When you acquire a good tool, such as a block plane, and it really, really works, the tendency is to buy all its friends. After I bought my first No. 5 (about 1996-97), I fell in love with handplanes. To be precise, I loved all the handplanes. Every single handplane ever made or collected or drawn up in some patent document.
Most weekends I’d hit the antique markets with whatever dollars I could scrounge to buy handplanes. What kind of handplanes? All of them. At one time I owned at least 10 smoothing planes, five block planes, six shoulder planes and Justus-Traut-knows-how-many rabbet planes.
This was the start of a dangerous pattern you’ll see throughout this list, which is when I would try to buy my way into a new skill. I thought: If I bought a plow plane, I would be able to make frame-and-panel joints. But that’s not how the craft works.
If I could go back in time, I’d tell myself to buy one No. 5, one No. 3 and one block plane. Then buy additional planes only when I needed them – and after a lot of research.
Reading a Little About Finishing & Sharpening
When I started woodworking, I knew nothing about finishing or sharpening. And so I finished the pieces I made and sharpened the tools I owned in peace and satisfaction. But then one day I started to read about finishing and sharpening, and I realized I had been doing everything wrong.
So I did what the experts said to do, and I became miserable. I refused to put this finish over that finish (the book said it wouldn’t work). I bought some Japanese waterstones. And I entered a long and tortured phase where my finishes and my tools’ edges sucked. I was experimenting too much with this finishing/sharpening system or some other system. I was trying to obey a lot of gurus simultaneously.
To get out of this misery, I had to read a lot more about finishing and sharpening. And I came to the conclusion that I teach today: Learn one system. Stick with it for a long time. Refuse to change until you have mastered that system.
And always refuse to read articles that say “never” and “always.”
Five Planers; Six Table Saws
When it comes to machines and critical hand tools (dovetail saws, block planes, smoothing planes, layout tools), I spent entirely far too much money upgrading my equipment incrementally.
I started out with crap equipment – a plastic table saw and sheet-metal thickness planer, for example. And then I sold the used equipment (it wasn’t worth much) to upgrade to a slightly better table saw and planer. And so on until I ended up where I am today.
It was a dumb and expensive journey for someone who was planning on making furniture for a living all along. I should have just plunked down the $1,200 for a cabinet saw and $800 for a 15” planer in 1996. Instead, I’ve spent at least $7,000 on table saws and $8,000 on planers since then. And I’ve had the agony of buying, selling and setting up all this equipment.
Yes, there’s a chance that you’ll buy a nice $3,000 table saw and then be swayed by the Bare Bosom Goddess of Golf. But that $3,000 table saw can be sold for almost that same amount. Cheap tools, on the other hand, depreciate quickly and to nothing.
Using a Cutting List
Don’t trust someone else’s cutting list. Not from me, Norm Abram or even Jesus the carpenter. Even if the cutting list is accurate (and it’s probably not), you shouldn’t cut all the pieces out to the specified sizes and start building. Things change as you build a project. And the sizes of your parts will change slightly, too.
Make your own cutting list based on a construction drawing. And only cut pieces to final width and length when you absolutely have to.
Cutting lists are dirty liars.
Buying Lumber Sight Unseen
Every time I have bought lumber before laying eyes on it, I have been swindled. The first time this happened was when I ordered 100 board feet of cherry from a reputable supplier to make a bookcase that needed about 40 board feet.
I picked the wood up, and it was so sappy and twisted that I barely squeezed the bookcase out of the 100 board feet. Yes, I complained to the supplier. They laughed in my face and said that sap and twisting was not a defect, and that the lumber met grade. I didn’t buy from them for five years after that – not until they hired a new customer rep.
Reading Tool Catalogs on Friday Night
After I finish work on Friday, I like to drink a beer and relax for a bit before making supper. Sometimes I have two beers. And sometimes I read tool catalogs with that beer in hand. And sometimes I order stupid tools that I don’t need but look pretty cool and now I read nonfiction on Friday evenings.
Don’t drink and shop for tools. That is the only explanation I have for owning an Incra Rule.
Believing the Jig Lie
This is a corollary to the above rule. Tool catalogs are great at explaining how jigs can solve your joinery problems. Can’t cut perfect miters/dovetails/spline joints? This jig does it with ease. You will be a master in no time. Promise.
Here’s what I learned: Cutting miters is a skill. Learning to set up, use and then remember again how to use a jig to cut miters is also a skill. Both skills take about the same amount of time to learn.
Yes, there are some jigs that can speed you along if you need to do something 134 times in a week (such as making a dovetailed drawer). But those jigs are rare and are usually needed only by production or industrial shops.
Most woodworking skills are mastered after a few tries, and then you will forget about owning the jig.
Buying Sets of Tools
Sets of chisels, router bits, carving tools, templates and so on are usually a waste of money. Buying a set seems like a good idea – and you sometimes save a little money compared to buying all the tools separately. But it’s usually a lie.
