To be honest, the vintage Ulmia workbench in our shop is actually closer in design to Charles Holtzapffel’s workbench design than this bench. But I wanted to build a bench with a twin-screw face vise, and Holtzapffel’s bench was the closest analog to what I wanted.
But I wasn’t having Holtzapffel’s tool tray. Or the European tail vise. Or the drawer. Or the knockdown bolts.
And since building it in 2006, I’ve added a leg vise so we can swap back and forth between the twin-screw (for dovetailing) and the leg vise (for everything else).
In addition to adding the leg vise, we also added a Record planing stop, like the one on the Nicholson workbench. But other than that, the bench hasn’t been changed much.
It’s a great bench – a perfect size for our crowded workshop. And it’s usually the bench that most students grab first when they arrive (if they can’t get to my bench).
This is Part Two of my interview with Kate Swann of the Florida School of Woodwork. You can read Part One here.
As Kate and her husband worked on their money pit home, she started acquiring tools. “I loved using them. It was magic.” She decided to make a table. “This was still pre-internet. I had no idea how.” She cut up some pieces of wood and put them together. As she carried it proudly up from the basement workshop to show her husband, one of the legs fell off.
Kate worked for a company that did credit card processing, but she spent more and more of her spare time learning to make things with wood.
“There was a local woodworkers’ store, Woodcrafters. [She makes clear that it was an independent store, not a branch of Woodcraft.] It was a wonderland — all these amazing tools with names like Powermatic and Jet. And wood! And people who would tell you about it.” One of the staff members took the time to explain to her how the various tools worked. “I had the most blissful times,” she remembers. “I fell in love with wood. In the northwest there is such an amazing domestic hardwood scene.”
The things she made were still “not very good.” But that would soon change. The Oregon College of Art and Craft had a 13-week program on Wednesday evenings and all day on Saturdays. She signed up. She got to learn from accomplished makers who weren’t judgmental about her ideas, some of which were more sculptural and experimental than was typical of the curriculum. Her pieces stopped falling apart. People started asking if they could buy them. “I’m my father’s daughter, so I said, “How much would you pay for it?” They named a number and I sold it to them.” I began this side hustle of making things and selling them. I didn’t know what to charge for them, and they would tell me to pick a number. My picking a number was very influenced by my lack of confidence at the time. But I really enjoyed that freedom to make and just explore. A lot of those things were very rudimentary, and not structurally appropriate. I didn’t know about grain. But I just loved it. I was deeply obsessed and in love with the craft of making.”
“Swannneck”
Then came 9/11. Her son, Caleb, was 18 months old. Her husband was recalled to active duty and offered a choice between three deployments: Afghanistan, Iraq or Tampa. With an 18-month-old, they chose the famous cigar-making city on Florida’s Gulf Coast. (The two divorced in 2015.)
Kate knew no one in her industry, so she set up a woodworking shop in the garage and got a listing in the Yellow Pages. Her prize possession was a Powermatic 66 she’d bought with her first bonus check at the job in Portland; it ran on 220 volts. There was only one outlet in the garage, and it was 110. So she stretched a heavy duty extension cord from the dryer outlet in the laundry room upstairs through the window and into the garage.
While establishing herself in the new community, she decided to work on her graduate degree at the University of South Florida.
One of her first gigs made her realize she needed better premises. In an entrepreneurial leap of faith, she rented a 600-square-foot workshop she describes as a “cell-like building in a bad part of town.” Nevertheless, she says, “I remember walking in and going, ‘This is mine. This is where I want to be, what I want to be doing. It was amazing…. In the process of doing commissions for clients you learn new skills, new approaches and techniques – really, my commissions taught me.”
One day, while she was resawing cocobolo in her non-air-conditioned shop in the middle of summer, a guy poked his head through the door. “Cocobolo turns your skin orange,” she points out. “So I was looking kind of weird – orange mustache, orange creases.” The man, Carl, asked if she would take him on as an apprentice. Still thinking of herself as “the most amateur woodworker,” she found the notion ridiculous.
Not long after, Kate got a commission for a large project. The client, who was a walk-in, began, “I have this project I want built. I’ve had a couple of other people build it for me and didn’t like it, so I refused to pay them” — hardly the kind of introduction that inspires confidence. The client wanted some way to display a collection of dolls dressed in national costumes. Kate proposed a set of three cabinets. “I was completely intimidated,” she lets on now. “But I have no fear.” Thinking another pair of hands would be useful for the job, she called Carl. He came in every day, and it turned out that he was a great engineering woodworker. Thus began a relationship that led to a formal business partnership. Over the years she and Carl have collaborated on numerous pieces. Both have learned. That synergy has allowed both to grow as woodworkers and build things that neither could have done by themselves.
