OK, after a technical hiccup, we have this worked out.

The 60-minute movie about the tools in “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” is now available for instant download in our store for $8. The download includes all the extras available on the DVD: the slideshow of the step photos, the SketchUp file and a text document that further explains some of the tools I chose and why.

This purchase is available for domestic customers through this link. International customers can also purchase this by sending $8 via PayPal to john@lostartpress.com. You will then receive a link to download the files.

Note that this download is a big file – 700 mb – so it will take some time when you order it. The download is one file – a zipped file. After you download it, it will decompress into a folder containing the video (an .mov file) plus the extras.

— Christopher Schwarz

This morning I’m finishing up all the small drawers for the gallery in this campaign secretary. The dovetails are little buggers, and the mahogany drawer front material is really dark stuff.

So I stole some of my daughter’s sidewalk chalk.

Chalking your knife lines and gauge lines makes your lines really easy to see, even in walnut. I usually rub some chalk onto the board coarsely, knife in my lines and then rub the chalk into the lines. This removes it from the face of the board and leaves it in the crevices.

However, today I learned something new, thanks to the kinda-creepy mind-reading power of carpenter Jeff Burks. He sent me a nice little article from an 1869 edition of The Manufacturer and Builder on dovetails.

There are some interesting tidbits in there, and in the discussion of chalk it implied you could pencil over the chalk. As I am somewhat dense at times, this had never occurred to me. So this morning I chalked my pin boards, knifed in the pins and then penciled in the vertical lines on the inside face.

It worked great.

Thanks dead guys. You’re the best.

You can download and read the entire article here.

http://www.carpentryarchive.org/files/dove-tail_joints_1869.pdf

— Christopher Schwarz

You can now purchase “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” – complete and unabridged – for your Kindle, iPad or any other reader that accepts ePub files.

The price is $16. You can purchase the Kindle edition here. The ePub version for iPad iPhone and other ePub reader is here.

Like all our electronic products, these are supplied without any form of Digital Rights Management – DRM for short. DRM restricts you from moving the file to other devices, or requires a password, or is just generally a nuisance.

We do not care for DRM. And I am pleased to say that pirating of our products has been minimal. So thank you for being ethical citizens.

“The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” was a complex book for us to convert into an electronic edition, thanks to the hundreds of illustrations and the copious footnotes. I am happy to report that the book is complete with all the footnotes – you access them by clicking on the superscript number in the text. You will then be taken to a section of the book containing all the notes. The function works quite well.

One last note: Several customers have asked if we will be offering package prices on the book, electronic book and the forthcoming audiobook version read by Roy Underhill. After much debate, we have decided to keep all these products separate and simply offer each at the best price possible. We think $16 is a fair price for a DRM-free book of this complexity.

— Christopher Schwarz

France was the first country to adopt the metric system, so a French-style workbench drawn in metric seems appropriate.

I’ve uploaded the SketchUp drawing for the workbench we just completed at the Dictum GmbH workshop to the SketchUp 3D Warehouse. You can download it (free, of course), from the warehouse here and play around with it.

The model includes nine scenes that show the construction process, step-by-step.

— Christopher Schwarz

Matt Bickford’s book, “Mouldings in Practice,” sets out to remake the way you look at, cut and apply the mouldings to your projects.

It is quite unlike any other book we have ever encountered. Why? Bickford grapples with a core idea that has plagued woodworkers for generations: Cutting mouldings by hand requires years of practice, patience and the acquisition of high-level skills.

After reading this book, I think you will say about that old idea: “Wow. That’s crap.”

To kick-start your education in cutting mouldings, we are offering a free download of a critical chapter of “Mouldings in Practice.” This short chapter lays out the basic principles of the book and shows the landscape that it covers.

To download the chapter, simply click here. You don’t have to register, give up some special bodily cells or even your e-mail address.

If you like what you see and read, you can order “Mouldings in Practice” with free domestic shipping by clicking here. This offer of free shipping is valid only until Aug. 8, which is when the book leaves the printing plant in Michigan. After that, you’ll have to pay shipping, just like any other stiff.

Long-time customers can tell you that this is the only sort of promotion we run on our products. We don’t put stuff on fake “sales.” The price is the price. This pre-publication special is the only one you will ever see on this book.

