This past weekend, I taught a 2-day workshop at Lie-Nielsen we called “Cut the Cord: Build a Table with Hand Tools”. My goal for the weekend was to instill a pre-industrial mindset and approach into the minds of the 15 students in attendance. The project was a taper-legged table from rough cut white pine (a simplified version of the table in our upcoming "Tables" video in our Apprenticeship series ). They needed to work fast - no time for fussy nitpicking. To set the tone, we looked at some examples of pre-industrial work and then watched a brief early 20th-century film of Swedish woodworkers. They were all blown away at the workmanlike pace these guys kept. Then I sent them to their...
Today began the second week of the Apprenticeship: Tables video shoot. It’s taking us longer than the Foundations video because I am doing more than showing techniques – I’m actually building a full piece. The table I’m building is loosely based on one I fell in love with at Old Sturbridge Village. It has the back legs angled beneath the table’s single drop leaf. It also has ‘H’ stretchers between the legs. On the original, the drawer is at the end rail but I decided to put mine at the front. It is a wonderfully quirky table that incorporates so many of the features of period table construction. It’s perfect for this video. The first five days...
After shipping out orders yesterday morning, Mike and I spent time reviewing the outline and logistics for a video shoot next week. We’ve been discussing this second video in the Apprenticeship series since we released the Foundations video last year. The idea behind this series is to bring you into the shop to learn the skills every pre-industrial cabinetmaker learned. It is designed to teach you the skills and mindset to approach any project without elaborate full-scale plans or expensive (and dangerous) machines. Rather than show you how to build one specific special piece, we decided to approach this series the way you’d learn in a real apprenticeship setting: you learn the form. This teaching model is perfect for...
Wyeth Day Klein born May 20th 9:51 a.m. It’s a good thing I was home from Handworks because three hours after the show started on Friday, Julia’s water broke. I left work right then and met her and the midwives at our house. She labored through the evening until the next morning when our third little man entered the world in a tub in our bedroom. The birth of a child is an awesome experience. Mama and baby are doing great. I’m on paternity leave taking care of the older boys and attempting to keep up on laundry, dishes, and homestead chores. I’ll go back to work half-time next week. So, it was time to set up the co-sleeper...
Today started out much like yesterday (rainy, cold, and windy), but that didn't stop the crowds from gathering outside the Festhalle Barn quite early to await Roy Underhill's presentation. Once the doors opened, the atmosphere was electric and excited. And damp. As I started in to find a place to listen, I received a text from Joshua announcing the birth of their third son, Wyeth Day! What awesome news to receive. Everyone agreed: even though we missed Joshua at Handworks, we were extremely glad he wasn't here! Congrats, Klein family! The talk was wonderful and hilarious, as usual. I can't think of a more amicable presence than Roy. He really does light up a room. The day flowed by, filled...
We set out early yesterday morning for the last leg of our 1700-mile journey to Iowa for Handworks 2017. After passing through endless fields of newly-sprouted corn, crossing the mighty Mississippi, entering another time zone, and being awed by The World's Largest Truck Stop, we made it to the Amana Colonies. It's a good thing, too - the game of "Spot a Windmill, Win a Quarter" was losing hold on our three kids. After driving slowly and rubbernecking past many beautiful stone and brick buildings, we found our spot in the Millwright Shop. My wife, Megan, and our kids helped me lug the benches, display, magazines, tools, DVDs, 19th-century chest-over-drawers, etc. into the shop as our poor van gave an audible sigh...
At long last, the new eBooks are now available! Over and over we’ve heard from readers that being able to see the guts of the pieces that are only ever displayed behind velvet ropes has been revolutionary to their shop practice. Seeing what historic hand-tool work looks like is inspiring and empowering because you quickly realize which parts are important to fettle and which aren’t. The feedback we’ve got about the photo essays in each issue of M&T has been encouraging. People said they loved the Federal Boston secretary in Issue One and the New England Queen Anne drop-leaf table in Issue Two. These new books of photography showcase the hundreds of other photographs we couldn’t fit in print....
At the end of this week, the biggest hand tool woodworking event in the world is happening in Amana, Iowa. If you don’t know already, Handworks is legendary. Woodworkers and tool makers are traveling from all over the world to convene in a barn (and various outbuildings) at the Amana Colonies in Iowa. These folks are serious, passionate tool nerds. Every boutique tool maker and their mother is going to be there. When the organizer, Jameel Abraham, emailed us to ask if we wanted to participate, Mike and I were stoked. Yes. Yes. Yes. No matter what hurdles we had to jump over, we would be there. We started making arrangements for the big journey a long time ago....
Roy Underhill's books, I believe, are vastly underrated. It seems that every page contains not only loads of useful information about hand-tool woodworking, but historical context, interesting anecdotes, folklore, and typical Roy hilarity. Really, stuff that you can't find anywhere else. Paging through one of his books (The Woodwright's Companion) recently, I stumbled upon a short chapter about whetstones. The popular opinion of today is that we need a wide array of dead-flat, precisely-graded sharpening stones in order to keep our tools sharp and usable, but this isn't the case historically. Roy mentions that in many old towns in Europe, the stone step of the stairway of a certain house was often discovered incidentally to be a good whetstone, and...
Saturday’s ‘Build a Box’ workshop at Haystack was fun. If you haven’t been there, the campus is gorgeous in its tucked-away water-front location. The story goes that, back in the 60s, they chose this location based on its remoteness and solitude. They wanted to find a place where no highway would ever be built. I would say this little island off the coast of Maine was the perfect choice. Off the beaten path is an understatement. I had a great variety of students: male and female, young and old. There were 10 students, most of whom had little no experience using hand tools. We started the day off discussing proportional design with dividers and then decided on dimensions for...
