Most of my students last week at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking are much stronger than am I. They cranked those K-bodies down … probably more than need be to close the baselines of their Anarchist’s Tool Chest dovetails. And because we used shims over the tailboards (so the clamp heads weren’t seating on the ends of the pins, instead of pulling things tight together), we were left with some dents. I said I’d show them how to remove those…then ran out of time. So here ya go: a quick video of me using an iron (which happens rarely) to fix all but one of the dents (missed one – oops).
At the bench. The upstairs bench room at Rowden. Photo by Will Reddaway, WR Photography
The following is excerpted from “The Intelligent Hand,” by David Binnington Savage. It’s a peek into a woodworking life that’s at a level that most of us can barely imagine. The customers are wealthy and eccentric. The designs have to leap off the page. And the craftsmanship has to be utterly, utterly flawless.
I am jumping now to what a student experiences during the first week at Rowden. I am doing this because it all fits together. Without the doing, the making, the faffing about in the workshop, all the drawing and waking up, there is no context for when you become a designer and a maker.
It’s not good enough to sit in a nice clean design office and get your sweaty minions to make for you. Making is what you do. Remember William Morris, and how he was always fiddling with making something or other. Fail to grasp this, and the maker will always be in charge of the dialogue.
“No boss, that won’t work – you need three fixings there.”
You need sufficient understanding and knowledge to argue. You need to know enough to suggest a different fixing, and to maintain the smooth identity of your design.
So pick up that plane. It’s on its side on the benchtop. Wait – maybe first let’s have a look at what we have here. There is a proper full-sized cabinetmaker’s workbench, about 7′ long. It has a newly planed, flat top. The top is beech or maple, and about 3″ thick; the undercarriage is similarly heavy. A good bench should be solid, and not gallop about the workshop the moment you put the pedal to the metal.
Look at that benchtop. Many makers may have worked there before you, but it should be in pretty good condition – if not unmarked by their work, it should be at least a respectable surface. There have been accidents, yes, that caused the odd bit of damage – but it’s a dead-flat surface. We need flat, especially around the end vice, because that is where we work. The flatness of the bench transfers to the job; a hollow near the vice would show up in thin components planed on that bench. The bench has a front vice and an end vice. Working with these vices will be dogs. Whuff, whuff. No – these are pegs that fit in holes in the bench; they are used to secure your work.
The Rowden workbench.
The bench is probably the most important tool you will ever encounter as a maker. Later, you will make your bench; it will become the foundation upon which other work will be made. Right now, you’ll use one of the Rowden benches. Bench height is important. Stand alongside the bench; let your arm hang and bend your elbow just above the bench surface. Now spread the thumb and index finger of your opposite hand. Add that distance to your elbow. This is your bench height.
It’s good to work with a high bench because it protects your back. Much of your work will be done not with your arms and shoulders, but with your trunk – the core muscles – and thighs. This again will protect you from injury. There will be times when you need to get up higher and get on top of a job. Then, use a small “hop-up” – a 3″-high box that you stand upon. This lives under the bench’s bottom rail.
Then there is a bench light. It should be a decent, bright source of light that you can direct into the dark corners of your work. Without a good light you will not be at all times able to see where you are going. A quick maker will be pulling that light around as they move about the job. You need to see the line as you cut.
Then there is a box of hand tools – yours until you can sensibly choose your own. These are prepared tools; all edges have been sharpened by Jon Greenwood to a keen edge. They should all work straight out of the box. All the boxes are different; they hold the same tools but from different suppliers. Spend time trying out different chisels and gauges to help you make informed buying choices. Hand tools have to fit your hands comfortably; different brands offer different solutions at different prices.
Learn to read grain direction.
With these three – a bench, a light and a box of basic hand tools – you can make a lot of things and need nothing more. Machine work can be done by a local shop; pay them by the hour. You might want some power tools to help out later on, but they are not for now. Most machines are about saving you effort and energy; you want to engage them for those reasons – not because a table saw is more accurate than you are at sawing a straight line.
On the bench, there is a piece of walnut, about 18″ by 2″ or 3″. This is to teach you about wood and tools at the same time. Look at the wood. It has been selected because it is mild and well-mannered. It will have a sawn surface, but you will be able to see the grain of the timber. Think of it as the fur of a cat – which way would rough it up, and which way would lay smooth, if you stroked it? That’s the way you plane it, smooth. Place it the right way around between the dogs and tighten the end vice to just nicely hold the job.
This is the bench doing its job in superb fashion. Now you are free to dance about the workshop, waving a No. 6 to your heart’s content. You don’t have to hold the job – it’s fixed in solid position on the benchtop. All actions now are down to you – how you hold and present that edge to the job. This is you, a sharp edge and a piece of timber. Listen. Attend to what that sharp, well-adjusted tool tells you about the surface in front of you.
