Three Rulers

 

 

This is a random aside. I've seen a number of ruler reviews here and there, so this is just my 2 bits on the topic. Up top are three rulers that I own. Two have been carried extensively.  

The 6" ruler is a Starrett 604RE, that I bought from McMaster. I think it was a Schwarz recommendation, but the part that grabbed me was the end graduations. I used them a LOT in setting up router bits. Because the rest of the ruler registered for a reasonable distance from the bit, I could see pretty easily, depending on the table, if there was a dip in the table, or if the insert wasn't quite flush with the surface. So, I carried it for a long while. 

The 3 incher on the left is a Starrett 603. It's an eBay find, and has a previous owner's name engraved on the other side. It, too, has end graduations, that are on the other side. It's a lot more pocket-friendly than the 6 inch, and I think I used it a couple of times for router table gauging. (If I'd had it back when I had a full time woodshop, I'd have used it a LOT more.) I actually bought it when I was a composite assembly tech at the flying car place, and it was actually more useful in that context, for an unexpected thing: Providing scale in pictures. Whenever I had an engineer who needed feedback on how well something was coming together... or wasn't, more importantly, this was a great thing to drop into the photo to provide a sense of scale. That way they had a reliable reference, in frame, that would give them a pretty reliable sense of what was going on. FOr example, in the photo at right, it was clear that the part in the background is in a parallel plane to the end of the part in the fireground, but per the end graduations, it's offset by about 1/16". And that's actually something I can use in some of my small projects these days, too. Especially if I'm trying to copy a detail of something I see 'in the wild.'

The other 3 incher is a recent find, and is an even older model, the 403. And the differences are interesting. For one, it has both capital and lower-case letters. And while it does have end graduations, they're on both sides of the ruler... but only at the 3 inch end. Lastly, it's beveled on the edge that has 1/64" graduations. I don't really need it, but it grabbed me because of the one beveled edge. And it makes a lot of sense, actually, that it's beveled on the 1/64" scale, because it eliminates a lot of errors in measuring at that scale, that would come as the result of parallax. The ruler itself is (according to my calipers) .405" thick: about 60% of the way from 1/32 to 3/64". Fussing over the exact number is pretty silly, but the point is that, lying flat, the surface with the graduations is 2.5 times higher from the surface, than the resolution of the graduations. So, you really need to be looking from directly 90 degrees over the mark, to see what the measurement is. Any side angle, and the precision of the measurement becomes suspect.

Now, my eyes are getting old, and it would require a good magnifying glass if I had to regularly measure to 64ths. (f I have to do this, I just use my phone as a magnifying glass: Turn on camera, and zoom. Take a snapshot if you really need it to hold still.) This is also ignoring the fact that, at that scale, a set of calipers or a micrometer, or feeler gauges will be a lot easier to use. BUT... as an intellectual exercise, it's one reason I like the beveled ruler better... it gets the graduations closer to the thing being measured, so the measured dimension is more precise. 

But the last odd thing that I've noticed is that, flipped over, it's easier to use with a pointy ball point pen, like the Pilot V5 Precise model. Because the bevel in that position is an overhang, the point can actually tuck in a little bit, so the point isn't pushed out from the ruler edge, and the ink doesn't wick in underneath the ruler. So, when I found a 6" on the 'bay, I picked that one up, too. (It needs a LOT of cleaning up, though.)

Jigs, Fixtures, and Shop Made Tools

 Hello the Internet!

Once in a while I stop to check, and find that this blog is still getting regular traffic, even though it's been years since I updated regularly. It's humbling to see that people still come by, and I hope the content continues to be helpful for you all. 

In that vein, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to corral some of the more interesting methods of work, and so, up at the top of the page is a new section, titled  'Jigs, Fixtures, and Shop Made tools.' Some of them were just cool projects, some were simple things that had a bigger impact than I'd anticipated... like the micro adjust for the table saw fence. 

I'm sure there are other things I came up with along the way that didn't get blogged about. And hopefully I'll be able to dig those out at some point and put them up. 

In the meantime, thanks again for coming by, and I hope you all are enjoying whatever work you're doing in your own shops. 

-JW 

5/12/23

Kitchen Thinking... My review of Kitchen Think, by Nancy Hiller.

I bought this book almost a year ago, but I'd consciously avoided writing this review. Quite simply, I wasn't really sure if the world really need a blond-haired white guy praising a woman for writing about woodworking. Wouldn't that seem kind of oblivious? Doesn't her work stand on its own? (YES. YES IT DOES.)  #metoodoesn'tneedmyopinon.

But then I remembered working at Rockler, and Woodcraft, and seeing Woodworking for Women magazine on the rack, with its cover headlines boasting "Easy projects you can make for your home or garden!" But it seemed like simplistic, 5th grade arts and crafts projects. At the time I thought this was perhaps the latest peak of sexist bullshit, that the best the publishing industry could come up with for women was to offer them pink frilly hammers and treat them like children.

I could only think of three articles that should be in a woman-oriented woodworking magazine, anyway: 

'Learning a trade that's dominated by men: Yes, they're sexist, gaslighting jerk-offs. Don't believe the hype. You're doing fine.'

'Working with Men in a workshop: Yes, they're sexist, gaslighting jerk-offs. Don't buy into their nonsense. Just continue running rings around them, like Ginger Rogers; backwards, in heels. Yes, it's annoying. You're doing fine.'

'Managing the Men who work in your woodshop with you: Yes, they're sexist, gaslighting jerk-offs. But if you can use their own blind spots to convince them that what you need done was their own idea, then at least they'll get the job done. Obviously you don't need me to tell you how you're doing, Please Persist. God speed on your road to mastery and excellence.' 

This last would have been written by some of the (admittedly, few) women that I'd talked to in the stores where I worked. (When I brought it up, they explained that they didn't usually come in to the store because they were tired of being talked down to by some of my coworkers. FML.)

Frankly, if a woman can (more than) hold her own in a shop environment, while simultaneously running a PsyOps mission, and still deliver a quality product to a client, maybe the publishing industry should aim a lot higher (Talking up, instead of down) when they approach that particular demographic. I digress... but remembering all of those experiences was what broke the mental logjam over whether or not I should write about this book.

Once I started thinking about Woodworking for Women magazine, and everything it wasn't, and Kitchen Think, and everything it is, I felt ashamed for keeping my mouth shut. At the end of the day, Kitchen Think has no truck with gender politics at all. It's simply the best book I've found about how to design and build a kitchen.

And, it was written by a woman.

---

Most of the 'woodworker-oriented' kitchen books that I'd seen put out by the usual suspects (Popular woodworking, Taunton Press, and other tool industry shills) are all variations on a theme: Use this jig, make drawers. WOW, see dovetails? Pinnacle of good work, they are. Use this jig to install these hinges. Here are a bunch of solutions to squeezing more storage space into awkward, and marginally effective spaces. Straight and square layouts of straight and square kitchens that, frankly, didn't look that exciting, and nuts-and-bolts descriptions of how to make plywood boxes with doors and drawers. A little attention to visual design would have gone a long way.

But from the design direction, I wasn't really sure where to turn. But one of my pet peeves with the kitchen 'design' blogs I found is that most of them also feel like they're shills, but now for the gadget and hardware producing industry. The kitchens on display are so enormous, and ostentatious, or over-run with stupid gadgetry, that I couldn't help but wonder if the bloggers involved knew anything at all about cooking. At one point I was reading a design post on houzz, and was so annoyed that I signed up to the website, specifically so I could comment on how ridiculously stupid most of it was. I felt bad later, because it was nothing more than a knee-jerk, full-throttle flame job. (I ended my diatribe by suggesting they get rid of their kitchen entirely, save their money, and order take-out. I was in rare form.) But I also got regular notices for years afterwards, that people were still clicking 'like' on my comment. So maybe I wasn't alone. (The original post, and my comment, are still up... if you're that bored, just scroll through til you find 'username: jwatriss')

Nancy does talk about tips and techniques, but it's not the dominant theme. Most of it's been exhaustively covered elsewhere. There's a strong emphasis on design, because that's as important, or more, than simply doing a good job of executing that design. If the end product flows in an uninterrupted way, the skill involved shouldn't need to stand out, because the goal is to make something the homeowner can live and cook and relax and eat in comfortably. It's not a Goddard high-boy, you don't need to masticate in awe. So there's plenty of space in the book that's spent on good ideas, and how to tie them all together. There's also plenty of time that was spent on how she found a solution to various problems... some specific to those kitchens, but some that are applicable to almost all kitchens, or to negotiating many homeowners' utter insistence on maximizing every possible cubic inch of storage space, even if they won't actually use those inches, and couldn't easily get to them anyway.