“The Three Sisters”
Kate decided to name the cabinet “The Three Sisters” after a bit of northwest Native American folklore. A chief had three daughters and was ready for them to be married. They didn’t want to marry; they rejected all of the suitors he arranged. In punishment, the shaman turned them into mountains so they could bear witness. As Kate sees it, “They were bearing witness not to settle for something that wasn’t right for you.” When she and Carl delivered the cabinet, she shared the folktale with the client, who burst into tears and asked, “Did you know I’m pregnant with my third daughter?”
Kate with Carl Johnson
Kate counts a piece she was commissioned to build for the chief of medicine at Harvard Medical School as one of the highlights of her career. Another was participating in the build of a 24-foot boardroom table made of salvaged wood from a cigar factory. Both were things she would never have imagined herself doing.
“Pagoda”
Along the way she discovered surface and textural embellishment, which she loves. “I found that for me, it’s one of the loveliest things to do, the gilding of the lily. The finishing touch that brings the piece to life.”
Around 2004 she got a grant to take a turning course at Arrowmont with Betty Scarpino. Sharon Doughtie was the teaching assistant; Kate was smitten by Sharon’s work with pyrography and has made that art form a signature of her own work. “The furniture making has become less important than the stories I embroider onto the surfaces of a piece,” she explains. “The pieces [of furniture] are truly canvases now.”
“Winds of the Prairie” table
Around 2008 Kate had a call from someone asking if she would teach her woodworking. She agreed. The student came back regularly. Kate enjoyed teaching, and word got out. A few years later she made a website. More students came. “It started interfering with my capacity to get my furniture pieces done.”
In 2009 Carl had bought a disused motor rewinding garage that hadn’t been occupied for a quarter of a century; after a year renovating, it became their woodworking shop.
The school building, before renovation
Eight years later, Carl’s wife retired and his 94-year-old mother passed away. They’d had a couple of difficult clients and were weary. It was time for them both to start a new chapter, and for Kate that was the School.
In 2017 Kate set the school up as a corporate entity and started developing the programming. There were many makers she admired and wanted to spend time with. She also felt, and still does, that her time at the Oregon College of Art and Craft was really precious, and the way she articulates that sense is a fitting expression of how she sees her own school:
It was there that I realized I’d found something that filled my heart with passion and let my imagination and ideas run wild, and my brain and hands play together. It was a wonderful discovery to know I could do that. That I could make — that moment of magic when you step back and think, look at that capacity to create! I think about my teachers at the time, and it was such a gift. They opened a door into a lifelong passion. I feel like I have a responsibility to open that door for others and be a good steward of the knowledge in my head. I’ve had many years of making and learned many things, sometimes in hard ways, and I need to gift that back.
Opening the school was not a scary thing, she says, but more like an opportunity to say thank you. “I feel incredibly grateful. I still don’t feel like I’m worthy. I’m humbled by the caliber of instructors that come in. The delight at sharing the craft is so rewarding. It’s a wonderful place to come and learn.”
As for her evening classes toward a graduate degree, that project also has a happy ending. In 2006, when Kate graduated with a master’s in Instructional Technology, her parents flew over from London. “It was marvelous,” she says. “That 10-second walk across the stage — I’ve never seen my dad’s smile bigger. They earned that moment.”
Editor’s note: This 1949 column from “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years” sums up two opinions about woodworking that don’t get much discussion. The first is one that I talk about all the time with woodworkers over a beer: We have a supply-side problem. One of the reasons that people don’t buy nice, handmade furniture is because there isn’t a lot of it around. Or, as Hayward puts it:
“Any revival must ultimately depend upon the work of the individual, and the more men there are turning out furniture of good quality and design, the more people are going to be influenced in the right direction. It must be remembered that although, as a nation, we have lost immeasurably, as individuals we have gained.”
A close examination of our beer culture is analogous. People had to taste the difference between a $4 beer and a $1 beer to understand why someone sane would charge $4 for a beer (this is in the 1990s). Dedicated brewers made beer even if the money wasn’t there. And lots went out of business in the 1990s. But eventually….
The second point Hayward makes in this column is that we are all too soon to rush to complete a piece of work. When doing our best work, the last 5 percent takes almost as much effort as the first 95 percent. But that is what differentiates good work from excellent work. I cannot always push myself to the limit. I have to eat. But when I can afford to do it, I always sleep with a smile on my face.
— Christopher Schwarz
The Will and the Deed
It looks as though to-day we are at the beginning of a new era. Values are shifting and changing, in many ways coming nearer to an ancient order of things than once we would have thought possible. Work in farm and field has become once more of prime importance, so has the skill of the technician, the man with the trained hands. We are being compelled to live more realistically, to see money as of less importance than things, a token of barter of little worth unless there are the goods available for barter. We may feel indeed that the time is ripe for the revival of craftsmanship, for the craftsman can only be truly valued when things are truly valued, and when productive, creative work is put first in the scheme of things.
