More of Roy Underhill’s The Woodwright’s Shop Classic Collection, Omnibus Ebook: Includes The Woodwright's Apprentice, The Woodwright's Eclectic Workshop, and The Woodwright's Guide

More of Roy Underhill’s The Woodwright’s Shop Classic Collection, Omnibus E-Book

Includes The Woodwright's Apprentice, The Woodwright's Eclectic Workshop, and The Woodwright's Guide

Roy Underhill

The Woodwright's Apprentice

The Woodwright's Eclectic Workshop

The Woodwright's Guide

ISBN: 978-1-4696-1278-2

Published by UNC Press

THE WOODWRIGHT’S APPRENTICE

THE WOODWRIGHT’S APPRENTICE

Twenty Favorite Projects from The Woodwright’s Shop

by Roy Underhill

With Drawings & Photographs by the Author

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill & London

© 1996 Roy Underhill

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Underhill, Roy.

The woodwright’s apprentice: twenty favorite projects from the Woodwright’s shop / by Roy Underhill.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-2304-0 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-8078-4612-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Cabinetwork. 2. Furniture making.

3. Woodwork—History. I. Woodwright’s shop

(Television program) II. Title.

TT197.U55 1996 96-14911

684’.08—dc20 CIP

paper 11 10 09 08 07 7 6 5 4 3

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Folding Workbench

2 Tool Tote

3 Jefferson’s Book Box

4 Sailor’s Sea Chest

5 Standing Desk

6 New Mexico Chest

7 Civil War Quilting Frame

8 Sawbuck Trestle Table

9 Standing Embroidery Hoop

10 Screwdrive Candle Stand

11 Shaker Sewing Stand

12 English Walnut Music Stand

13 Man’s Chair from the Ivory Coast

14 Jefferson’s Walking-Stick Chair

15 Moravian Chair

16 Revolving Windsor Chair

17 Spiral Carving

18 Bellows

19 Wooden Lock and Key

20 Gunpowder Shovel

21 Sharpening

Glossary of Terms

Appendix A: Contents of the Woodwright’s Shop Books

Appendix B: Tool and Trade Groups

Appendix C: Mail Order Tool Companies

Suggestions for Further Reading

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To my family, Jane, Rachell, and Eleanor, thanks for helping out in ways too numerous to mention. Everyone helped with the photographs, and even Salty agreed to appear on the cover with Eleanor. Thanks also to Gregg Davenport for the shot taken at the corner of the National Gallery that appears in the section on sharpening.

Thanks to Pam Pettengell, William Barker, Margie Weiler, Judy Kristoffersen, and Gary and Carolyn Morton for their friendship and support during the writing of this book. Thanks also to the people at Monticello, the Mariner’s Museum, and of course, everyone at the University of North Carolina Press.

My humble thanks go to the pine, oak, hickory, poplar, walnut, cherry, dogwood, and walnut trees that lost their lives to make this book possible. Someday my bones will help your descendants. Till then, thanks for the air, and good luck.

This book was written during the blizzard of 1995–96 to the accompaniment of: Koyaanisqatsi by Philip Glass, UFO Tofu by Bela Fleck, and Winter Was Hard by the Kronos Quartet. The owners of these albums may now retrieve them.

For fifteen years The Woodwright’s Shop television series has been funded by the State Farm Insurance Company. This book flows from their interest and generosity.

Thanks to you all.

INTRODUCTION

This is the fifth book in the Woodwright’s Shop series, with more indoor work and less heavy lifting than the previous four. It begins with building a workbench, and then moves from one project to another—from frame construction to dovetailing to turning to steam-bending to carving—each project building on the skills developed in the one preceding. In addition to the right-brained exploring with wood approach, I have included more measured drawings to help support a more left-brained engagement with the work. But if you are the kind of worker that just wants the hard dimensions, then you are probably not reading this introduction anyway, so I’ll go ahead and address some of the squishier ingredients you might find in The Woodwright’s Apprentice.

I have always enjoyed woodcraft as a window into the past. Technological history is just part of the dialogue between evolving culture and a changing environment. Here are projects from the rich and poor, the decorative and the workaday, from English Utopian sects, founding fathers, Spanish carpinteros, Moravian settlers, and African elders. The suggested readings at the end of this book will help you find more places to explore working lives around the planet.

Application rather than pure theory also appeals to the right brain, and I am surprised by the number of mathematical shop tricks that come in handy as we undertake these projects. With dividers, rulers, and loops of string, you have to learn how to bisect angles and lay out ellipses, octagons, and ogees. Building in three dimensions is simply using mechanics to manifest geometry. The joy of application is here aplenty.

All of these projects use muscle-powered tools. You can look at this approach as a conceit, as a discipline, as an aesthetic choice, or as something more urgent. The Woodwright’s Shop project began twenty years ago as a back-to-the-land assertion of self-reliance. Now, as each summer has become a little hotter than the one before, the consequences of our choices become increasingly real. As a recreational woodworker, one does have the luxury of choice. Let’s face it: choosing to work with muscle-powered hand tools makes you a little bit stronger and healthier every time you do it, and it does a bit less damage to the only planet we’ve got.

