The Charming Woodwright

July 17, 2008

Roy Underhill came out last week to the Studio. He came, he saw, and conquered us all laughing, as he must do everywhere. What a delight to have the charming woodwright in our midst. Roy of course hosts the Woodwright Show on PBS and has hosted it, get this, for the past 28 years. My goodness, that’s a heck of a run. Well he’s on to teaching in person now and he taught a class for us on building a foot treadle lathe. But he did more than that as he warmed hearts and won over new friends. What fun to have him here to share his love of traditional woodwork.

It’s not every teacher who can proclaim to his class that they have stemmed the tide of the norm. That in  their three days together they have managed to put another 13 foot treadle lathes onto the earth.  A magnificent if perhaps ultimately fruitless gesture, a gallant shake of the fist at the microchips of the world. But no matter, Roy would get up every morning and pronounce: We will slay bad woodworking today!

And not in false hope I truly think. As Roy said, working wood is what makes us human. We are too used to this wood. We have it, here comes the pun, ingrained in us. We have worked with wood as long as we have held tools in our hands. And this close connection with a material is not just a history of our time on earth although it can be viewed through that lens as well. It is part of our being, part of our living here on Earth. If we have forsaken it in the past 30 some years, it still does not diminish its sway on our being. We would dismiss it if we could but even the printed surfaces at our fast food restaurants show wood grain, not the grain nor hide of the nauga. Wood speaks to us with its warmth, with its utility, and with its beauty.

I believe this is true: that working with wood and tools puts us in touch with some ancient place inside of us. Some place that is calming and satisfying and right. Building or making is a common and necessary fact of life and when we make things with our hands it gives a kind of satisfaction that is unmatched by, for instance, finally reading the rest of my e-mail for the day.

So, Roy came among us and reminded us all of our past, of our connection to the world, of our connection to wood. He did it with grace and humor and I thank him for that. It was a fun weekend and we hope to repeat it again soon.

Taking a Class

June 30, 2008

We have just finished up two weeks of Joinery Concentration classes. We being 12 students and me, my two assistants, Virginia, and the beagle Jimmy. The only casualty I think was my ham sandwich the last day of class. Jimmy got that. My fault, it was my fault of course. I didn’t take him for that lunch time walk and then left the temptation too close to him. Still and all, Jim leaving me just the cucumber and one half chewed piece of bread seemed a bit cold.

Class at the Studio is an amazing slice of life. You come there, master of your own world, fluent in its nuance, trained by years of practice, and then you decide to try something completely different and take a class. Or maybe not you’re not quite new but you’re untrained. It doesn’t matter how much time you have spent in your own shop. It is odd being in someone else’s shop surrounded by new people, trying at the same time to deepen your knowledge of this woodworking stuff.

It’s hard to do. This I understand. You work side by side with folks you have never met. Working on projects or techniques, trying to remember that class like this is not a sprint but a marathon. And that keeping up with anyone else is always a losing battle. You have to remain true to your own beacon, true to your own pace. Trying to remember the important issues for you and what you really want to leave with. Of course, Mom or your sweetie at home will want to see the lovely trivet or Philadelphia Highboy you made in one week of class. But it’s the information, the practice, the techniques, and the shared experience that really make it worthwhile.

I took a class once in pewter work. At that point in time, the extent of my metal working knowledge consisted of knowing how to put a hacksaw blade on a saw. ‘Bout it. I had never worked bronze or copper and knew even less about pewter. Well we got into class about 14 of us and the teacher had us talk about our experiences and this one guy pulls out this pewter tea set he had done and everyone’s jaw just dropped and here he was in class with us and then too soon it was my turn to talk.

You know those naked on the stage dreams you get sometimes. Where you forget your lines, or forget your pants, or forget where to stand or something awful like that and you feel tiny and small? Well this would have felt good compared to how I felt when it was my turn to talk about my experience as a pewter smith. All I could say was, “ I like playing with the big kids. I have no experience at all with pewter.” That was it. I like learning new stuff. And I had fun melting giant holes in that incredibly soft tin. I also liked watching someone else teach because it’s always so instructive to see someone else leading and how they do it.

