It’s a long drive to Kentucky from most places. So we decided to make some short video tours of our storefront so you can see how we have our workshop set up, take a look at our library and even meet Bean the Three-legged Shop Cat™.
Our first tour is of the bench room, which is where I spend most of my good days. This room is also where most of the interesting events happened during this building’s history as a bar. The drag shows of the 1990s. The female bartender who was shot after she roused a patron asleep at the bar. And the place where the owners used to sell stolen TVs.
These days things are a little more boring in the front room, and the neighbors couldn’t be happier.
Stay tuned for tours of the library, the Klaus Skrudland Memorial Bathroom, our New Kitchen, the Biergarten and the Electric Horse Garage (aka the machine room).
Below my signature are some photos of what the bench room looked like when we bought the place. For your own protection, please wash your hands after viewing these photos.
Whenever I write, whether it’s a blog post, article, book or simple email to a friend, I’m thinking about what readers may make of my words – not only my words in a literal sense (especially when I use a term of art, a foreign name or a four-letter expression that starts with the letter F), but the points I aim to convey. As someone who was fortunate to have teachers who were strict about standards and liberal with criticism, I internalized the most challenging critiques that came my way, a practice that has served me well. Over the years I’ve augmented those critiques with thought-provoking comments from others, among them the kind of uncharitable characters who read everything with an arched brow and think they know the author’s mind better than she knows herself. (Really…just spare me.)
As the publication of “Shop Tails” nears,* I thought it would be helpful to answer a few questions from my inner dragonAva Hunting-Badcocke as a heads-up to those who may be interested in buying the book.
Dido, a kitten I adopted from a salvage yard.
I just saw that you identified your medical diagnosis as “adenoma of the pancreas” in one of your early chapters. Don’t you even know that the name of your disease is adenocarcinoma, not to be confused with the rarer form of pancreatic cancer, the neuroendocrine variety that killed Steve Jobs? How can you expect anyone to grant you a shred of credibility after reading that appalling mistake?
I make my share of mistakes. I cannot tell you how many times I read the manuscript, not to mention how many articles in medical journals I have read about pancreatic adenocarcinoma. And still I missed this poop pile while cleaning the yard. So now I’m covered in it. We will forewarn readers with a note on the ordering page.
Joey and Tony in the early daysof Tony’s regime.
Most publishers look for consistency in a manuscript – consistency in voice and chapter length, as well as spelling and punctuation. Your manuscript reads more like a lorry packed with the assorted contents of a shuttered Oxfam shop that’s spilt its load all across the motorway, leaving a trail of tacky Beatles portraits on velour, melamine ashtrays with burnt spots, hand-knitted Shetland jumpers, crotchless knickers and worn plimsolls with missing laces. The first few animal stories read as though they were written by a child. The rest are what we expect from you. Some of the chapters are 30 pages long, while others are only four – or in one case, two! What is that, even? How can a chapter be two pages long? I can’t believe that your publisher agreed to invest in this farce. — Miss Ava Hunting-Badcocke, 1973
Consistency may be overrated. I wrote the first few chapters from the perspective I recall as a child, when I lived with the animals in question: Sidney and Phoebe (both dogs), Binky (a mouse), then David (a guinea pig). One pre-publication reader described these chapters as “sweet.” The sweetness vanishes with “Oscar”; he was my first dog as an adult, so the narrative voice reverts to that of the adult who wrote the first two introductory chapters.
My goal is to convey important information and entertaining stories, and sometimes introduce a reader to new perspectives on familiar subjects. I’m writing about real life, and at least in my experience, real life is more like the contents of that overturned lorry than the polished near-perfection of your sitting room-turned-security–checkpoint-homework-checking station, with your line of girls and Gaston, your farting pug.**
My husband, Mark, with Henny.
I thought this was a book about animals and woodworking, but the first two chapters read like someone’s private cancer journal.
By the time Lost Art Press sent me a contract to publish this book, I’d been writing the stories about individual animals for about 15 years. My relationships with non-human animals have brought me comfort and joy (and the occasional heartbreak). They have also taught me important lessons about life and my relationships with my fellow human animals. What precipitated the contract was my diagnosis in November 2020, so as I began to work on the book as a project for publication, my mind went naturally to the circumstances that had prompted the opportunity.
When Christopher Schwarz was designing the book, I told him it would be fine with me if he wanted to excise the first two chapters, or parts thereof. I worried that there might be too much introspection and blow-by-blow accounting of what was going on in my head. He replied that he wanted to leave them in because they show how my mind works and add richness to the stories that follow. You can just skip those chapters and go straight to the animal tales if you’re so inclined. There will not be a test.