So, broadly speaking, apprenticeships are arrangements whereby young people supply labor in exchange for learning a trade in order to support themselves. But this is not commercial woodworking. This is woodworking for enjoyment, another fundamental requisite of life. If the young (or otherwise) woodworker learns to enjoy his or her capabilities a little bit more by working alongside this book, then it will have earned its way.

1

Folding Workbench

This folding workbench, modified from an early twentieth-century design, will serve you handily even if you already have a heavy, fixed workbench.

Henry Mayhew, writing on the lives of the working poor in nineteenth-century London, described the arrival of a country carpenter at a metropolitan sweatshop. Unable to find a bench to work at, he chose an empty corner of the shop, pulled up some of the floorboards, and went to work standing in this hole using the floor as his benchtop. I wish I had a good ending to the story of this carpenter who started in the hole, and how he came up in the world, and that his name was Duncan Phyfe, and that he literally started at the ground floor. But I don’t have such an end for this story, only the beginning; and like this country carpenter, you need to begin with a bench.

With the diagonal braces removed, the leg frames on this little bench fold reasonably flat against the top.

This folding workbench has a solid work surface ten inches wide and a tool well of equal width. It is a simple piece, yet very sturdy and a great thing to have when you are working out of the shop or don’t have space for a permanent bench. The height of a workbench is governed not by a rule of thumb but by a rule of knuckles. As you stand beside the bench, your knuckles should just brush the top. This is a good height for sawing and planing stock on the benchtop, yet it won’t force you to swing your mallet too high when chiseling. On average, this height comes to about 30 inches, but you should make it to fit yourself, not the average. And, be warned, I like a benchtop that is about one or two inches lower than most folks. At one shop where I used to work, it was not a week after my last day before all the benches had two-inch extensions on the bottoms of all the legs.

The top and legs begin as a two-by-ten-inch plank. Rough-plane the surfaces before beginning the layout.

The work surface and the tool well are joined on their underside by two or three cross-battens. Hinged to the outermost battens are leg frames, and two braces pivot down from a central batten to connect to the leg frames with carriage bolts and wing nuts. When you unscrew the wing nuts, the leg frames will fold up to lie against the top. (If you want the legs to fold completely flat against the top, you need to modify this design either by spacing the leg frames farther apart or by offsetting them somehow so that they miss one another when they fold.)

With the exception of the ¾-inch board for the tool well and its skirting, the whole bench can be made from a single rough-sawn two-by-ten. You need a full thickness two-by-ten plank, not one that has been machine-planed down to 1¾ inches (but such stuff must do if you have no choice). Look for the stiffest stuff that you can find, such as tight-grained hard yellow pine. My bench is only 4½ feet long, so I was able to make the top, the legs, the lower rails, and the braces from a single ten-foot length of pine two-by-ten.

Normally you would begin by setting the plank on a bench to plane it smooth, but since you are making a bench, I will assume that you don’t have one yet. Instead, you can hold the plank steady by sitting on it. Set the plank on stumps or kitchen chairs (don’t get caught) and sit down on it near the left end as you face it. Hold the back handle (or toat) of the plane in your right hand and the foregrip in your left hand. If there is no forward knob, grasp the body of the plane with your thumb on the near side and your fingers on the far side. Start planing at the far end and work your way backward down the plank. If the grain of the plank seems to be rising against you, sit on the opposite side of the plank and work in the other direction. You will need to turn around anyway when you run out of space to sit.

When you plane a rough board, you may find that the blade (the iron) can protrude a bit more than normal. When you start, you are taking off only the high points (the tips of the ridges that cover the rough wood). Since you are cutting about half air and half wood, the stroke is easy. Once the iron starts cutting a level surface and is bringing up long, full shavings instead of short crumbles, you will want to reset the plane iron to take a finer cut. The fastest way to work is go over the whole plank with an adjustment that works well, then reset the plane as necessary and go over the plank again until you are taking fine, translucent shavings off the entire surface.

If you have started with a long plank that will provide both the benchtop and a length to rip into the legs, you can now cut the benchtop to length. Before you cut anything shorter (and I mean anything—rope, copper pipe, or Shakespeare), be sure that you are not making your work harder by creating a piece that is too short to hold properly. In this case, cutting the 10- or 12-foot-long plank into two pieces will make the work easier, as the piece you choose for the benchtop will provide support for the processes that follow: the ripping and final planing of the two-by-two legs, rails, and braces.

Rip the two-by-twos for the braces and leg frames from the plank after laying them out with the marking gauge.

First, use your square to ensure that the edge of the plank you intend to rip into legs is straight and at a true right angle to the face, and correct by more planing if necessary. Set your gauge to the thickness of the plank (whatever it may be, as long as it is close to two inches), then pull the gauge along both the top and bottom faces to mark out the first two-inch strip parallel to the outside edge.