Is the note the plane makes a nice, high WHUZZ, or is it getting lower, telling you the edge is getting dull? Watch the shaving as it emerges over the frog – is it a clean, full-length shaving or is there a slight hollow just over there? You want information about that surface; the plane is your primary tool of inquisition.
Take overlapping plane passes down the work.
Consider your arms and shoulders during this process. The work should be coming from your trunk and thighs, not your arms. Imagine a piece of string tied around your plane handle and attached to your right nipple. If you push with your arms, it will pull on the string and hurt. Instead, use your core and legs. A long shaving then becomes like a dance step: forward step, forward step, forward step.
Plane a dead-flat surface on one of the 3″-wide faces. This is your “face side.” It is important, as this is the side from which all other faces are measured; get this wrong and you are in the poo. From day one, hour one, you are faced with quality. Screw this up, go too fast and slip it in under the bar, and it will come back later to bite you in the bum.
Flat is a terrible monster and can drive a newbie bonkers. But don’t let it get you. The sole of your plane is flat – I promise you – so use it. First, let’s look at the side-to-side movement of the plane. As you take a shaving, you can get it only about 1″ wide from the middle of the mouth of the plane – maybe less. If you are observant, you will see that the shaving is slightly thicker in its centre, thinning to nothing at the edge. This is deliberate; you want this.
Run the plane down the job, aiming to get a complete shaving for the whole length – then run another alongside it with a little overlap. If necessary to help you visualise, put a pencil mark across the job and plane it off. Suddenly, this is fun! The plane is working and you are doing the job – you are almost up to your knees in shavings. But the joy of taking long, ribbony strips of fragrant walnut is suddenly ruined by Jon Greenwood coming to your bench with a straightedge.
“Let’s see how flat it is.” What is usually the case is that you’ve been planing up onto the job and down off it, creating a crest in the middle. So, you learn to overcome this by applying more pressure to the plane’s toe as you come on to the work, and to the heel as you come off it.
Adjust your hand pressure on the plane as you come on and off the work.
Now check the surface with a straightedge, and hold the job up to the light and see what is going on. (You have a straightedge on the side of your plane; many skilled makers use that, as well as a purpose-made straightedge, for this and other jobs.)
High points can be removed with stopped shavings that address that area. As you approach flat, back the iron off to produce the finest shaving; this will allow the sole of the plane to have more effect. You might find yourself chasing a minor bump. Don’t do this; try taking a series of fine stopped shavings to the centre of the job, leaving pencil marks on at either end. Then, with three full-length passes, go right through, clearing off the pencil marks at both ends. There you are, nearly there.
Put winding sticks on your job parallel to one another.
Now check it for wind (that’s pronounced “whined”) by using winding sticks – one at each end, and peer across them from one end. Wind is twist. You can have a seemingly flat surface that is actually the shape of a propeller. If the winding sticks are out of parallel, they will visually tell you. This is the last check. You now have a face side to be proud of.
Mark it with a Face Mark, cannily pointing in the direction of grain – the direction the plane or machine must follow. It also points to the Face Edge which is the second surface. This is also a primary surface from which others are measured, so “heads up.”
Remember these steps. You may never do them again with a handplane but you will certainly do them with a pile of timber and a machine shop. The steps are identical: Face. Edge. Width. Thickness. End. Length. We use “FEWTEL” as a way to remember the order. You’ve just finished the first one. Now it’s on to the edge.
The objective is straight and flat on the narrower surface of the edge and, this is crucial, square to the face. Use a square to check this. (A good square can keep you safe; a rotten one, one that has been dropped, is a traitor in the camp that will undermine all your work.) Start off by sliding the stock of the square down the face side, and watch how the blade travels down the edge, looking for gaps between the wood and the blade. Use a bright light behind you to really see what’s going on. A square can easily be banged onto the job and tell you lies. Don’t let it.
A small combination square is ideal for checking that the face edge is square to the face.
Adjusting an out-of-square edge requires a well-set-up plane and some knowledge.
First, look at the plane. The blade, as you noticed earlier, is just a little curved – not straight across. This is important. This gives you the shavings you have previously enjoyed, with thickness in the centre tapering to nothing on the edges. Now look how that blade is set up in the plane body. Look down the sole from the toe, and you will see the thicker, dark shape of the blade in the centre fading out on either side.
Adjust the plane from side to side to make efficient use of the cambered blade.
This curve gives you the opportunity to adjust an out-of-square edge. Check which way the edge is out of square, then move the plane to the left or the right. What? Yes – look at the way the edge is out of square – it’s higher on either the right or the left. The centre of the plane blade takes a thicker shaving than the edge. So, shift the plane body to the left (or right). Run it down the edge and see a thicker shaving come off that side and nothing come off the other. Without that curved blade, you would not be able to adjust the edge in so accurate a way.
