Seasoning and drying of wood describe the same thing: reducing the moisture content of boards or planks thus bringing them into a dry-enough condition to use.
Acclimatising already-dried wood (acclimating in U.S. parlance) to the conditions in your workshop, or bringing it to a condition where it suits its final location as a piece of furniture or woodwork, is a different process to seasoning or drying wood. This subject (is) covered in section 6.12, Allowing for Changes in Wood Moisture Content.
There are several advantages of using dried wood.
Drying wood:
• Reduces its weight.
• Increases its strength and stiffness.
• Pre-shrinks it.
• Makes it more pleasant to handle.
• Reduces the chance of insect pest infestation leading to wood damage.
• Reduces warp and distortion of the wood in service because the drying process largely reveals any such tendencies in advance of constructing furniture and other wooden artefacts.
• The resin of resinous softwoods is hardened during higher temperature stages of the drying process in conventional kilns, making the resin less likely to weep out onto the surface of finished work.
• The end result of most machine and hand-tool operations are more predictable.
• Paints and polishes adhere better to dry wood.
• Modern adhesives formulations, in nearly every case, work best on dry wood.
• Wood preservatives and fire retardants penetrate dry wood better.
• Dry wood doesn’t spread damp to adjacent materials and objects.
• There is no fungal activity in wood dried to below 22 percent MC.
Cross section of a board illustrating the three zones used to describe a moisture gradient, i.e., the core, intermediate zone and the shell. This is convenient but there aren’t actually distinct lines between each zone.
Apart from traditional green woodworking briefly described in section 6.9, there are some situations where undried wood has distinct advantages:
• It’s easier to drive screws, staples and nails into undried wood, and the wood is also less likely to split during nailing, although wood shrinkage may later lead to splitting.
• Screws, staples and nails driven into wet wood go rusty and this increases their holding power. Pallet and potato box manufacturers use partially dried wood for this reason.
• Cutting, shaping and working the wood requires less power, a characteristic often taken advantage of by carvers, turners, in steam bending, green woodworking etc.
The preferred moisture content of wood varies with its planned end use (see section 6.10) but to summarise, about 19 percent MC suits outdoor wooden artefacts; wood for internal furniture in the U.K. should generally be made out of material between about 7 and 12 percent MC. This MC range suits typical seasonal RH values for most British habitable buildings, i.e., about 35 percent RH in winter to 65 percent RH in summer. These numbers are similar to those experienced in coastal regions of North America. On the other hand, in central and northern areas of North America, the typical RH of habitable buildings tends to be somewhat lower at about 20 percent RH in winter (which assumes no artificial humidification system is installed in the building to maintain higher RH values) to 50 percent RH in summer, equating to wood MC values of 5 percent to 9 percent MC. Wood at various moisture contents between 12 percent and 18 percent is suitable for a variety of construction work and joinery in heated sheltered locations, sheltered unheated locations and for exterior joinery.
The two most common methods for drying wood are air drying and kiln drying. The methods are often used in conjunction. For example, it’s a common practice to partially air dry and follow up with a kiln-drying cycle. Within the two broad categories of air drying and kiln drying there are sub-categories. Air drying, for instance, breaks down into traditional air drying, accelerated air drying, forced air drying, low-temperature warehouse pre-drying and drying in climate chambers.
End racking. Sycamore planks “end reared” and well-spaced apart. Sycamore is very prone to fungal growth if surface moisture is present so this practice of rearing the planks immediately after conversion into boards is quite common. Stickering the planks horizontally in piles straight after conversion may lead to the stickers trapping water and staining is the likely end result. Sticker-stained planks are unusable for show parts of furniture and sell at much-reduced prices to the upholstered furniture market.
Kiln dryer configurations and types are varied. Conventional medium-temperature kiln drying is the first and predominant form. Conventional kilns, by definition, operate at temperatures below 100 degrees C or 212 degrees F. The second most common kiln type is the low-temperature dehumidification drying kiln. The smallest versions of this type can generally only reach a high temperature of about 115 degrees F (46 degrees C), but large units will easily achieve 150 degrees F (65.5 degrees C). Thirdly, there is solar kiln drying. Lastly there are progressive kilns, which are uncommon – the only working ones I am aware of in the U.K. at the time of writing are owned by BSW Timber. With the exception of progressive kilns, a kiln is loaded and closed. A drying cycle is run through and then the kiln is emptied, ready for another batch.
Journeymen House Carpenters Association Institute of Philadelphia, June 1835. Collection of the University of Maryland Library.
The struggle to change the workday from sunrise to sunset to a ten-hour day was long and contentious. There were legal challenges to overcome in a country that had long followed English laws and customs. As journeymen formed their own societies and began to protest work conditions they took advantage of a free press and improved communications between “brother” societies in other towns and cities. And they took inspiration from the ideas and language used during the Revolutionary War.
English Law in the American Court
In the first quarter of the 18th century Philadelphia’s cordwainers, tailors and carpenters had incorporated guilds that operated much like their British counterparts. Close to the end of the century the first journeymen’s society, the cordwainers, was formed.
