The documentary, titled “The Master Craftsman: Richard Grell,” was created by Phillip James Sieb and assisted by Philip C. Leiter for Hudson Community Television, a non-profit station based out of Hudson, Ohio. It begins with footage from NBC Cleveland in the 1970s. The news reporter is sitting in one of Grell’s Windsor chairs next to a fire.
“You’ll be dreaming of spending part of a cold winter relaxing in front of a fireplace in a Windsor chair by Richard Grell,” the reporter says. “It will cost you $250 up, depending on the style. How available are these chairs? Well, he’s now taking orders for Christmas.”
The news clip then switches to footage of Grell, saddling a chair outside on fall day.
“The Windsor chair is something that you just can’t go buy in a store,” Grell says. “You can’t buy a handmade chair that’s built around you, to fit you, your size, the color, the style that you want, so I’m trying to bring back being able to build chairs, custom-made, for the people.”
After some more 1970s footage, the documentary moves to modern-day Hudson, Ohio, and Grell’s idyllic shop. He talks about his family’s generations-deep love of woodworking, his start in chairmaking 50 years ago, why he prefers hand tools, making a living selling furniture and looking for ideal trees in the woods on his property.
“A lot of years of my life looking at these trees as they’ve grown,” he says, his hand on a tall, straight hickory. “I love them.”
Walker, credited with archival research in the film, is interviewed throughout, speaking about the history of Windsor chairs, furniture design and creative freedom.
“Chairmaking itself is this real specialized craft,” Walker says. “It’s something that goes back millennia.”
Also interviewed are Grell’s wife and business partner, Gay; a client, Kathy Russell; and a woodworker/ER physician, Dr. Rafi Israeli.
About Grell Walker says, “He is an extension of this craft tradition that has gone back many, many generations. He is not reproducing Windsor chairs. He is making his own chairs that are refinements of chairs that have gone before him.”
Thirty minutes long, it’s a perfect morning coffee accompaniment. Enjoy!
Writing “Workshop Wound Care,” a field manual that’s part of Lost Art Press’s pocket-book series, combined two things Dr. Jeffery Hill enjoys and loves: medicine and woodworking. Hill, an emergency room physician and active woodworker, organized this 184-page book so you can resolve common workshop injuries quickly. The book is knowledgeable yet also exceedingly accessible, which is important when you’re feeling a bit panicked. Hill writes as if he’s talking to you bedside, and his manner is one made up of no-nonsense intelligence and education with a bit of empathy and humor. That ease of talking to folks during emergencies big and small comes naturally to Hill – it’s a skill he’s been working on since he was 16.
Finding Mentors in a Small River Town Emergency Department
Hill was born in Madison, Indiana, a small town of about 12,000 people situated along the Ohio River between Louisville, Kentucky, and Cincinnati. His mother was a school teacher who taught French (and Spanish in the bookends of her career). His father worked for the Indiana Department of Mental Health, first as a case worker, then as a district and regional manager.
Hill’s grandfather was a pretty successful carpenter and furniture maker, and Hill still owns a couple of the pieces he made, including a small school table that now has a place in his daughter’s room.
“It’s really nice,” Hill says. “He did a lot of work within the community, making things for churches, general carpentry, that sort of thing.”
Hill’s grandfather passed away when Hill was still fairly young.
Hill became interested in medicine as a teenager and in high school, he began volunteering in the emergency department (ED) of King’s Daughters’ Hospital and later working there as an orderly.
“The doctors I encountered there were very impactful,” he says. “I really became interested in medicine in general and picked it as my ultimate career path.”
Hill’s educational path is an interesting one. Emergency medicine (EM) residencies are relatively new in the broader field of medicine. University of Cincinnati’s (UC) EM residency, founded in 1970, is the oldest in the country. According to Hill, prior to EM residencies, a lot of doctors in communities were internal medicine or family medicine doctors who also worked in the ED but lacked in the specialized training necessary to deal with a wide range of emergent conditions.
Back to King’s Daughters’ Hospital: Among the many impactful physicians working in the ED at that time, Hill particularly remembers Dr. Joe Beaven and Dr. Barrett Bernard, who saw a teenager who had an interest in medicine. They talked him through cases, telling him what to pay attention to, how they were sequencing what they were doing, and showing him how to take care of a lot of patients at the same time.
“I still remember them drawing anatomy lessons on the bed sheets in ink to teach the patients what was happening to them,” Hill says. “I imagine it really pissed the hospital off,” he adds, laughing. But that kind of care and way of practice, which he witnessed as a teenager, really fed into Hill’s psyche as he embarked on his own medical degree. In addition to being valuable role models as clinicians, Beaven and Bernard were also role models as educators. The lessons Hill learned at King’s Daughters’ Hospital linger today, as he teaches his residents and as he wrote “Workshop Wound Care.”
