What Is a Shaving Horse?
Introduction
A shaving horse is a foot-operated work-holding bench. The operator sits astride it and applies foot pressure to a treadle, which clamps the workpiece between a movable jaw and a fixed platform — freeing both hands for drawknife or spokeshave work. It is one of the central work-holding tools of green woodworking and one of the defining tools of traditional chairmaking.
Documented forms of the shaving horse appear in European sources centuries before modern bench vises became standard shop equipment. It is depicted in medieval illustrations of coopers, chairmakers, and woodworkers across central and northern Europe, and persists into the present day not because no one invented a replacement, but because the basic design — body weight converted into clamping force, released instantly by releasing foot pressure — is difficult to improve upon for the kind of work it does. [Peter Follansbee — historical research]
What has changed over the centuries is not the fundamental principle but the details of execution: the geometry of the jaw, the position of the treadle, the height of the seat, the kind of work the horse is designed to hold. Each generation of makers has brought different problems to the design, and the design has changed accordingly.
This page documents that process. It is not a page about any single maker’s design. It is a record of how different woodworkers, across different eras and different countries, have adapted the shaving horse to solve the problems in front of them — and how that process continues today.
Much of the information available online about shaving horses is scattered across books, magazine articles, personal blogs, plan pages, manufacturer descriptions, and videos — often without clear attribution to who designed what, or why. Design lineage is cloudy. Mechanisms are borrowed without credit. Manufacturers and plan sets describe features without naming the makers who originated them. This page gathers that lineage around a single question: what problem did each design answer? By separating design contributors from teachers, popularizers, plan drawers, and manufacturers, the history becomes easier to understand and each maker’s contribution easier to credit accurately.
Key Points
- A shaving horse is a foot-operated work-holding bench used with drawknives and spokeshaves.
- It is best understood as a family of related designs — not a single invention with a single inventor.
- Documented forms appear in European woodworking sources at least as far back as the medieval period.
- Modern makers changed the design substantially — each one to solve a different problem.
- This page distinguishes design contributors from teachers, plan drawers, and manufacturers — because these are different kinds of contribution.
- Attribution here follows the problem solved: a design contributor changed the tool; a popularizer spread it; a plan drawer made it buildable; a manufacturer produced it.
- No single shaving horse design is best for every purpose. Each of the four modern designs documented here answered a different question.
What a shaving horse is used for
Shaving horses are used wherever a drawknife or spokeshave is the primary shaping tool: green woodworking, chairmaking, tool handle making, coopering, basket-making, and any work requiring controlled shaping of round or irregular stock. The foot-operated clamp leaves both hands free for the tool while keeping the workpiece securely positioned without a second person to hold it.
A family of tools, not a single design
The shaving horse is more accurately described as a family of related work-holding devices than a single design. Dumbhead horses, bodger's horses, English forms, German Schnitzelbank variants, and the more recent ergonomic designs of the green woodworking revival share a principle but differ significantly in execution. The diversity of the form is part of its story.
How this page classifies contributions
| Role | What this means | Examples on this page |
|---|---|---|
| Design contributor | Changed the tool's mechanism, geometry, ergonomics, or performance to solve a specific problem. | Brian Boggs, Dave Fisher, Pete Galbert |
| Teacher / Popularizer | Spread use and understanding through books, schools, television, videos, or demonstrations. | Roy Underhill, Drew Langsner, Jennie Alexander, Peter Follansbee, Rex Krueger |
| Documentation contributor | Made a design buildable and legible through technical drawings, plans, articles, or books. | Jeff Lefkowitz (plans), Fine Woodworking, Lost Art Press |
| Manufacturer | Produced, commercialized, or distributed a design or hardware component. | Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, Mark Hicks / Plate 11 |
Early History
Section 1
The shaving horse appears in European woodworking at least as far back as the medieval period. It is depicted in illustrations of coopers, chairmakers, and tool handle makers across central and northern Europe — evidence of a tool so well-suited to its work that it required little change for centuries.
European Origins
The German Schnitzelbank — literally “carving bench” — is among the oldest documented forms. It appears in period illustrations showing craftsmen using drawknives to shape barrel staves, chair legs, tool handles, and other round or tapered stock. The Schnitzelbank family encompasses considerable variation: some designs use a dumbhead jaw actuated by a pivoting treadle; others use a sliding beam; still others use body tension rather than foot pressure as the clamping force.
The English Bodger’s Horse
The English twin-lever bodger’s horse — documented in Jenkins’ and Edlin’s books on English woodland crafts — represents a distinct design tradition from the dumbhead form. Where the dumbhead horse actuates a single pivoting jaw, the bodger’s horse uses two parallel levers that clamp the workpiece between them. A detail that rarely appears in descriptions of this form but matters considerably in practice: the work hold-down crossbar can be either fixed or rotating. A rotating crossbar is important specifically because the pivot pin in the bodger-style design is located where it does not yield useful mechanical leverage — the rotation of the crossbar compensates for this geometry. A bodger’s horse built with a fixed crossbar is significantly easier to make, and this is why many examples in that style are close to useless in practice. The rotating crossbar is the difference between a horse that works and one that frustrates. (Drew Langsner, personal communication, 2026.)
Scandinavian Traditions
Scandinavian woodworking traditions preserved particularly diverse forms of the shave horse. The region’s long tradition of green woodworking — producing chairs, baskets, tools, and domestic objects from locally harvested wood — kept the shave horse in active use through eras when industrial production reduced its presence elsewhere. Regional variations in Scandinavian design reflect different materials, different work, and different ergonomic preferences developed over generations of use.
Drew Langsner’s connection to this tradition is direct and documented. When he first met Wille Sundqvist, Wille had never seen a shaving horse. Drew introduced him to the Swiss-style version he had built after his 1972 coopering apprenticeship with Ruedi Kohler. Both Wille Sundqvist and his son Jogge Sundqvist subsequently reproduced Drew’s drawings of the Swiss version in their own books — a transmission from a single American craftsman back into Scandinavian craft literature. Jogge later located a few surviving historical examples at the Nordic Museum outside Stockholm.
Estonian Examples and End-to-End Clamping
The book Woodworking in Estonia documents historical shave horse forms that include end-to-end clamping mechanisms — designs where the workpiece is held lengthwise rather than clamped across its face. [Woodworking in Estonia] Dave Fisher, in his own research and development of the bowl horse, identified this historical precedent as significant: it demonstrates that the clamping geometries being explored by contemporary makers were not inventions but rediscoveries of solutions that had existed in the historical record.
Peter Follansbee’s ongoing research into historical woodworking practices has further documented these end-to-end clamping systems in period sources, establishing them as part of the shaving horse’s legitimate historical tradition rather than modern departures from it. [pfollansbee.wordpress.com]
Regional Variation as Design Intelligence
What the historical record shows is not a single shave horse design that spread across Europe, but a principle — the conversion of body weight into clamping force through a foot-operated treadle — that was independently adapted to local materials, local crafts, and local bodies in dozens of different ways. The diversity is not inconsistency; it is evidence of a design principle robust enough to accommodate many different applications.
"Simple and Cheap Shaving Horse"
Engraving from a 19th-century carpentry manual. The full front leg and minimal construction reflect the tool's common form before modern ergonomic adaptations. Public domain.
Bauer auf der Schnitzbank
(Farmer on the Shaving Horse) — Karl von Enhuber, Bavarian State Painting Collections (Inv. 7669). One of the few period paintings showing the horse in active working use. Public domain.
Sources
Woodworking in Estonia — Documents historical shaving horse forms including end-to-end clamping mechanisms. Referenced by Dave Fisher in his bowl horse research.