Edie’s puppy Poika looking like a sheared lamb.
I see you’re trying to con us into believing that blurb from “Edith Sarra of Harvard and Indiana University” is legit. We know the two of you are friends, and we’re here to out you.
No one is trying to pull the wool over your eyes. Edie is one of my dearest friends. We met in 2006, by which time I’d been hearing for years from my friend Ben Sturbaum that I just had to meet this woman who lives in his favorite house in the world because we would love each other. And love her I do. However, I didn’t ask her for what publishers call a “comment”; that blurb is an excerpt from a personal note she sent to me after she had read the manuscript of “Shop Tails” a few times. She’d been interested in the project for as long as she had known of it, because she, too, is a serious lover of animals (especially dogs, but don’t tell anyone). My friend Edie has delivered some world-class withering comments, sometimes by saying nothing, so I trust her not to be giving me an easier time than she would give most other people. She implicitly affirmed this by granting us permission to quote her remarks as a blurb for the book.
William reading the comics.
So, Lost Art Press gave you a contract because you had cancer?
Pardon me while I wipe the tears of laughter out of my eyes. I know… I’m not supposed to be laughing, right? Because I have an incurable life-threatening illness. But why go on living at all if I can’t keep laughing?
Seriously, though, I get your point. When I sent my pitch to Chris and told him that writing this book could provide the motivation I needed in order to face chemotherapy, I added that I was simply stating the truth, not inviting a pity party or being emotionally manipulative. Or something like that. I trusted that he would get where I was coming from, because he is a straight shooter. I was relieved that his response included something along the lines of Lost Art Press does not engage in pity publishing. So, yeah, no.
Figure 9.1: Krenov (right) and Malmsten (left) examine a scale model in Malmsten’s design office in Stockholm.
Books are born in many different places. This one was born in a bar.
Brendan Gaffney and I were were having a drink at the Old Kentucky Bourbon Bar up the road, and we got on the subject of James Krenov. Brendan had attended The College of the Redwoods (now The Krenov School), but he wasn’t much like any of the other graduates I had met. Brendan admired Krenov, but he didn’t attend the school to walk in the master’s footsteps.
Brendan also attended the school after Krenov’s death, so there was no personal connection between Brendan and Krenov, who was one of the 20th century’s most influential writers, speakers and woodworkers. Full stop.
“Why,” I asked, “has there never been a biography of Krenov? There’s actually little written about his life other than a few stories in his books.”
That conversation led to Brendan’s book “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints.” It is the first and likely definitive biography of Krenov, and the story like an pulp adventure novel than an academic examination. Krenov’s life story spans three continents, from the wilds of Russia and China to Seattle, Alaska, Sweden and – finally – to the Mendocino Coast of Northern California, where his school now stands.
Through extensive interviews, journals, family documents and a whole host of photographs, Brendan traces Krenov’s entire life. And, more importantly, gives us a balanced and fully formed view of a man that some worship and others malign or dismiss.
Even if you have only a passing familiarity with Krenov, I think you will find “Fingerprints” relentlessly engaging. Krenov’s journey from Russia to one of the most important woodworkers is simply incredible.
— Christopher Schwarz
Learning Furniture Making at Carl Malmsten’s School
Despite his enthusiasm and passion to attend, Krenov’s admission into the Verkstadsskola [furniture school founded by Carl Malmsten] was not immediate. Krenov had been suffering in the factories of Stockholm and was primed for the rigor of Malmsten’s furniture school, but there was a requirement for prior woodworking experience, which his experiences in boatbuilding and wilderness handcraft did not fulfill in the eyes of the old master. In addition to that lack of prerequisite experience, Krenov was already in his late 30s, much older than the other students of the school. From a partial registry of students from Krenov’s years of attendance, he was the oldest student in his cohort by 11 years.
But in his own words in his interview with Oscar Fitzgerald, “I went up to the school and just wouldn’t go away. So they let me in just to get rid of me really, and I studied there.” After meeting with Malmsten in person at his storefront in Stockholm to discuss his entry and to lobby for his admission, he was accepted into the program.
Figure 9.5: Krenov at work on one of Carl Malmsten’s desk designs from the 1940s, the “Nefertiti” desk. The desk’s elaborate marquetry required technical skill and a time-intensive finishing process – and lots of sanding and scraping, as Krenov is shown doing above. Photos courtesy of the Krenov family.
