One simple change . . .

. . . and the whole shop needs to be rearranged.

This weekend, while listening to the debacle on the Saint Johns River, I took some scrap oak and had a great time building a project I have long admired: a plane storage rack based on a plan in the latest Tools & Shops issue of Fine Woodworking.

In many prior articles in Fine Woodworking either by or about Chris Gochnour, I have noticed and admired the plane rack hanging on the wall near his bench. Always wanting to build one but never finding the inclination to work out a design, I have just let it pass until I received this issue last week.

Since I didn't have anything else pressing to do, I decided to use up some scrap white and red oak and put it together. The construction is straightforward and easy. The only significant error I made was in mis-measuring the width of the back panel and cutting it too narrow to fit into dadoes on the side of the cabinet. Fortunately, I had not yet cut said dadoes and I was able to support the panel with the frame that fit into the rack. Undoubtedly, Joe Cox's three interceptions rattled my concentration and caused the error. Thanks, Joe.

At any rate, a few bootlaces and a couple coats of boiled linseed oil later and I have a snazzy rack to keep some of my planes at hand. You can see, from right to left, a Record No. 7, a Stanley-Bailey No. 6, a Record No. 5, a Record No. 3, a Stanley-Bailey No. 4, two Stanley 9 1/2 block planes and a Stanley No. 18 block plane that is obviously in need of a good cleaning and oiling.

Below them, on the shelf, you can see, also from right to left, a broken Stanley No. 18 that someone turned into a great chisel plane, a Norris bullnose plane, a Preston bullnose plane, and a recently made Stanley No. 92 rabbett plane. (By the way, if you have some planes wasting away and would rest more easily knowing that they are being put to use and well fed, let me know. But be advised that I am very "thrifty" and probably have no more than $100.00 in the planes on this rack.)

I hung the rack on the wall and had to move the bench that was up against the wall and that is what has created the problem I am now facing. Somehow, I have to rearrange the shop furniture to accommodate this change.

Since I have freed up a bit more wall space by moving the bench, I can now build a small but long rack to store a few chisels and hand saws closer at hand. This would include the Disston backsaw that was extensively used in cutting the joinery for the inside frame. Pictured to the right, it appears to have been manufactured between 1865 and 1871 . I was glad to use it because I had it, along with a Tyzack tenon saw, sharpened by TechoPrimitives in La Crosse, Wisconsin. They did an excellent job resharpening it. It cuts cleanly, quickly and tracks a line very well. Any errors are now due only to me. If you have a similar saw you want to put back to use, get in touch with Mark at TechnoPrimitives and he'll be able to set you up.

The Great Commission . . .

. . . is the first paying commission.*

About three weeks ago, I received my first woodworking commission. A friend and colleague was in my office and as I was showing him the standup desk I had built, he expressed some interest in a Shaker style step-stool for his house. Apparently, he spoke with his wife about it and they asked me to build them one to their specifications.

This stool is the result. It is built of heart pine, some of which my client gave me to use. It was actually left over flooring from his new house. The sides are made from that wood. The stretchers and treads are made from some ancient heart pine I found several months ago from one of my "sources."

Generally, the design is just an old Shaker design that has been undoubtedly emulated countless times. When I have built this stool previously, it was always painted and therefore, I could secure the joinery with glue and 18 gauge brads. The brad holes would be then filled and painted over.

However, since this finish was to be clear, I certainly didn't want to have a bunch of obvious brad holes to fill and disguise. Rather, I attached some small glue blocks to the inside of each tread with glue a few 23 gauge headless pins.

Of course, a few joints, while simple, were a slight bit gappy or suffered from accidental blowout while planing. They were pretty well fixed with a mixture of sanding dust and glue.

The finish is two coats of two different Minwax stains, several coats of amber shellac and two protective coats of satin polyurethane. Hopefully, the stool will work well for the client and his wife and lead to a few more commissions from his high society friends.


11/02/09 - After the punishing lost to the jorts wearers, I was jarred out of my funk and cheered this morning by an email from the afore-referenced stool's new owner with this photograph attached thereto showing the aforementioned stool in its new habitat:


* The intent is to be funny, not sacrilegious. See Matthew 28:16-20.

Final project of the summer . . .

. . . by which I mean that I hope that the pleasantly cool weather we have had the past few days is not a fluke and that autumn is now upon us, here in South Georgia. However, I also hope the Bulldogs loss on Saturday to the OSU Cowboys was, in fact, a fluke.

