Lost Art Press Blog

You’ll probably be surprised to find out there is _still_ a market for hand-forged nails. It’s not a large market, but as I understand it they behave differently in wood, due to their square profile. I think some of it is chasing authenticity, but also functional differences, which usually aren’t worth the price premium. Ref: https://blog.lostartpress.com/2015/07/30/forged-forged-nails-available…

not true for all woods. fast grown oak is better: https://blog.lostartpress.com/2020/11/17/slow-growth-oak-why-its-the-b… >Fast-growing oak has widely spaced annular rings, sometimes up to 1/4″ per year (see fig. 3.3, above). This timber is exceedingly strong because it has fewer rings, which creates a great concentration of the dense latewood that grows in the summer. But the resulting timber is visually distracting. Its radial face comes out looking heavily striped. It can also be difficult to work; it has an uneven texture resulting from the widely spaced transitions between the earlywood and latewood.

My next woodworking project will be building a Dutch tool chest. After some searching (too many pages only show the _outside_ of the chest, this page shows you some of the potential of storing and organizing literally dozens of tools in a box you could load into your car. https://www.lumberjocks.com/BrandonW/blog/35335 Another excellent way to store and organize your tools is in an English tool chest. https://blog.lostartpress.com/2020/04/06/anarchists-tool-chest-update-…

+1 Lost Art Press is an awesome company and publishes some great books, both in terms of content and quality. If anyone is looking to make a workbench, they released their workbench book creative commons: https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AWB_Consumer_…

They produce a series of books about "Anarchist" woodworking which I recommend. In fact, they released the workbench book free of charge as a pdf: https://blog.lostartpress.com/2020/07/07/updated-anarchists-workbench-… They are my go-to for woodworking reading material.

His workbench tutorial is excellent, but for me, an absolute noob, it was still daunting to build a workbench as the very first project. What I ended up is building the Paul seller's Trestle [1] as my Hello World project, and it has been super handy. Even after that, I still think his workbench is too much work for me, and I eventually decided to build Christopher Schwarz's knockdown workbench [2]. [1] https://paulsellers.com/trestles-drawings-and-cutting-list-download/ [2] https://blog.lostartpress.com/2014/09/18/materials-tools-for-the-knock…

Her profile on Lost Art Press is a fantastic read: https://blog.lostartpress.com/2017/05/25/meet-the-author-jennie-alexan…

It's fast. Two skilled pressmen working together could do 200 to 250 impressions per hour or about one every 15 seconds (which might be 4, 8, 16 pages on each impression depending on page size). That was the speed text was put to paper from Gutenberg all the way until steam presses arrive at the start of the 19th century. The screw press also applies an even uniform pressure across the whole page; that's hard to do manually and impossible to do in 15 seconds. Screw-press you can do drunk, and many printers did. (Just read Ben Franklin's account of how much his fellow printshop workers drank: [0]) Source for all this: I studied early modern history and especially history of the book. Movable type is an amazing invention, without which the whole history of the world would look utterly different. Everyone who has the slightest interest should try setting some movable type if you can find a printshop in your city offering classes (I did; it's fun). It's harder than you might think and you learn why skilled compositors and printers were quite well-paid by the standards of early-modern craftspeople. But you also see the enormous efficiency gains because once that type is set up, the marginal cost of producing each copy is low. [0] https://blog.lostartpress.com/2013/06/18/strong-beer-that-he-might-be-… : "My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at…

Thanks for reminding me that I haven't been to the Lost Art Press site in a while. I have a few of their books; they are fantastic. If you are interested in quality woodworking tools and high-quality woodworking books (both in terms of content as well as binding and paper), check them out. I hadn't seen their "Build a Chair from Bullshit" book before. I've always been a little intimidated at the thought of building a chair, but this one looks like it's easy to build and has nice lines. Definitely more involved than the OP's chair, but it still looks still approachable with basic tools and skills. https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/BACFBS_book.p… Edit: As mentioned in dlbucci's comment below, I forgot to mention that it's available for free as a downloadable PDF book as well as for purchase as high quality bound book on their site. If you have any interest in an easy to build chair with an attractive design, it's worth a look.