I use three chisels for 99 percent of my work. Six router bits. Three moulding planes. One sawblade. So buy one good chisel/gouge/router bit/moulding plane – one that you really need. Then, when you absolutely positively can’t work without an additional bit or blade, buy another. Reluctantly. And buy the best you can afford.
Buying the Hardware at the End
I can’t tell you how many times I made this mistake. I built a project and afterward bought the hardware for it. Then had to remake the drawers or doors to suit the hardware.
The hardware typically makes fundamental changes to your cutting lists and drawings. Buy the hardware before you cut the wood.
Being Poly-Guru-ous
When I was learning woodworking, I had four teachers, plus the books and magazines I was reading. So I got pulled in a lot of directions. All of the teachers produced good work, but they all had strong ideas about how to go about it.
And so most days I felt like I was a Muslim-Buddhist-Pentcostal-Atheist. There was no consistent instruction in my life. And so it took me a lot of error and error to sort things out. In time, I gained the confidence to go my own way. But it took a lot longer because I had so many masters whispering (or yelling) in my ear.
Pick one person to teach you joinery. Or sharpening. Or finishing. Stick with that person until you have mastered the basics and can start exploring joinery, sharpening and finishing on your own.
Oh, and if you own that little Powermatic 12-1/2” lunchbox planer I sold off in 1998, I’m sorry. I hope you now use it for something it is powerful enough to handle – such as slicing deli meats.
Mark just retired from a career as a carpenter and general contractor, so what better way to commemorate the transition than by turning our own home into a construction site with a full-blown remodel of our bathroom?
This potential marriage breaker domestic disruption has been a long time coming. It was prompted by our recognition that as we, along with many of our family members and friends, have reached the stage of life characterized by the occasional discount on a cup of bad coffee or condescendingly raised voice from pharmacy staff, it would be advisable to replace our high-rimmed, impossible-to-make-presentable clawfoot tub that I bought from a pile outside an antique store in 2004 with something less likely to cause us to trip and fall. What finally set our wheels in motion was the Hallelujah Chorus of stepping into the newly completed bathroom of our clients Nick Detrich and Kathleen Benson, who tiled their walls in seafoam green – a shade that, while not for everyone, proved the perfect evocation of 1930s camp for me (and luckily, for Mark as well). They’d ordered too much field tile and were hoping to sell it. We were happy to oblige.
The actual color is somewhere between how it appears here and how it looks on the Heritage Tile site at the “seafoam green” link above.
From the start, we agreed on most of the details. A built-in cast-iron tub, an exhaust fan that’s quieter and more effective than the cheap-motel-circa-1972 model we currently have and a wall-hung basin with intact enamel. The tall shallow cabinet I built years ago with a salvaged door and hardware will stay, as will the shuttered window-like opening that lets light in through the laundry room.
Don’t look closely. I haven’t cleaned properly for a while. We’ll reroute the floor vent through the cabinet barely visible here at right. I kept extra flooring for patches in just this kind of situation.
Then there’s the floor. I wanted to keep the black-and-white checkerboard of 12”-square commercial-grade vinyl composition tile that I installed when I first moved in, inspired by a room that Sharon Fugate and Peggy Shepherd had finished in their eclectic home-furnishings store, Grant St [sic.], in the early 1990s.
Mark wanted ceramic tile or unglazed porcelain mosaic. “It’s the highest-quality finish,” he insisted. “It’s thicker and more durable.” Exactly what I would have told customers 20 years ago. And considering that we’re tiling the walls up to about 5’, he said, we should also do away with the baseboard so that moisture condensing on the vertical surfaces wouldn’t drip down onto the square top edge. Hmm, I thought. I have never seen water pool on the baseboard, other than just behind the clawfoot tub, where the wall sometimes gets sprayed when certain tall people (one in particular) take a shower – and that condition will be eradicated when we install a built-in tub.
The wall-mounted basin, along with the tub and light fixture seen here, came from the former Foursquare Antiques in Bloomington, Ind. The sconce still has its price, “$15,” in china pencil script, written by our artist friend Margie Van Auken, who worked at the store.
The idea of a tiled floor didn’t feel right to me for this house. It’s a funky house built and finished on a shoestring budget. The funkiness is its charm, and I know the story behind nearly every house part, from the salvaged sink that lacks a mixer faucet to the gate I made to keep our dog in the mudroom and the lamp my maternal grandma made from an antique hand-cranked coffee grinder. I have never been concerned about using the “highest quality” offerings just because they’re widely considered superior; I don’t want to live in a house where my surroundings are dictated by other people’s often-uncritical judgments. I have always worked with budgetary constraints – at $1 per square foot for a commercial-grade flooring product, my VCT tile reflects a necessarily skinflint period of my history that I have no desire to forget. I feel more at home when surrounded by things that hold meaning for me.
I said it was funky. Simple bookshelves hold paintings by our friend Chris Blackwood, a clock that belonged to Mark’s grandparents, binoculars (for visitors to the birdbath outside) and an increasingly outdated globe for locating countries. The dirigible by the window is one of Jonas’s creations, made from telephone wire (is that still a thing?) when he was little; it even has a pilot compartment on the underside, though the purple pilot has disappeared.