In 1791 journeymen cordwainers (shoemakers using new leather) had formed their own society to protect against the hiring of non-members during “turn-outs.” A “turn-out” or walk-out was usually peaceful and might last for hours or a few days. Shop owners in turn tried to hire “scabs.” In 1805 the cordwainers staged a turn-out to uphold a closed shop and things turned violent. Scabs were beaten and employers intimidated. The cordwainers were indicted and charged with “combining to raise their wages.” The cordwainers appealed to the public in the Aurora newspaper of November 28, 1805:
The charge of combining came from English common law. The defense lawyer for the cordwainers was Caesar A. Rodney (later he would be the Attorney General under Jefferson) and he argued the employers were hiding behind an English statue passed in 1349 to halt the rise of wages following the Black Plague. In his closing argument he said:
The cordwainers lost. The charges of combining and conspiracy as defined by English common law would continue to be used against striking workers. This legal battle between Federalists (often employers and merchants) who favored English law and Jeffersonian democracy (journeymen and the emerging working class) was another conflict that needed to be resolved in the new Republic.
The use of “unlawful combination” and English common law to bring charges against strikes by American journeymen societies was challenged again four years after the trial of the Philadelphia cordwainers. This time it was the New York cordwainers and their lawyer “ridiculed reliance on non-applicable English precedents” and asked, “How long shall this superstitious idolatry endure?”
In 1810 Judge DeWitt Clinton (driver of the construction of the Erie Canal) said in the case of New York journeymen that they had the “right to meet and regulate their concerns, and to ask for [higher] wages, and to work or to refuse to work.” He advised that the means should not be too arbitrary and coercive. The defense lawyer in this case asked, “Shall all others, except only the industrious mechanics, be allowed to meet and plot and yet these poor men be indicted for combining against starvation?”
In 1842 the precedent set in the trial of the Philadelphia cordwainers was put to rest by Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Court: “…it was contended on the part of the defendants, that this indictment did not set forth any agreement to do a criminal act, or do any lawful act by criminal means, and that the agreement therein set forth did not constitute a conspiracy indictable by the law of this state…”
Ruinous Free Time
The journeymen shipwrights of New York formed a society in April 1803 and along with the caulkers thought it unreasonable to work a 14-hour day. The shipyard owners and merchants published resolutions that included:
The yard owners follow this with a declaration to blacklist any member of the journeymen’s society.
Close to 600 journeymen carpenters in Boston went on strike in 1825 for a shorter workday because “on the present system, it is impossible to maintain a family at the present time…” The response to the strike was met with the usual arguments that the current workday was “customary from time immemorial” and fewer work hours would expose workers to “many temptations and improvident practices.” There were also veiled threats that any journeymen who thought themselves worthy of becoming a master should reconsider their actions.
Boston shipyard owners spent large sums to defeat the ten-hour movement. In 1832 Boston shipyard workers met and published a resolution that from the 20th of March until the 1st of September they would “not labor more than ten hours per day unless being paid extra for each and every hour; and that we are willing, if requested, to begin at half-past four in the morning, and labor not exceeding ten hours…”
The shipyard owners published their response:
The journeymen ship carpenters did not gain their ten-hour work day but were allowed a two-hour break at noon during July and August because of the extreme heat and the “fear of pestilence.”
The lives of journeymen had long been controlled by master craftsmen. Previously, there were restrictions on being married. Now, many were family men and faced the requirement of excessive work hours and no prospect of becoming a master. The justifications for not granting a ten-hour work day had twisted paternalistic reasoning. It was better to work than have free time: “…for to be idle several of the most useful hours of the morning and evening will surely lead to intemperance and ruin.”
Philadelphia was one of the few cities that did not require property ownership to vote. In 1827 a newspaper article circulated in the city calling for a ten-hour work day. One of the points made was how could one be a good citizen and participate in, and contribute to, civic activities if you were too tired from unceasing exertion. Working from sunrise to sunset “was incompatible with citizenship, for it did not afford the workman the requisite leisure for the consideration of public questions and therefore condemned him to an inferior position in the state.”
In the Boston Post of April 17, 1835 one worker wrote, “By the old system we have no free time for mental cultivation—and that is the policy of the big bugs—they endeavor to keep people ignorant by keeping them always at work.” And the irony is one of the aims of many of the mechanic societies, including the one in Boston, was to maintain a library for skilled craftsmen.
When mechanics walked out for a short time or went on strike for days or weeks, the opposing party was no longer just the master of a shop. Merchant-capitalists financed production, the master was now the manufacturer-employer and the journeymen was the “property-less wage earner.” The journeymen needed better and stronger organization to gain changes in their work lives.
A first step occurred in June of 1827 when the journeymen carpenters of Philadelphia went on strike for a ten-hour workday. Other trades joined the strike and in October the Mechanics’ Union Of Trade Associations was formed and with it their own newspaper, the Mechanics Free Press. The Working Men’s Party, the “Workies” organized as the political arm of this first cross-trade association. Roughly four years later the Mechanics’ Union dissolved.
From the cover of “The American House-carpenter” by R.G. Hatfield, 1857.
Two Sons of Revolutionary Soldiers
Lambert Hitchcock was born in Cheshire, Connecticut in 1795. His father, John Lee Hitchcock, was a soldier in the Revolutionary War. Lambert set-up a cabinet and chair shop in western Connecticut in 1818. His shop made chair parts for shipment to Charleston and other cities in the South. His business thrived and eventually he was sending chair parts as far west as Chicago. By 1825, production shifted to making complete chairs and a new three-story brick building was built to accommodate 100 men, women and children workers. The price of a chair was around $1.50.