What is interesting also in Enzo Mari's concept is that there is no instructions, you have to figure out the best order of operations and how to offset some planks with others. For those of you who start from really zero and have no idea how to start, here is a step-by-step for a couple of pieces: https://lieu-subjectif.com/documents/caue-22-rietveld-mari.pdf If really you want a "cheat sheet", there's whole book to help: https://filmandfurniture.com/product/hammer-nail-making-and-assembling… But try not to use it too much, because it really defeats the purpose of Mari, which it is to get people to "think with their hands". Digging through the legacy and follow-ups of Autoprogettazione is also interesting: https://lieu-subjectif.com/documents/autoprogettazione-revisited.pdf https://greg.org/archive/mari-x-ikea.pdf The "Harz IV" (Germany's working poors) furniture project: https://www.guggenheim.org/articles/lablog/hartz-iv-mobel-its-not-abou… Simple Japanese Furniture by Monomono / KAK Design Group: https://woodworkersinstitute.com/simple-japanese-furniture-constructin… https://www.core77.com/posts/42562/Nomadic-Furniture-DIY-Designs-from-… And and and last but not least, the great Christopher Schwarz and team at Last Art Press just got out a whole video serie and book on how to make a highly respectable chair design from very basic materials and…

I read somewhere a year or two ago that basically compared cast iron to wood, which has helped my intuition of things a lot. Here is a blog post [0] I read a few months ago about wood finishes. I think the following applies just as much to cast iron as to the wood he is talking about: So, when I choose a finish, I ignore the industry-standard scratch and adhesion tests. Instead, I separate finishes into two buckets: 1. Finishes that look incredible immediately but look like crap in 20 years (the short-run finishes) vs. finishes that look incredible when worn/abused (the long-run finishes). 2. Finishes that want me dead vs. finishes that I can apply while buck naked. Basically I would equate Polyurethane with Teflon, and furniture oil with cooking oil. Teflon will be great to cook on initially. As soon as it gets damaged, it will be hard to fix without stripping and redoing everything. Oil will take more maintenance over time, but if it starts looking bad, you just put a bit more on. That's exactly how you should treat cast iron as well. The trouble people run into is they try to use oil to create a teflon surface. That's not what it's for. [0] https://blog.lostartpress.com/2020/11/30/rip-the-anarchists-finishing-…

+1, I'm in the same camp. Check out a Hungarian woodworker building a chest in 1955: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V0gQ9M45G8 I wonder how many tools an average contemporary hobbyist/industry worker would need to build that same thing. I'm from Estonia, and I recall a local master stating that in the 1930s a typical farmer had to do a lot of woodworking for his own use. And often they only had five(!) tools: a knife, a saw, a wide chisel, a narrower chisel, an axe. Most even didn't have a plane. This is all the equipment they used to even make furniture. Unplugged woodworkers of HN might find the book "Estonian woodworking" [1] interesting (it's a true classic of Estonian etnography, translated to English without permission in the 1960s and circulated as hand copies back then; these days published in English by Chris Schwartz). Or build a Roman Workbench (=Estonian workbench :) [2]. [1]: https://lostartpress.com/products/woodworking-in-estonia [2]: https://blog.lostartpress.com/2019/07/24/free-download-roman-workbench…

Because it looks better and is a guide to communication. For the poster child of a naïvely set/composed text which suffers thereby see: https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/virtuoso_exce… That a book about a perfectly made tool cabinet suffers from so many typos (the maker's name, Henry, is mis-spelled on the inside cover) and such pedestrian composition embodies much of what went wrong when the typesetting unions all bargained for sinecures rather than active participation in the Desktop Publishing Revolution.

