In reflecting back on my very productive recent days, laboring diligently to prepare The Barn to house our several tons of books, I have the nagging suspicion that I was the target of some subliminal mockery. I got some of the two dozen glazed doors cut and a few installed (and the stock for all of them ready to assemble). Still, just beyond earshot I thought I sensed, feeling more than hearing, a gentle guttural Gallic guffaw, cruelly chiding me with, “Roubo, Roubo, Roubo.”
Yes, only steps away from where I toiled from dawn to dusk were the ~600 pounds worth of components for The Bench, sitting patiently
waiting for my attentive affections. The top is already bound to a triple block and tackle, as it is the only way I can maneuver it at all. Based on my rudimentary understanding of mechanics and some back-of-the-envelope calculations, the top itself weighs about 450 pounds (my fully-clothed weight of about 230 is just barely enough to levitate the unit, hence the top weighs a smidge less than twice that weight).
Unfortunately given my upcoming schedule it is unlikely that I will be able to focus my efforts on completing The Bench before early October. It is immensely gratifying and frustrating to receive the periodic emails from my fellow FORPXI congregants regaling the group with the tales of completing their shrine, er, workbench, from the recent gathering in Barnesville, Georgia.
My day will come. My only steps thus far are to prepare the space where it will reside. Directly in front of two banks of north-facing windows, it will be the centerpiece of my work for the next three or four decades.
With the exception of my Victorinox Spirit multi-tool, I’ve always had the impression, and mostly the experience, that devices designed for a multitude of functions end up not performing any of them well. To that end I generally avoid “combination machines” for woodworking, even though I have long owned a Mini-Max over-under jointer/planer. Truth be told it was way too big for my current workspace in the basement and has mostly served as a lumber rack for the past 15 years, but I look forward to rehabilitating it in the machine room in the first floor basement of the barn. The Mini-Max’s mortising attachment has never been attached to the best of my knowledge, and I will rectify that shortcoming shortly.
One combination tool that did make some sense to me is the jointer/planer offered by Hitachi, Makita, and others in which the cutterheads for both functions reside side-by-side on the same drive shaft. For much the same reason as the Mini-Max – I simply never had the space for one of the 8” x 12” units – I never looked into them closely. Then came the day some years ago when I went to a garage sale promising “Tools, tools, tools!”
As I approached the garage I saw this petite little version of this machine, a model I have never seen and frankly was unaware existed, and at $100 it was almost my moral duty to purchase it. The capacity is for jointing and planing 4” wide stock and it can plane about 3 ½” thick, which limits the usefulness to very small projects. Or so I thought. It sat around mostly gathering dust out in my shed until I moved it out the The Barn a couple years ago, where it gathered more dust.
Flash forward to the present, when I need to crank out a couple dozen doors for The Barn Biblioteca. I had just returned from the Roubo bench fest in Georgia the night before, and I had this stack of rough-prepped stock to get over the finish line. The mondo oak slab for the bench top is smack dab in the center of the Great Hall of The Barn (I have to work on it in the only place where I had an overhead hoist), making maneuvering with my Ryobi or Dewalt planers problematic. I guess I could have planed everything by hand, but the clock for relocating is ticking really fast. Hmmm, what about the little Makita combination machine? It was dramatically smaller and more nimble, at least when it comes to moving it and the workpieces. I pulled it out and gave it a test run. It passed with flying colors.
After a quick look-see and cleaning and lubricating I fired it up. No flying shrapnel, always a good sign. A quick edge jointing: perfecto. A quick face jointing – since this was door frame stock nothing was wider that about three inches – and it was still performing just fine. Setting the planer height and immediately planing the other face of the stock and I knew I had a winner. Literally I could prep three sides of each piece in under a minute. I spent more time moving the stock than working the stock.
In considerably less than two hours I was able to edge and face joint and thickness plane each stick followed by a finish ripping on the table saw.
It is such a delight when you encounter any tool, hand powered or pigtailed, that performs its function perfectly. This tiny machine is a perfect tool for the task of preparing small, long stock. I expect to give it a real workout in the coming months and years.
If you ever find one, you might think about picking it up.
I don’t know if I am cheap or frugal, or even if I am a tightwad (probably not, given that while I hate shopping do not mind spending) but I am almost always interested in different ways of doing almost anything.
One specific example of this is my use of hot animal hide glue, and the means of cooking it. Glue is available at most woodworking retailers, but I buy mine in bulk from Milligan&Higgins in 50lb. bags, thus saving about 75% over individual 1 lb. bags. Properly repackaged and sealed, dry granular bulk glue is good for a very long time.
