Charles Brock of The Highland Woodworker sat down with Megan Fitzpatrick recently to talk about how she went from a scholar of literature to become a woodworker, editor and publisher.
In the segment, Brock gets Megan to explain how she got started in the craft, and during the piece she shows off her first project from summer camp, plus many of the big Shaker-style pieces that adorn her home in Northside. She also talks about gender in the craft (and how she wants it to become a non-issue) and her books with Rude Mechanicals Press.
It’s a good story – one she doesn’t talk about very often. And it helps show that simply being fearless and determined in woodworking can carry you a long way.
Check out the segment above. Have your dictionary handy.
This type of square was produced originally for engineers, but woodworkers have come to realise that it can be very handy to them. Of course the high precision tool needed for engineering is extremely expensive, but a low cost square of sufficient accuracy for woodwork is available, and this article deals with some of its advantages.
It will be seen that the blade of the square is separate from the stock, and is free to slide to give any required amount of projection. It is fixed by means of the small thumb screw. The advantage of this is that it becomes two squares in one. Every practical man knows that, whereas the 12 in. square is necessary for larger work, the 6 in. size is handier for general bench work. Thus, in the ordinary way the square is used with about 6 in. projection as in Fig. 1. When wanted for larger jobs it is merely a matter of sliding it along.
It can be used equally well for mitres as shown in Fig. 2. For this it has not the same usefulness as the set mitre because it can be used for the acute angle only, not the obtuse one, but it is suitable for the majority of jobs.
Apart from its general bench handiness, however, it can be used for purposes for which the ordinary square would be useless. Suppose you have to work a large rebate. How would you test it to see that it is square? The ordinary square could not be used because the blade projects too far. By giving the blade of the engineer’s square projection slightly less than the rebate width it can be used to test as shown in Fig. 3. In the same way if lines have to be squared across a rebate the square can be used as shown in Fig. 4. The advantage is that the butt of the square rests on the edge of the wood, not the bottom of the rebate. It might be that the rebate is tapered, and in this case the only way of marking a square line would be to work from the edge, not the rebate. This is made clear in Fig. 4 (inset).
The square can be obtained with or without a spirit level. Fig. 5 shows it in use to test a horizontal surface. The blade is either pushed in level or withdrawn entirely. For testing the vertically of a post or whatever it might be the square is held as in Fig. 6, the blade resting against the post. As a still further use, the blade of the square is marked out as a rule.
We’re putting the finishing touches on “The Difference Makers,” an inspiring book by Marc Adams, founder and owner of the largest woodworking school in North America. In this 11″ x 11″ book (which will likely be 250 pages) Marc profiles 30 furniture makers, artists and toolmakers he’s worked with at his school. Each profile includes a biography of the person, Marc’s personal history with the person and lots of drool-worthy photos of each maker’s work.
The photo above is not drool-worthy. It’s a photo, taken at 1 a.m., of my desk. If I had known I was going to post that picture I would have taken it in daylight. I would have fixed the crooked blinds, removed those pens out of their packaging (the red pens I bought at the same time were long-ago broken into), tucked away the big gold earrings that had grown heavy on my head, tossed my son’s Nerf bullet off my desk and at least turned over the Post-It note pad with Girl Scout cookie orders scribbled on it, the red ink bleeding because I used the same pad as a second coaster a couple hours prior.
But then I looked at the piles of papers – Marc’s book with Nancy Hiller’s copy edits – and I fell in love with the photo. That pile of papers represents more than three years of Marc’s life – hours spent researching, interviewing, writing, gathering, organizing, editing. That pile of papers represents hundreds of photos sifted through and chosen, checked for size (and in a quarter of the cases higher-resolution images requested, some re-taken), saved as CMYK and .tiff, each one cropped, edited and clipped. That pile of papers represents Chris’s edits and my edits and hundreds of emails sent and received with fact checks. That pile of papers represents hours of design work by Linda Watts, who turned all of this work into a beautiful book, one well worth placing on a coffee table to be thumbed through, often. That messy desk photo is the truth behind all that work and I imagine, 20 years from now, I’ll be thankful to come across it and remember.
Writing “The Difference Makers” was often Marc’s in-his-spare-time work. Here he teaches a class at MASW in 2018. I love the messy benches, the fact that no one’s posed, the guy filming, the chalkboard that had just been erased – this is the kind of photo that gets to the heart of one side of Marc.
And unlike any of our other titles, each chapter in “The Difference Makers” represents the life work of each person profiled. That’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of weight. I’ve only met Marc in person a couple times, but I’ve known him for years. I imagine he’s someone who excels under pressure. I mean, he did this – he wrote this. Not many folk would attempt this. And he’s made it all seem so simple. The chapters are written as if you were having a conversation with Marc about the profiled person over coffee. And the part when he leans in a bit closer, to tell you a funny or surprising story about the maker? It’s in there. Over and over. It’s the insider’s view, a sneak peak into the life of – it’s brilliant.
Maybe that’s why, when clicking through hundreds of photos for this book, I found myself lingering on the makers’ shop photos. We didn’t include many of them (if any) in the book – it’s not what the book is about. But after reading accolade after accolade, and zooming in on all those jaw-dropping beautiful pieces of work, I found myself wanting to know the truth behind the work. And the few shop photos we received felt like paths to the hearts of these chapters.