A Clinician Educator
Hill knew he wanted to attend medical school; emergency medicine in particular called to him.
He attended Xavier University in Cincinnati from 2000 to 2004 where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Sciences. From 2004 to 2008 he attended U.C. College of Medicine and earned his Doctor of Medicine. He then stayed on at U.C. for his residency training, following which he became a Medical Education fellow, earning his Master of Medical Education from U.C. in 2014. Since graduating fellowship, he has been an assistant residency director in the department of emergency medicine at U.C., an associate professor of emergency medicine, and an attending physician in the emergency department.
As assistant residency director, Hill supervises the department’s weekly Grand Rounds conference, considered “the cornerstone of resident didactic education” with both residents and attending physicians present. These weekly sessions involve simulations, case presentations, and lectures. Hill also mentors the journal club and is the founder and one of the chief editors of the department’s education blog, Taming the SRU (SRU stands for Shock Resuscitation Unit and is colloquially pronounced as “shrew”).
“It’s a great outlet for the residents to try their hand at academic writing,” he says. “It covers common procedures and conditions and literature, and includes weekly summaries of our rounds. It’s an awesome educational tool and a durable collection of all the teaching we’ve done, the Grand Rounds since we started. So if you’re on shift and a student has a question, you can look up and find where we’ve covered it before.”
Much of Hill’s work in emergency medicine has been focused on education and improving the teaching experience.
Since, as he states, “students engage when they’re more ready to engage,” he has sought to find ways of teaching that are adaptable to the variable work hours of his learners.
Finding Balance in a Busy Life
“One of the great things about emergency medicine is the opportunity to wear a bunch of hats,” Hill says. “It keeps things fresh.”
On a typical day, Hill might start out wearing an academic hat, attending meetings and working on academic papers. And then he might switch to a clinician’s hat, working a 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. shift. And then he’ll switch to his household hat, taking care of things at home.
Hill says while the field is challenging, there are tricks to not burning out. One of those is understanding the task-switching nature of ED medicine and bringing that task-switching nature to his everyday life.
“That’s how I get things done, essentially,” he says.
Emergency medicine has also taught Hill how to better relate to people.
“I think that emergency medicine is very much a people-person type of field,” he says. “You would expect us to be extroverts and we’re not very extroverted. But the ER makes you rapidly establish a relationship with people.”
This way of working, having to facilitate relationships with strangers in an instant, has helped Hill read and understand people in ways he didn’t imagine. You gain a lot of empathy for people, he says. You see a lot of folks who are going through some hard times.”
Woodworking’s Longitudinal Focus
Hill’s interest in woodworking grew later in life.
“I always liked to do things with my hands,” he says.
He took a woodworking class in high school, which he says he really loved, but it wasn’t until his residency that he picked up tools again. He and his wife, who he met in high school (they have a son, 3, and daughter, 8, “and they’re both awesome,” Hill says) had their starter home (a beautiful century-old house) in Pleasant Ridge, just north of the Cincinnati metro area.
“It needed some renovations and so I had to figure out how to do some things,” he said.
First up was an inset bench in their kitchen to give the family a little more seating.
“It’s fine,” he says. “It’s not put together appropriately. I used whatever wood I could find at the hardwood store because I didn’t know any better.”
Hill says he was inspired, in part, by Christopher Schwarz’s “Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”
“If you have something in the world you need, it’s great to make it,” Hill says. “And I learned I was able to make things as exactly as I wanted them and needed them.”
That project led to other projects, learning more about woodworking and watching a lot of joints being made and cut with hand tools on YouTube. Hill bought a small library’s worth of books and read them within a span of a year. He created a Rolodex-like collection of home resources, in the form of books, articles and videos, he says, so that he could solve problems as he encountered them.
There is a reason “Workshop Wound Care” is straight-up problem-solving. He wrote the type of book he wanted to add to his Rolodex collection of resources in his home shop.
Hill also loves cooking and gardening. This year he grew cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, lettuce and all kinds of peppers. Together, these three things are his biggest hobbies, yet they all share a common similarity – they are all hobbies you can lose yourself in, he says – especially woodworking.
“Emergency medicine requires deep attention to detail but not quite as much as some other medicine specialties,” he says. “I focus intently on something for a short period of time, shift to something else, and then repeat that a hundred times a day. Woodworking requires a longitudinal focus. I basically stay there and work hours at a time without realizing time has passed. I’m completely focused on that and I completely let go. Gardening is less so. It’s pulling weeds. But I grow for myself. I enjoy the process of starting something off and seeing that it grows.”
