In many professional shops, it’s common to hear someone spit: “Every time you pick up a hand tool, you’re losing money.”

And in many cases, that’s a correct statement. When I’ve worked in commercial shops, the chisels and planes come out when they have to fix some error they made in machining. They need to make a mortise a little bigger. Or they need to flush up some door stiles or dovetails that were routed incorrectly.

They are losing money when they do the rework. But it’s not the hand tool’s fault.

Also, it’s rare to get hand-tool training in a commercial shop. If you want to learn to use a plane, that’s something you have to pick up on your own.

I once trained a group of six professional cabinetmakers to make chairs. These folks could fit out an entire restaurant in a couple weeks. All were highly skilled, competent and fast.

I told them to bring a block plane to the class, because that’s what we use to make spindles.

They brought five block-plane-shaped objects that were covered in glue and couldn’t cut into a loaf of Wonder Bread.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a professional shop where hand tools were an important part of the work.

So when I started training people to make furniture and make money, I vowed to integrate hand tools into the weekly training sessions. It starts with a block plane. I’ll hand them a sharp one and show them how to use it.

This, I say, is how it is supposed to work.

Anyone can use a sharp block plane after a couple swipes. And what these small tools can do (when sharp) is impressive.

After we’re done, I show them how to sharpen the plane’s cutter. Then they sharpen it. The whole block plane lesson is about 30 minutes long. Later, we do a jack plane the same way. Then a chisel. By then, the sharpening part at the end of the lesson starts to go quickly.

The overall lesson is: Sharpen your tools before you put them away. And anytime things start to go awry in the shop, my first question is: Have you sharpened that thing?

At some point I decided that hand tools aren’t the problem. It’s sharpening. It needs to be acceptable to stop work to sharpen. And sharpening needs to be fast and simple.

As a result, everyone here has a boot tray under their bench with the same basic setup:

Read more

This week we have Eric O’Grey in the Lost Art Press shop to talk about his forthcoming book on restoring all sorts of hand tools. Eric has been restoring tools for many years and has spent the hard hours learning the science so he can separate fact from fiction for you.

His methods work. Check out his substack, Shop Dog Wood Works, where he details his processes, plus the science and chemistry. His book will cover how to restore most woodworking hand tools and will show a wide range of options, from how to get a tool back to functioning well, to making it look better than new.

His book will take a couple years before it’s in print, but you can follow his progress with it on his substack.

Today we shot a short video that shows the seven steps Eric takes to restore a plane sole in only one hour. We were all very impressed with the techniques and the results. I wish I had known this years ago.

— Christopher Schwarz

The last time I filmed a Chris Schwarz how-to video I shopped primarily at the Gap and still had room to spare in my Dutch tool chest. I guess a lot can change in two years. That video was “Build a Roman Workbench,” and little did I know then that the Roman workbench would become my favorite bench in the shop. That’s another blog post, though.

These last two weeks, Chris has been starring in his first long-form how-to video in more than two years. And unlike our last video, I won’t be the only one filming it. This time Katherine will be helping as she learns the ropes of how-to filming.

So what will Chris be building? Trick question. Of course it’s a stick chair. OK, then how will this be different from the original “Build a Stick Chair” video? Not a trick question. In the updated video, Chris demonstrates how his chairmaking techniques have evolved since filming the first “Build a Stick Chair” four years ago.

Of the several alterations Chris has made over the years to his chairmaking process, the most notable (to me) are the armbow and stretcher modifications. Also, his leg-tapering operation has gotten a thoughtful upgrade. All of which are shown in the updated video. Another difference you may notice are the number of gray hairs in Chris’s beard. But that’s neither here nor there.

For those who purchased the original “Build a Stick Chair” video years ago: You’ll receive an email once the video is published with a link to download the new video for free. No catches. And for those who haven’t purchased the original “Build a Stick Chair” video, the updated film will be half off ($37) the first month of it’s release. And a pdf of the updated, full-sized plan will be included in both the free link and new purchase. (This new video and pdf will replace the old ones on our site – so if you have and want to keep the first video and accompanying pdf, download them now.)

Speaking of downloadable plans, Katherine and I are just a gnat’s butt away from finishing the traveling bookcase Chris assigned us to build weeks ago. The build itself is complete; what isn’t yet finished is the painted serpent (that doesn’t at all resemble a colon) that enwraps the box. Katherine really outdid herself with this painted design. (The colon resemblance is not a dig. This was an observation that Katherine first mentioned. The snake has since been appropriately named Collin the colon snake.)

Once finished, the plans for the case will be made available as a free download for paid subscribers. However, you’re on your own when painting. I guess you’ll have to paint your own colon.

Have you ever tried to push a board through the table saw blade and had it pinch? Sure, a riving knife helps to mitigate this, but it can still take substantial Oomph to get a case-hardened board cut to width. Here’s how to make it easier (and safer).

