If you want to make historical furniture reproductions or pieces that are inspired by vintage work, you must devote yourself to studying old work – in person, up close and without prejudice.

But if you want to make things that are new or modern, you instead must devote yourself to studying old work – in person, up close and without prejudice. Otherwise, how will you know what it is you are rebelling against or rejecting?

In other words, no matter what sort of furniture maker you are, understanding the furniture record will make you a better one. Otherwise you might end up like some members of the Bauhaus, for example, who rejected historical work and set out to reinvent architecture, furniture and other crafts from first principles. As a result, they made a lot of unnecessary and time-consuming mistakes to create a new world. (See armchair F 51 designed for the director’s room of the Bauhaus.)

As I see it, every generation of makers has goals that fall upon these three lines:

1. Exalt old work to revive principles that have been forgotten by our degenerate society.

2. Create new work that rejects the principles of our degenerate society.

3. Make birdhouses.

All three are completely valid ways of approaching the craft. Only No. 3 allows you to skip the furniture record and create something useful with minimal effort.

As I write this, I am surrounded by hundreds of books filled with thousands of pieces of furniture that I’ll never build. Many of those pieces are somewhat ugly or, at the least, too ornate for my taste. Yet I am thrilled to study every line and curve of every William & Mary, Georgian or Seymour piece that I can lay my hands on.

Some of these pieces are brilliant because of their technicality. Their talented makers found clever ways of making extremely complex pieces in a shockingly simple way. (If you have studied furniture bandings, then you know what I mean.)

Other pieces are notable because of the sheer patience and focus of the maker (see French marquetry).

Still other pieces are forms that are perfectly proportioned in silhouette.

In my personal work, I seek to combine all three of those properties (though I rarely succeed). And the only way I can try to reach that goal is to study old work. So every day I open an old book, go to a museum in a strange city (thank you, crazy teaching schedule) or plumb the Internet.

Example: In a manor house in Cornwall there’s a beautiful Chinese chair. Why is it there, surrounded by 300-year-old English stuff? The house’s docents don’t know. So I buy a book on the history of the manor house and its contents. I explore Chinese chair construction on the Internet. I turn up some Hans Wegner chairs in my search and find a bright string from traditional Chinese furniture through Danish Modern.

Suddenly, the curve of the chair’s crest rail makes sense, across time and cultures. What I do with that information is up to me as a designer – but if I decide to incorporate a wishbone shape into a future design, I have a path to explore all the possibilities. And I can embrace or reject the history lesson.

(W)e want an architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast cars. — Walter Gropius (1883-1969), founder of Bauhaus

Earlier this year, a good customer named Jim asked me a sharp question: Why are all the people working for you in the workshop women?

If you aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of our company, Jim is mostly correct. Megan Fitzpatrick is the editor at Lost Art Press. Kale Vogt (who goes by they/she) and Katherine Schwarz are both associate editors. And all four of us work at the shop on Willard Street in Covington.

I didn’t have a good answer for Jim that day. That’s no surprise because I don’t think quickly on my feet. But I wanted to give him an honest answer, even if it’s probably the wrong answer or will piss some people off. So here it is.

Before I begin, one important background fact to understand is my father was a conservative and a Republican. And a lot of the advice he gave throughout his life (which I appreciated) was through that lens – plus his service in Vietnam and his training as a family physician at Washington University.

When I graduated college in 1990, I had to learn to pay rent, bills and car insurance – like everybody else. Plus I had to choose a doctor as my primary care physician. At age 22, I had no idea how to choose a doctor, so I asked my dad, a medical doctor, for advice.

Here’s a paraphrase of what he said: If you have to choose a doctor cold, choose a woman. The women in med school had to work far harder than the men, both to get into med school and to graduate. Chances are, any female doctor will be better than a male colleague.

That wasn’t the advice I was expecting from my Reagan Democrat father, but I took it. And it turned out to be a key part of my upbringing.

You see, I grew up with three sisters, all headstrong in their own ways. And we were raised by a woman who was both a mother and a serial entrepreneur.1 My dad had a busy call schedule, and he spent his days off at our farm following his true calling, which was building houses.

So for the most part, my mom raised me and my three sisters. And for whatever reason, I have always been more comfortable around women.

Years later, when it was my job to hire people, I always fell back on my father’s advice.

At the Kentucky Gazette, my first failed business, I hired a reporting staff that was half female and half male. The two men I hired were recommended to me by other reporters, and both were good hires. The two women I hired had been students of mine when I was an adjunct journalism professor at the University of Kentucky, and I had seen them destroy their male counterparts in class for months and months.

Both women were something else. One of them, Nikki, had a penchant for digging up public documents in dumpsters.

Then, at Popular Woodworking Magazine, the hire after me was Kara Gebhart Uhl. (She still works for me now as managing editor for Lost Art Press and handles our contracts and many other things). In addition to being the kindest person on the planet, Kara is the most organized and detail-oriented publishing professional I have ever worked with.

When Kara took a promotion to work with Writer’s Digest, I hired Megan, one of the fiercest human beings on the planet. She says I’m exaggerating when I tell the following story, but I swear I’m not. On her first day of work at Popular Woodworking, the IT department sent down a guy to set up Megan’s computers (it was complicated). He couldn’t get things to work right, and Megan’s professional-grade interrogation made the IT guy cry a bit.

And he was a former U.S. Marine.

Like me, Megan also came to the job at the magazine without any woodworking bona fides. Unlike other candidates for the job, she didn’t have professional training in the craft. But I had watched her come into our workshop years earlier and ask for training to build furniture for her house, including a giant trestle table. She had a natural drive to build things (big things) that other candidates couldn’t compete with.

Plus, I like underdogs.

This pattern has repeated itself here at Lost Art Press. When I went looking for my first apprentice, I queried men and women. The first person I offered the job to was a man.

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“He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.”

— “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” by Susanna Clarke

Warning: This is one of those blog entries that will make some of you wonder why you bother visiting here. You might just want to skip this entry and go play with your safety gear, micrometers and “Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition.”

About a decade ago, as I waited for the epoxy to harden on the half-scale model of a chair shown above, I poured myself a stiff drink and raised a toast to Jonathan Strange.

Strange is a magician in my favorite contemporary novel: “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” by Susanna Clarke. I’ve been quite obsessed with this book since it came out in 2004. It is, and I do not say this lightly, the most finely crafted piece of fiction I’ve read as an adult. Every footnote is pure genius. And it reeks of a work that has been finely combed over like the garden at Versailles.

(Oh, and If I ever get a tattoo, it will be the silhouette of the raven in the book. Also: I am just as likely to get a tattoo as I am to start vaping my own ear wax.)

So Strange, the radical magician in the book, figures out that to do really interesting magic, one needs to be somewhat mad. The insane kind of mad; not the Lumberjocks sort of mad. As Strange is quite sane at first, he gins up all sorts of ways to induce madness. In the end, it involves cats (naturally) and drinking something awful.

And that describes my ideal writing and design process.

“I’m not going to a party; I’m a writer.” That’s what I tell the nice people at the liquor store when I arrive at the register with two boxes of wine and four six packs of potent beer. The wine is for my wife (also a writer); the beer is for me.

Lucy and I very rarely get drunk. The last time I got drunk was by accident (Note to self: Never drink casually with the Irish.) But Lucy and I do have a drink with dinner and then we have a drink after dinner. Then we write and talk and write.

I know that some odd souls are fantastic writers and designers when they are dead sober. I am not. I find that a drink helps. As does fatigue, stress, incredibly loud music and stupid external constraints.

Why? Who cares why. Feel free to make up a theory. I’d rather just use these tools that have worked (since 1986) to write and design stuff at 5 p.m. that seems out of my league at 11 a.m. And with these tools I don’t have to bifurcate my private parts (thank you, Mayan civilization) or vape my boogers.

So I say to the Stone Saison in my glass tonight: Bring on the madness.

Oh, and where are my needle-nose pliers?

Chris is busy building a chair (shocking, I know), so you’re stuck with me for this Swag Week Giveaway – but that’s appropriate, because this time, we’re giving away a set of Frederick Parker Collection chair playing cards, courtesy of Derek Jones, and a blue-bound copy of Peter Nicholson’s “Mechanic’s Companion,” a 19th-century book on woodworking and allied traded that I scanned and painstakingly cleaned up in Photoshop just after my exit from Popular Woodworking. I then had 2,000 copies printed and mailed lots of them from my dining room…then made a book box tower of the remaining copies in my living room and front hallway. (My cat JJ loved climbing on that edifice.)

When I joined LAP full time, Chris and John bought the remainder of my copies and after they sold out, reprinted the book with a tan cover.

And the playing cards? Derek brought those with him last time he was visiting Covington to teach a Cricket Table class. The face cards feature chairs from the Frederick Parker Collection, 200 chairs from the 17th-century to the present, now managed by the U.K.’s Furniture Makers Company.

What is Swag Week?

As a thank you to our readers, the first week of every month, we’re going to give away something nice, unique or rare from our vast collection of books, tools and ephemera.

We’re going to select – at random – a paid subscriber from our three substacks. We’ll announce the recipient here. And then we’ll send the item out anywhere to them on planet earth.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you’re eligible. There’s nothing you need to do. If you subscribe to more than one substack, you will be even more eligible because your name will be in the pool of subscribers two or three times instead of once.

So if you’re a paid subscriber, do absolutely naught!

The winner will be announced on August 10.

– Fitz

After a long hiatus, Klaus Skrudland, Rudy Everts and I started doing our Chair Chats again. These descents into silliness began during the pandemic and became difficult to do once we had to actually perform our day jobs.

Now Rudy has quit his day job to be a full-time woodworker and has the time to edit Chair Chats.

The first new one is here. It’s behind a paywall, a bit like porn. And that’s for a good reason.

These Chair Chats are not for the easily offended. There is cursing. Off-color (and odd-smelling) humor. We regularly offend ourselves.

We’ve already done the second Chair Chat, so a subscription (or trial subscription) to Rudy’s substack is something to consider.

Planemaker Larry Williams once told me the thing he disliked most about teaching woodworking classes.

“Every damn class has to start with a sharpening lesson,” he said.

That was about 25 years ago. The craft doesn’t have that problem anymore. But now we have a different one.

“How many of you have used a band saw?” I ask.

Almost no one raises a hand.

This substack entry isn’t for people who want to make everything by hand. Or for people who want to do woodworking for fun, relaxation or “hand stuff” with their cousins. Instead, this column is for people who think: “One day, I want to build furniture in exchange for money.”

Here’s the gist: I recommend you first spend about 500 hours on each of the four basic machines: the band saw, table saw, jointer and planer. These machines (plus the HVLP gun) allow you to compete in the marketplace and (also important) will allow your body to work in the craft for many, many more years.