Dr. Hill’s woodworking shop is split – his machine tools are in his garage and his hand tools are in his basement. His first big project was a Benchcrafted Split Top Roubo workbench. It was a multi-month-long process.
“I had a joiner but it was very small,” he says. “I basically used hand tools and handplanes to true all the surfaces before I put it through my planer. I tend to build things that are too big. It’s very refreshing to build things that are smaller.”
He has a long wish list of things to build, one of which he just recently crossed off – a beautiful stick chair. While working on it, he enjoyed the same problem-solving aspect of woodworking that he enjoys when working in the ED.
“In a lot of fields, a patient presents with a known problem,” he says. “But in emergency medicine, the problem is figuring something out with the tools you have. It’s very engaging and fun.”
How does he have time for it all? Balance.
“All that just comes from prioritizing your time and being efficient as much as possible,” he says. “And I try to get better at starting projects and finishing in a reasonable time frame. And just making the time for it.”
The Lessons of Life
Hill says that while working in the ED does teach you the good and the bad of life, it’s an honor to take care of people who are very ill.
“Life is nasty, brutish and short,” he says. “People have terrible things happen to them: cancer diagnoses, car accidents, trauma of some kind, through no fault of their own.”
At times he has to compartmentalize the things that happen at the ED. Doing so helps him better appreciate the time he has outside of work. But he also recognizes that you can’t be scared of life. He still drives on the road, he says, even though he knows – and sees the aftermath of – terrible car accidents that happen every day. And he still enjoys woodworking, even though machines are powerful and hand tools are sharp.
Hill recently posted a picture of his nearly finished stick chair, soaking in the evening light, on Instagram. He wrote about the finish he used – one coat of Real Milk Paint Co. Barn Red, one coat of Arabian Night and two coats of Peacock. He said, “Probably burnished a bit much before top coating with two coats of shop finish. At the end of the day I’m happy with the finish and learned some lessons for the next project.”
Hill shared pictures throughout his stick chair-building process. Progress shots, successes and minor setbacks, intermingled with pictures of produce from his garden, his kids – just life. It’s all learning. As a skilled educator, he understands that. Working in both his home shop and in the emergency department, he knows that sometimes, life can be easier with a manual, whether it’s an explanation drawn in pen on a bed sheet, a YouTube video or a little red reference book you can quickly grab if you’ve accidentally hammered your thumb. And that’s why he wrote the latter.
Mid-July I had the pleasure of seeing “Cadi & the Cursed Oak” displayed at the Children’s Flower Shower at Birchard Public Library in Fremont, Ohio. Every summer members of Whispering Meadows Garden Club select a children’s book, create a floral design for the book and then donate the book to the library. The gardening club has been sponsoring the event for 10 years.
Donna Foss, a master gardener and member of Whispering Meadows for 22 years, chose “Cadi” and designed this beautiful display. (Thank you, Donna.)
“The story of ‘Cadi’ and the oak tree inspired me to use an old knot from a tree I had,” she says. “Along with oak leaves, hydrangea flowers, acorns and a small silver cup, it just seemed to support the story. Of course, a skeleton was hidden in the tree.”
Donna has been gardening for 50 years. She grew up on a farm and says both of her parents gardened – they had a large vegetable garden and many flower beds.
“Now it feels like I just have to get outside and play in the dirt,” she says.
That afternoon I picked up my twin sons who were visiting my aunt Ellen and uncle Skip. They had spent several days working – raising a Quonset hut, moving logs, filling in potholes in a gravel lane, clearing out a shed – and playing. They also came home with a generous gift. My uncle had spent the year prior collecting tools for them. And during the visit, he helped them each build a toolbox.
Cadi’s grandmother: “Our stories, they are roots do you see? Every story being told right now, every story waiting to be told, they are all connected to the roots of our past.”
Every Lost Art Press author I’ve interviewed for a profile talks about the people who have come before them, blood-related and not.
Cadi thought about her grandmother’s stories, passed from mothers to daughters who then became mothers. Over and again. She thought about her own mum and her many retellings of loved tales. She thought about the spirits’ stories, now inside her, and she thought about the stories yet to come.
Cadi leaned down and hollowed out a bit of earth. In it, she placed an acorn, and she gifted it a story.”
For every planted seed, every driven nail, every story told, someone is watching.
Craig Jackson started Machine Time in 2016. It now occupies 25,000 square feet of manufacturing space. The company has 15 employees and plans to hire five more this year. It recently brought on investors to grow even more.
“We mostly do aerospace parts, stupid tolerances,” Craig says. “Some of our tolerances are about the thickness of a Sharpie mark. It’s a whole world that I never truly knew existed. I mean, we’ve got to have temperature control within plus or minus 2°.”