I told my students the story about one of my Mastery students who ran a flooring business. He was running at the time a big crew of about 20 guys or so. And invariably he would get someone who came in and talked a good game but didn’t know squat. Then this guy would work for a year or so and pretty soon he knew everything. Or he would talk like he knew everything. And then, if he stuck around, if he stayed with it for another five or ten years, he would finally come to the realization that he didn’t really know that much. That there was still a bunch to be learned. Always something to be learned. That’s the fun part.

Anyways, we had a good week doing joinery. We covered a lot of ground and left a lot more that needed covering. But that’s how it is. It’s a long long race. All I can say is thanks to my students, it was fun again.

Solstice

June 21, 2008

It is one of the marvelous days. The day the earth pivots. I imagine it as a some kind of teetering top or a ballerina on one toe, just angling back. On a rock so big, you can’t see it become round. And with a precision so breathtaking we can measure years on it. We tip back away from the sun. A marvel. The days grow short.

It is also the time for teachers to rejoice. School’s out for summer. Teachers seen to run wild in the street. Time to drink from the waters of rejuvenation. They need it. They certainly deserve it.

But for us, it is not the break, it’s just the breaks. We hit our summer class schedule running hard. For us it is a summer of education. Visiting teachers, students from around the world and from right down the street. For us, it is also the time to rejoice. Twelve hour days, learning gone wild with eager students. What a treat to have grateful students!

What do we give them? Education, lots of bench time, a time of respite from their world, a time of hard work that they wear proud like a new set of clothes. You see some folks sweating like they never do in their day job and that’s good work they’re doing. It’s hard some days planing a board flat, but it’s real. The results are immediate, both good and bad. You know right away whether you’re succeeding or failing at the bench. That’s called feedback.

This week we were hard at work learning joinery for building carcases. Next week we put frames together with the most basic of joints, the mortise and tenon. Good fun, lots of hand work and routers routing. We’ll build through wedged mallets and a saber leg foot stool. If there’s time, we’ll be onto the shave horse for some work with a draw knife as we make legs for a milking stool. Much to be learned while having some fun this summer. At the end of a day, it’s a good kind of tired to feel. Come join us at the Studio even just to sneak a peek at what we’re doing.

As we enter this period of hard work for the Studio, I have to beg any faithful readers’ indulgence. I’ll be hard at the teaching end of things for several months so the blogging will diminish some. Please check back as I’ll keep things going on a bi-weekly basis and resume a full schedule of musings come the autumn. Do good work.

Everybody is a Star

June 11, 2008

Everybody is a star. Sly Stone said it best, years ago of course. I used to be convinced of quite the opposite. Certain people had artistic talent, certain people could draw, certain people could design and I could not. I came from the land of potato farmers and vodka. Oh sure, a talent or two rose up from the plains but mostly it was hard work and sacrifice for my ancestors. I surely could not have gotten any of the leavings of the few Polish geniuses.

Why was everyone else capable of building such cool stuff and I could only build pine bookcases with dado joints? Others made great dovetail joints in fabulous pieces and then inlaid pictures into their projects of the sinking of the Spanish Armada and I could make a bookend nailed together. Why did everyone else have all this talent and I was laden with none? It was such a burden really to carry around so little.

But something occurred to me years ago as I was teaching myself how to build furniture. I realized that I wasn’t teaching myself how to design work at the same time. I was learning how to use a band saw and a jointer but completely missing out on how to make stuff that was peculiarly my own. Now I know that there are plenty of folk out there who think that design began and ended with someone named Chippendale. [Doesn’t he dance in a club somewhere out in the suburbs?] But I felt that I needed to start learning about designing my own work. Work done in my style, whatever that turned out to be. Designers I figured learn a vocabulary just like everyone else. Why couldn’t I?

Now some folks of course are gifted. They’re genius right from the start. I used to have a girlfriend like this. We would go to this one restaurant where they had those paper tablecloths and a glass full of crayons. I would spend 20 minutes, frowning and making faces as I carefully put stroke after careful stroke down on the paper. After about 15 minutes into one of these drawings, when I realized that realism was not my schtick, I would turn the portrait into something more arty and edgy, you know, an impression of her face as she sat across from me. She would then grab a crayon and in five minutes draw my face onto the paper that looked like a photograph of me, look at it and throw it away. She had talent, but never wanted to use it. More’s the pity. Here I was desperately trying hard to draw well and feeling like I was paddling uphill with my crayon.

