It’s Only a Windsor Part Four or (I Don’t Do This in My World)

May 21, 2008

Now the beautiful thing about a Windsor is how many small parts it has. They’re each so light. They’re each so perfectly suited for the job that they have to do. The bad thing about a Windsor is how many small parts it has. They all have to fit into their holes all at the same time and fit just right and you can’t really dry assemble this beast once or twice or fifteen times like I’m wont to do making sure each tiny gap closes up or that each shoulder fits perfectly. Eleven spindles, some going through one piece then up into another. There was a lot that had to happen all at once.

You just have to go for it when facing this kind of glue-up. It’s a process more akin to cracking someone’s back than to building furniture. Curtis calls it Chairopracty. And believe me, I have been under the hands of an old school chiropractor. He just about killed me on the table with all his pounding and pushing and snapping and cracking. A lot like Windsor chair building. There is a surprising amount of noise in putting one of these together. Not the least of which is the noise coming from the builder.

Curtis and I had assembled our tools about us and I had assembled my wits about me and it was already 9am in the morning. We began and had to be done soon so I could get to the airport for my noon flight.

Now if the intelligence of a group decreases exponentially by any increase in the members’ numbers, so too does the effectiveness of one skilled woodworker paired with another less experienced. Curtis was busy moving about the chair assembling one part of it while I was on the other side of it busily taking it apart. Or so it seemed. Every time he’d get one set of parts lined up, I would pull another set apart. Then I would get mine in and he would pull mine out getting his in. It was work putting this chair together and there was no time for anything but continuing. We were both banging on this chair with our dead blow mallets like we were Chicago aldermen working over a voter.

We had left two of the outer spindles long so we could line things up better. A full 20 minutes into the assembly and we finally had all the spindles in their back rails and had run the wedges into the spindles. It was a tough glue-up, at least from my perspective. Curtis and I were sitting there relieved to be done.
He was plotting his recovery time. I was figuring out how I would get this chair home. About fifteen minutes passed by in relief and congratulatory rhetoric.

Then Curtis said, “We forgot the wedges in the long spindles.” Here were two spindles sitting about 4″ out of the back rail with no wedges to lock them in place. They were not a design element, they were not a surprise detail you wanted to leave behind. They were a flipping overlooked mistake in my book and Curtis had me grab a saw and saw them close to the back rail. I could saw them close but how were we going to wedge those spindles? How were we going to back out of this painted in corner?

Curtis said, “Here’s what we do, grab your chisel and make a slot cut in the top of the spindle.” “For what?” I wondered aloud. “For the wedges,” Curtis replied. I spoke in what I can only imagine as a loud tone of voice, “I don’t do this in my world, Curtis! I don’t do this.” “It’ll be fine,” he said, “I do this all the time.” But I was a true non-believer. My wedge slots had relief holes and carefully cut wedges to fill the holes and here was this guy telling me to make a starting cut and then let the wedge wedge itself in all by itself. Why wouldn’t it keep on splitting and split that dang spindle down past the back rail, maybe down to where you could see it, maybe in two! I was not a happy camper, but I was dutiful and I took out my chisel and made two starting cuts, grabbed my wedges, and took out my metal hammer.

I always liked those scenes where Elmer Fudd in the Bugs Bunny cartoons mouthed the word, “Mother”, before falling off the cliff or getting blown up. I was reminded of this scene as I started to bang in my wedge.

But, by golly, in it went. I was amazed. And in it went with no damage. I was further amazed. Both of the wedges did this. I was amazed and impressed. My Windsor teacher was a genius. He had managed to pull me back from the brink.

So there I was, happy if a bit spent. Now I had to figure out how to get this wonder of wood parts home. I had two choices for shipping my Windsor. One was to drive into town on the way to the airport and drop it at some packing place where several knuckle dragging cretins would throw it into a box with some newspaper, push it down the rack, and say So long, sucker. [I once had a UPS rep tell me that my box had to withstand another box falling down onto from a height of 36". Oh joy.]

Curtis had told me he’d seen another tactic work before, so I was ready to try it. I would get on the plane with the chair as my luggage. Why couldn’t I sweet talk my way onto the plane with the chair in my lap. Perhaps vice versa. Maybe I could tell them I needed special seating for my arthritis. Maybe they’d go for a sentimental story about my mother and this chair. But if people saw it, not as a box, which could hold anything, but as an actual chair, then I had a chance. I decided that having the chair close to me and sweet talking it on was the better choice. If it didn’t work, I’d go back to plan one.

