We sometimes stumble upon inadvertent discoveries, things that strike us as so quintessentially simple, and yet so great.... Such was the case of the nail-sword made by my student, William. Kids are always on the lookout for new adventures. When William saw the old English anvil in the corner of the shop, he immediately wanted find out how he could make use of it. After all, anvils are fascinating creatures, they look like a miniature iron rhinoceros, or a unicorn, yet they will never charge at you – even if you hit them with a hammer. I decided to give William an object – thin enough that he could manipulate it using a cold-forming technique with a Ball-peen hammer. I also wanted him to be able to take home a real “product” at the end of the experiment. So I went to the depository box of forgotten & forsaken nails and bolts (every decent shop will have one or two boxes like his) and extracted a double-headed nail. I gave the nail to William, showed him how to hold the hammer and hit the nail. Action and Reaction: the first law of particle physics.... and of Life as we know it.
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One of the greatest editions to any activity is having music play in the background; one of the greatest advantages of working with hand tools (as opposed to power tools) is that you can actually listen to music while woodworking. In our summer program classroom we have a Mac connected to speakers. I hooked the Mac to my GrooveShark.com play-list and ran my collections of song on random shuffle. If you want to listen to my play-list, here is the link: http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/user/yoavliberman/3414157
This summer I am teaching the next generation of wood-lovers, wood hobbyists, and perhaps even one or two future cabinet-maker/wood-artists. I preach the gospel of Woodworking in an amazing setting: the wood-shop of the Belmont Hill School in Belmont MA. The school’s summer program attracts kids and teenagers from around the Boston area. Each day I hang my bike on the front rack of bus # 78, and take the ride up the green hill onto the lush campus of Belmont Hill School. The group I teach is diverse: kids and teenagers, boys and girls. It's a fantastic class of students who are fun to work with. The youngest student in my class is only eleven, the oldest seventeen. But age does not always correlate to better or more accurate saw cuts, chisel handling, innovative thinking or motivation to start and finish the job on time. It is fascinating to see how some kids, who hold a saw or a chisel for the first time, will produce a perfect kerf a minute later. Others will devise clever ways to move their hands in the right way to achieve a successful cut, incorporating sawing-guides and other aids. They love planning and chiseling and gouge-work. I believe that all of them gain valuable experience: hand–mind skills and impulse control. Most importantly they realize that in some fields of life you just have to plan ahead and execute a project carefully, “you know, we don’t have an ‘undo’ button in woodworking”, I tell them. They manage to finish a project or two over the three weeks of the class, and they all do a good job and feel satisfied with their accomplishments.
I love working wood, but I also like the challenges of metalworking. I come from a family that was made in the forge: my grandfather was a metal-smith, my father and my oldest uncle were machinists (dad later became a chief engineer in the Israeli merchant fleet) and two of my cousins are blacksmiths. Yours truly went to a vocational high-school and learned how to cut, file, weld and turn metals. One of my high-school metalworking projects was to make an insulation wire stripper. We formed the arms with hand tools; We turned the thumb screw on a lathe, than we gun-blue the tool. The only parts we did not make were the spring and the chain. I don’t remember if we did the hardening of the cutting teeth, or whether it was done by our teacher?
Sunday morning: The bench stands near the window and seems happy. After waking up and eating breakfast (organic eggs that Jack and Caitlin got from their neighbor Nicole) and listening to Blue Grass music on Jack’s Makita battery powered radio, I finally found something productive to do: forming a tenon on a mallet handle that Jack started working on a few days before.
Forming a round tenon with a rasp and file takes time. But that morning I had all the time in the world and practically no incentive to go outside; rain was falling down and squadrons of mosquitoes, deer flies and other man-eating bugs were lurking in the forest. So we stayed in the cabin, rasping, filing... and eventually driving the tenon home.
If I were to built the bench again, I would have not added a decorated finials to the wooden nuts that anchors the lag screws. The finials allowed me to easily rotate the nuts right or left, and in and out in order to align them with the lag screws, but they are prone to breakage and might be just that obstacle you bang your knee or toe into. In hindsight the nut should have had a protrusion to help me align it to the lag screw, but definitely less conspicuous than the one I made. The best way to transform a wooden dowel into a leg screw nut is by pre-tapping the dowel hole with a makeshift lag bolt tap. Using a rectangle file I formed a tapered groove in the end of a lag bolt– starting at the tip and going back to about 3/4” long. The teeth formed on the sides of the groove thread the hole, so once you screw in the actual connecting lag-bolts, they easily anchor themselves in the wooden nuts.
