Dusk. Time to head out. The view from Terry’s front porch, looking out across the Cumberland foothills.
The following is excerpted from “Backwoods Chairmakers,” by Andrew D. Glenn. Part travelogue, part profile and part how-to, “Backwoods Chairmakers” explores the tradition of the enduring Appalachian ladderback form. Glenn takes you inside the shops of more than 20 makers, with photos and personal interviews about their lives and techniques.
Then, Glenn shows you how to make a post-and-rung side chair and rocking chair using the traditional techniques explored in the book.
“I think it was a lack of choice when I was young. This was successful enough, you just keep doing it, but you’re always looking for something better. One day you just realize, ‘I don’t want nothing better.’ That usually comes later in your life.” — Randy Ogle
I had mixed emotions while pulling away from Terry Ratliff’s place for the last time. The day had been filled with laughter and insight, as with each time I traveled out his way. Yet in returning his photo album, I’d removed the necessity for another visit. During this project, the path between our places had grown familiar. I’d gotten better at traversing Terry’s drive, and at this point I knew he’d be able to fix the Element even if I ran into trouble. And I was always interested in the chairs. Terry’s were some of my favorites.
As my travels came to an end, it was natural to weigh the state of affairs. I set out with a simple question in mind: Does the backwoods chairmaker still exist? I found a good deal more makers than I expected.
Chez, one of Mark Newberry’s horses, grazes outside the workshop at Newberry & Sons Chairs.
I was welcomed into the shop by experienced makers, many in the twilight of their chairmaking years. Most had more making behind them than in the future. Each of them, in one way or another, did their part to encourage the next generation.
Will that next generation take hold? That seems to be the question. Yet it’s too soon to say. The chairmakers have done their part. They’ve planted seeds. It’s now the germination and waiting stage of the process. We all must wait to see what comes next. There is potential for a full yield of chairmakers.
I initially felt daunted by the results. Sure there are a few makers still at it, but the field of Appalachian chairmaking is smaller than in the past.
Along this journey I’d come to a false conclusion about how makers came into the field. I bundled folks into two groups: 1) generational or a family line of makers and 2) new makers joining the field. It seemed right. Terry was new, as was Brian Boggs and Lyle Wheeler. Randy Ogle, Mark Newberry and Cecil Patrick passed along a generational line. But this framework is wrong.
This dichotomy and labeling, which I tried to tamp down, led me astray. For each maker chose this life. They weighed it and decided upon it. First generation or fifth, each made a choice.
A cat takes a nap on Mason Alexander’s planer.
Then I thought of conversations with Terry and his desire to make something with his hands. His desire to step outside the machinery of the industrial economy. And with more thought, I came to share in Terry’s optimism in the future of Appalachian chairmaking. He said:
You get isolated. People talk about the Covid being in isolation, well I’ve been in isolation before that. Working for myself, working here in the home studio and staying home. It was great to go to shows to be around sort of peers, people who live similar lifestyles or totally different ones, but they’ve chosen an art form that they want to pursue. The most changes in the last year was that all being taken away. Forty years ago to go to a craft show and see a shaving horse was kind of a novel thing. To see a craft show going on and find a shaving horse where somebody was splitting out wood and riving wood and working greenwood and I think there’s a little bit more of that now. It’s still not taking over the whole economy or anything, it’s just a few people, a very few people that are into it. Of those, I don’t know how many are hand tools or old-time technology and how many of them are using lathes and mic-ing things down to the thousandths. But it seems like there are. In a survey, in looking around, and getting what we have now, the media, the electronic media, you can find people, can find folks doing shaving horse work. And before the Covid you could go to shows, there would be folks there doing greenwood joinery, greenwood techniques with shaving horses, drawknives and hand tools. More so than when I first started in ’79-’80, along in there.
It’s not in my stock-in-trade anymore, and even before the pandemic I had cut down the number of shows I participated in. Pretty selective on what I put my energy I put into. So, I’m not out there mixing it up so much in the community. But when I look on Etsy, I see some work that people are doing, putting out there and marketing. Using a lot of hand tools, greenwood, a lot of hand work, spokeshave work.
Societal shifts brought about the rise and fall of Appalachian chairmakers. Local communities needed chairs, and the local chairmaker filled that need. When communities purchased manufactured goods made afar, the chairmakers began to dwindle in number.
Communities no longer need chairmakers. Chairs are available with the push of a button, delivered to your doorstep. Factories make elaborate chairs, using the help of computer design and computer-assisted machinery, with less effort than an individual chairmaker requires.
Mason and Orpha Lee Alexander weave a seat together in their living room.
Chairmaking swims against that tide. The attributes of chairmaking, the inspired creativity, the craftperson’s life, the physical work, being close to the material, residing within a place and a tradition, the opportunity for artistic expression, the ability to start making with low overhead and a few tools, the opportunity to work from home, and the possibilities of working alongside family (to name but a few) are all relevant and enticing. In this way chairmaking is not anachronistic but the pursuit of something different. It is a considered and deliberate way of life. A life lived intentionally.
I’m optimistic that others will choose this path as well, with more beautiful chairs added to the tradition. Appalachian chairmaking remains, with its hand extended toward anyone interested.
Edwardian Hallstand, 2002. A spec piece in curly white oak, made in my workshop on a buffalo farm. The piece was later published in Fine Woodworking. Photo by Kendall Reeves, Spectrum Studio of Photography & Design (spectrumstudioinc.com)
Standing in contrast to James Krenov’s “The Impractical Cabinetmaker” from 1979, Hiller’s “Making Things Work” is not about waiting for a particular plank of wood to tell you its true purpose. It is not an exhortation to fuss over each detail, no matter the personal cost.
Instead, Hiller’s funny and occasionally ribald story is about a cabinetmaker who was trained to work at the highest level possible and how she has dealt with the personal anxiety that occurs when the desire and drive for excellence collides with paying the monthly bills.
1. On the importance of conjunctions.
A few years ago I met one of our town’s most respected figures: a husband and father who has held several elected public offices and devoted his career to the cause of social justice. As we shook hands he said, “I understand that your work is very good, but not very cheap.”
“But?” I wondered, biting my tongue.
2. The Value of Nothing, Part One: The Magician’s Act
Guy and Poppy were retired business professors who had traveled the world. And judging by what I saw as they showed me around their home during my first visit, they’d brought a good bit of it back home with them.