Machine Time’s clients include NASA, SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin and more. U.S. manufacturing is such that Craig doesn’t need to look for clients – they find him.
Even though Craig never knows exactly where the parts he makes end up on rockets, he says he can’t watch a launch. “My feet are sweating, and I can’t be in the same room,” he says. “I just peek at the news the next day.”
Starting Machine Time, and the first five years, weren’t easy.
“From Easy Wood Tools, I had a big house, I had a Mercedes, I had Porsches, I had retirement,” Craig says. “I had to sell it all to fund this place. I didn’t take a paycheck for the first 5 years. My wife made $45,000 a year. We had to move into a house that was the size of a good-size living room, from a five-bedroom, five-bath mansion.”
Craig didn’t draw a paycheck until February 2022.
“Along the way it was so humbling, how many people were rooting for us, you know?” he says. “Chris [Schwarz] was like, ‘Hey, can you make these dividers?’ And I was like, ‘Probably not, but I’ll give it a try.’ I mean, it took us a month to figure out how to make anything at all productively. But now we’ve got an unbelievable team. I mean, a lot of these young guys are just sponges. And the relationship with Chris and Crucible has been pretty awesome.”
Like many shops, Machine Time’s first CNC was a Haas VF2.
The present location of Machine Time Inc., Nicholasville, Kentucky.
Craig says a super-clean and well-lit facility attracts great employees and customers.
Craig says the mix of making, say, rocket parts and hammers, has been great for the young folks in his apprenticeship program, too. Craig says it’s an honor to teach them a solid method to feed their family for the rest of their life.
“Solid,” he says. “They can go to any city in the country and make a living.”
Craig likes to show his apprentices the 38 ways he’s screwed something up and then tell them not to do it that way. Pick any other way but one of those ways, he’ll say. “Let me know how it works.” He loves being a machinist.
“It’s all I’ve ever been, a machinist,” he says. “I just think, I was made to do this. I’ve tried to not do it. It keeps coming back. It’s what I enjoy.”
Craig likes taking a big 600-pound hunk of aluminum and turning it into a part that might weigh 12 pounds, something thin, like a skeleton.
“It’s just an attractive process,” he says.
Craig says there are strong similarities and differences to woodworking. When woodworking with machines, often the cutting tool stays still and you pass the work across. In metalworking, it’s the opposite, he says.
“Really the precision of woodworking is pretty well directly proportional to the hand skills of the craftsman,” Craig says. “In metalworking, at least the parts we do, it’s more about the precision of the CNC machine.”
DMG Mori 5-axis CNC mills – $500,000 – are Craig’s machine of choice now.
All aerospace parts go through a rigorous CMM inspection – down to .0001” (about half the thickness of a Sharpie mark).
Everything Machine Time makes is programmed virtually via software. Craig and his crew see the entire operation take place on a computer screen first. Once perfected, the program is transferred to a machine.
“Now that sounds pretty straightforward but the devil is in the details,” he says. “There’s a lot of opportunity for mistakes. To program and make a part, it’s probably more than 10,000 decisions. Data points, rpms, speed rates, depth of cut, workholding – it’s the ultimate puzzle, just figuring out how to make this thing. In woodworking, there’s not really that much variety of joints. Everybody has a table saw, a band saw, a router. But in metalworking, I probably have more cutting tools than a whole community of woodworking. And I’m not saying one is harder than the other. I’m just saying there may be more overall variables to deal with…but maybe not.”
“To make one of those is a challenge,” he says. “But to make a thousand of them and to hand them off to an apprentice and foresee all the potential issues, that’s a good 180 hours of engineering and prototype work. It’s way up there. Especially on a thin part that can vibrate when you’re milling it. There’s a lot to it.”
Crucible Sliding Bevel.
And then there’s the Crucible’s Sliding Bevel. A collaboration between mechanical designer Josh Cook and Craig, Craig invented a way to allow users to independently control the rotation of the blade and the sliding of the blade.
“Engineering that, and I had to make a custom workholding, I probably had 400 hours in that,” Craig says. “I like what Chris once said: ‘Well, if you don’t like the price of it, we welcome you to go into small-scale manufacturing.’”
Of course, Craig acknowledges most of us are guilty of this line of thinking from time to time, including himself.
“When I go to the store and buy something made in China or a Mercedes or whatever, I look at it and think, ‘Well they got a machine and they just push a button and it spits it out,’” he says. “We just don’t have enough bandwidth to truly consider the depths of everything in our environment. We just don’t have enough brain to do that. And all we do is cuss when it doesn’t work. How does a car even hold together? There are 10,000 parts.”
