Elia Bizzari - Hand Tool Woodworking

“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).

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!

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:

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.