This year, we’ve decided to stop offering pre-publication orders for books (we’ve never offered it for tools).
Here’s the reason: About 80 percent of our customer service inquiries consist of, “Where is the thing I ordered?” And the “thing” is still at the printing plant. Most of these customers didn’t realize (or forgot) that they’d placed a pre-publication order.
It didn’t matter how many times we put the shipping date on their receipt or at the top of the ordering page. People overlooked it.
And as our company has grown, answering this question over and over has become a significant part of the work that Meghan and Megan do for us. We’d much rather have them work on making you new books instead of dealing with frustrated customers.
So going forward, here’s how book releases will work. When the book arrives in our warehouse, we’ll open up sales and start shipping immediately. And for the first 30 days the book is out, customers will receive a free pdf download of the book (if one is available).
This change will (I hope) reduce frustration all around.
Chair build in Greg Pennington’s shop. Photo by Justin Mabie.
A quick look at Jenny Bower’s Instagram page will leave anyone who hasn’t met her in person wondering just who this woman is. A glamorous beauty with flawless hair and makeup, she usually appears in the kind of clothes most woodworkers only dream about – form-fitting sheaths, or retro mid-century dresses with poofy skirts when she’s renovating the interior of a vintage camper she purchased in 2020. But along with the glamour, a pervasive wholesomeness animates her posts – expressions of gratitude for family, friends and good work; visits to military veterans and vintage car enthusiasts; hand-crafting some of the most elaborate Halloween costumes you’re ever likely to see, only to lament the early onset of winter, which requires covering up all that hard work with a full-length coat; cooking around a fire pit with her daughter; late-summer cannonballs in a bathing suit off a dock into Lake Michigan’s chilly waters – the essence of down-to-earth pleasures. She peppers her posts with hashtags such as #workwithyourhands, a bit of encouragement to others based on how she and her husband, Nathan, earn their livings, as an engraver and clockmaker respectively.
A corner of Jenny’s garden.
Jenny dressed to complement the interior of a Frank Lloyd Wright house for a Jacqueline Kennedy-themed photo shoot.Photo by H. Payne.
Another Jackie shot.
“Which is the real Jenny Bower?” you may ask. Answer: all of them.
Jenny was born in Alpena, Mich., in 1980 and has deep roots in the area. Both sides of her family are from the same town. Her father is a retired chemist whom she describes as “very scientific, a super-perfectionist.” He worked at a paper company when she was little, then created new formulas for a company that made hot-stamp ribbons for products, such as the sell-by date on a bread bag. The hot-stamp tool was essentially a branding iron. “It was the weirdest job,” she recalls. “I never could explain it to my friends.” Her mother was a cosmetologist who worked at salons and also did hair for friends in their house. “I grew up around older people because she specialized in those old-lady hairdos with the hair sets.” Jenny has one brother, Jerry, who is two years younger.
When Jenny was about 6, her family moved to Michigan’s west coast. She has lived in a few towns since then, mainly between Kalkaska and Traverse City, where she and Nathan live today. She went to public schools, other than a couple years at private school between moves, and graduated from Traverse City Central High School in 1998 before attending college. To make college affordable (she paid for it as she went), Jenny did all her work through a “university center program,” basically a satellite campus, and graduated in 2004 with a BA in English Language and Literature and a minor in Elementary Education from Grand Valley State University; she planned to become an elementary school teacher.
That plan changed when she and Nathan married. “We had no money and one car. Most of the teaching jobs that were available were in surrounding districts. I had interviewed at a couple of surrounding districts, but by the time we thought about getting another car – we didn’t want to go into debt! – I thought ‘I’ll just wait a bit and work in my husband’s business.’” She liked it so well that she didn’t pursue teaching, despite her love of that work. Instead, she started her own business.
She and Nate met at a New Year’s Eve party in the winter of 2002-2003. She found him intriguing – he’d been home-schooled, then taken a few college business classes without feeling the need to graduate from college. In his spare time, he had fixed an antique clock for his mother and become increasingly obsessed with mechanics in general and how things work. At the age of 18 or 19 he cold-called a local jewelry store and asked if they needed someone to help with clock repair. They did; he started working there as an apprentice, then eventually opened his own business. Fixing old clocks was one thing – he found antique European clocks especially fascinating. But then he started making his own, a whole new world of creative mechanical endeavor. He now does both clockmaking and repair.