Support the plank that you are ripping on the plank that you are saving for the benchtop. Start your ripsaw on the end so that the kerf is just on the outside of the line scratched by the gauge. Saw along for an inch or so, then flip the plank over and saw from the other side for another few inches. If you get off the line and need to steer, don’t try to twist the saw; just lower the angle of attack and hold your hand over to bend the blade in the direction you want to go. Keep flipping the plank over and sawing from the opposite side every six inches or so, not only to maintain an accurate cut but also to give your arm a break. Reverse the plank and start from the other end when you no longer have enough to kneel on.

When your first two-by-two is sawn free, set it on the benchtop plank and plane its rough face as you sit on one end. Because the piece is almost five feet long, you have plenty to sit or kneel on to hold it in place as you saw or plane. Only when both of these steps are complete should you crosscut it into shorter lengths. Start the next two-by-two by planing the newly sawn face of the remainder of the plank and repeating the process of gauging and sawing until you have all the legs, rails, and braces that you need.

In the next step, you join the timbers into two frames to support the two ends of the bench. The top rail of the frames connects to the legs with screwed half-lapped joints, and the lower crosspiece connects with mortice and tenon joints. The process of laying out these joints to connect the vertical and horizontal pieces is a basic procedure for all such framed work. In making chairs you lay out the legs and rungs in the same way; in making doors, you lay out the stiles and rails; and in carpentry, you lay out the posts and beams. Cut all the legs to length and align them on the benchtop with their ends square across. Mark all the upper faces of the legs with a squiggle to indicate the face side of all the pieces. This is the constant from which you make all gauge measurements, and it is usually the better, exposed surface. Best face to London, as they used to say.

For the joint at the top of the leg frames, take one of the two-by-six rails and set it directly atop the legs, aligning one edge of the two-by-six with the top ends of the legs. Draw a fine line down the other edge of the two-by-six and then set it aside without disturbing the alignment of the legs. Now measure down 18 inches from the top ends and draw a line square across all the pieces. Set one of the two-by-two horizontal pieces atop the legs with one edge aligned with this line, then mark down the opposite edge as before.

Now take each leg and bring these lines square around the two adjoining faces. The lines made thus far with ruler and square determine the location and height of the joints on the legs. For the remaining measurements, you’ll use gauges. For the half-lapped joints at the top, set your marking gauge at one-half the thickness of the stock, and with the fence of the gauge riding on the face sides of all pieces, mark the depth of the half-lap on the legs.

Lay out the joints in the leg frames by aligning the legs on a flat surface and then setting the horizontal members on top of them. Check for squareness and vertical position, then mark above and below the edges of the horizontal pieces.

Lay out the half-laps at the tops of the leg frames with a marking gauge set to half the thickness of the stock. Mark around the ends of each piece with the fence of the gauge always riding on the face side of the timbers.

The mortice and tenon of the lower rails is a bit more complex than the half-lap. First you must choose the proper proportions for the mortice and tenon. The rule of thumb in joining equal-sized pieces is to make the joint more than one-third but less than one-half the thickness of the stock. For two-inch-thick ( -thick) stock such as this, one-third of the thickness would be of an inch ( ), and one-half would be one inch ( ), so a ¾-inch ( ) mortice and tenon is right in the ballpark. Take up your ¾-inch morticing chisel and set the gap between the two teeth of your morticing gauge to match its width. To center the mortice in the two-inch stock, set the fence inch from the near tooth. Again gauging from the face sides only, run the teeth of the gauge down opposing faces of all the legs to delineate the width and location of mortices.

The double-toothed morticing gauge will mark both the width of the mortices in the legs and the width of the tenons on the ends of the rails. Again, the fence must ride on the face side of all pieces.

Finish your joint layout by marking the tenons and half-laps on the rails in a repeat of the preceding process. Set all the rails flat, with their ends squarely aligned, and lay a leg atop them with one edge flush with their ends. Mark down the opposite edge of the leg; then, using this line as a starting point, bring the lines square around the rails as before. Repeat the process on the opposite ends. Take the morticing gauge and run it around the ends of the two-by-twos, then use the marking gauge (still with the same setting used earlier) to lay out the half-laps on the ends of the two-by-sixes.

You can use just about any fine-toothed crosscut saw to cut the shoulders of the tenons and half-laps, but you will find the process much easier if you make a bench hook to hold the work. A bench hook is just a short board with battens screwed across opposite sides on opposite ends. I usually saw the shoulders (cross grain) first and then saw the cheeks (long grain). (This habit of sawing the tenon shoulders first comes from splitting off the cheeks of tenons.) However you work, cut with the kerf on the waste side of the lines and stop precisely as you touch the intersection with the next line. On the shorter cuts of the tenons on the two-by-two, a finer-toothed crosscut saw will do well for the long grain ripping of the cheeks, but on the two-by-six, you may want to use a proper ripsaw for faster cutting, or instead you might carefully split away the waste wood with a mallet and chisel. In either case, shave the cheeks smooth with a sharp chisel laid bevel up, cutting flat across the grain.

A mortice is simply a square hole, so one obvious way to work is to bore a series of round holes through the wood and then square them up to the final dimensions. Often, though (and it’s hard to say when), it’s easier (and more dignified) to chop the mortice square using only a mallet and chisel rather than boring and squaring.

The little bench hook allows you to rail with one hand as you cut the shoulders the tenon with a saw in the other hand.

