As you can see, Bean the three-legged cat is the worst wax salesman we have hired. Instead of doing something cute to encourage you to buy wax, he just sits and looks like someone poked him in the butt.
My youngest daughter, Katherine, has made up a big batch of soft wax this week and you can purchase it in her etsy store here. Soft wax is an easily applied, high-solvent finish. It’s ideal for finishing the inside of casework. It helps the look of antiques with aged finishes. It coats Crucible tools before they are shipped out.
Don’t use it on your beard. Or your three-legged cat. (The FDA has found it ineffective for growing back a missing leg.)
There are more details on soft wax and how we make it with a waterless process here in Covington in the etsy description. Katherine cooks it up herself. Bottles it. Ships it out.
Bean does not help, as you can clearly see in the photo.
During the last 30 years, I’ve heard hundreds of “I first encountered Fine Woodworking…” stories that have an impressive ending. The person becomes a lifetime woodworker or quits their job to build furniture. Or collects every issue since the magazine began publishing in 1975.
I’ll never forget my time, because it was just so random.
In 1991 I was a general assignment reporter for The Greenville News in South Carolina and had been invited to have a drink at the house of Jim DuPlessis, one of the business reporters. He lived in a tidy Craftsman bungalow on a leafy street, and on his coffee table was a copy of Fine Woodworking.
I grabbed it and started leafing through it. I honestly didn’t realize that magazines about woodworking and building furniture existed. I had graduated college the year before, and I was feeling drawn back into working with my hands after leaving Arkansas and our farm behind. But I didn’t know how to act on that desire.
I clutched the magazine (I’m almost certain it was the August 1991 issue) like a prize from the fair as Jim and a few other reporters wandered onto the front porch of his house to enjoy the air.
That’s when Jim’s dog started streaking toward the street, directly at a passing car. As a newspaper reporter you see a lot of horrible things, and you learn not to look away.
Jim’s dog ran right at the front tire of the car, like it was trying to put its head under the front tire.
When the car and dog collided it made the worst noise. I won’t even try to describe it. The car stopped. Jim screamed and ran out to the street while the rest of us just gaped.
I don’t know how, but the dog was unhurt. Completely fine. Jim hugged the dog like a teddy bear as he walked back to the porch. Everyone at the party spent the rest of the evening doting over the clueless thing, like it was a miracle sent from heaven.
I spent the rest of the evening reading Fine Woodworking.
This week marks another strange turn of events. And again, no animals were harmed. I now have my first article in Fine Woodworking, almost 30 years after first encountering the magazine. After leaving Popular Woodworking as an editor (1996-2011) and then as a contributor (in 2018), I had resisted getting in bed with another woodworking magazine. It felt like getting married to a new spouse on the way home from the funeral of my first.
But after getting to know the current crop of editors at Fine, I decided I was being stupid and to give it a chance.
My article is deep in issue 283, the August 2020 issue. It is about, surprise, workbenches. It was a bizarre experience being on the other side of the fence as a writer, not an editor. But the entire staff I’ve dealt with – Betsy Engel, Anissa Kapsales, Barry Dima, Tom McKenna and Ben Strano (who I will remind you that FWW “stole” from us) – were a delight to work with.
With any luck, I hope you’ll see more of my writing in Fine, if they’ll have it.
We ripped out our kitchen on March 1 and have spent the last 10 weeks waiting for a safe time (with procedures sanctioned by state health officials) to resume the work. This week the cabinets arrived, and so I recruited Megan Fitzpatrick to help me make the maple countertops.
I haven’t written about this project because it is deeply personal. I do almost all the cooking in our house, and my ideas about kitchens are not in line with the mainstream. Frankly, I suspect I am a little off base, and I didn’t have the stomach for the criticism.
But there is one funny exchange I’d like to mention.
Today Megan and I built the 11’ section of countertop that has to be installed in pieces for a variety of reasons. I’d surfaced and glued up the maple and had gone into total “machine production” mode, like when I worked at a door factory.
So after cutting the components to size, I got out the sanders to dress the panels. After 5 minutes of sanding, Megan stopped her buzzing machine.