Seth Luther was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1795, the son of Thomas Luther, a Revolutionary War veteran. Seth learned the carpentry trade from Caleb Earle. As a young man he traveled extensively. In the 1830s he worked as a house carpenter and in cotton mills where he encountered the horrendous conditions of mill workers. He wrote and gave speeches about the mill workers and the lack of education for mill children.
In 1834 he was one of the founders of the Boston Trades Union and in April 1835 he, and two others, wrote a circular that became pivotal to the ten-hour day movement.
The Boston Circular
In 1835 the carpenters of Boston went on strike and were joined by masons and stonecutters. They chose Seth Luther and two others to be their leaders and a traveling committee formed to explain their demands and ask for assistance. Although the strike did not accomplish a shorter workday the Boston Circular (or Ten-Hour Circular) written by the three leaders became an important document in strike actions elsewhere. The circular was first published in The Man newspaper in May of 1835. Soon, it was published throughout the Eastern Seaboard.
What became known as the 1835 General Strike in Philadelphia, and would involve both skilled and unskilled workers, began in late May when the coal haulers on the Schuylkill River docks walked out demanding a ten-hour day and higher wages. They paraded along the dock to prevent others from unloading or transferring cargo to the 75 barges waiting in the river. And they chanted “from six to six.” Shortly after the dock strike began the Boston Circular was published in Philadelphia and the mechanics of the city were galvanized to support the coal haulers. The house painters joined and were followed by carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, bricklayers and several other trades. Trades already on strike for higher wages joined the ten-hour strike. Store clerks joined, as did the bakers, who wanted to end baking on Saturday night and Sunday.
The banner of the Journeymen House Carpenters at the top of this post was painted and used during the General strike. One carpenter taps another on the shoulder and points to the setting sun and the clock on Carpenter’s Hall. In the bottom right corner, “6 to 6” is written on one end of a tool chest.
The strike continued well into June and strike leaders urged the public to give their patronage to merchants that supported a ten-hour day and to boycott those that didn’t. Eventually, the city workers joined the strike, and shortly after the Common Council met and approved a ten-hour day. By the end of June most workers were granted a ten-hour day.
Here’s an excerpt of the letter John Ferral, a Philadelphia labor leader, wrote to Seth Luther to tell him the effect the Boston Circular had had on the the workers of his city:
Carried by the labor press (not the employer press) the Boston Circular and news of the success in Philadelphia spread rapidly. Strikes ensued in mid-size and large cities and by the end of 1835 many more workers gained a ten-hour workday. The exception was Boston. And it has to be noted, the ten-hour workday would be suspended when there was an economic down turn and the fight had to start once again.
The Language and Symbols of Liberty
When the General Strike of 1835 led to the ten-hour workday in Philadelphia it was just over a half-century since the Constitution had been ratified. In their efforts to achieve better work hours and wages, which began before the ratification, the craftsmen of the new Republic often used phrases and concepts found in the Constitution as well as the writings of Thomas Paine.
In shipyards could be found the Mechanics’ Bell which proclaimed “the liberty of leisure for sons of toil.” The bells rang to start the workday, for the start and end of meal breaks and to signal the end of the day.
Mechanics’ Bell, New York. Harper’s Magazine, 1882, via Library of Congress.
The New York Mechanics’ Bell was moved to another shipyard when the yard where it was originally placed was closed down.
Baltimore’s first Mechanics’ Bell was located on Federal Hill. It was torn down and moved sometime in the late 1880s. The bell was still in use early in the 20th century. Visit a maritime museum and you are likely to find an old Mechanics’s Bell on display (if it wasn’t melted down for scrap).
The Philadelphia House Carpenters banner from 1835 was donated to the University of Maryland Library in 1994. It was encased in a frame and when the frame was removed for restoration the back of the banner was revealed. Like the front of the banner, the painting on the back is rich in symbols.
The motto at the bottom of the banner reads “Union and Intelligence – The Path to Independence.”
The banner displays figures used in the cartouche of an early map of North America and were often later used as symbols of America: Indians and the female figure of Columbia in a white gown. Columbia holds the American flag and atop the flagstaff is a red cap. The red cap, also known as the Liberty Cap of the Revolutionary War, was the Bonnet Rouge worn by the sans-culottes during the French Revolution. The background displays the natural wonders of young America.
The struggle to get and keep a ten-hour work day was followed by an equally difficult, and very long fight, to achieve the eight-hour workday. Women’s suffrage, child labor and education would also become part of the labor movements. In 1938, one hundred and three years after the General Strike in Philadelphia, the Fair Labor Standards Act created a 40-hour work week, minimum wage, overtime rules and limited the labor of under-age children.
Rest for the Weary
Matthew 11:28 “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.”
This ends where my previous post ended. “Rest for the Weary” was the motto used by the Chair-makers Society in the Erie Canal celebrations of 1825. Considering the the walk-outs and strikes that were happening in that same year I do wonder if the motto was also a plea from the journeymen marching in the procession.
