This is the final tour in our series. I have one more workbench on site – the Loffelholz workbench – but it is upstairs and in use as part of a makeshift kitchen (we ripped out our kitchen on March 1 and then the project halted because of the pandemic). So someday I’ll post a tour of that bench after our kitchen is rebuilt.
The bench in this video is a personal experiment. I have worked on lightweight commercial benches such as this all over the world, including some schools. I always wondered if I could improve them to the point where I might say: Yeah, this is a good idea for a beginning woodworker.
I improved this bench with about $50 in additional materials (cheap plywood, lag screws, shelf brackets and carriage bolts). But it’s still not as good as a bench you build yourself. All told, this bench cost $270 once you add up the cost of the bench ($200), shipping ($20) and improvements ($50). For $270 I could build a lifetime bench that is heavy and functional. Here it is.
So why even show this video to you? Well, I know that some of you own these benches. You inherited them or bought them out of ignorance or in the throes of drunkenness. If you are in this situation, these are cheap improvements that will help. Also, any bench can benefit from more rigidity, and this video shows you two ways to do that.
Finally, and I say this in the video but it bears repeating: I am not picking on this particular manufacturer. There are loads of these benches on the market. And they are all about the same quality. This was the one I thought was the best of the featherweights.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the series. I apologize for the low-rent quality of the video and audio. But it was the fastest way to do 10 five-minute videos without hijacking our entire book-production process.
After looking at these videos over myself, you can rest assured I am not headed to YouTube anytime soon.
James Krenov digs through lumber in a Stockholm yard (but not the Forsberg brothers mentioned on page 8 of “Notebook”).
This post is a continuation from last week’s post, a “read-along” or book club of sorts. This week, I’ll be discussing the first section of “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” by James Krenov, up to page 23. Next week, we’ll be reading on from here up to page 51, and you can leave comments and questions about pages 23-51 in the comments section at the bottom of this post, which I’ll answer and incorporate into next week’s post.
Immediately upon opening, it’s clear that James Krenov’s first book, “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook,” is not really a “how-to” in any sense. There’s no table of contents. The first writing past the acknowledgements is a poem by Chuang Tzu, a Taoist poet who wrote in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. The paragraphs are long and read like the spoken word. If you have the first edition, there’s an Old Testament quote on the copyright page, Sirach (or Ecclesiastes) 38:34.
Atypical though it was, this book was a huge success. Nancy Newman Green, Krenov’s editor at Van Nostrand Reinhold (with whom I had the pleasure of talking with recently), remembers that they had a saying around VNR about Krenov:
“If you hung up a sign in the middle of the woods that said ‘James Krenov will be here to speak at 3 o’clock,’ a few thousand people would be there to hear him talk.”
But I’m getting off track – suffice to say, the book was popular, and what made it popular were the words and philosophy Krenov detailed. So let’s get back to the text. The rest of all of this, the history, the lead-up, the legacy – for that, you can read my biography when it comes out.
One of the first things that strikes me about Jim’s writing is just how informal and stream-of-consciousness it is – in fact, you can practically hear Jim reading it out loud. If you haven’t heard Jim speak before, you’re missing out – say what you want about his philosophy, aesthetics or attitude, he was a remarkable lecturer, and he had a gift for elocution.
This book is, in fact, a collection of transcribed essays or lectures – in 1970, Einar and Kasja Telander (Einar is the silversmith for whom Jim built the veroola kitchen cabinet in 1976, which was photographed for “Worker in Wood”) gave him a voice recorder for his 50th birthday, and he took to it immediately, using it both for correspondence and for the dictation of his essays and books. He worked with both the tape recorder and his written notes at the workbench to write his books, bouncing between them to compose the writing.
The tapes for “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” were transcribed by Rochester Institute of Technology, as a favor to Jim – Craig McArt, the man responsible for recommending him as a teacher at RIT and the person who most encouraged him in the writing this first book, was by 1973 the chair of the Department of Industrial and Environmental Design at RIT. McArt had visited Jim in Stockholm back in 1966 and had carried back with him an essay written by Jim called “Wood: The Friendly Mystery,” which was published by Craft Horizons in 1967 (here’s a copy on the Craft Council’s archive website). If you’re interested, give that article a read and keep it in mind before you do next week’s reading.
So, once we know that the book was dictated, it puts the book in a different context – it might better be looked at as a series of lectures. Knowing that, let’s look more at the first passage, really just nine short pages, and pull a few important moments out.
Krenov in his workshop in Stockholm, with a few pieces on parade – in the background, you can see a few of Jim’s wall cabinets (and his tool cabinet at the back left), in the foreground is his “Writing table of Italian Walnut” made in 1977. You can see in the satin luster of the table’s surface that Jim didn’t heavily polish or build finishes on his work – he wanted to preserve the tactile impression of the wood, and even left a good many of his cabinets completely untreated.