“My dad was concerned about me dating Nathan,” Jenny says – his primary concern was whether Nathan, being self-employed, would have a sufficient income. “My dad had always had a company job with benefits,” she explains. “[He] always worked a Monday-through-Friday, nine-to-five job.”
“(Nate’s) really mechanically-minded,” she told her dad. “I’m sure if the clock repair goes bust he’ll find something to do.”
While Nathan was single, he saved up as much money as he could. Those savings disappeared in short order once they were married and began renovating what Jenny calls their “junky old house,” a single-story built in the early 1960s. They bought the house because it was zoned as a residential home while being on commercial property, which made it affordable. They spent the first chunk of their marriage running their business and renovating. When they moved in, the house had fake wood paneling on the walls and shag carpet on the floors. One room had silver wallpaper with blue roses. They put in new ceilings – the dining room ceiling had caved in due to water damage caused by poorly planned rooflines. When they pulled up the flooring, they found the subfloor there, but Nathan had suspicions. “I just feel like I should pull up this floor and see what’s underneath,” he said. A good thing, too – the floor system consisted of boards simply stacked on bricks. There were no floor joists. They had to completely rebuild the floor system.
The front living room and bedroom became the clock shop and their office, and remained so for about 10 years. Then they built their dream shop on the same property; it’s connected to the house but no longer inside the house. “We were penny pinching on all sides,” Jenny says, “but it was worth it to have our own business. It taught us a lot. When we built the new building [for their workshop], lots of that confidence came from what we learned in the renovation of the house.”
Jenny and Maylin in the new shop during construction.
Remarkably, she says, Nathan wasn’t raised to be handy. His mother is an oil painter; his dad was a pastor turned children’s book author. “His extended family are all business owners and very hands-on, so he grew up feeling like it was OK to have a business or pursue something that was not a typical job. He really understands the mechanics of things; he’s not afraid to take things apart and try to figure them out on his own. He fixes everything. We’ve never had to have a repair person fix anything.”
Replacing the radiator in her Jeep Wagoneer.
Nathan has passed that readiness to solve mechanical problems onto Jenny. Shortly after she bought her old Jeep Wagoneer, Nathan encouraged her to replace the radiator instead of paying someone else to do it. He’d planned to replace it for her, but asked if she might care to do it herself. He taught her how. “It was kind of cool for me, because car repair in general feels completely intimidating and so far out of my realm of understanding, but Nathan was really encouraging.”
Family For a long time I wondered where Jenny got her dark good looks. What was the source of that bone structure, those eyes? Were her ancestors from Italy or Spain? A post about fry-bread answered my question. Her forebears on both sides are at least partly Native American. “They were very quiet about their heritage,” she says of her grandparents when she was growing up. “It’s been hard to find out the story” – not surprising, if you know anything about historical efforts in Canada and the United States to erase cultural memory and traditions from Native American children. Her mother has tried to research her family history, but there’s little available at this point about which tribes her family members came from, along with related background. But fry-bread is a potent carrier of tradition; her great-grandma, grandma and mom all made it. “I loved it so much as a kid I thought my daughter would enjoy it,” Jenny says.
Making fry-bread over the fire.
Jenny and Nathan wanted to be parents, but it took them about five years to get pregnant. “It was a very difficult time for both of us. But for me as a woman, it was very hard. My husband is the eldest of 12 children – lots of siblings, and his siblings had lots of kids. We were the first to have any issue. It was hard for me to see so many people around me getting so easily pregnant. It was a long journey. It felt like a lonely time for me. I didn’t like to talk about it much with other people. I didn’t know what the problem was; later on I found I had some issues that complicated it, but when we did get pregnant with [Maylin] it was a very happy time for both of us.”
Her daughter, Maylin, was born in 2009 and is now 11. They chose not to know the baby’s sex before birth; Nathan came up with the name Maylin, which has no gendered baggage. “Maylin’s great-grandmother’s middle name is Mae,” says Jenny. “My middle name is Lynn. We tweaked the spelling a bit to make it easier to read and pronounce, but the sentiment of a family name is there.”
