Black Ash Pack-Basket Class
by Elia Bizzarri | Nov 22, 2024 | 0 Comments
“Penny Hewitt runs a great class,” Curtis Buchanan told me after traveling to Vermont to make a pack basket with her. “She’s personable and laid-back, and she knows her stuff. You should have her teach at your shop.”
A couple weeks ago, Penny emailed me, asking to do just that. I’m delighted to have her. Black ash baskets have interested me since I set up a booth in Jamin Uticone’s tent at a local music festival twenty years ago. I was demonstrating turning; he was beating on a log with a hammer. Crowds gathered around him like moths to a flame, drawn by the steady rhythmic sounds of his sledge. He peeled the log apart growth-ring by growth-ring, then spent hours scraping the material to a smooth and supple perfection. He and I were working the same material – ring-porous hardwood – but our understanding and use of the material couldn’t have been more different. I was splitting the log like firewood; he was de-laminating it year-by-year. I was carving it to shape while he was weaving it like cloth.
These days, ash is on the road to extinction, taking this ancient craft with it. Learn how before it’s too late:
Make your own basket and learn one of the oldest crafts in human history. For thousands of years baskets served as indispensable objects in every culture. Carry on the tradition and take home a beautiful, durable and useful basket crafted from responsibly harvested, hand pounded black ash logs. In this two day workshop, you will weave a traditional Adirondack-style pack basket with cedar runners and base and adjustable webbing harness. This roughly 18” tall basket is made to last and be used.
February 22nd and 23rd, 2025 – $550 (visit the class page for more info).
Raw Tools
by Seth Elliott | Nov 2, 2024 | 0 Comments
In light of the positive response to Elia’s midsummer wild hair to sell reduced-price Reamers in the Raw — and because it’s just an all-around good idea — we’ve decided to expand the concept. We are now pleased to offer both Travishers in the Raw and Tenon Cutters in the Raw.
I’m coming up on eight years working with Elia at Hand Tool Woodworking. For most of that time I’ve been carving out a niche as resident toolmaker, primarily producing our travishers and tenon cutters. While making hundreds of the same tool can get repetitive, it thankfully also lends itself to gradual refinement. Knowing that each batch of tools I make has been a slight improvement on the previous batch keeps things interesting and preserves a creative spark.
Over time our tools have become more precise, more practical, more consistently uniform, and — if I may say so — easier on the eyes. This has been a collaborative process, often with me problem-finding through hands-on workflow hiccups and Elia problem-solving by acquiring the right equipment or nifty jig-making. All of this takes time and has led to steady increases in our tool prices. By selling these tools “in the raw” we will be able to still provide quality tools at a reduced price and leave the level of finishing up to you.
When Elia first brought up this idea I was unsure about it. How would I feel about stopping at a certain point in the toolmaking process before a tool was finished according to my normal standards? It’s been an adjustment, but a good one. I’ve had to look through my toolmaking “recipes” and figure out which steps could be reasonably passed on to an adventurous end-user with some brief instruction — or even left undone and still produce a working tool. It’s actually been fun to whip through a couple batches of tools in record time and shake up my routine.
So what will you get? For the travishers, I’ve done the essential tooling of the brass soles but the blending and smoothing of those cuts is left undone. Each sole is matched to the individual blade that comes with the tool, but the blades will need to be sharpened. For the body of the tool, aesthetic chamfers and sanding have been omitted, as well as our shellac finish. Each tool will, however, come with an instruction list on how to make it workable at minimum, and how to — if so inclined — make it sexy. Both standard and wide-radius versions are available on our travishers page for $150 each, half the price of our finished tools.
For the tenon cutters, I’ve cut the blade beds, reamed the cutting holes, turned the handles, and hollow-ground the blades. All that’s left on these, besides finishing, will be to hone and set the blades. Setting can be a little tricky, but instructions are included and I’m always an email away for stubborn cases. All three of our standard sizes are available on our tenon cutters page for $70 each (also half our normal price).
So, while this won’t give you a purely soup-to-nuts DIY experience, it will hopefully provide an affordable and moderately challenging option for those of you who would like these tools, but have been hindered by the price tag.
Here’s to wild hairs, and may your blades be sharp enough to split them!
