With the two timbers glued into one slab I pulled out my trusty scrub plane and started hogging off material since the wind was a tad pronounced. I was able to get the initial pass finished out in the great room of the barn, and again put my mighty 10-inch circular saw to work cutting the slab to the 13″ width I wanted. As with the initial timber splitting I was left with an inch or so to cut by hand.
Moving the sized slab onto my Roubo bench in the studio I employed the Roubo technique for achieving the flat plane of the slab.
First I shot a rabet down each edge of the slab, using two pillared winding stick to determine when they were perfectly parallel to each other. My original Roubo winding-sticks-on-stilts were unavailable so I just used two hardware store aluminum bars sitting on identical blocks. Once I had the parallel edge tracks established I grabbed the scrub plane and got the surface flat in about a half hour each side. It’s worth noting that even though the wood was southern yellow pine, it was new growth SYP and much less dense than the timbers from the barn itself.
Next, it’s on to the staked legs.
My first exposure to the existence of something called “a patternmaker’s vise” was in 1978 when I went to work in an actual pattern shop. Although I had been engaged in woodworking at increasingly sophisticated shops for several years by that point, the Emmert vise was unknown to me. My job at the pattern shop was a 7AM-3.30PM shift, which was a struggle for me since I am a night owl by nature and getting up to work on time was a challenge even though it was only a three minute bicycle ride to the foundry from my house. But, that work schedule allowed me to have plenty of afternoon and evening time in the shop I built behind the house.
I was so entranced by the Emmert that I checked into buying a new one from Kindt-Collins, the Cleveland based foundry supplier who was by that time the manufacturer of the original Emmert K1 vise. I cannot recall exactly whether the new one was priced at $1750, $2250, or $2750. All I knew was that there was no way I could afford any of those price points in 1978. I did obtain a pair of Emmerts right after Mrs. Barn and I married and went to Delaware for college in the beginning of 1982. The Philadelphia Navy Yard had recently closed their foundry so there was a huge stash of Emmerts just up the road at a Philly machinery salvage outfit, and I think I paid $200 for my pair.
At least one of mine has always been installed and the center of my workspace ever since. I cannot really imagine a workshop of mine not having one.
Last week my pal JohnR let me know that the Emmert vise may have been rebranded as “the Hopewell vise” and back in production. The information is at the following link. Maybe this is already known throughout the woodworking blogosphere and I have just been too wrapped up in my own activities, but here it is.
CS Machinery (mprime.com)
If you have always wanted a brand new, incomparable patternmaker’s vise this could be your chance. I have no connection to the new maker and have not encountered one of these vises, but I would love to know more myself.
As I once told an aficionado of workbenches, “If you have avoided using an Emmert before, do not start now because you will be black and blue from kicking yourself for not trying it earlier.”
With my former planing beam cut almost all the way through using my trusty 10-inch circular saw I was left with sawing the last inch of thickness by hand. Grabbing my equally trusty ancient 3-1/2 t.p.i. handsaw I made short work of the separation, getting almost 1-1/2 inches of cut per stroke.
I then made a nuisance mistake by cutting off the wrong end of the timbers I was only going to make a six-foot bench). I should have cut of the end with the wainey edges, but instead I cut off the nice crisp end. So now I had to take a few minutes to plane flat the rounded edge and glue on a new piece in order to make it square.
That I accomplished by just sawing off and hand planing the excess.
With the pieces separated I dove in with my scrub plane to get everything more or less planar by eye. The beam had a bit of wind in it which became exaggerated (doubled) by the splitting. Once the mating surfaces were flat-ish, or at least fitted each other nicely, I got out my fave toothing plane and got it mated for real, ready for the, er, mating. In this instance I used PVA, in part because I did not know the final environment for the bench but really because I had not prepared hot hide glue in advance and thus had none ready to go when I was determined to execute the glue-up.
It is really comforting and confirming when the squeeze-out is uniform through the length and breadth of the joint.
My friend Justin sent me another picture, this time from the 1882 Boston Directory. Very exciting!
Is this where Studley got his bench vises?
The hunt is afoot.
