Early last week I was contacted by two separate spoon carvers asking about customizing Roubo’s polissoirs for their needs. I do not know if this is a point of discussion among spoonsters or both of these creative folks arrived a the same point at the same time. I gave it a try, and both orders have been sent off.
Given their descriptions of their needs I started by looking through all of the turner’s polissoirs I had on-hand, selecting the three with the longest bristles. Ostensibly these are designed to have 1/4″ bristles that can be gently domed for polishing the concave contours of bowl turnings, but in this case the crown needed to be dramatically more pronounced to fit into the bowl of the spoon. Since all of the polissoirs are hand-made there were minute variations in them, I wanted the ones that were a smidge longer (its a technical term you might not recognize) to accentuate the curve that could be imposed on them. Longer bristles allowed for a higher crown, so that is where I started.
With the first test I discovered that a very dramatic crown was possible. I worked cautiously to impart the contour I though they needed and arrived at a point that made sense to me.
The test subject got pretty dirty and the label beat up so on the subsequent two I first wrapped them with aluminum foil to provide a bit of protection.
I hope these work for the spoon makers, if not I guess I will hear back from them. Of course the unmodified end can serve to burnish the flat and convex surfaces of their spoons.
My practice polissoir remains on my workbench and I will carve a spoon-sized shape to see how well it works.
Stay tuned.
As the Gragg Chair(s) project progresses (two being built on commission, a third for myself as an experiment in porch furniture) I was noticing recently that it is not simply an opportunity to make (and video record the making of) a challenging and iconic piece of the American design pantheon. It is also a means of building the inventory of kindling and tinder that becomes part of everyday life during the alpine winters at The Homestead on White Run. The wood stove will likely be lit in the evenings in another six weeks, and get its final seasonal clean-out next April or May. That’s a lot of tinder.
With every stick that goes into the chairs there is an equal amount of material split, shaved, or planed away. I faithfully break down the stick-sized material into kindling and box that up, and the tinder, so vital to reviving the fire in the wood stove every morning, winds up in large trash bags. All of this goes into storage in the lower barn to be used as needed. Each chair produces about three bags of tinder and a box of kindling. Some day I will mock up all the individual elements to see how much finished stock it actually takes. I’m guessing about as much as a single 2×6.
Three weekends ago I taught the workshop Knotwork Banded Inlays, based on Roubo’s Plate 287. This was the first time I had taught this particular subject, although I had shown it many times before. But, working it through from beginning to end with students was a challenge. Fortunately I had not only some of my previous exercises but also my print that had been removed from a mutilated First Edition of L’Art du Menuisier to use as guidance.
The only way I could figure out how to get all the way through the exercise for the students was to give them a head start, so even before they arrived I had fabricated panels with the backgrounds already made and glued down. With those ready to go I had the students begin at the beginning, creating their own parquetry backgrounds so they would have the full experience of the process.
This started with cutting the veneer strips needed for the parallelogram lozenges that comprise the pattern. Once again my tiny band saw served us well, with each student making their own stock. After three or four passes on the band saw they shot the edge of the lumber and again returned to the saw until the had enough raw material to proceed.
After that it was cutting 60-120-60-120 lozenges by the score.
While one was occupied with cutting their parquetry elements the other glued up the materials for making the banding slices for use later on.
Then on to building the parquetry backgrounds in earnest, gluing down the elements to kraft paper backgrounds. Once those were complete they were set aside until the end of the day.
They then turned their attention to the already-prepared panels to trim them and begin the layout of the knotwork corner compositions. I had a number of veneer saws to try out, and the Japanese mortising saw and the Gramercy heavyweight French style veneer saw (the “King Kong” model) were much admired.
Soon the knotwork pattern layouts emerged.
We then glued the new parquetry backgrounds to plywood substrates for them to play with tomorrow and called it a day.
More than a dozen years ago I crossed paths with Tom, a retired police detective and rustic woodworker (that’s a description of the style in which he generally worked, not a commentary on his considerable skills.) Tom had a booth at a community yard sale selling some of his tools and, well, you know how the rest of that story goes.
Shortly thereafter we started spending Wednesday evenings in his shop making sawdust, sharpening tools, making and repurposing tools, and on occasion solving some global problem. Or more likely, just working on projects while we enjoyed each others’ silent company.