Most of the book falls under one of two categories: Design, but problem-solve, because some spaces are problematic. (More than half of the book) And Build, but problem-solve, because some spaces are problematic. (And who honestly knows what you'll find when the demo work is done anyway.) I get the biggest kick out of the problem solving part, personally. Just reading someone else's process around that really spins the gears for me, because this is the land where there are no jigs or pre-determined solutions.

And sandwiched between those two big themes, is details, details, details. Painted and/or illuminated cabinet interiors, floor pattern layouts, using color to tie a room together, hardware tips and tricks, half a dozen different spice racks, here's how to disguise a really uneven ceiling, and on and on and on.

There was no 'typical' kind of kitchen in this book. One example was mostly black and white, and designed to fit the original vintage style. Another looks vaguely like it was inspired by a diner, with a riot of  sculptural details and color. She also includes gushes over (justifiably) the kitchens of Johnny Grey, and Wharton Esherick, to provide some more inspiration. 

If there was anything that really came through as a possible Nancy Hiller trademark, it's her ability to track the details, so that they work. From big strategic things like laying a design out in a way that flows, to the finer points of execution, like continuous veneer grain around a prominent cabinet door, there are no obvious loose threads. Out in the day to day world, I've seen so many cabinets that almost fit, or almost line up, or almost took a sloping floor or ceiling into account, solutions that were shoe-horned in, but created other problems, potentially good ideas that didn't pan out... And none of that is on display here. Hiller clearly has an eye for what will work, and how to plan accordingly, but at a higher resolution than most.

She's a thinker, clearly. (In case you didn't get that, just from reading the title of the book.) 

Actually, there's one other thing I should add as a potential common theme in the kitchens that she's displayed here: They look like good kitchens. I'm not talking about glossy design mag flash, because they don't look like monuments to consumerism. I mean that they look like people live and feel at home there: They simply look like rooms for people to come in, hang out, make some food, and talk. Each has very individual character, none of the layouts look remotely similar, some are modern, some are vintage, but they all look comfortable, workable, and... like home. I don't have a good way to put a finger on what makes that happen. Clearly Nancy Hiller does. 

---

I'm the primary cook at my house, and I love seeing other people's kitchens to experience how they work. (Or, more usefully, how they don't.)  Given that, the only thing I would have liked to see is a floor plan for a few of these kitchens. Work flow fascinates me, and it's pretty clear that she had it in mind. It would help me 'see' these kitchens better if I knew where everything was, in relation to everything else. Then I could close my eyes and 'walk' around in them, and try to imagine how she approached it.

As my kids grow older, I'm also trying to find new ways to set things up so that the work still flows well with more than one person. So I was (am) idly contemplating a kitchen overhaul. With that in mind, I ordered this book a year ago.

I haven't been able to put it away. It's just too good. I see something new every time I look. And I can't recommend it highly enough.

On Curves... and current projects

My wife recently called me out on being a nerd. No, it wasn't the first time she's leveled such accusations. I was reading a victorian-era book on mathematical instruments at the time, because I wanted to read about trigonometry from people who had a more intimate familiarity with how it worked. (I learned to push a button on a calculator. It works, but Mr. Thoren, my trig teacher in high school, didn't ever really get around to explaining why. His ability to teach a class, or lack thereof, was perhaps the only thing my father and I agreed on during my high school years.) 

The backstory is that I need to brush up on my trig, so I can take a running start at Calculus. My current intent is to use those trig exercises as an excuse to get back into drafting and design. So, it'll be a few months of using lots of paper and spending time with these books:

-A Treatise on Mathematical Instruments, by J.F. Heather, 13th ed. I think the original was written in 1853.
-Industrial Science Drawing, by S. Edward Warren, 2nd ed, (I think) from 1889. Parts I, II, and maybe III.
-Essentials of Plane Trigonometry, by Rosenbach, Whitman, and Moskovitz, original copyright, 1937
-And, if I'm feeling froggy enough, I might add in some of Walker and Tolpin's book, By Hand and Eye. More likely, I'll use that as a distraction during vacation, after Calculus, and keep the drafting thing going.

I enjoy reading books from the late 1800s, when it comes to technical things. Among other reasons, that pile of books I just listed, combined, weigh less than the average 21st century math textbook. They're also more concise, and they make an effort to be readable.

Another reason I'm taking this route: I've found that drafting things by hand makes me think harder about what's actually getting laid onto the paper, and why it works, or doesn't. Some of that is because my brain, to steal a quote from Doug Stowe, is in my hands. Some of it is because, unlike working in CAD, the hand-drawn page does NOT automatically propagate, and I can't put a detail down on paper very well if I can't see it in my own mind first. Usually both images co-evolve, because I use the paper drawing to help hold the framework for my head, while I focus on the particulars... I think. It's a weird back and forth.

---

...And so it is that I found myself skimming through a section on free-hand geometrical drawing, from part I of Industrial Science Drawing. I got poked in the eye by the following quote:

"Work becomes costly as soon as straight outlines are abandoned, and especially as carved work begins to be employed, that its consequent difficulty of attainment makes it symbolical of the grace and beauty that can only be had under the best conditions, or, as the result of man's best aspirations; while the plain lines of ordinary work represent, by comparison, humbler human industries. Hence a bit of choice carving to crown, or tip, or face a piece of otherwise plain work, happily symbolizes the cheerful co-operation of happiness and honest industry, the meeting of truth and beauty."

Nineteenthth century predilection for male accomplishment aside, the quote stood out in part because it's basically the reason most people I've met as woodworkers, got into woodworking. They just want something that's a little bit nicer than what's typically on offer. It may also have something to do with why so many industrially executed embellishments fail so miserably to look nice: Something that skilled artisans used to do, to show skill and pride, is now done by machine, so the manufacturer can pretend to. It also reminded me of David Savage's telling of the story of the infamous 863, and the personal pride in making things that the 'daft old 863' had in spades. See his book, The Intelligent Hand for more.

Lastly, my mind read the quote, in part, as metaphor. Sometimes it's hard to take a roundabout way to get somewhere, like I'm trying to do with engineering. Like any other endeavor, really, as soon as the straight and well-worn path is abandoned, and the traveler tries to do something a little more meaningful along the way, it's just a little bit harder... and more precious.

Some basic trig, from Mathematical Instruments

Roubo on Furniture

The other day I posted this tease picture, under the headline "Satisfied would be a gross understatement."

After thinking about it, I felt weird and self-conscious about my approach to the post from a few different directions. And so I pulled it down.

And then the next day, I noticed that someone had left the following comment:

"I love those books, and can't believe we actually got to publish them. Plus, I use them all the time, so it's a joy to page through them."

For those who don't know, this is a shot of the spines of two expensive, limited edition books, in a very large, long-abandoned format. (12-1/4" x 17-1/4") The first, I bought years ago, when it was still available. The other, arrived this week. They're English translations of two (out of five) volumes on woodworking that were written by André Jacob Roubo. They were translated, and the content clarified, by a multi-disciplinary team that are each authorities in their own right, intending that the book should be not only authoritative, but readable and use-able to an English-literate audience. My understanding is that producing each of these books was a long, arduous, and devoted labor of love, that spanned an ocean, and many years. It also resulted in the production of two, separate, Award  Winning volumes. There are smaller, 'normal sized' editions of these books that are, and will continue to be available from Lost Art Press. But these are the big, fancy, brag-worthy ones. And I'm pretty sure that the comment was left by Chris Schwarz, one of the owners and stewards of this particular imprint.