Krenov’s two years at the school revolved around learning both machine and hand production of woodworking and rigorous design practices. The students were under the supervision of Georg Bolin, the lead teacher at the school who had encouraged Krenov, after their first meeting, to hang around. Bolin was himself a musical instrument designer and luthier, a career he came to after an initial training in Malmsten’s first classes. His position as head teacher is indicative of the eccentricity of the school’s environment. Bolin personally advocated for Krenov’s admission to the school, and in later years, the two would remain friends and respectful colleagues.
The school’s curriculum was rigorous, and entailed a six-day workweek aimed at a rounded and intense education of its students. For four days, the students built furniture from Malmsten’s drawings and designs at the workshop in Södermalm. Kjell Orrling, one of Krenov’s classmates from the school, remembers that the students’ furniture was either sold in Malmsten’s furniture store in Stockholm or given to his influential friends for their own homes; the students took no share of the payments in either case. In his recollections, Krenov decided early in his schooling that he wanted to work in a more holistic way, designing and executing his own work, rather than working from the designs of others or offloading his design work to other craftspeople.
“We had exercises where we were asked to design a coffee table or whatever, but you would never build it,” he related to Oscar Fitzgerald in his 2004 interview. “You just designed it and then it was discussed and if he didn’t like it, he’d throw it on the floor and stamp on it.”
Figure 9.8: Three photos taken by Kjell Orrling, one of Krenov’s classmates during his time at Malmsten’s school in Stockholm. On the left is Raimundo Estrems, Krenov’s close friend in the program whom he later recalled in “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook.” In the middle is Georg Bolin, the principal teacher at the school and a famous luthier, and on the right is Krenov, doweling a desktop to its frame. Photos courtesy of Kjell Orrling.
Krenov, decades later, critiqued the harsh top-down hierarchy of the school’s education, even teasing his professor’s stutter and mannerisms. But Malmsten’s philosophies, grounded in the Arts & Crafts movement and the elevation of folk designs, certainly shaped Krenov’s work in form, methodology and philosophy, and a connection to the Arts & Crafts style constituted a major influence through the rest of Krenov’s life.
One day a week, the students spent their day at one of Malmsten’s drafting and design workshops, studying the drawings and blueprints in production and rendering their own. And, on the sixth day of the week, the students reported to one of the many museums in Stockholm, where they were tasked with making scale drawings and plans for the pieces in the collection. At every stage, in the workshop, the design offices and the museums, Malmsten or Bolin were there, giving feedback to the students, holding their work to an almost unattainable standard. Negative critiques were delivered severely by Malmsten, and the complexity or quality of the projects and designs a given student made in the workshop were dependent on their meeting these standards.
Manne Idestrom, another one of Krenov’s cohorts from the school, remembers that the students were also often employed in manual tasks at Malmsten’s farm, just northeast of Stockholm. While the students trimmed hedges or dug potatoes, Malmsten used these days as an opportunity to lecture about his ideas of design and function, as informed by the natural world or simple work. This interest in the interplay between farm life, craft and old Swedish traditions would soon manifest in another school, Capellgården, which was established just a year after Krenov’s graduation. Orrling, too, remembers working for Malmsten outside of the school. He was younger than most entrants, just 17 years old in 1957, and he had to work as an assistant in the workshop and as an attendant in Malmsten’s downtown store before he was allowed entry to the Verkstadsskola.
Figure 9.10: One of the pieces Krenov made while in school, a coopered-door wall cabinet in Swedish fir. A number of these cabinets would constitute a large portion of Krenov’s first several years of work. Photo by Bengt Carlén.
Both Idestrom and Orrling remember Krenov as a novel, at times odd, member of the class. For the first six months, according to Orrling, Krenov barely interacted with his fellow students, in part because his Swedish language skills were still maturing, and due to the large age gap between himself and his classmates. He was also an oddity in Stockholm at large – his preference in personal style (corduroy clothes, neckerchief and beret) as well as his mannerisms made him stick out. In one anecdote, remembered by his daughter, Krenov’s appearance captured a surprised glance from the Princess Lilian of Sweden, whom he and Britta happened by on the street in Stockholm. Britta remembered him exclaiming to the princess and her company, “It’s not polite to stare, ladies!”
Krenov also had a penchant for reciting poetry and passages from books during the class lunches, a practice he enjoyed and would continue in his own lectures and classrooms decades later; but it put off some of his fellow students. In this way, he was perhaps quite similar to Malmsten.
“He would take 15 minutes to explain a blade of grass,” said Orrling.
