwood, if I recall correctly, while Rick used ancient kauri wood for the base and walnut for the top. In keeping with the flavor of the wood, Rick used kauri copal resin as the finish, employing a varnish component far more ancient than even the original table.
Rick just sent me a copy of the paper he presented at the American Institute for Conservation Annual Meeting two years ago, where I was part of a presentation at another session of that meeting even though our paths did not cross there. Rick’s paper will be available at some point at the archive for the papers from the Wooden Artifact Group of the AIC, and I hope in the meantime that Rick can someday get it into the more popular woodworking literary world.
I mean, who wouldn’t be fascinated by the prospect of replicating King Midas’ table? I know there are features of the table informing my future furniture-making designs.
Several months ago a thread discussion on Groopmail revolved around the question, “What can be used as a substitute for gold leaf?” My answer was short. “Nothing.”
In response to much of the discussion I presented a brief demo about gold leaf at this year’s Groopshop, showing real gold leaf, which was the first time many of the attendees had ever seen it in the flesh; my preparations for the ground beneath the gold leaf, and finally the manipulation of the leaf and its laying onto the substrate. It was, in short, a more brief version of my talk at Woodworking in America last year.
The actual demo was less successful than I would have liked, mostly due to the atmosphere in the room, but it did give a good idea about the process.
Gold leafing brings into focus the importance of the first of the Six Rules for Perfect Finishing — if the substrate is not well prepared, nothing else is going to work out well.
I moved through the preparation of the glue base for traditional gesso using a dilute solution of hide glue (I started out with a 10% solution of 444 gws glue granules in distilled water)
then the mixing and application of gesso itself,
smoothing the gesso and applying the bole. I’ve found that a polissoir does a terrific job a working the surface after I use abrasives of scrapers to get it ready for the next step.
Then I moved on to the handling of the leaf itself on the gilder’s pad, readying it for the application over oil size or by water gilding. Like I said, the room was a bit iffy for the process, but at least they got the idea of how it is done.
One of the things I did ex poste that was a lot of fun was to apply a layer of Finish Up to a panel and lay gold leaf into it immediately. Definitely something worth exploring further.
When closing down the HO Studley exhibit, one of the things I had to do was remove all of the exhibit paraphernalia from the exhibit hall, including the exhibit case for the tool cabinet, but also the platforms for the workbenches. This required me to rent a large cargo van to fit it all in for the drive back home.
I haven’t figured out what to do with the exhibit case, but the platforms are already recycled into terrific assembly tables. Inasmuch as they were exceedingly stout well-buily 4×8′ platforms with 12″ skirts, all from cabinet-grade tulip poplar faced 3/4″ plywood, they were easily transformed into these new accouterments in the barn.
For each platform-now-table I took a single 8-foot 4×4 and cut in into four identical sections to serve as the legs. At each corner I screwed a leg into the two converging aprons, then affixed big casters to the bottom of each leg, flipped it over, and viola, a new and lovely work table!
I moved one into my main workshop to serve as a workstation for either conservation or assembly projects, and the other is currently against the wall in the classroom. But since they are both on wheels, it is 100% likely that they will simply be moved from place to place depending on the needs of the moment.
It sure made me glad I am no longer bound by the 220 s.f. footprint of my former shop in the basement of the Maryland house.
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