They had been referred to me by a contractor who assured them I’d be ideal for their project. “We just bought a reproduction of a piece of sculpture,” Poppy wrote in her introductory email.
The first photo shows the original swan at the S. Museum, and the second is the reproduction in the museum shop, just like the one we have. We need a stand to display the statue. Please give us a call if you’re interested in helping us with this.
It wasn’t the type of job I ordinarily do, but because they’d been referred to me by a contractor I like and respect, I called Poppy and arranged a meeting.
Their house was stunning: a classic of modernist style, inside and out – not that I would have guessed as I pulled up to the windowless façade, a gray stone rectangle apparently modeled on a freight container. But no sooner had I set foot inside than the scales dropped from my eyes. The other exterior walls were glass, spectacular in the house’s wooded setting.
Works of art filled the interior. Here a Coptic embroidery flanked by a pair of Yoruba masks, there a threesome of Warhol prints. A 16th-century Japanese screen formed a movable divider between the living room and the kitchen, itself a perfectly preserved marvel of original 1960s design. Clearly these people had excellent taste and understood the value of art and craft. I made myself a mental note to send the contractor a letter of thanks for the referral.
They showed me the swan, a plaster cast of the original statue carved in marble, and explained their ideas for how to display it.
“See how the neck has been extended in the reproduction so it sits square,” Guy pointed out. “The swan’s tail is on the same level as the neck. We’d like to have a base in which the swan’s chest sits down in-side, with the neck and head hanging over the edge, as in the original sculpture. Also, we don’t just want an empty box for a base. That would be a waste of space. We could really do with some additional storage. I was thinking perhaps a couple of compartments with doors. No visible hinges or pulls, though; we do want it to look like a base for a sculpture, not a cabinet. Maybe zebrawood? Oh, and if you could put it on hidden wheels, that would be wonderful; that way we can move it around on the carpet whenever we feel the need for a change of scenery. We’re getting a bit long in the tooth to be lifting heavy objects.” He glanced affectionately at his wife. “Aren’t we, Poppet?”
Poppy took me into the study and fired up her computer to show me photos of the original frieze of which the swan was a fragment. She found the folder of pictures from the trip and furrowed her brow in concentration as she scrolled through thumbnail images.
“We’re getting close now,” she assured me after what seemed an eternity. She clicked on an image to open it at full size. Suddenly the screen filled with a picture of a misshapen purple posterior that put me in mind of Barney, the PBS dinosaur. “Oh dear!” said Poppy, “Wrong picture. Hang on.” She clicked forward to another, this one leaving no doubt that the posterior in question was Guy’s. “Guy had a very unfortunate fall on the steps of our hotel,” she said matter of factly. I blushed. “I had to get photos for the insurance claim.” She clicked on. “Ah! Here we are.”
“We had a fellow at the university do some work for us last year,” she told me after closing the folder.
“He had every problem in the book: financial troubles, health troubles…. I think his great-uncle also died during our project. In any case, the small job he did for us took two full years. So you can understand we’re not too keen on asking him about this one.”
I took some measurements, made a few notes, and said goodbye. While driving back to the shop, I thought about the project. These people obviously had strong ideas about how the base for the sculpture should look and function, yet they knew my specialty was period-style furniture, not museum-worthy display cases. There would definitely need to be some back-and-forth discussion, which probably meant a couple more visits to their home, half an hour’s drive away from my office, in addition to the time I’d spend on research and drawing. And all for a very small job. Poppy’s mention of the fellow from the university was a little concerning. I’m familiar with the phenomenon of the full-time, full-benefits employee who avails him- or herself of institutional facilities after hours. Unburdened by trifles such as shop rent, insurance, and similar expenses that full-time business people have to cover, such moonlighters can do some serious undercutting when it comes to price. In doing so they perpetuate unrealistic notions of what it costs to make things, which often leads their customers to see us professionals as engaging in daylight robbery.
For a moment I felt myself falling into a familiar doom-portending spiral. Why must people ask me to pull a rabbit out of a hat? “Give us an estimate to design and build this thing. Sure, you have precious little to go on, we have no idea what such a thing should cost, and you under-stand that we want something that will knock our socks off, though of course, as retirees, we have to watch every penny. But you come highly recommended. We’re confident you can do it.”
I stopped myself. These were sophisticated people. “Just be straight with them,” I told myself. “Trust the process.”
Still, to hedge my bets, I thought it prudent to ask whether they had even the vaguest budget in mind. “Dear Guy and Poppy,” I wrote the night following our initial meeting.
“I thoroughly enjoyed meeting you and seeing your fabulous home. I was writing a formal proposal for your job when it occurred to me that I should ask whether you have a budget in mind. In cases where designing a custom piece is such an integral part of the work I am proposing, I cannot give a fixed price; there is too little information available at this stage. So I usually submit a design proposal based on my design rate of $75 per hour.
“However, if you have a budget in mind, please let me know, and I will take that into consideration as we go through the design process.”
To cover myself, I threw in an extra paragraph.
“Because I operate a full-time business on which my livelihood depends, and because I am using equipment and a facility for which I am 100 percent responsible, my charges for such work are likely to be higher than those of a person working at the university who can do the work using university-owned equipment, in his or her spare time. Apologies for this explanation. I hope it will be helpful.
“I am certainly interested in doing this work for you. If you would like to proceed, please let me know where, along the budget spectrum, you would like your job to land, and I will gladly write up a formal proposal.”
Two days later I received a reply. “Well, you have startled us a bit, Nancy,” Poppy wrote. “The higher price you’ve proposed is twice the price we paid for the piece itself, including the shipping, and that seems awfully high.”
I don’t know who ended up building the base for the swan.
3. The Value of Nothing, Part Two: Artistic License
6/3/11 3:35 PM Inquiry Dear Ms. Hiller, I have admired your quartersawn oak desk with inlaid bumble bees and am interested in possibly commissioning one like it. Will you please tell me what it would cost for such a desk with a top measuring 36″ by 60″? “Dr. X”
6/3/11 8:18 PM Re: Inquiry Dear Dr. X, Thank you for your inquiry. I designed and built the desk that you found on my website in 2004. The desk’s construction is traditional, using mortise-and-tenon and dovetail joinery, and the inlay is all done by hand. I keep detailed records of the labor and materials that go into every piece. Based on today’s material costs and my current shop rate, the desk would be $5,250 plus sales tax. Of course the design could be modified to suit whatever bud get you might have in mind.
