The most useful woodworking classes I took in college were actually in the religion department.
Though I was a journalism major, every time I was allowed an elective class I blew it on Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Christianity and Judaism. I wasn’t comparison-shopping for spiritual guidance. Instead these classes offered me insight into the ways different cultures perceive time, the self and others.
And the classes made me a better turner.
Though I’ve been turning for more than a decade, I didn’t make any real progress until five years ago when I started thinking about some of the Eastern meditation practices I studied as an undergraduate.
The following explanation is a gross simplification: One of the goals of meditation is to focus your mind so you perceive only the present moment. You do not think of the future or the past – only the fleeting bit that you are perceiving. When you get to that point, you can do anything on the lathe (or with a saw, chisel or gouge).
When I can bring my mind to that level of focus, my perception of time can also change. It can stretch or compress, depending on my needs.
Before you start asking me what I’ve been smoking, I encourage you to try it. If you don’t have a lathe, then cut some dovetails and try to clear everything out of your head – everything – except what is happening with the saw in the wood. Don’t think about the next cut or even the next saw stroke.
In photography terms, tighten your aperture to f22, f32 or more. The result will be – also in photography terms – the deepest focus possible in your work and your results.
I’m not one to celebrate or even acknowledge anniversaries, but this has been an odd year.
On four occasions this year I’ve had people approach me at woodworking shows or classes and say almost these exact words:
“I’d love to do what you do for a living, but I don’t have a magazine that will give me a blog with all the promotion you have.”
As a result, I feel the need to do something I rarely do: Set the record straight.
Exactly 10 years ago today I took the first steps toward writing a blog. I was a junior-level editor at Popular Woodworking and we had just launched Woodworking Magazine, an advertising-free publication that was aimed at investigating basic skills and exploring handwork.
Our parent company, F&W Media Inc., had indulged us and let us try a few issues as long as we didn’t spend any money on staff, manuscripts, illustrations or photography. After printing the first issue of Woodworking Magazine, I was driving home from a family event in Chicago and was wondering: How are we going to get people to read this magazine if we can only publish it once or twice a year?
Somewhere on I-65 I remembered my cousin, Jessamyn West. She was one of the first bloggers, though I didn’t really know what the word “blog” was. I thought her site was an online diary-thing.
What, I wondered, would happen if I did what Jess did but wrote about woodworking? Could it build an audience for the magazine? If readers liked what they read on the “weblog” they might buy the magazine on the newsstand.
After much arm-twisting (thanks to Steve Shanesy), I was granted an audience with our three “new media” guys during a lunch at the worst health-food store in the city. The head of new media was a part-time DJ on the weekends and had a blog that he used to document the raves and dances he worked. So he was the expert.
His question: “How are you going to get readers to pay for this blog?”
My answer: “We won’t. It will be free.”
Question: “You’re going to give away free content? You can’t afford to do that.”
Answer: “I know.”
Question: “So who is going to generate all this free content and keep people coming back every day or week?”
Answer: “I will.”
It took more than four months from that disgusting lunch to get a blog set up on our servers and connected to the fledgling web site for Woodworking Magazine. During those four months I wrote a lot of sample blog entries that proved it could be done (thank you, newspaper job).
The blog launched in May 2005 and has continued to this day. I don’t know (or really care) how many entries I’ve written; it’s easily more than 3,000. During the last 10 years, I can honestly say my blogs have not sucked up any advertising or promotion revenue on a budget line. Instead, they have generated money.
And that’s the point.
If you want to do this, you don’t need a magazine or a promotion budget. You don’t need to beg other bloggers to promote your work. If what you write is good, the work will promote itself. You don’t need SEO or SEM or Google AdSense. Screw all the stupid lists of things you need to do to promote your work. Don’t take free tools. Don’t take anything. Just give.
Write about stuff you care about. Write honestly. Write often. Don’t be afraid of what other people think. And don’t build your reputation by trampling your fellow craftsmen. A flaming a$$%ole will soon flame out.
If you do all those things above and some people hate you, that means you have struck a nerve. And it’s good to feel something. Most writing makes me feel nothing.
Below my sig is the first blog entry that appeared on the Woodworking Magazine weblog. As I read it now, it’s not my best work. But it’s not bad, for 2005. I can do better. And I will.
After studying the topic of workbenches for years, it’s clear that — like automobiles — they’ve gotten much more complex since the heyday of the 18th century cabinetmaker. The vises do amazing tricks, cabinets below the top store an entire arsenal of tools, and there are accessories and clamps that allow you to hold any piece of wood in any orientation.
But that doesn’t mean that workbenches have gotten better.
As benches have become complex, some designs have discarded simple features that early woodworkers thought were essential. The tops became shorter and wider. This increased width makes it more difficult to clamp some work to the top and prevents you from working on long pieces (early workbenches could be up to 12′ long!). Aprons were added below the benchtop so you could use a thinner top. This apron gets in the way of some clamping operations.
The top was extended out over the legs, preventing you from clamping long boards, panels or doors securely to the front of the bench.
The handy storage cabinets below can interfere with basic clamping and jigging. Some vises, while more versatile, were made entirely of iron, which can damage your tools.
Among the myriad modern accessories, some have proven to be useful advancements while others are merely more expensive (but interesting) solutions to clamping problems that were once fixed by the humble and boring holdfast. The height of the bench was increased to get the work closer to your face, but this made some hand and power operations inefficient or unnecessarily tiring.