Anyway, I have built a credenza for my for wife for her side of our office at the house. She was drowning in books, research materials, bank statements, notebooks, etc and the flood threatened my manicured side of the office. Therefore, in order to stave off the wave of disorder, I built a rather easily constructed credenza with movable interior shelves to fit exactly under the sill of the window on her side and to run the length of the window.

The design is mine but it is greatly informed by work from Thos. Moser as found in his current catalog. The carcase is constructed with sandeply plywood from Home Depot which is rabbetted and dadoed together. The back of the box is oak plywood.

The top is built from two narrow pieces of oak. I wanted to give the piece a little "lift" so you may notice that the underside of the ends of the top are shaped. This detail is that with which I am most pleased as the shaping was accomplished completely by hand. It was laid out and I simply planed to the line with a big Stanley jointer and finish planed with my delightful Speirs-Ayr smoothing plane. And my new bench did not budge under the strain.

Obvious marks from the hand planes were left on the surface. Since the bulk of the piece is plywood and since oak furniture can look awfully cheap if one is not careful, I decided to leave those imperfections on the top to give it some character. The idea is the same as business men wearing 100% cotton shirts precisely because they wrinkle rather than wearing a polyester blend that doesn't.

Next, I trimmed it out with oak on the front and then finished it with Minwax Dark Walnut stain, a coat of Watco Dark Walnut danish oil for some warmth followed by a couple of coats of amber shellac. A coat of satin polyurethane is the topcoat. Hopefully, this will not be an issue but I learned later that dewaxed shellac should be used under polyurethane because of adhesion issues. I have not noticed a problem with prior pieces finished in this manner.

In the full photograph of the finished piece above, the interior looks washed out. Partly, that is a product of the flash and being in sunlight but I also should have put another coat of Danish oil and shellac on the interior. Of course, no one will ever notice that since it is inside and now hidden with books and notebooks. Other than nosy friends and relatives.

Next is a headboard . . .

A Lover's Quarrel . . .

When I received my monthly CD's of the White Horse Inn's broadcasts earlier this month and noticed that Michael Horton was interviewing a gentleman named Warren Cole Smith, I figured Mr. Smith had to be a southerner. Where else do folks go by their full names? Once I listened to the interview, there was no doubt. However, I'd never have guessed that Mr. Smith is also a Bulldog, having earned a graduate degree from UGA several years before I went to God's country. (The interview can be downloaded here.)

Mr. Smith, writer, editor and publisher of the Evangelical Press News Service, has written a gentle polemic that every pastor, elder, deacon and layman in any church or denomination that calls itself evangelical ought to read and study then read and study again. This is A Lover's Quarrel With The Evangelical Church.

Using Richard Weaver's monumental, yet sorely overlooked and under-read, Ideas Have Consequences as a touchstone, Mr. Smith correctly identifies the fault-lines in current American evangelicalism which threaten to destroy orthodox, historic Christianity and replace it with a golden calf of our own creation.

He begins by outlining the scope of the problem in his introductory chapter, "The Evangelical Myth." There he explodes the myths of evangelical growth, evangelical political power, and the evangelical market concluding that the evangelical church in America has become that which we (purport to) hate. Mr. Smith writes, "[T]oo often we have spent the moral capital our history and theology have accumulated in our behalf just to buy a seat at the table of power. And once there, as Ralph Reed among many others has demonstrated, we have no power left to resist the temptations of that table." (P. 41.)

He then moves on to name the five ways in which the evangelical church is destroying itself from within. First, in a chapter called, "The New Provincialism," he gives a brief comparison of the biblical roots of the first great awakening with the unbiblical methods of the second great awakening and shows how American evangelicalism is the true heir of the second great awakening and as a result, has inherited all its genetic defects. "The core problem," he writes, "this dislocation from history and causality that I am calling the new provincialism, is itself but a symptom of an Evangelical theology that is slowly eroding the Christian view of the incarnation." (p. 56). Because evangelicalism has become so subjective to its adherents, it is moving away from the historical facts upon which Christian truth is grounded and "when we reject the historicity of the faith, we become dangerously close to rejecting Jesus himself, for it is in history - the incarnation - and through Scripture that Jesus chose to reveal himself to us." (p. 57.)

Accordingly, the church has become, "the church of the airwaves or, on the other hand, the megachurch - a place in which we gather for a very short time, but which we leave and, in some cases, travel long distances to get back to our homes. The modern evangelical church is most decidedly not a church that is rooted in time and place." (Id., emphasis in original.)