In my quest to build a low bench, a/k/a a woodworking-while-sitting-on-my-keister-is-more-attractive-with-age bench, I am embarking on making a mélange of the Roman Workbench, the Estonian Workbench, and the Jonathan Fisher Workbench, with the occasional influence of Nicholson with a couple added features thrown in. Rather than rearranging and sorting through the log barn to pull out a timber of just the right cross-section I decided to repurpose my old planing beam that had become obsolete once the FORP bench was completed and installed. Not needing an 8″ x 10″ x 8′ shelf in the shop, it was a fairly easy conclusion to reach.
Much to my surprise the beam had become considerably heavier in the decade since it was installed, or was it the maker who became weaker? I’ve got a rolling table that I maneuvered into the shop to make the transport out to the large space a piece of cake. I placed the beam on two sawhorse and reached for my 10″ Milwaukee circular saw. (It’s times like these that I revel in having made that particular purchase 20+ years ago.) Making two passes on each side I was left with about an inch to saw by hand, and viola’ I would soon have a pair of ~5″ x 8″ x 96″ timbers.
Studley’s front vise
Over the past decade I have looked at dozens of piano makers’ vises similar to the ones H.O. Studley had on his workbench. Even at this very moment there are five in the barn. The head-scratching part about them revolves around two questions; 1) what were the processes of piano making that required such a remarkable vise, and 2) why are there no makers’ identifications on any of them? Given the time in which these vises were made, late 19th and early 20th Century, when manufacturers were stamping their names on everything that could be marked, this absence of identification was mystifying.
This week I got a picture from a friend, who had a friend who just bought a piano makers vise, and lo and behold there is a maker’s stamp right in the middle of the moving jaw, front and center.
Very exciting indeed.
The events of the past several months, including Mrs. Barn and me losing our remaining parents and my becoming closer to 70 than 60, are leading me on a path of deliberate winnowing of my shop and barn contents. Given that my sister is still going through my mom’s stuff — and she lived her last years in a one room “mother in law” apartment with my brother and sister-in-law — and the literal tons of belongings in my father-in-law’s four bedroom, two car garage house with a large back yard where he lived for 59 years, I am determined to reduce my material possession burden to my heirs as much as possible. Since my mom died at 103 I may have some time to get it all resolved, which is a good thing when there are 7,000 square feet and 70+ acres in the discussion.
Other contributors to this long-term process are the realizations that barn-based workshops will not have the prominence that I once thought would be true, and given my current set-up on the fourth floor I really do not need a second floor classroom outfitted with a perimeter of workbenches (I do however still use that space mostly for development of the ripple molding cutter). Also I recognize that at some point in time life in the mountains would just become too hard physically, and I would see the barn in my rearview mirror. Not any time soon, but it is inevitable in 10, or 15, or 20 years. One small step we are taking to delay that day as long as possible is to try to find someone who can execute most of the mowing and bush-hogging tasks around the homestead, but when you live in the least populous county east of the Mississippi River it can be a challenge to find someone to work for you.
One of my upcoming tasks will be winnowing the workbench inventory. Do I really need eight workbenches in my own workspace? Of course not. So, I will begin reducing that particular footprint almost immediately and there are definite “Workbench Wednesday” implications.
The first of these will be to replace my first workbench built for the space, the timber planing beam, with a low bench of the Jonathan Fischer/Roman/Estonian variety. Since completing my French Oak Roubo Project bench I have had no need for the planing beam so it will be resawn and joined to become the slab for that bench. It will occupy roughly the same space but serve a more immediate need as my knees and hips are becoming more troublesome and working while sitting is ever more congenial.
This change will also allow me to construct a standing tool chest to hold a copious inventory of hand tools, to be placed at the end of the low bench where my saw rack and metal hand planes hang on the wall. Since seeing Walter Wittmann’s cabinet a few years ago I have seen this as a solution to my tool storage problem and now is the time to act on it. The Japanese tool box will reside where Walter’s large lower drawers are located.
Of the plans for the workshop changes these are two of the three at the top of the list. The third is to restore my piano-maker’s workbench in order to make it a proper gift for my son-in-law, and move it out of my workspace. I m still cogitating on the ultimate home for the Studley-ish bench I built for the exhibit.