Ceramic and porcelain tile floors are hard. From a purely sensual perspective, I find them unwelcoming, though I have installed plenty of them in rooms where they were period-appropriate. Tiled floors are also cold. If we lived in a tropical climate I might value this characteristic, but we live in a place that has winter. Of course we could address the cold with under-floor heating, but that, too, strikes me as luxurious overkill, at least for our home. So you’re cold when you get out of the shower – dry off and put some clothes on. A little discomfort is good for us; it reminds us we’re alive. For our house, installing under-floor heating as a way to make tile more palatable also seemed a bit like the logic of building houses so tight and well insulated that you need a heat recovery ventilation unit to bring in fresh air. At some point, from a cradle to grave perspective, the efficiency arguably becomes inefficient.
Also, I like the bathroom baseboard, even if its interruption of the transition between a tiled wall and floor may not be typical in contemporary high-end bathroom construction. Does it work? Do we like it? Is it easy to keep clean? The answers to these and similar questions matter more to me than some industry stamp of approval, not least when I remind myself that such stamps appear on many cabinets made with ½” MDF carcases held together with staples and hot-melt glue.
A chair and mirror from a pair of now-shuttered antique stores in town, shop-made stair rail and house trim, a hickory floor I laid on my hands and knees. The framed photograph on the wall is by Kristen Clement, and the tile below was a gift from our stone-carver friend Amy Brier.
Vinyl composition tile is by definition synthetic – a product of the plastics industry.[i] At a prima facie level, this inclines me to view it with disapproval; it certainly raises all sorts of questions, from which chemical constituents went into its production to the possibility of toxic off-gassing over time.[ii] By comparison, the 1” hexagonal porcelain ceramic tile mosaic we’ve been considering seems more traditional, and so (in theory), safer – it was used in many a late-19th-century bathroom floor, at least in higher-end residences. (The majority of homes occupied by “working people” in that era did not have indoor plumbing.) I thought back to some recent news reports about cases of silicosis among workers in the composite stone countertop industry; even though ceramic and porcelain tile seem closer than VCT to their naturally occurring components, the dust from decanting, mixing and applying the cement and grout, as well as that produced by cutting tile, presents its own dangers to health. And when you’re talking about the industry that mass-produces ceramic and porcelain tile, you’re in the world of heavy materials that have to be mined and transported, often internationally, then processed with complex equipment at temperatures only achieved with significant carbon inputs, coloring additives, glazes and more – in other words, a highly energy- and resource-intensive product in its own right. So much for any “green” advantage, at least insofar as I can make out.
As for durability, while the 1’ x 2’ sheets of mosaic we were thinking of using are somewhat thicker than VCT, the latter is far denser than the resilient sheet flooring most people associate with vinyl; that’s how VCT came to be the flooring of choice for grocery stores around the country during the 20th century (even if acres of the stuff are now being scraped up in favor of an unapologetically bare, polished concrete floor). When properly installed, VCT will last for decades.
Our bedroom is furnished mostly with stuff we’ve made or had for years, such as the chest of drawers, once painted, that I bought from a shop in the English town of Reading circa 1982, a mirror frame and sloped-top box I made decades ago, homemade curtains and a Siamese cat that my paternal grandma gave to my parents when they got married. The mobile is by Karina Steele.
“But tile is more waterproof,” said Mark, invoking a common belief. Really, though? Water can’t get through 1/8”-thick VCT. Granted, there are joints where water could in principle penetrate to the underlayment and subfloor. Then again, there are many more potentially permeable joints in a floor made with the 1” porcelain hexagonal mosaic we were considering. Sure, if we installed a waterproof membrane beneath it, the tile floor would be waterproof in a meaningful way – as long as the membrane remained intact. But we use a bath mat when we step out, and how often does a sink in our house overflow or a toilet go bonkers and leak all over the floor? Neither has happened in the 17 years since the house’s construction, and with the two of us aging tradespeople who regularly clean out the gutters, mop up spills, and keep things reasonably well maintained, neither is very likely. Besides, should we design every feature of our homes with a view to its ability to survive a rare and potentially devastating scenario? I’m not talking about basics such as anchoring a structure to keep it on its foundation in an earthquake zone, or bracing it to resist high winds; this is a matter of interior finishes.
You can answer that for yourself, but my answer is no. In aesthetic terms, to make one room of our house State Of The Art would be an affront to the spirit of the entire place. It would also be a concession to dogma – “tile is better because harder, more permanent, more expensive” – the kind of prejudice I think it’s important to make my customers aware of on principle (because you know a friend or relative is going to ask them why they chose what they did, regardless of what they did), but that I don’t think should be the ultimate deciders.
And the VCT floor is already there, in perfectly good shape. Why rip it out and send those materials to the landfill?
For decades, the ethos in the building trade has been “tear out what’s there and upgrade” – more luxury, more comfort, more image-conscious “curation.” Maybe I have just been around for enough years that I recognize the motivations underlying so many real estate and construction industry recommendations, which too often boil down to “buy more.” My life and home have been shaped as powerfully by what I’ve rejected as what I’ve embraced. Mark is persuaded. (It helped that keeping the current floor will mean spending significantly less money.)
