The Joiner and Cabinet Maker: A Book Review
I spent much of the weekend reading the newest offering from Lost Art Press. It was a very good weekend. The Joiner and Cabinetmaker is sold as a reprint of an 1839 account of the life of an apprentice cabinetmaker but it is so much more.
I’m an old book nut. By that I mean I’m old and I like books. It’s also true that I do have a soft spot for old books. Sometimes I like them because of the cover. Sometimes it has more to do with the contents. My favorite “old book” is my copy of Tact, Push and Principle and it qualifies high on both scores. This book, published in 1880, is a guidebook for young men. It has title names like “Success”, “Thoroughness”, “Industry” and “Perserverence” as it attempts to teach the basic lessons of being successful in life. The original Joiner and the Cabinetmaker (JCM) was published in 1839, while the new reprint is of the 1883 edition. Thus, both of these books are addressing the same audience.
I was reminded of Tact, Push and Principle as I read The Joiner and Cabinetmaker as both books speak to how to grow up; how to approach learning; how to excel. The difference, of course, is that JCM teaches these lessons as it explains good woodworking skills and practices.
The 1839 Joiner and the Cabinetmaker was written by an anonymous author. The new book of the same title is authored by Joel Moskowitz and Christopher Schwarz. If you’re unfamiliar with these guys you probably live on Pluto. Joel is the owner/operator of Tools for Working Wood while Chris is the editor-in-chief of Popular Woodworking and Woodworking magazine.
The new JCM is a book within a book. The reprinted book is roughly 100 pages of its 373 pages and some of those 100 pages are extensive footnotes by Joel and Chris. This 1800s text is encased in a wealth of new material. Joel writes an introductory section that presents information about early woodworking practice, including insights into much of the early documentation of it.
This sets the stage for the actual Joiner and Cabinetmaker text, which follows a young boy, Thomas, as he goes through an apprenticeship in a cabinetmakers shop. While numerous projects are part of his learning process, 3 are emphasized. In these, discussions of wood selection, tool use and other techniques are discussed. The pleasant narrative style makes for a very pleasant trip through 1800s woodworking and the array of hand tool techniques that are described.
Clearly, however, Joel and Chris wanted the Joiner and Cabinetmaker to be more than simply a historical text and the last 150 pages reflect this view. With words and photos, Chris steps through the construction of the three projects that Thomas executes during his apprenticeship. Each teaches a set of skills and thus Chris’s “how to” portion of the book is a treasure trove for those wanting to master hand tool skills and/or to see what can be accomplished with them.
To make this book even more useful, there is an associated DVD available that provides Sketch Up plans and narrated slide shows of the three projects. This DVD is invaluable and I highly recommend you buying the book/DVD set.
We live in a wonderful time for woodworkers. Our community has rediscovered the value of hand tools and we’ve finally got companies who produce good quality hand tools, something that was lacking only 10-15 years ago. What many need, however, are books that show them projects, planned and executed using hand tools and The Joiner and Cabinetmaker is just such a book. I highly recommend it.
Cheers — Larry
Cutting Clean Notches for My Cabinet
When I did the post on creating the spoon holders for my cabinet project I didn’t think that cutting the notches was worth mentioning. Two things changed that view. First, I got two emails asking me how I was going to do it. Second, I tried cutting them on a table saw and then with a bandsaw and I wasn’t pleased at all with the results.
The problem was that these notches are 1) front and center in the cabinet (ie. visible) and 2) I saw a lengthy period of trying to sand them smooth if I used either of these techniques. I suspect that those who asked me how I was going to do it have already been down this road.
But as a guy who also works in miniature, I have lots of fine sawing implements. One such implement is my Gyros saw, which is available from Woodcraft stores and online. This little guy is about 5″ long and sports 60 teeth per inch (tpi). It cuts slowly but the cut is baby-butt smooth. I had 60 notches to cut which meant 120 cuts. As I said, this saw cuts slowly but once I’d marked the cuts to be made, I used a bench hook for support and those 120 cuts took me 16 minutes. There was some coffee slurping going on as well. I’ll probably touch the edges with sandpaper to remove the sharp edge but otherwise no sanding will be required.
Cheers — Larry
Just a Plain Old Plane
A couple eagle-eye tool aficionados asked me about the hand plane that showed up in a couple recent posts. Several years ago I bought it via eBay, not really knowing what I was getting. Do you know how, if you have lemons, you’re supposed to make lemonade? I made lemonade.
All I can say for sure is that it’s a Defiance-brand plane. I’ll leave it to the tool experts to know model numbers and such. I buy and use planes but have very little expertise in the tool name game. While I know that Defiance was a Leonard Bailey brand that Stanley bought and sold again (probably making Bailey ever more angry with them), this plane is more recent than those transactions.
What I do know is that, with a caveat, I like the plane. It has the virtue of being the length/weight of a #3 but it sports a 2″ blade, unlike the typical Stanley #3 which has a 1 3/4″ blade. I like to have a #3-size smoother as I do a fair amount of small-stock work and this smaller size works very well as a smoother. It’s also nice when working a small troubled area on a larger panel which is where I appreciate the wider blade.
The caveat I mentioned comes in the form of what you don’t see in this photo. This plane has no frog adjustment screw. This makes it a bit more difficult to set the frog as you have to loosen the two frog screws and then nudge it which is somewhat hit-or-miss. So, I do it as little as possible.