And so, after noticing the comment, I felt like a dope for pulling the post. But here's the rest of the story. 

I had already planned to road-trip down to Lost Art Press this month, specifically to buy this book. This was back when they had planned to open the doors to the public, as they do every month. But fate, and the pandemic, had other ideas. As I said the other day, I can't think of another way to support the lunatic ideas that are coming out of Lost Art Press, than to continue to buy their product. So, since I had the money earmarked for this particular book already, and because I was knocked so far sideways by what he's got planned for the forthcoming Anarchist's Workbench book, I knee-jerk ordered this thing in response. ("Books for free, my eye! Take that, you Anarchist! HA!")

I don't like doing reviews of things until I'm familiar with them. And it's Roubo. If I need to explain that to you, as the saying goes, you wouldn't get it anyway. For me to offer to pass judgment on Roubo would be the height of vanity.

That said, I can at least say something about the physical object that LAP has produced. Yes, it’s award-winning, and I can see why. But aside from that, there’s good reason to go with the large format: The plates and illustrations in Roubo are large, and detailed. And you get a much better look at large, detailed illustrations when they’re printed in a large, detailed format. And the resolution on the page is incredible, so those images are even more crisp. I can't decide if these books are too nice to use in the shop, or if they deserve to be on the bench as regularly as possible. Probably a false dichotomy: I do respect my tools, and I do use them on the bench. And the pages in these editions are printed on very heavy stock. So they’re going, in theory, to last for a good, long time. That, on top of a sewn binding, heavy, durable covers, and a slip case that actually slips off. (I’ve owned fine copies of other books, where the slip cases were very, very tight, and so some man-handling was required to extricate their contents..)

I can also say I was caught off-guard by the packaging of this latter book when it was delivered. They invested in some custom cardboard crating to provide ample crumple zones around the edges of the box, and did a noteworthy job protecting the volume. It's one of those little things that conveys just how seriously they take their product, and their customers. So, job well done. And thanks, for that.

Totally worth every penny.

Where I am now

One of the things I miss about my shop in Lawrence is the pillars. They gave some pretty ideal spots to take shots from. Recently, given all the downtime, I was feeling nostalgic, and went looking back through the old posts that I'd put up, and it was fun to see the shop in various states of construction, re-arrangement, or mid-project. So, I thought I'd try that again here. Seventeen years ago I got started in a basement, and moved through a few iterations of 'real' shops before shutting down in 2014. I'm back in the basement again. (Different basement, though.)

This is a shot taken from one of the lally columns, back by the bulkhead door, next to the rubber exercise mat I set up for working out. Yes, that's an old-school tool chest with sliding tills. No, I didn't build it. Yes, it's cool. No, I didn't need to read a book on it to understand that at the time.

Incidentally, the thing on top is something called an opaque projector, that was marketed under the brand name projecta-scope. I remembered my mom having one back in the 70's, and thought it would be perfect to keep the kids occupied while we were stuck at home. Essentially, you drop it on top of an image. (Book, trading card, or, in our case, Pokémon card) A light bulb illuminates the image, which then bounces off of a mirror, and is projected onto the wall. No circuitry, nothing much more than a light bulb in a box with a lens on the side. Yes, the room needs to be very dark. No, it's not very bright, but it works. It's very old-school, decidedly low-fi, and cost me maybe $30 on ebay. Worth it. The 4 year old gets to work on his own Pokémon drawings to color, instead of having me do it, and it's been remarkable watching his hand-eye coordination develop as a result. Doug Stowe would probably be proud of me for following my son's lead, and letting his interests dictate the project. I'm just glad it's had as much mileage as it's had, already.

Shot from the bulkhead door. You can see the shelves I put up to provide storage, and some pegboard. To the left, you can see the end of the bench. Yes, there's a shave horse on the bench. It's up there because I finally realized why I couldn't quite get it to work well: It's too tall. In practice, if you're astride your shave horse, and your feet are on the floor, your knees should be above the thing. In this case, my knees do not come up that high. So I need to take 6 inches or so off of the legs to turn this clydesdale of a shave horse into more of a carnival pony. Maybe more, we'll see. So, it's up on the bench to have the legs laid out for trimming. And in the background, you'll see my bandsaw.

The bandsaw is a Laguna LT18 HD. Italian made, circa 2007. Incidentally, that was the year I graduated North Bennet. Of all of the stuff I sold from my old shop, I missed having a band saw the most. I thought about settling for a 14" saw, but over the 7 years that I owned a 14 and an 18, and ran them side by side, I noticed that the 14" broke blades a lot more frequently. Not often, but more often than the 18. I have a lot of crazy ideas for things I'd like to do someday with this saw. It's almost 7 feet tall, has a 4.5hp Baldor motor, and even with my ambitions, it's likely to be more band saw than I'll ever need. It's expected to be the heart of my shop, instead of the table saw that everyone else has.

I've done the cabinet saw thing, and there will likely be times when I'll miss having one. I might buy a benchtop table saw for fine cutting of joinery and banding and little toys and trinkets. But, knowing what I know now, I think I'll be just fine without a big table saw for a while. Behind the bandsaw is my Festool MFT, which handles panel work, and has been a workable substitute for a chop saw station, too.

Around the corner, behind the saw, is a mess of stuff that still needs to be organized and given real homes.  In the foreground is a shop cart that dates back to my days up in Lawrence, behind that is the MFT, and a rolling station with a benchtop drill press on top. In the garage I have a lathe that will get set up out there. Beyond that, the only thing I lack right now is a planer. Maybe. I have thoughts on that, but it's not holding anything up at the moment.

Unlike previous shop iterations, this shop is planned to be a multi-function space. There's a wall-hung monitor at the right end of the bench, since that's where my laptop is. I've been studying calculus recently, and have plans to work my way back to school for an engineering degree. I also have plans to install a 3D printer down here. (The printer itself is on backorder.) The notion chafes against my traditional woodworker experience, but quite honestly, I've seen some interesting things done with 3D printing in my flying car day job, and I want to learn more about it. And, truth be told, it's something I want my kids to have access to as they get older, if they're into it.

So... yeah. As man-cave fab labs go, this one's off to a pretty good start.

Book Review: Guide to Woodworking with Kids, by Doug Stowe

This image copied directly from Doug's website, but without his express permission.

"Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with the truth."
-Thich Nhat Hanh

---

I love reading about what Doug Stowe is up to. As a graduate of North Bennet, there's a common thread of Educational Sloyd that ties together my experiences and his, but in vastly different ways. I wasn't really exposed to it until I was in my late 20's, and I will always remember walking around the school with my jaw on the floor for the better part of an hour, during the tour. I wasn't even sure people still knew how to do those things, let alone that there would be a school, let alone that it would be so close to me, and that I'd never even heard about it until then. North Bennet will always, always, always, have a warm place in my heart. And the roots of what they taught, and how they taught, were rooted in Educational Sloyd, which had actually been taught there by Gustaf Larsson to the teachers who would be bringing the experience to children. Reading his source material feels like coming home, in some ways, to a home I wish I'd grown up in... and maybe, would like to provide for my children.

But in my experience, there's a difference between the theory of what I thought I wanted to do for my children one day, and what I'm actually doing. In the trenches of temper tantrums and fights over screen time, snack food, and all of the other little battles against low blood sugar, neurological development, growing pains, younger/ older brother power plays... Well, I'm human. And I miss the mark sometimes. And that's when I have to step back and re-assess.

