Popular Woodworking Editors' Blog

Woodworking is a solitary pursuit. Even at our shop at the magazine, it’s unusual for a couple of us to get together to work on something in the shop. Usually, desperation has to be heavy in the air before any of us dare ask for assistance.

Last spring, for example, Senior Editor Glen Huey helped me out with processing some stock for a class in Michigan. He saved my buttocks (thanks again, Glen). And more recently, Senior Editor Robert W. Lang needed some help getting the shiplapped shelf in his cool new bench ready for a photo shoot. Megan stepped in there, if I remember right. (And if I remember wrong, she will tell me.)

But these are press-in-your-yearbook red-letter days.

Even when I teach woodworking classes, I try to encourage students to work with one another. I ask them to to spot their benchmate’s errant sawing. To correct their wildacious (not a word, Megan, I know) boring. Or to simply help one another hold some parts together while the other drives a few screws.

Sometimes they help each other a bit. Sometimes they drift off into some other problem of their own.

So today we had to glue up an ANSI-certified, totally homogonized metric buttload of workbench tops for the class I’m teaching at Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking. I’ve glued up a lot of workbench tops solo, but I can tell you that it is easier than biscuit joinery if you have a team of people slathering on glue, applying clamps and beating the living snot out of the miscreant boards.

Today was somewhat of a miracle. We glued up 31 laminations using a gallon and a half of Titebond Extend, more than 150 clamps and equal amount of sweat and saucy pirate talk. And while all this was going on, the students milled all their workbench legs to size using the jointer, planer and the God-awesome Felder table saw in Kelly’s shop.

At 5 p.m. and 28 laminations into the day, I was beginning to wane. But then I watched in stunned amazement as one of the students who had no vested interest in a particular lamination take charge of the entire situation to make sure that those three sticks of wood were glued together without a single gap.

That simple act took me through the next three laminations with great ease, as did the two Stella Artois beers that Kelly gave me.

Tomorrow is another day of brutal milling. We have to joint and plane all the laminations to make bigger laminations. And we have to mill the stretchers that go between the legs. Normally, I’d be resigned to this as another necessary step to get to the “good part” – joinery and fine-fitting. But with this group of students, I think we’ve already found the good part.

— Christopher Schwarz

Read "Build the Holtzapffel Workbench Part 3: Grit"

This was the scene right as lunch was served. Sure, we'd used $2,000 worth of clamps at this point, but the real work was still ahead of us.

Kelly Mehler and I both live in Kentucky, but his Kentucky is far different than mine. Tonight I packed up my truck in Ft. Mitchell – a suburb of Cincinnati – and made the 100-mile trek from the city to the Kelly Mehler's School of Woodworking in Berea, Ky.

Where I live, you can judge how close you are to the city’s center by how many Starbucks there are at each highway exit. As the city fell away tonight, their numbers diminished until I was confronted with soldiering on while sucking on an Excedrin or taking a chance on the coffee at Chester Fried Chicken.

By the time I reached Kelly’s school it was twilight. I unloaded my gear without incident, and as I write this blog entry the loudest noise is the crickets. And the brightest light is a toss-up between my laptop’s screen and the moon.

Tomorrow morning I start teaching a six-day class in building the Holtzapffel-style workbench I constructed last year for Woodworking Magazine. It’s a great workbench and is the one I have in my shop at home. But building eight workbenches in a week has turned out to be a logistical struggle for Kelly, who has been prepping stock for the class for too many days now.

You see, when Kelly and I decided to offer this class we really wanted to give the students a shot at actually completing the bench. Many people I’ve talked to who have taken bench-building classes have remarked that they only were able to work on the bench’s top.

So Kelly has been milling maple and gluing up blanks for legs and vise chops for days and days. When we start work tomorrow morning, we’ll have some chit-chat at first, but we’ll be gluing up the tops before lunch if all goes as planned.

The wood is waiting for them in four enormous piles on the ground floor of the shop. Each student’s top is dry-clamped and stacked on a cart. By the stairs is a large mound of leg blanks. Next to that mound is the stretchers and the vise chops. And over by the mortiser is a small army of wooden vise screws and all the other little bits of wood that will make the bench come together.

It’s going to be a week of physical exercise, but I expect the pace to be relaxed. It’s always that way when I teach at this school, and it is probably the result of the pastoral location and Kelly’s unflappable Zen-like vibe.

And the coffee helps, too.

Speaking of coffee, as I tooled through the rolling Bluegrass hills this evening I did spy one curious development on the landscape. At the Richmond exit – one exit away from Berea – they have a brand new Starbucks by the highway.

You could see it as sign of progress, or as something else.
 
— Christopher Schwarz

Read "Build the Holtzapffel Workbench Part 2: Glue"