Peter Follansbee — pfollansbee.wordpress.com — Period woodworking research documenting historical clamping systems.
Drew Langsner, Country Woodcraft (1978) and Green Woodworking (1987) — Primary documentation of European and North American shaving horse traditions for the revival generation. Drew’s current work: drewlangsner.art (abstract sculpture).
The Greenwood Revival
Section 2
By the mid-twentieth century, the shaving horse had largely disappeared from American workshops. Industrial production had replaced the crafts that depended on it. The skills of green woodworking — working fresh-cut wood with hand tools, using the wood’s own moisture content as an advantage rather than a problem — had been passed down in isolated pockets or lost entirely in much of North America.
The revival that brought those skills back, and with them the shaving horse, was the work of a small number of individuals in the 1970s and 1980s whose books and schools created a new generation of practitioners.
Drew Langsner and Country Workshops
Drew Langsner’s first encounter with the shaving horse came through an Eric Sloane book in the mid-1960s — a visual record of traditional American tools and craft practices that made a strong impression long before he had the chance to use one. That came in 1972, when he learned Swiss coopering with Ruedi Kohler. Working at Kohler’s horse turned out to be, in Drew’s words, a “huge life-changer.” When he returned to the United States and settled in California, he made an almost exact copy of Kohler’s version. He eventually brought that horse to North Carolina, where it still lives in his shop — collecting dust now, but carrying with it the direct line back to a working Swiss coopering tradition.
Over the years Drew studied many versions: the English bodger’s horses documented in Jenkins’ and Edlin’s books, a wide range of European forms, and the emerging designs of the North American revival. His own Z-version, described in Country Woodcraft: Then & Now (Lost Art Press), is — in his words — something with “elements borrowed from all over.” The Z feature itself came from Masashi Kutsuwa of the Gifu Academy of Forest Science and Culture in Mino City, Gifu Prefecture, Japan. The pivoting cam was suggested by John Kraus. That framing captures the spirit of the book and of the tool itself: the shaving horse as accumulated practice, not proprietary invention.
Drew’s trajectory helps document one important transmission line within the shaving horse revival. A working Swiss coopering tradition, carried into the American craft revival through direct apprenticeship in 1972, and transmitted from there to generations of woodworkers through books, workshops, and Country Workshops in Marshall, NC. The shave horse Drew introduced to many students was not abstracted only from historical texts; it was a tool he had built from a working European model he had used in practice and carried back to the United States.
Country Woodcraft (1978) and Green Woodworking (1987) were among the first books to bring those traditions to a North American audience in accessible form. His school became a gathering point for makers returning to hand-tool work — and a crucible in which the shaving horse reentered American practice at scale.
Jennie Alexander and the Chair-From-a-Tree Tradition
Jennie Alexander’s Make a Chair from a Tree (first published as John Alexander, The Taunton Press, 1978; second edition with afterword, Astragal Press, 1994; completely revised new edition as Jennie Alexander, Lost Art Press, 2021) introduced a generation of American woodworkers to the possibility of building a complete chair from freshly split wood, using the shaving horse as the central work station. The book was influential not only for its technique but for its framing: green woodworking presented not as a primitive alternative to proper furniture-making but as a sophisticated tradition with its own logic.
In the 2021 Lost Art Press edition, Alexander described the origin of her shaving horse design: it was built from a 14-foot two-by-six oak plank that had fallen off a truck in the streets of Baltimore. The board was too narrow to sit on directly — that constraint led her to think of a lathe’s parallel ways. She also noted that part of the inspiration came from “a misunderstanding of a faded picture in an English pamphlet on chairmaking.” The design, as she observed, has “got around” — but she herself later adopted a different version of an English-style horse.
The Z jaw mechanism
The pivoting Z feature on Drew's horse — the Z idea from Masashi Kutsuwa, the pivoting cam suggested by John Kraus. Photo courtesy Drew Langsner.
Sources
Drew Langsner — personal communication (2025), including his direct lineage: Eric Sloane (mid-1960s) → Swiss coopering with Ruedi Kohler (1972) → Kohler-copy horse (California) → Country Workshops (Marshall, NC). Also: Country Woodcraft (1978), Green Woodworking (1987), and Country Woodcraft: Then & Now (Lost Art Press) — countryworkshops.org
Jenkins and Edlin — English woodworking texts documenting bodger’s horses; cited by Drew Langsner as part of his study of shaving horse forms
John Alexander, Make a Chair from a Tree (The Taunton Press, 1978; revised 1994). Foundational text of the North American chairmaking revival.
Brian Boggs, “A New Breed of Shaving Horse,” Fine Woodworking #139 (Nov/Dec 1999) — Read free at Boggs Bench
The Problems Every Shaving Horse Must Solve
Section 3
Rather than organizing the history of the shave horse only by who made what, it is more useful to understand the problems that every shave horse design attempts to solve — because it is those problems, not the designs themselves, that explain why different makers arrived at different solutions.
Every shave horse design represents a set of choices about which of these problems to prioritize. No single design solves all of them equally well. That tension is why the shave horse continues to evolve.
Holding Power
The horse must clamp the workpiece firmly enough to resist aggressive drawknife work without shifting — but gently enough not to crush soft green wood or leave marks on finished surfaces. The geometry of the jaw and the mechanical advantage of the treadle determine how well this balance is achieved.
Speed of Adjustment
A shave horse that takes time to release and reposition defeats its own purpose. The ideal design allows instant release with a relaxation of foot pressure, and equally fast repositioning of the workpiece. Designs that require hand adjustment of the jaw height or angle lose significant time across a working day. For many hobbyists, the time to build a shaving horse outweighs some inconvenience like this, so the less efficient horses still have a viable place in modern shops.
Ergonomics
The position of the operator's body determines the quality of the work and the sustainability of the workday. Hip height relative to knee height, back support, the angle of the treadle relative to the leg, and the height of the working surface all affect whether a maker can work for hours without pain — or whether the horse becomes the source of the problem it was meant to solve.
Accessibility
Some work — particularly round forms, bowl blanks, or irregular billets — requires that the maker be able to approach the workpiece from unusual angles. Standard shave horse geometry assumes a roughly horizontal, linear workpiece. Designs developed for bowl carving or curved work require fundamentally different approaches to how the workpiece is presented to the tool.
Stability
The horse must stay put during work. A horse that walks across the floor, rocks on uneven ground, or shifts under lateral force from the drawknife costs time and precision. Mass, foot design, and the direction of the clamping force all affect stability.
Specialized Applications
Some makers need a horse that does one specific job extremely well: holding a bowl blank for carving, clamping a chair leg at an angle that matches the bevel of a tenon cutter, or positioning a long billet for drawknife work without the ends fouling on the horse's structure. Specialized designs that solve one problem precisely are often more valuable in practice than general-purpose designs that solve all problems approximately.
Long-Term Physical Sustainability
This is the problem that is rarely discussed but should be. A shave horse is a tool for a career, not a single project. The body position it puts the operator in, day after day, year after year, determines whether the work can be sustained across a lifetime. This consideration — largely absent from historical designs — became central to the ergonomic work that Brian Boggs undertook when his own career was threatened by back pain.
Primary sources for the ergonomic problem framing
Brian Boggs, “A New Breed of Shaving Horse,” Fine Woodworking #139 (Nov/Dec 1999) — the clearest published statement of why a shaving horse should be designed around the body, not just around work-holding. Read free at Boggs Bench →
Design Innovators
Section 4
The shaving horse has been redesigned many times in the past fifty years, but not all redesigns are the same kind of thing. The makers documented here each identified a problem that existing designs had not addressed and developed a new mechanical or ergonomic approach to answer it. In each case, the problem came first — the design followed from it.
