Popular Woodworking Editors' Blog

The funny thing about teaching a woodworking class is that I always come away learning a few things, about woodworking and about other woodworkers.

I left Berea late Saturday afternoon, and the eight benches we built headed to their final destinations (with the exception of the bench built by Larry the Alaskan – he’s staying on for a couple other classes at Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking).

During my 110-mile drive home, I made a quick stop at Starbucks in Lexington to wake myself up and then sorted out the week in my head. Here’s what fell out:

• All thickness planers should have digital readouts. After a week of using Kelly’s Format-brand thickness planer, I am convinced that adding an accurate digital scale to my thickness planer should be my No. 1 shop improvement this fall. The Format’s digital readout allowed us to get boards to an accurate thickness and width. And when we made mistakes, we could make replacement parts with little effort. I’m not a real gizmo-oriented woodworker (no lasers in my shop). This is not a gizmo. If I had my way, all planers would come with a digital readout.

• All jointer fences should be welded at 90° to their beds. Years ago, we fixed the jointer at the magazine’s shop so you cannot move its fence off 90°. I’d forgotten what a boon this was until I had to use jointers with adjustable fences. Many of the mistakes students made this week were the result of the jointer’s fence slipping. If I had my way, all jointers would come with 90° fences as the standard. Tilting fences would be an accessory.

• Wax is great for drawboring. I wrote about this already. After assembling several more bench bases this way, I became even more convinced.

• Matches are good for repairs. As we assembled these benches, many of the students dinged up their workbench legs with mallet blows. Some of these dings could be soaked out with water, but Kelly’s clothes iron was broken, so we couldn’t steam them out (a very common trick). Kelly showed us all a trick where he soaked a dent with water, then waved a couple lit matches close to the ding. This heated up the wood (it didn’t char it), and raised the dent. Cool.

• Using both hand tools and power tools is how I like to work. Some of the students were afraid I was going to make them cut the 3”-deep mortises by hand. Or true up all the rough stock with handplanes. Other students were shocked when a bit and brace was the only tool that would do the job well. Or how nice the bases looked after being smooth planed. I like to be able to choose from all the tools they make for woodworking. Some require electricity. Some require you to learn to tune them like an instrument. All of them have their uses (that’s not entirely true; I still roll my eyes at some of the accessories and jigs sold for both hand and power tools).

• Woodworkers are the nicest people I’ve met. I used to be a newspaper reporter. And after four or five years of that, I found that I didn’t much like the people I wrote about. (And they didn’t like me either, I suspect.). Woodworkers are different. I’ve met thousands of them since I started here in 1996, and I have never met a better class of people. And this class of eight people was no different. I’d trust them all to watch my children. Really.

I made it back home around dinner time, and my wife had (blissfully) ordered us all some Indian food. And there was Belgian beer in the fridge. Then I held down the couch for the rest of the evening and slithered off to bed for an unheard-of 10 hours.

After a few days the soreness in my arms and shoulders will dissipate, but the result of our labors – the eight Holtzapffel-style workbenches – will get set up and tuned up. And that is when the real work begins.
 
— Christopher Schwarz

I don’t know if it’s my upbringing or some sort of deep-South formality that was transmitted to me via a Sonic cherry lime-aid, but I always wear a collard shirt when I work or travel.

Actually, it probably was my upbringing. Legend has it that my grandmother never wore a pair of pants a day in her life – only skirts.

So I was a little uncomfortable stripping down to a T-shirt today to demonstrate how to flatten a benchtop. But it was so flipping hot and humid on Kelly Mehler’s front lawn that I was willing to shave myself bald to get cool if need be.

Despite my discomfort, I was really pleased to be giving this demonstration on a Friday afternoon. All of the students have assembled their Holtzapffel-style workbenches and have fit their end vises. Tomorrow we just have to install the twin-screw vises – and we have most of that work done already.

So when the eight students roll out of here tomorrow, they’ll each have a functioning workbench – including one workbench that is already certifiably dead flat, thanks to the planing demonstration today.

What is cool about this class is that each of these benches is different. The Holtzapffel design is flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of vises, from old ones salvaged from other benches, to a Lie-Nielsen face vise used in the end-vise position. All of these benches are slightly different heights and lengths and widths to meet the needs of its maker.

And all of them look fantastic. We had seven of them on the lawn today, all of them turtle-backed on sawhorses as the students merrily installed their end vises in a notch cut into the top with just a handful of chisel chops (thanks to the Makita circular saw jig I brought along).

Despite the large-scale joinery, the recalcitrant maple, the unusual fastening techniques (bolts and drawboring) all of the students turned out benches that will easily last hundreds of years.

In fact, we joked about this a little bit before lunch. As we were hammering home some drawbore pegs, I noted that those pegs would be tight for several generations. One of the students remarked that after he died his bench would probably end up in somebody’s high-end kitchen, or a plant stand in someone’s nursery or in an antique mall to hold a wide variety of ugly items for sale.

And that might be true, but if we build enough pieces of fantastic furniture on our benches, then someone will keep them safe for us. I guard a bench myself. My grandfather’s bench is where I spent my summers with him, building nice things for his house (bookshelves with split-bamboo turnings) and junky stuff for me (a ring made from a silver quarter, stands for my model ships).

