A woodworking friend of mine has the most boring tattoo ever.
It’s a single black dot – about 1/16″ across – on his hand. He put it there as a reminder. Whenever he sees that dot, he is reminded to stop messing around and get back to studying or working or some such.
This morning, I’m pondering a trip to the tattoo parlor myself. I need some totem to remind me to lay down my tools when someone is yakking at me.
This week I am in the heat of finishing a run of Roorkee chairs, and I’m down to the part where I am cutting and assembling all the leather bits. This involves hundreds (maybe a thousand) intense freehand cuts with a utility knife and punches. One miscut and the piece is spoiled.
For the last three days, I’ve been standing alone at my bench making these cuts. I have neat piles of hundreds of components. Zero mistakes.
Yesterday a neighbor came into the shop, asking me to make him a walking stick (he’s been using a tomato stake to help him get around lately).
First mistake: I kept working while we chatted.
Second mistake: I should have offered to simply buy him a walking stick at the drugstore a block away.
Third mistake: I installed a buckle on upside-down, and I had to then destroy and remake the piece.
Fourth mistake: I fixed the problem while he kept talking. My repair turned out to be half-assed.
Fifth mistake: I cut the belting for a chair’s thigh strap 1-1/2” too short, completely ruining an assembled $150 component.
I put down my tools and wished the neighbor a happy new year as he left, tomato stake in hand.
I know a tattoo can’t fix stupid. But you think I’d be smarter after working in group workshops for the last 23 years.
One of the reasons we’ve made Lost Art Press books as durable as possible might seem silly. Perhaps it is the result of growing up in the Cold War, but I’ve always worried that human civilization is on the brink of collapse.
And after that happens – whether it’s from war, climate or economics – people will need to build things without the help of YouTube or television. Maybe our books (which have already endured floods, babies and dog attacks), will survive as well.
Lately, however, my morning walks into Cincinnati have changed my mind.
Just about every morning I walk along a stretch of the Ohio River that features a geologic timeline of earth’s history from 450 million years ago until the settlement of Cincinnati in 1788. Each tile in the path is about 36” x 36” and can be covered in a single stride. And each tile represents 1 million years. Some of the tiles are decorated with the animals that developed during this period (227 million years ago: The first mammals are 6 in. shrew-like animals) or what was happening with the climate or the continents.
The entirety of human history is covered in the last of the 450-plus tiles. It’s a sobering thought to consider our lives and our work against such a grand clock. Even if you build things from solid stone, they are no match for time on this scale. Building a chair with excellent joinery so it might last 200 years suddenly seems laughable. In 1 million years, everything we know will all be dust anyway.
If this sounds like I’m headed down a path to existential despair, you’re wrong.
On the whole, I consider humanity to be a generally greedy, selfish and destructive force. But we are all capable of good. For me, the two most important things I can do are: Take care of others and create things that are beautiful. By “beauty,” I don’t mean the stuff in art museums, the books in our libraries or the soaring buildings in our cities. I mean the small (and big) things that we do everyday.
Beauty can be a rude chair that is nice to sit in and draws your eye from the other side of the room. It can be a handplaned surface. A moulding that creates bands of light and dark. A song that is sung at the end of a day’s work. A meal that you make for your family.
All these things are temporary; some last only an instant. But these bits of immediate and ordinary beauty (what you see, taste, smell and feel) make a moment – perhaps the one you are in right now – better than moments without them.
This beauty does not require a particular talent or decades of training to create. This is one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to vernacular furniture and architecture, outsider art, folk music, folk cooking. Anyone can do it. Anyone. Even if I’m making a chair from Curtis Buchanan’s pen, singing a song by Ralph Stanley or making a recipe from the Lee Brothers, the act of creating it (or creating it again) is what keeps me in love with life.
If you are a cynic, you might think this blog entry is my way of explaining that we are going to stop sewing the signatures of our books. Or quit using the fiber tape that reinforces the casebinding. Or heck, we’re just gonna have monkeys read our books out loud on YouTube. After all, it’s all going to be dust as soon as the earth steps forward onto the next tile.
But no. I think that making something well – even if it lasts just an instant on the geologic timeline – is a form of beauty and brings pleasure or delight to others (as it does to me).
Gotta go. I’ve got some leather scraps that need to be riveted together into something that – I hope – will bring joy to a man in California and a man in Idaho.
Earlier this month, John Kunstman gave a presentation at the Lost Art Press storefront on how to make breadboard ends using both power tools and hand tools.