I wrapped up the bottoms of the legs of the chair with cardboard, I wrapped the seat edge with cardboard, I wrapped off every protruding element, [the wedges had all been sawed off], and made it look harmless to the other luggage. I picked it up and looked at it. It was obviously a chair. It was obviously a hand made chair. It was also my luggage.

We drove out to the airport. I thanked Curtis’ dad for the lift and walked up to the ticket counter like I owned the airlines. I said, “Here’s my luggage.” The woman behind the counter looked at me like I was off my medication. But I was not daunted. I repeated, “Here’s my luggage, you’ve done this before, it’s wrapped, it can’t hurt anything, it has to get home with me to Portland, and I just made it this week in your fair state.” How ‘bout it, I said to myself. And danged if she didn’t go for it.

We flew to Cincinnati on a puddle jumper and when we got off the plane on the tarmac, I could see the baggage handlers. I looked hard and expectantly at them and gave them a thumbs up. They gave me a thumbs up. In Portland, the first piece of luggage, triumphant, untouched, unscarred, a throne descending the luggage ramp was my chair. I got several curious if no doubt envious looks, but grabbed my chair and headed on home.

It was one of several triumphs for the week. I had gone into another world of woodworking that was so foreign to my own but had emerged from it with such respect. Respect for its freedoms and its strict rules, for its quiet pace and frenzied activity. It was hard work and relaxing all at once. It opened up new possibilities for my own work and made me recognize the variety inherent in this craft. It was great fun to inhabit this different world. That’s what is good about taking a class like this. It stretches you out in ways expected and surprising. After 4 coats of milk paint and a coat of oil, I also had one of the most comfortable and handsome chairs in my house. I hope you’ll consider coming out to the Studio to try your hand at Windsor chair building.

It’s Only a Windsor Part Three or [This is Fun]

May 17, 2008

Once you get your parts split out and shaved to perfection, you get to feeling that this is a nice way of working. That Windsor chair making is a good pursuit. Quiet, serene almost. You really do start to wonder why you have so many router bits, why you have so many big pieces of equipment making so much noise. And here you’ve been sitting for 3 or 4 days not making much noise but the occasional grunt when you shifted positions on the shave horse. It was a very quiet and enjoyable way of working. The quiet part would change.

Somewhere in that week, we got to do our bending. Now bending wood is as close to magic as you can get with woodworking. You take these sticks that you’ve been fighting or sweating over trying to pry them out of a log, and shape them nicely and keep them straight and the same thickness over their length, working them hard, worrying over them a little. And now you were going to put them in a steam box so you could try to bend them into a pretzel. A semi-circular pretzel but the point is you’ve been working on something so dang hard, how in the world was it going to bend? It did not seem possible.

But it’s magic. You get the wood hot enough and it bends easy. The key is heat. Everyone thinks it’s steam and the steam is important as the carrier of the heat, but it’s really the heat that the wood needs. Now I won’t get into the specifics of bending wood. Suffice it to say that bending wood also involves failure. It is a part of the bending game so get used to it. I did not like this part but there it was. We cooked our back rails to within an inch of their lives and when we put them on the form they bent just like stiff rubber so nice, so smoothly and then crick, they each opened up a crack on the outside face of the bend.

Long face. I had a long face, maybe even a big lower lip. I was bummed. Curtis was his usual bubbly self and he said, “Oh well, we gotta bend us another.” That was about all the cursing he did. Get out there, split out another stick, and while you spent time on the shave horse whittling it down to size, try to figure out what you might of done wrong with the first one. Curtis didn’t know and he’s been bending wood for 25 some years. Best guess was that we overcooked it. You can do this just like you can undercook a piece. Neither will bend without splitting. We had gotten the grain right; there was no run-out, but somehow it didn’t get hot enough or it got too hot. In any event, we got back on it. The second batch of parts bent just fine. We kept them in the form for a night and then tied them off and let them dry out.