I’m not trying to take hand tools away from you. Just the opposite. Embrace planes, spokeshaves, scrapers, hatchets, drawknives, froes – anything with a blade. Those tools are what will separate you from the router table + ROS = cutting board crowd.

But machine work is something you need to get good at because it will save you decades of grunt work, repetitive stress injuries and tendonitis.

Most students who attend my classes are adept with hand tools. And “big yay” for all of us because of that fact. Decades of work by many of us in the craft have made handwork something that is mainstream. We have hand tool books, magazines and instruction. It’s all easy to find and pretty damn good, too.

So these days when I talk to people who want to go pro they ask me for lessons in stock preparation on the machinery. When I gladly give it to them, they go home and promptly forget a lot of what they learned. Just like with hand work, you have to practice machine work. A good table saw operator can dance with the machine safely and swiftly. They can calculate when it’s best to move the fence to make efficient work of the pile of parts before them. They know exactly how fast to push the work so it is clean and unburned.

This isn’t difficult stuff to learn. But it takes time on the machines.

Plus, and I hate to say this, you need to learn machine maintenance and safety. It’s a drag. I have an unusually dominant Maintenance Department Gene, so I actually adore keeping our machines in good shape and clean. But most people don’t.

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During the last 35 years, I’ve been asked a lot of questions about workbenches. Most of these questions I’ve answered 100 times already. That’s OK. When people first get focused on building a workbench, they usually haven’t read years of blog entries or the five or six books that are available on the topic.

And so they send an email asking what’s the best wood to use. Oh, and could I also compare and contrast all the different forms of benches? You know, like, just real quick?

We get these questions almost every week.

Below is a list of the questions I am asked constantly – plus my answers. A lot of this information is covered elsewhere in my blatherings. But this format – question and answer – seems to help some people work through their own doubts.

Questions about Workbench Materials
1. What wood should I use?
There are only a few woods I wouldn’t use for a workbench: white pine (too lightweight), expensive exotics (too expensive), rotted wood (too rotted). I recommend you use the heaviest, cheapest and most readily available species in your area. In the South and Midwest, that’s yellow pine (the cheapest), followed by poplar and soft maple. Don’t worry about the stiffness and other engineering factors. If you overbuild your workbench, it will be plenty stiff and strong.

2. Should the benchtop be a slab? A lamination? Plywood? LVL? Which material works best and survives the long term?
All of these have trade-offs, and all of them work well – both in the short and long term. The choice is less about engineering (all are heavy and stiff enough) and more about aesthetics, economics and the tools you have available. You can make a plywood bench using a table saw and screw gun. A slab bench requires far more (including a forklift). But which looks better? That’s your call.

3. What’s the best glue for building a workbench?
All the common glues are strong enough – hot hide, liquid hide, PVA, epoxy. Choose one that suits your wallet and the way you work. PVA is cheap and easy to get, and it sets up fast (this can be good or bad). Hot hide glue sets up very fast (again, good or bad). Liquid hide glue might be difficult to purchase in your area and sets up slowly. Epoxy is very expensive, but it fills gaps and can have a slow or fast curing time depending on its formulation. For most woodworkers, PVA (plain old yellow glue) is an excellent choice.

4. Can I use green wood? How green?
Yes. But it’s risky. Drier is better. You have no idea how much the components will move as they dry. Benchtops, even thick ones, can twist more than 1″ at the corners. If you do receive a fresh slab and need a bench today, build the bench quickly and use stretchers between the legs. The undercarriage and the joinery can help hold the top in place as it dries, reducing its tendency to warp. Also, it’s a good idea to orient the top so the heart side of the board faces up.

5. Is it OK to include the pith in my bench components?
I don’t recommend it. No matter what your local sawyer might say, a board with the pith included (sometimes called a “boxed heart”) will split. The split might be minor, or catastrophic. It depends on the tree. Why risk it?

6. Is air-dried wood better for a bench? Or is kiln-dried OK?
Either is fine. And I can’t say that either is better for a bench. Just use the heaviest, cheapest wood that is readily available. For me, the more important question is if the wood is at equilibrium with its environment. If not, let it sit a while. Then build the bench.

7. If I can’t find Southern yellow pine in my area, can I use….?
Yes.

8. What’s the best finish for a benchtop?
Probably no finish is the best. You don’t want your benchtop to be slick. You want the work to be easily restrained. If you want to make it look nice, some boiled linseed oil will do that (and give you a little protection from water spills). Or an oil/varnish blend. That will give you even more protection, but it might slicken up the benchtop a bit. Avoid waxes and thick film finishes, unless your workbench is a fashion accessory.

Questions about the Form or Structure of a Workbench
9. What style of bench should I build if I use only hand tools?
I think the easiest bench to build with hand tools is an English joiner’s bench, sometimes called a Nicholson. If you buy dimensional lumber, there is almost no wood to plane to thickness. It’s just cutting boards to length and fastening them together with simple joints, screws or nails. Mike Siemsen’s video “The Naked Woodworker” is a good place to explore this.

10. Won’t wood movement in the benchtop wreck a Roubo or Nicholson workbench?
I have never seen it happen. The top shrinks and expands, and the base contorts a little. It doesn’t affect the working qualities of the bench, and the benches don’t pull themselves to pieces.

11. Is it OK to use mixed species of woods when building a workbench?
Sure. There is no issue with strength, longevity or (realistically) differential wood movement. A hardwood top and a white pine base might be an economical way to build a bench. The only real concern is aesthetics. Sometimes a benchtop with strips of walnut and purpleheart through the middle make me throw up in my mouth.

12. What’s the best workbench for…
…a beginner?
Probably an English joiner’s bench (aka, a paneled bench). It has the fewest joints and is the fastest form to build in my experience. However, any beginner can build a French bench or a fancy German bench. It just takes a little more time. Don’t let your lack of skills snuff out your dreams.

13. …an apartment dweller?
I would build a small yellow pine bench like the one in this book with nice vises. It would have mass because of the pine and all the features of a full-size bench. Then, when you get a bigger place, you can build a bigger bench and use the same nice hardware. The small bench could go to a friend or become a kitchen island in a Manhattan loft. Or build a low Roman workbench.

14. …a garage or barn without HVAC?
I would use softwoods, such as yellow pine, fir or hemlock. These woods move less in service than hardwoods. So, if there are wild swings in humidity, you’ll see less wood movement.

15. …a person with very little money?
A bench made with yellow pine or any heavy construction timber. Pound for pound, construction woods are the cheapest and easiest to get.

16. What do you think of a torsion-box benchtop? Or the New-Fangled Workbench? Shaker workbench? How about this other workbench that you’ve never seen or heard of?
At times, I feel like I’m being baited with this kind of question. You can answer the question for yourself if you think about it for a minute. Your bench needs mass. How easy is it to work on the faces, edges and ends of boards with the bench? Can you modify the bench as your woodworking changes by adding different vises or holdfasts? Does the joinery seem impossibly robust or one step above a slumlord’s birdhouse?

17. Should the benchtop be assembled with loose tenons?
This is an ancient way to assemble slabs (made popular by Greek and Roman boat builders). It certainly adds long-term strength. Drawboring these loose tenons can help pull boards together without clamps. If you lack clamps or faith in your glue or edge-jointing skills, this is a good technique to fix those shortcomings.

18. Can I glue 8/4 material face-to-face to make a thick benchtop?
Yes. You also can laminate a large quantity of toothpicks to make a benchtop. The trade-off is you need the equipment to do a seamless job. Or you need to be OK with a few gaps. There is a lot of surface area that needs to be glued when you laminate boards face-to-face.

19. Why shouldn’t I buy a Lie-Nielsen, Plate 11 or Benchcrafted workbench or a high-end Sjöbergs or Ulmia?
I like building my own workbenches in the same way I like building all the furniture in my house and making pizza from scratch. That doesn’t make my furniture or pizza better than store-bought. It’s just what I like to do. In fact, I cannot do things any other way because my head is that stupid. If you would rather buy a workbench and spend more time building jungle gyms for owls, do it. As always, caveat emptor with tools and woodworking equipment. I’ve used Benchcrafted, Plate 11 and Lie-Nielsen benches and find them to be great. Sjöbergs are not my favorite. And I haven’t tried a recent-vintage Ulmia.

20. Could you evaluate all the workbenches you’ve encountered in your career and explain to me the best one for my work?
Sure thing. Wait right here.

21. What’s your favorite workbench ever?
Probably the one in this book.

22. Which workbenches do you regret building?
None, really. Even the ones that were less successful taught me important lessons. The bench I miss the least is the door on sawhorses.

23. Should I tooth my benchtop like veneer?
Sure. I’ve tried it. The rough resulting surface seems to help keep your work in place, but that might only be my perception and not an engineering truth. The best reason to do it is that every time someone tooths a benchtop, the internet poops its inter-pants.

24. Is there any case where you would advocate for a tool tray?
Yes, when the tool tray is a box with a lid and three sliding tills. And positioned off to the side of your bench where all your tools are at hand.

25. What’s the best way to make my workbench mobile?
Push it. Commercial “mobility kits” don’t impress me. I’ve seen engineered solutions that are more complex than a Jarvik-7 artificial heart. Simple is best. Most benches can be slid across a floor easily. If you want to protect the floor, put a moving blanket under the feet. Honestly, I own workbenches that are almost 400 pounds, and I can move them myself with my scrawny bird-like arms.

26. What’s the best height for a workbench?
I think it’s somewhere between the historical heights of 28″ and 36″. Plus, remember that you can endure working in a range of about 3″ around your ideal. So, if you can’t decide, make the bench a little taller than the internet tells you. Then saw the legs down bit by bit until you find that your work becomes easier. Second piece of advice: Sit down at your bench to do detail work with carving tools, chisels or a router.

27. What’s the best way to make my workbench height-adjustable?
I know this sounds snarky, but it’s not. Sit down at a shop stool if you need to be closer to your work. Stand on the same stool (or a raised platform) if you need to get way above it for some reason. Adjust your height – not the workbench’s.

28. What do you think of these commercial benches that adjust in height?
I am impressed by the engineering, but I don’t see a need for them in my workshop.

30. Should my workbench be in the center of the room or against the wall?
Either works, as long as you can move the bench for oddball operations. I shift my bench all the time here and there to do different things. I prefer to have my bench in the middle of the room so I can go around to its backside to take photos. But most people don’t need to do that. One caveat: If your bench is lightweight, having it against the wall (or secured to the wall) can make it more stable.

31. If I put my bench near a window, which direction should that window face?
The classic shop uses only the beautiful northern light. The real shop will take any window facing any direction.

32. Can I drawbore a bench together without glue to make it knockdown?
You can do this once. After you disassemble a drawbored joint, it never goes back together as tightly as it did the first time.