There's a great quote that I read once upon a time, that in an age of information overload, plans don't work, and maps don't work. What you need is a compass, a trajectory, and a way to measure the key values. (Are you headed where you want to be headed, how far do you have to go, how fast are you moving, and so on.) It doesn't matter if you're in over your head, as long as you can swim. And, keep swimming. (cue the inevitable Pixar earworm) And so, when I do step back, I have to consult some of my personal compasses... of which my wife is one. (Having the right partner is key.) But there are others.

And that leads me to this marvelous book, because it's reminded me of a few things. One of those things is, in no uncertain terms, don't project your own self-deluded nonsense onto your children. Another thing I needed to remember, is just how much I didn't know, and just where is the basic base-line?

As I've been getting things set up in my basement, I've been trying to think of ways to integrate the boys, ages 7 and (almost) 5. I've been reading about stick furniture and tapered tenons, and thinking to myself how easy it would be for them to understand. And they've helped, a little, with one small project (a bench) so far.

And in so doing, I missed the point completely. The children ARE the project: The wooden MacGuffin is just a thing. Sure, I'm happy to help them figure out what they can do with their hands. And in good time, I'm sure they'll be more interested in specific projects. But of all of the various tips and tricks and suggestion that Doug has, (and there are many) the big one is this: The point of woodworking with your kids, is not to build objects. It's to help to help the children grow, help them learn, and to stay out of their way while they figure out what they have to figure out. And maybe that's the second half of the point: The children are the project, but (just like all of their really cool LEGO sets) it's not my project.  Not really. They need me to provide boundaries, and give them a basic understanding of the structure they'll be working with, but they rest of it is up to them, their nature, and their inclinations. If I do it right, I'm just a spectator/ assistant.

Ultimately, the part of my experience at North Bennet, that I want to provide for my kids, is the learning part. And it's all too easy for me to forget the vast difference between learning, and being taught. And just because I see something cool in the bones of a particular project, doesn't mean that they see it... or that they see the same cool thing. Maybe that ball and claw foot really is the leg of Optimus Prime's long-lost Cybertronian nemesis, after all. Who am I to say otherwise?

That's actually one of the great things about the pictures in his book, of the children's projects. They remind me of what it was like as a kid, building similar things, that probably looked even worse, and how the real significance at that age isn't the finished project... it's that the object itself is simply a placeholder for the imagination, while it projects all of the epic adventures and zany experiments with reality that a child's head can produce. Ninjas, dinosaurs, misguided refrigerator monsters, and a family of broken crayons who only want for a hamburger... And that process is much more important than some poor parent's need to take the kid's newly finished project into the basement to be sanded, and refinished, and made into something for the parent's imagination to project greatness upon. Who cares if it looks like something that was made by a child? It was. And that is absolutely ok. 

I was fifteen before I had my first experience with jealousy over someone else's achievements: Scott McClary made a really cool coffee table in 9th grade. I really wanted to be that guy, who could build things. But my 7 year old isn't even halfway there right now. There is nothing in his world that demands that I help him to avoid my teenage experience. (And, for that matter, there's nothing I can do with him now that would ever help me feel better about my own childhood experience.)

So, this is a woodworking book, sort of. It's a teaching book, sort of. Maybe once you blow off some of the sawdust, it's a mystical zen treatise on child rearing, sort of. (Hence the quote with which I began this post.) Or maybe it's a map to the Lonely Mountain Erebor, where we can all battle our own hidden dragons, in search of treasure.

Or, maybe it's a compass.

Am I helping them learn? Or am I trying to teach? What was it about learning fine craftsmanship, that I want to help them find for themselves, if they need it? Do they even care, yet? Am I the person in their life who is best positioned to help them with that? Is this really my shop right now, or theirs?

In my experience, when I find myself neck-deep in questions, I'm probably in the right place.

(I'm still proud to see them sitting on the bench they helped make.)

Thanks, Doug.
 

What I've been reading and doing lately, thinking round, and the curious case of Mr Schwarz

So, I've been home at this point for almost 100 days. I've lost count. I spent money on various things, including a bunch of books from Lost Art Press. (Campaign Furniture, Welsh Stick Chairs, Good Work, Ingenious Mechanics, pre-order for Kitchen Think, and...one more.) I also ordered a copy of Doug Stowe's book on working wood with kids. I can't wait.

I've been gearing up to do some chair making, because it sounds very straightforward, and more visceral than the work I'm used to doing. Quite frankly, the Welsh stick chair thing has been an interesting footnote in my understanding of Chris Schwarz, and what he's been up to: The Anarchist's Design Book has a little more depth for me than it did before. Design Book was a bell-clear call for the reader to start doing things, without obsessing, or stressing the little things. And the more I read from, and about, John Brown, the more I understood those undertones of Design Book. My understanding of Brown's 'Welsh' approach to things boils down initially to 'I'm not a classically trained anything. I needed a chair, so I made one.  It came out the way it came out.' And when he saw the chair that apparently inspired a career, he went straight after it, know-how be damned. Don't have a lathe? Grab a block plane, and 'think round.' I wonder, a little, how he'd have gotten on with Lance Patterson.

Schwarz, the editor, spent a career, publishing a magazine dedicated to all of the must-know techniques, must-build pieces, must-have tools and jigs, must-try suggestions, must-own shiny things, and on and on. So I could see why Schwarz, the anarchist, would ultimately decide that the list of must-anything should be zeroed out, and to follow that thread. And now that I've read a bit about John Brown, that notion has crystallized a bit more. Think round, indeed. And get on with it.

---

Aside from that, I've also been reading the news, and despairing at how much of a boost it's given companies like Amazon, and gutted so much of the rest of the economy. Had anyone asked me, I might have justified buying the books, and a few spokeshaves, by citing my own effort to help stimulate the economy... Money should go to the small businesses, who need it.

Truth be told, I was just aching to get my hands to work. I needed space to work, so I carved out some space in my basement. Got my bench situated, and put an extension on the thing to use for homework, and such. The last piece fell into place yesterday, when the wheels started spinning on my bandsaw. With any luck I'll be writing about building things again soon, instead of just writing about reading about it.

---

Schwarz bent my head the other night. He's announced plans to give away his next book electronically, for free.

Initially, I was a bit angry. As far as I'm concerned, people should be paid for their work. How dare he... but who am I to judge, really? It's his to give away. But, still... you just can't do that.

Can you?

Then I thought, maybe he's worried about legacy at this point, and what he leaves behind. This idea seemed to miss the mark, somehow. I'm sure the book will have various new observations and helpful hints, but his legacy, when it comes to bench-building, is all over the internet. He's already written a book or three on the topic, blogged (almost) ad nauseum about workbench builds and theory, and inspired a lot of workbench builds. And that experience is pretty evident in the lines of the bench that he's built. (Or, at least, the bench that he shows us a photo of. I can't imagine he'll pull the rug out at the last minute and do a big reveal of a door on sawhorses. But I'd laugh if he did.) In point of fact, it may have been easier for him to actually write a whole new book, than it would be to actually index everything he's ever blogged about.

Then this morning, I thought about his focus on Individualistic Anarchy and where that goes, and it overlaid with my frustrations about Amazon laying waste to the economy and the little guy, and wondered if that's been on his mind as well. The notion that he's distilled 20 years of bench building and offered it up for free, so people can get on with it, and get set up and start building things for themselves... Well, I can't say that it's the kind of thing he would do, because it's something he's already decided to do. But in the absence of any other meaningful gesture in the face of Amazon's gigantic money-funnel... it's actually not a bad response.

Or, maybe it's just that the pandemic has been a windfall for him, too, as the woodworking world has been left with not much to do but stay at home, and read, and build things, and he issued that missive from his yacht. I doubt that, though. It feels more like an attempt to keep the community active and engaged, and help everyone get up to speed while we're all locked up anyway, so that the seeds of more anarchists can be quietly nurtured in a soil that should be good for such things. The idea that people should stop obsessing, think round, and get to work?

