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An Interview with Christopher Schwarz, Part 2: The Anarchist Toolmaker

It’s 1996, it’s nighttime and Christopher Schwarz is underneath an office desk in Frankfort, Kentucky, sleeping. With both a Bachelors and a Masters in journalism and a few years of work experience, Schwarz is struggling to get his local newspaper startup off of the ground, and the workload demands overnight stays at the office.

Fast-forward to 2017 and Schwarz is underneath a Roman workbench, wide awake, inside the Saalburg, a reconstructed Roman fort outside of Frankfurt, Germany. “I spent a lot of time under that bench with a flashlight,” Schwarz recounts. He was studying the workbench’s construction for an upcoming book. The Frankfort paper hadn’t worked out, but Schwarz had achieved his goal of becoming a publisher with the formation of Lost Art Press.

Launching Lost Art Press and a tool manufacturing company, which we’ll get to in a moment, required more than finding the right piece of furniture to lie down under; in the gap between Frankfort and Frankfurt, Schwarz generated 21 years’ worth of content for Popular Woodworking, wrote nine books, taught classes at sixteen schools in five countries and appeared in countless videos produced by himself, PW, Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, ShopWoodworking.com and others.

Schwarz has not only wielded a lot of tools in that time but, partly inspired by the “frustration at the bench” he described in Part 1 of this interview, also applied his journalistic training to learn about how tools are made. He put this knowledge into practice in 2015, when he and a couple of friends launched their manufacturing venture, Crucible Tool, whose mission is “To make good tools that we honestly need.”

“We don’t make precious things for collectors,” the Crucible Tool mission statement explains. “There are no serial numbers or limited edition this or that. And we don’t make tools that someone else already makes really well.

"Instead, we make tools that have been overlooked or desperately need to be improved or refined.”

Here in Part 2 of our interview with Schwarz, we discuss using tools, making tools, furniture design, anarchy, accountability, photography, and what he hopes folks in the future will do when they look back on our work.

Core77: For the uninitiated, can you talk about what the allure is of using hand tools?

Christopher Schwarz: Oh, I hated hand tools when I was a kid. My family had a farm in Arkansas, and we built our first house [there] with hand tools. I went to college [and thought] “I’m never doing that again.” And of course, as soon as I got out of college, I started taking classes, and it was in handwork.

What I’ve found about handwork is that it is the expression of skill. The machines that we have are great, and I love machines too, but a lot of times [the machine is there] so that somebody unskilled can do an operation. And that’s great, there’s no problem with that. The problem is when designs start to be made around the limits of the machine, which is I’m sure something that the Core77 readers run up against all the time, like “Well, our CNC won’t handle this or that.”

Well, the answer has always been handwork. If you can use handwork, and you have machines at your disposal, and you don’t let the machines dictate your designs, then you’re pretty much free to design whatever you can think of. That’s the beauty, the [freedom conferred by] handwork.

It’s also great if you can…figure out how to make a machine help. I’ve got no problem with [the situation where] you [possess] hand skills, and [are] not limiting your designs to something that a machine can spit out. I really think you need both, if you want to be a really good designer for furniture.

Case in point: Here Schwarz experiments to see if he can make saddling out a seat faster by starting with a drill and a Forstner bit… 

…then hitting it with a scorp…

…and finishing up with a travisher.

Let’s talk about Crucible Tool. It’s not an easy thing to bring a new tool into production, what inspired you to take that leap?

Well, I’ve been writing about toolmaking since I started writing about woodworking, and took a very deep interest in learning about steel, and casting and everything, so that I could be an informed journalist.

And what I found is that there were some tools that just needed to be made. A lot of toolmakers are fantastic toolmakers, but they’re not woodworkers. I teamed up with some other friends of mine, who are toolmakers and also woodworkers, and we’re slowly, gradually bringing tools into the world that are what we want to have at our bench.

The patterns for Crucible Tool’s Iron Holdfasts.

In the drag and ready for sand.

The pour.

The magic moment.

The magicker moment.

