The following is excerpted from “Mechanic’s Companion,” by Peter Nicholson, one of the foundational English-language texts in woodworking and the building trades. First published in 1812, “Mechanic’s Companion” is an invaluable and thorough treatment of techniques, with 40 plates that provide an excellent and detailed look at the tools of the time, along with a straightforward chapter on the geometry instruction necessary to the building trades.
If you work with hand tools, you will find useful primary-source information on how to use the tools at the bench. That’s because Nicholson – unlike other technical writers of the time – was a trained cabinetmaker, who later became an architect, prolific author and teacher. So he writes (and writes well) with the authority of experience and clarity on all things carpentry and joinery. For the other trades covered – bricklaying, masonry, slating, plastering, painting, smithing and turning – he relies on masters for solid information and relays it in easy-to-understand prose.
A B the treadle or foot-board.
a the manner of fixing the treadle to the floor.
C the crank hook, hooked into a staple, and the end of the piece A.
D the crank for turning the fly with the upper part of the crank hook formed into a collar for embracing the crank.
E the fly. heel with several angular grooves cut in its circumference, in order to hold the band and keep it from sliding.
F the pillar for supporting the end of the mandrel.
G the puppet supporting the end of the mandrel, which holds the chuck.
H the right hand puppet, containing the fore centre, which is tightened by means of a screw.
I, K the legs, the fly being supported by that of I, the other end is supported by an upright between the legs.
L the mandrel, showing the end of the spindle projecting over the puppet G, in order to receive the chuck.
M the rest, tightened below by means of a screw, and made so as to be fixed in any position to the chuck.
N a foot-board.
O several of the most useful tools employed in turning.
“Linda Lou” rocker. This rocker is the first design in which Leslie used caning, a nod to the bentwood rockers of the early 1900s.
People come to furniture making via many different paths, but Leslie Webb is the first furniture maker I know who got into the field through a gig as a nanny.
“I had gone off to college [at Bowdoin in Brunswick, Maine] and was completely lost in terms of direction,” she began, by way of explanation. “I found everything at college interesting. But when I thought about ‘do you want to do this for the rest of your life,’ it wasn’t THAT interesting.” She worried she might not have any direction at all.
So Leslie decided to take a break. Everyone she knew thought she was throwing her life away, and she remembers how scary it was to make her way forward against that disapproval.
It was around 2000, and she had to get a job to support herself. “I was looking through the newspaper at help wanted ads. I saw this ad; it said ‘childcare in exchange for an apartment.’” It was a start; at least she’d have a roof over her head, even if the job didn’t come with income. She wrote a letter of introduction, explaining that she’d babysat in high school, even if she understood that didn’t amount to much experience. It turned out that Julie, the mother, had family members from Texas, Leslie’s home state; she was born in Georgetown in 1978. Leslie thinks this seemingly tenuous connection may have been helpful. They hit it off at the interview, especially after realizing that Julie’s grandmother was at a nursing home in a small town called McGregor; Leslie’s mother was working with elderly patients as a physical therapist, and as it happened, she knew Julie’s grandmother. “It was such a weird thing!”
Family photo. John, Leslie’s father, and Sherron, her mother, with Nathan, Leslie, Evan and Alison, circa 1982.
After a series of interviews Leslie got the job. She got along well with the family, who treated her well. She still keeps in touch with the boy she was caring for, who is now a young adult.
“My adolescence was consumed with my love of horses and riding,” Leslie writes. “I would have moved into a stall if my mother had let me. This picture is of me and a horse named Sunshine, circa 1991.”
“My mother, Sherron, and me circa fall of 2001. She is my biggest supporter and fan.”
One day Leslie spotted a Moser catalog on the kitchen counter with a pile of mail. “At breakfast I was randomly flipping through and thought, ‘Oh, it would be so cool to build furniture, because it’s beautiful, but it’s useful too.’” Robert, the father of her charge, told her he knew basic carpentry and would be happy to teach her.
Robert was a fine arts painter who did massive paintings – 8’ long x 4’ high – for which he made his own frames and shipping crates. So she started helping him build crates in his Brunswick studio.
“I was cutting a 2×4 for a crate,” Leslie recalls. “I remember using a chop saw and seeing the blade sinking into the wood and I knew ‘this is it.’”