33. How lightweight is too light?
If the bench moves across the floor during normal planing operations, you have a problem. Bolt the bench to the floor (or wall), add weights or build a heavier bench. After experimenting with commercial benches that were on the featherweight side, I’ve found the typical 60 lb. bench is too light. At about 150 lbs., things begin to work. Above 250 lbs., I don’t notice the workbench.

Questions About Workholding
34. Won’t the toothed planing stop cut me?
It’s unlikely. I’ve never cut myself after 15 years of daily use. Can it happen? Sure. Have I heard of people getting cut? Only once. Is it mentioned in early texts, which detail many of the possible gruesome injuries in the shop? Not that I recall.

35. I don’t want to cut a mortise for the planing stop in my beautiful benchtop. Are there other options?
Sure. You can fasten a moving block to the end of your benchtop. But I think that’s lame compared to just chopping a hole in your bench and doing the job right. I totally understand that some people have a mental block about some things: grinding an iron, filing the mouth of a handplane open, doing the Ruler Trick for the first time. The barrier is all in your head. Close your eyes and jump off the tire swing. You’ll be glad you did.

36. Do I have to have a face vise? Can’t I use just a crochet? Or is that a dumb idea?
Screw-driven vises didn’t show up until the 14th century. So yes, you can do excellent work without a screw-driven vise. Yet, the screw-driven vise is enormously convenient. (There’s a reason that Record never made a iron crochet – painted blue – for workbenches.) And vises are readily available and inexpensive. (But for the record, I enjoy using a crochet.)

37. What is the best arrangement/placement of holdfast holes?
Three rows. The back row is 3″ from the rear edge of the benchtop. The middle row is 10″ from the rear edge. The third row is 17″ from the rear edge. The holes are 16″ away from each other. And the holes are staggered on each row by 8″. You might have to adjust these dimensions if you have a very narrow benchtop, but this is the general idea.

38. … of dog holes?
Dog holes should be close to the front edge of your benchtop – usually 2″-3″ or so. This allows you to use handplanes that have fences that drop below the benchtop (such as a plow plane). I like to keep my dog holes close together – about 3″ on center.

39. What’s better: a wooden vise screw or a steel one?
Neither. Both can close quickly and ferociously on your work. Both can last several lifetimes if cared for. Both can be trashed by abuse.

40. What’s the best material for lining the jaws of a vise?
I like suede and a cork-and-rubber gasket material (Benchcrafted sells this as Crubber). Avoid cork alone as it’s too fragile. Some people like neoprene, but I haven’t tried it.

41. What glue should I use to affix the liner for the jaw?
I prefer epoxy. Full stop.

42. Should I install a patternmaker’s vise? In the tail vise position? The face vise position?
If you are a patternmaker, yes. And it can go in either position on the bench, according to the historical record. If you are a regular-head furniture maker, this vise has downsides. It’s expensive and a trick to install. Most furniture makers don’t need one.

43. Why won’t my holdfasts cinch down?
Your benchtop might be too thin, so the holdfast cannot wedge itself in place. Or the hole is too big for the shaft, so the holdfast can’t wedge in place. Or the hole is not plumb. Or the shaft is too smooth. The least likely reason is the holdfast is poorly made and doesn’t have enough spring.

44. How flat does my workbench have to be?
The bench has to be flat enough so your work doesn’t spring in low spots to the point where you cannot flatten boards with your handplanes. If you work with handplanes, you will know when the benchtop is too wonky because your planes won’t do their job. If you don’t work with handplanes, flatness is rarely critical.

45. How often should I flatten my workbench?
I flatten a benchtop when I make it. Then I flatten it again when it has become disgusting from glue and abuse. Or when it stops working (as per the previous question). Some people flatten their benchtops yearly. Some do it after every big project. I ain’t got time for that. And I haven’t found it necessary.

46. What’s a vise garter? Do I need one?
Garters are a part of a screw-driven vise that links the screw mechanism to the vise’s jaw. With a garter in place, the jaw moves in and out when you move the screw in and out. Without a garter, the jaw moves forward with the screw, but must be pulled back manually when you retract the screw. Do you need one? They’re convenient but not necessary.

47. Will I regret not installing a tail vise?
The best path forward is to build a bench that allows you to add a tail vise immediately or in the future. That way you and your work can answer the question (instead of a dumb Kentucky woodworker).

48. Which is better: square dogs or round ones?
Neither. Square dogs don’t rotate; round ones do. Your work might need round dogs if it’s odd-shaped. Round dogs are easier to install. Both forms are traditional and go back centuries.

49. …steel dogs or wooden ones?
Steel dogs hold better but they will mess up your handplane as soon as you hit one. Wooden dogs don’t hold as well, but they don’t hurt your handplanes. The choice is yours.

50. What sort of woodwork requires a tail vise?
If you plane up a lot of boards that are similarly sized, a tail vise can be nice. They can also be nice for disassembling a frame that is tightly dry-fit. They are convenient for traversing wide boards with a jack plane or working diagonally with a jointer plane. We have several benches with tail vises or wagon vises. I use a tail vise once every few months.

51. Do I need a board jack (either integral or freestanding)?
These are helpful when you have very long boards (longer than 8′) or a face vise that has a poor grip and cannot handle an 8′-long board by itself. They are also handy for edge-jointing long tabletops and mortising doors. If you do big work, they are a godsend. If you don’t, they are occasionally useful but are mostly a storage facility for holdfasts.

52. Finally, what wood should I use for my bench?
Oh, do sod off.

When I began to build Roorkee chairs1 for sale, I used my old midi lathe to turn the mahogany sticks between the legs. But after about 40 sticks, I looked for a faster way. After all, the sticks are just simple cylinders with tapered tenons on both ends. They are, for the most part, pointy dowels.

I found a dowel manufacturer nearby willing to make them if I bought in bulk. I drove to the factory to talk about the job, and we discussed how important it was that the grain was dead straight.

“No problem,” they said. “We know how to pick for dead straight.”

When the first batch of 100 sticks showed up, they looked great. At least as far as I could tell. Mahogany’s grain can be tricky to read. It’s interlocked, and the fibers can swirl a lot. On some of the sticks, I couldn’t tell which way the grain was running, exactly.

“They know straight,” I said. “It will be fine.”

No problemo, right?

Narrator voice: But it was all problemo.2

In fact, I almost died from embarrassment. This was the Year of Our Frog 2012, and I was asked to present at the Woodworking in America event in Pasadena, California. One of my sessions was on campaign furniture,3 so I brought a few Roorkees because they’re easy to disassemble and ship.

I set them up on stage, I performed the Dancing Monkey Show and the attendees clapped. Afterward, several asked if they could sit in the chairs.

No problemo!

The first guy to sit in the chair cracked a stick. The chair instantly disassembled around him, and he almost got a free vasectomy/colonoscopy/liver kabob from the jagged stick.

Lucky for everyone, no one was injured.

I went home and smacked the remaining sticks with a hammer (this was an early anger-based version of the “Hammer Test” I wrote about in “The Stick Chair Book”). That day, I learned to read the grain of mahogany like a pigeon reads your cheese fries.

But I hadn’t learned the entire lesson.

Last year, one of my stick chairs was destroyed in transit. The crate somehow plunged from a great distance (or at great speed). When it landed, the chair’s legs were rammed upward and broke the elm seat.

I could have blamed the trucking company, but after some thought, I blamed myself.

The packing job wasn’t the problem. It was the crate itself. One day a couple years ago, I neglected to buy a 4x4 from the lumberyard to make the two skids I attached to the bottom of the crate. The skids lifted the crate off the floor so a forklift could easily pick it up. On the day of neglect, the truck was on its way to pick up the crate, so I said to myself: “It will be fine.”

And I put the crate on the truck without its skids.

You know what? It was fine. That chair arrived at its destination, no problem. During the next couple years, I had zero problems with my skidless crates. Occasionally a forklift poked a hole in a crate, but that happens when you ship things.

After my chair was destroyed, however, my brain solved the problem.

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The journey to the summit of Mount Vesuvius has all the romance of visiting an unlicensed reptile farm. It begins in Ercolano, Italy, a touristy village in the shadow of the volcano and home to Herculaneum, one of the towns buried by Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 C.E.

As Narayan Nayar (the photographer for the journey) and I stepped off the train from Naples we were assaulted by young, attractive Italians. Their job: Bait tourists to nearby restaurants. We glanced around and saw only one escape route from the train station’s cul-de sac. So, we plowed through the crowd of eager human fishing lures.

We emerged from the other side a bit relieved. Then we realized we’d scurried past the bus company that was supposed to drive us up the volcano. We turned around and dove back into the swarm of too-perky people in order to catch our bus.

The twisty-turny bus ride ended 660 feet below the volcano’s summit, and we then climbed a steep trail to the volcano’s rim. The top resembles a gravel pit where one of Frank Herbert’s worms might emerge. There’s no deep hole for tossing human sacrifices – throw a virgin into Vesuvius and she’s only going to get skinned knees and a sunburn. I looked around the volcano and promptly excused the early settlers of the area for building their homes at the base of Vesuvius. The only evidence you’re on a volcano (besides the little gift shops) is the occasional tiny plume of gas and the odd rocks below your feet.

I picked up a few rocks. For rocks, they were young – likely the result of the 1944 eruption, which destroyed several villages. I looked out from our 4,200-foot perch at the buildings in every direction below, which are built on top of villages that were covered in ash from earlier eruptions. It’s a grim scene if you think about it too much – 600,000 people now live in the so-called “red zone” for a future eruption.

And yet, as I fondled the rocks in my hand I felt only gratitude for this deadly, fire-breathing mountain.

The Earliest Workbenches

The recorded history of woodworking begins with the Egyptians. But the recorded history of workbenches begins (for now) with Vesuvius. Its massive eruption in 79 C.E. buried Pompeii, Herculaneum and other sites, preserving frescoes, buildings, pottery, human remains and even wooden furniture.

At Pompeii, the ash blanketed a fresco showing a low, four-legged workbench being used for mortising by a man in Greek attire. At nearby Herculaneum, the eruption preserved a fresco showing “erotes” – what we might call “buck nekkid cupids” – sawing a board at an eight-legged low workbench. It features a holdfast and other holdfast holes. This fresco has since been destroyed, but we have engravings that were made soon after its discovery (more on both the frescoes’ stories is ahead).

These two images are the earliest representations of workbenches of which I’m aware. And they launched my interest in exploring knee-high workbenches and how to use them to build furniture, boats, storage containers and wagon wheels.

The conventional wisdom is that these low benches were used in former times for simple work and were replaced by superior modern benches, which are thigh-high or taller. But the more I studied low benches, the more I found that they never disappeared. They are still in use. Additionally, these low benches can be used for complex work, including steam bending compound shapes and lutherie.

The low bench is more than a thick plank of wood with legs. It’s also a collection of simple jigs and appliances that allow you to do remarkable work while sitting comfortably on an easy-to-build platform. For centuries, these simple jigs remained hidden in plain sight in paintings and drawings in museums. And their appliances have been proven to work, both at my low benches and by the modern craftsmen who still use them.