Somewhere in the midst of all this back rail and spindle work, we also had to start work on our seats. Now we used white pine for the seats. Lovely wide boards, soft, almost buttery. Big thick chunks of the stuff too. Curtis showed me how to use the seat shaping adze without chopping off my toes and we proceeded to get them roughed out. It’s funny how you shape a Windsor seat really. Because you set the seat blank on your bench after doing the outside shape, and you mark out where you’re gonna shape and in the back of the seat you drill two holes. And this makes no sense at all until Curtis explains that these holes are depth holes. Spin that brace and bit I don’t remember 20 times or something and you’ll get a hole that’s about 3/4″ deep. That’s what you want. Two consistent holes that will disappear once you get to depth.

After drilling you took the adze and started hacking away at the pine. When you had done enough damage with that tool, you put your hands on an inshave or scorp. This is basically a curved drawknife. It works well in the hands of a seasoned professional for scooping out a seat. In my hands, it was a chatter machine capable of leaving big dents in the soft pine. Reminders of my wavering attention and technique.

I eventually got the seat rough shaped and then reached for my seat shaping double round wood hand plane. This I know how to use. It’s a Japanese style one made of white oak. It’s a beauty. It gets into that seat bottom and smooths the pine great, either heading down into the valleys or going cross grain near the seat pommel. Then we scraped to clean up the rough spots but seat shaping was mostly a bunch of fun. And comfortable.

Assembly would be the telling phase. Gluing day was the day when it all came together, when a week’s worth of work had to fit together seamlessly. I was up by 5am that morning to finish prepping all my parts. I had to be on a plane by noon that day. No pressure.

It’s Only a Windsor, Part Two or (How am I Supposed to Do That?)

May 13, 2008

If you missed out on Part One of our story, I was visiting Curtis Buchanan at his home shop in Tennessee where he was showing me how to make a Windsor chair. It’s a different model than the one we’ll build this summer at the Studio. But if you’re like me, any time you try something new, all the rules are wrong, all the standards are stupid, and the tools are all Greek. That is until you learn how to use them, learn how to relax a little, and learn how to just be ignorant for awhile until you get taught. It’s a humbling experience and I recommend it to every teacher out there.

Anyways there I was trying to learn Windsor chair making. I felt like a 1 year old learning how to walk and speak in a foreign language and also balance a chisel on my nose all at the same time and Curtis must have felt like Job. First the locusts, then the ten thumbed who didn’t know from draw knives, shave horses or travishers.

Curtis was of course very nice about welcoming me into his world where all the power you needed was supplied by you the worker. The shave horse is the perfect example. It is essentially a long low bench that you sit on clamping the workpiece with a lever that you push with your feet and legs. The dumbhead is the clamping part that comes down onto your stick so you have two hands free to work it. It’s a marvel of simplicity and engineering. I’ve built a couple now for the Studio based on Brian Boggs’ design and every time I use one, I just have to say, “Yep, this works, this really works.”

Now your first day on the shave horse is fine. You feel comfortable. You feel like you could actually get good at what you’re doing. Day two you discover the sitting parts of your anatomy and feel even better about shaving the parts level and true. Day three, you learn about pillows.

I am of course exaggerating. You do get used to sitting and doing your work and the shave horse becomes your friend for the week. So does the draw knife. This tool is scarier than a table saw. It’s a 12″ to 16″ long razor blade with handles on it. It has the look about it that when you’re sitting on the shave horse pulling off these long chunks of wood that you could keep on pulling and slice yourself in two. Fortunately no one is double jointed or dexterous enough to pull off that trick. Your stroke and your shoulders always prevent large bodily injury. The bad nicks from the draw knife come from setting it down with the blade up or reaching for it without looking. Then it’s sharpness comes into focus with a kind of rushed breath as you look to see how much time you’ll spend cleaning up. Fortunately I kept my wits about me for the week and suffered no cuts, but you do have to remain aware around this tool.

Soon as you split out your green wood for the back rails and the spindles you start shaving them down with your draw knife. Now there are a bunch of parts to a Windsor chair. You have to shape out 11 spindles and 12 other parts to make the legs, rails, seat, arms, back rails etc. But it’s this accumulation of parts that makes them such a marvel of design. The chairs are very light as they use a combination of woods: hard maple for the legs and red oak for the rails under the pine seat. Joined into the seat from above are white or red oak spindles and back rails and maple arm stumps. Since the Windsor chair is always painted, all of the wood species get colored and blended together. But with this combination you get the best from all the woods: strength and durability from the maple, light weight and shaping ease from the pine seat, and bendable strength from the oak. Take away any one part and you’re missing something essential from the design. It’s a design that is 200 years old so most of the bugs have been tweaked out of it.