Having been a machinist since the early 1980s, Craig has witnessed incredible advancements in the industry. Today, technology is key.
“We have to utilize every bit of CNC technology known to be or we can’t be accurate or we can’t be economical,” he says. An average CNC machine at Machine Time weighs 40,000 pounds, and has a 20,000 rpm spindle with 40 horsepower – and it costs half a million dollars.
“Weekly we’re bringing in new types of technology to the company, whether it’s how to hold a part with custom fixtures or another coolant system,” Craig says.
Always forward-thinking, Craig gets excited about technological advancements. He isn’t sentimental.
“Our vision as a company is to make manufacturing sexy again,” he says.
Craig says when he was a kid, it was considered cool if your dad worked in the plant. But now, it’s the opposite. Technology, he says, has the opportunity to change that.
“I grew up cranking handles on a Bridgeport mill or an engine lathe but machinists now are computer programmers at a basic level, with a high understanding of physics – we know materials, cutting tools and measuring,” he says. “As I get freed up from the day-to-day I’m going to try to hit the road and talk to colleges and high schools and just show them what we do, show them rocket parts and how we go about all this.”
Craig asks, “Have you ever seen a movie, heard a song, read a book that has a machinist in it?” He can think of one: “The Machinist.” It was a 2004 psychological thriller starring Christian Bale. It’s neither romantic nor uplifting. “I just want to see if I can move that needle a bit,” Craig says.
Craig’s vision for the future of Machine Time is to grow: increase benefits, capacity, all of it.
“The complete vision, as bold as it may be, is to create a standard machine shop model and apply it across the country,” he says. “Machine Time Nashville. Machine Time Las Vegas. And so on. That’s the goal. I don’t know that I’m the guy that can complete that but everything we do is in that direction. And whether we do another location or not, those are just good fundamental business practices.”
Craig says if he had $100 million, he wouldn’t retire. He’d have a bigger machine shop.
“We’ve got customers begging us to do more,” he says. “You know, I worked my butt off my whole life but with Easy Wood Tools, I always felt like it came too easy. It was not easy. But I was never sure that I earned it. I can tell you right now, at this point, I feel like I earned it.”
A Life Chronicled in Book Titles
Craig met his wife Donna on a blind date in 1984. She was 14, he was 16. They’ve been together 38 years. Today Noah is 24 years old, Sam is 22. They both work at Machine Time.
Donna and Craig, 1984.
“They both went their own ways for a little bit like most all young men do,” Craig says. “You know, your dad’s the biggest hero and the biggest asshole you’ve ever known as you grow up. And then when you go out in the real world, you realize it’s good to have somebody who truly has your back. So they’ve come back to my open arms!”
Craig and Donna after 38 years together.
Sam, Donna and Noah.
Craig and Donna live on 5 acres. Craig has a 30’ x 30’ detached garage at home that serves as a workshop – woodworking, as he doesn’t do any metalworking at home. He still loves woodworking and he makes cutting boards, bowls and dining room tables on weekends, giving most of it away to his employees and friends. He stores his wood in a 40’ x 60’ old tobacco barn.
Madrone burl bowl.
Maple burl bowl.
Pine desk for Donna.
A walnut table for an employee who celebrated five years with Machine Time. Buzz, the dachshund, is underneath.
Craig’s tobacco barn, where he stores his lumber.
“I love my lumber,” he says. “And bowl blanks. I’ve got two locations for Machine Time and I’ve got wood strewn across these two locations and my basement and my workshop and my barn so I can never find the bowl blank that I’ve got hidden who knows where and I’m still buying more.”
Craig likes to stay busy.
“I can’t even sit down on a Sunday afternoon unless my body gives out so there’s a curse to it,” he says. “Your strength is always a weakness. My weakness is that I can’t sit down and relax. Vacations, I’m not so great at that. I’m not saying one thing is better than the other.”
Craig used to travel a lot with Easy Wood Tools – he’d put up to 50,000 miles a year on his truck and fly. There were pluses and minuses. His boys were pretty young, but Craig says Donna likes to remind him that the family saw the country. They took the kids skiing, to Cancun, to Disney. They did all kinds of stuff. So although he was away from his family for periods of time, he also had the freedom to spend extended periods of time with them, too. These days?
“I don’t want to leave Donna, not even for an evening,” he says. “She’s my best buddy.”
Craig went through a really difficult period when he didn’t get all his money from Pony Tools and had to sell everything to start Machine Time.
“I about lost my mind,” he says.
To cope, he started acrylic painting.