I had a professor in art school who was brave enough to bring up the crutches that digital art has compared to physical art. All I could think to myself at that time was “Yeah, Josh, get their bitch-asses!” But now I realize that maybe… it was Josh who was the bitch-ass.

Digital art has never been in my tool box. The number of settings and options in Ph…

Read more

Things are getting reeaallll oily around here… Below, Megan shows how easy it is to make your own “woobie.” Rust, beware.

Read more

When I built a chair’s armbow using naturally curved wood in April, the whole project went to crap right after I carefully assembled the arm (which took more than a day to cut the mitered half-laps).

When I drilled the assembled armbow to receive the sticks, the surface of the arm turned craterous (see above). Giant chunks of wood popped out…

Read more

Chris Schwarz wants you to stop wasting wood!!! Below, Chris explains how he determines dimensions for rough-cutting lumber to size.

Read more

Whenever Chris leaves town for an extended amount of time, he makes sure to leave behind him a bullet-point list on the whiteboard for us to do. Sometimes the list is long, sometimes it’s short. But always, he leaves some “to-do” intended to keep our creative juices flowing.

So per usual, when Chris said he had a “to-do” for Katherine and me before leavi…

Read more

Oh, square no! Combination square out of square? In the video below Chris shows how to make things right. (Only one fart noise was added in the making of this video.)

Read more

I know this is a woodworking Substack so you might be getting sick of this painting stuff but here comes Miss Art School ( not a humble brag, by the way – I went to a college that was known for its nursing program) with more of her bulls%$t.

Lost Art Press has taught me that the final step of making a chair is the “make pretty,” where you clean up all machine marks and refine surfaces. Yes, I do this before painting – but it’s not my make-pretty step. Painting is my personal make-pretty step. It makes the chair one of a kind and adds depth to the overall look of the chair. What I love about painting furniture is that there are no rules – you can paint Eraserhead Baby 33 times over and no one will question you, unless they’re an asshole with bad taste. I aspire to build something and cover it in intricate details at least once. The slight asymmetry in the examples below is very pleasing to my eyes. Maybe I’ll start adding some personality to the outside of my Dutch tool chest….

Before I get there, it’s important to me that I start small. For now, I only fill some blank spaces on a chair until it looks a bit more full. I figure out what flower, shape or critter will fit in a space that looks a bit too bare. I don’t quite have the street cred or the confidence to blast paint everywhere on a nice handmade piece.

I do, however, feel confident enough to talk through my process of covering a blank spot with a creature, flower or what-hav-yuns.

1. Sketch

“Silhouette” is the key word for this step … and most of the other ones. I’ll be talking about the hare (shown above) through most of these steps.

Start with a ROUGH sketch of what’s in your brain. The sketch should only be made up of blobs and lines that somewhat resemble what you want to paint.

I’ve talked about this in a previous post, but finding shapes in the negative space around the image is how I start forming the overall shape of the piece. In the image above, I outlined some of the key areas in red that I was looking at in this step. The trickiest one for me is the space between the tail and the back leg. It was a super-tight place to work in, and I had to make sure there were no points of contact between different parts of the hare.

In this step I use part of my puzzle-loving brain by imagining these sections as puzzle pieces. Are the thin areas too thin to keep the imaginary puzzle piece sturdy? If so, then you should thicken it out more, i.e. make the negative space wider. This is the reason I struggled the most with the rear end of the hare. No matter what I tried, there were always some lines that were really close together – but I think it evens out in the end.

Always consider proportion when drawing these shapes. Yes, rabbits do not look like this in real life – but the image would look off if I made the back leg smaller or the head bigger.

After finding the shapes in the negative space you want to connect them all together (shown as the blue areas in the picture above). Keep your eyes blurred and your pencil marks light as let your brain fill in the gaps until it looks like a pleasing shape.

2. Transfer the sketch

Read more

I am wholly anal-retentive about paint brushes…which is why I keep my own old Purdy brushes in my chest for when I need to paint a piece of furniture. I can’t stand it when paint gets up in the ferrule, and I am dogmatic about reinserting a brush into its cardboard sleeve to dry after cleaning, so that it keeps its prope…

Read more

When Glen Huey started work at Popular Woodworking Magazine, he asked to write a blog entry about how he used gloves when machining rough stock.

“Absolutely yes,” I said. “Go for it.”

Glen left my cubicle and went into the shop. Megan (then the managing editor of the magazine) shot me a surprised look.

“You know what’s going to happen, don’t you?” she said. “He’s going to get eaten alive in the comments.”

“Maybe? Probably?” I replied. “Glen’s a grown man and can hold his own. Both the commenters and Glen might learn something.”