When we started that routine that lasted for a decade until we moved to The Fortress of Solitude, Tom’s shop was set up for him to work pretty much alone so one of our first projects together was to build another good workbench for me to use. Projecting from my own Old Faithful I designed and built a larger torsion-box-top bench on a petty standard base. Over a period of several Wednesday nights the bench took form until it was ready for battle.
Tom had never built a torsion box and was fascinated by the whole concept and process, especially when all the parts of the 1/2 baltic birch box were glued together into a 60″ x 24″ x 5″ thick whole. Once that was done I affixed the 60-inch twin screw vise to one of the bench faces (I had obviously already prepared the holes inside the box grid before glue-up) and suddenly he had another unique high performance tool added to his shop. I think we had it sitting on a pair of sawhorse for a couple weeks while I used it to fabricate the base, but before long it was all together and sitting on the floor for me to use.
Well, he used it a fair bit as well. Eventually Tom added a pair of rising stops to either end of the bench and I added a shelf underneath and it was done and put to work immediately.
For several years it served me well in Tom’s shop and I fully intended to leave it behind and for it to become part of his inventory when we moved away. (My weekly evening in Tom’s workshop was one of a very few things in Mordor I left behind with regret). Tom promised to visit The Barn and in fact he came a fair bit early on, and he had come several times to work on the barn with me.
On his first trip to work in the barn he surprised me by bringing the bench with him. He said he wanted to make sure he would always have a workbench whenever he came for a visit, which has not been as frequent as I would like.
But the bench is sitting in the barn, just waiting for him to join me. Maybe a little cluttered, but ready and waiting.
It’s getting to be that time of year when I will spend a day a week or so for the next dozen weeks building up the firewood inventory. I still have a half dozen more trees on the ground from last year to cut up and that should do for this coming winter but I want to get a good jump on the following one.
Last week in between thunderstorms I sliced up a 24″ maple and an 18″ locust, both tall and a ton apiece, probably three pickup loads together. Now I’m just waiting for the ground to get dry enough for the truck to get to them.
Way up the hill I still have several logs I thought might work for making Gragg chairs but the first couple bolts were not promising so the rest will instead provide heat. I’ve got another promising one for the chairs, though. Really long and straight.
We’ve got some sort of walnut blight going on here, so there will be some of them getting the axe this year.
For many years I have been on the hunt for a most rare quarry, the Emmert Metalworker’s Vise. As a life-long aficionado of Emmert K1 Patternmaker’s Vises, well, maybe not my whole life but certainly since I joined the Maddox Foundry pattern shop in 1978, I have found the K1 to be something close to a perfect woodworking vise. By that time Emmert Company was long gone but Kindt-Collins, the foundryman’s supply house, was manufacturing them. I was so taken by the vises in the pattern shop that I checked into buying the K-C version. The price of almost $2k in 1980 scared me off but I was indeed hooked.
Fortunately in 1982 I was able to buy a pair of vintage K1s at a price a married college student could afford. They sat unused for three years until I finished school, got a job, a house with a basement shop, and a workbench to put one on. This has been my constant woodworking companion ever since. (My second one waits forlornly for a bench of its own.) As I have often said to my well-established woodworking friends, “If you have never used an Emmert K1 don’t start now because you will be black-and-blue from kicking yourself for waiting so long.”
I am ashamed to admit that I never learned of the Emmert “Tool Maker’s and Metal Worker’s Vises” a/k/a “The Metal Hand” until a decade or so ago. If Emmert’s woodworking vise was this good, how fantastic must be their metal working vise? I was now on the hunt for this great beast.
Occasionally they would come up at auctions or on-line, but the prices, like that of the Kindt-Collins K1, were enough to retard but not diminish my ardor. It seemed as though every time the prices would eventually zoom into the stratosphere and I would have to drop out. A few years ago at Donnelly’s I hung in on the bidding long past my point of reason and still the hammer price was twice as much as when I dropped out.
As a profound gesture of friendship and condolence in the aftermath of my dashed hopes, my friend Jersey Jon presented me with a consolation prize, an equally rare but far less expensive (I hope) product brochure for the vise. It remains a treasure in the Archive of Don.
With high hopes I noticed one in this year’s MJD Summer Auction catalog and the chase was on. I knew from the listings that this item would be on the block at lunch time on Saturday. I located and examined the vise almost immediately on arriving on Thursday, and from that point on all the auction activity pointed to lot 26XX (at the moment I cannot recall the number).