In my world of cabinet making, I have to rough out my parts and fine tune my parts, four square my parts, lots of part working with jointer, planer, band saw, and table saw. In the world of Windsors, it’s all done on the shave horse. So there I was, sitting. Learning to love sitting and woodworking and wondering how I was going to make these shaved parts into anything resembling a chair. Because you spend a lot of time with this draw knife shaving wood. And it’s only later when you get to bending things that the light starts to come on. See the Windsor folk years ago figured out that if you orient your grain just right when you split it out and shave your sticks on the shave horse, that you can make these incredibly strong sections of wood with the growth rings running absolutely parallel to the surfaces of the stick. With 3 or or 4 or 5 growth rings in a section about 5/8″ thick, you have great strength and most importantly bending strength.

This is the key to Windsors. Learning how to make your parts so that even though they’re incredibly small, they’re incredibly strong. Shaving on the shave horse with that draw knife teaches you how to read grain in a way you never will on the jointer. It teaches you how to shave late wood in oak in an impossibly precise way with this draw knife. And then you bend the wood and it works! What a revelation! And all the time you’re sitting there talking to yourself: “How am I going to do this, I’ve never held a draw knife in my hands and which side is up anyways? And what happens if the grain does run out?”

But Curtis fortunately is a master at it and a good teacher. I did feel pretty morose around mid-week about my Windsor chair making skills. Here I was with a fair amount of time behind a bench and able to build some decent stuff and I felt like an idiot most days on a shave horse. Curtis wife sensed my discomfort and came up to me about mid-week and said, “You know, when Curtis started, he couldn’t turn anything on the lathe.” It was a small comfort but I took it home and put it under my pillow for the night. The week was moving along pretty quick, but we still had the bending of the back rails to do, seat shaping, and then assembly. And while the draw knife wouldn’t be the first tool I’d reach for when shaping, it had revealed many of its strengths to me. The language was beginning to dawn on me but there was a bunch more stuff to learn.

It’s Only a Windsor or (I Don’t Do This in My World)

May 9, 2008

Several years ago, I asked Brian Boggs about Windsor chairs. Brian was at the Studio teaching a class in Ladder Back chair making. He told me that if I wanted to go learn how to build a Windsor chair I should go study with his friend, Curtis Buchanan. Curtis lives in the oldest town in Tennessee and has a small 300 square foot shop behind his lovely house. He builds one chair a week using mostly hand tools and a lathe to turn his parts. He now also comes out to the Studio every two years to teach a class in Windsor Chair Making. He’ll be out this August again.

I want to tell you the story of me and Curtis during that week I spent learning with him. It will take a couple of entries but it’s worth staying with I think because it reveals so much about the variety of woodworking styles and techniques.

Curtis took me on as a student to build what is called a Sack Back Windsor. I just looked up what sack back refers to and the chair makers don’t know why it got that name either. Maybe it had something to do with a sack being put over the back of the chair to keep the sitter warm in winter. Who knows? But in any case it is one of several types of Windsor chairs including comb back, fan back, and continuous arm chairs.

Now Curtis agreed to take me on as a student for a week but he was about as happy to have a Fine Woodworking Contributing Editor over to his house as the Pope is to have visiting female Episcopalian Priests. He was polite yes, but enthusiastic to have me over? Not so much. Here was this router guy, this machine guy invading the quiet of his small shop behind his house. I’m sure he didn’t know what to expect from me. I was equally filled with trepidation. Did I know enough not to make a fool out of myself? The answer was no. Did I care enough? No again. I wanted to build one of these things to understand the appeal of them and to try something out of my comfort zone. It was woodworking but in a different dialect.

Building a Windsor chair is a giant step back in time and tradition. Welcome to the 18th century, leave your table saw at the door please. One of Curtis’ first questions to me was: “Do you have a draw knife?” “A what, no.” I replied. “Well you’re gonna need a draw knife to shape all your parts. Gotta have a draw knife. Well I got some extra.” Curtis said. Great, I said to myself. Good start, I felt real good, didn’t even have the tools. I had brought my spokeshave, I took my seat shaping hand plane and some other hand planes and chisels with me. But I had no draw knife. Curtis made a little mental note about that and me I’m sure and then we continued on. No draw knife, shoo.

