Highland Woodworking has published my “Sharpen This – the Hand-tool Backlash” speech that I gave at the Lie-Nielsen Open House a couple years ago. You can read the whole thing in Highland’s newsletter here.
(Note: You can subscribe to the free newsletter here and also read all the back issues.)
Chris Bagby at Highland asked if I would tweak a few sentences of the speech to take it from an R rating to a solid PG. But he didn’t ask me to pull any punches. So now the speech is an article called “Sharpen Up or Shut Up.” It’s basically the same speech but without a few Bozo-no-no words and my Southern preacher imitation.
Check it out. And if you like it, you might like the short series I wrote for the blog (also free). You can check that out here.
I will be one of the demonstrators at Fine Woodworking Live on April 26-28, 2019, along with four other Lost Art Press authors – Christian Becksvoort, Matt Bickford, Peter Galbert and Nancy Hiller.
As you would expect from FWW, the roster of teachers is top-notch – check it out here. I am honored, humbled and entirely nervous about the whole thing. Will I be able to make eye contact? Will I inadvertently rub my nipples during my demonstration? Will Steve Latta call me out as a fraud?
I’ll be happy to discuss the topic of my class when it is announced. For now, however, mum is the word.
Surprise, it’s Fine Woodworking
I’m sure that some readers will be surprised that I’m signing on with Fine Woodworking. But to be honest, most of the woodworking press has hung together during the last couple decades. We were not in competition with each other as much as we were in competition with extinction.
Plus, I’ve always admired Fine Woodworking. It was the first woodworking magazine that I read back in 1993. And, also out of respect, we always tried to take Popular Woodworking in its own direction.
So will you start seeing my byline in Fine? I can’t say. I’ve been approached by several magazines about contributing to their pages. And I have not said “yes” to any of them. What I have said is that I don’t want to jump in bed immediately after leaving Popular Woodworking as a contributing editor (my tenure ends on Dec. 31). Also, I don’t think that my writing these days would suit an advertising-based magazine.
Some magazines (not FWW) have pressed me a bit. One magazine said: We are ready to try something really different. What ideas do you have?
I sent them a proposal for seven-part series I have been working on for many months about setting up a workshop. It’s good enough to be a book, but I think it should start as a magazine series. Here was their response.
Crickets.
So I suspect that my series will end up as a serial on the blog (such as “Sharpen This”) or a book. Stay tuned.
The office corner in my shop. My stand-up desk, file cabinet, bookcases, catalogs and, yes, a dial telephone on the file cabinet. It has a ring that cuts through any machinery noise.
One of the most difficult tasks when starting a business is pricing your work or product. Many woodworkers, especially those just beginning, seriously underprice their work. Hobbyists, especially, have no idea. Let me tell you, it’s really tough to be at a show next to Joe Basement, who is selling his very nice coffee table. He has no concept of the actual hours he spent, but his $140 worth of wood has turned into a $200 table. Wow, a $60 profit…wrong. The most basic pricing involves the cost of materials + overhead + profit. Let’s take a look at these one at a time.
Materials are your wood, hardware, glue and finishes – anything that ends up in the customer’s possession. When working with a variety of woods, you’ll have to refigure the price for each species. That can run the gamut from a couple of bucks for No. 3 pine or poplar to $60 per board foot for exotics, to more than $100 per sheet for top-grade plywood with fancy veneers (in 2017 dollars, as are all prices in this book).
Working almost exclusively in cherry, and paying roughly the same amount for the past 20 years, makes pricing for me much easier. Not only that, but I get to use leftovers and offcuts for the next project. At this point in my career, I know the exact board footage for all pieces in my catalog. When starting out, you’ll have to do a bit more math. When you come up with the board footage, add 10-20 percent for waste, depending on how fussy or frugal you are regarding knots, defects, sapwood and general waste. Besides the wood, also include screws, hinges, locks, knobs, glides, glass, hangers and your glue and finish of choice. Speaking of hardware, I always buy the top grade. It takes just as long to install a cheap hinge as an expensive one. Cheap hardware will come back to haunt you, and result in unhappy customers.
Buy the best-quality hardware you can get your hands on – including extruded hinges and cast locks. It takes just as long to install cheap hardware as that of highest quality. These are by Whitechapel, Horton Brasses and Ball & Ball.
Overhead is an all-encompassing term that includes the expenses you pay as the cost of doing business, but of which the customer does not take possession. Here is a partial list: your shop building or rent or mortgage, insurance, vehicle, electricity, heat, office supplies, telephone, internet, tools, advertising, freight charges, accounting, postage, licenses and taxes, and a few others that I may have overlooked. The bigger items, such as the mortgage, vehicle and large power tools can be amortized over a long period of time. Don’t, however, forget to include small tools such as routers that need to be replaced, specialty bits and tooling for a specific project, etc. Again, it will be difficult to estimate these costs when first starting, but after a year or more of good bookkeeping, you’ll have a pretty good handle on what it takes to run your shop. Divide the yearly total expenses by 12 to give you a monthly figure, divide that by 30 to give you a daily figure, and divide the last by eight to give you an hourly overhead cost.