Maybe it's not about legacy at all, so much as what he's trying to accomplish right now. Maybe this is his version of thinking round, and working with what he has, in the absence of whatever else he's lacking while we're all locked down. Or maybe he's more worried, in the context of this particular content, about the students than the teacher. Lost Art Press seems to be on more solid ground these days, and the catalog is expanding. Maybe this feeds the community, some of whom may be unemployed right now anyway, more than anything else he could be doing.

Maybe I've been thinking too much. I'm still on lockdown, too.

In any event, in the absence of a better response, I decided to continue to support his lunatic ideas, and ordered another book. According to my email inbox, it'll be on its way shortly.

The Intelligent Hand, the 863, and David Savage

(Cover image is linked to directly from Lost Art Press) 

As excited as I was to read and talk about The Intelligent Hand, I had to digest it for a while before I could really write anything that felt right. The recurring thought, to be brutally honest, is that this is the book that I desperately needed 11 years ago when I decided to hang out a shingle and make furniture for a living. Or, maybe even 14 years ago when I first started at North Bennet.

The book is not aimed at dilettantes, or hobbyists. Savage is very up front about that, and so is Chris Schwarz, who wrote the foreword. The book, like Rowden, (the school David founded to teach aspiring professional woodworkers) is aimed at people who are 'bleeding from the neck.' (His phrase, used to describe people who wouldn't be there if something wasn't already wrong.)  People who would have been one of the 863.

I had to edit that last paragraph, because I initially started it with "this book isn't aimed at beginners." But perhaps it is, provided they're of a certain stamp. As much as I hear about a lack of qualified tradespeople, I think there's an abundance of individuals who won't be pushed, cajoled, bullied, or bribed into doing things they don't want to do, or pretending that they're someone that they're not... and are 'bleeding from the neck' as a result. These people are blessed with a bright, potential future of swimming against the current in a brutal, callous world. They will deal with bullies, jerks, and other types of naysayers, until they realize that The Opinions of Small and Worthless People, are Small and Worthless Opinions. With luck, hard work, guidance, hard work, mentoring, even more hard work, and a Willingness to learn, these blessed children will go on to inhabit incredibly fulfilling existences.

That said, guidance and mentoring are sometimes in short supply. And so those beginners should read this book immediately, and keep coming back, because the lessons between these covers will reveal themselves over time, with repeated exposure. Some of those lessons will only make sense after your first big failures... when they will perhaps be needed most.

---

The beginning of the book is incredibly approachable. David talks a bit about his life and experiences as someone with a speech impediment, and how he learns to move past it and express himself. He talks about going bankrupt, and the clients who helped him move on, and try again. He welcomes you into the experience. If that level of resilience is something you can relate to, and not something you pity, you'll get a lot out of the rest of the book.

He talks at some length in the beginning about his experiences working as an artist, about running a furniture shop that ultimately went bankrupt... and how he recovered from that with the help of some very patient and forgiving clients. He ultimately came to the understanding that the three legs of doing this whole woodworking successfully, are "Making, Design, and Business Management."

He skims the bare surface of the topic of design in a chapter that talks about drawing, and proportion, and tying together numerous threads while trying to come up with something new. All of the old ideas are there, but one has to get past them to see a new idea. That could be getting past old design styles to create a new kind of furniture. It could be getting past the ideas that follow bankruptcy, to see a path forward again. It could be seeing a way forward on any of a number of other fronts that have challenged you in the past, once you get past the baggage of your previous ideas or misconceptions. Proportion deals with the relationships of the different elements in a composition, to present a balanced, beautiful piece. This should be that long in relation to that, this needs to be emphasized here to break up the tedium... and that sense of proportion is well hidden, but present throughout the book. Whether you're designing a piece, and balancing the dimensions, or running a business that balances "Making, Design, and Business Management," (The three legs of his business.) that deliberate management of proportion needs to be developed and nurtured.

One of the other themes of the volume is that once you get started, You Have to Trust Your Ability.  Know that you are able to truthfully see, to boldly draw, to accurately build, to courageously sell, and to live such a life as this without apology or excuse.  Surviving is hard enough, and bankruptcy is always there as a backstop. Making, Design, and Business Management all go hand in hand, and in proper balance and proportion. This is not the time to commit, because once you're in business for yourself that ship has already sailed. This is the time to get real, and get to work.  There's no time left for second-guessing.

Better to know Victory, or to know Defeat. Either is better than mediocrity. Seeing and thinking and doing are all intertwined, and if you can't act accordingly, a corporate life might just be the thing for you.

It's a lesson that is mirrored in details as simple as sharpening. My take away lesson from the topic of sharpening wasn't how to sharpen... I already know how to do that. It was that even a simple thing like sharpening should be approached with the understanding that there's just no time to waste. You do need to understand how to sharpen, and what sharp is, but the point of the lesson was to get to the stones, get it done, and get back to work. When they interview makers who want to work at Rowden, one of the things that they look at is your tools... and they don't hire you if it looks like you're still fussing around with jigs.

---

I'm embellishing the 'hard road,' concept a little bit, because these are issues that will face anyone who wants to escape the tedium of corporate life. A small business is still business, even if you're romantically doing 'meaningful work with your hands.' I met a few of these folks at North Bennet 14 years ago: They came to school, they got out, they went into business, went bankrupt, and went back to corporate life. I met a number of long-term woodworkers who had moved into their shop at one time or another.  The importance of Business Management can't be overstated, because you only get to do this sort of thing if you can make it work and make it stick.

I've been having conversations about the real nature of this sort of work with other people lately, and one of the things that I've realized is that the work itself can be part of the problem. The idea of the "Big Job" is always really exciting, but it's a killer. Big jobs are hard. They're labor intensive. And anything that requires those long hours at the shop means you're not spending time running the business. You're not mentoring new people. You're not looking for the next job, or touching base with the clients who may very well bring you that next job. You're not crunching the numbers on what that next job will cost, or how long it will take. You're just trying to push the Big Job out of your shop. And if you're working alone, even small jobs can be Big Jobs, just because you're working alone.

David's approach of running a shop with multiple talented people, and making good use of their insights and experience, while running a small school to train still more made a lot of sense to me. Again, you don't get to do that sort of thing, either, if you don't know how to make it work, so I'm sure there's a lot more under the surface. But it made sense to me.

This is the no-BS book I needed 11 years ago when I set up shop. And it's the book I wouldn't have understood, because I was a beginner, with some romantic idea of how it was all supposed to work. It's not a question of not understanding the language, it's an appreciation of context. It's akin to someone who's never had a romantic entanglement, talking to a new parent about the challenges one faces in raising a family. If you haven't even successfully managed dating, let alone a long term relationship, you're going to have a hard time understanding the world the other person inhabits. The language may be the same, and gravity will affect you both in roughly the same way, but the lens through which you view the world will be different. And the lens I used 11 years ago is not the one that I'm reading this book through today.

This is also the book I needed 5 years ago when I took on the Big Job. But at that point I was living down 6 years of focusing on Making, with some attention to Design, and only paying attention to Business Management when I absolutely had to. No attention to balance or  proportion whatsoever. I just wanted the Big Job to work out.

I know a few people who have managed to stay in business in a creative, thinking way. I knew a lot more who didn't make it. The persistent narrative was that it's a hard road, and not everyone survives. Getting word back from the front that someone figured a way to make it, and make good, is a breath of fresh, and hopeful air. It's a book I've already started to re-read, because there's just so much experience between those two covers, and so much to think about.

There's no easy way to tie off this review, because there's so much more to the book than the little that I've written here, and trying to capture it all would be pointless. Go read the book. I heartily recommend The Intelligent Hand to anyone who wants to sink their teeth into woodworking as a business, or into opening any kind of bespoke enterprise. It's not written for everybody... but not everybody would follow this road to begin with.

As epilogues go...