[i] Although the word “synthetic” is commonly used to connote poor quality, it simply means that something made by putting constituents together. Strictly speaking, few things we live with, wear, or eat are not synthetic.
[ii] I should add that there was no discernible smell to this flooring, even when it was new. It’s a different product from sheet vinyl flooring.
The following is excerpted from “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years,” a collection of essays from The Woodworker magazine while the legendary Charles H. Hayward was editor (1936-1966). The columns are like nothing we’ve ever read in a woodworking magazine. They are filled with poetry, historical characters and observations on nature. And yet they all speak to our work at the bench, providing us a place and a reason to exist in modern society.
Standing at the threshold of a new year is at any time a solemnising experience. Even when we mark its coming with convivial celebrations, there is always, lurking somewhere in one’s mind a persistent: “Quo vadis?”—whither are you going? But it is rare indeed for a year to come to us so shrouded in mystery as 1940. There was a time—already remote—when one could comfortably forecast within a little what the new year would bring, not only in one’s own immediate circle, but in the larger affairs of the world outside. True we were always subject to the chances and changes inseparable from the fact of man’s mortality, there was always the possibility of something incalculable occurring to upset our plans, but after all there still remained the ordinary kind of changes, however unwelcome. And there was always an even chance that in any one year they would pass us by.
But now we are face to face with the extraordinary. What 1940 will bring forth is beyond the power of any of us to guess. We are launched upon a war which has opened so strangely that it is impossible to predict what lines it will follow, to what extent during the coming year each individual will be involved, or even what countries will be involved. And just as at the theatre there is always a hush, a thrill of expectancy as the curtain begins to rise, so there must, I think, be something of this feeling in all of us as we stand on the brink of the unknown.
One prophecy which it is fairly safe to make is that this war will eventually produce considerable changes in various aspects of national life, notably in building and architecture. The building of the future will conceivably be governed by the possibilities of aerial attack, and if air raids during the present war should develop to any great extent, then the changes in building and town planning might well be of a radical kind. We are already getting accustomed to the idea of each house in a vulnerable area becoming, at least theoretically, a fortress, with something in the nature of an air raid shelter, sandbag protection or a gas-proof room to safeguard the lives of its inhabitants. I say theoretically because anyone who has faced the problem of turning a modern house, with its large area of window space, its general flimsiness of construction, into anything remotely resembling a fortress is only too well aware of the difficulties. Essentially the modern house is built for peace, a pleasant, cheerful place which lets in all the sunlight and air possible, with no regard to the distinctly unpleasant possibilities of aerial warfare.
Not that the house of the future need be any less cheerful. That is a virtue in modern building and decoration which I hope we shall not easily part with. But it may be very much sounder. Building may become the tradesman’s craft again rather than a piece-work job to be slung together anyhow. There are sure to be structural changes based on war experience, and definite provision for air raid shelter. The very materials of which our houses are made will also have to pass the test of war, and it is conceivable that there will be changes in these, so that windows, for instance, may be of non-splinter glass or a glass substitute. It will be interesting to see whether erection of large blocks of flats, which has of late years met a definite modern demand, will continue. I very much doubt it. Aerial menace is quite definitely a factor which every builder and architect of the future will have to take into consideration, and will, I think, be the governing principle of housing fashion, possibly controlled by legislation. One thing at least we can reckon on, and that is that we are living in one of those dynamic periods in the world’s history productive of radical change.
How will it affect furniture? It takes an age of democratic peace and plenty to produce gimcrackery. Will furniture, like houses, revert to a more substantial form? We know, all too well, the type that could never survive anywhere within sound of a falling bomb. Having been blown together in the first instance, it would take so very, very little to blow it apart. It seems to me that we may live to see a definite revival of craftsmanship in furniture making, because strength and soundness of construction, which have been the least of our demands in the latter years of this industrial civilisation, will have acquired a new importance. Or rather, one would say, their old importance. For the scanty furnishings of a Norman house and the later and more luxuriant Tudor house had to be able to bear rough treatment and the weight of armoured men. Modern furniture may have to bear a different sort of rough treatment—and an even more intolerable strain. The saying that “an Englishman’s home is his castle” is threatening to become quite literally true. But whereas in olden times the castle dweller lived on the first floor because he was more at the mercy of his enemies at the ground level, to-day he chooses his ground floor—and strengthens his basement—as being his safest place.
Whatever changes may follow in the wake of war we may be reasonably sure of this, that beauty as well as utility will evolve. Man has an immortal spirit which is never satisfied for long with the purely material, especially in anything that concerns his home. The old Norman keep, with its nine-foot walls, had a dignity, a grandeur that still speaks to us across the ages of his unquenchable instinct for beauty. And we, with our modern house consciousness, are not likely to let this go. The English home of to-day, gradually evolved from primitive mud and wattle beginnings, may be—and probably is—standing on the threshold of still another change. But all the old craving to beautify our surroundings which was born with us will at least remain with us still.
