Ingenious Mechanicks

Early Workbenches & Workholding by Christopher Schwarz Workbenches with screw-driven vises are a fairly modern invention. For more than 2,000 years, woodworkers built complex and beautiful pieces of furniture using simpler benches that relied on pegs, wedges and the human body to grip the work. While it’s easy to dismiss these ancient benches as obsolete, they are – at most – misunderstood. For three years, Christopher Schwarz built these ancient workbenches and put them to work in his shop to build all manner of furniture. Absent any surviving ancient instruction manuals for these benches, Schwarz relied on hundreds of historical paintings of these benches for clues as to how they worked. Then he replicated the devices and techniques shown in the paintings to see how (or if) they worked. This book is about this journey into the past and takes the reader from Pompeii, which features the oldest image of a Western bench, to a Roman fort in Germany to inspect the oldest surviving workbench and finally to his shop in Kentucky, where he recreated three historical workbenches and dozens of early jigs. These early benches have many advantages: They are less expensive to build They can be built in a couple of days They require less material You can sit down to use them They take up less space than a modern bench and can even serve as seating in your house In some cases, they perform better than modern vises or shavehorses. Even if you have no plans to build an early workbench, “Ingenious Mechanicks” is filled with rediscovered ideas you can put to work on your modern bench. You can make an incredibly versatile shaving station for your bench using four small pieces of wood. You can create a hard-gripping face vise with a notch and some softwood wedges. You can make the best planing stop ever with a stick of oak and some rusty nails. For a chapter-by-chapter discussion of the book, go here. “Ingenious Mechanics” is 8-1/2” x 11”, 160 pages and printed in full color on beautiful coated paper. The binding is sewn to last for generations. The pages are surrounded by heavy hardbound boards that are covered in cotton cloth. Like all Lost Art Press books, “Ingenious Mechanicks” is produced and printed entirely in the United States. Sorry, but signed books cannot be personalized. Contents Introduction VII 1: Why Early Workbenches? 2: Workbenches Old & Modern 3: The Pleasures & Problems with Paintings 4: Workbenches: Where, When & Why 5: Early Workholding Devices 6: Herculaneum Workbench 7: Sallburg Workbench 8: 'Auf Widersehen' to Your Dollars 9: Holy Roman Workbench 10: 'Experto Crede' Acknowledgements 147 Index 149