I would be delighted to discuss this with you by phone or in person. Sincerely, Nancy Hiller
6/17/11 7:04 AM Following up Dear Dr. X, I am writing to confirm that you received my reply to your inquiry on June 3. Every so often I learn that an email message I sent was not received. I would be mortified if you thought that I had not responded promptly. Please will you let me know whether you received my message? Sincerely, Nancy
6/24/11 10:09 AM Re: Following up I did receive your quote. It is considerably higher than the prices I got from H Furniture and F Cabinets to build the same desk. Both H and F use tenon joinery and dovetails so we have nothing further to talk about.
4. Looking Over the Edge
10/11/03 5:47 AM Request for a meeting Dear Ms. Hiller, I admired your Edwardian hallstand in Fine Woodworking and was thrilled to see that you are located in Bloomington, which is less than two hours away from my home. I have taken a number of wood-working classes and am seriously considering leaving my corporate job to become a professional furniture maker. I would greatly appreciate an opportunity to meet you and tour your shop. Would this be possible? Sincerely, G.P.
10/11/03 6:46 PM Re: Request for a meeting Dear G, I would be happy to meet you and discuss your plans, but first I’d like to set you straight regarding the nature of my shop. There is nothing to “tour.” My current shop – the nicest one I’ve ever had – is in a utility building of about 1,000 square feet located on a cattle farm. It is a single space; you can see everything from the front door. I am there most days, so just let me know some days and times that would be good for you. Nancy
G arrived at the scheduled time and we had a nice conversation. He worked for an international company headquartered in Indianapolis. He was probably around 40, married, and told me that while he valued his job and did not take the pay, security, or benefits for granted, he was sorely tempted to try his hand at furniture making full-time. “I’ve taken a class in furniture making as a business,” he told me, “so I would have no trouble telling a prospective client that I had to charge $1,500 for a coffee table.”
“The question is not so much whether you have the guts to charge what it costs to build a piece,” I replied, “but whether the prospective client is able – and more important, willing – to pay it.”
I gave him what insights I could about the realities of professional furniture making based on my experience, and told him that in my opinion he was in an enviable situation: securely employed, with paid vacations and other benefits that afforded him the freedom to do work he wanted to do in his spare time. I told him to feel free to keep in touch about his plans, but he didn’t, so I have no idea whether he ever took the plunge.
Comments are now closed. Join us again next Saturday!
Chris is out of town this weekend, but Wally and I are here and ready to answer your woodworking and cat-treat-related questions. But unlike Chris, I will not start responding at the buttocks-crack of dawn – I like to sleep in a bit on Saturdays. And every day. (And Wally sleeps about 18 hours per day.)
As you surely now by now, leave a question in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer. You can even ask me about the Dutch tool chest book (now that the manuscript is in Chris’s hands, I’m far less stressed about it).
At the bench. The upstairs bench room at Rowden. Photo by Will Reddaway, WR Photography
The following is excerpted from “The Intelligent Hand,” by David Binnington Savage. It’s a peek into a woodworking life that’s at a level that most of us can barely imagine. The customers are wealthy and eccentric. The designs have to leap off the page. And the craftsmanship has to be utterly, utterly flawless.
I am jumping now to what a student experiences during the first week at Rowden. I am doing this because it all fits together. Without the doing, the making, the faffing about in the workshop, all the drawing and waking up, there is no context for when you become a designer and a maker.
It’s not good enough to sit in a nice clean design office and get your sweaty minions to make for you. Making is what you do. Remember William Morris, and how he was always fiddling with making something or other. Fail to grasp this, and the maker will always be in charge of the dialogue.
“No boss, that won’t work – you need three fixings there.”
You need sufficient understanding and knowledge to argue. You need to know enough to suggest a different fixing, and to maintain the smooth identity of your design.
So pick up that plane. It’s on its side on the benchtop. Wait – maybe first let’s have a look at what we have here. There is a proper full-sized cabinetmaker’s workbench, about 7′ long. It has a newly planed, flat top. The top is beech or maple, and about 3″ thick; the undercarriage is similarly heavy. A good bench should be solid, and not gallop about the workshop the moment you put the pedal to the metal.
Look at that benchtop. Many makers may have worked there before you, but it should be in pretty good condition – if not unmarked by their work, it should be at least a respectable surface. There have been accidents, yes, that caused the odd bit of damage – but it’s a dead-flat surface. We need flat, especially around the end vice, because that is where we work. The flatness of the bench transfers to the job; a hollow near the vice would show up in thin components planed on that bench. The bench has a front vice and an end vice. Working with these vices will be dogs. Whuff, whuff. No – these are pegs that fit in holes in the bench; they are used to secure your work.
The Rowden workbench.
The bench is probably the most important tool you will ever encounter as a maker. Later, you will make your bench; it will become the foundation upon which other work will be made. Right now, you’ll use one of the Rowden benches. Bench height is important. Stand alongside the bench; let your arm hang and bend your elbow just above the bench surface. Now spread the thumb and index finger of your opposite hand. Add that distance to your elbow. This is your bench height.
It’s good to work with a high bench because it protects your back. Much of your work will be done not with your arms and shoulders, but with your trunk – the core muscles – and thighs. This again will protect you from injury. There will be times when you need to get up higher and get on top of a job. Then, use a small “hop-up” – a 3″-high box that you stand upon. This lives under the bench’s bottom rail.
Then there is a bench light. It should be a decent, bright source of light that you can direct into the dark corners of your work. Without a good light you will not be at all times able to see where you are going. A quick maker will be pulling that light around as they move about the job. You need to see the line as you cut.
Then there is a box of hand tools – yours until you can sensibly choose your own. These are prepared tools; all edges have been sharpened by Jon Greenwood to a keen edge. They should all work straight out of the box. All the boxes are different; they hold the same tools but from different suppliers. Spend time trying out different chisels and gauges to help you make informed buying choices. Hand tools have to fit your hands comfortably; different brands offer different solutions at different prices.
Learn to read grain direction.
With these three – a bench, a light and a box of basic hand tools – you can make a lot of things and need nothing more. Machine work can be done by a local shop; pay them by the hour. You might want some power tools to help out later on, but they are not for now. Most machines are about saving you effort and energy; you want to engage them for those reasons – not because a table saw is more accurate than you are at sawing a straight line.