Now these Windsor chair builders have rules and you cannot break the rules. That’s rule number one. Rule number two is oh don’t worry about the rules, it’s only a Windsor. It was this curious mix of strict tradition and a devil may care attitude that was so interesting about my week with Curtis. We started out with the design of the sack back which was inviolate. It had to have this certain seat shape, it had to have so many spindles, the arm stumps were so big, the legs this large, etc. I tweaked it here and there using a slightly different leg shape than most, but essentially it was a traditional Sack Back.

We split out the lumber for the chair outside the shop using a froe and a mallet type thing. Really it was just a beat up stump and it had had a tough lot in life. It beat on the metal froe and that was its job. It looked beaten. “Do you know how to use a froe?” Curtis asked. Again, I felt naked without my table saw in front of me. However did I get by I wondered to myself. Well Curtis was going to show me how to work his lever.

That’s what a froe is essentially: a big splitting lever. Splitting out green lumber is about as basic as you can get with lumber. Most of us don’t get this pleasure and total body work out because our lumber has been cut, graded, dried, stacked, painted with painted ends, and a board foot tally done on them somewhere. It’s not like that in the Windsor world, not like that at all back in Tennessee. You got yourself a tree about 5′ or 6′ long and you cut it up and took out what you needed. The beginning, oh the beginnings of woodworking. This was fun. I liked this. It was different but there was a very direct path in this work. Here was the tree, here is your basic tool: a lever, now go get your wood.

This work was over too soon as it was just plain fun. We headed back inside to meet my new friend for the week: the shave horse.

Slow Down, I’m in a Hurry

May 6, 2008
Many people think of woodworking skills as simply the ability to pick up a hammer and read a tape measure. If an opposable thumb were all that it took, how simple this work would be. But woodworking is much more about planning and executing that plan than it is about picking up a tool. Don’t get me wrong. The picking up of the tool is quite satisfying. I love it. It’s a passion of mine and many many other woodworkers.

The real key to woodworking however is plannng out your efforts and carrying them through. I worked as a car mechanic many years ago for one winter in Ann Arbor Michigan. If you do not know, it snows in Michigan. A lot. Cars there rust, seemingly before your eyes. So a part of my job was to unstick rusted brake cables and wheel cylinders, rusted shut heater levers, under the cars, lots of air chiseling, and prying things loose.

My buddy at the shop where I worked was a little older than me and a sweet guy. His name was Jake. He was quiet, not taking part in the banter and exchange of an all male shop. Jake just went about his work quietly and efficiently. One day I had a problem with a car and I could not get a nut to budge. I couldn’t get purchase on it. There was no leverage to be had. It was frustrating.

I called Jake over. Now Jake never rushed into anything. He would look over a problem, think on it, chew it over in his head, maybe touch some metal with his long screwdriver/ pry bar and consider. He was very deliberate about things. Very slow. He would consider and think on a problem until he had found the one place where he could find his purchase, where he could gain his leverage. There it was that he put his tool and bang, he would knock something apart. It was brilliant. It was astonishing to watch too. Me, the college graduate, being completely stumped by rust and time and Jake, the simple quiet mechanic, just looking at things and figuring them out. It was a lesson for me.

Now it’s a tough lesson to get in to your head. That you need to slow down in order to speed up. That doing things right the first time is much faster than fixing every mistake you make in haste. But it’s a good lesson to try to learn. The pace of the woodshop is not the pace of your job. It is not the furor of driving in traffic or doing your taxes or even doing carpentry. It is a slower and a more deliberate pace. This improves safety but it also cuts down on mistakes that cost you not only in terms of lost time or material, but the more important loss of momentum. Slow down, you’re in a hurry.

On Design

May 1, 2008

A question from a reader:

“I know this is a broad subject but any help would be appreciated. I am thinking of going into business and I wish to avoid the IKEA look-alikes and plywood specials you find everywhere. I’m also aware of my own limitations as I am almost too practical when it comes to designing furniture. My designs always seem to be based on use and material costs. How can I separate my work from “Joe IKEA” ? “Thanks C.”

Dear C,

Joe IKEA is a pretty powerful guy. Separating your work from his will take effort, a vow of poverty, and design skills. Some people think that design cannot be taught. I disagree. I think, and our Mastery Classes at the The Northwest Woodworking Studio show how you can introduce design concepts to everyone. What each person does with these concepts is a matter of personal effort.