“It’s probably the most emotional thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “You know the fear of failure? It’s not like making a machine part or making a table or making a bowl. Because I never know what the results are going to be. I don’t look at anything. I just smear it out. And it’s an amazing release. And maybe that’s because of the point in my life when I started doing it. I’m not an artist on paper at least, but it truly helped me keep my sanity. So I paint when I have to.”
“I often have no idea what I am painting till I’m 90-percent done – same with most things I do,” Craig says.
Craig spent the morning of our interview cleaning up 100 gallons of coolant that had spilled out on the floor from a CNC mill. He was mopping it up, throwing wood chips on it. The way he talks about setbacks, big and small, is admirable. They’re all lessons.
“Those lessons, from the bad times, oh my gosh, they’re so much better than the good ones,” he says. “Anybody can do good times and I don’t know if there are any lessons in them, really.”
Around the time Craig sold Easy Wood Tools he also started taking notes, called Book Titles. Today he has hundreds of them, a compilation of big statements condensed. Sometimes he quotes famous philosophers and makes notes. For example:
“The measure of a man is how much truth he can stand (truth always demands change). Nietzsche. AKA – Don’t fear the facts.”
Sometimes he writes his own. For example:
“The universe owes no debts. AKA – Believe that your effort is worth it.”
He calls them learning statements.
“They’re hard-earned and they came at a price,” he says. “And each of them came from a particular moment in time.”
His biggest one?
“Be willing to accept the consequences of doing the right thing.”
The Consequences of Doing the Right Thing
When Craig worked at the tobacco company, the HR manager told him that one day, when she interviewed there, the general manager asked her, “What makes you a good person?” And she told Craig that she didn’t have an answer for that. Craig thought about this for a few days.
“For me,” he says, “it’s, I’m willing to accept the consequences of doing the right thing. And so is Chris. And so is Megan [Fitzpatrick]. I think the word consequences is so often associated with ‘violation’ or ‘you broke the law.’ But the true consequences in life are for doing the right thing. And that’s the best long-term solution. Just look at the long-term. Just think about that, five years from now.”
And five years from now, Craig just wants to keep making ever-more difficult parts.
“It’s all about making jewelry, make it perfect, make it to print, make it amazing to the customer and then we’ll see if we can make money at it,” he says. “I don’t know if I even care about the money. I don’t know. I don’t know that I do.”
“Smile and you will end up happy.” – Craig
Craig likes to tell people this story.
“I feel like when I meet my maker, he’s only got one question: ‘Did you do everything you could with every day I gave you?’ I’ve already got my answer. So when things get too easy, I feel guilty. I’ve got to do more. I’m still walking. Chris is the same way. I’m not the only person. I’m not saying any of this is unique to me, that’s not my point. Everybody’s got me in them. But I’ve got everybody in me too. And we’re all just trying to get through the day and go to bed.”
One morning in 2020, as Craig was driving to Machine Time, tired, his funds drying up more and more by the day, he saw a familiar barn, for the first time really, along the way.
“These words came to me instantly and I pulled over and jotted them down just as I heard them,” he says.
Today, he has them printed and framed, below the above illustration of the barn.
Craig grew up with his mom, dad and three older sisters on a 200-acre cattle farm just south of Owensboro, Kentucky, in Utica. They lived on his Grandpa Gus’s farm, who, semi-retired, was down to 40 head of cattle and a bull. There was a lot to experience, Craig says.
“We cut hay with the tractor and I could remember being so small, driving that Massey Ferguson 135 tractor that when I had to push in on the clutch I had to get both feet on the left side of the tractor to stand on that clutch so I could either do clutch or brake,” he says. “So it helped me make good decisions when I was young, that old survival of the fittest thing. And it was all on a hill. You know the old fold-down sickle bar mowers, these things that hang off the side of the tractor that are great at cutting legs off deer (I mean, I never did that). Just, from a really young age, I remember understanding the physics of things. If you didn’t, you got hurt.”
Poppa Gus’s homestead and cattle farm, Utica, Kentucky.
Craig was always the skinniest kid, so when lifting up bales of hay onto the trailer he would have to figure out ways to leverage his body to his advantage.
Craig on the farm.
“Growing up in all that, and all the conveyer belts and things that want to chop you up and spit you out in smaller pieces, it just gave me an attention to that, to looking at the mechanisms of the old equipment and the new equipment,” he says. “And then I always had a go-cart, four-wheeler, three-wheeler and motorcycle, so I was always riding those things. I didn’t like the feeling of crashing so I learned how to ride safely. But I was just around a lot of mechanical things.”
The day after Craig outgrew his go-cart.
Craig’s dad, a welder, and brother-in-law, a tool and die maker, started a machine shop in the backyard when Craig was 14.
The first location of J & L Welding and Machine, est. 1977, Utica, Kentucky.