So take a look at the chapter and decide if you really want to continue making mouldings with that spinning, noisy, dangerous machine in your shop. Or if you want to make any moulding you can imagine with just a few simple tools and the ideas in “Mouldings in Practice.”

— Christopher Schwarz

If you weren’t at my “60-minute Sawbench Class” yesterday at Woodworking in America, this download might not make total sense to you.

But as promised, below are the illustrated directions for cutting the compound angles on the legs of the sawbench. Plus there’s a tool list and a materials list for the sawbench I built during the class.

Sawbench2012HandoutWIA

Two things I forgot to mention during the presentation:

1. Hammer the points of your nails to blunt them before driving them in. This will reduce the fir’s tendency to split.

2. If you have some woodworking machines handy, Take a few extra minutes to dress the dimensional stock to remove the ugly rounded corners. The sawbench will look much nicer.

— Christopher Schwarz

If you attended one of my sessions at Woodworking in America in Pasadena, Calif., on Saturday, this is the blog entry you are looking for. The rest of you can go about your business – or download these and be slightly confused.

Campaign Furniture: Below are two links. One is an all-too short bibliography on this style of furniture. The other is a .pdf version of my presentation.

Campaign Furniture – Further Reading

Campaign Furniture WIA 2012

The Furniture Style With No Name: Below is my “recipe” for a six-board chest. There is a .pdf document that explains the tools required and the cutting and assembly procedure I use. The second document is a SketchUp file that shows the construction steps in a visual way. After you open the model in SketchUp, click on the different tabs at the top of its window to move through the different scenes.

Six-board chest recipe

Download the SketchUp file from the 3D Warehouse here.

Remember: If you build this chest using this recipe, please send me a photo and any thoughts on how the procedure could be streamlined.

— Christopher Schwarz

Here is our Christmas/holiday present to you, our readers – a fully produced version of the “Irish Joiner,” a fun 1825 tune about how all professions are similar to woodworking.

The “Irish Joiner” was brought to life by woodworker Dan Miller who performed the vocals, octave mandolin and Irish whistle. He is accompanied by Peter Connolly on the Irish whistle, guitar and Irish drum. If you like the “Irish Joiner,” I think you’ll like Dan and Peter’s CD “A Parcel of Rogues,” from their group, Finagle. Check it out here on Amazon.

The original score was dug up by (who else) Jeff Burks, who found it featured in the play “The Shepherd of Derwent Vale; Or, The Innocent Culprit: a Traditionary Drama, in Two Acts, Adapted (and Augmented) from the French by Joseph Lunn.” Read the entire play here.

Rooney O’Chisel, the Irish joiner, is a supporting character in this tale of two brothers and treachery. He’s a joiner who was robbed of his business and then becomes a jailer.

You can download the mp3 using the link below. Then you can add it to iTunes, an mp3 player or just double-click so it will play on your computer. I think it’s a perfect piece of shop music, and I am pondering a sing-along at the next woodworking event I attend.

The Irish Joiner

Thanks to everyone involved in this project. I hope you enjoy the song, and you whistle it on your way to work.

— Christopher Schwarz

Irish Joiner

I’m a joiner by trade, and O’Chisel’s my name;
From the sod, to make shavings and money I came:
But myself I was never consarning
‘Bout the lessons of schools;
For my own chest of tools
And my shop were a college for larning.

For by cutting, contriving,
And boring, and driving,
Each larned profession gains bread;
And they’re sure to succeed,
If they only take heed
To strike the right nail on the head.

Whack! whack! hubbaboo, gramachree;
All the dons in the nation are joiners like me.

Whack! whack! hubbaboo, gramachree;
All the dons in the nation are joiners like me.

The lawyers, like carpenters, work on a binch,
And their trade’s just the same as my own to an inch;
For clients, whenever they dive in it,
Soon find the cash fail;
For the law’s a big nail,
An’ the ‘torneys are hammers for driving it.
For by cutting, &c.

Then each Sunday, at church, by the parson we’re tould,
By line, square, and compass, our actions to mould;
And at joining himself the right sort is;
For he pins man and wife
Together for life,
Just as firm as a tenon and mortise.
For by cutting, &c.