Attribution on this page follows the problem solved. A design contributor is credited when a maker changed the tool’s mechanism, geometry, ergonomics, or performance to answer a specific problem. Teachers and popularizers are credited for spreading use and understanding. Documentation contributors are credited for making designs buildable and legible. Manufacturers are credited for producing or distributing designs or components. These roles often overlap, but they are not the same thing.
Design Innovators and Further Developments
This page documents modern shave horse development in chronological sequence. The makers in this section each identified a problem that existing designs had not addressed and developed a new mechanical or ergonomic approach to answer it. The makers in the following section — Further Developments — built on those foundations, contributing real value in accessibility, documentation, and reach.
Brian Boggs
Chairmaker & Tool Designer, Asheville, NC
The Problem
How can a shaving horse support long chairmaking workdays without damaging the body?
The Solution
Ergonomic seat position, sliding seat, ratcheting clamping mechanism, and improved clamping geometry for chairmaking and production use.
Designed for Ergonomics and Production Speed
Brian Boggs has been making chairs since 1982. By the late 1980s, chronic back pain was threatening to end his career — not from a single injury but from the accumulated cost of a body position that, repeated across years of full-time work, was extracting a toll he hadn’t seen coming. He stepped away from the bench and studied the problem seriously: workplace ergonomics, posture mechanics, the geometry of clamping systems, how leverage and body position interact across a working life.
Brian Boggs shaving horse
Anniversary Edition, 2016. Side profile showing the shortened front geometry and ergonomic seat position.
That research produced a shaving horse that departed markedly from the forms most chairmakers knew — not because it improved on existing designs in their own terms, but because it started from a different set of questions. Existing designs were work-holding devices. The Boggs horse is also a body-position device: a tool for keeping the maker in the work across a career, not just a project.
Drew Langsner — who had worked with shaving horses since 1972 and studied many forms, from Swiss coopering versions to English bodger’s horses to the wide range that emerged during the revival — described Boggs’s design as one of the first modern American versions he knew of to emerge from close mechanical and ergonomic analysis rather than direct inheritance of an existing form. That framing is worth holding onto. Much shaving horse knowledge was historically transmitted through working forms and apprenticeship: you built the horse that was shown to you. Boggs approached the horse analytically, asking why the established forms worked as they did and redesigning the tool around those answers.
“It wasn’t simply about comfort. It was about preserving my ability to work at all.”
— Brian Boggs
What the Design Changed — and Why
Each departure from conventional shave horse design addresses something specific — from the ergonomic research and from the practical geometry of chairmaking itself:
- Seat height and hip-to-knee geometry: The seat keeps the operator’s hips above their knees, reducing compressive load on the lumbar spine and allowing the body to work closer to its natural ergonomic optimum.
- Sliding seat: The seat slides fore and aft, allowing position adjustment relative to the workpiece without getting up. This keeps the working distance consistent and eliminates much of the strain that comes from reaching.
- Ratcheting clamping mechanism: The ratcheting system provides both greater holding power and faster adjustment — ratchet down to the workpiece quickly, hold with significant force, release instantly with foot pressure.
- Improved clamping geometry: The redesigned jaw and treadle geometry improves mechanical advantage, achieving greater holding force with less foot effort, with the clamping force positioned more directly over the work. A raised area behind the ratchet allowed the pivot pin to anchor higher in the body, increasing leverage while supporting the ratchet post more securely.
- Shortened front geometry: In Boggs’s later design, the front of the horse is shortened — removing the full support ramp that earlier bodger’s horses retained. The purpose is specific to chairmaking: a shorter front avoids interference when turning and shaving long, steam-bent chair legs. Longer, heavier stock could benefit from the traditional long ramp, but lightweight chair parts benefit from the smaller jaw and more open front area.
Together, these changes made it possible to work with the precision and speed that chairmaking demands — without the cumulative physical cost that had been threatening to end his career.
Evidence and Sources
In 1999, Fine Woodworking published Boggs’ article on the design — “A New Breed of Shaving Horse” (#139, Nov/Dec 1999) — which brought it to a broad audience for the first time. [Read free at Boggs Bench] The article is available free on Boggs Bench with permission from Taunton Press. Lie-Nielsen Toolworks later licensed the design for production, and plans for builders have been available through Boggs Bench for roughly a decade. The plans have circulated widely among chairmakers and hand-tool woodworkers. Brian’s design and the thinking behind it are also documented on video: Season 37 of The Woodwright’s Shop features Roy Underhill and Brian Boggs in extended conversation about the horse — its ergonomic principles, how it developed, and how it’s used in chairmaking. [Watch free on PBS]
What this design did not claim
The Boggs ergonomic design addresses one specific problem: long-term physical sustainability in chairmaking. It was not developed for bowl or curved-form carving, and it does not answer the access-geometry problem that Dave Fisher’s bowl horse addresses. The ratcheting mechanism is a meaningful mechanical difference from traditional pivot-jaw designs, but it is not a claim to have redefined the tool for all purposes. The ergonomic principles Boggs applied — hip-above-knee seating, sliding seat, improved clamping geometry — were drawn from workplace ergonomics research developed outside woodworking. Brian Boggs applied those principles to a shaving horse; the underlying principles were not his invention.
Ratcheting jaw — detail
The toothed post and upper jaw. The ratchet locks at any position along the post instantly under the pawl.
Three-quarter view
From the front-right, showing the splayed leg geometry and jaw assembly. The "Brian Boggs" signature burned into the rail alongside the Boggs Bench mark.
Adjustable seat — detail
The ratcheting seat adjustment mechanism. The seat moves to fit the operator rather than fixing them to a single position.
David Fisher
Spoon carver, bowl carver, tool maker
The Problem
How can a horse hold bowls and curved or irregular forms without blocking tool access?
The Solution
Bowl-horse geometry and end-to-end clamping that allow unrestricted access for drawknife work on curved forms from any angle.
The Problem of Unrestricted Access
Dave Fisher’s development of the bowl horse addressed a problem that Brian Boggs’ ergonomic design — and many traditional shave horse designs — did not solve: how to hold a round or irregular form for carving when what you need most is unrestricted access from multiple angles.
For spoon and bowl carving, the standard shave horse geometry gets in the way. The horse is designed to present a workpiece horizontally to a drawknife moving along its length. A bowl blank is not a linear workpiece, and carving it requires approaching from angles that a traditional horse either blocks or makes awkward.
The Evolution of Dave’s Bowl Horse
Dave’s solution evolved through several stages, each improving on the last:
- Initial sled attachment: Dave began by developing a sled attachment for an existing horse — an adaptation that allowed bowl blanks to be held in a way the original horse was not designed for.
- Large log bowl horse: The sled attachment led to a purpose-built horse designed specifically around a large log, optimized for the access requirements of bowl carving.
- Dimensional-lumber design: Around 2006, Dave designed a version of the horse itself built from standard dimensional lumber — no large log required. This made the horse far more accessible to build, and he offered the plans free on his website for roughly fifteen years.
- 2023 redesign: Dave redesigned the horse in 2023. Jeff Lefkowitz drew the plans and offered valuable feedback and guidance.
Plan drawing, "Bowl Horse From a Log"
D. Fisher. Body from a 16" diameter maple log, 57" long. Drawn after the build and shared on Dave's blog for interested carvers.
Dave Fisher at work
The dimensional lumber horse in use — end-to-end clamping provides unrestricted access along the full length of the curved piece.
