Class Descriptions

Handsawing, Handsaws and Sawbenches

Northwest Woodworking Studio, Portland, Ore.
Cost: $725 plus materials
July 14-18

Skill Level - All

In a traditional shop, sawing was reserved for the most skilled cabinetmakers on the floor. Most anyone could use a plane or chisel, but it was the sawyers who transformed the timber into furniture with rips, crosscuts and joinery.

And though we now have accurate power equipment in our workshops, sawing by hand is still a tremendous skill that – when done properly -- can save time and effort. That’s because handsawing can be done without jigs or guides and without regard to the angle of the cut or its bevel. In short, if you can see the line, you can cut the line with a handsaw.

Honing this simple skill allows you to easily cut compound angles, angled joinery and cuts that might take hours of jig-building and test-cutting on a table saw. And, as a bonus, learning basic sawing trains your hand, eye and mind to cut any sort of dovetail joint you can imagine.

In this class, you’ll learn to use handsaws and backsaws to cut joints as precisely as any power tool. With a series of special exercises, you will learn to make the three different classes of sawcuts: rough cutting for dimensioning stock, standard cutting for final sizing of casework pieces and fine cutting for precision joinery.

You’ll learn the proper stance, grip and body motions for accurate sawcuts and receive the instant feedback and corrections that will make you develop your skills quickly. During the first part of the class you will build a basic sawbench – the most important workshop appliance for handsaws – and a bench hook – the most important appliance for wielding a backsaw.

With your appliances built and your handsaw skills in place, we’ll dive into dovetails during the second half of the week. We’ll explore both English and Continental styles of making this joint (both are valid) so you can find the approach that is right for your work. And at the end of the week we’ll build a simple dovetailed Shaker silverware tray.

"Hand-cut Dovetails" and
"The Forgotten Art of Handsawing"

Woodcraft, Sterling Heights, Mich.

Cost $100 for each one-day class plus materials

Dovetails on March 15;
Handsawing on March 16

Skill Level - All

Hand-cut Dovetails
Saturday, March 15
Woodcraft, Sterling Heights, Mich.
To register, send an email to: sterlingheights-retail@woodcraft.com or call 586-268-1919.

Learn to saw dovetails by hand while building a cherry Shaker silverware tray with through-dovetails. You'll learn to lay out your dovetails so they look nice, saw them accurately, chisel out the waste quickly, and fit them right the first time (plus, how to hide any mistakes). This is a great class for first-time dovetailers or anyone who has struggled to learn this classic hand-cut joint.

The Forgotten Art of Handsawing
Sunday, March 16
Woodcraft, Sterling Heights, Mich.
To register, send an email to: sterlingheights-retail@woodcraft.com or call 586-268-1919.

In this class, you'll learn to use handsaws and backsaws to track a line like a bloodhound. With a series of special exercises, you will learn to make the three different classes of sawcuts: rough cutting for dimensioning stock, standard cutting for final sizing of casework pieces and fine cutting for precision joinery. You'll learn the proper stance, grip and body motion for accurate sawcuts and receive the instant feedback and corrections from an instructor that will make you develop your skills quickly. You will also build a basic sawbench - the most important workshop appliance for handsaws.

All About Handtools with Christopher Schwarz
Marc Adams School of Woodworking
Cost $695 plus $40 for materials
May 19-23
Skill Level - All

New Class: For 2008, there is only one place that I’m teaching a class that covers planes, chisels and saws. And that’s the Marc Adams School of Woodworking during May 19-23. In this fast-paced course you'll learn everything a woodworker needs to sharpen, tune and use handplanes, chisels, scrapers and the wide arsenal of edge tools available today. This class is for anyone who has ever been curious, frustrated or intimidated by hand work. It begins with the absolute basic principles of cutting wood and ends (after only five days) with you knowing how to make essential furniture joints using hand tools and building a traditional English sawbench. Here's what you'll learn:

Sharpening: Even if you've never sharpened anything before, you'll learn to put a keen edge on any tool – chisel, knife, plane blade, scraper – without spending hundreds of dollars on equipment. You'll learn all about edge geometry and how to pick the right angle for a tool every time, plus the little tricks that aren't in the books (back bevels and triple micro-bevels).