She worked as the family’s nanny for about three years. In her spare time, she tried to build some pieces of furniture but got stuck because she knew the quality she wanted to produce but didn’t know how to get there. There were no woodworkers in her family to ask for advice. YouTube videos were not yet a thing; the only resource she knew about was Fine Woodworking, which she read but found largely over her head.
Leslie concluded she was going to have to train through a program. She’d been in Maine long enough to know about the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, so she checked out its website and found the nine-month program was soon launching. The deadline was just around the corner, so she submitted an application and was delighted to learn she’d been accepted. Her mom was worried about Leslie’s ability to support herself as a furniture maker. Her dad, a doctor, was “not supportive at all.” As the youngest of her parents’ four children, she thinks she was his last hope for one of them to go to medical school.
Leslie with a good friend and CFC classmate at their first “real” furniture show, Philadelphia Furniture and Furnishings Show, spring 2005. Their class had a booth as part of the nine-month program
“I so enjoyed the entire process,” she says of her training at CFC. “I really enjoyed being able to design my own pieces. The first two projects are teacher-designed, to build hand and machine skills, respectively. The rest you design yourself, up to a point. I enjoyed the process of having an idea and figuring out whether it would work or not. And I still do enjoy that process, so much.”
“Beck Box Blanket Chest.” Maple and cherry with cedar bottom, 2004. Leslie made this for her case piece project during the nine-month program at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship. “It is the very first piece of furniture I designed and made,” she writes.
Leslie shaping a solid wood side panel for a blanket chest, a case piece project, using hand tools at CFC. Fall 2004.
For joinery, she focuses on traditional mortises and tenons, dovetails and miters with reinforcement. “Nothing too out of the box. I gravitate aesthetically toward contemporary stuff – pretty stripped-back designs that don’t have a ton of adornment. Sometimes integral tenons, sometimes floating.” She usually makes her own floating tenons. “I don’t always let the tool dictate. Sometimes I modify what the tool can do so it’s not dictating.”
Today Leslie works in a small shop, a converted two-car garage in Georgetown, Texas, where she returned to live around 2011. Some of her work is commissioned, some done in small batches and some on spec. Outside of Instagram, I first became aware of Leslie’s work when I saw a few pieces on exhibit at the Grovewood Gallery in Asheville, N.C. They were flawless – beautifully made and elegantly designed. She is also one of the women and woman-identifying makers whose work was juried into the Making a Seat at the Table exhibition in Philadelphia from October 2019 through January 2020. She has done lots of shows over the years, among them the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show, Architectural Digest Home Design Show, International Contemporary Furniture Fair/ICFF, and Wanted Design.
Stool with woven seat.
Heartwood Tools
Furniture making is an economically precarious field, especially for those whose livelihood depends on their own income alone, without help from a partner. By the time she moved home to Texas, Leslie had already weathered the Great Recession. “I went through the crash in 2008 with my furniture business and it was awful,” she says. So she’d been thinking vaguely about how she might add another income-producing dimension to her work. “One day the idea popped into my head: I wonder whether I could sell HNT Gordon tools over here.” There was no retail outlet in the States; the company is based in Australia. “I realized it would be a whole other thing,” but she reminded herself that furniture making has its own stresses. The idea stayed in the back of her head; it wouldn’t go away.
Over the years she’d bought some HNT Gordon tools for her own use. After pondering for two or three years, she decided to start with those. As part of her research she gauged interest among her woodworking friends. “People were hesitant [to buy HNT Gordon tools] because [the company] was overseas.” Some told her that the ordering process was unclear to them; others worried that there might be hidden fees for international orders and so on. Finally, she contacted the company to inquire. Terry, the head of the business, was on board. So she decided to try.
In late 2019 Leslie started Heartwood Tools, which specializes in high-quality woodworking tools. “It’s going really well!” she says. In fact, “it has temporarily taken over. If I had known that the pandemic was coming when I launched it, I probably would not have done it. But it has exploded – I think in large part people are spending more time at home and doing more furniture making.”
Do You Deserve a Good Caning?
Caning – for stools, chair seats and small tables – is another corner of the furniture-making world in which Leslie is making her mark. Over the years she has used pre-made sheets for caned work, but then she learned how to do it herself. “I’ve always liked caning,” she says. “We had dining chairs with caned seats when I was little. I remember being fascinated that they could hold people, child or adult. It didn’t seem like that should be possible.” She likes being able to introduce color into her work but hates to dye or stain wood. Caning (seat weaving?) offered a way to combine natural wood with eye-popping colors. “I don’t dye the caning. I have experimented with that, but was not happy with the results. That led me to look elsewhere for color, which led to cotton rope and paracord as weaving materials.”