Business
Jenny at her workbench.
Traverse City is a touristy, affluent, artsy area, especially when snowbirds return for summer. Many of Jenny’s and Nathan’s customers live within 30 miles of the Bowers’ home. Most of Nate’s customers come to him for clock repair, an art now so unusual that people will often drive from Detroit or Chicago and leave their precious clocks with Nate for as long as they have to, because they know of no one closer. Most of the clock-business customers are middle-aged or retired. They want to have their clocks fixed to pass them down to their grandkids.
Engraving a Lie-Nielsen plane.
Jenny came to engraving through the clock business. Many old clocks have engraved numbers and decorative designs on their faces. Jenny had collected a lot of antique jewelry; she had a couple of engraved pieces she found especially compelling. “I really was fascinated by art on metal,” she explains. Nathan saw many engraved clocks come into the shop for repair, some dating back to the 1700s. After seeing the gun and knife work of a local engraver whom Nathan had met through a customer, Jenny became interested in the engraving process. She ordered some engraving tools and tried her hand at the new skill; the timing was ideal, as Nate was toying with adding some engraved components to new clocks he was building.
One of Nathan’s clocks with Jenny’s hand-engraving. “The clocks are completely handmade in our shop,” Jenny writes. “Gears are manually machined on a lathe and the gear spokes, clock hands, plate/face designs are hand cut with a jeweler’s saw.“
“For me,” says Jenny, “when I’m engraving, I get into this zone where I’m really absorbed in my work. Three hours could pass in a few minutes. I’ve always been a very artistic individual; I enjoy drawing and hand-lettering. But with engraving, I like cutting the metal.”
Detail shot of an engraved handplane.
Most of her designs incorporate an artistic flourish or scroll, with a lot of acanthus leaves, vines and flowers. She prefers natural forms – she doesn’t do much with Celtic or repetitive geometric designs, both of which are common among engravers. She describes her designs as asymmetrical but balanced. “I like to draw things out to fill a space and look balanced, but if you look closely, [the design is] often not symmetrical.”
She started doing Instagram after she and Nate did a couple of TV shows “A Craftsman’s Legacy” with Eric Gorges and “Handcrafted America” with Jill Wagner. Jill and the cameramen on Eric Gorges’s show suggested that she share what she was doing. She looked into it. “I had started engraving some tools and posted some on Instagram,” she says. She quickly found twofold value in sharing her designs. “It became a way for me to document projects I was doing, for myself and to share with other people. Unless people know what hand-engraving is, they think it’s done by machine. I wanted to show [them] ‘I’m not a monogram machine or a CNC laser! I’m carving the metal with my own hands and doing my own designs.’ I wanted people to see that process. I didn’t want to get into teaching, but I wanted to show how I [create] a piece, so if you buy my work, this is how it’s done. There were a lot of assumptions, and the best way to explain was to show how I do it.”
Instagram, she finds, calls for a delicate balance. “I don’t want to come across as a braggart,” she says – ‘Look at me!’ It was more, the process might be interesting to people because it’s an unusual art form that people aren’t familiar with. That’s why my Instagram page isn’t just pictures of finished work. I include pictures of my car and my garden. I’m not just an engraver. I’m an artist, and that sprawls into different categories.”
Laying out the engraving pattern on a pair of calipers.
At this point Jenny has engraved so many handplanes that she’s lost track of the number; other common engraving projects are squares, tape measures, hammers, straight rules and calipers. She also engraves locks, and nameplates for badges. And ferrules for chisels – lots of them. “Those are fun. It’s so silly, really. A chisel doesn’t need to be pretty.” In 2020 she took part in a project to raise money for Color of Change; she engraved the ferrules, and each woodworker involved in the project made a handle. “Every chisel was different. It was so fun seeing what different woodworkers came up with.”
Engraved Florip Toolworks saw.
Jenny’s hand-tool engraving led her to woodworking. Her posts on Instagram caught the interest of quite a few woodworkers. “From that point I got questions about engraving hand tools and got to know a lot of people through the Instagram community and formed friendships with these people.” New friends encouraged her to try woodworking. “I was very nervous about that but interested in learning more about it. Through building friendships, I got to see the delight they had in their work.”
