Category: Cut and Dried

 

Editor’s Note: Richard Jones’s book on timber technology is designed, and Chris, Richard and I are working on final edits. The book will be available early this year.

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

In almost every project one can find good elements and bad elements in the process.

I’ll get the lowlights of working on this book out of the way first. I found there were times I struggled to put words on the page. Many things can hamper creativity, for that’s what writing is, even with factual subjects. Trying to get information across in a readable form requires finding the right words allied to illustrations so, yes, creativity matters.

It’s frustrating to complete a piece of text and ‘red pen’ it – literally printing the page, marking all the bloopers, jotting corrections (in red) and then going back to the word processing. I can’t properly proofread on a computer monitor, so printing it is. ‘Red penning’ helps me find the repetitions, awkward phrasing, spelling mistakes and bits so badly composed I need to start again. It’s frustrating, time consuming and wastes paper because on average I print and proofread five times before I’m happy, and even then I miss errors.

Other things that frustrate the writing flow include too many work commitments in my full-time job, illness in the family, and just becoming fed up with the whole thing. Why am I doing this? I don’t even have any idea if it’ll get published, and it could all just sit in big stored digital files no-one except me will ever see.

Ah, but the highlights outweigh all the frustrations. The kindness and generosity of people throughout the UK and overseas: Kiln operators, timber (lumber) yard owners, entomologists, mycologists, engineers, wood scientists, meteorologists, woodworking forum participants and so on all came up trumps with suggestions, guidance, photographs, participated in discussions face-to-face, by email and phone, and were willing to peer review sections I’d written suggesting improvements and approval when I’d got it right.

Two things surprised me. First, apart from the essential wood knowledge I chose to cover, I found the secondary information the most fun to write: tree history, ancient deforestation, forests and climate, balanoculture, the special place of oaks in the role of human development and The Baltic Problem from the point of view of the UK. The second surprise was the discovery that the supply of wood from the world’s forests currently teeters on the balance of just about enough at our level of usage – it could go either way, probably depending on future human ingenuity, or, perhaps, our greed and stupidity.

— Richard Jones

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series of blog posts by Richard Jones, who has written a detailed book about timber technology, which is scheduled to be released in early 2018.

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

What’s the best way to approach writing a book for publication? Well, probably not the way I went about it.

So what did I write about? At the end of 2007, I’d perhaps created a manuscript of about 15,000 words and devised a list of key headings. Writing as a woodworker for other woodworkers, not as a wood scientist, I’d decided the following list of topics covered what I, as the model woodworker in this exercise, ought to have a pretty good grasp of, and this probably applied to all serious woodworkers, both professional and amateur:

• Tree Classification, Growth and Structure

• Roots, Leaves, Seeds, Flowers, Germination, Transpiration

• Felling, Conversion and Yield

• Water, Water Vapour and Wood

• Coping with Wood Movement

• Seasoning or Drying of Wood and Drying Faults

• From the Kiln to the User (Storing, Transporting and Selling Dried Wood)

• Fungi

• Insect Pests

• Wood Strength and Structures

• Ecological and Environmental Issues

There were additional topics I felt it important to cover to round out the knowledge of the thoughtful and inquisitive woodworker, such as tree history, tree distribution, a section on the oaks in particular, balanoculture, ancient deforestation, socio-political and historical issues concerning trees and their use, the Latin-binomial system of identification, tree oddities and migration, and so on. All might be considered ‘soft knowledge’, but awareness of these topics contributes to being a well-informed woodworker.

In 2007 I met a publisher of craft books I knew at a woodworking show in the north of England. We talked about my writing project and he indicated he was interested in offering me a contract to write the book. I turned him down gently saying I didn’t want to work to a publisher’s deadline because I’d be writing under pressure and too many mistakes would occur, or important subjects might have to be omitted to meet their deadline. So, there I was, writing at my own pace with no deadline to spur me on, and no-one on board to publish whatever I produced. I’d made a decision that contributed to enabling what I believe is a better book, but left me with the challenging task of finding someone to publish my, er, well, I guess, labour of love.

I’m very pleased Lost Art Press is taking my raw manuscript to the next stage. And maybe I’ll tell the tale of my convoluted path to finding a publisher in a later post.