She taught herself how to weave. “Once you know how to do Danish cord, it’s not that intimidating.” She’d taught herself to use Danish cord using “The Caner’s Handbook”. A couple of people on Instagram also let her “pick their brains.”
Stool with woven seat.
Why Furniture Making?
“I have spent an inordinate amount of time contemplating ‘why furniture making?’, says Leslie, “mostly because it still seems like such an ‘out of left field’ passion when I look at my life. I have never encountered another subject which so thoroughly engages all parts of my brain, creative and analytical. Dreaming up new designs while also agonizing over 32nds [of an inch] and adding fractions in my head? Sign me up. Time in the shop also forces me to be completely present in the moment. Drifting off in thought for even a brief moment can result in ruining a piece or worse, a shop accident. Grabbing a hand tool or turning on a machine is the fastest way to leave my worries behind. I think the thing that keeps me coming back for more, though, is the continual chase for improvement – and not compared to others, but to what I have accomplished previously,” she says. “Even after 20 years, I don’t feel like I have mastered anything, and I kind of like that. There is always a new specialized niche skill to learn or a mistake to be fixed. It is a humbling pursuit; there is nothing like messing up a process I’ve done hundreds of time to keep my feet planted firmly on the ground. I could come up with a multi-page list of why I love woodworking, but the truth is I am not sure how much logic controls the things we love; we simply do.”
Ben Thresher and his line-shaft mill are among the last of their kind. Once driven by water, Thresher’s machinery is now run by a tractor and power take-off
The following is excerpted from “The Workshop Book,” by Scott Landis. First published in 1991, it remains the most complete book about every woodworker’s favorite place: the workshop.
“The Workshop Book” is a richly illustrated guided tour of some of the world’s most inspiring workshops — from garage to basement shops, from mobile to purpose-built shops.
Note: Ben Thresher died in 1995; his mill has since been restored and is now a museum. Find out more at bensmill.com.
Falling water has powered mills and machinery for several thousand years. Until the Civil War, when it was eclipsed by steam, water was the principal source of stationary power in America, spawning tens of thousands of small mills all over the Northeast. Several Shaker communities piped water great distances underground to run their machines.
For a brief while at the end of the last century, water and steam lived side by side. But the eventual decline of water as a primary source of local power parallels a similar transition between craft and manufacturing. (The recent revival of both craft and small hydro projects may be more than coincidental.) In today’s “post-industrial” society, water power is a comforting reminder of an age in which craft was more than a luxury.
Collapsed mills and breached dams flank the rivers of New England, but on a winding road in northern Vermont, one old woodshop clings stubbornly to its bank. I first saw “Ben’s Mill” in a film of the same name, which was produced in the early 1980s. When I visited the mill (shown above) in East Barnet, Vermont, last spring, I drove right past it, never thinking it might house a working shop. With its broken windows and overgrown yard, the haggard structure looked even more disreputable than it did in the film. Clinging to the clapboard beneath the eaves were traces of rust-colored paint that the mill’s owner, Ben Thresher, figure are original. “Modern latex wouldn’t last that long,” he says, and he’s sure he never painted it.
These meticulous drawings of Ben’s Mill (shown above and on the following pages) are the product of a joint undertaking, begun in 1976 with an engineering survey conducted by Earl MacHarg and Arthur Nadeau under the auspices of the Vermont Folk life Research Project of the Woodstock Foundation. Work was completed in 1979 by a team of architects, a photographer and a historian, employed by the Historic American Engineering Record. According to Ben Thresher, no effort was spared to make the drawings as accurate as possible. When he pointed out that a 1-15/16-in. dia. shaft had been drawn at 2 in., they immediately corrected the error and apologized profusely, saying, ‘You see any other mistakes, you let us know.’
The mill has become a Vermont institution and Thresher is a local legend, doling out sturdy country woodwork and droll humor in equal measure. For half a century, he has served the seasonal needs of his farming neighbors – building cordwood sleighs for the winter, wooden cattle tubs in the spring and tool handles all year. The fall before my visit, Thresher pressed 6,000 gallons of cider. It’s a no-frills operation, and Thresher would certainly be more at home in the Dominy shop than in many modern furniture studios I visited.