Having succumbed to the new provincialism, the church then replaces the God Who Is There with a "god and history of our own making. We create an alternate reality, which is actually not a creation of anything, but a deconstruction of reality." (p. 64.) Smith calls this "deconstruction of objective reality and the construction of an alternate and subjective vision of the world the triumph of sentimentality." (Id.) This idea he explores in the chapter titled "The Triumph of Spirituality" where, while dissecting the Willow Creek model, he makes this observation:

One of the unintended consequences of a church that is constantly focused more on outreach than spiritual formation is that this model all but ensures that every generation would have to be reevangelized, since the current adult generation does not have the spiritual training or maturity to raise its own children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. (p. 74).

I'd argue that the very existence of youth ministers, youth groups, Young Life, FCA, etc. is the proof of that very point.

His chapter on the third critical point, "The Christian Industrial Complex," is the most alarming because I think it accurately depicts where the church is right now. He notes the irony that "God wants the church to be the church and even the world wants the church to be the church. It is the church that doesn't want to be the church. That's the core problem." (p. 99)

His chief example of how the church doesn't want to be the church is how it has allowed the growth of the Christian music industry to mold its worship, its liturgy and its theology. Smith describes how, because of profit driven motives, Christian radio settled on its target customer/audience who is a mythical thirty-five year old housewife,named "Becky," with two kids, driving a minivan, a mostly stay-at-home mom, and a somewhat regular church goer, whose marriage is not all she dreamed it would be and who cares about issues affecting her kids. (pps. 106-107). If that is true, is it any wonder that the overwhelming majority of contemporary Christian music played in churches is sappy, sentimental, theologically vapid and makes men feel like they need to lop off their testicles to sing it?

He writes:

So here's the larger point: there was a time when theologians and the wisest minds of a church determined what was said and sung in a church. Today, who makes those decisions? Becky. What Becky likes gets played on Christian radio, and what gets played on Christian radio gets promoted to church musicians and church leaders, both intentionally, as part of the machinery of the Christian-industrial complex, or unintentionally, just because those songs are on the air. The result: our churches are filled with songs not because they reflect our highest and best thinking and artistry or because they remind us and teach our children important truths, but because they are-as many Christian radio stations say about themselves - "safe for the entire family." (p. 111).

He concludes, and this is beautiful, by quoting C.S. Lewis' description of Aslan as not being safe, but good. Instead, "[t]he church has become safe, but no longer good." (id.)

Fourth, Mr. Smith targets "Body-Count Evangelism" where he decries the growth of parachurch organizations and returns to his discussion of the first great awakening and the second great awakening by comparing those theologians most associated with the respective movements, Jonathan Edwards being the essence of the first and Charles Finney being the example of the second. Edwards, of course, believed "that God is in complete control of his universe and that it defies logic and it is an affront to God to believe that humans can do anything that hastens or speeds salvation." (p. 133.) Finney, on the other hand, "explicitly rejected the doctrine of the sovereignty of God" and thereby " . . . rejected salvation by grace but also opened the door to the use of emotionalism and technique to produce a high body count when it came time to sing the hymn of invitation at the end of the service." (p. 139). He then quotes R.C. Sproul:

Everyone who has faith is called to profess faith, but not everybody who professes faith has faith. We are not saved by a profession of faith. A lot of people, it seems to me, in the evangelical world, believe that if they have walked the walk, raised the hand, signed the card-that is, made some kind of methodological profession of faith-that they're saved. (p. 140).

This leads Smith to what I think is one of the most frightening verses in the bible: Matthew 7:21.

Fifth, Smith is critical of the way the church has un-critically embraced modern technology as tools to fulfill its mission to "go ye therefore" in the chapter "the Great Stereopticon." Drawing again on Richard Weaver as well as the writings of Neil Postman and those of novelist Walker Percy, he concludes that contrary to what evangelical leaders apparently believe as illustrated by their practices, the medium conveying the message IS NOT NEUTRAL and the context within which that message is conveyed is essential. He reminds us that words, not pictures, not interpretive dance, not drama, was THE chosen medium that the Creator of the universe deemed worthy to convey His Message. It is through preaching that that Message is conveyed and we change that medium at our peril. See 1 Corinthians 1:20-23.

Finally, if there was any question as to what he is saying, he clarifies it at the beginning of his final chapter:

[V]irtually no part of the American religious experience has remained unravaged by the overwhelming systems and machinery we have discussed. Indeed, not only has the body of Christ been seduced by the sentimentality and existentialism of modernism, but we are also being fully prostituted by it. (pps. 183-184).