Start the very stout morticing chisel with the blade aligned across the grain, just a little bit in from the line. Set the bevel facing toward the direction in which you will proceed and drive the chisel in about a quarter inch with a few blows of the mallet. Pull the chisel free, move it along about an eighth of an inch, and drive it in again. Because the first chopping made space for the second, the chisel will now go deeper into the wood. As you march along, the chisel will go deeper and deeper, because each preceding move has made more space. March down to the other end of the mortice, stopping just short of the line, then turn the bevel around and march back, repeating the process until you are halfway through the stock. Now flip the piece over and chop through from the other side until you meet in the middle. The wedging action of the chisel should force most of the chips out, but inevitably you will need to lever the chisel against the end walls of the mortice, denting them in somewhat. That is why you have left the very ends of the mortice uncut until the very end, when you can shear them off in a perfect vertical cut to achieve square perfection.

Starting at one end and marching along, the morticing chisel cuts deeper with each step. Now you are ready to turn about and cut the next pass, continuing back and forth until you’re about halfway through. Then repeat the process from the opposite side to meet in the middle. Finally, shear the ends of the mortice flush to the line.

The remarkable thing that you have just accomplished in chopping this mortice is the essence of real woodworking. The wedging action of the chisel blade was exerted along the length of the grain, severing it and forcing it up, and not between the fibers of the grain, pushing it apart and splitting the wood. You have taken a rather large piece of steel and driven it through a piece of wood without splitting it, leaving behind a perfectly square hole.

The same principle that made it possible to drive the chisel through the leg to cut the mortice also applies when you assemble the joint: the fit against the end grain of the mortice can be quite tight, but if the cheeks of the tenon are too fat, you may split the morticed piece. If it is too tight, shave a bit off the cheeks of the tenon. If the fit is too loose, glue on a shim or shaving. Although the mortice and tenon joint should push together and hold without a peg or even glue, eventually the joint will become looser when the wood gets really dry and will become looser still as the joint works when you use the bench and generate angular pressure that crushes the tenon.

Drawbore the mortice and tenon joints by first boring the peg hole through the cheeks of the mortice, then driving the unbored tenon tightly into place. Set the auger back in the hole through the mortice to mark the location of the hole on the tenon.

Now remove the tenon and bore the peg hole slightly offset toward the tenon shoulder. When the joint is reassembled, driving the tapered peg through the misaligned holes will force the tenon tighter into the mortice.

You can prevent the demise of your joint by gluing, drawboring, and pegging. Drawboring involves deliberately offsetting the peg holes through the cheeks of the mortice with the peg hole through the tenon, so that driving a tapered peg through them forces the tenon tighter into the mortice. To drawbore a joint of this size:

Bore a to ½-inch hole through the center of the two cheeks of the mortice, without the tenon in place. Place a waste piece in the mortice and under the far side to prevent the auger from breaking through and splintering the wood.

Assemble the joint and push the point of the auger back into the hole through the mortice cheek to mark its location on the tenon.

Pull the joint apart and bore the hole through the tenon, offsetting it a fat inch toward the shoulder of the tenon from the point marked as the center.

Spread glue on the tenon and in the mortice, reassemble the joint, and drive a tapered peg through the offset holes. The peg will force the joint up tight to the shoulder, and the glue will lock the cheeks together, and you have a joint for the centuries.

Three bits help the brace drive the screws through the half-laps. The gimlet-bit left) bores the pilot hole, the snail (right) countersinks for the screw head, and the screwdriver-bit cranks it home.

Now move on to the half-laps at the tops of the frames, which you have cut but which now need to be glued and screwed. There is a subculture of construction machismo that states that screws are just twisty nails to drive in with a hammer and that the slot is just for taking them back out. But by the older tradition—coming from the days before about 1850, when common screws were square on the ends rather than pointed—every screw got a carefully drilled pilot hole. Pilot holes are not just for making the screw easier to drive or to keep the wood from splitting; they also make for a tighter joint. If you try to screw together two pieces of wood without a pilot hole, the wood forced out by the screw will move into the gap between the pieces and prevent them from drawing up tight. The pilot hole needs to give passage for the shank (the unthreaded length) and for the root diameter of the threaded portion. Ideally, only the threads of the screw should be going into uncut wood.

Early machine-made screws, such as those shown in Smiths Key, an 1816 English hardware catalog (top row), were square-pointed. After about 1850, machine-made pointed screws, such as those shown in the 1913 Lipscomb hardware catalog, quickly replaced their blunt ancestors.

For joining the two one-inch pieces of the half-lap, you will be using four 1¾-inch #10 flat-head wood screws. The #10 refers to the diameter of the screw. Flat-head screws are intended to be countersunk into a conical depression in the wood, leaving the flat head flush with the surface of the wood. In softer wood you could skip the countersinking and just let the conical head compress the wood, but for hardwood or any work where appearance matters, you need to countersink the screw heads so that only a minimum of compression is necessary. In any case, rub the screw threads and shank with beeswax to make it go in easier. Don’t use soap, as it may make the screw rust faster.