Boiled Joints
by Elia Bizzarri | Oct 14, 2024 | 13 Comments
I have finished writing my book about Samuel Wing. Sure, there’s still editing to be done, but that never ends. The Lost Art Press folks will be here in February to photograph the book and we’ll go from there. Jeff Lefkowitz just sent me the proofs for a set of chair plans to go with the book and Curtis Buchanan and I are signing a contract with Lost Art Press to publish a video on making the chair. The video was Curtis’s idea. I learned chairmaking from Curtis, but this video is going to be me teaching Curtis how to build the Samuel Wing chair. I’m really excited.
The last section of the book that I wrote was about some old post-and-rung chair joints that I inherited from Jennie Alexander, part of her huge collection of old busted chair joints. Here’s a photo of the tenons:
And here’s the mortise (sawn in half):
This mortise is the real kicker. How did all that fuzzy-looking wood from the mortise get into the notch in the tenon? There’s so much wood in there that when Alexander pulled one of the joints apart with brute force, the tenon pulled huge splinters from the mouth of the mortise. That’s one tight joint!
Over the years, I tried various ways of making this joint. Even the most promising and oft-touted option – green mortises and dry tenons – never produced satisfactory results. Finally I stumbled on this video while learning to make wheels for my first wheelbarrow class with Peter Ross:
Beginning at the 10 minute and 30 second mark, the wheelwright puts the hub in a vat of boiling water, leaves it there for three and a half hours, then drives his notched spokes into the softened hub. The hub is able to compress an amazing amount. My heart started beating faster. Would this work with chair rungs? I quickly made a test joint and tried it. It worked, but one inaccurate joint isn’t much of a test. I began boring 20 or 30 holes in various pieces of green and dry oak, maple and hickory. I labeled them all, then brought them back into the house to boil:
Then I went back out to the shop to turn the tenons from air-dry hardwood – oak and hickory mostly. For consistencies sake, I turned them with a turner’s gate exactly 1/16″ bigger in diameter than the mortises. I turned a notch in them with the skew and rounded the ends. For fun, I made one tenon that was 1/8″ bigger in diameter than the mortises (the mortises were 5/8″, so this tenon was 3/4″). After twenty minutes the tenons were done and I got the boiled mortises and began driving them together:
All the tenons went into the mortises without cracking. Even the one 1/8″ oversized tenon went in; it dimpled the mortise some, but didn’t crack it. Amazing! But would these joints stay tight? I threw them in the attic to dry:
It’s been almost a year since I made these test joints. All of them are still tight. None of them were glued, since glue doesn’t bond to boiled wood (I eventually tried that too). But none of them will ever pull apart:
December Loop Back Class
by Elia Bizzarri | Sep 16, 2024 | 0 Comments
Just yesterday I finished teaching a wheelbarrow class with Peter Ross. One of my favorite parts of this class is the intersection between wood and fire. The tire gets heated in a wood fire before it is shrunk onto the wheel and even the staples for the staked sides can be burned into the wheelbarrow shafts for a custom fit.
The class was so much fun I’ve decided to add another class this year. It’s on a topic I’m more familiar with: Curtis Buchanan’s loop back side chair. I’ve been building this chair for over 20 years and have made hundreds of them, and have taught dozens of classes on making them. I know this chair pretty well by now, but there’s always more to learn. Which is why I’m excited to teach it again. I love honing skills that I know by heart to an even higher level and sharing that knowledge with others. That’s why I do what I do.
The class is December 2nd-7th, 2024, at my shop in Hillsborough, NC. More info on my class page.
Reamers in the Raw
by Elia Bizzarri | Jul 26, 2024 | 8 Comments
I sold my first reamer in 2004 or 2005 for about $40. Compared to the reamers we make now, it was a pretty rough affair; I ground the blade from a Stanley compass-saw blade and made the body from a maple blank for a Windsor chair leg. Since then, the price of our reamers has skyrocketed, and for good reason. We’ve been improving them for twenty years, and this has only increased the time it takes to make them, and the expense of the materials. But I wouldn’t be able to afford one of my reamers if I was a 17-year-old kid getting into woodworking now.