“When I was at school, woodworking was where the bad kids were sent.” — Mario Rodriguez
When you reach a certain age, it’s common to observe that people who have been fixtures in your personal woodworking pantheon have become less visible. As a reader of Fine Woodworking since the early 1990s, I’ve long associated the magazine with one of its prolific contributors, Mario Rodriguez. Mario has appeared regularly on the pages, instructing readers how to “Soup Up a Dovetail Saw,”optimize work set-up on job sites, or build a variety of pieces, from a classic Federal tilt-top table or mid-century coffee table to a fireplace mantel or oak chest on stand. After being relatively absent from my notice, there he was in issue No. 291 this summer, still doing his thing.
Every so often over the past few years I’d heard the occasional mention that Mario teaches woodworking to kids at a Waldorf School in Philadelphia. A masterful craftsman with decades of experience and a portfolio bursting at its figurative seams, teaching woodworking to kids in elementary and middle school? I had to learn more.
In 2018, I gave a presentation at Philadelphia Woodworks related to my book “English Arts & Crafts Furniture,” and was more than a little starstruck when Mario introduced himself. Those boots are not a fashion statement; he comes by them honestly. (From left to right: Bruce Chaffin; Michael Vogel, president of Philadelphia Woodworks; Mario; and me. )
Mario was born in 1950 and is the eldest of three siblings. His parents had come to New York from Puerto Rico; his dad worked as a merchant marine and was away from home for weeks at a time, and his mom worked various jobs, from hairdresser to surgical nurse, a field in which she was employed for some 20 years. After that she went into flipping houses. “She had no experience,” says Mario, “just a head for business.”
Mario at 2, already in touch with wood.
In elementary and middle school Mario was drawn to art. He later attended The High School of Art & Design in New York City, which prepared students for professional jobs in the field of art, broadly defined. Many of his fellow students went on to college, but Mario lost interest in school and dropped out.
After a series of menial jobs he joined the army at 17 and trained as a paratrooper and infantryman.
“What was nice was that in civilian life you were sized up and opportunities were provided or denied to you based on who you were and where you were from,” he remarks. “In the Army, you were judged by your ability to do a job. The overriding principle was: You had to do your job. If you did your job and took care of those you were responsible for, you moved ahead. It is one of the greatest social engines in this country, providing opportunities for ambitious young men and women not available to them in civilian life.”
He stayed three years and was posted in Germany, in addition to the United States.
“At 17, I found it very exciting and new,” he remembers. “As I advanced through the ranks, eventually making sergeant … I found that if I was stationed somewhere I didn’t like, I was stuck there.”
Despite the opportunities, he says that “on a day-to-day basis, it was stifling. I thought I could do better once I left.”
He returned to Brooklyn, where he’d grown up, got an apartment with a couple of roommates and took a series of unfulfilling jobs.
“I would have jobs that were boring or uninteresting where I was not excited or interested, and all I could think about was the coming weekend,” he says. It’s an experience many of us have known at one time or another. But Mario’s life was about to change in exciting and challenging ways.
Arts & Crafts-inspired cherry side table.
A Life-changing Couch
At around the age of 24, he decided it was time to acquire a sofa. It was the mid-1970s; being in New York City, he went to Macy’s, where he found an affordable damaged floor sample. The store scheduled delivery, and Mario took time off from his job to wait for the couch. The couch did not show up. He rescheduled the delivery, took more time off work … and the delivery people were again missing in action. At this point he asked the store to return his deposit and decided to make his own couch.
“I went to Barnes & Noble and looked for a book on making furniture,” he continues. “I made this crude thing out of plywood.” It’s rough, he remembers thinking. I enjoy the process and the compliments, but I really have no idea what I’m doing. It was time to get some training.
He applied to a four-year training apprenticeship with the Carpenters and Cabinetmakers Union in New York City. They put him in the program for exterior construction – “not what I really wanted to learn.” When he asked about changing programs, they said he couldn’t, so he changed his approach: Could he at least add some millwork and cabinetmaking classes to the work they’d already assigned him? Yes, they said; he could do both. So after spending the day at work on a jobsite, he attended millwork and cabinetmaking classes, two nights a week during the second year of his apprenticeship, three nights the third year and four nights during the fourth.
At that point the construction industry took a nosedive. As an Army veteran, Mario qualified for education benefits under the GI Bill and had already been taking college classes at night. When he found himself unemployed, he assessed his options and decided to attend school full time at Lehman College, a City University of New York four-year college. Around 1978, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art with a specialization in applied design through the university’s Self-Determined Studies program.
“That allowed me to explore woodworking,” he says.
Building & Furniture Making
With his newly minted degree, Mario went to work as a carpentry crew chief with a sweat-equity construction group in the Bronx. By the late 1970s, the South Bronx was devastated; some areas were so neglected they looked like bombed-out neighborhoods in European cities after the Second World War. The group secured its first building and raised the money necessary to gut and renovate. In lieu of a down payment, a would-be resident would invest 500 hours of labor, then be awarded an apartment. Not only did this plan increase the availability of affordable housing, it taught participants a range of practical trade skills.
