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    The Woodwright's Apprentice: Twenty Favorite Projects From The Woodwright's Shop
    The Woodwright's Apprentice: Twenty Favorite Projects From The Woodwright's Shop
    The Woodwright's Apprentice: Twenty Favorite Projects From The Woodwright's Shop
    Ebook387 pages2 hours

    The Woodwright's Apprentice: Twenty Favorite Projects From The Woodwright's Shop

    By Roy Underhill

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    About this ebook

    For more than twenty years, Roy Underhill has taught the techniques of traditional woodcraft with muscle-powered tools. With his four previous books and his popular PBS series, The Woodwright's Shop, now in its sixteenth season, Roy has inspired millions to take up chisel and plane. The master woodwright returns here with instructions for handcrafting an appealing selection of projects from the American woodworking tradition.

    The Woodwright's Apprentice begins with directions for building a workbench. Each successive project builds new skills for the apprentice woodworker--from frame construction to dovetailing, turning, steam-bending, and carving. Among the twenty items featured are an African chair, a telescoping music stand, a walking-stick chair, a fireplace bellows, and a revolving Windsor chair.

    Designed both for woodworking novices and for more seasoned woodworkers looking for enjoyable projects, the book includes step-by-step directions, complete with easy-to-follow photographs and measured drawings, and an illustrated glossary of tools and terms. All of the pieces presented here are based on projects featured in past and upcoming seasons of The Woodwright's Shop television show.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe University of North Carolina Press
    Release dateJan 1, 2012
    ISBN9780807869789
    The Woodwright's Apprentice: Twenty Favorite Projects From The Woodwright's Shop
    Author

    Roy Underhill

    Roy Underhill is host of the popular PBS show The Woodwright's Shop, now approaching its fourth decade of production. He is author of six previous books, including The Woodwright's Shop: A Practical Guide to Traditional Woodcraft and The Woodwright's Workbook: Further Explorations in Traditional Woodcraft (both from the University of North Carolina Press). He lives in North Carolina.

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      Book preview

      The Woodwright's Apprentice - Roy Underhill

      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

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