Handmade benches are one of the most personal pieces of your work that you can pass down. They are not only an expression of what you think is quality workmanship, but their passing to another is the passing of an obligation. Will your progeny use it to show off their wisterias? Or their workmanship?

I wonder about these eight benches and what the next 100 years holds for them. Of course, I’m also still sweating on my keyboard hours after that planing demonstration, so I’m also wondering if I should take off my T-shirt and drink a beer (also a result of my deep-South upbringing).

— Christopher Schwarz

This is my favorite picture of the ones I've taken while documenting the class. Here we're routing out the cavities for the bolts that hold the workbench bases together.

When you teach anything – animal husbandry, frog gigging or brain surgery – here’s some advice for you: Don’t give demonstrations after lunch.

Today in class we had a lot to accomplish; the goal was to get the bases ready to assemble on Friday morning. It was an ambitious plan, and the students worked quietly and diligently all morning to tune up their tenons and mortises.

Lunch today was shrimp Creole (Kelly Mehler always provides hearty hot lunches). And it smelled really good. I didn’t actually eat the Creole. You see, it’s not that I have a thing against chomping our crustacean chums, it’s that I have a thing against lunch. If I eat a big lunch, then I want to crawl under my workbench and take a nap. I learned this in kindergarten, where it was encouraged. Then they beat it out of you, which is no fair.

So I eat a light lunch. Greek yogurt. Some fruit. Maybe a cup of coffee. That way I’m quasi-perky come 1 p.m.

After lunch, one of the students, we’ll call him “Rob the Canadian,” asked if I would give a demonstration on drawboring. Rob the Canadian was at the point in his project where he needed the demonstration to proceed with his workbench. He’s a meticulous craftsman, incredibly driven, and he is a few steps ahead of the rest of the class as a result.

A little voice inside my head said that drawboring and digestion don’t play well together. But I wanted to keep Rob on track. Plus, I beat the tar out of things with a mallet during the demonstration, and I say funny words like “old groat.” So I agreed.

And 20 minutes into my demonstration Rob the Canadian drifted (briefly) off to sleep.

There’s more to the story (including some fairly hilarious teasing that continued long into the day), but we’ll just let that part of the story stay in Berea.

After waking up Rob the Canadian, I continued the demonstration. And that’s when another student, we’ll call him “Larry the Alaskan,” dropped a bomb on me. Larry the Alaskan recently took a three-month course in timber framing, and they also used drawboring (albeit on a much bigger scale).

One of the most stressful parts of drawboring is driving in the peg through the offset holes you have bored. The peg can pull up your joint tight (that’s good), or it can explode (that’s bad). Larry the Alaskan said that he was taught to simply wax their pins before driving them.

So we tried it on one of the student’s bases. All I can say is “wow.” Driving a 5”-long waxed oak pin through hard maple has never been easier. In the past, I’ve been driving my pegs while they were coated with nothing, hide glue or yellow glue. All three of the techniques have advantages and disadvantages.

But coating them with wax? That is genius. It’s such a good tip, I almost don’t feel like I should get paid for today’s work. Well, unless you count the bit of sleeping therapy I provided.

— Christopher Schwarz

I’ve taught eight woodworking classes this year, and I can tell you that every class has a Wednesday. This is the day when you work your hinder off (my hinder is long gone; ask my wife) and you don’t really seem to be much further along at the end of the day than when you started.

Oh, and this is the day when the instructor ruins some of your workpieces.

The day started great. We took the tops out of the clamps and cut them all to size on Kelly Mehler’s Felder table saw with a sliding crosscut table. Yes, the sliding table could handle a 3” x 24” x 8’ maple top. But it took a small army to porter each top in place.

And while Kelly was crosscutting, I demonstrated how to crosscut the tops to size with a Makita circular saw and an edge guide. No surprises here: With the Felder 10’ away, nobody opted to use the circular saw.

Then it was onto the detail work: cutting the tenons and dressing the legs. For the tenons, we set up two stations: One was a table saw with a dado stack that cut the tenons in one whack. The other setup used a table saw to cut the shoulders and a band saw to cut the cheeks.

I set up the machines, but I botched the setup on the table saw that simply trimmed the shoulders. I could blame the Europeans and their fancy table saw fences, but I won’t. It was me. When I thought I was locking down the saw’s rip fence I was actually just locking down the fence’s micro-adjust setting. So the fence moved and one of the students ended up making tenons with progressively longer shoulders.

Kelly had some replacement parts in the wings, so we quickly got back on track again.

Upstairs, the handwork began. I gave lessons in handplane sharpening and setup, and the students began dressing their maple legs with planes. There is a reason they call it “hard” maple. The stuff is hard to work. So I helped some students tune their planes a little higher. And we still have some tuning ahead of us.

I also got to give a demonstration in the care and feeding of augers and the bit and brace. By the end of the week, I suspect the students are going to be sleeping with their braces. Not because they love them so, but because their arms will be frozen while clutching them. Workbenches require a lot of boring.

Wednesday is now almost over. And Thursday is always a good day. These sticks of maple that we have been fussing over are about to become assembled workbench bases. It’s like making fire: Things get exciting when you put two sticks of wood together.

— Christopher Schwarz