So, engage your brain and eyeballs before engaging the plane. Analyse the situation. Do you need more off here or over there? The square will help – again, register the stock on the finished face and slide the blade down the edge. Use your damn eyes. Hold the job and the square up to the light – don’t be lazy. Once it’s square and straight, you have a Face Edge (the second letter of FEWTEL). Put a small “f” on the edge, adjacent to the face mark. You can, if you want, lean it in the direction you want the edge to be worked. Good job. Move on to “W” – width.
A wheel gauge is an ideal tool for beginners. Here we’re scribing the width on a board.
This is a surface parallel to your Face Edge, and also must be square and straight. Now you need another tool – a marking gauge. Popular at Rowden are simple wooden gauges that (with a little work) scribe a clean line. However, there is another type, a cutting gauge with a small wheel on the end that I find is simpler for the beginner to use. Both are fine. Toolmakers want us to have both marking gauges and cutting gauges, so that they can sell us more tools. I believe in fewer tools that work better. A single sharp gauge should be able to scribe a sharp line both with and across the grain – but you will need a few gauges because they are often left set up for stages of a job.
Mark the finished edges.
Take the job, register the gauge off the Face Edge, and scribe a line as close to the sawn width as you can. Make sure it goes all the way around the job. Keeping its stock against the Face Edge will be tricky at first; take gentle stokes to avoid digging into the job.
Now, before we go any further, let’s have look at that little wheel that made that scribe line (if you’re using that type of gauge). Note that it is beveled on one side and flat on the other, and in this case the flat side is facing the stock of the gauge and the bevel facing the outside. Plane or pare the edge to approach the gauge line. Try to do this evenly all round so there is a little bit of gauge line flapping all around the surface. Then take one plane pass down to the actual line. Smack on.
Now use your gauge, registered off the flat Face, to mark the thickness all the way around the job. Plane to the line, using the same process as in Step 1. Now you have the T in FEWTEL. Jon will come around with a caliper to check the thickness, to within 0.2 of a millimetre. (It should be 0.1, but we are cutting you bit of slack here.)
Use the gauge to mark the thickness all around.
I had a great student named Martin Dransfield, a former Yorkshire miner, who stayed on and worked for me for a while. A student asked Martin, “How do your joints come up so tight and clean?” Martin, being a Yorkshireman, is a man of few words. He paused, rubbed his chin, then said, “Well tha’ just cuts to the f-ing line.” Which is true. Leave it on and you are effed. Go past it and you are equally effed, but in the other direction.
Thank you, Martin. You are well remembered for your accuracy and your economy of language.
Mark a clean line from corner to corner.
A word on marking-out tools. A cutting gauge, with its bevel on one side of the wheel, is one of a family of marking-out tools that give you a perfect dimension, not an approximate dimension. Mark with pencil and you get approximate. A pencil line has thickness. The marking knife is another tool in that precision family. My personal favourites, made by Blue Spruce Toolworks, are expensive, but you get what you pay for. The blade is long, thin and sensitive. What do I mean by sensitive? Will it take offence if I shout at it, go off in a huff and roll off the bench? No, I mean it will enable me to click that blade into an existing scribe line and I will feel that click in my fingers. That’s what you need from a good marking knife.
Use the corner of the Face Side line to align the knife for the Face Edge scribe line.
Marking with a pencil is fine for some jobs – but not the next one. You’re now at the “E” and “L,” the End Length, in FEWTEL. Place your square across the Face Side, with the stock on the Face Edge. Hold it firmly between the finger and thumb of your off hand. Pick up your marking knife with the bevel facing the waste and strike a nice firm line against the blade of the square. The line should be clear and clean from corner to corner.
Now you need to transfer that line to the face edge. Secure the job in your vice and put the knife in the existing line right at the edge of the job. Make sure the end of your knife pokes out a little. Now slide the square right up tight to it. When you are up and snug, remove the knife then use it to strike a line across the Face Edge. If you are spot on, the line will be a perfect continuation of the line on the Face Side, and you can carry it on around the work to meet the Face Side line. If it doesn’t meet up one of two things have gone wrong: you’ve mismarked around a corner or the job is not square.
If the marking out is wrong you have no chance of good work. Step back to find out the problem, and start again – either the planing or the marking out, as needed. Engage brain before plane.
I am making this point: Making is an intellectual and creative challenge. It demands that you engage fully with every atom of your being. Your full concentration. Otherwise, you will mess up.
The essence of this is that there are no shortcuts to quality work. There are lots of easier, quicker, lower-quality ways that suit lots of other situations, but if you want to do it right there is no shortcut. We see this penny drop with people; it may take a few days, or a few months. Tom, a student with us now, sat with me recently on a log of Western red cedar and said, “David, I have had a really, really, great life, and this has been the very best year, so far. However, if I had come for a trial week I would have run a mile. It took me weeks to see that there is no shortcut.” Thank you, Tom.