When the moment was approaching our little band of tool mavens quieted down in anticipation of the lot number. Once it began it was soon clear that only one other bidder was fervently interested. As fate would have it he and I both had the same secret limit and fortunately I got there first! The auctioneer sang out the next increment several times then said “Sold to number 78.” With whoops and back slaps I was the winner, and unlike Captain Ahab I was going to live with my conquest.
Afterwards we loaded it into the CRV with some effort. At home I wrestled it to the ground, not much of a contest as it weighs more than a hundred pounds. The trick was avoiding smashing my toes or aggravating my back. Once on the hand truck it was a piece o’ cake to wheel it into the shop, and with caution I hoisted it onto my bench to remove the grease and grime.
And there it sits to this moment, awaiting a plan to mount it, perhaps on a new bench.
In hindsight I wonder if landing this beast after such a long quest will diminish my enthusiasm for attending tool gatherings like the one where I obtained it.
Nah, that’s just crazy talk.
But like Jameel Abraham once quipped to me, “Why couldn’t we collect thimble boxes instead of cast iron anchors?”
There were two individual tools on my “gotta bid on these” radar at the MJD summer auction. The “pretty one” was a small brass shooting plane.
Patrick’s plane
After seeing Patrick Edwards’ petite shooting plane he used for parquetry at the Williamsburg conference this year I have been itching to get one. (I will almost certainly make one myself, but that is a topic for another set of blog posts). Here was a sweet little one that was pretty clearly custom-made, perhaps even user made.
The auction estimate seemed pretty low, so I was interested on checking it out. Very, very nice, great lines, pleasant heft, a nice Sorby iron. I was hooked. Since it was being sold very late on Saturday, and Mrs. Barn and I were going to visit friends in Rochester NY for dinner and the evening I would not be around for the bidding festivities. Hyperkitten volunteered to bid for me and I told him my limit.
Late that afternoon he sent me a message on my newfangled smart phone thingy that I had indeed won that particular prize! A week later it arrived at the PO box and I had a chance to look it over really well.
It was pretty clear that the plane had never been made operable. There were no wear marks on the body that would suggest any real use, but the kicker was that the Sorby iron had never been sharpened. Its back had been “ground” on a flat waterwheel but had never been taken any further in the process. I took about a half hour and got it singing like Caruso. It is darned near perfect for my needs in cranking out French parquetry or other small-scale work.
The handle of figured walnut had been broken and repaired, albeit poorly. The repair seems to be holding firm so I may wind up just re-sculpting it a tad and leaving well-enough alone. Oh, and I think a nice knurled pressure screw is called for.
I noticed with some amusement that the maker had stamped his name on two places of the handle; A. Williams. we are probably only distantly related.
With the construction finally completed it was time to dive into the part of the project that had no down side, the part where it was all fun all of the time — finishing. In my back-and-forth with the client I decided to shoot for a non-filled-grain look, a general tonal consistency, and with craqueleure underneath the the final surface. In short my overall strategy for the process was to have the desk looking like it was “old but well-cared-for,” looking new was not part of the plan, nor was “antiquing” nor “distressing.”
Since the desk was small and convoluted I intended to finished almost all of the pieces prior to final glue-up. So the full glory of it was not revealed until nearly the last step when all the pieces were put together. Finishing each piece separately required a careful masking of all the surfaces that were glued together in that assembly.
The first step was to lay down a few seal coats of garnet shellac brushed on in three or four applications of a one pound cut. This allowed me to get a good sense of how I needed to shift the visual coloration and tone of the pieces to bring them into harmony. I would make no attempt to make each and every piece identical to the other, that was nonsensical given the variety of grain directions, etc. involved, but simply to bring everything closer en suite.
For the most part the starting point for this shifting was accomplished via the addition of dyes to the garnet shellac being brushed on. I am loathe to employ chemical stains to bare wood as part of the finishing exercise; they are simply too difficult to control for an equal outcome when the starting points are different, and when they do not behave their reversal (removing the surface of all the wood) induces foul language in the shop.
By building the finish with dyed coatings the depth of the wood’s beauty soon emerged forcefully.
I built the finish steadily, five coats becoming ten, then fifteen. I smoothed all of the flat surfaces by scraping with razor blades and the curved surfaces with pumice pads and before long I was ready for the home stretch.