One of my milder pet peeves in the blogosphere involves the sudden end of an otherwise enjoyable narrative. It's annoying when I get into a blog, and then it comes to a screeching stop, and I have no idea how the story ends. It's like having someone walk by and shut off the TV, and you miss the ending of a show. "Hey! I was watching that..." To this day, I still don't know how the series finale of the "A-team," ended.

Having now been on the other side of killing a blog, I can understand. But still, it's one of those things. Where did those bloggers go? What are they doing?

In all honesty, it took a while before I was really over this blog. There was a lot more I wanted to talk about and say,  and do... and I kept promising myself that I'd somehow go back and make good on it... And I didn't. At this point, I'm ok with that. I have other priorities. But it felt like a loose end.

I'm aware that I need to do a little bit here and there to spruce up this blog in general, to make it easier to dig through, and just to manage this part of my online presence, if nothing else. As a first step towards that, I've  added my final project, the Auto-Regulator, to the portfolio page, and given it a pretty decent write-up. It was one of the things I wanted to write more about. I'm not going to go into anywhere near as much depth as I'd intended, but I've finally put it up for all of you to see. It's pretty cool, even in retrospect.

But back to the point... how does this thread end? What have I been doing? Well, I have news to report. And hopefully that news will provide closure for those of you who were paying attention, or were curious how things have shaken out.

---

When I shut down my full-time shop four years ago, (obviously I haven't quit wood completely, and couldn't if I wanted to) I was painfully aware that a decade of making sawdust had decimated any marketable skill set I possessed that wasn't directly related to woodworking. And I decided that I wanted to do something else for a living besides just working with wood. I wanted something more interesting and educated-sounding, so that people would quit trying to 'help me' by suggesting I work at Home Depot. ("You're a woodworker! Hey, you know what you could do?") So, I decided to pursue prosthetics, and I embarked on a part-time effort to complete all the prerequisites, while also staying home full time to look after our 2 boys. (Well, it was one when I closed up shop. We had the other one soon thereafter, figuring it would be easier to have another one at the time, than it would be in grad school.) It was more than full time. It was a lot of hard, hard work, on top of the long hours that come with having a brand new, second child.

A year ago, I had wrapped up the prerequisites, and I was preparing to submit applications to two programs in prosthetics and orthotics. And out of nowhere, I got a call from a staffing agency, about a ridiculous opportunity. Two days later, I had an interview, and two hours after that, I had a new job. Two weeks later I started working at Terrafugia, in Woburn, MA, building prototypes for flying cars. Odd detail... they're basically across the street from the address of the Woodcraft store, where I worked for two years.

The job itself is as close to perfect as I could have hoped for. My overall skill set is pretty broad-ranging, but oddly well suited to what I'm doing now. I use a table saw and a band saw on a regular basis. Bonding components together, at the simpler end of the spectrum, isn't too far removed from some of the more involved furniture assembly glue-ups that I'd performed previously. There's a lot of problem-solving, and jig designing and making, which I love. And there's actually a call for good craftsmanship and hand-eye coordination: Despite our heavy investment in things like CNC machining and 3-D printing, I work in a prototype shop, and there are times when we just need to fix things in the moment, with the understanding that we'll iterate in the future. It means that skill set I worked so hard to develop wasn't a complete dead-end, and I finally have the opportunity, (if not the mandate) to learn a whole lot of other new, and marketable skills. I'm surrounded by brilliant, hard working people. I'm learning new things every day. And for the first time in a long time, I don't feel like I'm fighting just to survive.

I love woodworking, I do. Desperately. But doing woodwork for a living, and only woodwork, was brutal. And I watched that vocation destroy and/ or bankrupt more than a few people along the way.

Building flying cars is still a job, and every job has good days and bad days. But even after working there for a solid year, I just can't believe my luck.

And as epilogues go, this is a damn fine one.

---

I also have other news, though probably less exciting... Thanks in part to my new-found stable job situation, I've recently moved into a new home. And, that home has a two-car garage, with just enough room in it to set up a new rent-free shop. I have no immediate plans to do full-time woodwork for a living again, but having a (really, really cool) day job will free me up to use it to make a little money on the side. I might even try to build some of the speculative pieces I'd always dreamed about taking on, but couldn't justify... when I'm not trying to cajole my 3 and 5 year old into making Anarchist Stick Chairs.

As part of the setting up process, I'm pulling the remnants of my old shop out of storage. When I shut down four years ago, it felt like I'd hit rock bottom. I rented space in that building for storage, trying to hold on to something, and the stuff I kept has been there since. When I went out the other day to start moving out of that building, I discovered something via Google Maps that's only funny in retrospect: The name of the road that goes between the two old mill buildings, in that complex, is Rockbottom road.

How ironically appropriate.

---

While I may come back periodically to post an update, or to clean up the overall presentation, grateful is a pretty good note to end it on.

I'm also grateful that this blog managed to grow and get the exposure that it did, with little or no real attempt by me to self-promote. Somehow it still gets regular traffic, even after being shut down for so long, and that's something I'm proud of. I blame Chris Schwarz for a lot of that. I blame Norse Woodsmith, too, but Leif added me to the aggregator at someone else's suggestion, and i didn't find out about it until after the fact.

I'm humbled that enough of you were intrigued enough to keep reading.

Happy trails.

James Watriss, 8/1/2018

March-April Issue is here...

It's as good a way as any to book-end the last decade or so.

10 years ago this month, I walked out of the North Bennet Street School. I was mostly done. My chess table needed to be finished, which took a little doing, but otherwise, I was out, and ready to take on the world.

 

---

At this particular moment, I'm blogging, as a way to procrastinate, rather than study Anatomy and Physiology. I'm in the midst of the last prerequisite that I need, before applying to grad school for Prosthetics and Orthotics. The long-arching arc of my career track still involves making things, and so, for me, it makes sense. The insurance gig may or may not be a permanent part of the picture, going forward. We'll see.

Either way, something else has been happening lately. My second kid has passed the year and a half mark, and I realized the other day that my head is starting to clear. And I started having ideas about what my next shop will look like. Nothing concrete, mind you, but it was a strong enough whiff of an idea that it's clear that I'm nowhere near being done with woodwork.

So, this showed up in the mail yesterday...

Simple Pleasures (My review of the Anarchist's Design Book)

I'd intended my last entry to be just that, my last entry. But then someone gave me this book, and, well...

---

When I first read the premise behind Chris Schwarz' proposed Furniture Of Necessity, I really wasn't sure where he was going with the idea. Stripping away ornamentation usually leads to Shaker or Danish Modern, but he was citing source material that seemed more like cave drawings than draftsmanship, and I didn't see the point. Still, I was curious. Schwarz has a tendency to dig through old material, strip the big ideas down, and relentlessly discard anything that's not immediately, and efficiently useful. And he usually comes back with a nugget or three of something unexpected, and precious.

Now that I've finished this book, for the second time, I'm not 100% sure what Schwarz is up to. The book is brilliant, and the furniture is gorgeous, there are layers yet that I need to peel back. And even then, he makes it plain that there are things on his mind that are better left unsaid. 

---

When I unwrapped the book, and cracked it open, the obvious things that popped out on my first flip-through were the (gorgeous) photos and illustrations, and the crackling from the painted page edges. (This settles down quickly, leaving a quieter, and very handsome looking volume.) Then I started reading.

His design methods get to the point, without making expensive/ time consuming mockups and prototypes. (A drunken monkey could put some of these methods to solid and efficient use.) He walks through building stools and chairs, using simple, functional, and efficient methods. (One of the most complicated tools is basically a pencil sharpener on steroids.) The trestle tables... Simple, functional, and very attractive furniture. (Truly awesome commentary on that here.) I don't have room for a new table, but when I start grad school, I'm thinking I might just make myself a desk. I'll be reaching for this book when I get there.