But I kept after it. I read Betty Edward’s wonderful book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and recognized the ability that I had, the ability that everyone has, to produce art. It’s in us. It’s well buried of course. We have a school system dedicated to turning us into mindless clones of one another and forgetting that art is the best thing to teach anyone interested into going into business. It opens up a part of the brain that goes dormant and for many, stays that way. But when you learn how to access it, you too can design and draw and can be artistic.

We try now at the Studio to teach some of these skills. Designing is a teachable and learnable skill like any other. It is not just the privilege of the wealthy or the unfocused. It is within us all. The key of course is learning how to look at things carefully, how to see things carefully. And then borrowing from the best sources, from a variety of sources, to design something that you can call your own.

But you, you are trying to design your way out of a paper bag, need to know that you can do it

Please Step Away From the Project

June 2, 2008

I was in Seattle recently giving some seminars on simple finishes and hand tools. There were wonderful students in attendance, and a good time was had by me if not by all. Our Sunday session was a cornucopia of ideas and topics. We talked about laying out and cutting dovetails. I cut dovetails while talking about dovetails, which is not easy. We talked honing jointer knives, which tools to buy, which to avoid, proper hand plane technique, chopping mortises, precision, attitude, a whole slew of ideas.

Included in this discussion was the idea of perspective. I have mentioned this before in writing but it bears repeating. For we woodworkers, if you have not noticed, are an obsessive bunch. Tuned in to a frequency few other people can hear. Looking for things few other people care to notice. We get so involved, so wrapped up in a project that it’s not only difficult to stand back, but dang near impossible to see the forest for the wood in a project.

Why is this, you casual observer of the woodworking animal might ask. You who sit in front of your own hobby or book or obsession. Why obsess over building something? A most apt question. Why indeed? Few people know or care about the difference between a half blind or through dovetail. Or why one would look sloppy and another pristine.

We are too close of course. After several weeks or months of work on a piece, it becomes a part of our landscape. Our eyes can see nothing else. So it is very difficult to look past our mistakes. It is very difficult to look past our failures or perceived failures and see how lovely a thing we have wrought. We,instead, focus our attentions on what we missed. What we failed at. What we could have done so much better.

I took a walk before class one morning on the beach at Alki. Elliott Bay was spread out before me. It was a grey day but not raining. I did not have the Jim Guy, my beagle, with me so I walked alone with no stops for leaving messages. As I walked, I became fascinated by how quickly the ferry moved across the Bay. I wondered how it would stop in time to dock.

But distance plays tricks and after walking another 5 minutes, I could barely see the ferry pulling into its berth. I had to squint to see it move ever so slowly against the backdrop of some dock or shoreline. But slowly it did move. Other ferries sat and moved about the Bay. They were of momentary interest to me, like looking out at the birds, the mud flats, the scuba divers, the people on skates with dogs running by their sides with their paws in little leather booties to protect their pads.

There is of course always much to see on a walk. Bad architecture aplenty, cheek by jowl, lined by the bayside. I walked out along the Bay and then turned back. As I walked round the slow bend of the road, there was this monstrosity from the 70’s, the Space Needle, plunked down on the horizon. However did I miss seeing that I thought. Oh well, it was probably round a hill or something. But no, as I walked, I realized that the Space Needle was always visible to me, but I never saw it. I never saw it. And it’s big! What I saw were ferries and mud flats and herons and all sorts of other things but never once did I spy the needle.

An astonishment! Here was exactly the kind of myopia walking along with me, side by side, that I have told my students about. Looking so hard at something that you don’t see what else is around it.

Years and years ago, a local craft school here in Portland held a get together for woodworkers. Many of us emerged from the gloom of our 1970’s shops to blink and peer out at each other. Our bearded countenances looked back and we managed to speak and say: “you too?”

There was also a showing of work and one of the exhibitors was a guy from Montana name of Steve Voorheis. I had spent some time talking with him as he knew my brother up in Montana. I was raving to him about his fabulous piece in the show, a wonderfully shaped and sculpted mahogany armoire. In a conspiratorial tone, Steve told me to come with him and we went down to the gallery. He took me up to the 6′ tall piece and he said, “Look at those dovetails. I cut them all on the wrong side of the line. There are patches for each joint.”