One of two known banners of the Fancy Chair-makers. Illustration from the Memoir prepared for the celebration of the completion of the Erie Canal by Cadwallader D. Colden, 1825. New York Public Library Digital Collections
Pride in Craft and Accomplishment
The completion of the Erie Canal, the first navigable water link between the Northeast and the Midwest, was cause for celebration. A grand procession was held with the participation of the various artisan societies, including 200 members of the Fancy and Windsor Chairmakers Society. We only have two examples of the banners they carried and both are loaded with messages.
The two sides of a second Chair-makers’ banner. New York Public Library Digital Collections.
In both banners there are examples of the furniture made by the Society’s craftsmen with the second banner including specific tools. “Rest for the Weary” is a clever way to advertise a chair, the product and also the benefit offered to the customer, a comfortable chair to sit in after a long workday. The illustration accompanying “By Industry We Thrive” is about commerce: the female figure and cornucopia symbolize peace and plenty, the chair at the front and the furniture in the middle ground are another reminder of the Society’s output, the ships in the background are the movement of goods between marker and market.
A third banner described in the Memoir had the motto “Support the Chair” with a double meaning. It was a compliment to the Governor of New York as well as an inducement to buy a chair. Regrettably, there is no illustration of eight boys carrying a large gilt eagle with a miniature chair in its beak.
By 1825, artisan or craftsmen associations and societies had been around for around about a half century. Participating in parades was a way to display pride in their craft, accomplishments and the contributions made by the skilled crafts in building the new Republic. It has to be noted the skilled women artisans and free black craftsmen were not invited to be part of the celebration. As for the unskilled workers that worked on the canal, they were nowhere to be seen.
From the ‘Manual of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmens of the City of New York.’
Skilled craftsmen organized to protect the standards of the craft, settle disagreements between members, provide education, open libraries and provide mutual aid to members. Dues collected could be used to help injured or ill member and to support widows and children when a craftsmen died. Not all craftsmen chose to join these societies and were therefore not offered any of the protections of membership. Some societies were for masters and employers only. Journeymen, in turn, would form their own societies.
The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York was formed with 22 members from various crafts in 1785. They adapted the blacksmith’s hammer and hand as their emblem (and the blacksmiths borrowed the emblem from Hephaestus/Vulcan). The Carpenters’ Society of Baltimore was formed in 1791 and within a few years the carpenters would merge with other crafts to become the Baltimore Mechanical Society.
The Charleston Mechanic Society, with the motto “Industry Produceth Wealth,” formed in 1794 with an initial goal of preventing the hiring of skilled enslaved men over white craftsmen. A similar action was taken up by some Mechanic Societies in other Southern States.
In 1795 the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association was organized in Boston with Paul Revere as a founding member. One their initial aims was to do something about runaway apprentices.
In 1815, 17 skilled craftsmen groups formed the Maine Charitable Mechanic Association in an attempt to “counterbalance the dominance of local society by merchants.” In 1841 the Association commissioned banners for a Triennial Festival. The festival was organized to promote municipal pride and the contributions made by the skilled craftsmen of the city.
Top: Cabinet-makers, Chair Makers, Organ Builders, Piano Forte Makers, Turners and Plane Makers. Middle: House Wright’s. Bottom: Coopers. Maine Historical Society.
To Be One’s Own Master
In an article for the Department of Labor’s history of labor relations, Edward Pesson wrote, “Skilled workers – variously known as craftsmen, artisans or mechanics – received from seventy-five to one hundred percent higher wages than the unskilled. Some artisans owned homes, modest dwellings to be sure, yet sufficient to contain work area, kitchen, living quarters for the family and in some cases for servants or apprentices.
“The tools they owned and their proficiency in using them gave skilled workers marketable assets which enhanced their sense of worth. Working independently or with others as journeymen in small shops directed by master craftsmen, they could realistically anticipate becoming masters someday.”
Well before the Erie Canal celebrations of 1825, the master-journeyman relationship had changed. Master craftsmen had comfortable earnings and business networks that allowed them to enter the emerging middle-class. Journeymen came to realize they would very likely never advance to be a master of their own shop.
By the early 1800s craftsmen’s societies that were originally confined to one craft, or to groups of skilled craftsmen, had changed to include tradesmen and merchants. For the master craftsmen this meant a transition from a working master artisan to a capitalist.
Top: Membership Certificate, 1786. Bottom:book plate, 1822. New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Originally, this certificate and book plate from the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York were destined for the gallery along with other Mechanic Society documents. After reading a few chapters from “American Artisans: Craft Social Identity 1750-1850” edited by Howard B. Rock, the documents are worth a closer look as the symbols used reflect changes in the mechanic societies.
In the membership certificate the hammer in hand emblem is prominent and in the corners are scenes of craft and mutual aid: craftsmen at work, symbols of peace and plenty (top, left) and aid brought to a grieving widow and child. By the time the book plate was issued in 1822 the Society became a sponsor of the Mechanic Bank and the symbols of craft diminished. Although the Society had established a school and library for apprentices the emphasis was more on commerce relationships. In the plate two tradesmen, not leather-apron craftsmen, offer charity to a widow and direct her son to the apprentice school. The small hammer in hand floating on a cloud is “an apt symbol for masters who had ceased to be sweat-of-the brow artisans.” The hammer in hand symbol was not trademarked and was used by other businesses such as the Vulcan Spice Mill in Brooklyn. The owner of the mill later used the emblem on boxes of Arm and Hammer baking soda.