On the bench, there is a piece of walnut, about 18″ by 2″ or 3″. This is to teach you about wood and tools at the same time. Look at the wood. It has been selected because it is mild and well-mannered. It will have a sawn surface, but you will be able to see the grain of the timber. Think of it as the fur of a cat – which way would rough it up, and which way would lay smooth, if you stroked it? That’s the way you plane it, smooth. Place it the right way around between the dogs and tighten the end vice to just nicely hold the job.
This is the bench doing its job in superb fashion. Now you are free to dance about the workshop, waving a No. 6 to your heart’s content. You don’t have to hold the job – it’s fixed in solid position on the benchtop. All actions now are down to you – how you hold and present that edge to the job. This is you, a sharp edge and a piece of timber. Listen. Attend to what that sharp, well-adjusted tool tells you about the surface in front of you.
Is the note the plane makes a nice, high WHUZZ, or is it getting lower, telling you the edge is getting dull? Watch the shaving as it emerges over the frog – is it a clean, full-length shaving or is there a slight hollow just over there? You want information about that surface; the plane is your primary tool of inquisition.
Take overlapping plane passes down the work.
Consider your arms and shoulders during this process. The work should be coming from your trunk and thighs, not your arms. Imagine a piece of string tied around your plane handle and attached to your right nipple. If you push with your arms, it will pull on the string and hurt. Instead, use your core and legs. A long shaving then becomes like a dance step: forward step, forward step, forward step.
Plane a dead-flat surface on one of the 3″-wide faces. This is your “face side.” It is important, as this is the side from which all other faces are measured; get this wrong and you are in the poo. From day one, hour one, you are faced with quality. Screw this up, go too fast and slip it in under the bar, and it will come back later to bite you in the bum.
Flat is a terrible monster and can drive a newbie bonkers. But don’t let it get you. The sole of your plane is flat – I promise you – so use it. First, let’s look at the side-to-side movement of the plane. As you take a shaving, you can get it only about 1″ wide from the middle of the mouth of the plane – maybe less. If you are observant, you will see that the shaving is slightly thicker in its centre, thinning to nothing at the edge. This is deliberate; you want this.
Run the plane down the job, aiming to get a complete shaving for the whole length – then run another alongside it with a little overlap. If necessary to help you visualise, put a pencil mark across the job and plane it off. Suddenly, this is fun! The plane is working and you are doing the job – you are almost up to your knees in shavings. But the joy of taking long, ribbony strips of fragrant walnut is suddenly ruined by Jon Greenwood coming to your bench with a straightedge.
“Let’s see how flat it is.” What is usually the case is that you’ve been planing up onto the job and down off it, creating a crest in the middle. So, you learn to overcome this by applying more pressure to the plane’s toe as you come on to the work, and to the heel as you come off it.
Adjust your hand pressure on the plane as you come on and off the work.
Now check the surface with a straightedge, and hold the job up to the light and see what is going on. (You have a straightedge on the side of your plane; many skilled makers use that, as well as a purpose-made straightedge, for this and other jobs.)
High points can be removed with stopped shavings that address that area. As you approach flat, back the iron off to produce the finest shaving; this will allow the sole of the plane to have more effect. You might find yourself chasing a minor bump. Don’t do this; try taking a series of fine stopped shavings to the centre of the job, leaving pencil marks on at either end. Then, with three full-length passes, go right through, clearing off the pencil marks at both ends. There you are, nearly there.
Put winding sticks on your job parallel to one another.
Now check it for wind (that’s pronounced “whined”) by using winding sticks – one at each end, and peer across them from one end. Wind is twist. You can have a seemingly flat surface that is actually the shape of a propeller. If the winding sticks are out of parallel, they will visually tell you. This is the last check. You now have a face side to be proud of.
Mark it with a Face Mark, cannily pointing in the direction of grain – the direction the plane or machine must follow. It also points to the Face Edge which is the second surface. This is also a primary surface from which others are measured, so “heads up.”
Remember these steps. You may never do them again with a handplane but you will certainly do them with a pile of timber and a machine shop. The steps are identical: Face. Edge. Width. Thickness. End. Length. We use “FEWTEL” as a way to remember the order. You’ve just finished the first one. Now it’s on to the edge.
The objective is straight and flat on the narrower surface of the edge and, this is crucial, square to the face. Use a square to check this. (A good square can keep you safe; a rotten one, one that has been dropped, is a traitor in the camp that will undermine all your work.) Start off by sliding the stock of the square down the face side, and watch how the blade travels down the edge, looking for gaps between the wood and the blade. Use a bright light behind you to really see what’s going on. A square can easily be banged onto the job and tell you lies. Don’t let it.
A small combination square is ideal for checking that the face edge is square to the face.
Adjusting an out-of-square edge requires a well-set-up plane and some knowledge.
First, look at the plane. The blade, as you noticed earlier, is just a little curved – not straight across. This is important. This gives you the shavings you have previously enjoyed, with thickness in the centre tapering to nothing on the edges. Now look how that blade is set up in the plane body. Look down the sole from the toe, and you will see the thicker, dark shape of the blade in the centre fading out on either side.
Adjust the plane from side to side to make efficient use of the cambered blade.
This curve gives you the opportunity to adjust an out-of-square edge. Check which way the edge is out of square, then move the plane to the left or the right. What? Yes – look at the way the edge is out of square – it’s higher on either the right or the left. The centre of the plane blade takes a thicker shaving than the edge. So, shift the plane body to the left (or right). Run it down the edge and see a thicker shaving come off that side and nothing come off the other. Without that curved blade, you would not be able to adjust the edge in so accurate a way.
So, engage your brain and eyeballs before engaging the plane. Analyse the situation. Do you need more off here or over there? The square will help – again, register the stock on the finished face and slide the blade down the edge. Use your damn eyes. Hold the job and the square up to the light – don’t be lazy. Once it’s square and straight, you have a Face Edge (the second letter of FEWTEL). Put a small “f” on the edge, adjacent to the face mark. You can, if you want, lean it in the direction you want the edge to be worked. Good job. Move on to “W” – width.
A wheel gauge is an ideal tool for beginners. Here we’re scribing the width on a board.
This is a surface parallel to your Face Edge, and also must be square and straight. Now you need another tool – a marking gauge. Popular at Rowden are simple wooden gauges that (with a little work) scribe a clean line. However, there is another type, a cutting gauge with a small wheel on the end that I find is simpler for the beginner to use. Both are fine. Toolmakers want us to have both marking gauges and cutting gauges, so that they can sell us more tools. I believe in fewer tools that work better. A single sharp gauge should be able to scribe a sharp line both with and across the grain – but you will need a few gauges because they are often left set up for stages of a job.
