Repeat After Me

There is no shame in building nailed furniture.

It's been with us a long time. In fact, nailed furniture goes all the way back to the Egyptians.

But, according to Adam Cherubini in his presentation at WIA on nailed furniture, it was in 1632 when the Worshipful Company of Joyners of London managed to have standards for joinery passed into law.  These standards gave them exclusive rights to certain types of joinery, to the exclusion of carpenters.

Only joyners were allowed to use complex methods such as dovetails, mortise and tenon, and frame and panel construction.

This left carpenters with few joinery options for the furniture they built—mechanical fasteners, tongue and groove, lap joints, dados, grooves, and rabbets.

Adam explained that it's common to find centuries-old 6-board pieces such as chests, stools, and trays that are joined with nails. You can also find examples of writing slopes, hanging cupboards, bedsteads, tables, and large hutches that are held together with nails.

Carpenters had to think outside the box. They nailed thin strips onto a flat panel to simulate frame and panel construction.  They dressed up their pieces with simple moulding, corner and quirk beads, and roundovers.

"This is serious woodwork," Adam tells us. And it is. You need solid skills such as sawing, planing, drilling, and hammering nails without kinking them. There is also the challenge to make the piece look appealing without using all the bells and whistles found on high end pieces.

Do all our pieces have to be equally difficult to build? Who are we trying to impress? When was the last time a non-woodworker (who isn't a loved one who's been trained to notice) remarked on your fine English dovetails? More often than not, they comment on the shape of the piece, the appearance of the wood, and the finish.

Sure, we love the challenges and pride that come from cutting tricky joinery. And many pieces require complex joinery to be period-correct, to match their fancy design, or to be bomb-proof.

But building with nails is a blast.

When I got home from the conference, I remembered a couple pieces I had made that were completely assembled with nails. They were fast and fun to build and they have an honest charm. I built a sweater cupboard in a few hours and it's held up for over 15 years. The dogs' toy box is beaten up but the joinery is solid.

Adam showed us how to properly install nails without splitting the wood. It's a genuine skill, and one that we should pass along to the next generation.  Moreover, rose head, clincher and cut nails are just plain cool-looking. And shell bits, nose bits and brad awls are extremely fun to use.

Adam suspects that there will be a trend in nailed furniture because the reproduction market isn't very good right now.

He believes you can make a living at building nailed furniture. And even if you're a hobbyist like me, you might find that the nailed pieces that you built in an afternoon get more attention than those finely dovetailed keepsake boxes you spent days making.

Maybe—sometimes—we work harder than necessary and focus on the joinery rather than joy of the craft.

WIA 2011: Let the Fun Begin!

We arrived on Thursday, the 29th—two women, three days, 10 pieces of luggage, a cooler, and one yoga mat—ready for our woodworking adventure.

After registering, we headed for the Keystone Bar & Grill to meet up with what turned out to be a gathering of about 40 conference attendees.

A jocular time was had by all and the evening set the mood for what was the best WIA I've ever attended.

One reason the event was so enjoyable was due to the fact that for every year you attend, you add more friends to your circle of woodworking buddies.  Many of these guys who've been friends for years on facebook and twitter were meeting for the first time face-to-face.

And they were like a boisterous batch of puppies (I mean that as a term of endearment)—playing hard together until they dropped from exhaustion.

I wasn't able to keep up with the big dogs over the weekend and was in bed most nights by 9:30. But a bunch of these woodworkers went out each night until about 2:00 a.m., crashed hard in the hotel, and were seated in the front row of a seminar by 9:00 the next morning.

I don't know how they did it.

Moreover—without exception—every single one of these guys had brought only one piece of luggage with him to the conference.

And I don't know how they did that either.