The log horse, built
The 2004 maple log version. 16" diameter body, chainsawed channel for the swing arm, beefy drilled-in legs. Incredibly solid. Not portable.
End-to-end clamping in action
The jaw geometry that makes the bowl horse different — both hands free for the drawknife, unrestricted access along the full form.
Bowl blank in the jaw
The end-to-end clamping system holding a carved bowl blank. Full access to the outside of the form with both hands free.
The dimensional lumber horse
The 2023 redesign — built from standard construction lumber, no large log required.
Historical Context
Dave’s bowl horse work connects to a broader historical record. His research and writing drew attention to historical precedent for end-to-end clamping systems in Woodworking in Estonia and in Peter Follansbee’s research — establishing that these clamping geometries, which might otherwise appear to be modern inventions, have deep historical roots.
What this design did not claim
Fisher did not invent end-to-end clamping as a concept. Historical precedent for that clamping geometry exists in Estonian woodworking traditions, documented in Woodworking in Estonia, and in forms documented by Peter Follansbee’s historical research. What Fisher developed was a contemporary working design that applied those geometries to bowl and curved-form carving — solving a specific access problem through a particular configuration of seat, jaw, and treadle. The bowl horse does not address long-term ergonomic sustainability in chairmaking, and it is not a general-purpose shaving horse.
Sources for this section: Dave Fisher’s blog at davidffisher.com; Woodwork Magazine #74 (2008), “A Horse of a Different Sort.” For historical context on end-to-end clamping: Woodworking in Estonia and Peter Follansbee’s research.
Pete Galbert
Chairmaker & Instructor, Berwick, ME
The Problem
How can head-height adjustment be fast, simple, durable, and nearly invisible in teaching use?
The Solution
A toothed adjuster that allows quick, reliable head-height changes without the delays of a pin-and-hole system — simple enough that nine horses run in a classroom without a single conversation about the adjusters.
One Problem, Clearly Stated
Pete Galbert is a full-time chairmaker and one of the most widely read voices in Windsor chairmaking. When he designed his shave horse, he set a deliberate priority: easy to build, bulletproof, and simple to use. That framing matters. It is not the same priority Brian Boggs started with, or that Dave Fisher started with. It reflects a different moment in the craft — one where more woodworkers were attempting the horse for the first time, and where a design that could be built and used without extended learning was genuinely valuable.
The Smarthead horse — narrow two-rail body, toothed adjuster head.
For the body of his horse, Pete drew on two sources he acknowledged directly: Tim Manney and Brian Boggs. The narrow, two-rail body he settled on is comfortable and — something he noted specifically — it resists vibration in the direction the drawknife is pulled, which produces smoother cuts. There is nothing he claimed as new in that body design. His contribution came in the head.
The Toothed Adjuster
The shave horse Pete published in Chairmaker’s Notebook (Lost Art Press, 2015) features a toothed adjuster — a comb-like pin structure that allows the head height to be changed quickly without the delays of a conventional pin-and-hole system. The idea is not complicated. A row of teeth on the head engages a pivot; releasing and repositioning takes a moment rather than a process. Pete ran nine of these horses when teaching at North Bennet Street School from ~2006 through 2017. His own measure of success: there was never any conversation about the adjusters. They simply worked.
The version in the book was built from wood and aluminum — capable and accurate, but requiring some time to make. Pete subsequently developed a machined version and offered it to Mark Hicks at plate11.com to manufacture and sell. It fits Pete’s own horse design and has been adapted to fit Tim Manney-style horses as well. It can also be retrofitted to any dumbhead shave horse by cutting the mortise, drilling a few holes, and fitting the pins to ride smoothly on the pivot.
What this design did not claim
Pete Galbert acknowledged directly that the body of his shaving horse draws from the work of Tim Manney and Brian Boggs. The body design is not Galbert’s contribution — he did not claim it to be. His contribution is specific and bounded: the toothed adjuster, a mechanism for head-height adjustment that outperforms conventional pin-and-hole systems in classroom and production use. The complete horse is a synthesis drawing on others’ established work, with one clearly identified mechanical improvement of Galbert’s own.
Primary sources for this section: Chairmaker’s Notebook (Lost Art Press, 2015) and Chair Notes blog at chairnotes.blogspot.com (2016 post on the toothed adjuster). Toothed adjuster available at plate11.com.
Further Developments
Section 4b
Editor’s note
The makers documented here built on foundations established by those in the preceding section. Their contributions — in accessibility, portability, material simplification, and documentation — extended the reach of those earlier designs and brought them to a much wider audience. The sequence is chronological: these developments followed because they could not have preceded what came before.
Tim Manney
Chairmaker & Teacher, Maine
The Problem
How can a high-performing shaving horse be built from ordinary, accessible materials and transported or taught easily?
The Solution
Construction-grade lumber, knock-down design, and an accessible build process — without sacrificing performance, as validated by Curtis Buchanan after 20,000+ hours at a shaving horse.
A Different Lineage
Tim Manney’s horse belongs to a separate branch of modern shave horse development. Its lineage runs through makers he learned from directly: the base comes from Curtis Buchanan’s horse, while the clamping mechanism is a simplified version of Carl Swensson’s design. Manney’s contribution is best understood in terms of accessibility of materials and construction: a knock-down horse, built largely from inexpensive construction-grade stock, that lowers the barrier to entry for chairmakers and green woodworkers.
The Buchanan Endorsement
The most telling validation of Tim’s design came from Curtis Buchanan — one of the most respected Windsor chairmakers alive and a maker who has spent over 20,000 hours at a shaving horse. In Fine Woodworking #262 (July/August 2017), Buchanan was quoted saying that Tim’s horse is the best he’s used. Buchanan had also had two of Tim’s horses in hard use in his workshop for four or five years before the article was published, and contributed suggestions incorporated into the final version.
Documented and Taught
Tim documented the design development in a series of blog posts in 2013. Plans — begun by Chuck Lockhart and completed by Jeff Lefkowitz — were published alongside the 2017 Fine Woodworking article and are available through Tim’s website. He has since taught the design at workshops across the Northeast, including at Plymouth CRAFT, where Peter Follansbee documented a 2020 session.
What this design did not claim
Tim Manney drew explicitly from two makers’ existing work: Curtis Buchanan’s horse for the base, and Carl Swensson’s clamping mechanism — simplified for the Manney design. The underlying clamping principle — that a shaving horse works best by jamming on a pull, not by pressing downward like a vise — comes from Swensson’s analytical work, which Manney carried forward in practice. The Manney horse is a synthesis that acknowledged its sources; its contribution is the problem it answered: high-performing, teachable construction from accessible, inexpensive materials.
Primary sources for this section: Tim Manney’s 2013 blog series at timmanneychairmaker.blogspot.com; Fine Woodworking #262 (July/August 2017, plans by Chuck Lockhart and Jeff Lefkowitz); Peter Follansbee’s Plymouth CRAFT documentation of a 2020 shave horse building session.
Jeff Lefkowitz
Teacher & Plan Drafter
The Problem
How can the Boggs ergonomic system and Fisher rail/rear-leg layout be repackaged into a compact, bolt-together form that stores easily and builds from construction lumber?
The Solution
A synthesis combining the Boggs ratcheting lower jaw and movable seat with the Fisher rear-leg/rail attachment, refined into a smaller footprint for small-shop accessibility.
An Accessible Synthesis
Jeff Lefkowitz’s Boggs style shave horse is best described as an accessible synthesis of earlier ideas rather than a new mechanical departure. In his own materials, the horse is presented as combining Brian Boggs’s ratcheting lower-jaw system with Dave Fisher’s rear-leg attachment to the rails, then refining those features into a compact, bolt-together form that can be built from construction lumber and stored easily in a small shop. Lefkowitz’s contribution lies in documentation, dimensional simplification, portability, and material accessibility; the core clamping and ergonomic concepts remain those developed by Boggs.