But why bother with this musty old crap? Modern woodworkers are blessed with a wide array of vises, dogs, clamps and other devices that can immobilize a piece of wood so you can work on its faces, edges and ends.

Well, at times I think we tend to make our workholding far more complex than it has to be. And that can affect your approach to the things you build. While your brain might see the logic of a screw-driven tail vise with a series of movable metal dogs, the ingenious early craftsman might find this same vise slow, fragile, fussy to maintain and cumbersome in use.

I empathize with the early woodworker. My brain is wired to look for a simpler solution to a problem instead of creating complexity.

Example: Earlier this year, I spent a couple hours in the dentist’s chair and was force-fed several episodes of a home-improvement show focused on carving out storage from oddball places in a home. Some of the examples I remember over the whirring of the dental Dremel include:

• Hinge your steps to create trap doors on the landings of your stairs to make small bins in the wasted space between your stringers.

• Find stud walls that are chases for utilities and turn them into built-in chests of drawers.

• In attic spaces, create sliding racks on the interior of a high-pitched roof. You slide giant plastic bins into the racks – it’s a bit like a top-hanging drawer.

Through the entire program I wanted to puke (that was mostly because I have a sensitive gag reflex). But it was also because these “storage solution” programs neglect to mention the easiest way to control clutter: Get rid of your excess crap.

No one should have so much stuff that they have to slave excessively to make a place to stow it. In the same way, no workbench needs vises on all four corners (I’ve built these for students and customers) to build fine furniture. You just don’t.

With this book, I hope to expose you to early and simple ways of holding your work. While many of these devices were used on low workbenches, most of them work on high workbenches as well. I use both sorts of benches – high and low – in my work for building all manner of things, from stud walls to Welsh stick chairs, dovetailed chests to nailed-together coffins.

The workholding on these benches is truly ingenious and effective. Things change when you sit down to work. And I think you’ll be surprised what you can do on your bum: planing, chiseling, shaving and even dovetailing.

The low bench form might not be for everyone. But it might be right for you and you might not know it. Woodworkers with limited mobility use low benches because they can sit and work. Apartment woodworkers use low benches because they take up little space and do double-duty as seating or a coffee table. Curious woodworkers use them because – dammit – they are an interesting form to build and use. Many chairmakers already use a low bench (but they call it a shavehorse), as do many other specialty trades, including coopers and basketmakers. Oh, and a low bench is the best sawbench ever made – promise.

One more plug for these early benches: Using their lessons, you can make almost any surface into a worksurface. A couple drywall screws can turn a picnic table into an English-style workbench. A missing brick in a wall (and a pine wedge) can become a face vise. A shavehorse can be cobbled together with a rock and a scrap of wood strapped to your gut.

Even if you never build a low workbench and reject its appliances as “not whiz-bang-y” enough for your engineering mindset, you might enjoy the journey of discovery required to write this book. It involved trips to exotic Italy, Germany and Indianapolis. (And understanding the low bench might connect your work to Chinese benches.) In the process, we rescued oak slabs from a pallet factory. We flushed $1,000 down a metaphorical toilet to learn about the construction of the first modern workbench in 1505. We ate a ton of Neapolitan pizza.

“The way to succeed, in bookbinding, was to get out of it.”

— David Pearson, English librarian

For eight years, most of my income came from building furniture commissions for (mostly) wealthy customers.1

My customers were always nice. I got paid on time. I was never stiffed, cheated or treated poorly. And I had enough work that I could refer good business to other shops.

And yet, I hated commissions. I felt like an ingrate for hating the work, but the feeling wouldn’t go away.

One day I looked at my commission book (it was actually a clipboard with notes on each project), and I decided to stop taking new work. I worked like hell to finish up the projects in that clipboard. Then I threw it away.2

What was my problem?

OK, the answer to that is probably a book. How about instead: “Please crap out a brief summary of your beef with commission work.”

Before I answer (and before you post a comment) remember this: All the following problems are entirely my fault.

The Customer was Always in my Head

When I built a piece, I couldn’t make myself happy. I was too worried about the customer’s expectations and their budget. Example: I was building a case with seven dovetailed drawers. The customer opted for router-made dovetails, and the price of the piece was based on that.

When it came time to make the drawers, I couldn’t do it. I had access to a Keller dovetail jig (the only dovetail jig I don’t hate), but I thought the joints would look cheesy compared to hand-cut dovetails. I was already late in delivering the piece, so I wasn’t brave enough to ask for more money.

I punted. I cut the tails by hand and routed the pins using plywood templates I’d made. I ate the extra labor charges. Which put me further behind in delivering the project and reduced my hourly rate for the job. It was a lose-lose decision. I lost money, and I still wasn’t happy with the way the dovetails looked.

Whenever I was at the bench, it felt like the customer was standing with me, watching the work. “Is this good enough?” I’d constantly ask myself. “Probably not,” I’d answer. And so I would nitpick myself into oblivion. I’d refinish a piece a couple times if I felt the need to.

I was trying to please someone I couldn’t see who had a huge say in my work.

There were no “happy accidents” when things went to crap. Just the need to do it over again until it pleased the invisible asshole staring at me across the bench.

I wish I could say that the upside to this problem was that I became a better woodworker. It didn’t feel that way. I was just worried and terrified all the time. And that’s not a good mental state for growth.

I Became Weirdly Consumed by Money

I enjoy working hard. I enjoy physical labor. And I’ve never made life decisions that were guided by pure money.3 But the more commission work I did, the more I gravitated to jobs that had higher margins, instead of pursuing work that paid less but was more interesting.

Again, as stated above: all my fault.

Example: I had the patterns for Roorkhee chairs worked out to the old groat. I had a good stock of latigo leather and a huge pile of 8/4 old mahogany that I’d purchased at poplar prices. So every Roorkhee chair I built was a damn-good payday. I could build a pair of them in two days, ship them flat in a tube that could go anywhere in the world via UPS, and make ridiculous money.

So I was always up to make Roorkhee chairs. That is, until I made 100 of them or so. All identical.

I wanted to learn to hand-stitch the leather for the backrest, but in my mind that was a waste of time and money. Better to just take the money for a riveted backrest and smile.

When I realized I was doing this, it kicked off another kick of self-loathing.

But the third problem was the worst.

I Couldn’t Pursue New Designs I Loved

One of my strengths as a newspaper reporter was that I loved working “general assignment.” That meant that I wrote about whatever the city desk needed that day. Trailer fire? I miss the burning plastic smell of a good trailer fire. Unusual liquor-store murder trial in a remote county? I’m your huckleberry! A lady just called to say her dog was in love with her neighbor’s duck? Give me her phone number!

I like to learn new things and go places I haven’t been.

When my editor promoted me to beat reporter, I did such a poor job (unintentionally, I assure you) that they kicked me back to general assignment – a job I then did alongside the summer intern who refused to wear socks.

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This Welsh-inspired stick chair was built for a forthcoming video about the process of making stick chairs.1 The chair is what I call a “squareback” because it has more room at the back of the arm compared to my typical comb-back chairs.

The price and details on how to buy it are below. But first, some notes about the design, construction and finish of the chair.

The chair is made from elm with a one-piece sassafras seat. All the joints are assembled with animal glue so the chair can be repaired easily in the far future.

The finish is a pigmented glaze that I made from soot, red earth and raw linseed oil. To begin the breaking-in process, I rubbed back the dried glaze on the seat, arms and comb. Then I rubbed the entire chair with a coat of homemade soft wax. The finish is designed to look better the more the chair is used.

The seat height is 16-3/4" The seat tilts 5°, and the back sticks tilt an additional 22°, making for an overall tilt of 27°. That makes this chair ideal for reading or lounging by the fire. But the back is upright enough to be used at a dining table as well. The chair is a compact 35-1/2" tall overall.

The arms are fully rounded, like many old Welsh chairs. And the tenons are left slightly proud and burnished smooth with bone. These details – and the finish – will make the chair look at home in a room with antiques, or in any traditional setting.

How to Buy the Chair

I’m selling this chair via a random drawing. All prices include packing and shipping to anywhere in the U.S. There are no additional charges. The price is $1,800.

If you wish to buy the chair, send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com before 3 p.m. (Eastern) on Thursday, July 23. Please use the subject line: “Squareback” In the email please include your:

• Name

• U.S. shipping address

• Daytime phone number (this is for the trucking quote only)

If you are the “winner,” the chair will be shipped to your door. The price includes the crate and all shipping charges. Alternatively, the chair can be picked up at our storefront in Covington, Kentucky.

When my first book, “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use,” was released in 2007, I played a game that many first-time authors play. I looked for my book on the shelves of every bookstore I visited.

After a few years, I gave up. I’ve never seen the book for sale anywhere except online. But I do have something else that I’ve decided is better: Hundreds (maybe thousands) of photos of workbenches that people built using the advice in the book.

This is not the first time that I was let down by my expectations.

Like many woodworkers, I once fantasized about a piece of my furniture ending up on display in a museum. That, I thought, would mean that I am a good designer and craftsman – and that I have succeeded as a woodworker.

But a funny thing happened. I visit a lot of museums to see both the art and the furniture collections. Years ago, I got to visit the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to look at its collection of early American furniture, which is mostly behind glass. To my side was the curator of the collection, and when I asked him about how a piece was constructed or what a drawer looked like, he answered:

“I don’t know. I’ve never been permitted to touch this piece.”

At that moment, I began to feel sorry for all the furniture pieces in all the museums all over the world. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, it wasn’t “real” furniture anymore because it wasn’t being touched, sat on or used. Sure, it was being preserved, which has value, but careful use and conservation can do the same thing (with most pieces) and allow the piece to maintain its dignity as a working piece.

Now, my greatest accomplishment as a furniture maker happens when I visit the home of a customer or friend who owns one of my pieces. One of my early commercial pieces – a Morris chair from the Shop of the Crafters (shown in the photo at the top of this entry) – is in several homes in Cincinnati, Lexington and Texas. When I visited the Lexington home once, I saw my chair sitting in the middle of the living room. It took me aback. It was worn. Scratched in places. And draped with the morning paper.

I couldn’t have been happier. That was when I knew my work was OK.

2026 Update: How to Get Your Pieces into a Museum

Hey worms! I still don’t have a single piece in a museum, though lots of my friends and colleagues do. If you have ever wondered about the process, here’s an overview of what it looks like (from an outside observer).

There are two main tracks to making it as a furniture maker. One of track is what I call the “Low Road.” This is where you focus on making pieces that appeal to a wide swath of people and are intended for individual customers. Your income comes from that, plus some teaching and a little writing (if you are able). The hard part of this road is finding lots of customers and cultivating enough of them to keep food on the table.