In the film, Thresher notes, “I was just a johnny-come-lately. The real history of it came way before me.” Ben’s Mill is situated about 2-1/2 miles up Stevens Brook from the Connecticut River, New England’s major inland artery. At one time, there were at least four mills in Barnet – including a gristmill, a sash and blind factory and a sawmill on Thresher’s side of the village – and three more in West Barnet (two more gristmill and a woodshop like Thresher’s).
Ben’s Mill has been running since 1848 on the site of an earlier sawmill, and it is the only survivor. The mill hasn’t run off water since 1982, when a flood swept away one end of the dam and part of the penstock. Thresher installed a concrete foundation the following year to keep the mill from sliding into its own stream. He calls it his “monument,” and says, “it wouldn’t be there now if it hadn’t been for me. I’m just that stubborn.” Although electricity was installed on Thresher’s road in 1903, he uses it to power only three bare bulbs, an electric drill and a small motor. In the early days, he recalls, the lights in the shop dimmed when the farmers down the road began their evening milking.
The machinery is now powered by a small tractor, which is belted to the mill’s main lineshaft. Apart from having to oil the wooden bearings (which used to be lubricated with water) and not having to drain and clean the penstock, operation and maintenance of the mill is about the same as it was when it was water driven. “Of course it’s different work,” Thresher says. “It comes out about the same … except you have to buy gasoline.”
In the beginning, Thresher put in 16-hour days at the mill, adding, “Maybe I’d be able to do more now if I hadn’t done so much then.” He relates one particularly chilling episode about an ice floe that jammed the gates open. Thresher waded into the waist-deep water and chopped the ice out with an ax until he could pound the gates shut with a sledge. The next morning, it was -27° F but the dam was full and the mill was running. “I wouldn’t do that now,” he says.
Nowadays, Thresher doesn’t work much in the mill in the winter – it’s dark and the walls are uninsulated. But sometime around April (or on an occasional warm winter clay), he shuffles down the hill from his house across the road, rolls back the front door and fires up the tractor. For the last ten years, Thresher has worked alone. “I’m used to it,” he says. “No arguments that way.” On a more serious note, he adds, “I do so many different things that you pretty well lose your time to do [an employee’s] work.” Shrugging at the triphammer in the corner of the blacksmith shop, “That’s the best man I ever had,” he says. “It won’t talk back.”
Over the years, the river has proved company enough. The water may be high or low, frozen or flooding, but it’s never the same. When the mill was running, water flowed through a gate at one end of the wooden dam and into the penstock. Ben built the penstock in 1949 out of hemlock and tamarack, tough softwood that lasts about as long as oak. In its construction, the penstock resembles a horizontal wooden silo, with metal spline in the butt-jointed ends of the boards to keep it from leaking. As the wood swells, the joints seal “just the same a a tub,” Ben explains, “and as well.”
At the end of the penstock is a horizontal turbine, built in 1911, the year before Thresher was born. The flow of water is controlled by a cast-iron “cheesecake” gate inside the turbine or by boards shoved in front of the penstock. Next to the penstock in the basement is an old boiler, which Thresher uses to fire a steambox to bend wagon wheels and sled runners or to evaporate cider jelly.
The tailwater beneath the turbine is 16 ft. below the top of the mill pond, a drop (or “head”) that generated 29-1/2 hp, or enough to run all the shop machinery at once. (According to Thresher, the 2-ft. long draft tube beneath the turbine added almost as much power as the drop from the pond.) “You could nun a 1-/2-in. dia. bit in the drill press and slow it right down,” Thresher explains, “and you’ve still got the torque.”
Thresher pulls the wheel on his bandsaw to jump start it in motion and explains that the machinery “is pretty much like it was 100 years ago.” In the last 40 years, he has purchased only two machines – a drill press and a lathe – and the drill press was older than the one it replaced. A horizontal boring machine, more than 100 years old, was moved into the shop from another mill. The elegant cast wheel on the Carey jointer is stenciled “Lowell Ma. 1870.” He has two table saws: a sliding saw for crosscutting and a hinged saw for ripping. (The depth of cut is controlled by lifting one end of the hinged top.) “Boy, if I had the lumber that went across that table it’d be quite a pile,” Thresher says.
Most of the machinery is situated in the middle of the first-floor workspace, and Ben works across the width of the shop. That way, the material is less likely to interfere with other machines, and he can open a window or the large sliding door to accommodate long stock. There’s hardly a tool guard in the building. “OSHA would shut me right down,” Thresher says, “only I don’t hire anybody.” Over the years, the machines have caught him only once, when he snagged his sleeve in the table saw and lost the first digit of one thumb.