Comparison drawing of the Boggs and Lefkowitz shave horses. The Lefkowitz design has a 51″ footprint vs. 58″ for the Boggs. The drawing makes visible how closely the design follows the underlying Boggs geometry — and where the 7-inch reduction comes out. The drawing’s claim that the Lefkowitz horse offers “all the range and function” of the Boggs design deserves a closer look: see the trade-off note below.
What this design did not claim
Jeff Lefkowitz did not originate the ratcheting lower-jaw system — that comes from Brian Boggs’s design. He did not originate the rear-leg/rail attachment geometry — that is documented in Dave Fisher’s bowl horse work. The design does not introduce a new clamping mechanism or ergonomic principle. Its contribution is synthesis, dimensional simplification, compact packaging, and material accessibility.
The 7-inch reduction in footprint also carries a functional trade-off. On the Boggs horse, the treadle is positioned so the operator can sit with their leg fully extended — maximizing the arc of treadle travel from full extension to bent knee. That full arc is what determines how wide the jaw can open, and therefore how large a piece of stock the horse can accept. Compressing the footprint shortens the treadle and reduces that arc. The Lefkowitz horse is more compact and portable; it does not offer the same jaw opening capacity.
See also: Jeff Lefkowitz’s plan-drawing work for Tim Manney and Dave Fisher is documented in the Documentation and Publishing section below.
John Rönnerblad
Green Woodworker & Designer, Malmö, Sweden
The Problem
How can a spoon mule serve green woodworkers who work outdoors, travel to workshops, or have no dedicated shop space — without sacrificing clamping performance?
The Solution
A foldable, portable design that converts between spoon mule and shave horse modes, using a 2:1 pulley system for firm clamping in a compact, transportable form.
A Different Use Case
The Karvmärren addresses a problem that no other horse on this page was designed to solve: what does a green woodworker use when they have no permanent shop, travel to sloyd gatherings, or work outdoors? John Rönnerblad’s answer is a horse that folds flat, travels easily, and sets up quickly — without giving up the clamping performance that spoon carving and drawknife work demand.
The design is convertible: it functions as a traditional shave horse for drawknife and spokeshave work, and as a spoon mule for carving spoon bowls and handles. The 2:1 pulley clamping mechanism — which Rönnerblad adopted from a design by Korean green woodworker @iseilnam and has credited and
Karvmärren in use position
The horse set up for work. The jaw mechanism and leather strap are visible at the top of the post. Photo: Konrad Welinder, courtesy John Rönnerblad.
attempted to contact directly — provides a firm, foot-activated grip from a mechanically simple system. The folding structure and overall design are Rönnerblad’s own.
Attribution
Rönnerblad has been explicit that the 2:1 pulley mechanism is not his invention — he borrowed it from @iseilnam, a Korean green woodworker, and has acknowledged that source publicly. The foldable design, overall form, and convertibility between shave horse and spoon mule modes are his original contribution.
Sources: John Rönnerblad, personal communication (2026). karvmarren.com — product information and manual. @karvmarren on Instagram. Original pulley mechanism: @iseilnam on Instagram.
Folded for transport
The entire horse folds into this compact upright form — the core of the portability design. Photo: Konrad Welinder, courtesy John Rönnerblad.
Teachers, Popularizers, Documentation, and Manufacturing
Section 4c
The shaving horse survived the twentieth century and found new practitioners in part because a small number of writers, teachers, publishers, plan drawers, and hardware makers kept it visible and buildable. These contributions are different in kind from design contributions — they did not change what the tool is — but they changed who knew about it, who could build it, and how faithfully designs were transmitted. The distinctions below matter: being a visible advocate for the shaving horse is not the same as solving a design problem the horse had not previously solved.
Teachers and Popularizers
People who kept the shaving horse visible through books, television, schools, and online content — expanding the community of makers who knew the tool existed and what it could do.
Roy Underhill
The Woodwright's Shop, his long-running PBS series (1981–present), brought the shaving horse and drawknife into millions of American homes. Underhill's television work made these tools visible to audiences far beyond any woodworking school or magazine. His demonstrations established the shaving horse as something a person could actually use — not a museum object, but a working tool.
woodwrights.com →
Drew Langsner — Country Workshops
Langsner's books and Country Workshops helped carry a living European-derived shaving-horse tradition into the American green woodworking revival. His own Z-version — described in Country Woodcraft: Then & Now (Lost Art Press) — is, by his account, a horse with "elements borrowed from all over": an adaptive synthesis rather than a claim of invention. A major strand of his shaving-horse practice traces directly to his 1972 Swiss coopering experience with Ruedi Kohler.
drewlangsner.art →
Jennie Alexander
Make a Chair from a Tree (first published as John Alexander, The Taunton Press, 1978; second edition, Astragal Press, 1994; completely revised new edition as Jennie Alexander, Lost Art Press, 2021) established the shaving horse as the central work station of splitting-and-shaving chairmaking in North America. The book introduced a generation of woodworkers to the idea that a complete chair could be built from freshly split wood — and that the shaving horse was not a secondary bench but the primary one.
lostartpress.com →
Peter Follansbee
Follansbee's historical research has documented period shaving horse forms in primary sources, establishing that clamping geometries now associated with contemporary designs — particularly end-to-end clamping — have medieval and early modern precedent. His blog and teaching have kept traditional woodworking visible for a new generation of practitioners and provided historical grounding for design work happening today.
pfollansbee.wordpress.com →
Rex Krueger
Krueger's YouTube channel has introduced the shaving horse and hand-tool woodworking to a large audience of newer makers who might not otherwise find their way to the published literature. His video content on building and using shaving horses has extended the conversation beyond the traditional woodworking press.
Documentation and Publishing
People and organizations who drew plans, published articles, or produced books that made specific designs buildable — a different contribution from originating those designs, but a real one.
Chuck Lockhart & Jeff Lefkowitz — Plan Documentation
The published technical drawings for Tim Manney's horse (Fine Woodworking #262, July/August 2017) were begun by Chuck Lockhart and expanded and completed by Jeff Lefkowitz. Jeff prepared the drawings for Dave Fisher's redesigned bowl horse independently in 2023. These drawings made both designs clear, buildable, and accessible to readers. On this page, plan authorship and design authorship are credited separately so readers can understand both the person who developed the horse and the person who prepared the drawings. Jeff Lefkowitz also designed a Boggs-style horse — an accessible synthesis of earlier ideas. That horse is documented in the Further Developments section above.
Fine Woodworking
Two significant shaving horse articles in Fine Woodworking gave designs their widest audience: Brian Boggs' "A New Breed of Shaving Horse" (#139, 1999) and Tim Manney's "Build a Thoroughbred Shaving Horse" (#262, 2017). Magazine publication turned private workshop knowledge into community-accessible instruction. The Boggs article is available free on Boggs Bench with Taunton Press permission.
Boggs 1999 article (free) →
Lost Art Press
Pete Galbert's Chairmaker's Notebook (Lost Art Press, 2015) brought his shaving horse and toothed adjuster to a wide, carefully curated readership. Lost Art Press's commitment to thorough technical documentation has made it an important channel for transmitting craft knowledge — including shaving horse design — to new practitioners.
lostartpress.com →
Hardware and Manufacturing
People who manufactured hardware or commercial versions of elements developed by design contributors.