Rest for the Weary
The flipside of the chairmakers’ motto is the sheer number of work hours and stagnant pay of a journeyman. Work hours were sunrise to sunset, six days a week. In the summer this could mean working 14 to 16 hours with short breaks for breakfast and lunch.
Three New York City cabinetmaker price books illustrate the stagnation of wages. The first price book was issued in 1802. The next revision was not until 1817 and the third revision was in 1832. In the “History of Wages in the United States from Colonial Times to 1928” by the Department of Labor. A portion of a price comparison table is below (pounds and shillings used in 1802 and 1817 were converted to dollars).
The 1802 book states “men working by the day are to be paid in proportion to their earnings by the piece, and find their own candles.”
Even with skilled craftsmen earning much higher wages than unskilled workers, living conditions of skilled craftsmen were crowded and lacked adequate sanitation. This was not unique to large cities like New York. Similar conditions were common in mid-size cities and towns in the South and Midwest. The workers that made up most of the urban populations owned 5 percent or less of urban wealth.
Entering a skilled craft and training for years with the promise of advancement, good wages to support a family and ultimately having enough to support oneself in old age was the expectation of a journeyman. In April 1809 the Carpenters’ Strike Manifesto was published in the American Citizen newspaper and addressed to the public. The Manifesto was from the Journeymen House-Carpenters and involved a strike to work for no less than 11 shillings per day. This statement explains the frustrations of the journeymen:
“Among the unalienable rights of man are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By the social compact every class of society ought to be entitled to benefit in proportion to its usefulness, and the time and expense necessary to its qualification. Among the duties which individuals owe to society are single men to marry and married men to educate their children. Among the duties which society owes to individuals is to grant them compensation for services sufficient not only for the current expenses of livelihood, but to the formation of a fund for the support of that time of life when nature requires a cessation from labor.”
The Manifesto continues with an account of annual income and expenses. Using a base of 300 work days (Sundays and several days for possible illness or injury were deducted), earning 11 shillings per in day in the spring through autumn and 10 shillings through the winter, total annual earnings would be $400. After deducting expenses for house rent, firewood, food for the family, work clothes, replacement of worn or lost work tools and a small amount for contingent expenses the journeyman would have $42.50 left for the wife’s and children’s clothing, education of the children and family illnesses.
The Manifesto ends with “And now let us ask those that are fathers of families to judge what will be the amount of the surplus for the maintenance of old age?”
Readers from Philly may be asking why your city’s craft societies have not be mentioned. Fear not! In the next post your fine city will figure prominently in the struggle to improve the wages and work hours of journeymen.
The gallery has a few more mechanic society membership certificates and banners.
In my Amercian Welsh Stick Chair classes, we start with home center dowels that have been selected for dead-straight grain for the chair’s back spindles and sticks. They work great (wood is wood), but there can be a lot of luck and driving around necessary to get enough sticks for a class of six to 12 students.
In fact, last year, I denuded the Kentucky/Ohio/Indiana Tristate area of straight-grain red oak dowels for my March 2019 class.
For my classes in the coming year, I decided to find a way to reduce my driving and gathering.
After trying many options (too many to list here without wanting to slap myself with a cold, dead mackerel), I settled on the Veritas Dowel Maker. I’ve used it before when making the sticks for Roorkee chairs.
The idea is simple: you spin square stock into the device. Two blades slice it down to size.
The only complication is that the device is a bit complicated to set up. After reading the instructions a few times, I went upstairs to see if the university had taken back my diploma. I simply wasn’t able to follow the instructions in a couple places. I needed a good video to understand what I’m missing here.
Sadly, there aren’t any really excellent videos out there on this tool. There are a lot of OK ones. After watching a few of them I was able to make the appropriate synapses and the device became crystal clear to operate.
With my stupidity set aside (for the time being), I made the blanks for my spindles. This was the joyous part. I could select the straightest, clearest stock to make spindles that were super strong.
After that, you spin the blanks into the device – a drill powers the operation. The surface finish on the dowels was pretty good. A single swipe with a scraper was enough to remove the annular rings. Another plus: I could fine-tune the dowels to come out at exactly the dimension I wanted.
After running 100 or so sticks, I decided to sharpen the blades and see if that improved the surface finish. So I stoned them both up to #8,000 grit on my waterstones (they sharpen just like a plane iron). The improvement in surface finish was minimal – I still need to scrape them.
All in all, I believe the Veritas Dowel Maker will pay for itself with my first class. It saves me a tank of gas, and I can make the sticks for a chair using $10 in wood instead of $24 to $36.
If I made only an occasional chair, I’d make the sticks the old-fashioned way with a spokeshave or block plane. But you need 50 perfect dowels with dead-straight grain, the tool is a nice thing to have.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Of course I paid full price for the Veritas Dowel Maker and the accessories. And the wood. And etc.
Christian
Becksvoort was born in Wolfsburg, Germany. His father, who had spent seven
years as a German apprentice, worked as a cabinetmaker. When Chris was 6, his
parents decided to move to Toronto. But shortly before relocating to Canada, the
Toronto church sponsorship fell through and Washington, D.C. became a
last-minute alternative. In time, the family settled in Wheaton, Maryland
– better school, better neighborhood.