But the real magic of final blending of the coloration, along with imparting craqueleure, was achieved in the next step.
Stay tuned.
The bench today
Sometime in the mid-aughts I came into possession of a raggedy c. 1970s Sjoberg workbench that was slated for the dumpster. It was a rickety old thing that needed to be pretty much disassembled and reconstructed to make work properly. Before, it wobbled so bad it was probably an injury magnet, afterwards it was stout and sturdy. I eventually added another four inches to its height by simply bolting on some mondo skids. Since it was still unusably light I then bolted the skids to the floor and now it is one of my high-value work stations for when I am doing conservation projects for smaller decorative objects or gunsmithing, engraving, marquetry or carving.
Some of the accouterments I have added to it include a tilting fret saw table that fits perfectly into the end vise, and a swiveling ball vise made from a pair of toilet flanges, a duckpin bowling ball (it’s a Maryland thing) and a hot melt glue gun and wood scraps. This resides on the floor underneath the bench when not in use. I’ve also got a stereo-microscope sitting there for those times when I need it, and a pair of Gerstner tool boxes filled with the tools I need for these projects on a shelf above it and a small drawer unit with carving and engraving tools sitting on the shoulder vise end. It is light enough to move aside easily whenever I need that vise.
The bench was one of the very first things I brought to the barn, probably within the first year after it was enclosed, in ’09 or ’10. It was the closest thing I had to a functioning and available workbench and it arrived even before there was the final flooring underfoot.
Being pretty light it was moved around frequently until the spaces took shape. It finally wound up in a perfectly fitted niche just inside the entry door, adjacent to the propane wall furnace.
It is not the perfect bench, but the purchase price was perfect and with a bit of finessing it has turned into a valuable contributor to the shop’s functionality. Were my life situation different I could probably make a decent living with this as my only bench.
At the annual MJD summer tool extravaganza the action of acquiring tools at the auction itself is only one of the many attractions. The tool-dealers flea market gets larger every year and I always manage to get a few treats.
This year it was a pair of screwdriver tips for a brace, always a useful thing to have more of, and a vintage Panavise.
Even better is the extravaganza and fellowship if the cluster of friends I sit with, often kibitzing about the tools being sold and reviewing each others’ purchases. Here is my pal JohnH and a pile of wooden body planes he got for a buck or two apiece.
I am particularly fortunate in both the tool acquisition and fellowship aspects to sit alongside tool merchant extraordinaire Josh Clark of Hyperkitten.com. He comes with a detailed “Buy” spreadsheet and generally has great success as he is buying good quality “user” tools for his customers to purchase from him at a very modest price. Any while he is aggressively obtaining his winter inventory we get to scour his purchases and make side deals with him. It is especially superb when he gets a large lot of boxes with stuff he doesn’t want. The the horse trading begins in earnest.
Here’s my haul from Hyperkitten this year.
I’ve always liked “take down” framing squares since they can fit into a low-rider tool tote. I bought one many years ago and Josh was happy to pass this one along to me.
One of the lots that Josh was watching carefully was a small box chock full of Yankee drill bit sets. I find Yankee drills to be an integral element in almost every work setting and have them scattered about in numerous locations. The problem is that the littlest bits you use the most are the ones that also break the most. Once the box was in his hand I bought three complete bit sets from Josh.
One of the tools that is often in abundance is the venerable wood screw, something Josh has no interest in due to the fact that they are so bulky and the demand is too low to commit space to them. Here is a pile that he just gave to me since I use them quite a bit.
In separate lots were a very nice Ulmia horned toothing plane and an unmarked so-so scrub plane. SOLD!
This lovely little wire and sheet metal gauge was identical to one in Henry Studley’s tool cabinet, and I did not already have one exactly like it, so…
Josh brought this one to my attention and it was so beautifully detailed I snapped it up. The French wrest for setting saw teeth is simply a spectacular thing.
Finally, Josh found a fairly good number of plow plane irons amongst his treasure that were too boogered up to be reclaimed without extraordinary effort, and since I can use them in re-purposed applications he handed them over to me.
The final off-book delights were fellowship dinners with friends old and new. One night the lovely toolaholic Christine reserved the upper floor of an excellent local restaurant for our crew, and the next night was the annual pig roast at the auction. A grand time was had by all.
Recent Comments