This “Doing Thing” isn’t easy. You need to listen to the tool in your hand. That blade has an edge engaging with the infinitely variable material before you: timber. That cutting edge in your hands is the closest you will ever get to understanding this material. The distance between you and it is, at this point, the shortest it will ever get. The information is traveling down that blade into your hand. But do you have the wit to receive it? Our bodies are wonderfully receptive information centres. The body feeds us with information. Do we listen well enough to the sound of the blade in the timber? Do we listen to the note the saw is making, to the feel of the chisel in our hands? Do we weigh the push the tool is requiring and look quizzically at the edge of the chisel? I hope so.
This is why sharpness is so important. With sharpness you have less shove and more sensitivity, control and information. Dull tool/dull maker.
We are asking you to use your eyes in a new and more intense way. This opens the door to learn drawing (more on that to come) for each stage of the process. The ability to draw quick bench notes is an essential skill in making things; it enables us to resolve what’s going on inside that joint.
The eight-week hand-tool initiation ritual builds a solid base upon which to learn machines and other processes. This is tiring, ache-inducing, hard-won accuracy. This is accuracy you have never achieved before. That’s control. That’s you in control. I like that.
Matt Cianci’s mom was reading a book in her living room, having just put Matt down for a nap upstairs, when she saw his 4-year-old body fly past the living room window and crash into the ground. She screamed, jumped up and threw open the door. Matt was in the bushes, a blanket tied around his neck, smiling.
“Mom, I can fly!” he said.
Matt laughs.
“That about describes me,” he says. “Always testing the limits of things. I guess you could say I’m a curious person with a vibrant imagination. I’m not a follower of the crowd.”
“My mom holding me when I was a wee babe … a well-placed hammer and peg toy in my lap!” — Matt
Matt was born in Evanston, Illinois, north of Chicago. His parents met in college in the 1970s, married, had a daughter in 1976, Matt in 1977, then moved to a suburb northwest of Chicago.
“I have the two greatest parents in the world because they are the two people I look up to more than anyone,” Matt says. “I had an exceptionally privileged upbringing, for a very simple reason. Anytime anything ever goes wrong in my life, I just have to take a moment and ask myself, ‘What would my parents do?’ And it’s never steered me wrong.”
Both of Matt’s parents have master’s degrees. Matt’s father is a biomedical engineer and his mother is a clinical social worker. When Matt was a kid, his mom stayed home, raised the kids and was (and is) a social justice warrior, says Matt, working with the greater Chicago chapter of the National Organization of Women, promoting the Equal Rights Amendment.
Matt, 6 or 7 years old. “In the woods (always!) and with the required makeshift tool belt and plastic screwdriver/stabbing implement.”
Always creative, Matt enjoyed drawing and playing with Lego bricks as a kid. At 6 years old he started making things out of scrap wood in his dad’s workshop. His grandfathers had workshops, too. One was an engineer; the other, a welder who worked for the United Automobile Workers at a General Motors factory until he was 75 years old. Matt’s ancestors were old-world Italian stone masons.
Matt loved to make guns out of wood (ironic, he says, giving his views on guns today) because his mother refused to buy him toy guns. But she couldn’t stop him from making them. Over the years, the guns became pretty elaborate.
Woodworking, Matt says, has always been a solitary activity.
“My dad preached nothing. He just showed everything. I don’t remember doing anything with my father, but he still taught me so many things because he did them and I just watched. Many of my values I’ve gotten from him that way. Just seeing what he did, whether it was getting up and going to work every day or how to deal with people or be a parent. He was more passive that way – classical modeling.”
When Matt was 10 years old, his dad was transferred and the family moved to Massachusetts.
“I had some social upheaval and I kind of struggled for the new few years.”
Academically, he did well – never a straight-A student but Bs without having to work too hard for them. He enjoyed writing and in high school, he wrote a lot of poetry.
“I’m a rather pensive, melancholy kind of person. So as soon as I started having any interaction with girls, it turned into romance drama. So that was good fodder. It brought out the tortured poet in me,” he says, laughing.
When he was around 12 years old, he started playing guitar.
“The band ‘in vivo’ likely playing for an empty hall with just the other bands and girlfriends watching (I’m far left).”
“From that point forward, my life focused on my band, playing the guitar and my girlfriend,” he says. “Then I got into metal and I started wearing all black. I was kind of a metalhead – you know, the tortured angry suburban white kid. But I really didn’t have anything to be angry about. I looked for targets of opportunity to put my angst out on.”
In high school, Matt started tinkering with guitars in his dad’s workshop, Eddie Van Halen-style. And then he was accepted to Providence College in Rhode Island.
“Nobody even suggested that not going to college was an option,” he says. “It was just what you did.”
“My college thrash metal band, ‘Sorrows Path’. I’m with glasses in the middle row, right (note the bleached hair … no wonder I’m bald).”
The college education was great, Matt says, but there were a lot of things he didn’t like about it. And by his sophomore year, things came to a head. He failed just about every class he took. He felt as if he was just going through the motions. He lacked purpose.