The other path is what I call the “Art Road.” These artisans make furniture aimed at a different customer: the world of patrons, academies, grants and museums. In general, the pieces offer a “message” and are aimed at people who have wealth, status, taste, intelligence about art and connections. An Art Road woodworker gets income from selling furniture to this smaller group of people, plus grants, fellowships, teaching residencies and speaking fees. The hard part of this job is getting your foot in the door with this level of client (one way to do it is to teach at the craft schools, which are run by wealthy donors). Compared to furniture makers on the Low Road, you need to be far more gregarious, willing to mingle and eager to understand the complex and politial world of pleasing very wealthy people.

I chose the Low Road because my personality is, well, you know, not that super good. I’m awkward around most people, and I’m even worse when dealing with the country-club set. Also, I would rather eat a stick of deodorant than attend a party.

I don’t consider the Low Road better or worse than the Art Road. Both are necessary in this world.

So how do you get your doo-dad in a museum (besides breaking in at night with one of your chairs in tow)? It usually starts with getting a residency at a school or a grant from a foundation. These usually result in you giving a talk about your work to a room of well-connected donors. Some of them are likely on museum boards. And museums have an acquisitions budget.

I think you can figure things out from there.

Another way to get your pieces into a museum: Label your guest bedroom the “Museum.” Worked for me.

One of the problems with many modern stick chair designs is that the armbow has some short grain where the arm and its shoe intersect. If an arm is going to break during assembly, this is where the crack almost always happens.

I’ve got a dozen tricks to prevent the arm from cracking, and it’s now fairly rare for a student to break an arm in class. Once the chair is together, the sticks reinforce the arm. I’ve never had an arm crack after the chair was assembled.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have bad dreams about it.

Avoiding short grain is one of the reasons I have followed Chris Williams’ lead and have been making armbows using material that grew curved in the forest. It’s not easy. And not everyone has the patience or will to do this.

So what are your options?

1. Make your chairs with two separate arms, like the Irish Gibson chair. These chairs avoid short grain by separating the arms.

2. Get into steambending. It takes some gear, but steambending your arms (and combs) is a deft way to avoid short grain. The only wrinkle is that steambending takes some skill and there are failures.

3. Use a plywood armbow (a la “Build a Chair from Bulls%$t”).

4. Read on about my newest armbow design.

Recently I’ve returned to making chairs that have a squareback design. And we recently finished filming a video on making them that should be released this month. The squareback design was the subject of my original video. And this new video will replace the old one. Details in the footnote.1

So I took the opportunity to redesign the armbow so there is no short grain.

My prototype arm is shown above. It was too square. It was like cuddling with a board. So I added some curve and still managed to laminate all the areas with short grain. That new arm is shown below.

I know some of you are looking at the joints in the arm and are thinking: Isn’t that a cross-grain problem? Answer: Not if you use PVA or a protein glue that has a little glycerin added (for flexibility).

PVA can handle cross-grain movement along a joint about 6" long. This joint is only 3" long. That’s easy-peasy for PVA.

This arm can be hit by an enraged toddler. In fact, I can knock this arm into place during assembly like it was steam-bent.

If you are interested in trying it out, you can download the full-size patterns for the entire chair here.

Squareback May 2026 34 X 24

115KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Notes For Stick Chair Video 2026

41.3KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

This arm is a great design for a beginner because it can take a lot of abuse. One of the mistakes most beginners make is they start with joints that are way too tight. Something has to give (so it’s usually the short grain).

If I forgot to add one piece of advice to “The Stick Chair Book: Revised Edition” it is this:

All the joints should be loose before assembly. And when everything comes together, they should be tight.

Or, as I said a thousand times last week during class in every language I know (that includes English and also English):

Loose until you’re tight! Loose until you’re tight! Loose until you’re what? Tight tight tight!

My lunacy worked, by the way. We didn’t have a single busted arm or stressful glue-up during that class. Maybe I should start cutting the pills in half before class each day.

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With my kids, I struggle when we talk about their futures. I want to tell them: Do what you love, work really hard and everything will be alright. It’s a great line, but it’s USDA prime horse crap.

My first business – The Kentucky Gazette – failed in the 1990s. And no amount of hard work could save it. I slept under my desk many nights, and I did a good deal of good journalism. There is more to it than hard work, intelligence and talent.

The person who put it best, in my mind, is Doug Martsch, the founder of the band Built to Spill. He is one of my guitar heros and has an independent streak a mile long (which he somehow maintains while his band signed to Warner Bros. records).

I probably will forward this interview to my daughters someday. But it’s far too nice outside today, and they are both in good places with their lives and their work.

So perhaps I’ll disrupt your day instead. (I actually take great comfort from Doug’s words.)

— Christopher Schwarz

These excerpts are from SPIN magazine, an article written by Rachel Brodsky and posted April 14, 2015.

RB: Ira Glass has a quote where he essentially says that every creative person does terrible work in the beginning. Everybody who’s ever wanted to make art is terrible at first. But as long as you create a “volume of work” — even if it continues to be terrible — it will get better. That’s kind of reassuring.

DM: Well, I’m going to go one further and say that it doesn’t get better. You will not get to a point where you write good things. I’m saying that even now, 99 percent of what I write is really stupid, and it didn’t get any better.

What keeps you going with it then?

I can’t do anything else; there is nothing else I can do. I don’t know how to do anything else, and I still like it. Mostly what I’m talking about is the lyrics. The music part of it, it doesn’t come easy for me, but it’s more subjective, so you can get away with more. Whereas the lyrics, lyrics are subjective. But if they’re bad, they can really turn a person off to what’s happening in the whole. If the lyrics are bad, it’s impossible to listen.

Got any career advice for younger indie-rock bands?

I don’t at all. I can tell you about my circumstances, but they’re not going to apply. I just feel like people have something in them that they want to just do, and they’ll do it no matter what anyone says. Or if they need to be advised, maybe it’s not for them.

Yeah, the music industry is pretty much the antithesis of practical.

Yeah, exactly. So the thing I always say is that I’ve been really lucky. That’s my secret, that I got lucky. I’m not saying that there aren’t other things involved, but I wouldn’t be where I was if I hadn’t lived in Seattle at a certain time, met certain people. The people that I started a band with, I just happened to hook up with some people who were a little older than me who put out records themselves. That was a big deal back in those days. For me to work with them was amazing, and that made my whole life.

I wouldn’t say, like, put out your own record, because that might not do it. I wouldn’t say tour a bunch, because that might not do it either. The other thing I say is don’t have any expectations. If you want to do it, just do it. But if you want to make it big, you’re on your own. I have no idea how to make it big. No one knows the secret to that. I mean, I can tell you how to book time in a studio, but that’s neither here nor there.

Years ago, a reader with an embroidery machine sent me this. By “this” I mean the thing in the photo. I don’t know exactly what to call it, but it is awesome.

During one of John Brown’s many phases, he wrote a column for Good Woodworking magazine called “The Anarchist Woodworker,” and it featured this little guy holding a bomb.

I’ll be honest: I have no idea if JB was an anarchist, or if he just liked being a contrarian. I would never use violent imagery. But I get it. It’s funny, and I don’t have a stick up my butt about stuff like this.

Anyway, you can win “this.” This 14" x 15" “this” would look good on your shop wall. “This” would be too thick to add to a shirt. But “this” is one-of-a-kind.

What is “swag week?” For a long time, I’ve wanted to come up with a way to say “thank you” to the paid subscribers of our three substacks. It is impossible to overstate how much the subscription money has helped us.

So the first week of every month, we’re going to give away something nice, unique or rare from our vast collection of books, tools and ephemera.

We’re going to select – at random – a paid subscriber from our three substacks. We’ll announce the recipient here. And then we’ll send the item out anywhere to them on planet earth.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you’re eligible. There’s nothing you need to do. If you subscribe to more than one substack, you will be even more eligible because your name will be in the pool of subscribers two or three times instead of once.

So if you’re a paid subscriber, do absolutely naught!

The winner will be announced on July 13.

Micah: “It was amazing.”

Band members: “You think we’re amazing?”

Micah: “Oh, no, I hated the music.”

Friend of the band members: “She’s trashing your music!”

Micah: “I’m not trashing their music. I said that I hated it. … I didn’t say it wasn’t good. I said that I hated it. And people hate every band.”

— from the movie “That Alien, Sound”

I adore drawings of exotic animals that were clearly made by someone who had never seen an elephant, giraffe or rhinoceros. The artist had drawn the animal based on someone’s description: long nose like a snake, ears like a ship’s sails, a body like an enormous grape and a tail like a piece of wee string.

To the artist, their drawing is correct. It fulfills the description. But to anyone who has seen the animal in person, the drawing doesn’t even begin to capture what an elephant looks like.

These antique animal drawings are like most modern furniture designs. The designer followed the written rules on proportion, volume, symmetry, value, color and detail/ornament. The piece should be perfect because it followed the rules faithfully. But it’s not. It sucks. Why?

Usually, the answer is that the designer hasn’t seen enough furniture. They haven’t fallen hopelessly in love with 23 cabinets, four turned bowls and a trestle table this week. They don’t have a crush (that mutates every month) on some form of ornament or door arrangement or oddball furniture form that doesn’t even exist today (armoires built like houses is my current crush).

They don’t have 30 floating furniture forms all bubbling in the back of their phone and their mind, trying to emerge through some work on the bench. Do you have a favorite moulding this week? Do you ever think about changing your entire woodworking practice after visiting an excellent museum exhibit? Is your phone filled with almost as many photos of furniture (that you didn’t build) as photos of your family or pets?

Do you have photos of colors that make your insides squirm?1

All the good designers I know are in love with the visual world and behave like a giant receptor. Almost anything can plug into their receptor, from the curve of a cat’s back to the layout of a door’s panels to a stone bridge.

When the information comes in, it usually gets sorted into three bins: “that’s beautiful and I love it” or “I am indifferent to that” to “it’s not beautiful and I hate that.” All three feelings are valid. But the two important ones are the ones that relate to beauty.

Let’s get this out of the way: I believe that beauty exists. It’s real. But I also believe that the bar for something to be beautiful is laughably low. Almost everything in the natural world is beautiful (unless – weirdly – it has been modified by people). Have you ever seen an ugly tree? A plant that wasn’t – when examined closely – perfectly proportioned? Or a color in nature that didn’t evoke the animal, vegetable or mineral world?

Everything that I design has a foot planted in the world around us. I’m sure it’s possible – somehow – to work outside of nature, but for me that’s like trying to see the fifth dimension. I just don’t have the equipment.

I look to trees to help me design chairs. Mountains and rock formations for cabinets. Clouds for tables. And gorgeous architecture for … everything.

Whether you like it or not, furniture is the stepchild of architecture. Almost everything we do with our furniture is rooted in the vast architectural record. Beautiful buildings might be our species’ greatest achievement. And we are fortunate that we have an existing (and written) record of it that goes back thousands of years.