Mark the finished edges.
Take the job, register the gauge off the Face Edge, and scribe a line as close to the sawn width as you can. Make sure it goes all the way around the job. Keeping its stock against the Face Edge will be tricky at first; take gentle stokes to avoid digging into the job.
Now, before we go any further, let’s have look at that little wheel that made that scribe line (if you’re using that type of gauge). Note that it is beveled on one side and flat on the other, and in this case the flat side is facing the stock of the gauge and the bevel facing the outside. Plane or pare the edge to approach the gauge line. Try to do this evenly all round so there is a little bit of gauge line flapping all around the surface. Then take one plane pass down to the actual line. Smack on.
Now use your gauge, registered off the flat Face, to mark the thickness all the way around the job. Plane to the line, using the same process as in Step 1. Now you have the T in FEWTEL. Jon will come around with a caliper to check the thickness, to within 0.2 of a millimetre. (It should be 0.1, but we are cutting you bit of slack here.)
Use the gauge to mark the thickness all around.
I had a great student named Martin Dransfield, a former Yorkshire miner, who stayed on and worked for me for a while. A student asked Martin, “How do your joints come up so tight and clean?” Martin, being a Yorkshireman, is a man of few words. He paused, rubbed his chin, then said, “Well tha’ just cuts to the f-ing line.” Which is true. Leave it on and you are effed. Go past it and you are equally effed, but in the other direction.
Thank you, Martin. You are well remembered for your accuracy and your economy of language.
Mark a clean line from corner to corner.
A word on marking-out tools. A cutting gauge, with its bevel on one side of the wheel, is one of a family of marking-out tools that give you a perfect dimension, not an approximate dimension. Mark with pencil and you get approximate. A pencil line has thickness. The marking knife is another tool in that precision family. My personal favourites, made by Blue Spruce Toolworks, are expensive, but you get what you pay for. The blade is long, thin and sensitive. What do I mean by sensitive? Will it take offence if I shout at it, go off in a huff and roll off the bench? No, I mean it will enable me to click that blade into an existing scribe line and I will feel that click in my fingers. That’s what you need from a good marking knife.
Use the corner of the Face Side line to align the knife for the Face Edge scribe line.
Marking with a pencil is fine for some jobs – but not the next one. You’re now at the “E” and “L,” the End Length, in FEWTEL. Place your square across the Face Side, with the stock on the Face Edge. Hold it firmly between the finger and thumb of your off hand. Pick up your marking knife with the bevel facing the waste and strike a nice firm line against the blade of the square. The line should be clear and clean from corner to corner.
Now you need to transfer that line to the face edge. Secure the job in your vice and put the knife in the existing line right at the edge of the job. Make sure the end of your knife pokes out a little. Now slide the square right up tight to it. When you are up and snug, remove the knife then use it to strike a line across the Face Edge. If you are spot on, the line will be a perfect continuation of the line on the Face Side, and you can carry it on around the work to meet the Face Side line. If it doesn’t meet up one of two things have gone wrong: you’ve mismarked around a corner or the job is not square.
If the marking out is wrong you have no chance of good work. Step back to find out the problem, and start again – either the planing or the marking out, as needed. Engage brain before plane.
I am making this point: Making is an intellectual and creative challenge. It demands that you engage fully with every atom of your being. Your full concentration. Otherwise, you will mess up.
The essence of this is that there are no shortcuts to quality work. There are lots of easier, quicker, lower-quality ways that suit lots of other situations, but if you want to do it right there is no shortcut. We see this penny drop with people; it may take a few days, or a few months. Tom, a student with us now, sat with me recently on a log of Western red cedar and said, “David, I have had a really, really, great life, and this has been the very best year, so far. However, if I had come for a trial week I would have run a mile. It took me weeks to see that there is no shortcut.” Thank you, Tom.
This “Doing Thing” isn’t easy. You need to listen to the tool in your hand. That blade has an edge engaging with the infinitely variable material before you: timber. That cutting edge in your hands is the closest you will ever get to understanding this material. The distance between you and it is, at this point, the shortest it will ever get. The information is traveling down that blade into your hand. But do you have the wit to receive it? Our bodies are wonderfully receptive information centres. The body feeds us with information. Do we listen well enough to the sound of the blade in the timber? Do we listen to the note the saw is making, to the feel of the chisel in our hands? Do we weigh the push the tool is requiring and look quizzically at the edge of the chisel? I hope so.
This is why sharpness is so important. With sharpness you have less shove and more sensitivity, control and information. Dull tool/dull maker.
We are asking you to use your eyes in a new and more intense way. This opens the door to learn drawing (more on that to come) for each stage of the process. The ability to draw quick bench notes is an essential skill in making things; it enables us to resolve what’s going on inside that joint.
The eight-week hand-tool initiation ritual builds a solid base upon which to learn machines and other processes. This is tiring, ache-inducing, hard-won accuracy. This is accuracy you have never achieved before. That’s control. That’s you in control. I like that.
Matt Cianci’s mom was reading a book in her living room, having just put Matt down for a nap upstairs, when she saw his 4-year-old body fly past the living room window and crash into the ground. She screamed, jumped up and threw open the door. Matt was in the bushes, a blanket tied around his neck, smiling.
“Mom, I can fly!” he said.
Matt laughs.
“That about describes me,” he says. “Always testing the limits of things. I guess you could say I’m a curious person with a vibrant imagination. I’m not a follower of the crowd.”
“My mom holding me when I was a wee babe … a well-placed hammer and peg toy in my lap!” — Matt
Matt was born in Evanston, Illinois, north of Chicago. His parents met in college in the 1970s, married, had a daughter in 1976, Matt in 1977, then moved to a suburb northwest of Chicago.
“I have the two greatest parents in the world because they are the two people I look up to more than anyone,” Matt says. “I had an exceptionally privileged upbringing, for a very simple reason. Anytime anything ever goes wrong in my life, I just have to take a moment and ask myself, ‘What would my parents do?’ And it’s never steered me wrong.”
Both of Matt’s parents have master’s degrees. Matt’s father is a biomedical engineer and his mother is a clinical social worker. When Matt was a kid, his mom stayed home, raised the kids and was (and is) a social justice warrior, says Matt, working with the greater Chicago chapter of the National Organization of Women, promoting the Equal Rights Amendment.