We’re not trying to take over the world; it’s more like, “I want this damn mallet, but no one will make it for me in the way I want it made, to this hardness, with this length of handle,” et cetera. So we make it, and hopefully other people will think it’s good too.

For people who might mistake your focus on historical objects as just slavishly looking backwards, Crucible produces a pair of pattern dividers for which you designed a new hinge, no? A new hinge mechanism.

Oh yeah, absolutely. And it was informed by past designs, but is a move forward. I’m not a puffy sleeve guy, and I don’t wear weird underwear. Historical reproduction is not what I’m into at all. I try to be very…I don’t want to use the word contemporary, but I’m always trying to push forward, and not just trying to reproduce the past.

Crucible Tool’s Improved Pattern Dividers.

You can sharpen the tips to your liking, and the hinge allows you to dial in your preferred level of friction. In two generations, when the steel has worn a bit, all your descendant needs to do is tighten it and it’ll be good as new.

Five easy pieces. 

That’s the same way we are with the tools. We have modern materials. We can use them, but we don’t want to abuse them. We want to make sure that they’re used appropriately so that these tools will last forever, instead of the crap that we find at the home centers now, where design is a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, made by somebody who just really doesn’t know what a screwdriver or a chisel does.

In addition to the pattern dividers, Crucible currently makes a set of design curves and iron holdfasts. What else is in the pipeline?

We’re working on a mallet right now. We’re just waiting to get the handle prototype back from a factory. This is a classic example of what we’ll normally do: So in England, they would use a two-and-a-half pound metal mallet head with a short handle for everything. For mortising, for dovetailing, for setting holdfasts, for putting assemblies together and taking them apart. But it never [caught on in America]. They called it a lump hammer over there. I fell into using one of those several years ago, after working in England, and fell in love with it. So we’re designing one, a modern one. I think people will love it; everybody who uses it in the shop goes gaga for it.

We also want to do some more measuring tools. We’ve found that as people’s eyes get older, it becomes harder to read those six- or 12-inch rules, which have black numbers on a silver background. Machinists have a great solution, which is to make the numbers white on a black chrome background–but their rulers are measured in hundredths of inches, so that doesn’t help us. So it’s making woodworking rulers that are easier to read, but use [standard 4R marking] instead of silly hundredths.

You just reminded me of something, that’s to do with what we call “universal design.” I follow a hand tool woodworking group on Facebook, and have read updates from older woodworkers suffering from arthritis and reduced vision. So I’m really interested in the potential for tools designed for people whose physical abilities are declining due to aging. Because it’s heartbreaking that by the time they reach the age where they have all the experience to produce great work, now their body is starting to give out. So I do think there is a market for that kind of stuff.

Oh, absolutely. We’re all getting older, none of us are getting younger. I’m 49, and I’m just starting to deal with some of those issues. So something else that we’re developing is a mechanical pencil lead that you can use when marking out dovetails, tenons, whatever. But what’s interesting about this pencil lead, is that it fluoresces under UV. So that if you have a UV light [or even] a cheap little UV flashlight, all of a sudden you can see a 0.5 millimeter line like it’s on fire. So I’m totally into that stuff, and that’s a good example of how technology can make it better for all of us in the long run.

Whoa. Should I not mention that pencil lead idea, because that’s pretty brilliant [and someone is bound to steal it].

Thanks. No, mention it, that’s fine. We’ve got the formula, we’re just trying to find a factory that will do it for us. No, like I said, I’m open source. We’re not going to patent it, so if somebody else beats us to the market, that’s great too, because it’s great to have it out there.

Both Lost Art Press’ books and the tools from Crucible are manufactured in the U.S.A. Have you run into any manufacturing challenges?

Well, we’ve got some other stuff that we’re still trying to find [capable manafacturers for]. There’s some hollow casting techniques that were really common in the 19th century, but it’s very difficult to find foundries to do that sort of work today. That’s a problem we run into all the time: “Yeah, we used to be able to do that, but we’ve forgotten.”