And the heroes who sarve in our army and ships,
When they’re fighting our battles, are all brotherchips,
So entirely our trades are according;
For, with tools of sharp steel,
Soldiers cut a great deal,
And the tars are nate workmen at boarding.
For by cutting, &c.

Then our nobles and marchants, and stock-jobbing lads,
Like joiners, work best when they’ve plenty of brads.
Each projector’s a great undertaker;
And, to clinch up the whole,
Our good king, bless his soul!
Is an elegant cabinet-maker.
For by cutting, &c.

I’ve always been surprised how hard it is to find Joseph Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises” in the public domain. A few years ago I stumbled on a link from that HathiTrust and totally forgot about it.

While doing some research on S.W. Silver (makers of campaign furniture), I stumbled on HathiTrust again.

If you don’t have a copy of “Mechanick Exercises,” go here.

The link is for the section on joinery. To download the entire book for free as a pdf, look at the left rail of the page and click on the link “Download Whole Book.” A couple clicks later and the entire “Mechanick Exercises” from 1703 will be on your hard drive, with the plates intact.

— Christopher Schwarz

One of the “Rosetta Stones” of 18th-century tool forms is a book with the long-winded title “Explanation or Key, to the various manufactories of Sheffield: with engravings of each article designed for the utility of merchants, wholesale ironmongers and travellers.” Most people just call it “Smith’s Key” because the editor/engraver was Joseph Smith.

What is it? It’s collection of beautiful plates of all sorts of tools for woodworking, some other trades and a big section of cutlery, always a popular item in Sheffield, England.

The Early American Industries Association published a reprint of it in 1975 with a nice essay by John S. Kebabian and an important price list. According to the Kebabian essay, it is likely this “key” was used by salesmen who represented different manufacturers and needed to show the lines of several makers.

There are earlier tool catalogs than this circa 1816 example, but this one is particularly important because it might have been used extensively.

For us, the catalog is important because it shows tools in their new states, without any user modifications from sharpening, mishandling or simple use. Most significant is the page on saws, which shows backsaws with blades that get narrower at the toe. I wrote about this years ago, and saw wright Matt Cianci of the thesawblog.com has been crowing about it, too. (Yay Matt!)

If you’ve ever looked for a copy of “Smith’s Key,” you probably decided to instead spend the money on a mortgage payment or a trip to Europe. And that’s why I’m pleased to present this link, courtesy of Jeff Burks, that allows you to download “Smith’s Key” from Gallica.bnf.fr.

Click here to get started. The link to download the entire book is at the top right part of the screen. It’s a fantastic scan. And though it doesn’t include the essay or price list from the 1975 EAIA edition, it does offer some of the plates in color.

Check it out. Download it now.

— Christopher Schwarz

Every year we try to offer our readers a little gift during the holidays. Last year was an mp3 of “The Irish Joiner,” before that was Henry Adams’ rare “Joints in Woodwork.”

This year, we offer you lateness.

John Hoffman and I have been working around the clock to build a new Lost Art Press web site and get our book fulfillment handled by a local company so we can spend more time making books than mailing them.

Oh, and I’ve been working on a little book called “Campaign Furniture.”

But today I had a few moments of free time to pull together something special for you. It relates to one of the book we released this year: “By Hand & Eye” by George Walker and Jim Tolpin. In all honesty, we have been shocked by how well the book has been selling since its release in mid-2013. We are already in our second printing.

After talking to students in classes and at shows all over the world, I have heard the following question: I love this book, so what is the next step?

As Obi-Wan Kenobi says, it’s “the first step into a larger world.” And that is the world of geometry, which is more important to our craft than math or even reading.

I am not certain what George and Jim would recommend, but I heartily recommend you investigate some of the basic (very basic) manuals designed for beginning mechanics that were written in the 19th century. My favorite of the basic manuals is Peter Nicholson’s “Mechanic’s Companion,” which was written as a sequel to Joseph Moxon’s “Mechanick’s Exercises” (1678).

Unlike Moxon, Nicholson was a practitioner with a traditional training. And as a result, his book is more detailed. I own the 1845 edition of Nicholson. And while I know you can get copies of it on GoogleBooks, I decided to scan his chapter on basic geometry for you at a high resolution (800 dpi – almost good enough for a decent web press).