– Richard Jones

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of blog posts by Richard Jones, who has written a detailed book about timber technology that required hundreds of hours of research, which he talks about here. The book is scheduled to be released in early 2018.

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

My tentative foray into writing articles on timber technology for magazine and journal publication morphed almost seamlessly into writing a book (which you can read about here). I felt the material was unsuitable for the compressed format expected by woodworking magazine editors. Short, snappy articles of 2,500 to 3,500 words incorporating 10 or so images are favoured. The generally small remuneration for significant writing effort was off-putting, and occasional, irritating editorial blunders made by the magazines niggled: How, for example, could a couple of sentences from one paragraph be moved into another paragraph on another page? It turned the article I’d spent a great deal of time perfecting into verbal flatulence, and rather diminished the end product.

I wanted to create something that differentiated itself from other books on timber technology. I asked myself questions such as: “As a woodworker, what’s important to know?” and “Are there issues secondary to the core material that gives a woodworker important and useful ‘rounding out’ knowledge?” By this time in 2007 I’d moved to a new job leading the undergraduate Furniture Making programme at Leeds College of Art (LCA, now Leeds Arts University). LCA required I develop a ‘research profile’ befitting a lecturer in the UK Higher Education sector. I had a project in hand that I could use to undertake appropriate ‘academic research and publishing’. I had the kernel of a manuscript suited for such a purpose where light Harvard Referencing would be appropriate.

My starting point was to write what I knew, but to verify the information. It quickly became apparent that what I ‘knew’ was a mixture of truth, along with myth and hearsay that had been passed down through generations of woodworkers to me. I needed to research a topic through studying several reliable sources of information, collate, assess, draw conclusions, and then write. Sources were books, journals, online publications, personal discussions and correspondence with specialists in their field, all with verifiable credentials, e.g., wood scientists, entomologists, mycologists, engineers, etc, and further, to persuade experts to peer review relevant sections of my manuscript. Being in an academic field at the time of writing had its advantages. There’s a common etiquette in academia of peer reviewing the work of fellow academics – I was in the fortunate position of being able to take advantage of this arrangement.

– Richard Jones

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of blog posts by Richard Jones, who has written a detailed book about timber technology. The book is scheduled to be released in early 2018.

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

I didn’t set out to write a book on timber technology. Doing so was an accident of circumstances. In 2003, I closed my furniture business in Texas, moved home to the UK and started teaching furniture undergraduates at Rycotewood, which I mentioned here. I was given the task of introducing the students to the craft furniture maker’s primary material of wood in the Timber Technology module. I possessed a relatively good expertise in the subject but I’d never prepared and delivered learning materials on it. It was a challenging sink-or-swim moment for me – well, more of an ongoing fight against drowning throughout a 12-week term. But it got easier with practice and as the years passed.

In 2005, I started creating illustrated Timber Tech PowerPoint presentations as learning tools. From that, I converted the PowerPoints into articles to sell to woodworking magazines, a sideline of mine. At some stage in this article production I decided the topic was too involved to be covered adequately in a series of articles in several magazine issues. So, being a bit bloody minded, I decided to create a manuscript covering the key issues relevant and of interest to me as a woodworker. Further, I decided to write it in such a way that non-specialists could understand some of the more challenging elements, and my students were the model non-specialists. Of course, this meant I was writing speculatively, without having a publisher on board – but more on that in a later post.

Most books on timber technology are written by timber technologists for wood scientist colleagues, or students of the topic. They’re consequently a difficult read for the general reader, something probably true of most woodworkers, myself included. Wood science authors assume a certain background knowledge in their expected readership. And why not? They’re generally singing to the choir, or at least aspirant wood scientists. It doesn’t really help the non-scientific woodworker who wants a better understanding of their material as simply as possible. In creating my manuscript I took pains to try and make some difficult science accessible and useful to all woodworkers – carpenters, joiners, furniture makers and so on.

 

An oak tabletop, such as the one shown above, 1100 mm (~43-1/4″) wide with end clamps (aka breadboard ends) needs allowance for expansion and contraction on the main panel across the grain. A tongue and groove, incorporating three tenons worked in the main panel fit motices in the clamps. The central tenon is glued, and the two end tenons are free to move side to side in extended mortices, but held tight in the main panel with dowels passing through slots in the tenons.

– Richard Jones