Millions of talented builders were inspired by nature, and they distilled their thoughts into structures that can be studied by anyone today simply by walking around them.

We can take their lessons and apply our own crushes with the natural world (and the built world) to make something “else” (I can’t say that we’ll make something “new”).

And then there’s the other side of the coin. The things we “hate.” I think that hate or revulsion is as important as love. It’s a valid emotional reaction. Honestly, most furniture I see today in stores provokes zero reaction in me. I am indifferent to it. It is not worth caring about.2

When I see a thing I hate, I spend time to figure out why, because this is important information.

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The following is excerpted from “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years.”

When we started on “The Woodworker” project more than a decade ago, we didn’t intend to publish “Honest Labour.” The series was going to have four books that covered handwork: “Vol. 1: Tools,” “Vol. 2: Techniques,” “Vol. 3: Joinery” and “Vol. 4: The Shop & Furniture.” But as we paged through every article from The Woodworker during the 30-year period, we kept getting stuck on the “Chips From the Chisel” column at the beginning of every issue.

These columns during the Hayward years are like nothing we’ve ever read in a woodworking magazine. They are filled with poetry, historical characters and observations on nature.

This column was first published in a 1936 issue of The Woodworker; it remains relevant today for woodworkers old and new.

Are you finding woodworking as easy as you thought? Or is your ardour being cooled by disappointment? If you have not encountered any serious set-back you are indeed fortunate. If you have, don’t worry; take heart—and the advice below.

Think It Out

One thing is certain: that, even though the craft is a lifetime’s study, the application of a few simple principles will assuredly bring success in woodworking. In the first place, never start a job until you know precisely how you are going to do it. Pass its construction step by step through your mind, so that you may hit upon the snags and mentally smooth them out. Making full-size working drawings is part of this thought-before-doing process. It compels you to think out your construction. Besides, full-size drawings are an aid (sometimes an indispensable aid) to setting out, and you need all the aids you can get.

Be Thorough

Don’t work hurriedly. Your very keenness may prompt you to rush, but to do so is fatal. Curb your desire to see the thing finished, and always concentrate intently upon the particular bit of the job you have in hand. The trueing up of work in preparation for setting-out may strike you as irksome, but it forms the foundation upon which you build. Therefore do it well. See that you have on every piece of wood a face side and edge, and that each piece is truly gauged and planed to width and thickness. Reject twisted stuff; if you use it, it will only give trouble later.

With your well-prepared material, you are well started and ready for setting-out. This is not the marking-time process it seems to be. Actually, during setting out, the work is going forward quite rapidly. You are indeed casting the die of the whole job. It is at this stage that your full-size drawing proves useful. Avoid the risk of relying too much on the rule, as this leads to inaccuracies, and when-ever possible apply your wood to the drawing, ticking off the points as need be. When two or more pieces are to be marked alike, set out one from the drawing, then cramp the others to it, and so mark them all. Door stiles and rails, for instance, should always be treated like this and never marked separately. Keep your pencil sharp, and always draw fine distinct lines, not thick ones. When setting out, always take care to arrange any necessary pairing of pieces.

Be Accurate

In all you do be accurate. No measurement, no cut, no squaring, should be “near enough.” It must be right. For often one inaccuracy becomes the seed of others, and reproduces trouble as the work proceeds. Remember that the secret of the successful joint is to cut just on the waste side of the lines. If your joints do not fit right away, take your time and much care in making them fit, but tread warily; it is very easy to ruin a joint when fitting.

Unless your job is of the simplest, you may find yourself stuck over some point of construction or procedure, in which case put down your tools and think, or consult someone who knows. Whatever you do, re-start only when the way is clear. Look to the state of your tools. With a blunt chisel or gouge good work is impossible; and such a tool, because of its tendency to slip, is dangerous to use. Chisels and plane irons need sharpening much more frequently than you may think. Don’t spare your oilstone. Rather err on the side of too frequent sharpening. The craftsman always does; and if this helps him, it will help you. It is wise to have your saws sharpened and set professionally. If properly done, they should need attention only rarely.

Clean Up Well

Be particular about the contents of your gluepot. Throw away stale glue that has been heated many times and has therefore deteriorated, and substitute fresh. Keep it at the consistency of paint, and don’t forget that, because of the evaporation of the water, glue is thickening all the time it is being heated. When thinning, use hot water. Do your glueing in a warm atmosphere, away from draughts, and be smart about it. Be liberal with the glue, but keep it from running and setting in places from which it will be difficult to remove.

Should cleaning up trouble you, bear this in mind: that every surface to be cleaned up must be levelled off (if need be) and made quite flat and more or less smooth with the jack plane or the jack and trying planes. Only on such a surface will a fine-cutting smoothing plane work.

Finally, don’t worry about an honest mistake. Ponder the reason for it and so learn from it. Progress at your own speed from simple job to something more difficult, but never force the pace. At the same time, be just as ambitious as your previous work warrants.

The Tools You Need

Now an excerpt from “The Anarchist’s Design Book: Expanded Edition,” which is also available as a free PDF.

This book is an exploration of furniture forms that have persisted outside of the high styles that dominate every museum exhibit, scholarly text and woodworking magazine of the last 200 years.

There are historic furniture forms out there that have been around for almost 1,000 years that don’t get written about much. They are simple to make. They have simple lines. And they can look shockingly modern.

This book explores 18 of these forms – a bed, dining tables, chairs, chests, desks, shelving, stools – and offers a deep exploration into the two construction approaches – staked and boarded – used to make these pieces that have been forgotten, neglected or rejected.

The tool list below is based on building the furniture pieces in this book and is a good foundation set for any woodworker.

I wrote my first book in 1995 on a Macintosh Centris 610. The story was about a carpenter whose life is saved when he joins a religious cult teetering on the brink of collapse and violence. The book was titled “Fisheye” because once you can actually see the world around you in all directions, it becomes distorted and difficult to interpret. Think of a fisheye lens for a camera.
The book completely sucked. I burned the manuscript in 1998.

What’s important about the first paragraph of this tale is the model number of the computer. It was the same machine I used at my newspaper job. There my editors assigned me about 300 stories a year on everything from the machinations of the zoning board of appeals to a local duck that had fallen in love with a neighbor’s dog.

I am grateful that most of that work went to wrapping fish, starting fires and stuffing the coats of mountain hermits.

In neither case was the Centris 610 to blame for the resulting drivel. It was caused by the stupid bag of meat between my ears. Yet there is a key difference between the two similar stories above. At the newspaper, I used my Centris 610 to make money for my employer. When I wrote my doomed novel, I used the Centris 610 to attempt my escape.

It’s the same in woodworking. The tools – hand, power or digital – are neutral. What makes them terrifying or liberating is how they are wielded. You can use a table saw to make MDF tchotchkes for a mass-market retailer, or you can use it to build something for yourself – a table, a chair, a business that exists outside of the corporate world.

It’s too easy to anthropomorphize our tools with political, social or emotional traits. In the end, all tools are just rocks. You can use one to scoop out a tree trunk for a canoe or bash in your neighbor’s head.

So why do hand tools seem more subversive than a random-orbit sander? It’s probably because you don’t find many handplanes on the factory floor anymore. So owning a backsaw instead of a chop saw makes you feel like you are thumbing your nose at industry or society. But the truth is that until you put the saw (either saw) to the wood, you are just picking your nose with the wrong digit.

Tools are interesting. The things we can make with them are far more so.

In that spirit, I’d like to introduce some of the critical tools (and a couple machines) that will help you build the projects in this book. This chapter is not an infomercial. All of these tools here are mine, and I paid full price for them. You might not even be able to purchase some of them because of where you live in the world or because you are reading this book in the prison library run by our squid overlords in 2174.

So don’t sweat it. There are lots of good tools out there. This chapter will show you what to look for.

16 oz. Hammer

Hammers are essential to woodworking. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling dovetail jigs. But which hammer is basic to building furniture?

The furniture-maker’s hammer has a 16 oz. head, a smooth and slightly domed striking face, a wooden handle and the balance of a trapeze artist. A 16 oz. tool allows you to drive 4d and 6d nails for furniture with a few strikes and without wearing you out. A domed striking surface lets you set the heads of nails flush without “Frenching” the work.

A wooden handle is warm in your hand and won’t vibrate your arm apart like some metallic or fiberglass hammers.

Lots of people talk about the “balance” or “hang” of a tool, but it’s difficult to describe. You will not know it when you first pick up the hammer. You will not know it after you drive your first nail. By your thousandth nail, however, you’ll know. And the knowledge will never leave your fingers.

Lump Hammer

I’m fond of using what the English call a “lump hammer” to assemble casework and chairs. Here in North America, it’s called a sledge, blacksmith or engineer’s double-face hammer. But none of those names does the tool justice quite like “lump hammer.”

I like one with a head that weighs between 2 lbs. and 2-1/2 lbs. (in metricland, look for a 1,000-gram head) with the tool’s total length about 10-1/2". You might have to cut down the handle; this will improve its balance and finesse.

The lump hammer offers gentle whacks when you lift it and let it fall a few inches. And if you put any swing into it, you can knock almost anything home, even a dovetailed carcase that is locked in mid-assembly because the glue has swollen the joints.

That’s how I came to love the lump hammer – I had one in my tool kit to rescue student work that was on the brink of failure. But I came to appreciate it as a tool of great subtlety; I use it for mortising and setting holdfasts, too. Plus beautiful vintage ones are cheap and plentiful. (I love it so much, we now make our own Crucible Lump Hammer.)

Nail Set

Sometimes called a “nail punch,” these are goofily named but important tools. If you want to drive, set or punch a nail head 1/32" below the surface of the wood, you need them. Buy good ones or undamaged vintage ones. They typically come in three sizes. Get all three.

A Few Bevel-edge Chisels

A “few” might be more than you need. For most work, a 1/4", 1/2" and 3/4" chisel will handle most everything.

Don’t worry about the tool’s steel or how long it keeps an edge. That’s fairly irrelevant. If a chisel is garbage, you’ll figure that out and exchange it. Most, and by most I mean 90 percent, chisels have steel that’s better than you need.

Focus instead on the handle and determine if the chisel is handle-heavy, which will wear out your wrist. I prefer a lightweight wooden handle – most plastic-handled chisels are too heavy. The chisel should feel like something you want to hold all day, like a pencil.

The long edges of the chisel’s blade should be beveled so you can get into acute corners. These bevels also reduce the tool’s overall weight.

There are lots of other details in this simple tool, but if you buy a wooden-handled bevel-edge chisel, you can make any necessary modifications yourself.

Mallet

Mallets are as personal as hammers. I have a 16 oz. round-head mallet for light chopping with chisels, mostly. You can make your own if you like. Wooden mallets are great because they can be easily modified or repaired by a woodworker (you).