She took a chairmaking class locally to familiarize herself with hand and power tools – “a nice way to learn some of the fundamentals of woodworking.” The class was titled “Chair Making for Women.” When she showed up, she found herself alone with one other woman. Fortunately, the instructor was willing to run the class, which gave them a lot of one-on-one time. After taking another woodworking class locally, she took one with Greg Pennington in the fall of 2019 in which she made a continuous-arm Windsor chair. That chair is now in the clock shop.
Working on her Windsor chair at Greg Pennington’s shop.
Nate has been turning a storage shed on their property into a small woodworking shop for both of them. “Woodworking and clockmaking don’t really go together well,” she notes. “The dust from woodworking – you don’t want to get [that] into the mechanics of clocks!”
Going back to the question of who, on Instagram, is the real Jenny Bower, she remarks, “If there’s a realness that comes through, it’s because this is my real life. This is what I do every day. I don’t have a fancy camera; I just use my phone. It’s a snapshot of what I’m doing today. If somebody’s standing next to me in the shop, that’s what they’re going to see.”
Jenny’s completed chair. Portrait by Maylin Bower.
“When I was growing up it was always about going to college. I didn’t understand that there were craft schools, that you could go away and learn these different crafts. Now I can say to my daughter, ‘If you want a college degree, we’ll support you in any way we can.’ But I want to expose her to craft alternatives before she makes that decision. There’s a lot of opportunity open to her.”
Maylin’s Harry Potter-themed birthday party in the new shop.
Editor’s note: Here at Chair Chat Headquarters, we love wonky chairs. In fact, the weirder the better. So even though we might say the chair’s finish looks like it came out of someone’s butt, we honestly wish we could go to the store and buy a can of McSharty’s Brown Chair Wax.
As always, Chair Chats are not for the sensitive. Do not read this aloud at your local day care center or at your prayer breakfast. That never goes well (sorry, Rev. Mauze).
Rudy: Do we still have time for another chair?
Rudy: The torched hedge chair.
Klaus: That looks VERY torched.
Rudy: From Far West Kentucky.
Chris: So far east that it’s west. This one screams “messed with.”
Klaus: So west it’s east and then west again.
Rudy: And I love the way it looks. So it is probably a fake.
Chris: I know. I am so jaded. Same thing. If it sucks, it’s real. If it’s nice, it’s fake.
Klaus: The hands are very nice on this one. Uncommon.
Chris: I’ve not seen hands like that.
Klaus: Through tenons on the crest. Nice.
Rudy: And look at that tenon that bulges out of the arm. It says “Look, I am really old!”
Klaus: Yeah, that’s a fat tenon for that arm. It’s putting on a fake limp. Making its voice sound so old and weary.
Chris: The arm has fallen. I think it might be legit.
Klaus: We’re so cynical.
Chris: I had this problem on my prototype. If the arm falls at the back, it will eventually come down at the front.
Rudy: True, the long sticks don’t swell enough under the arm to really support it.
Chris: That is what I fought with. It’s a tricky detail with these chairs.
Klaus: That’s interesting.
Rudy: The crest looks steam bent. I thought the Irish vernacular chairs only rarely used steam bending?
Chris: The crest could be cut from solid. That’s very common in Irish chairs.
Klaus: It has the same kind of legs as the one from our last chair chat. Chunky, almost square, and a crude tenon that almost looks like it’s whittled.
Chris: For me the most unusual part of this chair is the arm shape. I’ve not seen one like it.
Rudy: The arms sure are a funny shape. Not entirely unlike Irish arms. But then odd.
Rudy: With all that wear, I find it funny to still see a chamfer under all those years of paint. I would imagine it would have been rounded off by now?
Chris: It could be a stripping gone awry. The chamfer on the top of the seat is a bit unusual. And the angle at the back of the arms too.
Klaus: But a nice detail.
Chris: I like it. You see it more on modern chairs.
Rudy: the chamfer is just so visible and constant. Weird.
Chris: Agree.