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Be sure to check out the other bloggers' websites throughout the week for their take on the conference:
Vic Hubbard's Photo Album
Uppercut Woodworks
Tom's Workbench
Matt's Basement Workshop
The Bois Shop
Peter Follansbee
Logan Cabinet Shoppe
Giant Cypress
Penultimate Woodshop
Taylor Garage
Renaissance Woodworker
The Garage Shop
Digital Woodworker
I'm sure I've missed a few, so let me know if I have and I'll add it to the list.

Blogger Partay at WIA

Nik Brown has organized an opening night extravaganza at a local bar near the WIA convention center.

It's being billed as a blogger gathering, but all are welcome.  My partner and I will be there to keep everyone in line as we will no doubt be the only teetotalers.  Although, she's been known to dance on tables and I do a mean Joan Jett on the karaoke machine. (Kidding. We're Presbyterian.)

Here are the specifics.

Date and Time: Thursday, September 29, 7:00 p.m. until they give us the old heave-ho
Location: Keystone Bar & Grill, 313 Greenup Street, Covington, Kentucky

Those who've attended WIA in the past will tell you that one of the very best aspects of the event is talking with other woodworkers. Doggone it, we're a friendly bunch. So if you're in town that night, stop by, hang out, make some new friends, and chat with old ones.  (I just turned 47, so I'm one of the latter).

See you in a couple weeks!

Making Do

Scrub plane.

I am not a masochist.

I don't really like pain or discomfort.

But when you need to mill rough cut boards—none of which are flat enough to run through a power planer and are too wide for a power jointer—it's time to break out the handplanes and play some workout music.

Here is one method for flattening boards. Other woodworkers use different approaches.

Scalloped surface left by scrub plane.

First, remove high spots.  You can do this by traversing your board (planing across the grain) with a jack/fore or scrub plane—or any plane that can hog off thick chunks of wood—and checking your progress across the grain with winding sticks and with the grain with a long straightedge.

After that, you can switch to a jointer/try plane—or any plane with a slight camber on the iron and somewhat large mouth opening. This flattens the scalloped channels left by the previous plane.

Finally, a plane with a fine-set mouth and straight iron achieves a finished surface.

Transitional plane with slight camber.

Problem is, I do not have a jointer plane that can be used for step two. The wooden one that I made is set up for fine shavings along the edge of a board. I don't have time to make a new one, nor do I wish to part with more money having spent a chunk of change on lumber for my workbench.

This dilemma sent me to the basement (my former shop) in search of...anything. What I found was an old transitional plane (the love-child of a wooden plane and a metal plane) that was given to me years ago, and is about as attractive as Billy Ray Cyrus' Kentucky waterfall.

Chuck, my beefy short plane. 

We shall call him Ned. 

Ned needed a thorough scrubbing behind the ears to get him in working condition.  And his iron needed to be re-ground with a slight camber and steeper bevel.

Heavy and awkward and difficult to set up as he his, he performed pretty darn well. Well enough to be followed by the much easier to use and lighter weight Chuck.

I did not finish-plane the boards. I got one side flat enough to feed through my power planer.*

Check the flatness along the length
of the board with a straightedge.
Check across the grain with
winding sticks.

*See first sentence.

When All Else Fails

Reach for a cabinet scraper.

Because I rarely work with ornery wood, this tool does not see much action in my shop. But when you're working with a species that won't play nice, the cabinet scraper is your best friend.

A neighbor asked if I would make some striped discs of wood for a jewelry project she's working on. So I glued up a bunch of exotic wood strips and planned to plane the laminated board to thickness once the glue dried.

Sometimes even a well-tuned and sharp handplane can't handle the likes of Chakte Viga.

You can use a card scraper for small projects like this, but a cabinet scraper keeps your work flat and prevents your thumbs from being set ablaze.

And it can save you from some frustrating scrapes.

WIA: A Month Away

We're in the home stretch for the Woodworking In America: The Ultimate Joinery Weekend conference.


If you've been riding the fence about attending, Lie-Nielsen is offering an incentive if you register before September 9:

Using the promo code below, you will save $25 when you register online for a Full Conference Package.  In addition, you will receive a $25 Lie-Nielsen gift certificate, courtesy of Popular Woodworking.  