And truth be told, all I was able to think about was how cool it would be to teach this stuff to my boys, once they pass the age of 6. He uses band saws and drill presses, for the sake of efficiency, but a coping saw, hand plane, spoke shave, and a modified ship builder's auger would work just fine for smaller hands, if you wanted to build one of these chairs with a child. I don't just want to build this stuff, I want to share the experience. So in that regard, I think the author has done his job well.

Clearly there was a lot more to the cave drawings than I properly understood. 

---

This quote reached out and poked me in the eye while I was reading about the 6-board chest:

"After all, if you are going to build these projects by hand and build them for the non-rich, you have got to be efficient."

After all of his years in editing and publishing, I'm sure that Mr. Schwarz is very careful when writing in the second person. It makes sense when he's walking the reader through a build, or in a comment like: "If you want to learn how to build furniture, you have to study furniture." Because his tone is so casual, a random aside like the one I put in italics wouldn't normally stick out... but I've already had a pretty solid go at this whole furniture making business once already, so it hit me a little differently than it would have a decade ago. I'm not sure if he was just assuming the reader wants to make an enterprise out of building furniture, or if he's trying to quietly, conversationally, plant the seed of that idea. Either way, it felt subtly done.

At that point, the tone of the book took a left turn for me, and I started paying closer attention.

Schwarz comes clean about some of his motivations at the end of the book. He's clearly had it with idle chatter from professional moaners, uselessly rambling about the loss of the craft.* He's very much interested in making people want to get off their backsides, and do things. And so he's stripped that idea down to something that's immediately and efficiently useful. The projects in this book can be built with a set of tools that will fill a small backpack, even if he pairs them with ideas and ways of thinking about design that will help you fill your house... and maybe someone else's, too.

My observation after reading the book, is to re-examine just how over-done a lot of fine furniture really is, if you're trying to strip down to what's really useful. 

And, for myself, I can't help but want to build this stuff.

 ---

The 'Useful Stuff at the End' section feels less like an appendix, and more like a place to put a few spare parts that didn't fit in with the final layout of the book. He talks about how PVA glue has short-changed the world, and why hide glue is so much better. He talks about scrubbed finishes, and soap finishes. Simple, safe, healthy, and sustainable ways to keep a piece maintained. And other bits and pieces. But these short blurbs are also useful devices for bringing up some very serious complaints with the way things have been made in recent years. Not only are things so poorly made, they're hard to maintain, and almost impossible to repair. Between chapter 99, and this last section, my impression was that of a curtain being pulled aside, just for a moment, and getting an incomplete glimpse of what drove him to put this book together.

---
Once upon a time, I was a North Bennet student, selling tools at Rockler, and then Woodcraft. And I was frustrated and pissed off about how much money it was taking people, just get into dabbling in woodworking, about how much of it either wasn't helpful, wasn't entirely necessary, or helped the aspiring woodworker to assume that they were out of their depth. I really loved The Anarchist's Tool Chest, because it stripped most of those things down for the average beginner: 'You need these things, you don't need those, and for god's sake, don't worry about that stuff. It's crap.' (That's my one-sentence summary, that does the book a grave disservice, but it's more palatable than "STFU and go read it already.") It was a great book that provided guidelines for a solid tool kit, and a good exercise or two, to help the newcomer get to understand their tools.

I feel like this book has gone a step further. Because he's now stripped away a lot of techniques that aren't necessarily needed, either. No dovetailed boxes, no rectilinear mortise and tenon work, no embellishment. The 'joinery' when there is any, is only used when structurally necessary, and it's bombproof. The finished pieces are proof that this philosophy of design can still produce comfortable, attractive pieces, even in the hands of someone who's just starting out. And nothing encourages progress like success. With luck, he'll also shoo away some of the tire-kickers who will step up to a Goddard highboy and first want to see how sloppy his dovetails were, ignoring completely the sense of proportion, or the quality of the piece as a whole.

In short, I think Schwarz has jumped from 'making it easier to get into woodworking,' to 'making it easier to build durable, useful furniture.' There are times when I'm tempted to joke that his next book will feature a series of boulders, but the truth is that Schwarz has managed to take the philosophy of 'make things as simple as possible, and no simpler,' to a long-forgotten level. A simpler tool kit, a simpler set of techniques, and furniture that, to be plain, will be easier to live with and maintain.

So... STFU and go read it, already.

JW, 7/9/2016


-----

*re: The loss of the craft: The rise of maker-spaces, and the upsurge in people wanting to make things, is ample proof that the spirit of craft is very much alive and well. Some of them are into woodworking. True, I find it sad to think that the world may never see the likes of the Seymours, or the Roentgen shop again. But the truth is, they were a very limited and isolated subset, of a subset of elite craftsmen, who happened to be positioned to sell amazing things to royalty, for a ransom. And there are still subsets of elites, selling remarkable things to royalty, making anything from furniture to bicycles, sports cars and motorcycles to airplanes and who knows what's next, timber frame homes or over-the-top yachts... Or even just really good food. Anyone who thinks that intelligent craftsmanship is dying, either hasn't been paying attention, or probably wants to have inspiration fed idly to them on a spoon.

Thank You

I got into woodworking seriously in the summer of 2004, when I took my first workshop at North Bennet Street School. My last commission wrapped up about 10 years later. In that time, I worked for Rockler, and Woodcraft. I went through North Bennet. And then 7 years of running my own business, during which time I got to make some really cool custom furniture for some very nice people. All in all, not a bad run.

Almost two years later, I've had a couple of abortive attempts to reboot this blog, and finish talking about that last project... and a couple of others. But it's slowly turned into one of those things I keep meaning to get around to, and feel bad that I haven't... and I think that means it's time to tie it off, for now.


---


My writing about woodworking started out on Woodcentral.com, and morphed into this thing you're reading now. Along the way, I ran into a guy named Chris Schwarz, and talked about my experiences selling over-rated newfangled widgets while I was learning traditional craftsmanship at school. He told me I should write a book. I wrote a lot of material, but the real point of the book kept getting away from me, and it never came together. Maybe it'll crystallize now, who knows. But I can't thank Chris enough for his encouragement.


---


If anybody asked me what's the most important lesson that I've learned, I'd be split.

Lesson number one in the shop has always been that the fundamentals are fundamental, and every time I revisited things like sharpening, planning/ drafting, process, layout, and accuracy, my work improved by leaps and bounds.

But as important as I think the fundamentals are, I think it's equally important to stay inspired, and aspire to always try to build something that's just beyond your grasp.

If I was going to send someone on a guided tour of woodworking awesomeness, it would start with names like Greene and Greene, Chippendale, Sheraton, Townsend, Goddard, John and Thomas Seymour. Some of the designs and work from these men were the ego pieces that I aspired to when I was in school. I think I'd include a sampling of British campaign furniture... and Japanese Tansu. (stacking, and step-chests) More recent American designer/ builders like Wharton Esherick, George (and now Mira) Nakashima, Sam Maloof, and even Wendell Castle would be on the list. I think it's really important to learn about Chinese furniture joinery, because it makes the humble dovetail joint look like finger paint, and about the work of the Roentgen shop, which is simply astonishing. Those would have to be on the tour as well.

(To be fair to the rest of us, The Roentgen shop had something like 200 craftsmen in house, working in a variety of disciplines, from joiners to marqueters, and including people casting and chasing the absolutely gorgeous metalwork, and they had clockmakers on retainer to build some of the mechanical niftiness. They also violated a lot of guild guidelines in the process.)

I do wish that the glossy rags would focus on work like that a little more, just once in a while, even if it was only a review of an exhibit at a prominent museum. I think it's important for people to understand just what heights human ingenuity and skill were able to achieve, without electricity. I think that would put more recent work in proper perspective.

But then there's other work by craftsmen like Sidney Barnsley... or Garry Knox Bennet. I find Barnsley's work to be utterly visceral, and it grabs me in a way that the American Arts and Crafts designs don't. And when I hear or read from hobbyists who are taking themselves too seriously, I really want to see how they'd react to Garry Knox Bennet.  It took me the better part of a year or two to realize that I just... love his work. It's powerful and whimsical, colorful, and it doesn't take itself too seriously.