What OSHA never got around to doing, time is taking care of. Between spring floods and winter frosts, upkeep on the dam and penstock is enough to make anyone think twice about generating their own power. (Thresher has rebuilt the dam four times.) Still, water is more efficient than just about any other source of power – including electricity, gasoline or wind. It’s 90 percent efficient, according to Thresher, and he hated to see it go. Sometimes he still talks as though it hadn’t. As I left, he told me, “If it keeps raining, we’ll have a good year.”
Editor’s note: Please note you are entering the Chair Chat area, a place full of naughty language, toilet humor, bad dad jokes, inappropriate musings, infantile jokes, plain bad jokes, very ugly chairs and many other things that can harm a to a not-yet-fully developed brain like a child. We again rate this post PG13, because of all the bad words. We don’t want to harm anybody.
I’m calling this a book report rather than a review, because I don’t have the gumption right now to write a proper formal review. So please forgive the relatively casual nature of what follows.
I love this book, which was recently published by Routledge. (I’m linking to the sales page at Amazon because the publisher’s ordering system has proven problematic. I am still waiting for the copy I ordered pre-publication.) The historical overview of women in woodworking is fascinating, including consideration of women picking up where men left off in wartime, and a wonderfully insightful discussion of the role played by the D.I.Y. movement in drawing women in. Earlier sections of the history include lots of information gleaned from research by Suzanne Ellison right here at Lost Art Press, a wonderful tribute to Ellison herself and to the Lost Art Press blog for publishing it. The international dimension is also noteworthy, though the book is overwhelmingly grounded in North America.
My favorite aspect of the book is the intellectual perspective that Deirde Visser brings to the subject, which she treats with welcome nuance. Many pages of my copy are covered with laudatory notes. I greatly appreciate that Visser and her colleague in the project early on, Laura Mays, saw fit to include not just art and studio furniture makers, but builders of custom work who happily refer to their workspaces as shops, and builders of buildings (albeit to a lesser extent).
The book is refreshingly free from top-down, supercilious attitude. Rather, its embrace of a diverse cross section of makers and making reflects beautifully on Visser herself. Kudos in particular to her and to the legendary Wendy Maruyana for including such gems as, “With characteristically self-effacing humor, Maruyama opened our conversation stating, ‘I’m not a great woodworker.’ She is talking about technique: ‘Making a perfect joint doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s quite a struggle, actually. So I frustrate myself because you always measure yourself up with other woodworkers and think ‘Oh fuck.’ In fact, Maruyama is perfectly capable of exemplary technique.” If you really want to invite people into a field, this is one way to do it.
It takes a strong spine to admit to imperfection in furniture making, and this in its own right is a welcome bit of iconoclasm. Furniture is made to be used, not just admired. In most cases the perfection of joinery or the attention given to finishing the back of a dresser or the underside of a table has far more to do with the maker’s conceit, or playing into widespread expectations of “quality” in the luxury furniture market (barf), than with actual durability or ability to serve the purpose for which a piece is made, which also has a bearing on who will be able to afford it. This, too, is for the underdog to point out, and women in this field have traditionally been underdogs.
I can’t imagine having to choose which makers to feature in such a project and am honestly baffled and gobsmacked to have found myself included. It’s a real honor. The sheer diversity of featured makers is admirable. So many others deserve to be included in a work of this kind, but as someone who has edited essay collections and copy edited Marc Adams’s “The Difference Makers,” I understand the need to make really tough decisions. That said, if there is one person whose absence is conspicuous in the discussion of particular women who have championed the cause of inviting women in and giving those women already in woodworking the visibility they deserve, it’s Megan Fitzpatrick, in particular during the years she worked as editor at Popular Woodworking; Megan has gone out on many a fragile limb, risking her own livelihood and fielding many an indignant comment from people who still don’t see the need to shine a light on members of specific underrepresented groups. Fitzpatrick would have fit perfectly into the part of the book that discusses efforts others have made in giving women woodworkers the recognition they’re due.
While this is by no means a formal review, I hope it’s clearly an appreciation and a strong recommendation. Thank you Deirdre Visser, Laura Mays and Phoebe Kuo, for conceiving this work. Looking back over the years in which I have been aware of this project, and the conversations I had early on about publishers with Mays, I recognize the massive investment of time and energy this book represents. I love it. What a joy!