[We’ve designed] a multi-tool handle, and it’s this open casting and you can put a variety of tools in there. You can put everything from a nail in there to use the tool as a scratch awl, to a knife blade, to a file. It has a million little uses for turning simple objects into very useful tools, but we’ve got to find somebody who can make hollow castings.

Like much of Core77’s readership, my background is in industrial design. And the preface that you wrote for “The Anarchist’s Design Book” really resounded with me, as I think it would with many of our readers. I won’t paraphrase and butcher it here, but it drove home the point that we can build durable objects for ourselves rather than buying mass-produced disposable junk, specifically in a furniture context. Can you talk a little bit about that preface, and what inspired it?

Yeah, the idea of that book, and the idea that runs through my personal furniture work, is that it’s silly for us as designers and builders to imitate gross, ornate, crap furniture designs that were driven entirely by status and money. You look at the history of furniture, or of any basic object that we use, and the designs started out very simple. You can go back and look at 11th century furniture, and you’d think that Hans Wegner designed it. The lines are clean. It’s very spare. It’s about angles, comfort, simplicity to build, and robustness.

But when money first enters the equation, then you have makers who have patrons, are being patronized by rich people. So they start making their pieces more ornate, so that it looks better [than the patron’s neighbor’s] highboy. So that becomes the standard. Then technology comes along, and they find a way to make the ornate stuff for the more common people, [so another maker has to top that for the rich patrons]. And now you have this cycle that just [repeats] over and over, where the rich people determine our design cues, and have in furniture forever.

Whereas throughout human history, we’ve had a silo of furniture that nobody writes about, that is pretty unchanged from Egyptian times up until now. It was the furniture that normal people like you and me use, not the ultra rich. And like I said, it was this very spare aesthetic, I wouldn’t say spartan, but it’s not this ornate crap.

Discovering that sort of furniture and seeing that lineage of 2,000 years of really basic design, and its vernacular–that’s not a great word, but it is the right word–is what inspired that book. It lays out the principles that these pieces were built on, which are much simpler than the really complex ways we build furniture now. And taking those designs from the 11th century, whether it’s Italian, Spanish, Moorish, and building them, bringing them into the modern time, and they’re shockingly modern. I’ve got a 14th century Italian table in our showroom [photo below], and when people see it they think it was something that came out of tomorrow, and it’s not.

The idea behind the book is that there were these construction principles that all of us can use. And the democratic part about it is that you don’t have to have a crapload of tools or a crapload of experience. You don’t have to have seven years under a master in a European system to build this stuff. You don’t have to be good at math. You don’t have to be good at much, you just have to want to build furniture.

And so the book lays out the basic designs that I found, and how to make them using very simple tools. One of them is basically an oversized pencil sharpener, and a drill, and a knife. You can bring in some electric tools, but you don’t need very many. And you can produce stuff that is really pretty good looking, I think. That’s the basis of the book, and that’s guided my work for a long time. And the book was the first time I had the guts to talk about it in public.

You referenced anarchy in the first part of the interview, and are of course known for having written “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” prior to “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” Anarchy is a word that can easily be misconstrued. Can you talk about your concept of it?

Sure. By the way I’ve found it’s really difficult to sell, to people in Europe or on military bases, your books when they have “anarchy” in the title.

American anarchism is not the violent sort of anarchism that is associated with European movements. The father of American anarchism, Josiah Warren, is actually from Cincinnati here, very close to where I’m sitting. American anarchism is basically a distrust of large organizations. It’s not seeking to overturn them. I think that American anarchists are very practical, in that you know you can’t run a world without any sort of organization, but it’s a tendency to avoid working with, associating with, or having contact with large governments, large corporations, large churches. That something bad happens when you get a certain number of people into a group. They stop acting like humans, and they start acting like something else.

The way that I work in my life, is I try to limit my contact with all these sorts of people. I pay my taxes, and I’m a good citizen, and all of that. I’m not a bomb throwing person and don’t believe in violence at all, in fact most American anarchists are total peaceniks. It’s more just trying not to get ground up by the corporate culture, and the consumerism, and that’s what American anarchism is.

Of course, every American anarchist is different. I’m sure there’s an American anarchist out there right now throwing things at this article and using it to wipe himself because he hates what I’ve just said, but that’s the beauty of it.