I’ve gotten a lot of use out of this plane but I doubt I would have bought it if I’d known more about it. It is an example, though, of how one can find virtue in less than optimal designs.
Cheers — Larry
Making a Plane Mallet
Sometimes I’m asked where I got the plan for this or that project. Most times I don’t have a plan but in this case I do. Here it is:
Bob Roziaeski, chief cook and bottle washer at the Logan Cabinet Shoppe produces some of the finest podcasts you’ll ever see on the use of handtools to shape wood. His recent podcast, Hand Plane Tune Up goes through the process of fettling a typical steel-body plane as well as a wooden-body plane. During this second session Bob wields the hammer you see in the photo. As Bob is so much better at adjusting wooden planes than I am I know this is because of his jazzy hammer and that the one I use is one step up from a tack hammer.
And so it began (phrase stolen from Lord of the Rings), I gonna make me a jazzy hammer too. I got the idea not only from Bob’s podcast but the fact that I was rummaging in my scrap box and right there, on top of everything was a block of paduak that looked almost like a Roziaeski hammer head ™. Now I wouldn’t recommend padauk as the ideal hammer material but gosh, I had it and all it took to get it to proper size was a short time on a shooting board to get the ends square. I added to this a stick of maple for a handle and I was, as they say here in Quebec bien equipped!
I began by working over the surfaces of the headblock with a plane and scraper.
As this was a through-tenon I marked out the mortise on one side and then drilled two small holes on each end so that I could reference them while chopping from the other side. I chopped a shallow mortise from that side so that I wouldn’t get a bunch of tear out and then started the heavy mortising from the other side. On to the handle.
The first step was to cut it to length. My “plan” suggested this to be somewhere around one-foot so that’s what I cut.
I marked the base of the tenon. This was determined by the depth of the hammer head plus a bit. You choose the size of your bit. It doesn’t really matter, though, as it will be cut off before the day is done.
I then marked the tenon sides. Some might only mark two sides at this point as you really lose half the markings when you make the first two tenon cuts. I prefer to mark the whole thing so I can compare it to the mortise before I start cutting. Remarking is quick as the gauge is already set.
This is where your ‘cut to the line’ practice pays off. I cut the two sides and then use a bench hook to cut them off at the shoulder. I remark the short sides of the tenon and cut those as well. Easy peasy. If you don’t have a lot of practice with this, it’s best to cut the tenon fat and use a shoulder plane to bring it to size. It’s likely that you’ll have to use that plane to fit the tenon to the mortise in any case.
Before worrying about fitting the tenon, I shaped the handle. Most of this was done with a spokeshave, followed up by a rasp. This is really the fun part as it happens quickly and you get to play with the shaping. I finished up with some sandpaper.
Now’s the time to slow down. You need to clean up both tenon and mortise so they fit together. Repeated checking of this fit as you remove material is better than wishing you had when you find out that you’ve removed too much material. The end of this process is to clean up the shoulder of the tenon so that it fits snug to the bottom of the hammer head.
Once all that is done, cut a slot down the middle of the tenon for the a wedge. The parts should look like this.
I used this little scrap of padauk for my wedge. Notice the bit of wood I put between the padauk and my bench hook fence. This provided an angular cut that you can see in this photo. I then flipped the piece on the left and cut it straight, providing me with a thin wedge-shaped piece. Sorry, my photo of the wedge was out of focus.
Because your mortise and tenon fit so nicely together, when you pound the wedge into the slot is should produce a very strong handle/head connection, leaving you with almost nothing else to do. I used a flush-cut saw to remove the protruding tenon and then applied a couple coats of boiled linseed oil and a bit of wax. I tend to use either oil or shellac as a finish on my tools as 1) it makes them feel good in my hands and 2) they are very easy to freshen up as they age.
Thanks, Bob, for both the plan and the inspiration.
Cheers — Larry
A Bit of Boring Activity on the Cabinet
I’ve mentioned a cabinet I’m making in previous posts. This cabinet is destined to hold the client’s spoon collection and so I’ve got to install holders for the spoons. Back when I was selecting wood I cut up a bunch of 3/8″ maple strips to use for this purpose and this post is but a few words about turning these strips into spoon holders.
The first thing I needed to do was cut the strips to length. At this stage I cut them 1/16″ longer than the 17 1/2″ I’ll need as I want to fit them to the inside of the case and wanted a bit of wiggle room.
Next step was to surface/smooth all four sides of each strip. As they came from a table saw it only required a pass or three with a #5 to get them straight enough to please me and some work with a smoother prepared them for finish. I relieved the front two edges just slightly with a block plane to eliminate the sharp edge.
Drilling holes is easy. Getting them in the right place – harder. This is particularly true when you’re going to drill 60 of them and they’ve got to be equally spaced. I chose to elicit the help of a couple easily constructed jigs.
To get 12 holes along a 17 1/2″ stick I needed the first hole 1 3/16″ in from the end and then 1 3/8″ spacing between the rest of the holes. I made a simple jig to position the first hole, and a forstner bit was dropped through the jig hole to create the first hole on a stick.
I also made a jig that had a pin that sits in one hole and provides 2 holes showing the positions of the next two holes. With this jig it was easy to march along the sticks, drilling the remaining holes.
I still have to cut slots into each of the holes and shallow reliefs on each end of the sticks so they’ll fit nicely against the frame-and-panel cabinet back but otherwise they’re ready.
Cheers — Larry
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