One nit: there are times when you do want to use a metal nail or screw in a joint, particularly if there is some sort of cross-grain joinery going on and you want to allow for wood movement. Chris Schwarz (publisher of this article) makes the point himself: https://blog.lostartpress.com/2015/07/11/the-bare-bones-basics-of-nail…

> brass tacks An interesting story behind those: https://blog.lostartpress.com/2023/02/07/john-wilson-1939-2023-the-sha…

> How does the woodworking company ensure payment? Does the specialized nature ensure only "real" customers buy? Yes, I believe it does. These are highly specific brass tacks for making oval shaker boxes. There are very few manufactures of a proper #2 brass tack these days, so I would very much want to stay on the good side and any suppliers. I think they said in their faq that twice they haven't been paid in 20 years or something like that. Their online "store" appears to be down right now–hopefully they are still in business. edit: It appears John passed in 2023 :( https://blog.lostartpress.com/2023/02/07/john-wilson-1939-2023-the-sha…

This was for occasionally handheld measurement instruments. Ultimately it might be a little nit picky, but I figured if it was noticeable to me it might be noticed after a while by a user and then bother them. Some users would never notice but why risk it? While thinking about what to do I went down a rabbit hole learning about clocking screws. I decided that was far from necessary but if I ever make something really nice for myself in metal with the right design I might give it a try. https://blog.lostartpress.com/2019/04/18/the-church-of-the-clocked-scr…

Also, you can get a free PDF copy of The Anarchist's Workbench: https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AWB_Consumer_… (I liked it so much that I ended up buying physical copies of all 3 books in the Anarcist's series)

Steam bending was and is still used for mass-produced furniture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._14_chair And there are also very interesting modern takes on bending wood such as compwood: http://compwood.com/processen/ The wood is heated and compressed longitudinally. Once cold it stays (super) bendable as long as it is still wet. https://blog.lostartpress.com/2020/07/22/a-little-bit-about-cold-bend-…

Traditionally, furniture makers have used different types of backs to increase the rigidity of the carcass, depending on how the carcass was constructed. If it's just an open box, for example, it'll require a more significant back compared to if it has multiple dividers spanning the interior. This excerpt[0] describes a few common types with relevant illustrations. Ikea--and other flat pack furniture--takes this approach to an extreme. Their backs are the absolute bare minimum to keep the carcass sides square under their own weight. Apply a bit of pressure to the corner of one of their bookcases, for example, and you can easily move it out of square. Cheap knockdown joinery that's meant to be easy to assemble make the problem worse. The bookcase won't have a very long lifespan, but that's acceptable for most of their customers. They're cheap and easy to replace for a reason. Other Ikea cabinets, with internal dividers, are a bit stronger because they're no longer relying on just the back to increase rigidity. As for homebuilding, exterior sheathing plays a critical role in racking strength, resisting wind loads, etc. by effectively tying the stud wall assembly together. But as with the Ikea bookcases, for builders looking to save every penny that can be found, there are options. Stuff like Thermo-Ply--basically, aluminum-faced cardboard--is used in lieu of plywood or OSB. It might not immediately disintegrate if it's properly covered with a quality house wrap as a…

If you're actually plugging holes with the plugs you make, the other thing to look for is a plug cutter that cuts a slightly tapered plug. The taper ensures that the plug will fill the hole even if it's drilled slightly undersized or (more commonly) slightly oversized. Beware that if you're driving a tapered plug into a hole near the edge of a board, you can split the board. Now you have two problems, as they say. What other use would a plug cutter have besides cutting plugs for filling holes? Cutting cylindrical tenons. For that application, you'd want one that cuts straight-sided plugs. Unless you're cutting tapered mortises too, of course, in which case you want the tapers to match. It turns out that you can also use plug cutters without the center spur in a handheld drill to cut cylindrical tenons if you taper the end of the stick so that the plug cutter rides the taper onto the end of the stick. I wouldn't try this with a cutter with four spurs, but the single spur ones apparently do quite well: https://blog.lostartpress.com/2022/02/24/chairmaking-on-the-cheaper-pa…