For the attendees, John also prepared a nice 15-page handout on the process that illustrates the process with words and photos. I was supposed to print the handout for the 25 or 30 attendees, but I had too many things on my plate that day.
So I’m posting it here for everyone.
The handout covers just about everything you need to know, from panel preparation to drawboring. John even shows a few of the common mistakes he made.
The download is free. You don’t have to register, or sign up for anything or give away your social security number. Just click the link below and it will download to your device.
Thanks to John and everyone who turned out on Dec 14 for our last open day until June. It was a fun day with cameo appearances from Nancy Hiller and Peter Follansbee.
There are a few tools that I consider essential to making a living. Most professionals in the U.S. live and die by the table saw. I don’t. But I think that’s because I don’t use sheet goods much.
For me, it’s a three-way tie between the planer, my old 14” band saw and my HVLP system. The planer and the band saw are – I think – obvious choices. The HVLP system might be a bit of a surprise to some.
My first woodworking job was in college at a door factory where I assembled and finished entryway doors. That was my first taste of spray finishing, and I have an apparent knack for it. As a result, I’ve always had a spray system on hand – mostly cheapos. A spray system can save days of work compared to applying finishes by hand. Today was a good example.
I’m finishing the parts for three Roorkee chairs, The parts have lots of facets, coves and tapered mortises and tenons that need to be finished (or look finished) to be presentable. Each Roorkee has 10 parts (plus two replacement stretchers), so I had to finish 36 parts today with garnet shellac.
While shellac dries quickly, getting it into tight corners and mouldings with a brush, rag or pad is a challenge. With a spray system, a job that should take eight hours takes less than one hour. And (my opinion is that) the results are superior.
Even when I want the final finish to look hand-applied, I use the spray system to build up a few preliminary coats. Then I apply the final coat of paint, shellac or lacquer by hand so it looks less than perfect. Is that cheating? I don’t believe in the word when it comes to making ends meet.
With spray systems, you don’t need to spend a lot of money to get great results. I started out on a Binks systems – arguably the best. Now I use a cheap Earlex 5500 (basically a converted vacuum cleaner) that produces the same results. I can spray anything except latex.
Honestly, the equipment is not as important as thinning your material properly and simply knowing how to spray intelligently. Before buying the Earlex more than 10 years ago, I had a Fuji spray system, which was the budget leader back in the 1990s. (However, do stay away from the Wagner systems at the home centers. I have yet to produce a decent finish with one of these. Which is curious.)
There’s a learning curve with a spray gun, just like with any tool. I can teach people to spray (decently) in about an hour. Learning all the tricks takes a little longer (two hours?).
If you struggle with finishing, maybe your problem isn’t a result of the medium. Maybe it’s the messenger.
When I build chairs, I always make extra parts – spare legs, stretchers, arms and even seats. Sometimes I need these parts when I (or a student) takes a chairmaking dump. But mostly, the parts pile up in the background until a day like today.
I’ve been designing a lowback chair in my head and on paper for months. The next step is to make a half-scale model (I did that yesterday) and then build a prototype that can answer my questions about the model. I also want to try out some new techniques I’ve been pondering for drilling stretchers and cutting tenons.
So this morning I gathered up an armload of spare parts and started building a lowback while I waited for finish to dry on three commission chairs.
What is on my bench is a 100 percent disastrous failure of the chairmaking craft. The front legs do not have the same rake (it’s not even close). The back legs need about 10 more degrees (holy cow that’s a lot) of backward rake. The front medial stretcher is wildly cockeyed.
The experiment for drilling stretchers was a 50 percent fail. The tenon-making technique was a 100 percent success.
But despite all this, this evening I’m not drinking to forget. I know exactly what I need to do to make this chair work (at least from the seat down to the floor).
Tomorrow I will likely fail to make the arm and the short sticks that connect it to the seat.
When it’s all assembled, I won’t even glue the parts together. I’ll take the chair apart and send the bits to fireplaces, compost bins and chicken coops around the greater Covington area.
I am sure that some people will call me wasteful – I could make a sittable (if ugly) chair from these parts. Or I could fix all the mistakes with plugs and paint and build a half-decent chair with 20 extra hours baked into it.
The way I see it, wood decomposes and provides food for worms and other slimy creatures. It burns readily and can warm some locals who might not be able to afford a gas furnace. Chickens love to poop in it. And life is too short to make something ugly or half-baked.
