Lost Art Press Blog
The founders of Lost Art Press – Lucy May, Christopher Schwarz and John Hoffman – are trying to restore the balance between hand and machine work by unearthing the lost art of hand skills and explaining how they can be integrated with the machinery in the modern shop to help produce furniture that is crisp, well-proportioned, stout and quickly made.
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Woodworking in America: Country and Gospel
November 16, 2008
The waitress rushed up to me at the cash register with a desperate look in her eye. In defense, I held out a $6 tip, but she ignored it and fixed me in her gaze. “Will you sign a placemat? Or a napkin?” she asked. “Do you have something you could sign?” I shook my head and started walking to the exit. “Sign anything,” she said. “The cooks will be so disappointed if you don’t.” This was the final and odd scene of my four-day odyssey at the Woodworking...
Bathroom Cabinetry: Coming Out of the Water Closet
November 1, 2008
Years ago, we performed a year-long survey at Popular Woodworking to find out what sort of projects appealed to our readers. We were interested in what furniture styles they liked, but we were also interested in what furniture forms (tables, bookshelves etc.) that they most liked to build. So in every issue we asked the readers to rate which projects they liked. After a year of data, we were shocked at some of the results. Here was the wildest finding: Our readers...
Workbenches in use.
October 5, 2008
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Coming Soon: Joseph Moxon’s ‘The Art of Joinery’
September 17, 2008
When I first became intrigued by hand-tool woodworking, I kept encountering people who would say things such as: “Yes, but Moxon says jointer planes should have their cutters sharpened straight across – not curved.” “Moxon says you should cut mortises this way.” “Moxon says you should test a handsaw by bending it.” To appropriate Jan Brady of “The Brady Bunch”: Moxon. Moxon. Moxon! At the time, I thought that I should really try to take a woodworking...
New Saw!
September 14, 2008
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September 7, 2008
What do you think of this clock! Nice isn’t it. Yes and no. Yes that is my house and no I didn’t build it. This is a Shaker clock built by Glen Huey built for Popular Woodworking issue number 163, 08/01/2007. As a woodworker, I have a strong aversion to purchasing furniture. When I see a piece of furniture that I like, I say to myself “I can make that and I will be able to justify a new tool”. ...
D.L. Barrett & Sons Plow Plane: A Total Gloat
August 27, 2008
During the last 12 months I've taken on a lot of extra freelance work. The money probably should be going into my children's college fund, but instead I decided to spend a chunk of it on a traditional beech plow plane from D.L. Barrett & Sons in Barrie, Ontario. Dan Barrett is a 25-year veteran of the trades and has been teaching woodworking and making handplanes for a long time. His sons, Kyle and Jeremy, are both involved in the business. Kyle has been...
Southern Yellow Pine and drywall
August 20, 2008
Once upon a time, after finishing a nice dinner, a couple bottles of wine, some beer, vodka and gin someone said “John don’t you have a bench to move”. The referenced bench was the 8' long Nicholson English bench built by Christopher Schwarz and made from Southern Yellow Pine. My shop is in the basement which lies on the other side of a tight turn at the bottom of the steps. Earlier in the evening I had taken out a tape and measured the space. It seemed to me that there was...
Filming a DVD at Lie-Nielsen
August 14, 2008
Last summer we filmed a new DVD on workbenches. When I say "we" I mean Chris Schwarz, Jeff, AJ and Mandy. I helped as I could, moving benches (three benches were used and rotated through), turning on and off lights, chiseling an area of a workbench and whatever else I could do. I also learned what a "Grip" is. You know when watching the credits at the end of a movie you see the term "Grip". In order to fix a light issue,...
Altering the Plan
August 6, 2008
John completes the Trestle Table I must admit that I do not like the corbels on Chris’s trestle table. I don’t like the way the ends look rounded. Being a smart guy, I just incorporated the width that the corbel adds to the stretcher to get the total width of my version. My finished stretcher was 7” wide instead of 6” that Chris stated in the plan. That said I was ready to paint the base and put a finish on the top. Then I got a chance to speak to Chris and...