When it comes to cooking glue, commercial glue pots are available for upwards of a hundred bucks but I am disinclined to buy them when perfectly serviceable options are available cheaply. In fact, I prefer these methods to the commercial glue pot.
My source for all of my glue cooking implements is a variety of flea markets, thrift stores, and yard sales. Crock pots, especially the smallish ones used to stink up the house with potpourri, are darned near perfect as glue pots. They certainly get hot enough to cook the glue without making it too hot, their ceramic shell is a great reservoir of heat allowing you to take the pot to the work if needed without losing all the heat at once if you have to unplug it, and they are cheap. I have several, and make a point to buy more whenever I find them. I’ve never spent much for one, and mostly they are in the fifty cents to $2 range. The only time I spent $5 was as a donation at the Humane Society Thrift Store.
Another wonderful option for preparing very small amounts of glue is the coffee cup warmer, which comes complete with a ceramic cup at many dry goods stores, but are also available from the same places I buy my mini-crock pots. A small glass jar with glue can be heated directly on the warmer, which works just fine for doing the small scale gluing I need for most restoration projects.
A third tool for cooking glue is the fondue pot. I have a couple and like them very much. Fondue pots have the advantage of getting a little hotter than either the potpourri crock or the coffee cup warmer, plus the cheese pot is usually just sitting on the heater coil and can be easily moved for working elsewhere in the shop.
The mini-crock, the coffee cup, and the fondue can be used to heat glue directly or with a water jacket with the glue in a second container. In fact my most frequent method is to prepare my glue in a small canning jar and place it into a crock filled with hot water.
One thing I do after acquiring a yard-sale cooker is to plug it in with a container of water inside and wait for it to reach full heat, then measure the temperature of the cup of water it has heated. I write that temperature on the outside of the cooker so I know exactly how hot my glue is getting.
One of the grand new pleasures for me has been my fairly recent intersection with the hand-tool-makers world occupied by many new friends and acquaintances, as reflected in the recent gather of toolaholics at the Handworks event in Amana, Iowa. Perhaps most heartening of all was the reality that the riches contained in the Amana Festhalle were by no means the complete community as many other tool makers and aficionados were unable to attend for a variety of reasons.
One of these non-attendees was planemaker Tod Herrli. I first become aware of Tod through my long time friend Bess Naylor, who often hosted Tod as an instructor at Olde Mill Cabinet Shop in York PA. Then I ordered Tod’s brilliant instructional video on making a hollow-and-round pair. Thanks in part to my previous job duties I have seen dozens if not hundreds of instructional videos on a wide variety of topics, and I cannot recall ever seeing one better. Ever. To watch him construct a matched pair of hollow-and-round planes in near-real time is an awesome thing.
Last spring I had the opportunity to meet and visit Tod on my way to teach at the National Institute of Woodfinishing in Minnesota, spending a delightful afternoon immersed in tool chat. On my departure I indicated my desire for a small sash plane, and asked Tod if he could make one for me. Last month a package arrived with a sample of the output of such a plane, along with the question of whether or not I still wanted the plane I had requested.
The answer was an unqualified “Yes!”
On my way home from Amana I stopped by Tod’s house again for another wonderful afternoon of fellowship, culminating with taking delivery of my new plane. Now I have no excuse for not building small cabinets with glazed doors. A matching coping plan is in the works, and I will wait patiently until my turn for that comes up in Tod’s hectic schedule.
It is my hope and desire that Tod can come to The Barn On White Run for a week of planemaking 
teaching next summer, and perhaps many more summers after that. My plan is for Tod to teach an introductory class on simple planemaking on a Monday and Tuesday, with Wednesday, Thursday and Friday dedicated to a second class on making a more complex tool.
Stay tuned, and thanks Tod for making this new heirloom tool for me.
Chris Schwarz just posted my newest contribution to the Lost Art Press Blog. You can see it here. My ongoing exploration of these vises and my efforts to replicate them will mostly occur ay my blog, so stay tuned.
waiting for my attentive affections. The top is already bound to a triple block and tackle, as it is the only way I can maneuver it at all. Based on my rudimentary understanding of mechanics and some back-of-the-envelope calculations, the top itself weighs about 450 pounds (my fully-clothed weight of about 230 is just barely enough to levitate the unit, hence the top weighs a smidge less than twice that weight).
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