This might be veering off topic a little bit, but it’s a very interesting subject. What do you suppose it is about large groups of people that brings out the crazy?

I think because you can make decisions without accountability. If you’re a car company, you can think “Should we have a recall, or is it cheaper to just pay the fees when people die?” [Without accountability] you can have those conversations, whereas as an individual, you can’t even fathom that. “Is human life important?” Of course it is, and you can’t put it in monetary terms.

You can justify going to war for things that are really amazing. The organization gives you the tools to kill people, and sure there are some individuals who may push you into it, but it’s really having that huge organization that’s like, “Yeah! Hey, we’ve got tanks.” So this becomes a very easy decision, [whereas] I’m not declaring war on Newport, Kentucky. I can’t do that. So I think it’s [the being shielded] from accountability.

Circling back to tools, an underrated one: The camera. You recently launched a website of your own work, and in addition to the pieces themselves I was struck by the photography, which is stunning. Your background is in journalism, not photojournalism; what drove you to ensure the quality of the photography?

Photography has always been important to me. It’s another part of the whole media equation, understanding how to run a publication company. I used to have a darkroom when I was a kid and my first real job was processing studio photos in a photo lab. So I do most of my own photography and have a friend that does some of it.

Being in media you know that images are gold. They’re as important as the words, and sometimes more important. So we’ve taught all of our authors how to do it. And you don’t have to be super talented to take good, basic photographs of your work; it’s just understanding a few basic principles, how light works, what backlighting is, what a key light is, how diagonals work. [Get those down and] you can take really amazing photographs.

The rules are stupidly simple. A lot of times, it’s using fewer light sources and simpler compositions. No need to make it more complicated than it needs to be.

We’ve touched on this topic a bit, but just to beat a dead horse: What is your take on trends, and how can we, as a society, fight fashion?

Dressing like me would be a good start.

[The delivery was so dry I didn’t realize he was joking.] Oh, I don’t mean fashion as in clothing. I mean–

No, no, I know what you mean. I think it’s important to have an appreciation for the past. Not that you’re going to dress up like them, or you’re going to have furniture that is like them. But I think that if you have to build your own stuff, you’re not going to do really crazy, outrageous, ornate stuff, but something far more practical. Whereas, if you have somebody who’s like, “Look, I just want the best, I want to spend, I have a $100,000 budget for this project”–well, you’re going to pull out all of the stops.

So having an appreciation for what other people had to build, and then building it yourself. That’s how I inoculate myself from trends.

And this isn’t new, this idea’s not mine. If you look at Kaare Klint and a whole foundation of Danish modern furniture, which we think of as this radical change from what came before, it was actually very much looking back at English and Chinese furniture and saying, “How can we take the best of those, and produce something that reflects today?”

And that’s the best for me: Taking the best of the past, and smoothing it out for what we need right now. And hopefully, if we do that, then maybe somebody will look back at what we do, do the same thing, improve upon it, and make something beautiful.

__________

And that concludes our interview with Christopher Schwarz. By the way, here’s something I didn’t expect when I first contacted him requesting an interview. In this video explaining the design and manufacture of the Crucible Tool holdfast, listen carefully to the things he says and explains about materials, manufacturing techniques, design and, while he never says “UX,” the clear priority on the user experience, even to the detriment of marketability:

If you didn’t know who he was and I asked you to guess his profession, I’m willing to bet you’d say “Industrial designer." 

Guess I should’ve kept going with that alphabet thing in Part 1.

______________

Where you can follow Schwarz’s work:

- The Chris Schwarz Blog on Popular Woodworking. "Your typical workaday blog, what I’m doing in the shop, shop tips, stuff like that.”

- The Lost Art Press blog. “More about the hardcore research that I do, the books that we’re publishing, and my personal work.”

- The Crucible Tool blog. “Pretty straightforward, [whatever] we’re doing at the foundry or at the machine shop, making tools.”

- Lost Art Press’ Instagram.

- His website of personal work.

- His YouTube channel.