Use a pair of T-hinges to join the completed leg frames to battens screwed to the underside of the bench top. Swing the leg frames open and bore the holes for the carriage bolts and wing nuts to join the diagonal braces to the leg frames and center block.

When you buy screws, hinges, and other hardware, they can be jarringly bright. You can produce a good-looking dark finish by heating the hardware in a fire of shavings and then rubbing it with linseed oil while the metal is still warm. Be very careful, as linseed oil is extremely flammable and can easily burst into flame and burn you.

Finishing the leg frames for the bench is most of the work. Now all you need to do is fasten a two-by-two batten to the tops of the frames with two pairs of four-inch T-hinges. In turn, fasten these battens to the underside of the benchtop with 3 ½-inch #12 screws and to the tool well with 1 ½ inch #8 screws down from the top. The hinges should of course face the insides of the underside of the bench so that the legs fold toward one another. Before you put in all the screws, check to see that the legs are flush with the front edge of the bench when folded up. If you have been squaring everything carefully as you go, it should fit perfectly, but tiny errors can sometimes add up in the same direction.

If the angle of the dovetails is too shallow, the joint may not hold, but if it is too sharp, the tails may he too fragile and may break. The angle created by setting the bevel to cross the one-inch and six-inch points on the square is a good compromise.

To do simple dovetailing on equal-thickness pieces, you begin by marking the depth of the joint around the ends of both pieces. Set the gauge to the thickness of the stock, plus a little bit. This leaves some extra wood protruding for you to plane off smooth after completing the joint.

The braces not only stiffen the legs with the power of unyielding triangles; they also add to the rigidity of the middle of the workbench by transferring outward to the legs any downward-bending force. The braces join to the lower rails on the leg frames with -inch carriage bolts and wing nuts. To really do their job well, the tops of the braces need to join solidly to the top and to one another yet still be able to move freely to allow you to fold the bench. Hinges alone would not be solid enough. If you use hinges to fasten the braces to a third, central batten, the ends of the braces need to butt firmly against both the batten and each other. The load must be taken by wood-to-wood contact, not just by the hardware.

Instead of using hinges, alternatively you can bolt the braces to a two-by-two block screwed lengthwise down the center of the benchtop. Bore the hole for the carriage bolt through this center pivot block before you screw it to the benchtop. The upper ends of the braces then need to be cut off at a bevel to fit up close to the benchtop: with the legs fully extended, lay the bench on its side and set the braces on it so that they intersect the center of the benchtop and the upper or lower edge of the lower rail of the leg frames. (You will be able to fold the bench flatter if the braces pass under the rails than if they pass on top of the rails.) Reach underneath the brace and pencil-mark its intersection with the top. Cut the braces accordingly, then hold them in place against the prebored center block to mark the bolt holes for their top ends. After boring the holes for the top bolt, attach the two braces and stand the table upright. Mark where the braces lie against the lower rails of the leg frames, and saw and chisel a flat about half an inch wide into the corner of the rail. Bore through both pieces and slip a carriage bolt through to make the final connection. You now have a bench that is wondrously strong and needs only a few more pieces to finish it up.

The two-by-six face screwed to the benchtop not only widens the top by two inches but also adds stiffness. With the addition of a frog and a series of holes for pegs and holdfasts, it supports boards for edge planing. The frog is easily chopped from a two-by-four with a hatchet and fastened to the plank with screws. To hold stock as you surface plane it on the top of the bench, inset a bench stop, a simple one-inch-square peg set through a hole bored and chiseled square just clear of the far side of the left leg frame. When it is not needed, the peg can be pushed down out of the way.

Start with these measurements on the end grain of the piece to receive the pins. Mark the areas to he removed with X’s.

Square the lines on the end grain down the sides until they reach the gauged line. Cut down the lines with a fine-toothed saw, first sawing diagonally through the corner, then squaring up to barely touch the gauged line on both sides.

A coping saw is among the fastest and easiest tools for removing the roots of the dovetail joints.

Now, with the legs braced and the benchtop well supported, you can use the bench to complete itself. The tool well needs a perimeter skirting to keep the tools from rolling out. The skirting is just some ¾-inch by 3-inch-wide board dovetailed together at the corners. There are numerous techniques for dovetailing, but the following procedure, cutting the pins first and using them to mark the dovetails, works quickly for narrow boards.

Set a gauge to the thickness of the skirt stock, plus a hair (this extra length will be planed off flush at the completion of the task), and mark around both the ends of both pieces with the fence of the gauge riding on the end grain.

Set your bevel against a framing square so that it intersects both the 1-inch mark and the 6-inch mark. (Later you will know this angle on sight and no longer need your

Lay out three pins (the boundaries of the two sockets that will accept the two dovetails) on the first board. Make the center pin ½ inch wide and the end pins inch in from either

Draw lines back across the end grain with the bevel to make a sort of W with the bottom cut off.

Square from these lines down to the marks made by the gauge. Mark the two spaces to cut out with X’s.

Saw down the lines, keeping the kerf on the waste side of the line. Cut out the root of the waste with a coping saw and finish with a chisel. Start the coping saw blade in one of the vertical kerfs with enough room left to make the turn onto the track of the bottom cut. Pop the piece out and turn the saw back the other way. Leave just enough wood remaining above the line that you can quickly clean up the remainder with a chisel.