I was astonished. Here he was admitting his mistakes, here he was showing me his skillful fix of these mistakes, and here I was a supposed critically eyed woodworker and I never saw them. I was so busy drinking in the rest of the piece that I didn’t see and now didn’t care that he had screwed up. I was more impressed by his ability to recover and to fix and to move on.

Few people have the skill you woodworkers have, to build things with your hands and with your machines. Few people have the patience, the knowledge, the determination, and the obsession to build the furniture of quality, the furniture of precision, to build furniture filled with mistakes that you do. When you goof up, when you make a mistake, just step away from the project Sir or Madam. Step away and no one will get hurt. It’s never that bad that it cannot be fixed. And few will notice what you see as a mistake.

A Ramble About Reward

May 30, 2008

We sell T-shirts at the Studio. We also sell a lovely sweatshirt. Just in time for summer. Virginia has remarked upon the timing of my fashion decisions. But I think sweatshirts in summer are just as warm as in winter. Perhaps warmer. Perhaps fluffier. If fluffy is what you’re after in a sweatshirt. Some people need rags as well.

These people wear their sweatshirts to do their plumbing. I have been plumbing recently. Interesting word that. Plumbing. From the Latin, plumbum for lead. Plumbing:: to seal with lead. Which is what I’d like to do to the roto-rooter guy who put a hole in my pipes with his rooter. But I’m just daydreaming. Back to commerce.

We sell these T-shirts and sweat shirts out of no love for periwinkle or mocha. Color choices are very difficult as anyone who has seen me around a color chart knows. The Studio building will be a new shade of orange some time soon. And some other colors I can’t quite decide upon. But our shirts are lovely shades of denim and lime.

The new black of course is muddy brown or maybe it’s still black. How do the hipsters convince themselves they’re cool when they do such things to themselves? It’s a wonderment. We, the Studio, live next door to a hair salon central HQ. It is a beehive of activity. It really seems so. All these girls dressed in black, all in black, head to toe, every one of them. I guess those are the individualists. Wearing their black. Checking into the hive. To do whatever work these worker bees do there. Comment on their choice of black no doubt.

But at the Studio, we wear more than black. We wear greens, and blues, and I have a nice lovely yellow sweatshirt perfect for the country club no doubt that appeared a bit less yellow in the catalogue.

And so to appearances. This is one of the things that what wearing shirts is about: appearance. I want to give the appearance of wearing nice shirts and so I hope you’ll come by the Studio and at least look at the shirts. They will make a nice rag some day. But we also have classes. And about these you can have no doubt. We work hard to make these classes informative, fun, and rewarding. What reward means to you is different than for me.

I had a student in class once who was just pounding away on a project. Just pounding mallet on chisel. The results were less than stellar. I walked up to the student and I said, “You know, you might have better results if you didn’t hit the chisel so hard.” The student looked up at me and said, “I’m enjoying this.” There you have it. Can’t get better than enjoyment in class and so I had to leave him be to enjoy himself while destroying his piece of wood.

There are many reasons for coming to the Studio. One trusts that destruction is not primary on your list. Release, surcease, a respite from the calm. These we hope for. And we hope you buy a shirt. Thank you.

How Much Glue is Enough Glue

May 27, 2008

I’m glad you asked that question as I am asked it all the time. How much glue is enough glue?

Now you know of course that glue is one of nature’s great mysteries. It is fixed, immutable, sets in seconds and is dependable. Our language is filled with references to it: that door is stuck like glue, those two are inseparable like glue, in this crowd stick to me like glue. Yet at one and the same time it is changeable, it can fail, and it can fail repeatedly. All this depends completely upon your needs at the time. It seems sometimes that it is perhaps one of nature’s great anticipators: what you want, you ain’t getting here.

Consider what happens when you glue. You are an experienced woodworker. You know to practice your set-up, get out your clamps, maybe even anticipate a potential problem or two in the glue-up. You have your act together.