And if I wanted to say anything with this blog to date, it's that I think that it's important to both aspire, and to not take yourself too seriously. John Ruskin made the point in his writing that only a craftsman who can forgive himself for his mistakes will be able to reach greater heights. Nobody's perfect, and I think we're all capable of a lot more than we realize.

Thank you all for reading.

James

Circular logic, part 3

At this point in the series around radius cutting, we have a very reliable way to cut a convex or concave part. But making an accurate cut in woodworking is usually dependent on accurate layout. And so this entry will cover some of the results of my head-scratching on the topic. Coming from a straight and square world, some things transfer, and some don't.

As with part 2, it bears mentioning up front that this is NOT the way I'd do things in a one-off environment, or in a typical production environment. I went off the reservation a little bit, away from the job at hand, and into the realm of obsessive curiosity and experiment, in the hopes that it would make this particular project roll more smoothly into limited production.

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The photo above is a simple beam compass made with some T-track and scraps, a screw, and a modified X-Acto knife: I ground the knife to something close to a 90 degree point, for durability.  This is the curved version of a marking gauge, for my purposes: Among other things, I wanted a mark that would positively engage with the brad point of my drill bits when I went to drill the holes for the locating pins.

Note that I set the beam compass up with the blade at the end, and the pivot point in the interior of the beam. I learned to do that years ago. It allows me to rest the weight of the assembly on the point, and I can teeter the thing as needed to put only the desired pressure on the marking end. This is something I learned with pencil beam compasses, to keep from breaking leads or digging into the paper. It helps a lot here, too, for controlling the cut.  (A look at vintage compasses will reveal a shoulder on the pivot point, to keep it from digging too far into the paper. This supports the weight while the compass pivots, so the point doesn't just gouge in.)

When I set the radius, I do so with a good Starrett machinist's scale, as the graduations are etched, and the points (point of the knife, pivot point) will both register.

"Why?" Is an obvious question. Why make such a fuss over precision? The arch on the clock is free-floating, as it were, and doesn't connect to or reference against anything. There are no reference edges. The answer, in part, is that the locating pins for the radius jig needed to be precisely placed, and I used the scribed arc to register my brad point bits when I set up to drill the holes. Another answer is that when it comes time to connect to the three-way miters, every advantage helps.

Back to work...

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At this point in the project, with the concave part of a bending form in hand, I needed a mating convex part to use in the laminating proces. (I'm not using a vacuum press here.) And, to make matters more complicated than they needed to be, I wanted to make that part using the scraps that I had from cutting the concave part.

It occurred to me that for a bending form, I just wanted to take a certain amount off of the edge of the scraps, to account for the thickness of the part being laminated. If I had access to the geometric center, I'd use a compass to find the radius of the blank, subtract the amount I wanted to cut off, and lay out that way. But I didn't have access to the center. On a straight and square board, you can measure from a straight edge, at any point along the edge, to make a parallel cut. But in this case, there's no straight edge to reference against. But eventually it occurred to me that a center finding head will allow you to measure in from the edge pretty reliably, to lay out a concentric curve without knowing what the radius is. The blade will point towards the geometric center of the arch, and allow you to measure from the outside in, perpendicularly to the tangent line... which isn't the way I was taught to work with circles, so it bent my head for a minute. That's just a way to measure, it's not the same thing as laying out with a real marking gauge. But I found I could use it to guide a marking knife concentrically around the curve, and lay out that way. This really only works accurately for circular curves, but it turned out to be a pretty neat trick.

In the picture, you'll also see an arch with a labeled radius. That's one of my radius gauges.

At some point, it became clear that gauging a perfectly concentric arch off of a radius of unknown dimension wouldn't give me the precise results I was after. I needed an arch with a known radius, (radius gauge) to at least make sure the line I'd drawn was at the desired radius. This was when I made the beam compass. With a gauged line, you can see when you've accurately hit your mark. With the jig on the router table, I could fine tune the adjustments well enough to split the mark. (You can see when the knife mark remains in the edge you've just cut.) It's probably not precise enough for a machinist, but it was good enough for me.

Another interesting bit: Without knowing the radius of the edge of this blank up front, using the radius gauge and a center finding head allows me to get a reasonable measurement of the radius anyway. Using the center finding head, I can check to make sure the radius gauge is positioned concentrically. From there, I can measure from the outer edge of the radius gauge, to the outer edge of the curved blank to find out the difference in radii, and go from there.

 

The outer radius on the arch above (R= 10 1/4") corresponds to a pair of holes on the scissor jig, where the mounting pins drop through. The inner curve corresponds to the next set of holes, (9 9/32" *)  which are the holes I used on the jig for this operation. (You can see this in the pictures.) Those holes are centered at a 9 9/32" radius from the center of the pivot pin on the jig. So this was a necessary dimension to gauge where to drill the new holes, for the convex part of the bending form. The arch was an aide to help me make sure that my layout was accurate.

From there, I could set up the drill press to drill symmetrically placed holes...

The holes let me make a concentric cut on the band saw...

...and make the finish pass on the router table. 

As Mark had observed, I'd wandered pretty far away from paying work while I was tinkering with this. But as I was tinkering, a lot of things jumped out at me, all at once, about navigating curves, and I dove head-first into the rabbit hole. It's one thing to understand the geometry of a circle on paper; radii, diameter, calculating chord lengths, etc.. It's something else entirely to be able to create those things in a physical object. It's not a matter of being able to calculate what the measurements should be, it's a matter of being able to cut to those dimensions, and be able to refine the cut to course-correct as needed. This all began to feel like I was learning to lay things out and plan the process in a whole new way, so I steamed straight on ahead.

There's gold in those hills, if you look for it. But one of the things I've learned recently from Mark Twain, is that getting the ore out is one thing, but nobody tells you that refining and smelting the ore is a wholly separate process, and the finished product can sometimes be smaller than what you think you dug up. Between the beam compass, radius gauges, etc, I burned up a solid day or so in tinkering. The nuggets were pretty shiny, but the final take-away was maybe not as big as I'd hoped. I'm still digesting what it all means, but I have no doubt that it will turn up in future work, when I get there. 

Considering that the point of departure for all of this was my frustration with more primitive methods of cutting curves, I can say that I went a LONG way towards easing those frustrations, and cutting curves is a lot simpler and more precise for me now than it used to be.

You can see by the shadows above that the sun was getting low on the horizon by the time I had this worked out. 

But the bending form came out cleanly...

And the finished part did, too.

Again, a lot of this is tantamount to driving From Boston to Connecticut, by way of Tokyo. (Which is clearly accomplished by driving a very over-thought car, with re-invented wheels.) Making a bending form is NOT a complicated task, and certainly doesn't call for this degree of caffeine-fueled head scratching. But then again, there are jigs that will come up later on that wouldn't have worked without some of the groundwork laid here.

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Side note, I wanted to add in here that the MFT was a really remarkable layout aide. Using dogs in the hole grid gave me a way to register parts against each other, or to hold and clamp them at a reliable 90 degrees to each other. I don't think that's enough of a reason to buy an MFT, but if you have one, it's reason enough to invest in some qwas dogs.

* 10 1/4", 9 9/32"... the radii on the jig seem bizarre, I know. I drilled the holes at 1" intervals along the beam, but the geometry of the dog-leg feature meant that the angles to the mounting holes were constantly changing, and the radii didn't end up working out to be 'regular' intervals. I'm sure it's possible to design and build a jig to have more 'even' sounding numbers, but at some point, it really becomes academic... or, more academic than this already is. Laying out a part to be cut with this system, means laying out the final radius with a compass, and laying out the concentric radius along which the locating pins would be placed, to make the jig work the way it's designed to. So, I had to measure the actual radii, from the center to the holes on the beams, to be able to lay them out... and the actual numbers ended up being weird ones.