Jack Plane

The jack plane is by far the most common handplane in woodworking, and for good reason: You can set it up to hog off material, straighten surfaces or provide the final surface for finishing. For many years a jack was the only bench plane I used.

A vintage (the older the better) metallic jack plane with wooden handles is a fantastic choice. My Stanley No. 5 cost less than $20 in 1996 and is still going strong after 30 years of constant use.

There are so many resources out there for picking and restoring planes that it can become a hobby unto itself, though that’s not my bag. Get the tool working and improve its condition every time you disassemble it for sharpening. That’s my best advice.

Block Plane

The second plane I use the most is a low-angle block plane. You basically have two choices with this tool: Buy an old one and restore it or buy a premium new one. Inexpensive modern block planes are good for rock fights or adding ballast to a bag that you’re trying to sink to the bottom of the lake – little else.

I like a tool that has an adjustable mouth and fits easily in one hand. I’m not a fan of monster block planes.

Router Plane

Router planes are essential to every hand-tool shop for installing hinges or making dados or sliding dovetails. The larger size – based on the Stanley No. 71 – is the most useful if you can buy only one. I like a “closed throat” router, or a tool where the throat can be temporarily closed.

Premium router planes include a depth stop, a handy feature. Don’t worry about having all the different irons; you’ll do 99 percent of your work with a straight iron.

Combination Square

Though originally designed as a metalworking tool, a good combination square is outstanding for woodworking. I use the 12" and 6" models. You get what you pay for with combination squares; cheap tools are frustrating and quality versions are not.

Pick up a Starrett or a Brown & Sharpe, and you will be spoiled.

Cutting Gauge

Cheap marking gauges that use a dull pin to abuse the wood are frustrating. You need to file the pin to a sharp, flattened point that is angled slightly away from the fence and make sure the beam and fence lock so everything is at right angles.

Or buy a good cutting gauge and get to work. There are lots of good ones available. Look for one that has a fixed (not rotating) wheel to make the cuts. Keep it sharp.

Compass/Dividers

Woodworking has more to do with geometry than mathematics. So a compass is essential for layout – not just arcs and circles, but for many straight-line layouts as well. I have a nice Starrett compass I purchased (finally) after struggling for years with a draftsman’s compass. The Starrett is built like a tank and allows me to swap out one of the points for a pencil – it’s perfect.

Brace

If you are ever going to build a piece of staked furniture, you need one good brace with an 8" or 10" sweep. I’m not picky about brand names. Instead, I nitpick the tool’s condition. You need a chuck that has its springs, closes tight on the bit and has crisp – not worn-out – jaws. The brace’s pad at the top shouldn’t wobble much, if at all. The handle, where you grab the tool to crank it, should spin freely.

Hand Drill

If you are going to use nails or screws, a hand drill is essential. Just like with the brace, don’t shop by brand name. Shop by the tool’s condition. The chuck should be in perfect working order. The tool’s gears should engage and turn freely. A little lubrication in the tool’s oil ports will work wonders. Oh, and the crank’s handle should be firmly affixed and not weirdly bent. All the other features – detachable side handle, multi-gear transmission, bit storage – are tits on a tomcat.

Spokeshave or Drawknife

To create the rough shape of a round tenon for staked furniture, a spokeshave or drawknife is essential (if you don’t own a lathe). A drawknife works faster than a spokeshave, but it is more difficult to sharpen and learn to use.

If you buy a spokeshave, I recommend ones based on the Stanley 151 model. These have two spinwheels that let you adjust the tool’s cutter. Beginners have much better luck with these tools compared to ones without mechanical adjusters. Spokeshaves come with either a flat sole (like a handplane) or one that is slightly bellied from front to back. Both are useful.

Coping Saw

For sawing tight curves, a coping saw is ideal. Most of the modern ones are shoddy; vintage ones are much better. Look for tools that accept pinned blades.

More important than the tool is its blade. Good blades make the difference. I use Swiss-made Pegas blades. If you are having difficulty finding them, that is because I have hoarded a lifetime supply. Apologies.

Rasps

Rasps are invaluable for curved work. I use them for smoothing the cuts made by the coping saw or drawknife. For the projects in this book, you need only a small, fine-toothed half-round rasp. Look for rasps with random, hand-stitched teeth. They are (a lot) more expensive, but they cut smoothly and leave a better surface behind.

Backsaws

For cutting pieces to final size or cutting joints, you need a backsaw or two. Most woodworkers end up with three backsaws: a 10-point tenon saw filed with rip teeth, a 14-point carcase saw filed with crosscut teeth and a 15-point dovetail saw filed with rip teeth.

You can get away with just buying a dovetail saw at first. Look for one that is lightweight and fits your hand in a glove-like manner.

Handsaws & Buckets

For cutting pieces to length, a handsaw and two plastic 5-gallon buckets (thank you Mike Siemsen for that advice) are the ticket. Good vintage handsaws that are ready to work are difficult to find or expensive. So buy a hardware-store saw with induction-hardened teeth. This tool will last you about 10 years. Yeah, the handles are plastic or uncomfortable, but the tools cut surprisingly well and cost almost nothing.

Sharpening Stuff

Entire books have been written about sharpening gear, so reading one of those books is (eventually) a good idea. What’s more important than your equipment or your technique is that you choose one sharpening system and stick with it. Sampling all the systems is expensive, confusing and another hobby entirely.

I use a side-clamp honing guide (sometimes called an Eclipse guide) and waterstones.

Bottom line: It’s more fun to make tools dull than it is to make them sharp.

Some Brand-name Stuff

I hate to do this to you. But here are some of the tools where the brand really makes a difference. It is worth searching for these specific tools.

WoodOwl Auger Bits

In 2013 I switched to WoodOwl Ultra Smooth Augers after working for years with vintage augers. These Japanese-made bits are the best I’ve found. They cut fast and clean, and they clear chips with ease. Plus you can get them sized by kinda-16ths. Yes, they are technically metric. No, it doesn’t technically matter.

I use the 5/8" WoodOwl in a brace to bore the initial hole for the mortise in all the staked furniture pieces in this book. If you can’t find a WoodOwl, find the best 5/8" auger you can.

Large Veritas Standard Tapered Reamer

This Canadian-made reamer works incredibly well in a brace, corded drill or drill press. That’s why I prefer it to Veritas’s professional reamer, which can be used only in a brace. I’ll get about a dozen chairs out of an edge before I need to sharpen the edge, which I do with a carbide tool sharpener.

I usually drive this reamer with a heavy-duty corded drill. My second choice is using it in a brace.

Veritas 5/8" Tapered Tenon Cutter

This is the matching tenon cutter to the reamer above. It works like a giant pencil sharpener. Simply shave (or turn) your tenon near to its finished size. Then take it for a spin in the tenon cutter and you will have a tenon that matches the tapered mortise.

The blade is easy to remove and sharpen – it’s about the size of a spokeshave blade.

Vesper Tools Sliding Bevel

I have an incurable case of Chris Vesper Fever. He is one of the best two or three living toolmakers I’ve ever met. His stuff has the precision of Karl Holtey – and I can afford it on my salary. I use the small one for chairmaking and staked furniture because I can sneak it right up next to the auger bit or reamer. The blade of a large bevel can get in the way during these operations. (I still love my Vesper Tools. We’ve since developed the 4″ Crucible Sliding Bevel, on which you can lock in the angle but still slide the blade up and down, or lock the slide but still adjust the angle, or lock/unlock both simultaneously, if you want to check it out.)

Oh, & Electric Things

Corded Drill

For building chairs and staked furniture, I use a corded drill to ream the mortises because it has an endless supply of torque. You might as well spend the extra money and buy one that has a 1/2" chuck, a side handle and a long power cord. Don’t worry if the drill is heavy – you’re not a contractor who has to hoist it all day.

14" Band Saw

If you’re making furniture for yourself (not for a living), a 14" band saw is likely more useful than a table saw. It cuts both curves and straight lines, it’s safer, quieter and takes up less space. I like vintage U.S.-made band saws that have little (or no) plastic parts. They are better machines and are less expensive than new. My Delta/Rockwell band saw was made in the early 1980s – so you don’t have to hunt down the ancient stuff.

Portable Thickness Planer

The portable thickness planer is the single-most time-saving woodworking machine in my shop. It saves immense amounts of time and labor and produces a better surface finish than most industrial machines. The knives are simple to change. It can be stored under a workbench.

Most woodworking texts recommend you use an electric jointer in tandem with your thickness planer. And for a production shop, that’s the correct advice. In a home shop, however, you can flatten one face of a board with a jack plane then run it through the planer to create two parallel faces.

Yes, you need a dust collector. No, it cannot be a shop vacuum.

(We now have a 20" planer – but mostly because we’re now prepping a lot more stock for classes and need the advantages of a larger planer for doing lots of work quickly. It might be overkill – but delightful overkill – for a home shop.)

And Perhaps a Lathe

I enjoy turning, so I use a lathe in some parts of this book to make tenons or add details to legs. You don’t have to own a lathe or learn to turn to make furniture – you can use a spokeshave or drawknife to create round shapes.

If you want a lathe, I recommend a solid benchtop model (sometimes called a “midi” lathe) that can accept a bed extension. You want to be able to chuck up a 30"-long table leg in the machine. Anything less is for turning pens.

Almost two years ago (yes, I checked), I wrote about the line of workwear we’ve been developing called “Joiner.” After much tribulation, I’m happy to say that we are launching Joiner’s first product – a nice overshirt – to our paid subscribers today.

You can jump to our store to take a look with this link, but it would be great if you could let me say a few things first.

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There are more words written by André J. Roubo than there are words written about him. We don’t know much about the joiner Roubo, who (almost single-handedly) produced a four-volume set on the craft of woodworking that has yet to be eclipsed.

“l’Art du menuisier” wasn’t the West’s first woodworking book. But it was the first woodworking book written (and illustrated) by a practitioner of the craft. Unlike Joseph Moxon, who wrote the first English-language treatise on joinery in the 17^th century, Roubo’s 18^th-century work was the result of him interviewing fellow members of the trades.1

Before Roubo, most of the early woodworking writing was intended for rich people who had to hire joiners, carpenters and cabinetmakers. The books were mostly “l’Idiot’s Guide to Menuisierie” – aka, here’s what you need to know so you don’t get cheated or look foolish when dealing with these rough, woody characters.

Instead, Roubo’s task was to document the craft in France in the 1770s so that the knowledge wouldn’t be lost. Losing technical knowledge has always been a problem for a craft that runs on secrets, or the “arts and mysteries.”

What do we know about Roubo? We have a brief hagiography written in 1836 by Louis-Auguste Boileau from the book “The History and Portraits of Useful Men.” The book seems written for children in tone, with lots of exclamation marks and Roubo being hoisted on the shoulders of a crowd for constructing a wooden dome at the Grains Exchange (now long gone).