***
We may feel that much of our old tradition of craftsmanship has been lost, that fine tradition which has been described as “the fearless, faithful, inherited energies that worked on and down from death to death, generation after generation.” As a nation we flung it recklessly away, too pleased with our new prosperity to realise that we had flung away the baby with the bathwater and that it had been a very lusty child. Nowadays we can realise something of what we have lost, shocked into realisation by the prevalence of low standards of workmanship against which a robust, inherited tradition is the best kind of safeguard.
***
Nevertheless, signs of revival are all about us. The need for good quality and design is entering more consciously into industry, and every effort is being made to interest the public in it. The public, that is to say, the purchaser, is in the last resort the judge, and as the general level of taste rises so will the quality of the goods that are offered to meet it. The woodworker, whether he be a home craftsman or professional cabinetmaker, can be an influence all for the good. Any revival must ultimately depend upon the work of the individual, and the more men there are turning out furniture of good quality and design, the more people are going to be influenced in the right direction. It must be remembered that although, as a nation, we have lost immeasurably, as individuals we have gained. The potential craftsman of to-day may indeed be out of touch with his traditional inheritance, but he has hopes and opportunities which his forbears never knew. Lose touch with it altogether he cannot because the instinct for creation is in every man’s blood. And if with fidelity and honesty of purpose he makes use of the wider opportunities which now every citizen takes for granted, then he will be among those who are helping to forge a new tradition in every way worthy of the old.
***
Ruskin, who sprinkled many a homely truth among his art teachings, said that, “The weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which worthily used will be a gift also to his race for ever.” In how many of us, I wonder, does the gift lie dormant? It is like a seed which must be fed and watered before it can yield its fruit, and wether it will be a weakly or a sturdy plant depends mainly on just how much attention we are prepared to give it. Honest, persevering work is the first requirement, and with it goes the courage to battle with any defect of our own temperament, whether of impatience or carelessness or laziness, that will hinder and thwart our progress. In this way a man may become a competent handicraftsman, turning out work which will not shame him.
***
But say he wants more than this. He has seen examples of fine craftsmanship and is ambitious to become a really fine craftsman. It means still deeper cultivation, not only by still further increasing the skill of his hands but by feeding his intelligence as well. He has to train his eye to recognise beauty of form and to teach his heart to love it, so infecting his judgment that it becomes intuitively fine, expressing itself in the smallest part of whatever thing he is making. To the craftsman of old much of this came by inherited instinct, fed by the example of the older men and the examples of fine work all about him. We have consciously to acquire it and go out to seek examples for ourselves. Time and opportunity are on our side. What we most need is the will.
***
And that I fancy is the crux of the whole matter. In our wisest moments we see the good we strive to follow, but we are not always wise. Other things come in to distract and deter us, it is so easy to drift along, always intending to do this thing but somehow never quite succeeding. We hold part of ourselves back, that last ounce it hurts us to give, because to give it we have really to live actively in every fibre of our being and give up some of the easier, indolent pleasures. Is it worth the sacrifice? We know, in our best moments, how greatly it is worth it. When we have achieved a piece of work which we know is really good, when our whole being thrills with the satisfaction of it, we are touching a kind of happiness which nothing else yields, a happiness which alone satisfies the deepest craving of our nature. We need the strength and courage so to work that the things we fashion with our hands express the best that is in us. Our purpose is there, our knowledge, these things we can compass. But to express them at their highest takes the staunch will, the integrity of purpose that does not count the cost. Enough that in so doing we find our own highest fulfillment.
This was the first slab-top workbench I built, and I made it entirely by hand (save for one long rip when I defaulted to the band saw because I thought I might pass out).
The bench’s size was dictated by the wood that was available, which is why it’s 18-1/2” wide and less than 6’ long. You work with what you got. It’s a good bench for an apartment, but its small stature is its biggest weakness.
The other fun part about the benchtop was that the cherry had rotted a bit, and so I stabilized it with epoxy, which I tinted with black iron filings. This was in 2010, and I had no idea that epoxy and rotted slabs would ever be a thing. And then Roy Underhill, decided to take a whack at it.
If you are interested in reading about its construction, Popular Woodworking has been vacating its vaults of all the plans we built up there through the last 20 years. They’ve made it a free plan, which you can get here.
If you are going to make your own version, make the top 22” to 24” wide and a full 6’ or 7’ long. And skip that stupid door below (it wasn’t my call).
Some products shown in the video. These are not affiliate links.
Editor’s note: The chair chat you are about to read (or not, if you are scared of Canadian humor) this time features two unique chairs. Please note neither Chris, Rudy nor Klaus is related to the makers of these chairs.
We don’t authenticate chairs – we just talk about what we like and don’t like based on the available photos and data. We have not seen these chairs in person. As always, you should shield small children from reading Chair Chats because the humor is infantile, and the language is salty, not sweet.
Editor’s note: This 1949 column from “