Finish the cuts right up to the line by paring down across the grain with a chisel.

Position the completed pin piece precisely aligned with the gauged line on the tail piece and mark within the spaces with a sharp pencil. (This pins-first approach is one of two different methods of transferring dovetail dimensions used in this book.)

Square the lines across the end grain and saw down carefully on the waste side of the lines marked for the tails.

Trim the pieces as necessary to a snug fit that will make a good glue joint. Finish by planing the end grain of the pieces flush and smooth.

The frog on the front surface of the bench and the bench stop in the top will hold your work for both edge and surface planing. Holes bored at convenient locations through the top and sides give lodgments for pegs and holdfasts to further secure your work.

Set the second piece flat on the bench and stand the end of the just-completed piece atop it. Align the inner edge of the vertical piece with the gauged line on the horizontal piece and hold it steady. Reach in with a sharp pencil or scratch awl and mark the inner dimensions of the spaces onto the piece below. Don’t let anything move until you are done marking.

Square these lines around the end grain and bring them down on the opposite side using the bevel as your guide. Mark the three spaces, one in the middle and one on each end, with X’s.

Saw down these lines with the kerf solidly on the waste side of the line. You can always shave off a bit more if necessary. Saw out the roots of the end pieces, and saw and chisel out the root of the middle piece.

Tap the two boards slowly together while watching for an overly tight fit that might cause a split. Trim as necessary, remembering that Shakespeare’s joiner from A Midsummer Night’s Dream was named Snug.

When all is well, dovetail the other corner, glue the dovetails, and screw the skirt to the bench so that the upper edge is level with the work surface.

So now you are done. If you head off to town to seek your fortune as a woodworker, you now have a bench to take with you. If you are just beginning in woodworking, you now have had your first experiences in planing, sawing, measuring, cutting mortice-and-tenon joints and half-laps, screwing, gluing, drawboring, and dovetailing, and you’ll never have to work in a hole in the floor again.

2

Tool Tote

I never realized that I was carrying my tools around in an inverted frustum of an irregular pyramid, but there it is. The defining characteristic of this tool tote is the beveling of the sides and ends. These angles, plus a few refinements to the attachment of the handle and the corners, elevate this tote beyond the status of a simple nailed-together box. This tool tote is modeled after one found in Duplin County, North Carolina, but you will see similar versions that have been carried by woodworkers for the past few centuries, and this one will serve you well.

Start by laying out the pattern on a ¾-inch-thick pine board. You will need the two ends, one handle, and one bottom, but only one side. You lay out only one of the side boards, because to save weight, you will rip this single ¾-inch side lengthwise into two thinner boards. The angles of the ends and sides are equal and thus can be decided by a single saw cut, leaving equal angles on both pieces. You can set this angle on your bevel gauge by holding it on your framing square so that the blade intersects the 1½-inch and 5½-inch marks.

Crosscut all the pieces and set them aside. Set your gauge to half the thickness of the side board and mark it around all its edges. Fasten the board to the front of your bench at about a 45-degree angle leaning away from you. Start the ripsaw on the near corner and saw down, bisecting the plank. When the depth of your cut approaches the far corner, flip the board around and saw from the opposite side for a while. Keep flipping the board around and sawing from opposing sides until you need to flip the whole thing over and begin ripping from the far end. If you have a good ripsaw, it won’t take very long at all. Plane down the rough-sawn faces until they are as smooth as you like.

Although you could begin now to just nail the corners together, the small nails would soon pull out. Glue wouldn’t help much either, because glue won’t hold very well on end grain. The answer is to saw a rabbet into the shoulders of the ends of the box. This will enable you to nail from two

The craftsman’s companion — a full tool tote — held in one hand will counterbalance the weight of the folding workbench held in the other!

Begin the rabbeted shoulders on the ends of the tote by slicing across the grain with knife or with a cutting gauge, as shown here.

crossing directions and make a very strong corner. Lay out the rabbets on the ends with your gauge set equal to the thickness of the sides. Saw the cross-grained cut first, then split down from the end grain and chisel smooth. Clean up the inside of the rabbet with a chisel or a rabbet plane if you have one.

Having both the ends and the sides splay out creates an entirely new angle for the bottom and top edges of the boards. If you imagine a triangle standing on its point and then slowly lean the triangle away from you, you will see that the apparent angles of the sides of the triangle change, becoming squatter with more gently sloping sides. The change in angle is literally a matter of degrees: a 75-degree angle tilted at 75 degrees spreads only about 1 degree, but a 45-degree angle tilted at 45 degrees spreads about 10 degrees. The same change happens with the angled sides of this box: as you lean them out to the sides, the angle between the sides and the base changes. You can find this new angle by temporarily tacking the sides together, laying a straightedge fiat across the top, and setting your bevel gauge to the angle between one side and the straightedge. Using this bevel gauge setting as a guide, plane the edges of the sides and ends to match. This angle on the bevel gauge will also allow you to fit the bottom, and you might as well go ahead with it while the sides are tacked together.