“I wasn’t happy,” he says. “I’ve always struggled with ups and downs. And I was like, ‘Something doesn’t feel right. What do I really want to do with my life?’”
In a magazine, he saw an ad for a guitar-building school on the West coast. He tacked the ad above his desk – a dream. But not all dreams come true, or at least not as envisioned.
“I stayed in school. I stumbled my way through college. I graduated with a degree in social work and I kept tinkering with guitars.”
Building Guitars & Furniture
After graduating in 1999, Matt and his then-girlfriend moved into an apartment in Providence. He had a job (in social work – vocational rehab), paid rent, was doing all the things adults do, but he still longed for something more. With time, he recognized the itch, the need to work with his hands. So he taught himself how to build guitars from scratch. And he fell in love with it.
Matt’s girlfriend at the time worked at Brown University as a research assistant. Matt says they were dirt poor. But they needed furniture. So Matt taught himself how to make furniture, too. Within a couple years, Matt, 25, and his girlfriend saved up enough money to buy an old house, and started rehabbing it.
“That was, essentially, how I learned woodworking,” he says. “Just trial and error. I didn’t really have any instruction and I didn’t read woodworking books.”
Every once in a while, Matt would get his hands on a copy of Fine Woodworking, and use it as a guide. But money was tight and more often than not, holding it while standing in line at the grocery store, he couldn’t justify the price. Around 2003, Matt remembers seeing an ad for a Lie-Nielsen dovetail saw in the back of Fine Woodworking. He wanted it.
“One of my early guitars. I made this one in 2002. It now hangs in my shop and I play it regularly.”
By now, Matt was well-versed in power tools, building furniture and beautiful guitars out of mahogany and curly maple. Next up were side tables for his bedroom. With the Lie-Nielsen dovetail saw heavy on his mind, he decided he was going to build two Shaker-style end tables in curly maple using only hand-cut joinery.
But at the time, the dovetail saw was $120. There was no way he could afford it. So he went to a big box store and bought a $10 saw. Now he had a blade. He scrounged together some scrap wood (curly maple), scrap metal and toilet bolts. And he made his own backsaw.
“And that’s when I learned to file saws,” he says.
In an old tool catalog, Matt found a one-page article titled “How to File Your Saws.” By now he had discovered eBay and he used it to buy a setting device. Following the tool catalog instruction step by step, he sharpened his handmade saw and used it to cut the dovetails in the two Shaker tables.
Around this time, both of his grandfathers were clearing out their workshops and Matt inherited a bunch of their hand tools. He continued building furniture for his house – a corner hutch, a table, an ottoman, a desk. Struggling to drill a deep hole through an exterior wall, he used a brace and bit for the first time, and was amazed by its torque and speed. He bought saws on eBay for a few dollars each, and practiced filing them. He quickly fell down the rabbit hole, he says, and he was happy. Until 2006. That was the year he and his girlfriend of eight years ended their relationship.
“My world got turned upside down,” he says. “I had to put all my tools into storage.”
An Intermission, a Tiny House & the Return of Woodworking
Matt’s ex-girlfriend bought him out of his half of the house.
“I walked away with this big wad of cash, which I had never had before,” he says. “And I’m not going to lie, I frivolously spent a good chunk of it.”
Always the guy with a girlfriend, Matt, now 29, had never been single before.
“I got back into playing guitar in seedy bars. I was not doing constructive things with my time or money. But it was just an absolutely wonderful experience I treasure because I needed to be on my own and just be young.”
Having realized how dysfunctional his relationship was, and the number it did on his self-esteem, Matt embraced his freedom.
“I just kind of went nuts and indulged myself,” he says.
About a year later, in 2007, he decided he needed to stop blowing his money on guitars and rounds of shots for the entire bar. He was living in an apartment, but wanted to put money back into a house. He found one pretty quickly, a 600-square-foot ranch in Warwick, Rhode Island.
“I fell in love with it because it had the most perfect, dry, sound basement I have ever been in,” he says. “And at that time in my life, basements were where all the good stuff happens. I remember going into this basement and thinking, This is the perfect blank space for my existence. And the upstairs was nice too – it had all the stuff you needed – but I was subterranean at that point.”
Matt bought the house, built out a nice basement workshop and started a part-time business making furniture on commission.
“Well, I say business, but I’m probably flattering myself because in business, you’re supposed to make money,” he says, laughing. “I remember building these pieces of furniture and essentially charging people for the lumber and, like, a little bit of money for me. I remember building this one lady this all-solid cherry desk. And I still love that desk. If I ever found that lady I’d offer to buy it back from her. I remember charging her $400 for it and the lumber cost me $300. I am such a horrible business person. I really am.”
Matt still worked full-time in the mental health field and most of his early customers were colleagues.