And we know he served in the Revolutionary Guard, and he died somewhat poor because a lot of the rich people who owed him money left the country in order to keep their heads intact.

We translated Boileau’s entry on Roubo, and you can read it for yourself via the link below.

Roubo Hagiography 1936

57.3KB ∙ PDF file

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The best bit of information in Boileau is the location of Roubo’s “new” workshop in 1777 on “Rue St. Jacques, across the street from the church of St. Jaques du Haut Pas.”

The church is still there and looks much as it would have in Roubo’s time. But across the street, things are a different story.

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Between 1995 and 2001, chairmaker John Brown and Drew Langsner carried on extensive correspondence about JB’s classes at Country Workshops. In addition to discussing flights and fees, the two men wrote a lot about how they viewed the craft and the world today.

During our research for “Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown,” Drew graciously sent copies of the letters to help author Chris Williams. I recently reread the letters during a long flight and copied down some of JB’s more eloquent pronouncements about his work. I have left the punctuation and spelling as JB wrote. Drew agreed to let me publish these excerpts here.

Thanks so much to Drew for preserving these letters and letting us share them with you.

Thanks to him, too for sharing his VHS tapes of “The Chairmaker’s Colloquium” – you can see Part I here, Part II here and Part III here.

3 January, 1995
I am a Welshman, and I am influenced in the chairs I make or some of them, by old Welsh chairs. Irish chairs are as different as is possible, so are Scottish chairs. Brittany is Celtic. The people of Brittany, Cornwall and Wales speak a language which has little relation to the Irish or Scots Gaelic. Celtic (with a hard C) is difficult to define, but it is a fashionable ‘buzz’ word, as was ‘heritage’ a year or two back. I strongly recommend you do not use it, and I would forbid the word Celtic to be applied to my work, it is Welsh. Welsh.

… One thing is certain, the chair I had seen had no woodturnings. I have a total and complete antipathy towards woodturning. It seems to me a mindless occupation to stand, holding a chisel up to a piece of revolving wood, the epitome of monotony. Without doubt some of the more artistic turning is clever, but the finished product leaves me cold.

When I see competitions for woodturnings at shows, it seems to be the woodworking equivalent of the Eurovision Song Contest, – ‘nil points’. There, I’ve said it, now you know how I feel about woodturning.

… I am not really a craftsman, the standard of my woodwork is very poor, I feel an artist, I work like an artist, each new project starts with a clean canvas. I shall be very disappointed if at the end of the week’s work any two of the chairs made are the same, and, furthermore, the chair that I make with them will probably not be the best one. This is surely a chair workshop rather than a school. Correct me if I am wrong.

… I shall recommend, but there will be no rules. I understand there will no complete beginners. If we have 8 people I would expect 8 different chairs. I would start each day with a short talk on what we must achieve before sundown, energy and commitment from everyone will be more important than skill.

2 May, 1995
I’m getting nervous. 13 students! Will you have enough bench space? vices? etc, etc? I guess you have done all this before and seem very laid back about it. I have some horrors though, for it is important the way my chairs are built. If you look through my book, articles etc you can see the equipment I use. For instance I don’t know how I could operate without an engineer’s vice on top of a bench, three quarters of the process is based on this. A low flat, level board for boring the seat and levelling we can rig up. Since I have been involved with the Country Workshops project I have come to realise myself that the process is as important as the materials. For instance you mention tapered holes, even numbers of degrees – I wouldn’t know what a degree looked like. My methods work. I have no purist views, just that in 1979 when I built the first chair I had no books on how to do it, no example to look at, just a picture in my mind’s eye. I worked with the tools I then possessed and built my ‘think’. It all came together, miraculously, you have sat in the chair, I am sitting in it now – it worked. A few adjustments here and there, a few more suitable tools, and I’m still doing it the same way. Remember, I do use glue (yellow polyurethane, BISON or BALCOTAN, both made in Holland, but there must be American equivalents, PVA is not suitable)

17 November, 1995
Notice, also, that I ALWAYS give credit. Time & again I have said I am only an average woodworker. It is true. Most woodworkers are more expert than I am. But I do it differently, and this, in retrospect was the main problem with my course. I was in awe of you and didn’t do some things as I should. Next time I must do it my way. Welsh Stick Chairs was an anomaly, I was just in charge of cobbling together 12 chairs, no matter what. They could have been Mongolian Chairs. The Spirit of Wales was missing. …I abhor these people who keep their archive under their armpit, I tell anybody what they want to know. But this seems rather different. We live in an age of instant experts… And when I write I always have a respect for other workers. I cannot enhance what little skills I have by criticizing others. But I am truthful, and I want to be kind.

4 June, 1996
The solution is to start a new magazine, which is what I am doing in my spare time. At the moment I am making a dummy to see what it looks like. It will be of smaller format with a square binding, black and white. More a journal that a magazine. 6 issues a year with an annual subscription in the UK of £20. I am going to try and get American readers. It will be called ‘QUERCUS’. Will keep you informed as to progress. I would hope to have first issue JAN/FEB, 1997. The magazine will have a high content on hand tools and techniques, chairs, history and the ‘zen’ of woodworking. I shall look for people who have something new to say, or want to get something off their chest. It’s bound to be a success because the competition is so poor.

1 July, 1996
Without any doubt I broke new ground in woodworking writing – quite unintentionally. I covered all sorts of subjects, from smoking bacon to the breakdown of my marriage. Nick (Gibbs) told me that 50% of their correspondence mentioned my stuff. I’m not trying to blow myself up, but realistically about 70% of woodworking writing is boring, repetitious stuff.

… Most of the woodworking press has a certain teethgritting fundamentalism which attracts readers with similar problems. I keep wanting to shout ‘woodwork is fun’, let’s have a smile. I hardly know any woodworker who reads any of the magazines. The true market is hardly scratched over here. Then we have this growing inbalance in our population of old people. Add to this that many are now retired at 55 – there is a vast market.

2 April, 1997
I think it is a very retrograde step to be on the internet, there can be no justification for this. I had a man from Paris phone me to tell me what I was doing this summer, even telling me of the seminar. I was very angry. Never mind, I shall continue swimming against the stream, I was born to do it. By joining this latest fashion you will attract the kind of people you don’t need – like the man from Paris.

30 April, 1997
We are gradually handing all our skills over to technology. I imagine the devil appearing and offering me a computer, free, in exchange for my soul, and my ability to write, and my typewriter etc. The router, the saxophone, and now the computer, these are inventions of the devil. I am happy in my stupidity.

I am keen to make better chairs this time. If I don’t make a chair, and if we don’t have twelve students it will be O.K. I will send seat pattern. This is to be a REAL Welsh chair, unmistakable. I will bring a completed one with me in parts as before. This time I will finish it as I do for home consumption. And I will leave it with you, gratis, on one condition. That is that you allow me to put an axe through the seat of the one I left last time. It was a disaster.

18 June, 1997
I want everybody, I mean everybody, to dispose of all their machines and work by hand. However incompetent I am, to me my woodwork is my life. I keep trying to get better.

10 March, 1998
I do not operate in a ‘teaching’ atmosphere. The finest craftsman of the past were never, never ‘taught.’ An apprentice had to learn, most of his life was spent sweeping the floor, fetching and carrying, and doing menial tasks. They watched, they learned, and in the course had many a ‘thick ear’ for their pains. Now it’s all formalised, regularised, and is death to design and imagination. The first instinct of modern woodworkers when they want to make something is to buy a set of plans. This should be made illegal, with death as the penalty. Modern artists are all imagination and no skill, modern craftsman all skill (machine) and no imagination. I am not a strict traditionalist, we do have modern products that are good, but there should be a better ability to recognise what is good, and what is rubbish.

5 January, 1999
This rustic woodworking worries me a little. It’s O.K. to leave drawknifed surfaces, flats on the sticks and legs etc, but to go over sawn parts to make them LOOK rustic is akin to plastic beams, complete with worm holes, in some pubs! If a chair is ‘rustic‘, it should be so because it was made ‘rustic‘. My highly polished chairs are the real modern rustic. I make no effort to cover anything I have done. Most of the proportions are eyeballed, and the sticks and legs are not regular. We live in an age when subtlety is no longer acceptable. Unless an object strikes you between the eyes, the modern punter doesn‘t see it.

22 September, 1999
I fully appreciate that you work on a shoestring, but it annoys me that people take it for granted that craftsmen can‘t be properly paid. Of course, I am not unmindful of the honour of being asked, but I can‘t eat glory.

28 November, 1999
I am getting older, and being a loner can‘t think of having a helper, they wouldn‘t do it right. I refuse to use machines, whereas nearly everyone else does. I have been hungry many times since I started making Welsh chairs. I invented the name Welsh Stick Chairs, and this is what I make. They are not really rustic. I do not bother to smooth them too much. But they are polished. No one is more mystified than I that people will pay so much, but I won‘t knock it. I love my chairs, I hate selling them, some of me, some pain is in them. But they are not rustic. Rustic means poorly made, primitive.

12 June, 2000
My chairs are art, sculpture. Each chair is a new canvas, and they are simple of construction, but sophisticated of design. With my total lack of formal education it has taken a large part of my life to interpret in words the feelings I have. Right, my chairs are INSPIRED by old Welsh chairs. But the slight dished tapers, the shapes and forms, copied by many in the last twenty years, have come from my imagination. Many people have influenced me over the years since I have been making chairs. I looked to many methods, some conventional, some the idiosyncratic workings of others trying to do their own thing, but I used those processes which I felt comfortable with. I am still learning, becoming increasing less interested in processes than the finished article. I have never ceased to try and improve the honesty of my work. Rustic is insult to all the hours of study, all the attempts to grasp the mysteries, all the pain I have had in working my way towards the perfect chair, an object that really doesn‘t exist. It is a mystery, and in trying to solve all the ‘whys‘, I have become increasingly less interested in the ‘hows‘. The hows are the practical side, easy to solve. They are an exercise in engineering and economics. Enough, even if you don’t agree I think you will understand what I am trying to say.

2 February, 2001
Three or four years ago I used to write at least a page a day in my diary, now I don‘t even write it every day, and when I do it‘s just a few lines. I bore myself! Just at the moment I live in a tiny little single story house, central heating and plastic double glazed windows. No ventilation. Too small for a bath, there is a shower. It is warm (hot) and convenient, but the A40 main road passes about 10 feet from the door. I took the place temp(orarily) whilst I got medical stuff sorted and that was 15 months ago. The only prospect that excites me is thought of moving in amongst trees again.

I hope Louise’s garden is as beautiful and fruitful as ever. I remember it so well, I have some good photographs of it. Anyway it is my hope that you are all well. Thank you for phoning. I’ll write more often in future. When I am depressed I try not to contact my friends but to save them for better days.

Love to you all,
John