Mark Hicks — Plate 11
Mark Hicks at Plate 11 manufactures the machined toothed adjuster for Pete Galbert's shaving horse design. The original version of the adjuster was built from wood and aluminum by Galbert; Hicks later had it machined as a single piece, making it available for purchase. It fits the Galbert horse design and has been adapted for Tim Manney-style horses as well. Hicks' contribution is manufacturing and commercializing a hardware element, not originating the design concept.
plate11.com →
Lie-Nielsen Toolworks
Lie-Nielsen Toolworks produces Brian Boggs' shaving horse under license. As a manufacturer, they bring the design to buyers who prefer to purchase rather than build. Their involvement does not change the origin or authorship of the design.
lie-nielsen.com →
Design Analysis
Makers and thinkers who examined how shaving horses actually work — and whose analysis has influenced the designs that followed.
Carl Swensson
In Drew Langsner’s account, Carl Swensson brought unusual analytical rigor to the question of how shaving horses actually function. Drew described Swensson as someone who did “serious thinking and testing about how the tool works.” One key insight attributed to that analysis is that a shaving horse holds most effectively by jamming under pull, rather than by acting like a downward-pressure bench vise. That distinction reframes how the tool should be understood mechanically. The shaving horse is not simply a clamping device; it is a tool that converts the pulling force of the drawknife into holding power. In that account, the holding action increases as the drawknife pull engages the geometry of the horse. Tim Manney drew from Swensson’s clamping mechanism in developing his design, and Pete Galbert’s published account likewise emphasizes the importance of the pull-and-jam principle.
Source: Drew Langsner, personal communication (2025). Tim Manney, blog series (2013) and Fine Woodworking #262 (2017). A fuller account of Swensson’s design work awaits additional documentation.
Primary sources for this section
Roy Underhill — woodwrights.com — The Woodwright’s Shop, PBS (1981–present)
Drew Langsner — Country Woodcraft (1978), Green Woodworking (1987) — drewlangsner.art
Jennie Alexander — Make a Chair from a Tree (first published as John Alexander, The Taunton Press, 1978; second edition, Astragal Press, 1994; completely revised new edition as Jennie Alexander, Lost Art Press, 2021)
Peter Follansbee — pfollansbee.wordpress.com — historical woodworking research
Pete Galbert — Chairmaker’s Notebook (Lost Art Press, 2015) — for the Galbert / Lost Art Press entries
Chuck Lockhart and Jeff Lefkowitz — plan credits confirmed: Fine Woodworking #262 (Tim Manney; Chuck Lockhart began the drawings, Jeff Lefkowitz expanded and completed them). Jeff Lefkowitz solo: 2023 Dave Fisher bowl horse redesign.
Drew Langsner — personal communication (2025), including observations on Carl Swensson’s design analysis and the pull-and-jam principle
Contemporary Adaptations
Section 5
The shaving horse continues to evolve. Makers working today — visible through books, magazines, and online communities — are building specialized forms that solve problems existing designs do not address. This section covers only forms that can be described with reasonable confidence from available sources.
Specialized Chairmaking Horses
Chairmakers have developed horses adapted to the specific geometry of their work — horses that hold a chair leg at the angle required by a particular chairmaking tradition, or that present a seat blank at the right height and angle for shaping a saddle. These are not general-purpose shave horses but tools optimized for a single, recurring task in a specific body of work.
Bowl and Curved Work Horses
Following from Dave Fisher's development of the bowl horse, a number of bowl and spoon carvers have developed variations suited to curved work. The common thread is the need for unrestricted angular access — something traditional shave horse geometry was not designed to provide.
A Note on International and Undocumented Forms
Shaving horses and related work-holding devices have been developed across many woodworking traditions outside North America and Europe. Online communities have made some of these designs visible in recent years. One example observed through social media uses a large tweezer-style clamping mechanism rather than the treadle-and-jaw system common in Western designs — evidence that parallel solutions to the same work-holding problem exist across different traditions.
The history, lineage, and design attribution of most international forms are not documented in sources available to this page. They are noted here as evidence that the shaving horse is not a single invention converging toward one optimum — but they require further documentation before they can be placed accurately in the broader history of the tool.
Categories of Design Innovation
Section 6
Across the history of the shave horse, several distinct categories of innovation emerge. These are not the property of individual makers — each has been approached from multiple directions, in multiple eras. But naming them makes it possible to understand why different designs make different choices, and what trade-offs each choice involves.
Ergonomic Redesign
Moving from a tool that incidentally positions the body to a tool explicitly designed around what the body needs for sustainable work. The hip-above-knee seat height and sliding seat in Brian Boggs' design are the most documented examples in contemporary practice.
Ratcheting Clamping
Moving from a clamp that requires manual jaw-height adjustment between workpieces to one that ratchets down to the workpiece quickly and releases instantly. The time and precision advantages compound significantly across a production workday.
Sliding Seats
Allowing the operator to adjust their working distance from the clamped workpiece without getting up and repositioning. This keeps the working relationship between the body and the tool consistent across a workpiece's changing shape.
End-to-End Clamping
Clamping the workpiece lengthwise rather than across its face — a geometry documented in historical Estonian sources and in Peter Follansbee's research, and rediscovered by Dave Fisher in his bowl horse development. This is one of the oldest clamping innovations and one of the most recently rediscovered.
Access Geometry for Curved Work
Redesigning the horse to allow angular access to round or irregular workpieces — the central problem Dave Fisher's bowl horse addresses. The horse gets out of the way in directions it previously blocked.
Mechanical Advantage Improvements
Redesigning the geometry of the treadle, jaw, and pivot point to achieve greater clamping force with less foot pressure, or to change where the clamping force is concentrated relative to the tool's action on the workpiece.
Parallel Solutions
Designs developed in different traditions that solve the same work-holding problem through different mechanisms. One example observed through social media uses a tweezer-style clamping mechanism rather than a treadle-and-jaw system — a parallel approach whose history and lineage are not yet documented in sources available to this page. These parallel solutions are evidence that the problem space is richer than any single design tradition reveals.
Specialization
Moving from a single general-purpose horse to purpose-built designs for specific applications: bowl horses, chairmaking horses, horses optimized for long stock or short billets. The most recent phase of shave horse evolution has been toward increasing specialization.
Gallery
Section 7
The following images document the shaving horse across its history — from historical examples to contemporary designs, student-built horses, and international adaptations.
Dave Fisher — Bowl Horse Evolution
Images courtesy of Dave Fisher.
Original design sketch, 2004
"Bowl Horse From a Log" — D. Fisher. Body from a 16" diameter maple log, 57" long. The document that preceded the build.
The log horse, built
The 2004 maple log version in the shop. 16" diameter body, chainsawed channel for the swing arm, beefy drilled-in legs. Incredibly solid. Not portable.
Dimensional lumber version
The accessible design built from standard lumber. Two-upright jaw system, integrated treadle and seat. Plans were available free on Dave's site for fifteen years.
Dave Fisher at work
The dimensional lumber horse in use — drawknife on a curved blank, end-to-end clamping providing full access along the length of the piece.
End-to-end clamping in action
The jaw geometry that makes the bowl horse different — the workpiece held lengthwise, both hands free for the drawknife, unrestricted access along the full form.
Additional Images
Historical shave horse
Brian Boggs shaving horse
Student-built horse
Specialized chairmaking horse
What People Ask About the Shaving Horse
Section 8 · Frequently Asked Questions
What is a shaving horse?
A shaving horse is a foot-operated work-holding bench used in green woodworking and chairmaking. The operator sits astride it and applies foot pressure to a treadle, which clamps the workpiece between a movable jaw and a fixed platform, freeing both hands for drawknife or spokeshave work. Documented forms appear in European woodworking sources at least as far back as the medieval period, and the tool remains in active use today.