But despite his oddity, after a few months Krenov’s devotion and technical prowess won the respect of his classmates and teachers, and both Orrling and Idestrom remember his abilities as noteworthy, surpassing the talents of some of his fellow students. Many of the students came to the school with pre-existing skills, but Krenov’s natural talent for the work was considerable, as were the long hours he spent after school in the workshop. Students were allowed to use the space in the evenings for their own work, and while some used this time to make simple wares for their own homes or to pursue other hobbies, Krenov worked hard on his own designs for cabinets or on his assigned projects. These after-hours pieces included his first wall cabinets, a candlestick (which caught the eye of Malmsten and led to his choosing Krenov for a piece that involved difficult carved panels) and a number of other small works that served to hone his skills and nurture his design practice outside of the prescribed designs of the school.
Figure 9.11: A photo of Krenov around the time of his graduation from Malmsten’s Verkstadsskola in 1959. The small sailboat on Krenov’s lapel pin shows that even a dozen years away from Seattle and his work with the boats had not suppressed his love of sailing. Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.
Years later, Krenov fondly wrote about one of his cohorts, Raimundo Estrems (whom Krenov called Ramón), a Spaniard whose background was in pre-industrial furniture construction and luthiery. Krenov was a witness at Ramón’s wedding, which took place during a lunch break one day during school; the students were hardly able to take a day off from their schooling, and even an event like a wedding had to be shoehorned into the school’s daily proceedings. It was Ramón who showed Krenov his wooden bodied planes and how he tuned and used them. This introduction, alongside an old Norwegian book he remembered reading in the office at the Malmsten school, were formative in Krenov’s adoption and championing of the wooden handplane as his preferred woodworking instrument. While in school, Krenov made his own handplane, looking to modify the ergonomics of the tool to a form he preferred. In subsequent years, Krenov would make hundreds of planes, and later referred to the tool as “the cabinetmaker’s violin,” indicative of his consideration that the tool was at the forefront of his approach and enjoyment of woodwork.
It is hard to overstate the school’s importance to Krenov’s career; many years later, his teaching and lecturing approach, in addition to his cabinetmaking practice, would be deeply shaped by Malmsten’s own approach. His charge against Malmsten, that he was an authoritarian or difficult teacher, would come back as a critique often levied against Krenov’s own approach to teaching, and his future blend of uncompromising and lofty ideals with technical education also came to mirror Malmsten’s.
“He was very strict – in one sense he was despotic,” Krenov remembered in 2004. “In another sense he was a purist in the sense that there was no compromise as to fine workmanship, as to a good eye, good hands – that sort of thing.”
After we shipped out our first big batch of Crucible Type 2 Dividers, we realized that we made the tips a little too long, and they bent more easily than we liked. It’s an easy thing to fix with a piece of sandpaper. And the “fix” is also the way to sharpen the dividers after they become dull with use.
Note: The dividers that are shipping now have already been sharpened using these methods, or they have tips we have modified on the mill.
Sharpening these dividers (or any dividers) is part of routine maintenance and is much easier to do than sharpening an edge tool.
Materials Needed
Here in our shop, we use #220-grit sandpaper that we have stuck down to a piece of inexpensive 12” x 12” floor tile from the home center. We stick it down using a thin squirt of spray adhesive (also available at your home center).
You will find this setup ideal for truing the soles of your block and smoothing planes.
You also could use a medium-grit diamond plate (if that’s how you roll), oilstones or India stones (crystalon). I don’t like to use waterstones for this because they are so soft, and it’s easy to plow a ditch in your stone with dividers.
How To Do It
The video above shows how to do it. If you read our blog via email, click here, and you’ll be whisked to a page where you can watch the video. The desired result is two tapered tips that curve to fine points. The curve strengthens the tips and helps prevent them from bending.
If you have bent your tips, you can either bend them back with some needlenose pliers or (if they bend only slightly) remove the bend on the sandpaper.
We were going to make a $99 micrometer-powered jig that attaches to your angle grinder to do this operation, but this seemed the better solution.
Editor’s note: This Chair Chat™ has been edited extensively and was stripped down of all foul language. Accordingly, you don’t see a disclaimer here that salty language will follow – because it won’t. Enter with confidence.
Rudy: look at this chair I found on the internet:
Chris: That is a nice-looking chair.
Rudy: I agree, it has a nice shape.
Klaus: Look at those legs, they have probably been shaved on a shaving horse?
Rudy: Likely. I like to use a shaving horse, too.
Chris: I prefer a jack plane, but a shaving horse can work well, too.
Klaus: The seat has a nice shape.
Rudy: Yes, it does.
Chris: OK, I’m pretty much out of things to say. Chat again soon?