“I think a handplane would be faster,” she said.
I laughed. She was completely correct. I grabbed my jack plane and dressed both faces of the two countertops in less than 30 minutes. After I planed the first countertop, Megan began sanding the countertop to a higher grit.
I walked over to her bench with a card scraper and began dressing the surface.
We put the sanders away and spent the rest of the day blasting Jason Isbell’s new album, “Reunions,” and getting the job done faster, with crisper results.
We’ve run out of copies of “The Anarchist’s Design Book: Expanded Edition.” We ordered enough to last us two years, but they lasted only four months. We ordered a new press run on April 17 and should have our stock replenished within the next two weeks.
Having books or tools out of stock makes us grumpy. And we have new systems now to help prevent this from happening with any book. So we’ve been busy this month and have six press runs in the work right now. That’s crazy. The most we’ve ever managed before is two.
Other Book News I am designing Nancy Hiller’s book, “Kitchen Think: A guide to design and construction, from refurbishing to renovation.” It’s a big book with many involved layouts. I can safely say I’ve never seen another kitchen book like it. But we would expect nothing less from Nancy. We are headed for an early summer release.
“Make a Chair From a Tree” by Jennie Alexander is inching closer to the finish line. Peter Follansbee finished his work on the book in April and now Megan Fitzpatrick is getting it ready for page design. I know we’ve had some fits and starts with this title, but we hope this will be out by the end of the year. Megan promises to write up a detailed blog entry on this book soon.
“Country Woodcraft: Then & Now” by Drew Langsner is being designed by the other Meghan. We’re also trying to get this book, which covers all aspects of green woodworking, out in 2020.
And there’s more.
Brendan Gaffney is about to finish his manuscript on James Krenov (we’re trying to get that book out before the 100th anniversary of his birth). And Kara Gebhart is working with an artist to complete illustrations for Monroe Robinson’s book “The Handcrafted Life of Dick Proenneke.”
So enough of this leisurely blogging. It’s back to the salt mines for me and the rest of the crew.
Here in downtown Covington, we live with a lot of people who are in and out of homeless shelters. Plus, my wife’s job is to write about homelessness, poverty and social justice issues for a local television station. So it’s a topic at every dinner upstairs and at our storefront’s door everyday downstairs.
When we lived in the wealthier suburb of Fort Mitchell, I never answered the front door (our doorbell broke about 1998, and I never fixed it to achieve bliss). It was always someone trying to sell me wrapping paper or mulch. Or it was a political candidate or religious zealot – also selling something.
But here in Covington, I try to always open the door when it’s knocked. Sometimes it’s people looking for the upholstery shop one block down, or someone wondering what the heck we do here. And sometimes it’s someone who needs something. They might be experiencing homelessness, they might not.
I try not to judge. To some people, I look homeless. Last week I walked to Klingenberg’s hardware store to buy some glue, and I had two people stop me and direct me to the soup kitchen on Pike Street.
“Better hurry,” one said. “Today is hamburger day!”
For the most part, the visitors need some change for the bus, some toilet paper or to borrow a tool. We’re happy to help when we can. What is surprising is how often the visitor is there to help us. One guy gave us some rusted F-style clamps he found in an alley. Another woman, one of the prostitutes, found the car keys that a drywaller had dropped while doing some work for me.
A few months ago, a guy with no teeth began knocking at the door. He looked like he hadn’t eaten in a long time. On the way to the door I picked up the jar of change we keep for these occasions. I opened the door, looked him in the eye and said “Hi!”
“I think you lost this,” he said, holding up an engineer’s square. It was a little rusted, but was still in good shape. I told him it wasn’t mine.
“Someone dropped it out here in the gutter,” he said. “It looks too nice to be trash.”
I thought it might belong to one of our students, so I took it and thanked him.
We checked with the students who had attended recent classes – no one had lost a square. I checked the square for accuracy. It is dead-on ISO 9009 perfectly perfect. So I keep it in our machine room. Every time I pick it up it’s a small reminder to stay human, to keep opening our front door and that the first Tuesday of the month is hamburger day.