As a
child, Chris remembers building small wooden boats, model ships and historic
schooners – “little things like that,” he says. “I always enjoyed making
things and being outdoors.”
Chris’s high
school had a nice shop, and he took four years of shop class. There he learned how
to use power tools, tool safety, joinery methods and finishing techniques. Wood
technology, however, was glossed over. He built a mahogany plant table “that
was put together pretty well,” he says, but it cracked. When he asked his shop
teacher why, his teacher simply said, “You didn’t let the wood move.”
Chris says
at the time, he didn’t have the faintest idea of how wood movement worked or
how to allow for it. (He later took one semester of wood technology in
college.) His furniture now sells to clients all over the country, in many
different climates.
“Sending
it back to me is not an option,” he says, citing, in particular, substantial
delivery costs. “Once I get paid I never see it again.”
And that’s
how he likes it – his furniture is built to last generations, and this
lesson he learned in high school has influenced the design of every piece he
has made since. On his website, under “The Becksvoort Difference,” he writes,
“I take wood movement seriously, over-building and compensating to ensure that
your investment lasts.” He includes two examples: dovetailing all his mouldings
and constructing telescoping web frames between his drawers.
Chris’s dad continued working as a cabinetmaker in the states, building furniture and doing architectural work, built-ins and kitchens. When Chris, who was still learning, turned 12, his dad, a perfectionist, hired him.
“Things didn’t go as well as they should have,” Chris says, counting the number of times he was fired and re-hired in one summer. “He was not the easiest guy to work for. So the last thing I wanted to do was be a woodworker for a living.”
Chris Becksvoort in 1972, when he met his now-wife, Peggy, in a photography class.
Chris
ended up at the University of Maine – far enough away that he couldn’t go
home for a weekend but close enough that he could go home for a week’s vacation,
he says. Plus, he enjoyed cold weather. He played intramural hockey (and, later
in life, did speed skating for several years). He started out studying
forestry, but switched to wildlife. The switch in majors required some summer
coursework to catch up on credits. While taking a photography course he met a
woman who would soon become his wife, Peggy.
Peggy and Chris Becksvoort, shortly after their marriage.
After graduating
in 1972, Chris got a government job at a wildlife research center in Maryland. Part
of his job was feeding 600 Japanese quail. While he enjoyed the fact that
everyone knocked off early on Fridays to go out for a beer, the work wasn’t
what he expected, and wasn’t much fun (let’s just say another employee’s
misplaced decimal point once meant the untimely demise of hundreds of birds).
Woodworking, he said, was beginning to look not too bad after all.
So Chris returned to Maine and worked for a furniture manufacturer for nine years. He learned a lot, both about woodworking and running a business. Next was a gig with a large architectural millwork shop in downtown Portland. There he helped restore Victorian homes by working on stairways, windows and doors, and reproducing historic mouldings. “It was a real learning experience,” he says, as he describes using routers and shapers in heart-stopping ways.
Chris Becksvoort at one of his first teaching gigs in 1979.
In 1986, he opened his own shop. “I’ve been at it ever since, and it’s been a real challenging ride, to say the least,” he says.
‘That Shaker Guy’
“Mary mother of God. That’s
Christian Becksvoort! He’s the modern master of Shaker style. I never dreamed
that I would see him in the flesh.” —
Ron Swanson, played by Nick Offerman, NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” season 5,
episode 9.
Before
Chris’s name became synonymous with Shaker furniture, he first became smitten
with the form after seeing pieces in a 1974 exhibit at the Smithsonian American
Art Museum’s Renwick gallery. “I went back to visit it five, six, seven times,”
he says. Little did he know that someday he would have the chance to reproduce
two of the gallery’s pieces in his own shop.
Chris says his father built a lot of Danish-style, mid-century modern furniture. So Chris grew up admiring clean surfaces and with an understanding that less is often more. “I don’t want to interrupt a surface with fancy mouldings,” he says. He doesn’t like design that exists without a utilitarian purpose (ahem, gingerbread), anything that screams “hey, look what I can do” or anything that makes dusting difficult. “There’s no dirt in heaven,” he quips.
Chris’s signature piece, a cherry 15-drawer chest. Photo by Dennis Griggs Photo.
In his 1998 book “The Shaker Legacy: Perspectives on an Enduring Furniture Style,” (The Taunton Press) Chris writes, “As a furniture maker, I not only value the Shakers’ considerable craftsmanship but also respect their insistence upon utility as the first tenet of good design. With the Shakers, there is no ego involved, no conscious effort to produce works of art. Austere utility is beautiful in and of itself, and often works of art are inadvertently produced.”
With full-width panels, Chris says web frames must be allowed to telescope to account for side-to-side wood movement, as shown here.
He not
only appreciates the simplicity of Shaker furniture, but the construction
methods used as well. “It’s clean,” he says. “But some of the construction is
fairly complex. It’s well-designed.”
Chris says
his biggest entry into Shaker furniture was being allowed to do maintenance and
restoration work for Sabbathday Lake, the last remaining active Shaker
community, in New Gloucester, Maine.