“You feel bad saying ‘This is going to be $2,000.’ Because these people, who are essentially your acquaintances or friends, they’re not going to pay that. Because, who the hell are you? You’re not Sam Maloof, right? You’re just the guy who has decided you’re going to be a furniture maker. I did that for a little while and literally lost money. Because I also justified all these purchase for tools and such. Well I have to buy this mortiser because I’m a professional furniture maker now so you’re taking in maybe $1,000 and spending $2,000. So that was silliness.”
But Matt was happy. He had his woodworking, his day job, another part-time job, and he was single – for a while. Around 2008, Matt had a whirlwind six-month romance. And for the second time in his life (the first was with his ex-girlfriend who he shared a house with) he bought a ring. It didn’t work out. But then, in 2009, Matt met Angie, now his wife, at work.
(An aside: Matt liked the idea of dating people at work, thinking it would be less work. “I would not – would not – recommend that to anyone,” he says. “Especially having an affair with your boss.” Matt laughs and says he hopes that if there’s anything folks take away from this article, it’s that he’s not your go-to guy for romance advice. “I did everything wrong. But the one thing I got right was that I met my wife at work and it just worked out.”)
Matt says he didn’t know Angie was going to be his wife at first.
“But she says she knew instantly,” he says. “We dated three months and she was like, ‘Hey, do you want to get married?’”
She even bought a ring. Matt said yes, and asked if she and her daughter wanted to come live with him in his “teeny-tiny little house” in Rhode Island. She did. They got married in 2010.
“I’m madly in love with my wife,” he says. “We’ve been married 14 years.”
Matt and Angie, 2010
Marriage gave Matt’s life a purpose and focus he hadn’t had before.
“It calmed me down and just made me grow up,” he says.”
And with that newfound focus, the saw bug came back.
The SawWright
Matt started writing a blog called The Saw Blog. People took to it and began asking him questions about saws. And then they started asking him to sharpen their saws.
“I was like, ‘You’ll give me money?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah!’ And I was like, ‘OK!’ Again, not a good businessman.”
One day, in 2011, Mark Harrell, founder of Bad Axe Tool Works, called. Mark wanted to focus entirely, at least for a little while, on making saws. But at the time, he also had a sizeable sharpening repair business.
“He tested me,” Matt says.
Mark asked to buy a tuned-up saw. He wanted Matt to show him what he could do. And if was good, Mark said he’d send Matt all his sharpening work. So Matt took an old saw and fully restored it – polished it up and sharpened it.
“Now I had never seen anyone sharpen a saw,” Matt says. “I had never owned another saw sharpened by somebody else. But I thought I’d do my best and send it to him. And he loved it.”
And that was the start of Matt’s saw-sharpening business.
“I became a professional saw doctor and it really blew up,” Matt says. “And I figured out how to pay myself a good wage for what I was doing.”
Matt also began getting invitations to teach saw sharpening at woodworking schools around the country, which was welcome additional income. Coming full circle, Lie-Nielsen also invited Matt to teach.
Matt came up with a name – The SawWright. He was sharpening saws and still working full-time, but now he wanted to try his hand at saw making.
“My prototype for the carcase saw I made for sale based on Smith’s Key. The backdrop is an article I wrote describing the history of Smith’s, as well as my design and building process.” — Matt
In 2012, Matt and Angie had a son, Francis. Matt remembers sitting in the hospital room and creating the layout for a website to sell custom-made saws while Angie and Francis slept. He started making backsaws based on an early 19th-century pattern he found in Smith’s Key. He contracted with a machinist to mill the backs. He wrote about his process in the Society of American Period Furniture Makers annual American Period Furniture Journal. And he sold them through his site.
In 2013, two big things happened. Angie and Matt had a daughter, Phoebe, and Matt decided he wanted to make saws full-time. So he took a leave of absence from his full-time job.
“And absolutely hate it,” he says. “I was in my shop fricking 12 hours a day in the basement making saws, and I was fricking miserable. I was just longing for human interaction.”
The full-time saw-making gig lasted a few months, and Matt went back to his old full-time job. It was an itch, he says, that he simply had to scratch to get it out of his system.
“Similar to when I was doing furniture, I didn’t know how to price things,” he says. “Sharpening and repair? I can do that. There’s something about the psychology of it. I know what it’s worth and I know what people will pay and it works. When it comes to making things, apparently I just will work for nothing.”
Today, sharpening and repair remain his niche.
“I like doing it part-time and I like having my day job where I can work with people because even though I hate people, I need them. I am a social animal. I’ve found my balance.”
In 2013, Kevin Ireland, then publisher of Popular Woodworking, called Matt while he was driving home from work. (Matt has always worked in Massachusetts and lived in Rhode Island. It’s a long commute – an hour and a half each way – but he loves the distinct separation of the two.) Kevin wanted to know if Matt wanted to make a DVD. Matt could hardly believe it.
“Here this magazine flies me out, treats me kind of like I’m a celebrity, we’re filming – it was surreal,” he says. “It was great.”