What is a shaving horse used for?
Shaving horses are used wherever a drawknife or spokeshave is the primary shaping tool: green woodworking, chairmaking, tool handle making, coopering, and basket-making. They are especially well suited to shaping round or tapered stock — chair legs, rungs, tool handles, spoke blanks — where the work needs to be rotated, flipped, and repositioned frequently while both hands remain on the tool.
What is the difference between a shaving horse and a workbench vise?
A workbench vise requires hand adjustment to clamp and release. A shaving horse releases instantly the moment foot pressure on the treadle relaxes, and clamps equally instantly when that pressure returns. This means the workpiece can be repositioned in seconds without putting down the tool. For work that requires frequent repositioning — which is most hand-tool shaping work — this speed advantage makes the shaving horse significantly faster in practice than a bench vise for the same tasks.
Who invented the shaving horse?
The shaving horse has no single inventor. It appears in European woodworking illustrations at least as far back as the medieval period, in forms that vary significantly by region and application. The German Schnitzelbank, Scandinavian variants, and English forms represent different regional traditions that developed independently. The shaving horse is more accurately understood as a family of related work-holding devices sharing a common principle, developed over many centuries across many woodworking traditions.
What makes the Brian Boggs shaving horse different from traditional designs?
Brian Boggs’ shaving horse was designed around workplace ergonomics after chronic back pain threatened to end his career as a chairmaker. The key departures from traditional designs include a seat positioned to keep the operator’s hips above their knees, a sliding seat that allows positioning adjustment while seated, and a ratcheting clamping mechanism that provides greater holding power and faster adjustment than conventional pivot-and-jaw designs. The design prioritizes long-term physical sustainability in addition to clamping performance. Plans are available through Boggs Bench. Lie-Nielsen Toolworks produced a version under license for a number of years; that production has ended.
Who are the most significant modern shaving horse designers?
Four contemporary makers stand out for making design contributions — not just popularizing the shaving horse, but changing what it is capable of doing. Brian Boggs redesigned the horse from the ground up around workplace ergonomics, developing a ratcheting, sliding-seat design to support full-time chairmaking without physical injury. Dave Fisher developed the bowl horse, a fundamentally different clamping geometry for spoon and bowl carving. Pete Galbert contributed the toothed adjuster — a head-height system so simple and durable that it disappears in use, even in demanding teaching environments. Tim Manney developed a high-performance design built from ordinary construction lumber, extending the reach of the horse to makers who could not otherwise afford to build one. Each answered a different problem; no single design is the best for every purpose.
What is a bowl horse?
A bowl horse is a shave horse variant designed specifically for spoon and bowl carving. Standard shave horse geometry holds workpieces horizontally and presents them for linear drawknife work — a geometry that gets in the way when carving round, irregular forms that require approach from multiple angles. David Fisher developed the bowl horse to solve this access problem, building a design that holds bowl blanks while allowing the carver unrestricted angular access. His 2008 Woodwork Magazine article documented the design, which has been further developed and updated since.
How do I build a shaving horse?
Plans for Brian Boggs’ ergonomic shaving horse design are available through Boggs Bench at boggsbench.com. The Fine Woodworking article documenting the 1999 design is also available free online. Dave Fisher’s bowl horse plans (drawn by Jeff Lefkowitz for the 2023 redesign) are available through Dave Fisher’s teaching network. Tim Manney’s plans were published in Fine Woodworking #262 and are available through Tim’s website; the drawings were begun by Chuck Lockhart and completed by Jeff Lefkowitz. All four designs on this page can be built by woodworkers with basic shop skills.
What tools are used with a shaving horse?
The primary tool used with a shaving horse is the drawknife — a two-handed blade pulled toward the body to remove stock from a clamped workpiece. The spokeshave, a smaller plane-like tool for refining curves and surfaces, is also commonly used at a shaving horse. Rasps are also commonly used on a shaving horse. In chairmaking, the drawknife is used for roughing out legs, rungs, and seat blanks; the spokeshave for refining them. In bowl and spoon carving, drawknives and carving knives work alongside the horse for the shaping stages before the piece comes off entirely for detail work.
What is the difference between a shave horse and a shaving horse?
The terms refer to the same tool. “Shaving horse” is the more common name in North American and British woodworking literature. “Shave horse” is a widely used informal variant that appears in plans, online discussions, and some published sources. Neither term refers to a different type of tool; they are interchangeable, and both are used on this page.
What is a dumbhead shave horse?
A dumbhead shave horse is the most common type found in North American and European woodworking literature. The “dumbhead” refers to the pivoting jaw assembly — a shaped block or head that pivots on a horizontal axis to clamp the workpiece when foot pressure is applied to the treadle below. Dumbhead designs vary considerably in seat height, jaw geometry, and adjustment mechanism. The shaving horses documented on this page — the Boggs, Galbert, and Manney designs — are all variations of the dumbhead form.
What is a bodger’s shave horse?
A bodger’s horse is a traditional English form associated with craftsmen who worked in the beech woods of the Chilterns, often in temporary woodland workshops, turning and shaping green wood. The term “bodger” referred to these itinerant woodworkers, not to poor-quality work as the word later came to mean. Bodger’s horses tend to be simple, lightweight, and optimized for rough shaping of green stock. They are closely related to the continental dumbhead forms and to the horses documented in English chairmaking traditions.
What is the difference between a shave horse and a bowl horse?
A standard shave horse clamps a workpiece horizontally and presents it for drawknife work along its length — a geometry suited to linear stock like chair legs and tool handles. A bowl horse is designed specifically for bowl and curved-form carving, where the workpiece is round or irregular and requires approach from multiple angles. Dave Fisher developed the bowl horse to solve the access problem that standard shave horse geometry cannot address: clamping a bowl blank in a way that leaves the carver unrestricted angular access without the horse structure blocking the tool.
Who designed the modern ergonomic shaving horse?
Brian Boggs developed his modern ergonomic shaving horse in the 1990s, following a period of chronic back pain that threatened to end his career as a full-time chairmaker. He applied workplace ergonomics research to redesign the horse: adjusting seat height to keep hips above knees, adding a sliding seat, redesigning the clamping mechanism to ratchet rather than pivot, and improving clamping geometry. The design was published in Fine Woodworking in 1999 and plans are available through Boggs Bench. Lie-Nielsen Toolworks produced a version under license for a number of years; that production has ended.at, redesigning the clamping mechanism to ratchet rather than pivot, and improving clamping geometry. The design was published in Fine Woodworking in 1999 and is available through Boggs Bench. Lie-Nielsen Toolworks produces a version under license.
Who drew the plans for the Tim Manney and Dave Fisher shaving horse designs?
For Tim Manney’s horse (Fine Woodworking #262, July/August 2017), Chuck Lockhart began the drawings and Jeff Lefkowitz expanded and completed them. Jeff Lefkowitz prepared the drawings for Dave Fisher’s redesigned bowl horse independently in 2023. On this page, plan authorship and design authorship are credited separately so readers can understand both the person who developed the horse and the person who prepared the drawings.
What is the difference between a design contributor and a plan contributor?
A design contributor is a maker who changed the tool’s mechanism, geometry, ergonomics, or performance to answer a specific problem. A plan contributor made an existing design buildable by producing accurate technical drawings. The distinction matters because design authorship and plan drafting are often confused when both names appear in the same publication. On this page, plan authorship and design authorship are credited separately so readers can understand both the maker behind the horse and the person who prepared the drawings.