“If you want any repair work done I’ll do it for the cost of materials,” he said. They agreed, and it’s work he’s still doing today.
One of Chris’s cherry four-drawer chests, photographed in the hallway of the Girl’s Shop at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker community. Photo by Dennis Griggs Photo.
“From making display cases to replacing chair parts, restoring a sewing desk, replacing moulding, or assembling an entire built-in, my work with the Shakers has been rewarding, educational and, hopefully, mutually beneficial,” Chris wrote in “Shaker Inspiration,” his latest book from Lost Art Press. “Seeing the size, angle and spacing of dovetails cut 200 years ago, or taking apart a mortise-and-tenon joint and discovering that the edges were carefully chamfered, was a learning experience unlike any taught in school.”
Chris also rose in name recognition through his work with Fine Woodworking. Chris had heard about a guy who had a cool portable band saw so he drove to him, interviewed him and took pictures. He sent it all to Fine Woodworking and not only did they buy the article, but soon after they offered him a job. Not wanting to move to Connecticut, Chris agreed to a contributing editor position, which he has held since 1989. (You can read much of his magazine work here.)
He has written several books, including “The Shaker Legacy” (Taunton Press, 1998); “With the Grain: A Craftsman’s Guide to Understanding Wood” (Lost Art Press, 2013), which was originally published as “In Harmony With Wood” (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1983) and “Shaker Inspiration” (Lost Art Press, 2018).
And for years he ran workshops and conducted lectures around the country.
What Chris Becksvoort calls “brainstorm designing” of a music stand.
As such, Chris says he’s been dubbed “that Shaker guy.” I
ask if this has ever made him feel pigeonholed. Sometimes, he admits. But he’s
also taken some creative liberties with design. For example, a traditional
Shaker music stand is fairly straight forward and stiff – his are more
fluid, “Shaker-inspired.”
“There are plusses and minuses,” he says. “But mostly it’s a good label.”
Chris Becksvoort, Nick Offerman and Thomas Lie-Nielsen
His work has resulted in a bit of fame. Fans regularly take the time to find and visit his showroom and shop, tucked away on a dirt road in the backwoods of Maine. Most visitors are kind and considerate, he says. He’s been featured on Martha Stewart’s show (you can watch the 2001 clip here). And actor, woodworker and writer Nick Offerman considers him a personal hero (Chris is featured in Nick’s book “Good Clean Fun” (Dutton, 2016) and Chris appeared in an episode of “Parks and Recreation,” in which Nick plays character Ron Swanson).
“A major treat, and a great honor, was to be featured in
Nick Offerman’s new book, ‘Good Clean Fun,’” Chris wrote on his blog in October
2016. “A whole chapter, no less!”
Crafting a Business
In “Shaker
Inspiration,” Chris spends a lot of ink on the business of woodworking. He
begins with the necessity of preparation and a solid business plan that
includes a summary, organization, description, product line, market analysis
and funding. He then dives into the importance of quality photos, advertising,
catalogs, customer lists, customer records and time cards.
Pre-website
days Chris could buy a 1”, black-and-white ad in The New Yorker for $800. Search the October 19, 1992, issue online
and you’ll see one, on page 106, situated aside a review of Quentin Tarantino’s
movie “Reservoir Dogs”:
Why invest in furniture from a one-man shop on a dirt road in New Gloucester, Maine? CATALOG $5.00 C. H. BECKSVOORT FURNITUREMAKER Box 12, New Gloucester Maine 04260. (207) 926-4608
These ads
often led to a couple sales.
Additional
business matters he addresses in his book include mailing lists, public
relations, craft shows, galleries, selling direct, customer care and giving
back.
“There
were a lot of dead ends,” he says, when talking about the business side of
things. He started collecting catalogs from other woodworkers, not to copy them
but to be different. He learned that placing his work in galleries cut too much
into his profits and unless a show was indoors and juried, he skipped them.
“After
more than five decades, I can do the woodworking almost in the dark,” he writes
in “Shaker Inspiration.” “It’s the business end that’s a constant challenge,
and it keeps me on my toes.”
Chris
eventually built a 14 x 20 showroom on his property. “It takes effort to find
me,” he says. But a customer/fan who is willing to find him is one often
willing to purchase a piece. And having a designated space where customers can
see much of his work in person, touch surfaces, pull out drawers and run their
fingertips over carvings has been a great benefit, he says.
He works
alone and builds 20 to 30 custom pieces each year. They are all signed and
dated, and each piece has an embedded silver dollar in it, secreted away to the
delight of many customers. He estimates he’s built more than 850 pieces.
“I keep
trying to retire but it’s not happening yet,” he says. “I keep saying to
myself, ‘Where were these people 25 years ago?’” Right now he’s booked almost
to Christmas. There are five to six pieces he would like to design and build
for himself, “but the bills have to be paid first,” he says. Finding time for personal
prototypes is difficult.
The Gift of Simplicity
Chris and Peggy have two children, a son and daughter, both now grown but within easy driving distance. They also have one grandson who likes to push his bulldozer through little piles of sawdust in Chris’s shop.
Chris and Peggy’s $20,000 house (plus 25 acres) in 1977.