Because of this, I’ve decided to try selling a new product: Reamers in the Raw. They are the same as our finished reamers, but they still need a finial fitting to make them cut evenly. They also need the ends trimmed and a handle made (the blade comes sharpened and ready to use). They can then be finished to your specifications (or left unfinished). Included with the reamer is access to the second half of my online reamer-making video which details the steps needed to finish these reamers.
This is not a money-making venture. Rather it is an attempt to make our tools more accessible to people who will use them. So I am selling these reamers for half the price of a finished reamer: $70. If there’s interest in them, we’ll keep offering them (and maybe offer Travishers in the Raw as well).
Tenon Cutter Giveaway
by Elia Bizzarri | Jul 14, 2024 | 20 Comments
These tenon cutters were donated by a former student who has retired from his chairmaking hobby. We’d like them to go to someone who would have trouble affording them and would use them a lot. If you know someone like that, please nominate them (or yourself) in the comments section. I’ll pick a winner and mail the set of three tenon cutters to them. (Our tenon cutters have progressed a long way since these were made, but I’ve tested all three of them and they seem to be working quite well. It’s our usual set of three cutters: one 11/16 one for legs, one 1/2″ one for arm stumps or posts, and one 1/2″ cylindrical one for spindles.)
A Big Long Trip (and a sale on online classes)
by Elia Bizzarri | Jul 4, 2024 | 4 Comments
I’ve been gone for what seems like forever. In the beginning of June, my wife and I went on vacation for a week with the ultimate goal of Eric Cannizzaro’s shop in Vermont. There I taught a green woodworking class with Eric for a week.
It’s a pretty idyllic spot. We made spoons and fan birds, brooms and pitch forks. The pitch forks were my favorite, and a lot of the student’s favorite too. I had new information from Peter Follansbee about setting the bends, which was a lot of fun:
From Eric’s, I visited George Sawyer and his sister Annie:
Annie was around when I worked with their father Dave fifteen or twenty years ago, but George was off in school or somewhere so I’m just now getting to know him. Nice guy. Then I went to Old Sturbridge Village for my third viewing of the Samuel Wing collection to answer a few leftover questions for my book. The most interesting thing I found was these three unused spindles that have funny convex facets on them. Could have been done with a convex spokeshave, but I’ve never seen a wooden-bodied version of that tool. Maybe it was done with a hollow pane? I’ll have to try it:
F
From there I went to eastern Mass to spend a week with Peter Follansbee:
We built a “Samuel Wing” chair together and talked about old woodworkers we knew:
And I found four boxes of additional Samuel Wing Documents at the Sandwich Historical Society and Glass Museum:
Then I went to the Jersey shore and looked at a mid-19th century collection of chairmaking tools in the storage facilityof the Monmouth County Historical Association, including this rare chairmaker’s low bench:
And a box of unused spoon bits:
From there I went home. It’s really nice to sleep in my own bed again.
——————–
P.S. I have decided to offer my first-ever sale of online classes. From now through Sunday, all the classes I did with Curtis Buchanan are 50% off.
Velda’s Chair: We make a rocker and and an arm chair in this ten-part series. Nearly 20 hours of content. $82.50 through July 7th.
Democratic Chair: Seven episodes on making Curtis’s Democratic side chair. $50.00 through July 7th
Spoon Carving: We make one of Curtis’s steam-bent spoons in this 2-hour video. $10 through July 7th
A New Wheelbarrow Class
by Elia Bizzarri | Apr 19, 2024 | 2 Comments
Peter and I are at it again. Last year’s wheelbarrow class was so much fun we’ve decided to do it again. A local sawmill is at work sawing one of the last green ash logs in the Piedmont for barrow frames (no thanks to you Mr. Emerald Ash Borer) and we’ve got Roy Underhill’s foot-powered mortiser in the wings ready for mortising emergencies. Should be a grand time. Here’s the details:
Learn to make a traditional wheelbarrow! First, Elia will help you mortise the wheel’s hub, shave its spokes and fit its fellies. With the wheel under way, you’ll begin learning basic blacksmithing techniques as Peter helps you forge the brackets and braces for your wheelbarrow. Peter will make the tires for the wheels, then we’ll heat them in a fire, tap them onto the wheels, then dunk the wheels in a vat of water to shrink the tire and lock the wheel in its iron grip. Once the wheels are done, we’ll begin mortise-and-tenoning the barrow’s wooden frame. Students will go home with a finished wheel and a partially-completed barrow, plus all the parts and knowledge needed to finish it.