I equipped my new American workbench with a Record Marple Hold Down clamp (Model #145), a quick release bench-vise, three rows of 3/4" diameter holes to accommodate the Veritas system of bench dogs. The street-found workbench served me well. For eight years it stood in my living room enabling me to do small scale projects in the comfort of my home. Because I had to relocate and knew that a close friend would probably make best use of the bench, I decided to give it to Jake, knowing he could put it to good use in his and his girlfriend's cabin in New Hampshire. Last weekend I took the bus and visited my friends in Tamworth N.H. Their cabin is nice and cozy, built twenty years ago by Karl, Caitlin's father; no running water, no electricity, but with a working stove and lots of character. The first real woodworking project I built in the USA was a pine workbench. The story of this piece began with a discarded metal cabinet I found on Irving street in Cambridge MA. I mention Irving Street because a few weeks after I found the metal cabinet I found a set of pine bunk beds waiting patiently to be picked up by the trash truck on the same street. The bunk beds provided the wood for my new workbench. A few years later I discovered another âgemâ on Irving Street, which I used for the construction of a High Boy I named Cantabrigian Highboy, but more about that later. Irving Street is also important because its the street that Julia Child used to live on. A few years before she passed away her historic kitchen was taken apart, shipped to Washington and reassembled to proudly reside in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Museum. So you see for some mysterious reason Irving St. is an important location in the tales of my own pieces and of the culinary legacy of the nation.
I started my new workbench by disassembling the old bunk bed parts. After that I joined planed and re-dimensioned the old-new lumber into vertical and horizontal members. For added strength I used lap joints for all the joints.
The new wooden frame was designed to encapsulate the metal cabinet. The workbench upright parts (the legs) are connected to the rails with lag screws anchored into 1â diameter wooden nuts. The bench was designed so it could be easily disassembled. Itâs top incorporated lumber from the bunk beds as well. After completing the workbench, I decided the drawer pulls on the metal cabinet were just too small to be used, so I built new pulls from wood with a shape that compliments the overall look of my new American furniture.
Eggs, ducklings and the art of woodworking On the last day of the Furniture Society 2010 conference at MIT, I met Randy Johnson for breakfast. This I think was the first time (I am almost sure about this) that I ate Eggs Benedict, and it was at that meeting that Randy, who is the Chief Editor of Woodwork and American Woodworker magazines, encouraged me to start blogging here. You see, I do blogging alright – but so far only in Hebrew. And though I am a proud contributor to American Woodworker and Woodworker magazines, I must admit that blogging in the language of Shakespeare or even Lady Ga Ga, is not cake walking for me. Anyway, I will do my best to interest you guys and girls with the things I have in mind, that I want to show, and that I care about. ...I will talk about my woodworking mentors, friends and students, and of course about the things I do: Find stuff, change, morph and reincarnate old objects into new creations. What I will also talk about is my love for tools, furniture design and probably more. As the saying goes “If you want to make an omelet, you must be willing to break a few eggs” which brings us back to the beginning of this blog entry.. so without further adieu, let me start by showing you some of my work. In this picture (taken by Mike Canfield) I'm cross-cutting an old growth heart-pine beam into more manageable – and lighter pieces. I saved this beam from a pile of debris near a mill building in Worcester MA. The old mill building was taken down to make way for a new highway. Most of the post and beams were salvaged by a reclaming company, but few broken and “ugly looking duckling” posts and beams where left on the ground. I sifted through that pile and managed to collect some great heart pine, chestnut and oak timber. Some time you just have to give these old timers a second chance.... Re-sawing these behemoths open revealed terrific looking lumber inside.
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AuthorI will share with you my own work, tools, and techniques. I will show how my friends and students build beautiful objects. Sometimes I will talk about wood, forests, sustainability and much more. I am sure it will be interesting Archives
January 2011
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