Klaus: There’s something timeless about this chair. I love it.
Rudy: Almost no splay, just some rake.
Chris: Also unusual: The seat shape. Square at the front. Rounded corners at the back.
Rudy: You’re right, I didn’t see that. Most of these have square corners all around?
Chris: Or rounded all around. Just a lot of little oddities on this one.
Klaus: Is that front left mortise hollow?
Rudy: It sure looks like it. Perhaps the leg came loose
Chris: I suspect the leg was repaired.
Klaus: They inserted a new one, you think?
Chris: Leg came out. They stuffed cloth in there and couldn’t get it seated all the way. Very common repair and very common problem.
Klaus: I need to get my copy of Claudia Kinmonth’s book…It’s been stuck in the mail for a month.
Chris: I think a Chair Chat with Claudia Kinmonth would…get us thrown in chair jail.
Rudy: Haha. She would be interesting to talk to!
Klaus: Haha.
Rudy: Why would they not remove the cloth to make the leg fit? And did they wedge the leg in or did they just leave it in there loose?
Klaus: You mean they stuffed cloth in when they hammered in the legs in the first place? I’m not following.
Chris: To tighten a leg they would wrap some cloth around the tenon and add some glue. Then pound it it. Once it’s in, it ain’t coming out. So you only get one shot until the leg comes loose again. The cloth is the repair.
Klaus: Ah.
Rudy: I see. Have you tried that kind of repair yourself too?
Chris: I haven’t tried it. But you see it a LOT on old chairs. There were five or six at St Fagans that had this sort of repair. Like the chair went to the loo and still had some toilet paper stuck to its tenon.
Rudy: That is very interesting.
Klaus: Cool. I’ll look out for it. Never seen it.
Chris: Once you see it, you’ll see it a lot. Anyway, could be wrong. Maybe the chair took a COLD shower and it’s tiny tenon shrunk up.
Rudy: In freezing cold Ireland.
Klaus: I hear it’s cold in Far West Kentucky.
Rudy: Have you seen this type of repair with sticks, too, or only with legs?
Chris: I can’t recall seeing it on sticks. Most stick repairs are snapped sticks that get repaired with a branch or a bolt. Sticks don’t come loose too often.
Klaus: That outer left stick looks like a branch. Look at the tiny knot:
Rudy: I noticed that too! In line with West Irish Kentucky chairmaking traditions.
Klaus: Could be just a wonky shave.
Chris: Nice catch. Looks “stick-y.”
Klaus: Sure does. And it’s more organic looking than the others.
Rudy: Now that you have torched a chair Chris, does this finish look familiar?
Chris: A little. This one looks like they applied stripper and scraped it until it got like this. It doesn’t look like a naturally aged finish.
Klaus: It’s still a nice finish, though? I like it.
Chris: Sure! I like grungy finishes.
Rudy: New or old, east or west, real or fake, this view is a seller:
Chris: I wouldn’t kick this chair out of bed for eating crackers. But it has too many little “that’s odd” things about it that make me prefer the box chair from our previous chat.
Klaus: That’s a great stance. It’s got personality. What would this chair’s name be if it was an Irish person?
Chris: McWonky.
Klaus: First name Cracker. Cracker McWonky.
Chris: McWonky with the Broken Left Arm
Rudy: Cracker McWonky with the Broken Left Arm and the sticky stick.
Chris: That’s it!
Klaus: That’s the title right there.
Chris: Ole Knot in the Back.
Rudy: There is a pub in Dublin called “Y’ole Knot in the Back.” Probably.
Klaus: HAHA, I bet there is.
Chris: It’s also a term of endearment. “I’d like to fondle your ole knot in the back, lassie.” Or it’s the Irish G-spot?
Rudy: Man, your Irish is so good!
Klaus: I like it when ya tickle my ole knot, young lad!
Chris: That’s what the priests say.
Rudy: There are a lot of priests in Ireland.
Chris: And a lot of knotty wood. (Naughty wood).
Klaus: McKnotty wood.
Chris: I’d like to put my tenon in your knot hole. In your feathered crotch.
Rudy: Hahaha!
Klaus: Hahaha. You can’t say that on television.