The first half of the passage is, in effect, an ode to wood as a material. In the opening paragraph, ironically beginning with “It’s always a little difficult for me to begin talking about wood” right before he goes into a very eloquent missive about wood, he relates that he feels that wood, in his own way of thinking, really is alive. Krenov’s daughter remembers her father as being an animist of sorts, ascribing some kind of soul or inner life to the objects and plants around him – Krenov hints at the root of these beliefs in this essay, his childhood “in the North,” and in that context, the serious sensitivity and love he shows for wood as a medium only makes more sense.
The other thing that quickly becomes clear in the book is that it is not instructional – many of Jim’s visiting students, whom he hosted in his home workshop throughout the 1960s and 1970s, remember his advice as always being a bit vague, a trait that carries right through into his lectures from the 1990s and 2000s. Phrases such as “It is still possible to find a few good sources of wood” would, at time, frustrate his visiting students, but here in the book, they serve as anecdotes and a sort of fable about his life as a craftsperson, with their own morals and conclusions presented to the reader. He doesn’t give you a shopping list for the home center, but more of an idea of what has worked for him, and what could work for you, if you happen upon it or go in search of it.
There is a moment of Jim’s past that flashes across the page at one point. On page 13, Jim writes that “Expression in wood, if I may say so, is a bit heavy handed there [in the United States]; oversimplified. So often the emphasis in on form – as in sculpture.” This passage is certainly a reflection on Jim’s dissonant time in his first stint at RIT alongside Wendell Castle – they did not get along, and Jim would, for a number of years, relay his disappointment in the pursuit of furniture as sculpture and the indifference to wood as a medium he found in many of his colleague’s work. “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” largely stays out of the weeds of criticism, though, certainly in relation to the essay’s Jim wrote in Swedish magazines at the same time – articles with titles like “Is craftsmanship boring?” or “Do we care about wood art?” make it clear that Krenov was not always optimistic about the attitudes around him. When the language between the two different platforms is compared, it’s clear that this book is not aimed at the Swedish craft scene, or his colleagues and contemporaries (with whom he often had a strained relationship) – it’s aimed at a new generation, students or curious onlookers, and Jim often speaks using “we” rather than “I.”
Here’s a last selection to look at, before I get into a few questions and comments people posted from their own reading. I’m just going to pull a big quote, because it’s as close to a synoptic manifesto as you’ll get from Krenov.
“I think that what I would like to do before it is too late is to get this across to a few craftsmen-to-be who will work after me, and also to a public which will be there to receive them, because we are living in a time when, I believe, this is important. Fine things in wood are important, not only aesthetically, as oddities or rarities, but because we are becoming aware of the fact that much of our life is spent buying and discarding, and buying again, things that are not good. Some of us long to have at least something, somewhere, which will give us harmony and a sense of durability – I won’t say permanence, but durability– things that, through the years, become more and more beautiful, things we can leave our children. (page 15)
Krenov spent 11 years jumping between various educational institutions, and accepted at least three long-term teaching positions that he either quit within weeks of starting or was encouraged to leave after interpersonal difficulties arose with administrators or colleagues, often caused by his irascible and uncompromising attitude toward craft. This passage is his call for those students, a next generation of craftspeople that might be more sympathetic to his holistic and idealistic way of working, one that he hadn’t found academia or art schools to be sympathetic to. He also makes a form of plea to the public to change or be more aware of their attitudes to fine work (the main subject of his writing in Swedish magazines, though there he chose a decidedly less optimistic or charitable way of expressing it).
When he wrote this book, he wouldn’t have known it, but it was exactly the right step to take in the direction of the establishment of his own school, which would happen just a few years later in 1981.
On to a few comments and questions from the comments section on my post from last week, where I prompted you all to ask or comment away about this first passage. I responded to many comments directly, but there were a few I wanted to share and elaborate on in this post, in keeping with the idea that this might be more of a discussion or back-and-forth between you and me while we read through the book.
Ryan Stadt asked about the Chuang Tzu passage at the beginning of the book, translated by Thomas Merton. If you’ve got a minute, Merton is an amazing character to look into – he was a Christian mystic, and Ryan wondered if there was any deeper connection there.
In fact, I think the first time Jim encountered this quote was in Form magazine, the Swedish design magazine Jim wrote for a number of times in the 1960s and 1970s. The passage appears as interstitial material between a preceding article and Jim’s essay for Form in 1973, but it doesn’t appear to have been at Jim’s request nor is it relevant to the subject of his article. The text is shrunk and oddly formatted and, to my eye (I was a managing editor for, like, six months!), it looks like it was included to make the line and page breaks neat and without white space. But, obviously the poem is well-suited to Jim’s sensitivities – perhaps it was a moment of poetic chance, or was included at his direction? It’s a detail I can’t confirm, and so it doesn’t go in the book, but if it did occur that way then it’s a lovely moment of happenstance. Perhaps even mystical?
