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.
Editor’s note: As we wrote about in August, longtime LAP author Don Williams is writing a new book, “A Period Finisher’s Manual.” Don is a conservator, craftsman and author of many articles and several Lost Art Press books, and the maker of Mel’s Wax, a patented archival furniture care product. This post has been adapted from his new book’s introduction. Don is currently editing the manuscript and taking lots of pictures at the finishing bench.
It’s probably not the best marketing approach but now that the first draft of “A Period Finisher’s Manual” (APFM) is in the compewder it is probably time to scribe a few words about what it is not. That’s right, what it is not.
Even the title gives a clue; it is not “The Period Finisher’s Manual,” not “The Complete Finisher’s Manual” nor “The Ultimate Guide To Finishing.” Regardless of the subject or context those kinds of book titles almost always make me roll my eyes audibly. Epistemologically they strike me as pretentious and implicitly fraudulent; even The Bible confirms there was a lot more going on than there was time and space to record it all. I am personally not burdened with undue humility, but any book I write is by definition incomplete. To quote the punchline to an old joke, “An expert is a guy with a briefcase a long way from home.” I’m at home so my work can only include a portion of knowledge. So my title is “A Period Finisher’s Manual.”
Another thing APFM is not is a slavish catechism of pre-industrial finishing practices. No, you will not need to don knee breeches and replace your electric lights with tallow lanterns or wax candles in order to comply with the thrust of its message. You do not need to be strictly limited to the materials and tools available to the 18th-century workshops of London, Paris or Williamsburg. Certainly these form the conceptual and practical foundations but are instead the guides to thinking about finishing compatible with the technologies and aesthetics of the past. It’s sorta like the tag line for Don’s Barn: “Where modern craft meets the past.” APFM is about a way of working at the woodfinishing bench that transcends the limitations of orbital sanders and catalytic spray lacquers. Hint: You are probably not astonished when I suggest that old-timey hand-worked surfaces and their finishes are the more beautiful option. Just my opinion, of course (but I am right).
Were I forced to describe APFM briefly, it would be “The
What, Why, and How approach to traditional woodfinishing.”
What?
“A Period Finisher’s Manual” is not any sort of definitive survey of finishing materials and processes. It is a selective review of just a few materials and practices predating the Age of Synthetic Chemistry: a few waxes, a few varnish resins, and a few oils, applied (or not) with elegantly simple tools. The greatest attempt to recount a complete inventory of materials and processes available to the finishing enterprise was the magnificent WWII-era undertaking “Protective and Decorative Coatings” by Joseph J. Mattiello, consuming multiple volumes and almost 4,000 pages. Yes, I own and have scoured the set, along with its 1970s-era successor “Treatise on Coatings” by Myers and Long, and the most recent “Organic Coatings” by Pappas, Jones and Wick.
I could enter into writing APFM with the expectation that
the reader would undertake a thorough study of these tomes beforehand, but that
would likely be an unfulfilled expectation.
So necessarily APFM will be restricted to materials and information the
reader is most likely to actually use.
Why?
Recently I was corresponding with my friend John, a former seminarian, about the meaning of a particular passage in the New Testament. At one point in the discussion John said something to the effect of, “You can only get so far in this without reading Greek.” What does that have to do with woodfinishing (other than the possible implicit divinity of the craft)? Well, in the very same exchange John reminded me of my exhortation to students that, “In woodfinishing you can only get so far without learning some chemistry.” That said, “A Period Finisher’s Manual” is not a chemistry textbook. Rather than bombarding you with such exquisite knowledge, even though it would no doubt thrill a small cohort of readers, APFM integrates chemistry and its parent, materials science, as I believe necessary for the finisher to understand why things happen as they do on the surface of the wood. Solvent theory, molecular weight, adhesion, rheology, film formation, gloss, diffractive index, surface tension and many other components of successful finishing are essentially manifestations of molecular properties.
So too is color, even though I spend almost no time or words on the subject. APFM is not a color technology book, at least in the context of historic dyes and stains on bare wood. I find little use for ancient recipes for chemical wood stains in my own work so the topic is not addressed in any meaningful depth here beyond japanning and interlaminar glazing.
The need for understanding materials science in the finishing room is a constant theme running through the art form. One vignette from my own past is a fairly omnipresent reminder to me. Forty-five years ago, while working as a “scratch and dent man” for a furniture store, I was charged with touching up a set of bilious French Pretentious bedroom furniture. (Pop Quiz – Q. What’s the difference between a furniture repairman’s “touching up” and a conservator’s “inpainting?” A. About $75/hour.) Though I have a pretty good eye for color and layered finishes it was a struggle to get to an acceptable appearance, in the end involving the forcible integration of powder pigments with a concoction of spirit varnish, oil paint and latex. With these three totally incompatible materials I got it to work through the sheer application of energy, in this case the forced agitation with a brush. I was so pleased with the result that I bragged about it to my friends. Hey, I was 19.
Knowing what I now know about material properties, I have to wonder if at some point later the touched-up areas simply exploded off the surface. As my late friend and colleague Mel Wachowiak used to say, “With enough force you can pull the tail off a living cow.” I guess the same is true for incompatible woodfinishing materials. I got them to work together under the whiplash of vigorous mixing, but some understanding of the chemistry involved sure would have helped me then and it will help you in your future projects.
Which leads directly into another descriptor of what APFM is not – a stuffy academic book. I won’t say that Chris put his foot down, but he did suggest in a most emphatic manner that any book with hundreds of footnotes was unlikely to be appearing in the LAP catalog. Any technical citations will simply be folded into the folksy banter of the text. If you have read my other books or follow my blog you will know what to expect – big words when necessary, good humor always.
How?
“A Period Finisher’s Manual” is not a book of “how-to” tricks. Pets and circus animals do tricks, craftsmen have skills and techniques. (I’ve literally warned editors if the word “tricks” ever appeared in concert with one of my articles our working relationship was terminated.)
Instead, APFM is my attempt to describe a systematic approach to woodfinishing, complete with several dozen detailed verbal and visual descriptions – basically the How? culminating the What? and Why? considerations I mentioned above. By walking through a variety of finishing projects, complete with conceptual rationales and step-by-step visual representations, I hope to instill you with the confidence to embrace finishing as something to be anticipated with a delight rather than be feared and loathed, and ultimately, shortchanged. I have seen far too many examples of wonderfully designed and skillfully crafted woodworking projects that were betrayed by their makers’ puking some polyurinate on the surface with little understanding and less care.
Decades of woodfinishing (and teaching same) confirm that despite its vagaries it can be a predictable step-by-step process built on a foundation of technical and artistic understanding. So, I’m organizing the book’s contents the same way I organize the concepts and practices for my own woodfinishing, resulting in predictably good results.
Perhaps I should have titled it “A Predictable Finisher’s Manual,” or even “A Contented Finisher’s Manual.”
Because in the end, it is also not unpredictable and definitely not intimidating. It is in essence the very reason we make stuff.