Matt, 6 or 7 years old. “In the woods (always!) and with the required makeshift tool belt and plastic screwdriver/stabbing implement.”
Always creative, Matt enjoyed drawing and playing with Lego bricks as a kid. At 6 years old he started making things out of scrap wood in his dad’s workshop. His grandfathers had workshops, too. One was an engineer; the other, a welder who worked for the United Automobile Workers at a General Motors factory until he was 75 years old. Matt’s ancestors were old-world Italian stone masons.
Matt loved to make guns out of wood (ironic, he says, giving his views on guns today) because his mother refused to buy him toy guns. But she couldn’t stop him from making them. Over the years, the guns became pretty elaborate.
Woodworking, Matt says, has always been a solitary activity.
“My dad preached nothing. He just showed everything. I don’t remember doing anything with my father, but he still taught me so many things because he did them and I just watched. Many of my values I’ve gotten from him that way. Just seeing what he did, whether it was getting up and going to work every day or how to deal with people or be a parent. He was more passive that way – classical modeling.”
When Matt was 10 years old, his dad was transferred and the family moved to Massachusetts.
“I had some social upheaval and I kind of struggled for the new few years.”
Academically, he did well – never a straight-A student but Bs without having to work too hard for them. He enjoyed writing and in high school, he wrote a lot of poetry.
“I’m a rather pensive, melancholy kind of person. So as soon as I started having any interaction with girls, it turned into romance drama. So that was good fodder. It brought out the tortured poet in me,” he says, laughing.
When he was around 12 years old, he started playing guitar.
“The band ‘in vivo’ likely playing for an empty hall with just the other bands and girlfriends watching (I’m far left).”
“From that point forward, my life focused on my band, playing the guitar and my girlfriend,” he says. “Then I got into metal and I started wearing all black. I was kind of a metalhead – you know, the tortured angry suburban white kid. But I really didn’t have anything to be angry about. I looked for targets of opportunity to put my angst out on.”
In high school, Matt started tinkering with guitars in his dad’s workshop, Eddie Van Halen-style. And then he was accepted to Providence College in Rhode Island.
“Nobody even suggested that not going to college was an option,” he says. “It was just what you did.”
“My college thrash metal band, ‘Sorrows Path’. I’m with glasses in the middle row, right (note the bleached hair … no wonder I’m bald).”
The college education was great, Matt says, but there were a lot of things he didn’t like about it. And by his sophomore year, things came to a head. He failed just about every class he took. He felt as if he was just going through the motions. He lacked purpose.
“I wasn’t happy,” he says. “I’ve always struggled with ups and downs. And I was like, ‘Something doesn’t feel right. What do I really want to do with my life?’”
In a magazine, he saw an ad for a guitar-building school on the West coast. He tacked the ad above his desk – a dream. But not all dreams come true, or at least not as envisioned.
“I stayed in school. I stumbled my way through college. I graduated with a degree in social work and I kept tinkering with guitars.”
Building Guitars & Furniture
After graduating in 1999, Matt and his then-girlfriend moved into an apartment in Providence. He had a job (in social work – vocational rehab), paid rent, was doing all the things adults do, but he still longed for something more. With time, he recognized the itch, the need to work with his hands. So he taught himself how to build guitars from scratch. And he fell in love with it.
Matt’s girlfriend at the time worked at Brown University as a research assistant. Matt says they were dirt poor. But they needed furniture. So Matt taught himself how to make furniture, too. Within a couple years, Matt, 25, and his girlfriend saved up enough money to buy an old house, and started rehabbing it.
“That was, essentially, how I learned woodworking,” he says. “Just trial and error. I didn’t really have any instruction and I didn’t read woodworking books.”
Every once in a while, Matt would get his hands on a copy of Fine Woodworking, and use it as a guide. But money was tight and more often than not, holding it while standing in line at the grocery store, he couldn’t justify the price. Around 2003, Matt remembers seeing an ad for a Lie-Nielsen dovetail saw in the back of Fine Woodworking. He wanted it.
“One of my early guitars. I made this one in 2002. It now hangs in my shop and I play it regularly.”
By now, Matt was well-versed in power tools, building furniture and beautiful guitars out of mahogany and curly maple. Next up were side tables for his bedroom. With the Lie-Nielsen dovetail saw heavy on his mind, he decided he was going to build two Shaker-style end tables in curly maple using only hand-cut joinery.
But at the time, the dovetail saw was $120. There was no way he could afford it. So he went to a big box store and bought a $10 saw. Now he had a blade. He scrounged together some scrap wood (curly maple), scrap metal and toilet bolts. And he made his own backsaw.
“And that’s when I learned to file saws,” he says.
In an old tool catalog, Matt found a one-page article titled “How to File Your Saws.” By now he had discovered eBay and he used it to buy a setting device. Following the tool catalog instruction step by step, he sharpened his handmade saw and used it to cut the dovetails in the two Shaker tables.
Around this time, both of his grandfathers were clearing out their workshops and Matt inherited a bunch of their hand tools. He continued building furniture for his house – a corner hutch, a table, an ottoman, a desk. Struggling to drill a deep hole through an exterior wall, he used a brace and bit for the first time, and was amazed by its torque and speed. He bought saws on eBay for a few dollars each, and practiced filing them. He quickly fell down the rabbit hole, he says, and he was happy. Until 2006. That was the year he and his girlfriend of eight years ended their relationship.
“My world got turned upside down,” he says. “I had to put all my tools into storage.”
An Intermission, a Tiny House & the Return of Woodworking
Matt’s ex-girlfriend bought him out of his half of the house.
“I walked away with this big wad of cash, which I had never had before,” he says. “And I’m not going to lie, I frivolously spent a good chunk of it.”
Always the guy with a girlfriend, Matt, now 29, had never been single before.
“I got back into playing guitar in seedy bars. I was not doing constructive things with my time or money. But it was just an absolutely wonderful experience I treasure because I needed to be on my own and just be young.”
Having realized how dysfunctional his relationship was, and the number it did on his self-esteem, Matt embraced his freedom.
“I just kind of went nuts and indulged myself,” he says.
About a year later, in 2007, he decided he needed to stop blowing his money on guitars and rounds of shots for the entire bar. He was living in an apartment, but wanted to put money back into a house. He found one pretty quickly, a 600-square-foot ranch in Warwick, Rhode Island.