Then you add the glue. As you also know by now, glue acts as a wonderful lubricant for about 5 seconds. Then it sets and hardens with your parts in the wrong position. How it knows to set up with these parts askew is also one of nature’s mysteries. You have to see it to believe it. But it happens all the time. Your project will go together like a seamless puzzle and you the puzzle master. Then you add just a tiny wee little smidgen of almost a whisper thin minute microscopic barely a wash coat of adhesive and all of a sudden your parts lock in a wrestler’s armlock embrace of cockeyed asymmetry.

What has just happened you ask yourself? Your self has no answer because there is no answer for one of nature’s mysteries. Glue does everything you want it to in all the wrong ways at the wrong time. How could it know? How could it anticipate your desires and be so perverse? Is it the animals hooves and bones and sinews taking aim back at us? Is it that the hubris of modern chemistry has caught up with us, the end users?

I am a long time user of poly-vinyl acetate glue. PVA glue, yellow glue, white glue, carpenters glue, woodworkers glue. Many names for this adhesive. Sets up fast, dries clear, has good strength, allows for some stretching or creep in the joint so it’s good for joinery, not so good for bent laminations. There are other glues as well: urea-formaldehyde which set up more slowly and are more temperature sensitive. Hide glues which need warming but are sticky like crazy and can be taken apart easily if something goes wrong. Water. Water makes an excellent glue. Yes, temperature sensitive it is. But just keep everything at about 20 degrees Fahrenheit and your parts are locked forever together. It’s not a great gap filler but if your parts fit well and have room for a little bit of water between them, man they’re locked together.

Why do I find glue to be so perverse? What about it doesn’t like me? Let me first say that I do not consider myself special. I do not get special scrutiny from glue. It will mess you up the same as me. I just think that gluing comes at the end of a very long and sometimes tortured process. We have been sawing and shaping and joining and sanding and sanding and planing and sanding and scraping and sanding and then just little bit more sanding to get to this point. Boy this is it. Glue-up. The big day. The big moment.

And you start, unavoidably, to move a little faster. To quicken your pace when you actually need to slow down. When you actually need to breathe deep, take a look around, count your blessings, and go through your check list one more time, you have instead grabbed a helmet, jumped on board the sled and without looking start heading down the hill to disaster. You begin rushing after weeks of patience. You grab the glue pot and that 4″ wide paint brush and start slopping the glue on. A nightmare you shriek, but there’s no help for it, you have to finish, why? Because you started and the glue is on and it’s hard to get off and I started and so I have to finish.

Glue does this to people. It’s not nice. Glue is not nice. It makes you hyperventilate, it causes strange words to come out of your mouth. People you love are screamed at, hammers are raised, clamps thrown, wailing and gnashing of teeth occurs.

Or so I have heard. From other woodworkers. Their stories.

For myself, glue is merely a disturbance. A bump in the road. I can get by, I can get by. Just take my time and put on just enough glue so it slops out only where I want it. Thank you. I’ll move on now. But it will do things to you. It will start to grab where you’ve never seen it grab before. Lock parts together when what you need is another 5 seconds, 5 seconds! of turning the clamp screws. It is a mystery to me at least that it is like this. But there it is. It is one of nature’s mysteries.

Now in answer to your question about glue and how much glue is enough, the answer of course is just enough. Too little and you’ll worry all night if you put on enough. Too much and it’s like the miraculous beads of glue oozing from the joints will never stop dripping on your project, your bench, and your clamps. I can only say this to you, fellow gluer. Stick with me, as soon as I get the glue off my hands, I will be able to help you.

The Woodworkers Total Body Work-Out

May 23, 2008

Many people come to the world of woodworking interested in building things. It is a nice idea. Quaint even. Building things in today’s world. That’s funny. We buy things in today’s world. We buy things, we don’t build things. We use them once or twice and then we throw them away. Silly woodworkers.

Anyway, many woodworkers come to this hobby out of this cute desire to build things. They miss the point. The point is that woodworking is the New Total Body Work-Out. It’s like no other. Jake doesn’t have it, Tony doesn’t have it, Mr. Tae-bo doesn’t have it, Jane Fonda wouldn’t have had it. No one has it but us woodworkers. And it’s so simple. It takes only 5 days, 60 hours per week, of constant effort behind the bench doing your woodworking to get the kind of muscle tone and firmness you’ve always wanted. Just look at these simple exercises and tell me that they’re not the best, the easiest way ever to get the six pack that you deserve.