Hold a chisel at an angle and draw it along on the waste side of the line to make a V-shaped track for the saw to ride in.

Saw across the grain with the blade riding in the slot, then roll out the waste wood by guiding the chisel down across the grain.

The bottom shown in the measurements is a bit oversized so you can custom fit it to the interior. Begin by beveling two adjacent edges of the bottom with your plane. Now set this oversized bottom upside down on the benchtop and set the tacked-together box on it, precisely aligning one of the inside corners with the corner of the two beveled edges on the bottom. Mark around the inside with a pencil to transfer the dimensions of the bottom face. Plane down the remaining two edges of the bottom board guided by the bevel until you touch these two lines. Remember that the face with the pencil lines is the smaller of the two faces of the bottom. Drop the bottom in place and it should just fit right in, but don’t do any final trimming or nail it until the rest of the box is finally assembled.

Now, make and fit the handle. The handle starts as a four-inch-wide board but will retain its full width only in the middle eight inches. The easiest way to get to this tapered shape is by chopping. Stand the handle on a stump and, holding the top end in one hand, chop in toward the line with the hatchet at regular intervals at about a 45-degree angle. Now, with the hatchet held almost parallel to the surface, slice down to the roots of these nicks. Repeat the procedure until you are shearing off wood right down to the line.

The handle hole is one of those instances where it’s easier to bore holes and then square them up. Three holes bored with a 1¼-inch bit will give you a good-sized handle after you chisel it out. (But five holes will give you a longer handle and make it easier to adjust to an unbalanced load.)

Find the angle for the bottom by tacking the sides together and recording the angle across the base with the bevel.

Take the pieces apart again and plane their top and bottom edges to match the angle recorded on the bevel.

You can quickly shape the handle by chopping to the line with a broad hatchet.

If you make a handle that reaches all the way to the bottom of the box to act as a divider, you could just saw the handle ends to a bevel and fasten it with nails driven through the ends. On a narrower handle such as this, however, nails would never really be secure. The best way to work is to leave tenons on the handle that fit into mortices in the ends. While the box is still tacked together, mark lines down the inside corner on one of the sides. Knock this marked side off and use it for a guide to cut the ends of the handle to fit within the lines except for the tenons left on each end.

Find the centers of the ends of the box, measure down, and mark the locations for the mortices. Bore ¾-inch holes deep enough to receive the tenons and finish them up with a chisel. Fit the handle in place, joining the tenons into the mortices. Finally tap the sides together with inch-long brads, nailing in from opposite corners.

You may wish to make one side of the tote vertical rather than splayed out (on the theory that it will not bump your leg as much when you walk). If you do, remember that changing the outward tilt will change the geometry of the intersection at the corner. The easiest way to get a good match when making an asymmetrical box is to join up one side to the ends and then use the partial assembly to measure directly onto the second side. If you make a mistake and find that one side is cut too short, just cut down the other side and make the whole thing a bit shorter.

Rough in the handle hole with a large auger bit. Here, three holes with a center bit begin the job so that it can be quickly finished with a chisel.

The mortices in the ends and the tenons on the handle give the stout connection required for a full load of tools.

Finally, flip the board for the bottom upside down and set the tote on top of it. Trace around the inside with a pencil to mark the smaller, under face of the bottom board. Plane bevels outward from this line all the way around, and the bottom should fit perfectly within the sides.

3

Jefferson’s Book Box

This simple dovetailed box has a story to it. It is a story of two men, one who lived in a big house on the mountaintop and another who lived in a cabin on the side. One man was Thomas Jefferson, and the other was a man he owned, John Hemmings. Hemmings was born in 1776 and began his woodworking career felling trees and sawing plank, but before too long he was working along with James Dinsmore, the joiner out of Philadelphia who was responsible for much of the best woodworking at Monticello. Hemmings also became one of the better-educated men of his time and regularly corresponded with Jefferson regarding construction details of his new home at Poplar Forest.

Hemmings was a favorite of the Jefferson children, always available to make toys or flower boxes for them. One of the simplest jobs he may have worked on is the construction of the stacking dovetailed book boxes that held the Jefferson library. As another slave, Isaac Jefferson the blacksmith, put it, Jefferson wern’t no rich man, just all them books. Jefferson could have afforded to buy mahogany bookcases with glass doors, but instead he chose boxes much like those he used to ship his books back from France—just simple dovetailed boxes like a joiner’s tool chest. Indeed, he thought of his books as tools and sorted them precisely according to their subject (instead of by color and size) so he could use them better. Later, when he sold his books to the government to replace those burned by the British in 1812, these boxes became the shipping cases, with the books still in their original order. Those books became the foundation of the new Library of Congress.

Making these bookcases will give you a thorough exercise in dovetailing. These are simple dovetails; the only refinement is a miter cut into the corners of the joints to give a more finished look when viewed end-on. You cut dovetails earlier when making the skirt for the workbench, but here you will take more time with the layout and saw the tails first, then use them to mark the pins, the reverse of the technique used earlier.