“The notion was so new,” he says. “We took people from all backgrounds who needed a place to live and had a desire to move ahead.”
Would-be residents came from the area. The program even attracted the attention of Jimmy Carter, who paid them a visit and pledged some $5 million to expand. The union, though, was opposed to this idea; they built homes for profit.
“The idea that people could get together and build their own homes was not something they approved of,” Mario says. They put challenging stipulations on the project, but the program still grew.
After three years, Mario returned to Brooklyn with a plan to strike out on his own. He rented a 12’ x 30’ space in Greenpoint, and started to take on small, fairly simple furniture and cabinet jobs. If he finished a job and had nothing lined up, he’d spend a couple of days going to museums or the park, then come back to new orders. He often found himself starting to work with a prospective customer, only to have them complain about his price. Once that had become “a frustrating and frequent event,” he decided to find a market where price was not the primary consideration.
He found that market in antique restoration, learning the necessary skills on the job as he worked for dealers, fixing broken joints and replacing missing parts. Before long, he was teaching part-time in a college-level antiques restoration program at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Hans Wegner-inspired modern armchair in white oak with laminated arm and back splat. Mario carved the seat on the table saw.
He also started writing for Fine Woodworking and had a growing interest in building Windsor chairs. At the time, the best-known person building Windsors was Michael Dunbar, who had written a book about the form. Michael “didn’t give measurements,” Mario says; he focused on techniques. Michael was building chairs in his basement and at Strawbery Banke Museum, a historic village in New Hampshire. “He was very friendly,” Mario recalls. One of the most valuable pieces of advice Michael offered sprang from his observation that “there’s no money in making these chairs. The money’s in teaching people how to make them.”
So Mario explored Windsor chairmaking as a sideline, fascinated by the chairs’ design and construction – so economical, and largely done by hand.
By this point Mario had married; he and his (now-former) wife had a little girl. Their location in a Polish and Italian neighborhood of Brooklyn was “still a frontier,” he says, with no dependable public services – a good place for a solitary artist, but not for a family. So they moved to Warwick, New York, and bought a farmhouse.
For the next few years, Mario renovated the house and taught woodworking classes in a garage at the back. He focused primarily on classes based on hand tools – Windsor chairs, basic veneering, cutting dovetails – taking four to six students at a time. Then they lost their daughter, who was 7, in a swimming accident.
“That derailed everything,” he says.
Work was most helpful as a diversion from the pain. He continued to write for Fine Woodworking and teach at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking, the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship and other schools. As Mario puts it, “I was pretty much a mess.” When his wife took a job in New Jersey, they moved there. They had a son, Peter, and eventually divorced in the mid-1990s.
Sheraton-style lady’s work table. “I built one a few years ago that appeared in FWW,” says Mario’s caption on Instagram. “It’s made of solid mahogany and crotch veneer. It has tapered, reeded legs, dovetailed and cock-beaded drawers.” His wife, Nicole, uses it in her sewing studio.
Meanwhile, Mario’s position at the Fashion Institute of Technology had become full-time, with benefits and newfound job security. He commuted to the city daily. The program, however, “was not well designed,” he says. “The chairman had no experience in manual creative work but was a very charming Ph.D.” As a result, the curriculum “was full of holes.” Students would graduate but not be able to get a job. Decreasing enrollment invited closer inspection by authorities, who eventually shut the program down. Between his part- and full-time positions, Mario had taught at the Fashion Institute for 14 years. It had been a stable point in his life, “like hitting the lottery – good, solid pay, security, outstanding benefits.” The loss left a gaping hole.
As he wondered what he was going do next, it dawned on him that the secure, well-paid job had come with its own price. “You’re giving up time you would [otherwise] devote to pursuing your craft and becoming as good as you can. So it’s kind of a trap.” He says he wandered around a bit, and ended up at the Philadelphia Furniture Workshop, where he met the founder, Alan Turner, a lawyer and part-time woodworker who invited Mario to teach there.
Federal candle stand in mahogany and crotch veneer.
The students at the Philadelphia Furniture Workshop were a mix of amateurs and professionals interested in learning new skills or refining those they already had. Many were men looking for a hobby or on the verge of retirement; a good percentage, says Mario, “had abandoned ‘getting dirty’ and using tools for their [professional] work” and wanted to explore the creative process afresh.
“It was great to revive that need that everyone has,” he says, adding that he could have a student “who hadn’t picked up a hammer in years and take them from a total beginner course all the way through construction of a Federal card table.”
Portsmouth card table in solid mahogany and crotch veneer. All the inlays, paterae and bandings were shop-made. Mario offered this piece as a masterclass at Philadelphia Furniture Workshop.
Mario says that when many amateur woodworkers run into a problem they can’t solve, they abandon the project. “The real damage is, it limits their vision and undermines their confidence. Running these masterclasses … I could illuminate the pitfalls and guide them through the process. You are having an impact on someone’s life and supercharging their confidence in relation to woodworking.”