They made two DVDs – Build a Custom Backsaw and Super Tune Your Backsaw – in just a couple of days. It took a while for Matt to come to terms with the idea that he knew how to do something so well, other people would be willing to buy a DVD to learn from him.
“To me, the whole thing is like people want you to come teach them how to tie their shoes,” he says. “I don’t mean to sound like a pompous sort of expert but saw sharpening to me is kind of a mundane thing. It’s very challenging for people, I get it, but to me it’s not this complicated thing like, ‘Hey, I’m going to impart this wisdom to you that no one else can.’ I figured it out in my basement and if I figured it out, anybody can do it. I’m not that smart or talented, God knows. So it was just surreal.”
To this day, Matt is still surprised by recognition and publicity.
“Me and my love today (my wife’s in it too) lol!” — Matt
“I get to wake up every day and have this reasonably comfortable life because people have this faith in me to sharpen their saws and pay me really well for it,” Matt says. “I just feel so incredibly lucky to be able to do that. I’m grateful I get to live this way. I’m not saying I’m famous or a big deal, but it’s kind of like a dream come true. And I love it. And it’s really afforded me the ability to raise my family. If it weren’t for this, I would be doing something else that is not as fun, not as rewarding and certainly doesn’t pay nearly as well, which would put a lot of demand on my time and sanity. So it’s been cool.”
A Book, 9 Years in the Making
Matt has known Christopher Schwarz for more than a decade, via the occasional email, meet up at a woodworking show, or saw sharpening job. Around 2014, Chris needed a technical editor for a new Lost Art Press book by Andrew Lunn about making saws. He called Matt.
“I was like, ‘How much do you want me to pay you to let me do that?’” Matt says. Chris hired Matt (and paid him).
“I got to read and edit this whole thing. It was such a cool experience and a privilege and amazing. There’s so much wisdom in it. As a saw maker, I really loved a lot of it – he got so much of it right.”
But the book was never published. Andrew quit making saws and exited the woodworking world entirely.
Matt thought a lot about that unpublished book, including the last short chapter at the end that provided a brief overview of how to file a saw. One day, Matt asked Chris if he’d ever like to publish a book just on saw sharpening. Chris was interested. He asked Matt to write up a detailed outline and a sample chapter.
“I had this running theory: If I can teach, I can write a book,” Matt says. “I have this idea, I think, of what people need to know. And I have a lot of experience with what people struggle with when they start sharpening saws. I wanted to put that in a book to get more people to be able to do it. Because if they want to try, there’s nowhere else to learn it.”
In the 1980s, Harold “Dynamite” Payson wrote a short book called “Keeping the Cutting Edge: Setting and Sharpening Hand and Power Saws.” But Matt wanted to do something different – lots of macro photography, close-ups of important steps. A book that would have saved him from ruining 20 to 30 saws when he was starting out.
Matt wrote an outline and sample chapter, and sent it to Chris.
“He’s like, ‘Great. Let’s do it. I’ll send over a contract,’” Matt says. “And I was like, ‘What? I didn’t figure you’d say yes. Shit, now I’ve got to write a book.’”
Matt signed the contract in 2015. Then spent nine years writing the book.
“I think I know how to write,” says Matt, who does a lot of technical writing on policy and regulation in his day job. But he struggled with taking something that is such a huge part of his everyday life and putting it into words. At first, he was writing a chapter a year.
“I edit myself to death,” he says. “I will go back and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. I have written this book 10 times over. There are entire versions of this book that no one has ever seen.”
In college, Matt took a writing class that he loved and there he learned the importance of efficient writing. His professor would say, “Don’t say in 10 words what you can say in six.” So Matt knew his first attempts, meandering and laden with fancy language, needed work. He’d edit, turning 1,000 words into 150, saying the same thing but clearer.
“But that process for me is not fast,” he says. “It takes forever to do and that’s the loop I was stuck in.”
A few years in, the bones of the book were there, but Matt considered it only half done. He also had another obstacle: photography.
“Chris, he’s a freaking genius, right?” Matt says. “He’s just this incredibly smart, talented person. And I was like, ‘So Chris, what about the photography?’ And he’s like, ‘You can do it. You can do it with a digital camera.’ And I’m like, ‘Chris, I don’t even have a smartphone. I don’t know what a digital camera is.’ But he convinced me I could do the photography.”
Chris sent him a list of things to buy along with a how-to photography guide he gives to writers. But the whole process felt daunting to Matt. Every once in a while Matt would check in with Chris, worried about how long the book was taking. And Chris would always give him words of encouragement: “It takes as long as it takes. You’re doing fine.”
One day, Matt was teaching a class at Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking and ran into Mike Pekovich, creative director of Fine Woodworking. Matt and Mike had become friendly over the years and Mike knew Matt was working on a book. At one point, he asked about the photography. Matt told him he was trying to do it himself but so far he hadn’t figured out which end of the camera faces the work. Mike laughed and offered to teach Matt photography.
“Talk about privilege,” Matt says.