It’s a much prettier scan than you’ll get from Google, and I hope you will download it, read it and attempt some of the lessons. It’s a short chapter, but not a single word is wasted. (Oh, there is one error, but I’ll leave that for you to find.)

If you can master this short chapter, next year I’ll post the next stage of a geometry education for a mechanic.

Download the low-resolution pdf here (less than 3mb).

Download the high-resolution pdf (197mb) from Jeff Burks server here. (Thanks Jeff!).

— Christopher Schwarz

I am sorry that I gave you geometry homework yesterday. To make it up to you, I cobbled together a 60-page document of more than 100 campaign chests, plus construction and hardware details.

You can download the pdf document here: CF_DESIGN. It’s about 17mb, in color and the pages are in 6×9 format. That’s the same form factor as the book “Campaign Furniture” and leaves plenty of room for you to make notes in the margins on an 8-1/2” x 11” sheet of paper.

I offer these images without comment or details other than what is shown in the photos. Most chests are fairly standard in size (40” L x 40” W x 17” D), so you should be able to figure out the proportions and details on your own if you want to reproduce one of these chests.

To be honest, I made this document so you can train your eye to appreciate this somewhat non-standard form. I hope that you will design your own chest using the details you like.

If I have time, I hope to produce some more documents like this on chairs, trunks and bookcases before “Campaign Furniture” is released in early March.

— Christopher Schwarz

It’s a remarkably slow weekend here in our house, so while waiting for some servers to wake up and get busy on our new Lost Art Press web site, I pulled together another short booklet of images for you to download.

This download contains images of campaign-style chairs. They are mostly Roorkees and their variants, but I’ve included some other chair and stool images for you to study.

Here’s the link: CF_DESIGN_CHAIR

— Christopher Schwarz

Several readers have asked us this considerate question: Does the author of a Lost Art Press book make more money when someone buys a physical book or a downloaded book?

The answer is: With Lost Art Press books, the author makes the same amount.

Outside of our little publishing terrarium, many electronic books are just about the same price as the physical book. This usually translates into more money for the publisher because of the lower cost of creating and delivering an electronic book. It’s a complicated equation, but that is the greatly simplified version.

We use a different formula to determine the cost of an electronic book. We remove the cost of pre-press, printing, transporting and storing the physical book. So the cost of our electronic books is the intellectual cost of the book (writing, editing, designing and eating), plus storing it and transmitting it to customers.

And that is why our electronic books cost less than the physical book. We think it’s the fair way to go for readers and authors. Others disagree. We give not a crap.

Here are links to the books we offer electronically:

• Campaign Furniture
• Doormaking and Window-Making
• The Art of Joinery
• By Hand & Eye
• The Anarchist’s Tool Chest
• To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry
• Mouldings in Practice
• The Essential Woodworker
• The Joiner & Cabinet Maker

One last thing: All of our electronic books are free of Digital Rights Management (DRM). That means the files have no passwords and can be transported easily from device to device.

— Christopher Schwarz

Thanks to woodworker Donna R. Hill, you can download a free SketchUp drawing – or a pdf version – of the knockdown workbench I built a couple of weeks ago. Here’s the video in case you missed it.

Donna (some of you might know her as the “Wood Wench” through the Society of American Period Furniture Makers), produced a SketchUp file that she uploaded to the 3D Warehouse. You can download that file by going here. She also produced an excellent three-page pdf with complete measured drawings of the bench. Even if you have SketchUp, I recommend you snag these plans as well.

KD Nicholson Bench Lost Art Press

Donna teaches SketchUp classes locally here in Cincinnati; so if you need some instruction in this program look her up. She’s also a frequent demonstrator at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event when it comes to Cincinnati. She’s a talented woodworker – and expect to see more of her illustration work in upcoming Lost Art Press books.

Thanks Donna!

— Christopher Schwarz

Pure opinion: Buying sharpening stuff would be easier if manufacturers used microns to describe the particle size of the abrasive in each product.

While microns isn’t a perfect description, it’s a heck of a lot better than saying a stone is a “fine crystolon” when that stone is useful only for grinding away damage on a woodworking tool.

Woodworker Bert Bleckwenn recently created a chart that converts many sharpening products for woodworkers to microns and shared it with me. It’s an excellent and useful chart and is a good way to understand how coarse or fine your abrasives are.