Hinge Question
July 25, 2008
I was able to get a resource for the ramped mortis I used when installing hinges on my plane cabinet. As you recall I ramped one side of the mortis to accomodate the non-swaged hinges. This of course was not an original idea of mine and it generated some great thougths on the blog. Below is a page from Charles Hayward's “Carpentry for Beginners”. If you look at figure 2 you can see that he is showing a ramp for one side of the non-swaged hinge. The file is a word document. ...
American Wall Cupboard
July 22, 2008
When you design a piece of furniture to build, there are three well-worn paths (some might call them ruts) to follow. The first path is to design a piece in a wholly original style. This actually happens about once or twice a century, and its rarity is why we don’t have furniture styles such as “Early Bill,” “Middle Chuck” or the “Late Butch Period.” Few people alive can claim they have successfully launched a style, but don’t let that stop you...
John’s Plane Cabinet
July 18, 2008
Here are pics of the completed Plane cabinet. I haven’t forgot the issue that was raised in the comments section related to “ramping” the mortis I will get back to that when I have something intelligent to say. Here are some “learning points” I got from finishing this project. I had a problem installing the molding around the lid. The problem started when I discovered that the lid was a hair too narrow in width, meaning the molding would not go over the box....
Hinges
July 13, 2008
John is explaining a problem installing non swaged hinges… I recently completed a plane cabinet. Yes I actually completed something! This was a cabinet following Chris’s plans, that holds all my planes. I made it out of walnut which has become my favorite wood. Anyway, I needed to put quality hinges on the lid and since my past experience with no-mortis hinges caused me to turn the air blue, I went with a traditional hinge. I hoped to avoid one of my last problems, that...
How to Buy a $1 Chisel (And How Not)
July 3, 2008
No matter how much (or little) money you have, if you are clever enough you can score an exquisite chisel for about $1. I was reminded this week when I picked up some items on eBay and had to take a few extra unwanted items in the lot, including three plastic-handled chisels. Two of them were Craftsman chisels that were dead ringers for my grandfather’s 1970s-era tools. The third was a Stanley 1-1/4”-wide 720 chisel with a translucent yellow handle and steel...
Bread Board Ends
June 29, 2008
John is working on completing the Trestle Table I used my tax stimulus money to buy a flat screen TV. The problem is that I have to walk past the TV to get to the shop. So I was enjoying TV in all it flatness when I saw the end of the table sticking out of the shop. It seemed to beckon me as it lay there cupped and in need of work. But, I am a man, so I grabbed the remote and ignored it. Now I am back at it and dealing with the cup across the width of the table. The...
Designing a Wright Table
June 23, 2008
As a kid, probably the first furniture style that I ever became aware of was the Prairie style, the strongly rectilinear forms that most people associate with Frank Lloyd Wright. My dad had lots of books about architecture lying around the house that he used to help him design the two houses for our farm outside Hackett, Ark. I used these books to help me design model houses that I built using Legos and wooden blocks. Lucky for me, Prairie-style houses and furniture...
Andre J. Roubo: Translation of “L’Art Du Menuisier”
June 7, 2008
One of the most important early books on woodworking has been indecipherable to everyone who cannot read 18th-century French. Andre Roubo’s landmark five-volume “L’Art Du Menuisier” is difficult to find – reprints are available mostly in Europe and at Tools for Working Wood – and even harder to actually use. To my knowledge, no one has attempted a systematic translation of these books, which cover furniture-making, carpentry, marquetry, carriage-building...
Tricking the Banana
June 1, 2008
One of the most common errors when planing is to create a gentle banana shape on one face – where the ends of the board end up thinner than the middle. The cause of this problem resides both in you and in your tool. First off, divide the sole of your plane into two regions: The infeed side of the sole before the blade (the toe). And the outfeed side of the sole behind the blade (the heel). And remember this: The blade of your plane isn’t co-planar with the...