I was right. It was a shit bath. Or a blood show. Anyway, when it was all over, Glen figured out how to navigate the troll-y comments from a blog entry. And the trolls on our blog had a new-found respect for the fact that yes, there are times that gloves can be used with machines.1

I hate the fact that so much of woodworking is telling people all the things they cannot do. You can’t rest a handplane on its sole. You can’t use oil- and water-based finishes on the same piece. You can’t finish only the top of a table. You can’t use lumberyard wood to make a chair. You can’t wipe on shellac. You can’t use nails in fine furniture. You can’t assemble furniture with cross-grain assemblies.

On and on. And wrong and wrong.

The longer I study and work in the craft, the more I realize that the rules are flexible. And so when people ask me if they can do something that sounds crazy (“Can I use Alligator Juniper to make a chair?”), my default answer is this: Go for it. The numbers are against you. But the numbers were against life ever forming on this planet.

I’ve also learned that both deep ignorance and deep knowledge are superpowers. So much of what we think we know about wood movement ignores the idea of “hysteresis.” I wrote a column about it. Here’s a link.

Once you can see your work in the grand scheme of things like this, you can worry a little less.

Or, once you have no idea that this is a problem, you can worry a little less.

So mostly, my advice to our apprentices here is based on observing old work and setting aside modern advice. And saying yes.

Read more

Hey apprentices! A tape measure is a ubiquitous tool, and if you’re like me, you have more than one in your shop, house, car’s storage compartment, purse… In fact, I have at least one on each floor of my house and probably five in my basement shop.

For construction-sized work (i.e. measuring for a run of kitchen cabinets or a new flower bed), I like a 2…

Read more

Because writing can still feel daunting for me, many months ago Chris gave Katherine and me writing prompts to help make our blog responsibilities easier. It came as a long text in our work group chat one evening, separated into two parts – a number of bullet-point prompts for me and the same for Katherine. The list has come in clutch; I’ve since used n…

Read more

The world is filled with advice about what to do about squeeze-out. Why? They have a cool idea for how to remove it (a tool they sell, a drinking straw, the rhythm method).

And they have some sketchy ideas about why you should remove the glue using their method (finishing problems, they own stock in a straw company).

Read more

I’ve been asked what my process of painting is like, and I always find it hard to explain. For me it’s a very natural step one, two, three to get to the finished product – the main reason is that I’m comfortable with the medium of acrylic paint compared to something like charcoal (no hate to charcoal, it’s a beautiful, complex beast).

The chair sign I’m painting in this post is for a furniture show my dad’s in. The design is trickier to transfer compared to how I did it for my hare chair and hog chair. I’ll first go over my process for the chair sign and talk about the hare and hog chairs another week.

First, you have to really get to know your design and the size of your canvas. Clearly my reference photo isn’t the right scale for this small piece of cherry. You could always print out a photo in different sizes and use the graphite transfer method – covering the back of the piece of paper with pencil and tracing over the design that’s on the front of the paper onto your canvas – but I wanted to challenge myself. So I found the center of the chair and drew guidelines on the top and bottom that I must swear to never cross.

In art school you learn that a human body is “eight heads tall.” This means the length of a person’s head can fit eight times in their total height. When painting this chair, I learned this specific one is four heads tall (I broke up the comb to the arm, the arm to the seat, the seat to the stretchers and the stretchers to the bottom of the feet). These sections will vary depending on how high your comb is off the arm, or if it’s something like a low-back chair. The mid point is the seat, so I marked that on my centerline.

Keep these four equal sections in mind while sketching to keep the proportions correct. You want to start with small dots that map out where the edges of things will be, such as the hands, ends of the comb and the feet. Essentially, you make a “guide-bubble” for the whole chair to keep you in place.

From here, the important step is making strong, accurate lines connecting some of the dots together. Connect all the dots forming a skeleton of the chair (I forgot to take a picture of this step – oops). Be sure to press down lightly with your pencil so you don’t make grooves in the wood that you can’t get rid of. In this sketching stage, don’t worry about the details such as swellings on the sticks and stretchers. Instead, just make straight guidelines and add the detail in the next step. I find the fewer pencil marks the better – the marks really mud up the paint and require more layers to get a solid color.

Besides being confident in the lines you put down, the step that is most important is transferring the shapes you see. I learned this in fourth grade (Ms. Mitchell was a badass who wasn’t afraid to yell at bad children) and it’s been in the top drawer of my painting tool box ever since.

Read more

My newly added tail vise was missing just one thing… Enter, shop finish – the quick and dirty on how we make it.

Read more

One of the reasons we survive (occasionally, thrive) as book publishers is that we know a lot about giant rolls of paper.

Paper rolls for printing come in standard widths. So if you do your math right, you can squeeze the maximum number of pages from that roll with only a little scrap paper sent to the recycling mill.

Paper costs are one of the two bigges…

Read more

Students are sometimes shocked or bewildered by how I go about preparing surfaces for finishing on a chair. Basically, I get parts to shape with saws, shaves and rasps. Then I quickly homogenize the surfaces with #80-grit sandpaper backed by cork or a wooden block.

Scrape. Do…

Read more