Are modern shaving horses inventions or adaptations of older forms?
Modern shaving horses are adaptations — all four contemporary designs documented on this page draw on existing forms and principles while solving problems those forms did not address. Brian Boggs adapted the dumbhead horse using workplace ergonomics research developed outside woodworking. Dave Fisher adapted end-to-end clamping geometries documented in historical sources. Pete Galbert synthesized elements from multiple makers’ designs and contributed one specific mechanism. Tim Manney built from Curtis Buchanan’s base and Carl Swensson’s clamping mechanism. None claimed to have invented the shaving horse; each improved it for a specific purpose.
Resources
Section 9
The following sources are organized by what they contribute to the shaving horse story — not all sources are the same kind of thing. A primary source for historical design is different from a plan set, which is different from a teaching resource or a manufacturing supplier. These distinctions help readers find exactly what they need.
Historical Sources
These sources document the shaving horse as it existed before the modern green woodworking revival — the forms, clamping geometries, and regional variations that preceded contemporary designs and, in some cases, anticipated them.
Woodworking in Estonia
Documents historical shaving horse forms from Estonian woodworking traditions, including end-to-end clamping systems. Dave Fisher cited this as historical precedent for the clamping geometry he developed in the bowl horse — evidence that what looked like a modern invention was a rediscovery of much older practice. Available through specialty book dealers.
Peter Follansbee — Historical Research
Follansbee's ongoing research into period woodworking documents shaving horse forms and clamping systems from primary sources — establishing that end-to-end clamping and other geometries now associated with contemporary designs have deep historical precedent. An essential counterweight to the assumption that modern makers invented what they may have rediscovered.
pfollansbee.wordpress.com →
The Greenwood Revival — Key Texts
The books and schools that reintroduced the shaving horse to North American woodworking culture in the 1970s and 1980s. These are not design sources for specific modern horses — they are the context within which the modern design work happened.
Make a Chair from a Tree — Jennie Alexander
The book that introduced a generation of North American woodworkers to splitting-and-shaving chairmaking with the shaving horse as the central work station. First published as John Alexander (The Taunton Press, 1978); second edition with afterword (Astragal Press, 1994); completely revised new edition as Jennie Alexander (Lost Art Press, 2021).
lostartpress.com →
Country Woodcraft & Green Woodworking — Drew Langsner
Country Woodcraft (1978) and Green Woodworking (1987) brought traditional green woodworking to a North American audience. Langsner's school, Country Workshops in Marshall, NC, became a center of gravity for the revival generation. Drew's current work is abstract sculpture.
countryworkshops.org →
Design Theory and Ergonomics
Sources that address the why behind design decisions — the ergonomic research, the problem framing, the reasoning that distinguishes intentional design from accumulated tradition.
Fine Woodworking #139 — "A New Breed of Shaving Horse"
Brian Boggs, Nov/Dec 1999. The article that introduced ergonomic shaving horse design to a broad audience — covering the problem (back pain threatening a career), the research (workplace ergonomics), and the design decisions that followed. The clearest published statement of why a shaving horse should be designed around the body, not just around work-holding. Available free on Boggs Bench with Taunton Press permission.
Read free at Boggs Bench →
Original at FineWoodworking.com →
The Woodwright's Shop — "Brian Boggs, Chairmaker" (Season 37)
Roy Underhill and Brian Boggs in conversation — including extended discussion of Brian's shaving horse design, its ergonomic principles, and how it developed from his work as a chairmaker. One of the best available video sources for understanding both the horse and the thinking behind it, in Brian's own words. Free on PBS.
Watch free on PBS →
Modern Design Sources and Plans
Where to find plans, documentation, and firsthand accounts for the four primary modern designs covered on this page. Plans are the work of the plan drawers noted; designs are the work of the makers credited above.
Boggs Bench — Brian Boggs Shaving Horse Plans
Plans for the ergonomic shaving horse Brian Boggs designed in the 1990s, including the 1999 Fine Woodworking article available free with Taunton Press permission. The primary source for building this design.
boggsbench.com →
Pete Galbert — Chairmaker's Notebook
Lost Art Press, 2015. Includes Pete Galbert's shaving horse design and the toothed adjuster in full detail. The most thorough published documentation of Galbert's design and his thinking behind it.
lostartpress.com →
Pete Galbert — Chair Notes Blog
Galbert's blog, including a 2016 post documenting the toothed adjuster design in detail. Useful for understanding the specific problem the adjuster addresses and how it was developed.
chairnotes.blogspot.com →
Fine Woodworking #262 — "Build a Thoroughbred Shaving Horse"
Tim Manney, July/August 2017. Documents the construction-grade lumber design, with plans begun by Chuck Lockhart and completed by Jeff Lefkowitz. Includes Curtis Buchanan's endorsement. The primary published source for the Manney design.
finewoodworking.com →
Tim Manney — Blog Documentation
A series of posts from 2013 documenting the development of Tim Manney's shaving horse: concept, base construction, and clamping mechanism. The best existing record of the thinking behind the design, in Manney's own words.
timmanneychairmaker.blogspot.com →
Bowl Horse and Specialized Sources
Sources specific to Dave Fisher’s bowl horse and the broader category of shaving horses designed for curved and irregular work.
Dave Fisher — Bowl Horse Plans
Updated 2023 plans for Dave Fisher's bowl horse design, with drafting by Jeff Lefkowitz. Available directly from Dave Fisher through his teaching network. Contact through his workshop listings for current availability.
Woodwork Magazine — 2008 Bowl Horse Article
"A Horse of a Different Sort" — Dave Fisher's original published documentation of the bowl horse design (Issue #74). The first public account of the access-geometry problem the bowl horse addresses and the design evolution that produced it. Out of print; available through library collections and archives.
Dave Fisher — "Adaptable Shaving Horse" (2016)
A blog post in which Fisher documents the development history of the bowl horse in his own words — from the initial sled attachment to the log horse to the dimensional lumber version. A primary account of the design lineage, from the maker.
davidffisher.com →
Dave Fisher — "Bowl Horse at Fifteen" (2019)
A retrospective on fifteen years of using and refining the bowl horse design — what held up, what changed, and how Fisher thinks about the tool after extended use. Useful context for understanding how the 2023 redesign came about.
davidffisher.com →
Research note — possible earlier precedent: Dave Fisher noted in correspondence (2025) that he believes there may have been an end-to-end clamping horse in Don Weber’s shop in an old episode of The Woodwright’s Shop — used for holding chair seats. He is not certain. If confirmed, this would be an additional American precedent for end-to-end clamping geometry predating or contemporary with Fisher’s own development. The most likely episode to check is Season 21, Episode 1 (“The Sawhorse,” 2001) — which deals specifically with shaving horse forms — rather than Episode 2 (“Welsh Chair Bodger Don Weber”), which focuses on building a Welsh stick chair. Season 21 is available free on pbs.org. Not yet verified.
Hardware and Manufacturing
Where to source manufactured versions of specific hardware elements or commercial shaving horses. Manufacturing a design element is a different contribution from originating it.
Plate 11 — Toothed Adjuster
Mark Hicks at Plate 11 manufactures the machined toothed adjuster for Pete Galbert's shaving horse. The adjuster fits the Galbert design and has been adapted for Tim Manney-style horses. Available for purchase; retrofittable to any dumbhead shaving horse with appropriate mortising.
plate11.com →
Lie-Nielsen Toolworks — Brian Boggs Shaving Horse
Lie-Nielsen Toolworks produced the Brian Boggs shaving horse under license for a number of years. That production has ended. Plans for building the horse remain available through Boggs Bench.
lie-nielsen.com →