Now a lot of groundwork, both good and bad, has been laid for everyone in their past. If you grew up with plastic covers over your furniture like I did, you know what I mean. If Mom thought that Early American Maple was a style of furniture and not just a stain, then you know what I mean. If you had a wagon wheel as your headboard, you know exactly what I mean. You bring your own ideas to this design table in other words. From this starting point you can learn an amazing number of ways of looking at the design world and you then can decide how you want to design your own work.

So, remember grasshopper, that the first rule of design is that you must steal from the best. Someone once said that bad designers copy while good designers steal.

Open your eyes first. You live in a designed world. Everything including the plants and trees around you have been designed by someone. It might be Ma Nature or any of several gods depending upon your point of view or it’s a Nike design or General Motors or Knoll International you’re staring at or using or putting on, but someone somewhere has had a hand in how the things look that surround you. Start by observing.

Sunflower seedhead whorls don’t just happen by accident. Neither did Gerrit Reitveld’s Red and Blue Chair. Design is at work in all these things. Start looking and deciding what you like and don’t like and most importantly, why. Because once you start to understand what you like and dislike you will start to develop a vocabulary. And a vocabulary of design will allow you to create things just like a vocabulary of words allows you to speak. You are born with neither lexicon. Start learning by observing first.

As for my own designs, and this is the shortened version of a very long discussion, I design my work to meet several needs. First I need an idea. Some kind of starting point be it a slice of zucchini, a Mackintosh chair, or a tapestry. Something needs to kindle my imagination. Next I ask what is the function of the piece, what will it do. How many drawers does it need? How big or small does it need to be? Then what is its intent? A very different question. What are you trying to do with the piece? What is its goal: grandiose shouting like Rococo or simple restraint like Shaker? How will the structure then affect the design? Will you use 16d nails or ½ blind dovetails? Bent laminations or bricklaid curves? What is the texture or delineation of the piece? Is it carved, inlaid, painted, hardwared? There are many ways of building a simple piece of furniture, but ask these questions to yourself as you go along and certain elements of your own style will start to emerge. Then continue to work hard at it. Look around, keep a notebook, and jot down your ideas. Have fun with it.

Gremlins

April 28, 2008

I am an educated person. I read books. I understand geometry and have an understanding of how the planets revolve around the sun. I can design a drawer pull and cut a dovetail joint or two. I see the value of differing points of view. But on this one point, there is no argument. On this matter, there can be no quarrel. It is too real, too palpable, too visibly real in my shop every week. The subject is gremlins.

The evidence for gremlins in the shop is overwhelming of course. Too many times I have lost something that I just held in hand. Too many times has something gone from my bench or my apron or my desk and just gone missing. Then it turns up again in that same place, that same bench some minutes later or maybe it shows up across the shop or maybe it turns up days later under a pile of papers. But I, the fool, keep looking, keep walking around the shop, lost in search, wasting time, lost and maniacal as I thunder around looking for the glasses tipped up on my forehead. Who put these here? One minute the tool is right in front of my eyes as I work at the bench and the next it is lost in a sea of shapes and objects. Hidden in plain sight by the little beasts.

Do not doubt me. These gremlins steal things. They will sometimes be charitable and give them back fairly soon. But often they can be selfish and too playful altogether. No the question is not, do they exist? The question at hand is whether or not they can be placated? Whether you can mollify them. Or if they’re such capricious little imps that nothing you do will ever stop them.

Gremlins can of course just be seen. You’ve caught them yourselves I know. They are barely visible out of the corner of your eye. I’m sure I’ve stared full on at one but have never really seen it. But in the shop they are often visible from the corner of your bifocals as your eye shifts from one focal depth to another and you can see these little shapes scamper out of sight. Do not snicker, Sir or Madam. It is true. I have seen them scamper, that fast, out of my view. Oh yes, they exist. I am not crazy. Crazy would be ignoring their presence. Crazy would be saying that I’m just forgetful or messy. Not true. Gremlins steal my things.

I struggle with them of course. I have learned not to curse them. Not to implore or beg: please give me back my calipers, please let me find that missing wedge, please oh please let me see my sliver of wood again against the brown wood floor or the wood of my bench or the wood of the project. Why is there so much wood everywhere? No I do not struggle. I do not whine. I have learned to keep my peace. To maintain some shred of dignity while I walk around the shop muttering to myself for hours seemingly on end in search of some lost thing that I must find now.