These stacking book boxes, based on the reproductions at Monticello, make life easier for the scholar-on-the-move

You can lay out evenly spaced dovetails on a board of any width by marking equal increments along a diagonally held ruler

Dovetail joints, as we saw, come in two parts: one board gets the tails and the other gets the pins, and one is stronger than the other in resisting outward forces. When a dovetailed box is assembled, the boards with the tails are held in place only by glue and the friction of the fit. The board with the pins is actually captured by the strength of the wood on the adjoining boards, so it can be considered the stronger of the two. In an obvious circumstance—as on a drawer, where the working stress of pulling open the drawer happens only to the front of the four boards—this is the one that should have pins on its ends.

In a chest, the pins and tails orientation is not quite so obvious. True, one might put handles on the ends, placing them under heavy stress, but the broad sides are subject to more pressure from the stuff held within. Considering the probability that a failure when lifting is bound to be more catastrophic than one caused by stuffing in that last book, wisdom might dictate placing the pins on the long boards. Putting the tails on the end boards will make the boxes stronger if they are lifted from the top when full of books. Whatever you choose, the process works the same way.

First ensure that the ends of the boards you are joining are square and true. Set your gauge to the thickness of the wood plus a bit more. The plus a bit will make the dovetails stick out a little, and you can plane these bits off after the joint is assembled. Run the gauge around the ends of all the boards with the fence riding on the end grain.

Bring the points down to the end with a try square and lay out the tails with a bevel

Lay out the spacing for the tails on the short end boards. On early work the pins are usually quite small relative to the tails. As you are cutting the tail board, you are actually laying out the spaces where the pins will fit. In inch-thick wood, I would make the spaces for the pins a half-inch wide at their big end. Thus, I would make the initial marks half an inch in from the ends on the gauge line.

The pin spaces in between can be distributed evenly by using a long ruler. Set one end of the ruler centered on the outer pin-space, and swing the other end in a sweeping arc until the first of the even numbers is situated at the same distance from the opposite edge. If you now mark the board at every even number, you will have equally spaced (but staggered) divisions for the tails. (For wider spacing, use every third number, or whatever division you wish.) Now reach down from the ends with a try square and extend these lines out to both ends of the board. These lines will form the center lines for the pin-spaces when you cut them. Measure out ¼ inch on either side from each of these lines and you have defined the wide dimension of the gaps between the tails.

Clamp two boards together and square the lines across their end grain. Except for the mitered corners, both boards may be sawn at the same time while clamped together.

Set the bevel gauge as before to an angle of 1 in 6 and bring these points up to the edge. Use the try square to bring these lines square across the end grain. If you wish, continue these lines down around the back side by switching back to the bevel.

Clamp the board upright on the face of the bench, and with a fine-toothed backsaw, make all the vertical cuts down to the gauged line, except for the last one, where the bevel goes. You can clamp two or more boards together and saw them at the same time if you wish. Accurately following the squareness of the cut across the end grain is more critical than following the angle on the face. Any deviation in face angle will be copied onto the next piece and compensated for, but out-of-squareness will produce an error that will leave a gap.

Turn the board around, and on the corner of the book box that will face outward, mark a 45-degree line from the inside gauged line outward. This is the mitered (picture-frame-type) refinement. Remember to cut the diagonal of the line only from the inside of the box; no cut at all should show on the outside.

Now you have all the saw cuts of the tails. Mark the spaces that you will cut away with X’s, but do not chisel out these waste pieces yet. First you will use these narrow slots to lay out the pins. Remove the tail board from the vise and replace it with the pin board. Maneuver things about until you can set the tail piece right on top of the end grain of the pin piece as if it were ready to go together. Remember that there will be a little bit of overhang

The mitered ends must be sawn diagonally (on dovetail joints with this detail).

Set the board with the sawn tails firmly on top of the joining board and transfer the dimensions by pulling the saw lightly back through the kerf. Use a scratch awl to mark the mitered end joint where the saw cannot reach.

Bring these lines on the end grain down the sides to the gauged lines.

A bow saw with a cranked blade will make quick work of removing most of the waste between the pins.

due to the excess setting on the gauge. Weight the tail piece down, because it must not move during the entire following procedure. Take your same saw and place it back in the kerfs in the tail piece, and with just enough downward pressure to leave a clear mark on the end grain of the board beneath, draw it backward out of the slot. When you have repeated this move in all the kerfs, take the tail board off and you will see a precise transfer of the kerf positions to the pin board. Extend the lines squarely down the sides to the gauge line and mark the large areas to remove with Xs.

Now comes the trick. You need to make these next saw cuts on the waste side of the scratched lines. This will be more difficult if you scratched too deeply when you pulled the saw backward to transfer the layout. Still, you must saw leaving the scratched lines intact, checking carefully on both sides as you do.

Cut these pieces out at the root using a coping saw, boring with an auger, or doing it all with a chisel. The coping saw is really the fastest. Cut close to the gauge line, then finish up with a chisel. Note that you are sawing with the face side of the board toward you. Just like a bullet, a saw leaves a more ragged edge where it comes out than where it goes in, so watch for splintering as you pull the coping saw blade toward yourself. If there is a problem, cut the line scratched