On top of everything else I have stock for at least another half dozen workbenches still unbuilt, but that may be moved on to other folks with the time, energy, and need that I do not have. Among these are the gigantic mahogany slab and vintage walnut 6×6 that would result in an eye-popping Roubo bench, a 14/4 curly maple slab already glued up, a stack of oak 10x15s, some 12-foot long 7×15 Douglas Fir timbers…
Stay tuned.
One of my quirks is that I usually like to lay a piece of sacrificial sheeting on top of my workbench most of the time, and today was my day to swap out the old one for a new one on the FORP Roubo bench. As I was making the swap I noted that it was also time to address one of the two main manifestations of Seasonal Affected Disorder that afflicts (?) wood in the natural course of events, sometimes called hysteresis, sometimes called rheological cycling, but generally known to us folks at the workbench as “wood expands, wood contracts.” One of the consequences is that when there are pieces of wood assembled with different grain orientations eventually they get out of sync dimensionally. In a Roubo workbench this become manifest as the tops of the leg tenons eventually protruding past the top of the slab.
As I was fitting new pieces of luan plywood to lay on the bench top I noticed that the tenons were quite proud of the slab, perhaps 1/16″. I only assembled the bench a couple years go and did not notice the issue when I laid the initial sacrificial covering at the time, but it was there now.
You might have thought that since the bench was initially fabricated eight years ago it should be fully settled into its new environment. Maybe, maybe not. If the old adage that wood seasons at the rate of “one year for every inch of thickness” is true then the answer would be “yes.” Since I moved to the hinterlands and talked to some of the local wood guys I have come to appreciate their view of seasoning woods, especially dense hardwoods. To them “one year per inch” does not hold true; instead they use a formula of “one year for the first inch, two additional years for the second inch, three additional years for the third inch,” and so on. By that metric my five-inch-thick bench top will pretty active for 1 year + 2 years + 3 years +4 years + 5 years, for a total of 15 years.
I dealt with the tenon ends directly in about an hour this morning, and will address the slight crown of the overall bench perhaps at the end of summer.
It might be worth reiterating that once I get a slab bench top flat I prefer to hit it with a toothing plane to give it a little texture. I lose none of the planarity but gain a lot of grip on the workpiece.
Going back many years I was an enthusiastic supporter of the concept of a vertical marquetry saw as an alternative to a horizontal chevalet, a machine I never got the hang of. I’m not sure if I was the first person to raise the concept to Knew Concepts but certainly I was in there early with encouragement and specific concept and design ideas. The development of the tool took many years and trips down many rabbit trails, not the least of which was the passing of our beloved friend Lee Marshall from Knew and the transition to Brian’s sole leadership and all the logistical and legal details that entailed.
Then came the day several months ago when the very first unit rolled off the assembly line and shortly thereafter arrived on my doorstep. I assembled and used it just enough to get the sense of the tool, then put it away since I had so many other things in my pile of things to get done. Well, I am finally returning to the tool. The first thing was to find a permanent (?) home for it in the workshop. At the moment that location is the end of my oldest and dearest friend in the shop, my Emmert workbench.
Time will tell if this is the final resting place for this magnificent machine, but for now it is working just fine.
With all of the steam bending done for the Gragg chair workshop John and I spent a little time reorganizing the attic of the barn, now with only the months of waiting for the students to arrive. One more workbench to move across the room and it’s all done.
Yes, we hoisted one and made two new benches and began to place them around the perimeter of the space. At almost a thousand square feet it is a grand luxury for any workshop, and I have only Mrs. Barn to thank for it. I had intended to leave the level of the barn un-floored, but she recommended, correctly, that if I did lay down floor I would find it immensely useful She was correct, again.
So, at the workshop every participant will have a fully outfitted bench plus half of a 4′ x 8′ assembly table on wheels, which are themselves re-cycled platforms for the long-passed Studley exhibit.
One final decorative touch was to tack the graphic panels from the exhibit over the benches. Whether these inspire or intimidate is yet to be determined.
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