“I started working out in the machine shop begrudgingly, you know when you’re 14,” he says. “My first job was sharpening jack hammer bits. A jack hammer bit gets blunted on the end so I stood at our shop-built belt sander and put a four-facet point on it, kind of a four-facet pyramid point on it, and I heated them up in the torch and dunked them in oil. I did that for probably a whole summer.”
They soon got into building weight-lifting equipment. By now it was 1983. Customers would bring in pictures from weight-lifting magazines and ask for four-station machines with pulldowns, bench presses etc.
“And I would just look at the picture and I would measure from my elbow to my shoulder and just build the machine,” Craig says. “I would drill all the holes in weight stack plates, make the benches, I’d do all the spray painting, I’d do all the upholstery, make all the pulleys – I learned to work from minimal information.”
By the time Craig was 18, he bought his dad out and moved J & L Welding and Machine just north to Owensboro, Kentucky. There he made all sorts of things, such as fixtures for furniture companies to glue up chair frames and fixtures to rotate an entire couch while it was being upholstered.
The second location of J & L Welding and Machine, 1022 Oglesby St., Owensboro, Kentucky.
“It was just so awesome to have the trust of customers and to build and deliver what they needed,” he says.
He was working 60 hours a week but he liked the work and he liked working. When Craig was 22, he sold his part of the machine shop and went to work as a machinist for America’s Best Chew tobacco factory in Owensboro (back then it was known as The Pinkerton Tobacco Company; the name changed in January 2022). The 10-acre factory produced about 25,000 pounds of chewing tobacco and about 600,000 cans of snuff a day on three miles worth of conveyor belts.
Craig as a machinist at the tobacco company, 1994.
“I was in heaven,” he says. “All this stuff, cutting and chopping and conveying tobacco, kind of like what I grew up with.”
He found himself remaking the same stuff over and over. “So, I set out to fixing the problems that caused the never-ending use of all these spare parts,” he said. “I would re-engineer and remake the part. I would make a proper shaft once, instead of 15 shafts a year. And that really increased throughput in the factory.”
For about seven years during this time, Craig held several other jobs too. He would work at the tobacco factory from 6:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., then he’d work his side business, Jackson Contracting, grading and seeding new yards until 6 p.m. Then he’d teach machine tool technology at the local vocational school from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Jackson credits his mom and grandpa for his strong work ethic.
“They didn’t just sit around,” he says. “And they seemed to be the happiest people I knew. My favorite book of the Bible is Ecclesiastics, by King Solomon, maybe the richest, most successful person in the history of the world. All he concluded was, nothing beats a hard day’s work. He had all the gold, all the women, all the power, and he just said, it ain’t doing it for me.”
After about a decade at the tobacco company, Craig was promoted into a management role as continuous improvement manager over the entire factory. Although he was being groomed for Factory Manager, he ended up leaving in 2010 to grow Easy Wood Tools.
A Better Woodturning Tool
Craig stumbled into woodturning in 2007 while shopping with his wife, Donna, in Evansville, Indiana. Donna needed a pair of shoes so while she went into a Shoe Carnival, Craig went next door into a Woodcraft.
“I had never heard of a Woodcraft,” he says. “I went in there and saw a book by Malcolm Tibbetts, on segmented woodturning. I opened that up and I was just amazed. I had no idea anything in woodworking could be this complicated.”
Craig got into making segmented bowls.
“I bought a little Jet mini lathe, put it in my garage, and kept making bigger and bigger bowls, got a big Powermatic lathe, and a trailer, and a 30” chainsaw and it kind of got out of hand,” he says. “But the whole time I was like, what is up with these bowl gouges? This makes no sense! If I had set out to make the most complicated and dangerous cut known to man, I would end up with a bowl gouge.”
So Craig started playing around with carbide inserts. Unable to find anything he liked, he engineered his own replaceable carbide inserts (eliminating the need to constantly resharpen) with crazy angles. He then designed tools with stainless steel to hold the carbide inserts and wooden (mostly maple) handles.
Craig holding Robin’s work of art.
“I was just making the heck out of these bowls with my carbide tools and I thought, maybe I need to show somebody,” he says.
Nick Cook tried Craig’s tool for the first time in 2008. Nick helped Craig land his first retailer.
“Nick Cook has probably done more woodturning than maybe anybody on the earth,” Craig says. “So I handed him the tool and I said, ‘Nick, I made this tool. I got $125 I’ll pay you to just try this tool out.’ He said, ‘Let me see that thing.’ He took a few cuts with it and said, ‘You don’t owe me nothing. You need to get this on the market.’ I said, ‘OK, I’ll do that.’ And then I said, ‘Hang on. How do you take a product to market?’”