Yet, as one who loves the church, the bride of Christ, he gives hope by referring to movements around the world such as Gospel For Asia and its Believers Church in India and identifying them as models of church planting and discipleship to emulate and follow.

There is much. much more to be plumbed from this book and even though this is a lengthy review, I have barely scratched the surface of Mr. Smith's thoughts. Many of his sources I have read such as Richard Weaver, Neil Postman, Walker Percy and Michael Horton. Unfortunately, as I pointed out to Mr. Smith in some emails we traded, those who need to read this book are least likely to do so. I hope I am wrong and this book, along with others in the same vein, adds to the evangelical zeitgeist so that a desire for a needed reformation comes ever closer to fruition.

The Bird Print . . .

This is a link to a website of the wife of a friend of my wife. He has rectal cancer at age 29 and she is an artist and is selling a print of one of her paintings to raise money to help pay for their expenses. Check it out and help by purchasing a print if you are able. We are buying one.

http://www.thebirdprint.com/tpb/Welcome.html

A sobering graphic:

Let's just spend more. Why not?




For my little household, our sum comes to $736,000.00.

How nice. That really makes me want to get up and come into the office in the mornings.

Benchmarks . . .

In Scott Landis' beautiful book on workbenches, he observes that, like toolboxes or tool cabinets, making one's own workbench is a rite of passage. His book, The Workbench Book, was one of several I thoroughly dissected as I was planning and constructing my own "rite of passage," which I finished this past weekend.

Taking ideas from Chris Schwartz's Workbenches and Lon Schliening's, The Workbench, I finally settled on a design that is mostly drawn from Mr. Schwartz's writings, both in his book and Woodworking Magazine and Popular Woodworking.

There were three primary goals: low cost, sturdiness and function. It is built from six 12' 2"x 8s" from Home Depot, eight bolts, two 3/4" oak dowels, one quart of boiled linseed oil, four lag screws, a handful of exterior deck screws, two pop-up planing stops from Lee Valley, two jig handles from Rockler and two used Wilton woodworking vices. All told, the cost was far less than two hundred dollars. The goal of low cost was definitely met.

I'm not sure what it weighs but it takes some effort to move it. Playing around with it, I learned it does not budge when jointing a long board along its front edge. While flattening the top, it likewise did not squirm as I planed across the top with a jointer. If I determine it does move too much under heavy use, I can always throw a few sandbags onto the shelf to settle it down but I don't think that will be necessary. All the joints on the body are mortise and tenon and the long stretchers are bolted while the side stretchers and rails are drawbored and pegged.

It will take a few projects to determine if the goal of function is met but after carefully thinking through the typical joining processes I go through and reflecting on the shortfalls of my old bench, I hope all of those will be rectified. First, if needed, I can clamp almost anywhere on this bench. Second, the face vise and tail vise are pretty stout. They are set into the bench itself and lag bolted on. The fixed metal jaw was covered with cork paper while a wooden jaw made of red oak faced with white oak is screwed to the movable jaw. The dog holes along the length of the bench ought to handle any long panels or boards to be planed. The movable planing stop at the end should be a nice and easy addition. I doubt I will need the pop-up stops but I thought they would be a nice extra.

The sliding deadman should be handy. It glides down its rails with the push of a finger. That completely surprised me. I waxed the heck out of the rails and the tenons in the rails but I was taken aback by how easily it moved. I intend to make a peg dedicated for the deadman that will have an eccentric cam on the outside so I can fine tune the level at which it holds boards.

The whole thing has a couple of coats of boiled linseed oil so with time and use, it should take on a nice, warm patina. Two benchhooks are already made and ready for action as are a small box of oak bench dogs and some planing battens.

On it are a few recent additions to my "working set" of saws. The larger brass-backed tenon or sash saw is English and made by Tyzack. Other than that, I don't know much about it. It saw action in cutting the shoulders of the tenons for the base. In front of the Tyzack, is a Henry Disston dovetail saw that dates from circa 1850s - 1860s. It cuts the tiniest little kerf. They will likely be sent off to Technoprimitives soon for a professional rehab and sharpening.

The brace on the bench is an English made by David Flather. Its dates are unknown. It is simply a pretty tool and is not destined for any more work. It definitely was not the brace used to bore the dog holes.

I am considering adding a bracket on the lower left side to hold the hammers and mallets most frequently used. No rush on that addition. The first project for the bench will be a headboard for a twin bed.

So what became of the old bench? It departed the shop in the back of a church friend's SUV on Saturday for hopefully another eight years or so of use until she decides she wants to create her own "rite of passage." Then, as I told her, give it to another person to use . . .