First we’ll start with our Total Body Warm-up: Bringing the Lumber Down into the Basement. How many times do you get to go up and down steps with a stack of heavy boards? Try it, it’s fun. Bang the door frame with the end of a long stick! Put a new hole in the sheet rock! This is fitness like you’ve never tried before. Stretch out those vocal cords! Learn how to bend a sheet of plywood around a door frame! Get your upper body warmed up and ready to work out by lifting sheets of particle board out of your truck. Don’t let one slip or watch out for your toes! This will really get you moving and keep you moving.

Next is the Total Body Ab Intense Work-Out: Removing a Splinter. Forgot your gloves again when you were unloading the lumber? It’s the right way to do things because now you’ll spend 15 minutes of ab tightening as you dig with a needle to get out that nasty long splinter from your finger nail. Nothing focuses the attention, grips the buttocks, or firms the tummy more than pulling out a splinter. This is what we in the fitness trade call an IFW. Burn more calories faster pulling out splinters!

On to the forearms thighs and glutes firming. It’s called Total Body Rubber Arms and Chest: Planing with a Dull Blade. Sure you sharpened back in ‘82 but that blade got dull again somehow. Use it to your advantage and plunk down that piece of hard rock maple on your bench top. It’s time to turn your glutes into rock hard buns. Set the iron just a hair too low and you’re ready to start sweating to the oldies! Just think of the aerobic work-out you’ll get pushing and pushing, harder and harder, to get that dull iron through the work. It’s like nothing else! Continue planing and you’ll start to see results in no time. The blisters you get on your hands are just part of the fun. Your elbows and shoulder joints will ache with the high intensity of this work-out! Keep your wood at a really high level on the bench for that upper body surge or put it low on sawhorses to make your legs feel like rubber too.

Are we having the fun we thought we would? Then let’s keep going because I think you’re gonna like what’s coming next. It’s called the Total Body Isometrics: The Joinery Way. Sure you could buy rubber bands or fancy springy things to get your isometrics in. But try taking a tight mortise and tenon joint apart. Now that’s Isometrics! They’re stuck together almost like glue because you hammered them in, but work hard, make a good face, and squeeze squeeze squeeze trying to get the joint apart. It’s fun. [Be sure to stay out of the way when the joint does come loose. The Woodworkers Total Body Work-Out is not responsible for injuries due to smacking yourself in the face with a board.]

It’s the fourth day of our Total Body Work-Out and you’re getting ready for the hyper-ventilating work-out we call the Total Body: Total Glue-Up! It’s anaerobic like you’ve never gasped before. Grab your parts and your glue bottle and let’s get started! Spread out your glue on your work but remember? You forgot your clamps across the room and have to race for them! The glue is drying now and you forgot to cut your wedges and have to run to the saw to get those done. Oh, watch those fingers! The glue is almost set and you forgot your hammer upstairs and have to run halfway across the room for that before giving up and grabbing a small sledge hammer. Do you see how you get both an upper body blast and an aerobic blast!? Put that glue on and watch time race as you lose to the clock again and your parts stick in a new and crooked way. Bang on it with that dead blow mallet, 10! 20! 30! times and not ever see the parts move. Now we’re cooking with gas! You’ll be drenched in sweat in no time.

Our last Total Body Exercise is the Total Body Complete Work-Out: Rubbing out the Finish. This exercise is both a heat up and a cool down. You have that finish on and it’s a mess! What to do? Rub it out with four or five hundred sheets of sandpaper, that’s what! It’s fun and it takes hours! Keep rubbing until you scratch right through the finish and start all over again! Keep rubbing until you can’t feel your fingertips and your arms ache like crazy! Who knew this could be such fun? All that standing, all that pushing. This is exercise at its most fun and look at the work you create.

Folks, I know you’ll agree with me that the Total Body Work-Out is the best way you’ll ever find to get into shape. Ask any of our happy clients and you’ll learn just how fun it is to get fit while doing your woodworking. Send for our free brochure today and check out our website. Let’s get fit the Woodworking Way! Hooray.

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.