Mike underlined the importance of the book Matt was writing. And the only payment he wanted for the lesson was making a good book with pictures. So Matt went to Mike’s house and spent an entire day in Mike’s shop learning not only the technical aspects but also composition and lighting.
However, Matt found it difficult to find the time to replicate the process in his own shop. Another year went by and Chris, while talking with Matt about some saw sharpening, asked about the book.
“And I was like, ‘Chris, I’ve got to be honest with you. I have gotten one-on-one, day-long, private instruction from Mike Pekovich on how to do photography and I still can’t do it. I can’t make time for it. This book is going to take me another 10 years to do the photography.’ And then Chris, just casually in his Chris way, goes, ‘Well you know, I could just come up there and shoot all the pictures for you in a day or two.’ And I was like, ‘What?’”
In summer 2023, Chris drove up to Rhode Island. Matt created a shot list for every photo he needed and spent a few days on prep work and staging. They shot the whole book in two days.
“It was awesome,” Matt says.
Matt also got to spend time with Chris in a way he never had before.
“I got a better sense of his vision and what the business is like. And he’s just an amazing person. He told me his business model is to essentially take care of as many people as he can in his life. Now I understand so much more about why he does what he does. And it’s not charity with him. He just means it in this really profound way. He’s like, ‘I’m going to find all the talented people that I can and if they have things they want to do that I can help facilitate I’m going to use whatever resources and privilege I have to help remove the bullshit so that they can be creative and prosperous in a way that he has been able to.’ I was just like, ‘Wow. That’s really fucking cool.’”
Wrapping up the photography lit a fire under Matt. And although Chris never put Matt under a deadline, he said it would be great to publish the book within a year.
“I just buckled down and every free moment I had, nights, weekends, I just sat on my porch and wrote,” Matt says.
“It’s been totally surreal,” Matt says. “I just have to kind of pinch myself. I started sharpening saws on a lark 20 years ago because I was literally too poor to buy a tool I wanted and here I am, 20 years later. I wrote a book and people pay me to do this for them. I’ve gotten to meet all these amazing people and just spend time with people who are so talented and smart and just can’t help become more talented and smart on your own just because you’re with them. And that’s pretty cool.”
Inigo (right) and Fezzig (left), who are darn near cute enough to distract from that masterful shell carving in the tiger maple Queen Anne lowboy behind them.
Comments are now closed. Thank you, John, for hosting!
Today’s Open Wire is hosted by our friend John Cashman, a historian long-time woodworker (mostly hand tools) who lives in eastern Massachusetts. He’ll no doubt be assisted by Inigo and Fezzig; all misspellings are theirs.
If anyone has questions on Shaker boxes, now is your chance. Likewise, questions on Queen Anne and Chippendale pieces, any of a million (give or take) woodworking books on topics ranging from birdhouses to Spanish furniture in colonial Peru.
John reminds us that, “I am no chair expert. Not remotely. I’ve made a half dozen or so, and half of those were of the Queen Anne and Chippendale variety. Aside from being seating, they bear no resemblance in construction to stick chairs. You can still ask, but if I’m not sure of the answer, I’ll say so.”
As always, brevity is appreciated, and comments will close at around 5 p.m. Eastern. Also, for some reason that we can’t figure out, replies are not appearing directly under the comment to which one is replying. Apologies for the annoyance; we’re working on it.
We have brought back the old cover color for the final printing of this edition.
When we released “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” (almost 13 years ago to this day), the goal was to create a book that looked like an odd old text that you might find on a library shelf in the basement. We chose a vintage tan cover cloth, binding process and diestamp that all fed into that look.
Unfortunately, the printer had difficulty with the manufacturing. The glue that reinforced the signatures was either spooged on or non-existant. The endsheets weren’t glued right, so some of the books were bound too tight. Others were too loose. Some books fell apart (we replaced those). All in all, it was a bit of a let-down after two years of work on the text.
After that, we spent a long time working with the press people to get results we are both happy with.
Today we are releasing the final printing of the first edition of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” and we decided to return to that original look to see if we could nail it this time. If you ever wanted to get a copy of ATC that looks like the original, this is your (last) chance.
All copies of this book that are purchased from Lost Art Press will be autographed by me.
This is the 16th printing of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” We’ve sold 45,000 copies of the book. And the last 2,000 that arrived today will mark the end of this edition.
In time, it will be replaced by a new edition that will be redesigned, printed in color and revised to reflect the changes in the marketplace and in the tools in my chest. I don’t know when this new edition will be released. Probably in 2025 or 2026 (the 15th anniversary of the book). It’s something I have been working toward for a couple years.
Kale made this short video of us going to fetch the new edition….
The chest itself will remain unchanged in the new edition. But Megan Fitzpatrick and I have devised dozens of improved methods to make the work easier. These will be in the new edition. And I might add a new coat of paint to the old boy. It has seen a lot of work.
The final tan edition is now available in our store.