September 9th-14th, 2024
Visit the Traditional Wheelbarrow page for more info and to register read more…
Seat Blanks for Sale
by Elia Bizzarri | Mar 21, 2024 | 0 Comments
I’ve been doing some spring cleaning. Yesterday and today I’ve been hauling pine seat blanks into the attic from where they’ve been air-drying outside. Before that, I was going through more seats upstairs, making room. The upshot is that I have found some surplus seats. They are surplus for various reasons. The white pine is either surplus because it has cracks (I’m selling it cheap for glue-ups) or because I found a pile of nice seats that I sent with Seth to the Handworks show in Iowa. Some of these seats came back, so I figure I might as well throw them in here. The rest of the seats are surplus because they are of a species that I am no longer interested in making seats out of. I’ve gotten lazy in my old age and don’t want to mess with anything but white pine and butternut. So I’m posting them here. (Some of it is long enough to make table tops if you’re so inclined.)
Please Note: I really don’t want to ship these seats. This is for a couple reasons. I don’t know how to grade these things. Plus I live in humid NC and, while the seats have all been air-dried for several years, they are still somewhere between 10 and 20% EMC. I don’t know what they’ll do if I ship them to the desert. All told, there’s too much room for disappointment. But if I can’t sell them otherwise, I might be willing to ship some of them without a warranty. It makes my nervous, but I need them out of here and they’re too good to burn.
With that in mind, here they are:
Buckeye: These are the widest seats I’ve ever had. The one in the photo is 27 to 29″ wide and well over 2″ thick. It may be close to 2.5″ The ones that I have carved had some curl – pretty, but tough. They also grew with a twist, which means they are more likely to twist. These broads are six or eight years old and still pretty flat, but that can still change. I have three boards, 5-6′ long. $4/bf
A stack of nice white pine seats. Came from Michigan. $70/seat (I definitely will not ship these, but these folks do)
White pine for two-piece seats: I have enough of this for maybe 10 or 15 seats. $3/bf
Elm: This stuff is very hard. It’s also rather pretty, in a greenish sort of way. Like all elm, it has interlocking grain, which makes it impossible to split (a benefit for seats), very hard to carve, and very likely to twist. Most English Windsor chair seats were made out of this stuff. I have a half dozen boards of varying widths up to 22″ or so. They’re maybe 6′ long. $5/bf
Walnut: This is mostly some stuff that I had sawn eight or ten years ago. It’s really nice walnut, air-dried with lots of color. Most of it is pretty clear. Some of it is 8′ long or so. $120/seat (this one has a couple cracks, so it’s $80)
Greenwood Week with Eric Cannizzaro & Elia Bizzarri
by Elia Bizzarri | Feb 12, 2024 | 0 Comments
I’m excited to be teaching this class again. It’s the kind of woodworking I love best, and I love getting to share it. And I’m especially excited to be teaching with Eric Cannizzaro again – he’s an excellent chairmaker, a good teacher and a really nice guy. I’ve never been to his shop before, but he’s spent the last couple years improving it and it sounds really nice. Here’s the class description:
Spend a week working wood as nature intended. We’ll begin with a walk in the woods and learn how to identify several useful tree species and how to pick a good tree for green woodworking projects. Then we will return to the shop to split and rive parts from an ash log to start our first project. A variety of projects will teach us how to exploit wood’s strengths and weaknesses for our benefit. Emphasis will be placed on learning fundamentals that can be applied to a variety of projects, green or dry. Projects options include spoons, pitch forks, brooms, firewood carriers, tool handles, fan birds sharpening and other projects useful and otherwise. A pole lathe will be on hand for fun and turning.
The class takes place at Eric Cannizzaro’s shop in Charlotte, Vermont. The class is open to 8 students. We will also offer a work-study position to someone for whom money is a barrier.
GREENWOOD WEEK, June 10th to 14th, 2024 – $1000
For more information, visit the Greenwood Week page.

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