John Owen at his workplace, Indiana Bell, in the late 1930s or early 1940s. Photo by Tom Heifel.
I’ve always been drawn to workplace photography. We spend a huge percentage of our lives at work and so rarely is it documented. Same with hobbies. It’s why I loved writing the “Great Woodshops” column at Popular Woodworking Magazine. And it’s why I spent so long writing for my small city’s blog. My neighbors’ basements and garages held the most wonderful workplaces. Examples include a studio for painting, one for wood turning, another for music recording and still another for casting and painting pewter figurines. Hours of time are spent in these environments and even if you never make it into a book called “The Difference Makers” or you “just” end up written about in a small city blog, I believe those places should be documented and remembered. I recently came across the photo above while helping my mother-in-law go through things – it’s her father, John Owen, at work in the late 1930s or early 1940s at Indiana Bell. All I’ve ever seen are pictures of him with friends and family. Never before had I seen a picture of a space in which he spent so much time. I love it.
My father-in-law took this picture without me knowing, in 2011. I’m grateful for it now.
The same could be said for a parent in a kitchen – all those meals cooked for people they love. Or someone working in a well-tended garden or tinkering with an old car in a garage. A child doing homework. A teenager raking leaves. A young adult mopping a floor, trying to make ends meet. The work that we do, whether for pay, in order to survive or for pleasure, makes a difference to someone – maybe to just that person alone, maybe to a baby who will never remember, maybe to a small group trying to make a difference, maybe to hundreds of thousands of visitors to a museum. We’re all difference makers, to a degree. And I think the space we make those differences in should be documented and remembered.
Of course, this doesn’t mean tidying up, because that’s not truthful. That doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. If your shop is always immaculate, so be it. But let the coffee cup stay. And if you consider your shop to be an embarrassment, so be it. Leave it. And someday soon, after you finally finish that project on which you’ve worked so hard, or you cut that near-perfect dovetail, or the glue-up works out despite the worry, take a photo. Not a fake one, for Instagram. But a real one. For you. One that gets forgotten about until someone finds it, and lingers.
And know that in shops a lot like yours work comes out, daily. Maybe it’s a simple table a family gathers around every night or maybe it’s a piece of work so beautiful some editor somewhere, well past midnight, is lingering on an image of it when she should be editing.
Production update: All the makers have received their profiles for review, and I am making their edits now. (Fun fact: The personal stories from Marc in each chapter will be a surprise for each of them – we have kept them hidden until the book is released.) Marc will do his final review in the next two weeks, before MASW classes ramp up again in April. We don’t have a printer date yet, or a release date, but as soon as we do we’ll let you know.
F+W’s old building on Dana Avenue. They owned it outright. Then….
F+W Media Inc., the parent of my beloved Popular Woodworking Magazine, filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 on Sunday, reporting it has more than $100 million in debt and a host of problems with its e-commerce business.
It will be easy for people to shrug their shoulders at the bleeding out of another mid-level media business. After all, who subscribes to magazines anymore? Or reads physical books?
I, however, would like to paint a different picture for you. Imagine the rest of this blog entry in the voice of Bob Ross.
It wasn’t the changing economy that (perhaps) mortally wounded this once-magnificent company. It was debt and venture capital, plain and simple.
When I started at F&W Publications Inc. in 1996, it was owned by the Rosenthal family, which started the company in 1913 around two magazines: Writer’s Digest and Farm (writing and farming were the “F” and the “W” in the name). The company owned its building outright. It had no debt. It had a fully functional warehouse. Its biggest weakness was it was a technological backwater. (When I left seven years ago it was, ahem, still a technological backwater.)
In 1999, we were told that the third generation of Rosenthals didn’t want to run the business, so we were being sold to a group of investors.
First order of business for the investors: Sell the building, grab the cash for the investors and sign a lease on a building in the suburbs. Borrow money to buy up other companies. Sell their assets (buildings, cars, coins). Reduce the workforce to pay the loan that you took out to buy the company. Pay the bankers.
With what money is left, try to improve the business.
When that doesn’t work, sell it to a new group of bankers. These specialize in cutting costs. Fire the experienced managers. Reorganize the way the company works. Borrow more money to buy even more magazines and websites. Cut their costs. Fire their people. Then sell the limping company to another group of venture capitalists.
And repeat until you end up in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.
As a publisher who sells old-fashioned books, I can tell you there is still a healthy appetite among people young and old for physical products. But they have to be products that are worth buying. That are made with great effort (and, at times, expense). And you have to protect your business by avoiding debt. When the bankers start running a publishing business, it’s game over. The only thing they are interested in printing is money.
My heart breaks for the poor SOBs who have been keeping the lights on at Popular Woodworking Magazine and all the other magazines under the F+W umbrella. Unlike me, perhaps, they stayed on out of loyalty (or desperation, perhaps) to make it work. The deck was always stacked against them because most of the revenue they brought in went right to the banks to pay the debt service.
My hope is that Popular Woodworking and the other magazines will end up with new owners – perhaps ones who love publishing more than they love insane margins.
Crazier things have happened.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. I know someone will ask, but we are not buying Popular Woodworking. I think the future is in scrolls of some sort. Or painting animals on rocks. Maybe gourds.