Finally, your profit. Yes, we’d all like to make $100 per hour take-home pay, but let’s be reasonable, especially when you’re just starting out. My profit, or hourly wage, when I opened my shop in the mid ’80s was $20 – which I thought was pretty good. It has since gone up considerably, but only after a few years. You can’t start out with astronomical prices when you have no track record, no reputation and no customer base. That comes with time, working efficiently, keeping your nose clean and keeping your customers happy.
A few random thoughts on prices and shop finances in general. First, if you give a customer a price quote, stick with it. You’re only as good as your word, and your word is your reputation. I’ve eaten my fair share of underpriced projects. It’s all part of the learning curve. Customers don’t want to hear “This took a lot longer than I thought….” They want results, not excuses. On the other hand, if a customer request changes for alterations to the original design, then a change in price is warranted. Keep track of any additions or alterations made after the original quote.
I don’t dicker, and I try to be fair. I don’t gouge customers because they drive up in a Mercedes. The same hourly rate applies to everyone. Once that price is established, it’s fixed, unless times and circumstances change. My shop rate is based not just on time, materials, overhead and profit, but also on my experience, craftsmanship and reputation as a craftsperson. When potential customers try to talk my prices down, I tactfully end the conversation. Now they are messing with my self-worth. Remember, once a customer asks for and receives a discount, they will expect one from then on. And word spreads.
Note: Oh dang, I promised myself I wouldn’t use any puns. Also, you’ll notice the comments are disabled for this post. This is not because I am averse to criticism (feel free to visit Sawmill Creek, where trashing me is a sanctioned sport with letter jackets and a leaderboard). Instead, I simply ask you to think about this for yourself, without the noise of comments. Decide for yourself if I’m full of crap.
My first blog entry (ever) on David Pye was purposely left half-finished, with no real conclusion. My hope was that readers would take the next steps themselves. Some did, some didn’t.
So to conclude, I think the amount of risk between things Pye describes as “risk” and those that are “certain” is so small in reality that they are useless distinctions. In general, making things involves risk. We try to control it at the workbench and on the factory floor. But ultimately – and this is important to me – hand processes and machine processes are ruled by the same narrow factors.
“Will I screw up this part with this operation?”
“What can I do to prevent that from happening?”
I ask myself these same questions at the router table and with a chisel in my hand. The answers are always the same:
“Keep your wits about you. Know your materials. Don’t rush. Pay attention to feedback.”
I find no significant continuum of risk that offers any help in understanding my work. Instead, where I do find meaning is in thinking about the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge – but I have no desire to open that can of worms on this blog today (or likely ever).
So why am I writing this? To dissuade you from using the expression the “workmanship of risk” when describing your work. Though Pye would be horrified by the following fact, it is an expression that (unintentionally) belittles the work of some and props up the work of others.
When I was the editor of Popular Woodworking, it had about 220,000 readers at the peak of its circulation. Our surveys indicated that about 99.8 percent of them owned machines. As someone who wrote about hand tools, I became quickly sensitized to phrases and language that would come off as elitist – or at the very least evangelical.
I know this because I made these mistakes myself. A lot. I heard from the readers. And I learned.
Quick example: When you say you love hand tools because they are quiet and allow contemplation – and you don’t have to hear the roar of machines and wear safety equipment – you are:
Wrong. Real handwork is fricking loud and dangerous.
Disparaging the things that bring joy to many machine woodworkers.
Confession: I love putting on my earmuffs and cranking up my 12” jointer. I enjoy the hum it makes as it spins up to speed, and the tactile feedback I receive from its cutting action.
So the “workmanship of risk” and “workmanship of certainty” distinction sounds – to a machine woodworker and to me – like “hand tools require skill; machine tools require you to push a button.”
Put another way, “risk” sounds cool and daring. “Certainty” sounds like owning a condo in suburban Wichita (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
I feel certain that most hand tool woodworkers aren’t elitist. But the language thing – it’s tricky.
And that’s why I’m not going to write about this aspect of our craft anymore. It’s back to animal idioms and thinly veiled poo jokes from here on out.
Note: Some people are having trouble signing up for the waitlist – we’ve checked everything we can think of to check (and googled the problem). We cannot replicate the issue. So, if anyone else has trouble, send an email to covingtonmechanicals@gmail.com and I’ll manually register you for the waitlist in the order I receive said emails. Sorry.
