“I’ve heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you’ve spoiled what was pure and simple; and without the pure and simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest. Where the life of the spirit knows no rest, the Way will cease to buoy you up. It’s not that I don’t know about your machine – I would be ashamed to use it!”
— From The Chuang Tzu, Section 12, tr. Burton Watson
In my early days at Popular Woodworking magazine, we would draw up the projects we wanted to build for an upcoming issue and present them to the other editors for review and comment.
On the one hand, it was a great idea. After years of the process I learned to receive criticism with grace and now look forward to it.
On the other hand, there are cupholders.
When presented with a design, a group of woodworkers will complicate it until it is unbuildable, unsittable and will require custom titanium hardware made by a water-jet cutter.
And that’s just for the birdhouses.
So I also learned to keep things simple. I’m always trying to take things away from a design instead of adding them. But last week I forgot that lesson.
Right now I’m building a traveling tool chest for an upcoming article that’s also a prototype for future classes. I spent two days designing the thing in SketchUp and was convinced I had created the Tardis of tool chests. It was a traveling chest that could hold a full set of tools, including full-size handsaws instead of the shorter panel saws. Plus a full working set of full-size planes.
On Saturday night I glued up the dovetailed carcase and I saw the folly of my design. While it might hold all these tools, I could see that the chest’s proportions were going to be totally wrong at the end. Ugly even.
I walked outside and stared at a tree for a good five minutes.
Then I came back inside and redrew the chest using the same proportions and principles I’ve used since I built my first tool chest in 1997. And these are the same proportions used since tool chests first emerged in the furniture record. I pulled some more rough pine from the woodpile and fetched my jack plane.
Anyone need a dovetailed pine casket for an Oompa Loompa? Cause I’ve got a nice one right here.
Despite what seems like common sense, John and I like to keep our retail network small and personal. We enjoy working with people who share our philosophy on craft and business. Those people are few and far between.
Recently we began working with Best Made Co., a retail and online store headquartered in Tribeca in New York City. After initial conversations, it became obvious that our businesses were well-matched. Best Made Co. offers really nice tools, knives, books and outdoor clothing.
We are pleased and honored to be associated with Best Made Co. They currently carry three of our titles: “With the Grain,” “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” and “By Hand & Eye.” Be sure to check them out next time you are in the city or online.
I hope to stop by their retail store at 36 White St. during a visit to Brooklyn in January for a Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event.
If I have only one complaint about my life, it is that with all the teaching, writing and building that I do, I have no time left to take woodworking courses for myself.
I don’t drool over tool catalogs. My personal pornographic publications are the brochures and web sites from woodworking schools that teach skills that I want to master.
So when I had dinner with David Savage last summer, you can imagine how long it took me to say “yes” to his following proposition: I teach a class in building a tool chest at his school in Rowden, then stay on for a second week to assist and take a class in sunburst veneering.
Savage has long been one of those woodworkers I wanted to learn from. He does amazing work. And, equally important to me, he is one of the most daring woodworking writers alive today. He is, simply put, nobody’s tool. He is fearless in exploring the craft and his own human failings. Check out some of his articles here.
So this summer I head to Rowden to lead a class in building a dead-nuts traditional tool chest, one I have specially designed for this course. During the first week, Aug. 24-28, we’ll build the chest using hand tools and traditional production methods and joints – dovetails, tongue-and-groove, miters, breadboards etc.
The second week (Aug. 31-Sept. 4) we will embellish the interior lid of the chest with a sunburst veneer pattern designed for the course, plus traditional veneer and crossbanding on the lid of the top till. The goal is for all of the students to walk away with a finished chest, a boatload of newfound skills and a slightly swollen liver.
When David announced the course last week, it filled up immediately. But the wait list is very short right now and these classes always have a certain amount of churn. If you’d like to read more details about Rowden, David’s crack team of instructors and the course, check out these pages here and here. You can sign up for the course’s wait list here.
I’ll be writing more about the chest design in the coming months. It is based off a number of historical examples that have survived quite well and has some features you might consider for your tool chest.
While some critics put my work on par with cat poo, few have ever considered that my work could actually contain and control feline fecal matter.
But reader John Notis of Portland, Ore., is a visionary.
While he prefers a wall cabinet for his woodworking tools, he took the basics from “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” to make this litter box. It is impressive. (The only thing more impressive would be to get one’s cats to defecate in a wall cabinet.)
I hope my wife does not see this post or I know what I will be building next week.