Nick told Craig that he’d connect him with some folks at Craft Supplies USA. Craig sent Darrel Nish a sample.
“They were like, ‘Yeah, you need to start making these,’” Craig says.
Craig knew he needed to go into mass production, but he had no idea how to go into mass production. He simply had to figure it out. Craig sold his tool with Craft Supplies USA exclusively for a year. Then Woodcraft called him up. He sent them some tools.
“A week later, they sent me a $75,000 purchase order,” Craig says. “So I called them back and said, ‘Hang on now. This is just me, my wife, and my two sons – they’re 8 and 10 years old – and the baseball coach. So I mean – we’re just – this is not what you think!”
Craig says a couple things set them apart – aside from the product – that likely made them noticeable to a company such as Woodcraft.
“We did pretty good at marketing and presenting of the product,” he says. “No. 1, we loved the customer. Whatever the customer wanted. I didn’t care how ridiculous it was. If you wanted a purple handle, I made you a purple handle.”
Craig told Woodcraft he didn’t have the capital to buy the raw materials to fulfill the purchase order.
“So they said, ‘We’ll send you a check,’” Craig says. “About three days later I got a $75,000 check in my mailbox. They hadn’t met me, they hadn’t shook my hand, they hadn’t seen my face. No contract. I sat there in the driveway and cried. This is, this is, OK.”
Craig then laughs thinking back at this poignant time in his life, when Easy Wood Tools was officially in business.
“All I’ve ever been and all I am still is just a machinist,” he says. “That’s all I’ve ever claimed to be. So we had to figure out packaging, logistics, shipping, mass production, all in the backyard.”
At one point they ordered all the packaging for the tools and it arrived on a pallet. The delivery person left the pallet in the street, and Craig and his family crew were left figuring out how they were going to muscle the pallet and all its contents up a slope to his garage. At one point, everything fell off the pallet, into the street.
“Everything you can imagine going wrong went wrong,” he says. “But we shipped that order, on time, in full, with no rejects,” he says. “I don’t know how we did it.”
The humble beginnings of Easy Wood Tools in Craig and Donna’s small backyard garage.
At first it was a family affair. In the evenings, Craig, Donna and their two sons, Noah and Sam, would package up products Saturday and Sunday nights while watching “America’s Funniest Home Videos” while sitting on the living room floor. Sam would get a cutter and drop it in a bag. Noah would add a screw and Ziploc the bag shut. Donna would fold it and staple it. Craig would box it up.
“It was a little Jackson assembly line and they thought it was just as normal as could be,” Craig says.
Craig, Samuel and Noah Jackson
The company grew and grew with upwards of 20 employees, and moved from Owensboro to Lexington, Kentucky.
Craig designed most of his packaging and branding, with the help of Tim Jones, and did woodturning demos all over the country.
Easy Hollower, patented by Craig.
Easy Chuck, patented by Craig.
Noah and Craig with woodworker Thomas MacDonald (aka Tommy Mac).
Craig and Donna filming “The American Woodshop” with Scott Phillips.
Craig and Scott Phillips.
There are two things Jackson is really proud of when it comes to Easy Wood Tools. First, it was the company’s ability to capture the essence of the power of possibility.
Something Jackson has always found interesting: At woodturning shows, during the auctions at the end of shows, wood blanks would often go for more money than turned pieces of art.
“And what that told me is the value of possibility is much greater than the value of possession,” he says. “I think that’s what I was able to do with Easy Wood Tools. I would give the customer the path to the possibility of making a great bowl because the tools are so simple. We could hand them to 8-year-olds and they would turn pens.”
Second, in the beginning, traditional tool companies would chastise Craig for taking away business. At first, this stung. But in his heart he knew he was not taking away anybody’s income. So he simply asked competing companies to simply give him a chance. He told them he would increase their sales by growing the number of woodturners. And sure enough, he did. Easy Wood Tools produced more woodturners who not only bought Easy Wood Tools, but woodturning tools from every other woodturning tool company as well.
The goal was to make woodturning simple enough for anyone to try.
“And then, by 2013, everybody and their brother was knocking me off and I was about done with it,” Craig says. “I mean, it was like 20 companies. I’d go to a trade show and on each side of me there were companies selling knockoffs, and they weren’t as good.”
This hurt, Craig says. “I built that company best I could not taking nothing from nobody and I just, I don’t know.”
In 2015 Craig sold Easy Wood Tools to Chicago-based Pony Tools Inc., of Jorgensen clamp fame. Within six months Pony Tools went bankrupt, and Craig didn’t get all his money. So he turned to what he knew best – machine work.
(Note, Craig has not had any affiliation, whatsoever, with Easy Wood Tools since 2015.)