Sharpening & Honing – Stones – Abrasives – Inventory – 050514

A couple of caveats: Natural products are difficult to rate this way. For example, novaculite is the abrasive found in Arkansas oilstones. These can be coarser or finer depending on the individual stone. And there are other factors with abrasives – too many to really write about here without creating a book.

So if you have problems with this chart, I ask only this: Make a better one and I’ll consider posting it, too.

When I sharpen, here are the micron sizes I use for each operation.

1. Grinding. This is the rapid removal of material to repair an edge, reshape it or to shrink my secondary bevel. I like a particle size that is 50 microns or larger.

2. Honing. When I have dulled an edge and need to recreate a new zero-radius intersection, I like an abrasive that is between 15 and 6 microns.

3. Polishing. All abrasives smaller than 6 microns are polishing media in my eye. How far you polish is personal. I usually polish at about 3 microns and then finish at 1 micron or so.

Thanks to Bert for this chart. And thanks in advance to readers for not trying to turn this post into a fight over sharpening (that’s a hint).

— Christopher Schwarz

Here you can download the geometry animations discussed in “By Hand & Eye” by George Walker and Jim Tolpin. There are a variety of ways to download them to your computer or watch them.

1. Download the following .zip file. After it lands in your “Downloads” folder, double-click it and it will extract itself. You will have a folder with three documents. Double-click on “By Hand & Eye Animations.html.” That will open your default web browser and you will see all the animations.

   BHAE_animations

2. Follow this link to a Dropbox folder where the three files discuss in No. 1 will be located. Download those. Double-click on “By Hand & Eye Animations.html” to get started.
3. Visit Jim Tolpin’s YouTube channel. Scroll down and you’ll see all the animations there.

— Christopher Schwarz

While scanning more than 350 old magazines edited by Charles Hayward, we kept running into articles that were made us pause because they were so interesting, yet we didn’t have a place for them in our forthcoming book.

We clipped them anyway, and I’ll be posting many of them here for you to enjoy.

Today is an article from the fantastic series called “The Old School,” which ran in The Woodworker between the wars. Each “Old School” column was a first-person account of work in a hand-tool shop at a different trade. This particular column was on making coffins.

You can download a pdf of the article using the link below.

Coffin_maker

Also, reader Jeff Hanes sent me this link to a film by craftsman Jeremy Broun about Hayward’s influence on him as a craftsman and illustrator. It is well worth watching.

Tomorrow I am off to San Diego to teach a two-day seminar at the San Diego Fine Woodworkers Association. I have take the smart extremely stupid step of packing all of my tools and the wood for my project in my checked luggage. Along with my undies and minty floss.

Well, it couldn’t be worse than my performance in Detroit!

— Christopher Schwarz

Last weekend at the San Diego Fine Woodworkers Association I didn’t have time to install the chest lock on the campaign-style officer’s trunk I built for the organization’s fall seminar.

And so I promised I would post directions from “The Joiner & Cabinet Maker.”

I’m always happy to revisit this particular book because it was such a fun project. Joel Moskowitz at Tools for Working Wood unearthed a very rare copy of this 1830 book that we reprinted. Joel wrote a nice introductory section to the book about woodworking during that period. Then I built the three projects shown in the book.

The pages in the pdf below are what I wrote about installing a chest lock, which is based on the excellent instructions in the original 1830 text.

Fitting_a_chest_lock

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Later this week I will post the other thing I promised to share with the club: A video of how to install corner guards and L-brackets on campaign pieces.

After reading Charles H. Hayward’s writings during his tenure as editor of The Woodworker, I think he was of two minds about furniture. While the magazine was filled with plans for up-to-date pieces that would look at home on the set of “Mad Men,” Hayward also took pains to educate readers about old work.

One of the ways he did this was by drawing pieces from the collection in the Victoria & Albert Museum, and all of those drawings will be featured in our upcoming book on The Woodworker magazine.

He also published one-page drawings that showed how a particular form of furniture – tables, beds, chairs – changed during the centuries.

Today we offer a free download of seven of these pages compiled in one pdf. You can download it using the link below.

Recognizing_the_Styles

One of the things you can see from the pdf is why we are so keen on publishing this book. The acid-based paper that these are printed on is deteriorating rapidly.

— Christopher Schwarz