“I fell in love with it because it had the most perfect, dry, sound basement I have ever been in,” he says. “And at that time in my life, basements were where all the good stuff happens. I remember going into this basement and thinking, This is the perfect blank space for my existence. And the upstairs was nice too – it had all the stuff you needed – but I was subterranean at that point.”
Matt bought the house, built out a nice basement workshop and started a part-time business making furniture on commission.
“Well, I say business, but I’m probably flattering myself because in business, you’re supposed to make money,” he says, laughing. “I remember building these pieces of furniture and essentially charging people for the lumber and, like, a little bit of money for me. I remember building this one lady this all-solid cherry desk. And I still love that desk. If I ever found that lady I’d offer to buy it back from her. I remember charging her $400 for it and the lumber cost me $300. I am such a horrible business person. I really am.”
Matt still worked full-time in the mental health field and most of his early customers were colleagues.
“You feel bad saying ‘This is going to be $2,000.’ Because these people, who are essentially your acquaintances or friends, they’re not going to pay that. Because, who the hell are you? You’re not Sam Maloof, right? You’re just the guy who has decided you’re going to be a furniture maker. I did that for a little while and literally lost money. Because I also justified all these purchase for tools and such. Well I have to buy this mortiser because I’m a professional furniture maker now so you’re taking in maybe $1,000 and spending $2,000. So that was silliness.”
But Matt was happy. He had his woodworking, his day job, another part-time job, and he was single – for a while. Around 2008, Matt had a whirlwind six-month romance. And for the second time in his life (the first was with his ex-girlfriend who he shared a house with) he bought a ring. It didn’t work out. But then, in 2009, Matt met Angie, now his wife, at work.
(An aside: Matt liked the idea of dating people at work, thinking it would be less work. “I would not – would not – recommend that to anyone,” he says. “Especially having an affair with your boss.” Matt laughs and says he hopes that if there’s anything folks take away from this article, it’s that he’s not your go-to guy for romance advice. “I did everything wrong. But the one thing I got right was that I met my wife at work and it just worked out.”)
Matt says he didn’t know Angie was going to be his wife at first.
“But she says she knew instantly,” he says. “We dated three months and she was like, ‘Hey, do you want to get married?’”
She even bought a ring. Matt said yes, and asked if she and her daughter wanted to come live with him in his “teeny-tiny little house” in Rhode Island. She did. They got married in 2010.
“I’m madly in love with my wife,” he says. “We’ve been married 14 years.”
Matt and Angie, 2010
Marriage gave Matt’s life a purpose and focus he hadn’t had before.
“It calmed me down and just made me grow up,” he says.”
And with that newfound focus, the saw bug came back.
The SawWright
Matt started writing a blog called The Saw Blog. People took to it and began asking him questions about saws. And then they started asking him to sharpen their saws.
“I was like, ‘You’ll give me money?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah!’ And I was like, ‘OK!’ Again, not a good businessman.”
One day, in 2011, Mark Harrell, founder of Bad Axe Tool Works, called. Mark wanted to focus entirely, at least for a little while, on making saws. But at the time, he also had a sizeable sharpening repair business.
“He tested me,” Matt says.
Mark asked to buy a tuned-up saw. He wanted Matt to show him what he could do. And if was good, Mark said he’d send Matt all his sharpening work. So Matt took an old saw and fully restored it – polished it up and sharpened it.
“Now I had never seen anyone sharpen a saw,” Matt says. “I had never owned another saw sharpened by somebody else. But I thought I’d do my best and send it to him. And he loved it.”
And that was the start of Matt’s saw-sharpening business.
“I became a professional saw doctor and it really blew up,” Matt says. “And I figured out how to pay myself a good wage for what I was doing.”
Matt also began getting invitations to teach saw sharpening at woodworking schools around the country, which was welcome additional income. Coming full circle, Lie-Nielsen also invited Matt to teach.
Matt came up with a name – The SawWright. He was sharpening saws and still working full-time, but now he wanted to try his hand at saw making.
“My prototype for the carcase saw I made for sale based on Smith’s Key. The backdrop is an article I wrote describing the history of Smith’s, as well as my design and building process.” — Matt
In 2012, Matt and Angie had a son, Francis. Matt remembers sitting in the hospital room and creating the layout for a website to sell custom-made saws while Angie and Francis slept. He started making backsaws based on an early 19th-century pattern he found in Smith’s Key. He contracted with a machinist to mill the backs. He wrote about his process in the Society of American Period Furniture Makers annual American Period Furniture Journal. And he sold them through his site.
In 2013, two big things happened. Angie and Matt had a daughter, Phoebe, and Matt decided he wanted to make saws full-time. So he took a leave of absence from his full-time job.
“And absolutely hate it,” he says. “I was in my shop fricking 12 hours a day in the basement making saws, and I was fricking miserable. I was just longing for human interaction.”
The full-time saw-making gig lasted a few months, and Matt went back to his old full-time job. It was an itch, he says, that he simply had to scratch to get it out of his system.
“Similar to when I was doing furniture, I didn’t know how to price things,” he says. “Sharpening and repair? I can do that. There’s something about the psychology of it. I know what it’s worth and I know what people will pay and it works. When it comes to making things, apparently I just will work for nothing.”
Today, sharpening and repair remain his niche.
“I like doing it part-time and I like having my day job where I can work with people because even though I hate people, I need them. I am a social animal. I’ve found my balance.”
In 2013, Kevin Ireland, then publisher of Popular Woodworking, called Matt while he was driving home from work. (Matt has always worked in Massachusetts and lived in Rhode Island. It’s a long commute – an hour and a half each way – but he loves the distinct separation of the two.) Kevin wanted to know if Matt wanted to make a DVD. Matt could hardly believe it.
“Here this magazine flies me out, treats me kind of like I’m a celebrity, we’re filming – it was surreal,” he says. “It was great.”
They made two DVDs – Build a Custom Backsaw and Super Tune Your Backsaw – in just a couple of days. It took a while for Matt to come to terms with the idea that he knew how to do something so well, other people would be willing to buy a DVD to learn from him.
“To me, the whole thing is like people want you to come teach them how to tie their shoes,” he says. “I don’t mean to sound like a pompous sort of expert but saw sharpening to me is kind of a mundane thing. It’s very challenging for people, I get it, but to me it’s not this complicated thing like, ‘Hey, I’m going to impart this wisdom to you that no one else can.’ I figured it out in my basement and if I figured it out, anybody can do it. I’m not that smart or talented, God knows. So it was just surreal.”