Rudy: You can in Ireland, I think.
Chris: How about tongue in groove? The chair was made of Naughty Pine.
Rudy: With a butt joint.
Chris: Nailed that butt joint! And this is where Claudia calls the police.
Rudy: I found the info on the chair! Check it out:
True Early 19th Century Irish Antique Primitive Armchair
This is an honest, late Georgian Irish antique country armchair, not to be confused with the large amount of fakes around. This Irish primitive antique armchair is a good, large size, it features a thick elm seat, shaped arms and a comb back rest. In very good solid condition and in the original paint finish. A lovely sculptural looking country armchair that has four stick legs, again all honest and original. Dates from around 1800-20.
Writing a book isn’t hard. Anyone can write a book. The real trick is this: Once you start, can you stop writing a book?
That’s exactly where I am. I’ve already built four additional chairs than I had originally planned to make for my next book, and today I eyed the walnut chair coming together on my workbench and wondered about making one more chair. In cherry.
I’m old enough and have built enough things to know the source of my problem. John Economaki, the founder of Bridge City Tools, put my misgivings into words years ago when we were driving somewhere together.
“When I teach a class on design I ask the students this question: Would you rather build a project that is beautifully proportioned with a few gappy joints, or a technically flawless piece with a design that is just OK?
“The students unanimously answer: technically flawless.”
This walnut chair is a good design. It sits beautifully. It looks good from all angles. But there are a number of technical flaws that make me want to grab the Sawzall and dismember it. Three of the through-tenons have cosmetic flaws. I have small bits of tearing around the mortises for the back sticks. The saddling is good overall, but my straight lines have some tiny variations I cannot improve. When I assembled the arms, I was so happy that I didn’t crack the delicate hands when I wedged them that I forgot to check if the arms were in the same plane. They are 1/4” off at the back of the chair.
Oh, and some small (cosmetic) honeycombing opened up in one area of the seat.
I should just look past these problems and move on. I should stop building and dive into the writing full-time. But I can’t.
Several years ago I changed the way I sign my pieces. I have a big stamp and a little stamp. I mark the underside of the seat with my big stamp. Then, with the little stamp I make an additional impression for every defect that the piece has. Most pieces get one or two “little stamps.” A few get three. I don’t know if I’ve ever made a perfect piece with zero little stamps.
But as you can see from the image at the top of this blog entry, this walnut chair isn’t going out into the world. Time to fetch the cherry.
Editor’s note: Raney Nelson at Daed Toolworks has been bringing the Improved Pattern dividers back into production at his shop. Details on the tools and how to purchase a set are below.
After months of revising process and materials, the Improved Pattern dividers are back in production, at a slightly lower cost, and will be for the foreseeable future. I’ve added a batch of 40 sets to inventory today, and will be adding more sets early next week.
While it may take several weeks or perhaps even a few months to catch up with demand, I am firmly committed to keeping these available for as long as there is a desire for them.
What changed? Well, primarily there are two changes that make the tools fully viable long-term from a production standpoint. First is a change to the steel used. While I am extremely fond of the O1 tool steel these have been made from previously, it is a very demanding material for production of the dividers. After trying out a number of other steels, I’ve settled on 12L14 – a low-carbon alloy that is specifically formulated for increased machine-ability through selective inclusion of lead throughout the matrix. This method makes the steel much easier to cut and mill, with little or no effects on the actual alloying composition. The steel is tough, and has a similar chromium content to O1, making the aesthetics of the steel quite similar. The only significant difference is that 12L14 is not a through-hardening steel, and so is not conducive to forming cutting edges. If you have a need for forming a cutting leg on your dividers, you can contact me (raney@daedtoolworks.com) about a custom run of dividers in O1 or another high-carbon steel.
The second change is in the process of tuning the pivot joint. In order to hold very accurate settings, the fit between the through-bolt and pivot bore of the legs must be fitted to very tight tolerances (about .0005″ or less). By hand-lapping the bores with barrel laps in final fitting, this fit is much easier to ensure and maintain. Finally, the addition of very fine Teflon washers between leaves has made the already smooth movement even smoother, and ensures consistent tension throughout the range of movement.