Tune-up: With your edges sharp, you'll fine-tune and modify your hand tools so they behave predictably and beautifully. You'll tune your planes to do the job they were intended to do, without spending hours and hours ridiculously lapping their soles. You'll learn the real working differences between the traditional bevel-down planes and the newer bevel-up planes and get a chance to try both to compare for yourself. You'll learn a 100-year-old trick for modifying your card scrapers that has been almost – but not quite – forgotten. And you'll learn to modify the grips of your tools to suit your work, your workbench and your hand size.

Use: Once all your tools are properly sharp and tuned, you'll discover how they work almost effortlessly if you understand just a few principles, including how to properly read the grain of any board and that not all tools are intended to be used "with the grain."

You’ll also learn a good deal about the tools needed for handwork, including:

1. The three bench planes needed to make any board flat, plus how to tune them and use them.

2. The joinery planes that every woodworker should own.

3. The four handsaws necessary to hand-cut any furniture joint, from dovetails to dados.

4. The chisels needed for good woodworking, all abou good bevel-edge chisels, mortising chisels and paring chisels.

Application: On the final day of the class you'll put your new skills and knowledge to the test to build an English sawbench, one of the most useful hand-tool appliances ever invented.

This week-long class is great for beginning and intermediate hand-tool woodworkers alike.

Building Furniture with Handplanes
Kelly Mehler School of Woodworking
Cost $300 - includes all materials
June 14-15
Skill Level - All

Many woodworkers own handplanes, but few know what task each tool is designed to do, and even fewer know how to actually use planes for the many furniture-building tasks they were designed for.

In Chris's work, almost every surface gets touched by a plane during construction. Most of the work involves the bench planes – which flatten and smooth the work – though the joinery planes, such as the router plane, shoulder plane, moving fillister and plow, handle many joinery tasks.

While many woodworkers avoid these hand tools because they assume years of training are required to wield them, that’s not the case. Cutting joints and flattening stock are all simple tasks when you understand the tool, have it sharpened correctly and know just a few tricks.silvertray

In this weekend class, you will learn to sharpen and use bench planes and planes for cutting joinery. And, using these planes, you will build a Shaker serving tray that features rabbets, grooves and dados all cut with hand tools.

Build the Holtzapffel 1875 Cabinetmaker's Workbench
Cost $750 plus $75 milling and 100' of 8/4 maple lumber @ cost
September 8-13
Skill Level - All

Build a bench designed for a lifetime of cabinetmaking in this six-day class with Christopher Schwarz, the editor of Popular Woodworking magazine and the author of the new book: "Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use."

In this class, you'll build a modified version of the 19th century-Holtzapffel workbench, a simple and stout bench that can hand more varied tasks than most modern benches. The Holtzapffel, which was featured on the cover of the Fall 2007 issue of Woodworking Magazine, features a twin-screw face vise that can handle a 24"-wide case side and an end vise for clamping individual boards and panels up to 24" x 60".

The original design has been modified for this class so that the bench can be disassembled for easy transport back to your shop or for standard shipping. But rest assured the modified design is as simple, stout and useful as the 132-year-old original.

The class will use a combination of both hand and power tools to build the bench – power tools to handle the rough work and hand tools for the fine details and critical joints. No particular expertise in hand tools is required. This bench is simple enough to be a good first project for an aspiring woodworker.

The school will handle all of the wood selection and rough milling of the bench stock so that you'll be focusing on the joinery and assembly during the six days.

In addition to assisting students in building their benches, Chris will be sharing the years of research he's done into forgotten and historic workbench designs. Plus, he'll be covering (in detail) the most important and oft-forgotten part: How to use a workbench properly to make all workholding tasks easier, including the use of bench appliances and jigs.