Ingenious Mechanicks – Christopher Schwarz

Early Workbenches and Workholding

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 is easy to dismiss these ancient benches as obsolete, they are – at most – misunderstood.

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 Chris Schwarz 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 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 newly 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.

Ingenious Mechanics is 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. And the whole book is wrapped in a heavy matte-coated dust jacket. Like all Lost Art Press books, Ingenious Mechanicks is produced and printed entirely in the United States.

Hardcover, 160 pages

ISBN 978-0-99787-027-5

Author, Christopher Schwarz

Publisher: Lost Art Press Reviews: Lost Art Press Reviews