Still not a fan of hot weather, Chris says he enjoys Maine and the changing of the seasons, although he hates shoveling in the winter and isn’t a big fan of mowing in the summer. When they first moved to New Gloucester, they rented while looking for a house to buy. Eventually, in 1977, they saw an ad in the paper – a fully furnished house for sale on 25 acres for $20,000. In reality, there were only a couple pieces of furniture and the house required a significant amount of work. Chris and Peggy spent a year working on it, tearing out, redoing plumbing and wiring, adding insulation, sheet rocking and painting. They moved in in 1978.
The house last winter, with an added showroom, shop and two outbuildings.
With time Chris added a shop (Fine Woodworking featured it in their Tools & Shops 2019 Issue – you can take a tour of it here), garden shed and showroom. In the main house, there are built-ins in every room. They did a significant amount of landscaping, including planting hundreds of daffodils. They rebuilt stone walls and created trails through the woods. The land allows for gardening and Chris’s first love, forestry.
When
studying forestry all those years ago Chris remembers being handed a sheet of
paper with spaces numbered 1 through 100. Outside the university’s lab were
trees labeled with numbers – students had to identify them all. He did
well, and to this day he can identify most any tree in any season.
Climate
change has changed Maine’s winters, he says. The first winter he and Peggy
moved into the house the only heat source they had was a wood stove and the
temperature dropped to 44 below zero. The water in the washing machine froze.
“We haven’t seen temps like that in the past 30 to 40 years,” he says. They
also now have ticks and opossums and cardinals.
Every year
he buys a little calendar that he uses to track the daily temperature, first
frosts, the birth of a child, the addition of a dog (he’s had three huskies
over the years). “It’s not really a diary,” he says, “but every day I write two
or three lines of what happened, what we did.”
The house
and land, he says, is getting a little more difficult to maintain. With
thoughts of retirement on the horizon Chris and Peggy are considering moving to
something smaller.
These days
Chris sometimes slows down on Friday afternoons, as he and his colleagues did
at his first job at the wildlife research center. He still works Monday through
Friday, and he’ll occasionally finish up some work on a Saturday, after supper.
But he no longer puts in what used to be a solid 60 hours a week. He splits his
time between working in the shop and the business side of things – sending
out proposals, tracking down hardware, bookkeeping, taxes etc.
Chris
enjoys working in the garden, walking, going out to eat with friends, drinking
Scotch and listening to music. He has a Bose player in his shop and 4,000 songs
on his iPhone. His taste in music is varied – ’60s and ’70s rock, folk
music, jazz, classical, dulcimer music (but no opera or hip hop). Peggy is a
librarian and they both enjoy reading.
“Bookshelves are all over the house – we have way too many books,” he says. They’re filled with books about woodworking, Shakers and forestry. He typically doesn’t indulge in buying novels – those he gets from the library. He uses his books for research and owns almost every book on Shakers that has ever come out.
One of Chris’s nine tattoos.
Some folks may be surprised to learn that Chris has nine tattoos (you can see a few of them here). They include a butterfly joint, a maple leaf (because he likes working with maple and almost became a Canadian, he says), a white pine silhouette, a dovetail saw, a cross section of black walnut, a No. 5 plane, a black cherry tree, a chisel and, his newest, a Shaker peg (“a wink at my wife,” he says). “That’s it for now, unless the spirit moves me.”
The
Herbie Project
In the June 20, 2010, issue of Portland Press Herald,” Bob Keyes wrote an article titled “Herbie’s
come down, sadly. Happily, there’s a big upside.” Herbie was considered the biggest American elm
in New England, and started growing in Yarmouth in 1793.
“In 2010, the tree was beyond saving, and had to be cut
down,” Chris wrote in a September 2016 blog post. “Some of the branches were
over 4’ thick, and the trunk was over 10’ long and roughly 7’ at the butt end.
I joined the Herbie committee and suggested that we distribute the wood to
craftspeople throughout Maine. During the next nine months the branches were
cut up, and the trunk was sawn and the boards were kiln dried, and the wood was
distributed to woodworkers throughout the state. They made chairs, benches,
birds, baseball bats, cabinets, desks, tables, music stands, hundreds of bowls,
pens, a coffin, sculptures, cutting boards, and even an electric guitar.”
In November 2010, the items were auctioned off and the
Yarmouth Tree Trust netted about $40,000.
According to the Portland Press Herald article, Chris made a music stand, which was debuted at the Maine Festival of American Music: Its Roots and Traditions at the Shaker Meeting House in New Gloucester, hosted by the Portland String Quartet. The article also noted that the tree’s birth year, 1793, coincided with the establishment of the Sabbathday Lake Shaker community and its plans for the building of the 1794 Meeting House – which was where the festival’s concert took place.
Tailor counter. Photo by Dennis Griggs Photo.
Looking at Chris’s life as a whole, circles like this become
apparent. His love of forestry and trees and woodworking connect in a simple
and satisfying way as in the story about Herbie. His love of reading and
learning have translated in dozens of articles, books and workshops. He has
followed his father’s legacy, but on his own terms. And his philosophy on life,
rules, if you will, for good living, are seemingly so simple on the outside,
but require a sometimes surprising bit of complexity on the inside (much like
Shaker furniture):
“Only let
positive people influence you. Try to stick to your values. Leave a little
footprint. Be as creative as possible. Honesty and kindness go a long way.”