Larry Barrett, a good friend who taught me to make greenwood chairs a few years back, wondered what Jim might’ve thought about greenwoodworking, especially the appreciation of materials and the similar thrills of splitting open a log and sawing it open. In fact, Jim Krenov and John Alexander did meet at one point in California – the story isn’t much, but I know that Jim was aware of greenwoodworking as a method and of Alexander’s work. Krenov certainly split open his fair share of wood, being an avid hiker and self-sufficient backpacker in the north of Sweden, and he did often split up slabs that were too wide to fit in the basement or had already begun splitting at their pith. But, perhaps his interest in woods from abroad and the backyard left him more likely to stick with the sawn stuff – though, he did use an Alaskan chainsaw mill quite a bit, and we were still learning to use them at his school when I was there.
Larry also pointed out that the Welsh concept of the “square mile” that Chris Williams wrote about in his new book fits neatly with the mention of Wharton Esherick’s idea that one could work with only the wood in your own backyard. Krenov was quite aware of John Brown – in Krenov’s papers and effects there are a few articles written by John Brown that Jim had saved, with highlighted notes in the margins. There are also definite connections to Slöjd in Wood (Wille Sundqvist, Jogge’s father, also went to Carl Malmsten’s school, and Jim’s reverence for carved pulls and knife-work has some of its roots in his exposure to Swedish crafts). Really, a sensitivity to wood as a material is a common thread through much of the craft, and when you start reading the more philosophic threads of Jim’s writing, it does echo through a number of methods and traditions that were not his. It makes sense that wood and woodworking are intertwined, no matter how many people try to melt clown wigs and pour them into the space between two live-edge slabs – but, did you know, Greg Klassen, who popularized the “river” tables (and made them in a much more interesting and durable way than the epoxy knock-offs that followed, in my opinion), was a student at Krenov’s school?
I really enjoyed the comments and questions that you all sent along for this reading – so, please do it again! Next week, I’ll be writing about the next few passages, up to page 51 of the book, and if you want to join in and read along, please do, and use the comments section below to ask any questions, highlight a passage or make a comment on the next section of the book. Also, I’d encourage you to read the two-page article “Wood: the Friendly Mystery” as well – here’s a copy from the Craft Council’s archive. You’ll understand why once you do the reading!
Screen capture of Dallas Bump (right) with his nephew, Leon Sutton, and a “Bump Rocker.”
Dallas Bump (1918-2016) of Bear, Arkansas, was a fourth-generation chairmaker who learned the trade at a young age from his father, Fred Bump, son of Philander Bump. Philander Bump emigrated from France and opened the Bear Chair Shop shop in 1870 – the same shop out of which Bump worked more than a century later, using many of the tools and patterns that his father and grandfather had used.
Bump passed on the family tradition to his nephew, Leon Sutton, who worked with him to harvest and dry local hardwoods (mostly red and white oak) that became the hand-made chairs – constructed with no glue, nails, pegs or other fasteners – for which the family was known. From what I can tell, just about everyone in the family was involved at one time or another; the men made the structure, and the women wove the seats and backs from white oak.
Bump’s work was featured by the Smithsonian in several “folk life” exhibits, Southern Living magazine and many television programs, and one of his rocking chairs was in the White House during the Clinton administration.
Unfortunately, the Bear Chair Shop appears to now be closed. Nonetheless, the 2014 video below is a fascinating glimpse of Bump, his shop and the family chairmaking affair.
— Fitz
p.s. I’m am stealing Bump’s ingenious post-marking process for my staircase spindles. I’m sure others have used a similar approach, but as a non-turner, it’s the first time I’ve seen that.
I built my first Roubo in 2005 out of yellow pine. Loved it to death. I sold it after I had the opportunity to build this beauty in 2013. It has remained my workbench ever since.
I don’t know why, but this bench seems to receive more abuse than any other bench in our storefront. Perhaps it just looks like it can take a punch. Or an auger. Or a sawcut. It doesn’t look any worse for the wear, however.
When I first built it, I omitted the parallel guide on the leg vise, which is how A.J. Roubo shows it in his 18th century text. I worked that way for more than a year. It’s not a bad way to work; you just slide a scrap between the vise jaw and the leg at the floor. But a Crisscross mechanism is much more convenient. So I was glad to upgrade (even though it was difficult to do on an assembled oak the size of a baby woolly mammoth).
That was the major change. I also added a swing-out seat (it’s vintage; I recommend you buy a Benchcrafted version). And some one-piece bench hooks, which people are constantly stealing. I might make some for all the benches in the coming weeks.
Products shown in the video (these are not affiliate links):
Peter Ross planing stop, tommy bar and iron ring for the hub
In my last compilation of workshop animals I left out the dogs. As a way of apologizing to shop dogs everywhere (and their faithful humans) they now have their own collection (gee, hope I didn’t miss any).
Using suggestions made by readers of the first Animals in the Workshop here is a second edition.
If you have read ‘Grandpa’s Workshop’ by Maurice Pommier you will be familiar with one more workshop animal. And although he has not lent his name to a tool or bench appliance he is nevertheless indispensable: le lapin – the rabbit.
As Maurice explains, “the rabbit is the apprentice – he has big legs to run fast and big ears to hear everything.”
In my last compilation of workshop animals I left out the dogs. As a way of apologizing to shop dogs everywhere (and their faithful humans) they now have their own collection (gee, hope I didn’t miss any).