He stayed 10 years, until 2012. The job was “extremely demanding for just two people,” even after Alan Turner, founder of the school, left the practice of law to work at the shop full-time. They worked six days a week, with more than a few 14-hour days. By the age of 65, Mario was ready to slow down.
A Different Kind of Teaching
Serendipitously, a teacher at a local Waldorf School inquired whether the Philadelphia Furniture Workshop might know of someone who could teach woodworking to kids. Mario took her up on the offer to visit and agreed to teach at the school one day a week. He found he liked it and increased his teaching there to two days a week. The job also introduced him to his wife, Nicole, who teaches sewing and knitting, known as handwork in the Waldorf system.
In the Waldorf system, handwork and woodworking are required, not elective. Mario emphasizes that while he teaches at a Waldorf School, he has veered away from the traditional curriculum slightly.
“The Waldorf education process is essentially threefold, engaging head, heart and hands – thinking, feeling and doing. I’m a woodworking teacher who teaches at a Waldorf School, not a Waldorf woodworking teacher. I come from a different place than trained Waldorf teachers.”
He strives to bring honesty, attention to detail and reflection to each student’s work.
Introductory students start with a branch, which they have to shape, sand and finish; Mario encourages students to familiarize themselves with the wood, exploring its natural shapes and colors. Next they make a spoon, using a template and a #7 sweep, 1/2″ carving tool. (Yes, he says, there’s plenty of focus on safety.) In fifth grade, students make a spinning top using a rasp and block plane instead of a lathe; although the project is designed to encourage creative expression, it demands real skills – the top has to spin upright for at least 30 seconds. Some, he says, spin for almost a minute. Sixth-grade students make a sword and shield, the sword with hand tools – “that’s a lot of fun,” says Mario – and the shield cut out of a plywood panel. They learn about the culture of heraldry and create a coat of arms that represents their interests, family background and ambitions, coming up with three qualities that they admire and practice, such as honesty, curiosity and kindness. They cut the parts out of Baltic birch plywood and finish them with paint, then mount these inspirational elements on the shield.
“I’m at the other end of the age spectrum now,” he reflects. “When I was at school, woodworking was where the bad kids were sent. Anybody with ability was steered toward the advanced, [more intellectual] classes. Now I’m getting [kids] on the front end, where they’re still curious and exploring things. I’m there to guide them through the experience.”
One of his seventh-grade students made a Wharton Esherick stool and told Mario that her mother, an architect, cried when she saw it, overwhelmed that her child could build such a piece. “That’s a pretty common experience,” he adds. “Even if they never make another object of wood, they leave the woodshop with an appreciation and respect for handmade objects.”
Ask Mario for a word that might characterize his professional trajectory and he answers “curiosity. I live for the challenge of something new, never tried before.”
“Chris Becksvoort is the Shaker,” he suggests by way of contrast. “People generally gravitate to a particular style or period.” (To be fair, Chris Becksvoort also has some striking contemporary pieces in his portfolio.) But Mario is “all over the place,” with mid-century modern, Early American, Arts & Crafts and Federal pieces, and he has written and taught about a wide variety of tools and techniques.
Chest-on-stand in quartersawn oak.
Lately, he has been doing more work for Fine Woodworking. He was fascinated by the display of Julia Child’s kitchen at the National Museum of American History, especially her kitchen table. The table was covered with a yellow oilcloth, which hid a lot of detail. He Googled the image and found it was basically a Scandinavian farm table. Wow, that is so cool! he thought; there must be some interesting joinery involved. He contacted the museum and asked if he could take measurements and get pictures, but didn’t hear back for close to a year.
The table Mario built based on the one in Julia Child’s kitchen.
“Everything Julia Child belongs to the Julia Child Foundation,” he explains; the whole thing is very proprietary and controlled by lawyers. “I just want to run a class,” he told them; “maybe do an article.” They refused. He persisted, appealing directly to the museum. They finally sent him some vague dimensions. So once again he took a different tack: One of his students happened to work at a studio that used a program capable of translating a photograph into a design with measurements. He published the piece as a project article in Fine Woodworking issue No. 241.
Drawing of a handplane.
Today, at 71, Mario is combining less physically demanding projects with furniture making and teaching. He’s going back to his artistic training, exploring more painting and graphic work. Part of his basement now serves as a painting studio. He can see himself teaching for a good five more years. And who wouldn’t want to, knowing the difference good teaching can make in a young person’s life? One of the nicest compliments anyone has ever paid him came from a parent who, on learning that Mario Rodriguez taught woodworking at their child’s school, exclaimed, “What?! You know, that’s like Mick Jagger teaching seventh-grade band.”