To this day, Matt is still surprised by recognition and publicity.
“Me and my love today (my wife’s in it too) lol!” — Matt
“I get to wake up every day and have this reasonably comfortable life because people have this faith in me to sharpen their saws and pay me really well for it,” Matt says. “I just feel so incredibly lucky to be able to do that. I’m grateful I get to live this way. I’m not saying I’m famous or a big deal, but it’s kind of like a dream come true. And I love it. And it’s really afforded me the ability to raise my family. If it weren’t for this, I would be doing something else that is not as fun, not as rewarding and certainly doesn’t pay nearly as well, which would put a lot of demand on my time and sanity. So it’s been cool.”
A Book, 9 Years in the Making
Matt has known Christopher Schwarz for more than a decade, via the occasional email, meet up at a woodworking show, or saw sharpening job. Around 2014, Chris needed a technical editor for a new Lost Art Press book by Andrew Lunn about making saws. He called Matt.
“I was like, ‘How much do you want me to pay you to let me do that?’” Matt says. Chris hired Matt (and paid him).
“I got to read and edit this whole thing. It was such a cool experience and a privilege and amazing. There’s so much wisdom in it. As a saw maker, I really loved a lot of it – he got so much of it right.”
But the book was never published. Andrew quit making saws and exited the woodworking world entirely.
Matt thought a lot about that unpublished book, including the last short chapter at the end that provided a brief overview of how to file a saw. One day, Matt asked Chris if he’d ever like to publish a book just on saw sharpening. Chris was interested. He asked Matt to write up a detailed outline and a sample chapter.
“I had this running theory: If I can teach, I can write a book,” Matt says. “I have this idea, I think, of what people need to know. And I have a lot of experience with what people struggle with when they start sharpening saws. I wanted to put that in a book to get more people to be able to do it. Because if they want to try, there’s nowhere else to learn it.”
In the 1980s, Harold “Dynamite” Payson wrote a short book called “Keeping the Cutting Edge: Setting and Sharpening Hand and Power Saws.” But Matt wanted to do something different – lots of macro photography, close-ups of important steps. A book that would have saved him from ruining 20 to 30 saws when he was starting out.
Matt wrote an outline and sample chapter, and sent it to Chris.
“He’s like, ‘Great. Let’s do it. I’ll send over a contract,’” Matt says. “And I was like, ‘What? I didn’t figure you’d say yes. Shit, now I’ve got to write a book.’”
Matt signed the contract in 2015. Then spent nine years writing the book.
“I think I know how to write,” says Matt, who does a lot of technical writing on policy and regulation in his day job. But he struggled with taking something that is such a huge part of his everyday life and putting it into words. At first, he was writing a chapter a year.
“I edit myself to death,” he says. “I will go back and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. I have written this book 10 times over. There are entire versions of this book that no one has ever seen.”
In college, Matt took a writing class that he loved and there he learned the importance of efficient writing. His professor would say, “Don’t say in 10 words what you can say in six.” So Matt knew his first attempts, meandering and laden with fancy language, needed work. He’d edit, turning 1,000 words into 150, saying the same thing but clearer.
“But that process for me is not fast,” he says. “It takes forever to do and that’s the loop I was stuck in.”
A few years in, the bones of the book were there, but Matt considered it only half done. He also had another obstacle: photography.
“Chris, he’s a freaking genius, right?” Matt says. “He’s just this incredibly smart, talented person. And I was like, ‘So Chris, what about the photography?’ And he’s like, ‘You can do it. You can do it with a digital camera.’ And I’m like, ‘Chris, I don’t even have a smartphone. I don’t know what a digital camera is.’ But he convinced me I could do the photography.”
Chris sent him a list of things to buy along with a how-to photography guide he gives to writers. But the whole process felt daunting to Matt. Every once in a while Matt would check in with Chris, worried about how long the book was taking. And Chris would always give him words of encouragement: “It takes as long as it takes. You’re doing fine.”
One day, Matt was teaching a class at Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking and ran into Mike Pekovich, creative director of Fine Woodworking. Matt and Mike had become friendly over the years and Mike knew Matt was working on a book. At one point, he asked about the photography. Matt told him he was trying to do it himself but so far he hadn’t figured out which end of the camera faces the work. Mike laughed and offered to teach Matt photography.
“Talk about privilege,” Matt says.
Mike underlined the importance of the book Matt was writing. And the only payment he wanted for the lesson was making a good book with pictures. So Matt went to Mike’s house and spent an entire day in Mike’s shop learning not only the technical aspects but also composition and lighting.
However, Matt found it difficult to find the time to replicate the process in his own shop. Another year went by and Chris, while talking with Matt about some saw sharpening, asked about the book.
“And I was like, ‘Chris, I’ve got to be honest with you. I have gotten one-on-one, day-long, private instruction from Mike Pekovich on how to do photography and I still can’t do it. I can’t make time for it. This book is going to take me another 10 years to do the photography.’ And then Chris, just casually in his Chris way, goes, ‘Well you know, I could just come up there and shoot all the pictures for you in a day or two.’ And I was like, ‘What?’”
In summer 2023, Chris drove up to Rhode Island. Matt created a shot list for every photo he needed and spent a few days on prep work and staging. They shot the whole book in two days.
“It was awesome,” Matt says.
Matt also got to spend time with Chris in a way he never had before.
“I got a better sense of his vision and what the business is like. And he’s just an amazing person. He told me his business model is to essentially take care of as many people as he can in his life. Now I understand so much more about why he does what he does. And it’s not charity with him. He just means it in this really profound way. He’s like, ‘I’m going to find all the talented people that I can and if they have things they want to do that I can help facilitate I’m going to use whatever resources and privilege I have to help remove the bullshit so that they can be creative and prosperous in a way that he has been able to.’ I was just like, ‘Wow. That’s really fucking cool.’”
Wrapping up the photography lit a fire under Matt. And although Chris never put Matt under a deadline, he said it would be great to publish the book within a year.
“I just buckled down and every free moment I had, nights, weekends, I just sat on my porch and wrote,” Matt says.
“It’s been totally surreal,” Matt says. “I just have to kind of pinch myself. I started sharpening saws on a lark 20 years ago because I was literally too poor to buy a tool I wanted and here I am, 20 years later. I wrote a book and people pay me to do this for them. I’ve gotten to meet all these amazing people and just spend time with people who are so talented and smart and just can’t help become more talented and smart on your own just because you’re with them. And that’s pretty cool.”