So it will be clear, it is not obsession on my part. It is not love of the hunt to be sure. It is neither a contest of wills between the gremlins and me. I merely want to go about my business. And so I have a strategy to assuage their mischievious ways. Chocolate. It seems to work. Sometimes.

Put out a piece of chocolate for them. A peace offering as it were. And let them see it and they will relax their grip on your tool or screw or wedge and you will find it again. Then you eat the chocolate, triumphant! I do not believe this upsets the gremlins much. I of course have no evidence of this.

I do however have continuing evidence that the gremlins live in my shop as things continue to leave and then return. Now where did my glasses go?

Shameless Commerce

April 23, 2008

It’s what we do of course. Try to make a living out of this stuff. So, to work:

I want to alert you to some of classes both for Spring and Summer that we have coming up on Finishing.

Now I understand how furniture makers feel about the subject. Open the can, oh right, read the can, close the can up first, read the instructions, re-open the can, put on the finish, complain about how that’s not what you wanted, and then try to fix it, and then give up. All the while making up new excuses for that color or shine when you show the piece to people. I know how this works for furniture makers. You love finishes; you hate finishing.

First, there is my lecture on 3 Simple Finishes come this May 27th. In it I hope to demystify some of the confusion about oils and varnishes and shellacs that the finish manufacturers love to manufacture. Just so you’ll open a can and it can start to gel over. There will be lots of useful and practical information on hand applied finishes. It is a 3 hour session, and it is only about hand applied finishes. I’ll lecture in Portland May 27th and then in Seattle at the Woodcraft Supply Store on May 31^st.

I also highly recommend Roland Johnson’s Restoration Class this September 8^th and then his Finishes Class September 15. Rollie is a spray guy, a lacquer and varnish guy, a restorer with 25 years of experience tearing things apart and then rebuilding and refinishing them so that they act and look as good as new. This class wowed me last year when we just did the Restoration class because there was so much to be learned. Not just learning about how to knock things apart which is fun of course, but also how old things got built. Figuring out how the makers 50 or 100 years ago put something together. One thing I learned is that finishers aren’t afraid to start over which is what restoration is all about.

Restoration will be the first week: taking an old piece of yours, examining it, figuring out how it went together, what needs fixing, tearing it apart, stripping it, and then putting it back together. Learning about strippers, hide glues, joinery, patching mistakes, fixing broken pieces, veneers, hardware, fabric and leather treatments. It’s great stuff.

The second week will be about finishes, and I can tell you that one week barely scratches the surface of finishes, pun intended. First there is surface prep including sanding, planing, and scraping. A week alone could be spent on colors, glazing, stains, tints, and dyes. The differences between mordants and chemical dyes. How to darken wood, how to lighten it, how to show things, how to hide things. Oh, I forgot filling, grain filling, filling with color added, leveling and detailing. Surface treatments will include oils, varnishes, special mixtures of oils and varnishes including Rollie’s hot mix varnish, lacquers: both brushing and spray lacquers. It’s a huge amount of stuff but it only gets us to the application of a finish.

The killer, what everyone forgets about, [perhaps it’s not forgetting but a willingness to overlook] is that once a finish is put down, then the real work starts, rubbing it out. Giving it the look you’re after from a matte and restrained oil finish to the high gloss of a piano finish and everything in between.

A ton of stuff to cover in these two classes and it’s finishing which is regrettably not like furniture making. It really bears little resemblance to furniture making. Their only point of commonality is that they both use wood. So these classes I recommend highly. Come and learn about the stuff that people will see and touch first, the finish.

Getting Back on the Pony

April 21, 2008

When you have your accident in the shop, it will be an important day for you. Notice I say when and not if. Accidents happen of course. This is a given in the shop. Your accident will occur. It may be with a hand tool, maybe a power tool. But one day you will do something unintended. It will be an important day for a variety of reasons. Of course how badly you may or may not get hurt will be the first issue. But I think that learning from this moment is another equally important issue.

Now stupidity follows certain people around the shop like a faithful dog. They do such stupid things in the shop you wonder how they manage to get to work without harming themselves. They’re constantly cutting themselves or dropping things or forgetting to tighten the blade in the saw. I had an apprentice once who could not keep a sanding disc on a dual action sander to save his life. I was constantly ducking these 5″ discs as they came flying by.