Saws you should have if you make furniture: FIG. 1. CHIEF KINDS OF SAWS: A. Cross-cut B. Panel C. Tenon, D. Dovetail E. Bow F. Keyhole FIG. 2. USING THE CROSS-CUT SAW. A. Overhand ripping, B. Cross-cutting FIG. 3. PANEL SAW IN USE. A. Sawing a tenon, B. Cutting a plywood panel FIG. 4. HANDLING THE TENON SAW. A. Tenon being sawn, B. Cutting in the mitre box FIG. 5. DOVETAIL SAW IN OPERATION. A. Sawing dovetail, B. Cutting shoulders, C. Using bench hook, D. Mitre block FIG. 6. USE OF THE BOW-SAW
If I owned only one set of woodworking books, it would be the four texts edited by Charles Hayward that we titled “The Woodworker: The Charles Hayward Years Vols. I-IV.” These four books cover everything – and I mean everything – that you need to get started in woodworking and to grow as a craftsman.
I’ve been woodworking for nearly 30 years, and when I have question about how to do a certain operation, these books are where I turn.
Collecting this information into the four volumes was an epic tale in itself. The four books are made up of the best magazine articles on handwork from The Woodworker, a British woodworking magazine that Charles Hayward largely wrote himself. We had to comb through 30 years of monthly magazines and sort out the best articles. Organize them. Scan images and retype the articles and then assemble them into these huge volumes.
It was worth it, if only for me to own these four incredibly useful books (there’s also a fifth book of Hayward’s inspirational essays we added later). Here is a small taste of the clarity Hayward brought to his writing from “The Woodworker: The Charles Hayward Years,” Vol. I, Tools.
– Christopher Schwarz
On Saws
Of all the tools in the kit the saw is probably the most difficult to control, and it is certainly the most easily damaged by abuse. Remember that, apart from proper handling, a saw should not be given work for which it is unsuitable.
Since the general modern practice is to buy prepared timber ready cut to size the need for many saws has passed. Still, it is necessary to be prepared to do a certain amount of cutting up, and a cross-cut handsaw is advisable.
Handsaws. If you propose to have one saw only, the panel saw is probably the best investment. If you can have two (and it is better) choose a panel saw and a larger cross-cut saw. The latter will do for the general cutting up of larger timber—you can use it for ripping with the grain as well as crosscutting. It is rather slower at this than the ripsaw, but most men are agreed that the latter is an unnecessary expense nowadays.
For the cross-cut select a saw of about 26 ins. length, with a tooth size of 8 or 9 points to the inch. It will cut quite fast enough for the limited amount of cutting out you need to do, yet it is not so coarse as to tear out the grain. Fig. 2, A, shows the overhand method being used to rip out a set of stiles. Cabinet makers usually prefer this as it is less back-aching than bending over trestles.
The panel saw comes in for a good many jobs. Its fine teeth make it far less liable to splinter out the grain, a feature specially valuable when sawing across the grain of brittle hardwoods. For the same reason it is invaluable for thin wood which would probably split if a coarse toothed saw were used.
Plywood again can be sawn with it without danger of the layers being forced apart. Another use is that of sawing the larger tenons—in fact, it can be used for any of the work for which the tenon saw would be too light. A 20 in. length with a teeth of 12 points to the inch is a good all-round size.
Back Saws. These are required for the general bench work of cutting smaller pieces of wood to size and sawing joints. The blade is of a finer gauge than a handsaw and the teeth are smaller so that it makes a much finer cut. It is kept stiff by the iron or brass back. You need two; a tenon saw and a dovetail saw. The former is used for all the larger bench work sawing. A length of 14 ins. is recommended and a tooth size of about 14 points to the inch. Lighter work is done with the dovetail saw; dovetails, small mitres, in fact, any job requiring a fine cut. A small saw—say, 8 in.—with extra fine teeth is recommended. It might have 20-22 points to the inch. This will give it an extremely fine cut, making it ideal for small joints, but take care that it is not abused by giving it work which is too heavy.
Bow and Padsaws. These are needed for cutting shapes, and of the two the bowsaw is infinitely the better tool. There are, however, one or two jobs for which it cannot be used, and it is for these that the pad or keyhole saw is needed. First the bow saw. The exact size does not matter a great deal; a blade length of 12 ins. is a good average size. Its advantage is that, since it is kept taut by the tension of the cord at the top which is twisted tourniquet fashion, the blade can be narrow, this enabling it to negotiate quick curves. Furthermore there is no danger of its becoming buckled by the pressure put upon it. It can be used for internal cuts because the rivets holding the blade can be withdrawn, enabling the blade to be passed through a hole.
The only restriction is that it cannot be used internally at a distance from the edge greater than that between the blade and the centre bar. For this work the keyhole saw is necessary. This has necessarily to have a somewhat coarse blade because it has nothing beyond its own stiffness to keep it straight. The rule in using it is to give the blade the minimum projection consistent with a reasonable stroke. It helps to avoid buckling. A typical everyday use is that of sawing the lower part of a keyhole after boring the hole at the top. Here it would not be worth the bother of threading in the bow saw for two short cuts.
It is not advisable for the reader to sharpen his own saws—he will probable do more harm than good unless he has had some experience. A common practice is for cabinet makers to sharpen their own saws twice and then to send them away every time after that. The point is that if a saw gets into bad condition-uneven teeth and so on-the sharpener charges more to put it right, so that it is not an economy in the long run to do it oneself. This applies specially to the saws with small teeth.