Details are as follows:

• You must register before September 9, 2011.

• To register for WIA, visit:  www.woodworkinginamerica.com

• Enter the promotional code:  LieNielsen25 (this offer cannot be combined with other offers)

• You will save $25 off the the Full Conference price of $395, so you pay only $370.

• Lie-Nielsen will email you a $25 gift certificate on September 12, 2011.  

• Lie-Nielsen gift certificates may be used for a purchase on the Lie-Nielsen website (www.lie-nielsen.com), by phone (1-800-327-2520), by email (toolworks@lie-nielsen.com), in their Maine showroom, or by bringing a printed copy to the Lie-Nielsen booth at Woodworking In America.

If that's not incentive enough, then you need to check out all the updates by Shannon Rogers, who has been hard at work interviewing Chris Schwarz, Adam Cherubini, Megan Fitzpatrick, Charles Brock, Mike Siemsen, and Thomas Lie-Nielsen about the event.

Shannon will have his own booth at the conference promoting his Hand Tool School. He'll also debut his new joinery bench.

If that's not enough to entice you, then maybe The Blogger Challenge will. Mike Siemsen thought it would be fun to create teams of bloggers who will go tool-to-tool at the Hand Tool Olympics booth, located in the marketplace.  

My impressive teammates are Rob Bois and Matt Gradwohl, and our team name is Foggy Bloggers. We'll compete against other teams in six events. All I know is, I hope I don't have to compete in the boring competition.

Wagon Vise Design

Based on sage advice from friends, I bought soft maple for the base of my bench rather than poplar. I wasn't able to get 16/4, so I'll need to glue up some boards, but this is a much better choice in the long run.

In the meantime, I came up with what I think is a good design for a wagon vise. It's one that I can add to the thick-slab benchtop anytime and requires no hardware, just some careful chiseling.

I believe the single wooden screw with handle will provide enough pressure.  I've never had to tighten the vise too hard to keep a board immobile. In fact, clamping too hard can make a board bow.

But I'd like to hear what you think.  I've been known to be persuaded by wise counsel.

Bench Sketch

I believe I have the dimensions sorted out for my new workbench. Thanks to Chris Schwarz' two workbench books and the dimensions he provides for his Roubo, working out the measurements was much easier than starting from scratch.

I've decided on poplar for the base of the bench. The top will be cherry. I realize that poplar might not hold up as well as the cherry, but if I need to tighten the through tenon and dovetail in the top over time, that's okay. Poplar is readily available in 16/4 and is priced to please.

This is going to be my main bench and my travel bench which means that on rare occasions it will need to be broken down.

Rather than make something lightweight for travel, I decided to make the main one more portable.  The top will be made up of two 12/4 slabs that are not glued together. Because of this, I added two short stretchers beneath the top--one at both ends.  The four short stretchers will be mortise and tenoned and glued into the legs. 

I'm not a fan of metal fasteners, so the long stretchers will be connected to the legs with wedged through tenons.

I figure I'll be able to remove the two top pieces and remove the long stretchers, but leave the two end assemblies in tact. I *think* I'll be able to carry them.

The front vise will be a leg vise, and I think I've settled on a shop made wagon vise for the end.

The overall dimensions are 19.75" deep x 58" long x 33.75" tall. 

Those may seem like weird dimensions for someone who's only 5' 5", but they are very similar to the cheapie bench I've been using for almost two decades, so I've become accustomed to them.  All my jigs and two shop stools work with this size, and I've never found that I needed a longer or shorter bench. I don't plan on building large pieces, but if I do, I can slide my cheapie bench up end-for-end with the new one.

I plan to add a sliding deadman and put a shallow, removable tool box between the bottom stretchers.

Now it's time to go lumber shopping again. We're off to Groffs Lumber tomorrow and hope that Hurricane Irene doesn't rain on my workbench parade.