There are other folks who are plenty aware and cautious and just have an off day. I had a friend once come over to use my table saw one time. He was a good carpenter. He used to build houses from the ground up, from the foundation to the trim work and cabinets. The whole job. Well he was using my saw one day trimming the edges of some plywood and wing wang the piece went flying and hit the floor behind the saw and bounced up into the sheetrock in the wall about 12′ away. Where I kept it as a momento, a reminder, a holy cow moment.

You see, if you’re lucky enough to miss getting hit by your mistake, the very next thing you need to do, after your heart rate comes down, is to figure out what just happened. It’s the most important thing to do next. Because you’re right there. You have all the evidence. You need to understand what happened [because it’s usually you that causes the incident]. You need to understand what happened so that you can prevent it the next time. That’s the key. Learning from your mistakes.

The common reaction is to breathe a sigh of relief and leave the shop. But you’ve just lived through a really bad 3 seconds of your life as you pause before looking to see if you’re bleeding. You figure if you just dodged a bullet that it’s time for a beer or a lottery ticket. You figure that if the saw just tried to bite you that it’s better to walk away scared and live to fight another day. But you’re quite wrong. It is the perfect time to walk back through everything that happened to figure out what occurred, why it occurred, and how to prevent it from happening again.

Things happen quickly in the shop. One minute you’re running something through the saw, the next it’s a missile and it’s stuck in the back wall of the shop. Quivering. Figure out why. Figure out how to be smarter next time. If something bad happens in the shop, and you’re not headed for the emergency room, don’t leave for the day. Don’t close the door and walk away. Get right back on that pony and figure out what just happened. So it will be the last time it happens.

Do You See It?

April 18, 2008

I used to work in a large old furniture factory that had been converted into a dozen smaller woodworking shops. We occupied the second floor of this behemoth building and it was a great old space if a bit difficult to find. Across the hall from me was a friend of mine, Michael, and he built custom made furniture like I did. Over the years we would always help each other glue up, or talk about designs, shoot the breeze, lift many heavy objects together.

The interesting thing about our relationship was how we relied upon each other. For myself, I needed Michael to bounce ideas off. He would come in and I would say what do you think about such and such a leg shape versus another leg shape. And he would tell me what he liked and I would always pick the opposite shape. I needed this conversation as much as he did, I’m sure. Just someone to push against, to test out ideas.

One of the curious things about us though was when something had gone wrong in a piece. This plague, unlike the seventeen year locusts, was more frequent. More reliably frequent, mistakes being a part of the woodworking game. So something would go awry in a new project, something that to my eye looked terrible and I needed confirmation of this fact. It could be a dent somewhere, or a screw tip poked through a door, the misplacement of a hinge, or any number of things in a list so long I hate to think of it. The mistake would occur and then I had to decide was it obvious? Was it just me or did I need to launch into the costly fix? First I needed another set of eyes to confirm what I saw.

I would call Michael over and ask, “Do you see it?”

And he’d say, “What?”

“You don’t see it?” I would ask incredulously.

“What?” he would respond.

“I can’t show you. Don’t you see it?”

“No, what?”

“It’s right there.”

“What?” Michael growing more impatient with his cuckoo neighbor.

“Well I… I can’t…I’ll show it to you, but are you sure you don’t see anything there? It’s so obvious”, growing more impatient with my cuckoo neighbor.

“No not unless you show me where.”

“It’s right there.”

“Oh that, oh yeah I saw that. So what?”

Next came my grimace, the gnashing of teeth, the inevitable question in my mind: is the man blind? Does he not see this neon sign of a mistake pulsing out HERE LOOK HERE! But no, he wasn’t blind and it was always true. He never saw the mistake like I did. Never.

Nor would I see his mistakes like he did. It was never as big a deal for the observer, the neighbor, the client even, as it was for the maker. The maker whose ten thumbed approach, whose blindness and incompetence, whose woeful lapse of concentration again, had caused this flagrant violation of all design and construction principles. That maker, that idiot. No one saw it like him. No one was as hard on his work.

It is a sad constant for us woodworkers that I, for one, work on minimizing. Our focus is so small, our constraints on our obsession so meager that we think everyone can see all the mistakes that we make. I laugh when I think about the old saying of not offending god by making a perfect piece, by including one mistake so as to not offend. God must be plenty satisfied and not offended by now with how many mistakes land on my work. But few others even notice.

Bear that in mind. Step away sir. Put down the hammer and step away from the project. Try to see it with someone else’s eyes. It’s not so bad. You do pretty good work.