When we designed a workbench for Woodworking Magazine, it was on the principle that it should be only as complex as necessary, and no more. It had to hold our work for a wide variety of hand and power tool operations. And it had to be inexpensive, easy to build and easy to modify.
As luck would have it, that bench already exists. It was drawn by Andre Jacob Roubo in his landmark book “L’art du menuisier” (1769-1775) (Originals of this four-volume set are expensive. You can buy a reprint here: http://www.archambault.ca). So we gathered up all our old books and began sketching out the cover project for the September 2005 issue. Here’s what we’re thinking today: $32 in hardware, dimensional pine and traditional joints.
Furniture maker David Savage has posted a review of “The Book of Plates” on his blog today.
I wasn’t sure what he would think of the book. His furniture is so incredibly contemporary, that it would be easy for a modern maker to dismiss the work of A.J. Roubo as irrelevant or obsolete.
But then David is also an artist who values highly the skill of drawing.
If you would like to read his entire entry, go here.
Here is a brief excerpt:
This book is just stunning! Why in this three-second-attention-span age should we need an American publisher to show us the work of an almost forgotten French furniture maker? We deserve the celebrity-ridden, cultural desert we inhabit – so we should celebrate and recognise the publishers who take this delightfully contrarian view. It will have taken conviction and determination to do this – this alone should be celebrated.
So what have they done, this small independent American (dammit) publisher?
They have found and published the writings of an almost forgotten and largely ignored French writer, designer and craftsman, called Andre-Jacob Roubo. This is a man who not only has the technical skill of great maker, but the illustrative ability of an artist and, to complete the circle, the communicative ability of a writer.
“The Book of Plates” is available from the Lost Art Press store, where it is shipped in a box made from baby seals who were clubbed by Festool employees. It also is available from our retailers here.
Because saws are delicate rust-magnets, storing them is a balancing act of protecting their bendable, rust-prone sawplates and still making them easy to get in and out of storage.
There are many good solutions. This is a simple one that gobbles up the least amount of precious real estate in a small chest. It’s made using one piece of tough 3/4” x 2-1/2” x 5” wood and two screws.
Kerfs in the block of wood hold the toes of your saws. The heel of the saw rests on the floor of the chest. The weight of the saw keeps it from slapping around when the chest is moved. The saws would be more secure if you added a second kerfed block near the heels. Also good additions: magnetic chewing gum, making the thing from transparent aluminum and airbrushing a buxom librarian/barbarian somewhere on the saw or chest.
I have seen this form of simple till in many surviving chests, and the block of wood usually has some rudimentary decoration. I decided to shape this one like the blades of some 16th-century try squares I’ve been building this year.
First I made a sample block to see how much wood I could remove and keep the saws stable. I decided to end the kerfs about 3/4” from the end of the block.
After cutting the block to shape and sawing the kerfs in it, I secured it to the chest with one No. 8 x 1-1/4” wood screw into the front wall of the chest and a second one through the floor of the chest and into the block.
That’s all there is to know except one important detail: If you are right-handed, put the block on the left side of the chest. That will make it easier for you to fish the saw out of the bottom of the chest.
Pins or tails first? Yes, it’s that eternal question, once again: If you overload a dovetail joint, which will fail first, the pin board or the tail board? I was inspired to take a closer look at this after reading a comment posted to Chris’s Popular Woodworking blog a while back: the poster was concerned about the strength of the skinny little pins in so-called London Pattern dovetails. Chris’s response (which was the correct one) is that it doesn’t really matter, because dovetail joints are generally overkill for what they’re meant to do.
But it does beg the question: Can you make your pins too skinny? What about your tails? To get some insight, I fired up the finite element analysis engine once again. But before we get to that, a brief refresher on stress and strain (you did take engineering mechanics in school, right?). You can skip to the juicy stuff if you get bored.
When we apply a mechanical force of some kind to a chunk of material, we exert a stress on that material. If the material deforms because of the stress, the deformation is known as strain. There are a variety of different kinds of stresses and strains; for analyzing dovetail joints we’ll concentrate on two: tensile and shear.
Tensile stress occurs when we push or pull on our material in a direction perpendicular to the surface:
Tensile stress
As long as we don’t exert too much stress, the relationship between stress and strain is linear: double the stress, double the strain. The ratio of stress to strain in a given material is known as the modulus of elasticity, or Young’s modulus. Because wood is anisotropic (it has different mechanical properties along different axes), we need to keep track of three separate elastic moduli, one for each of the major axes (longitudinal, radial and tangential). Finally, we can apply either tension or compression along each of those three axes, so there are six basic kinds of tensile stress that a piece of wood might have to endure:
Wood is very strong in longitudinal tension and compression, much weaker in radial tension, and weaker still in tangential tension. (Anyone who has ever split logs knows this instinctively.) Radial and tangential compression tend not to follow idealized elastic behavior; a localized compressive stress will lead to a dent where the sides of the depression have undergone tension failure.
Speaking of elastic behavior, a typical stress/strain graph looks like this:
In the first portion of the graph (low stresses) the material undergoes elastic deformation, meaning that when the stress is removed, the material returns to its original dimensions. As the stress increases, the material reaches a point where it can no longer fully recover after the stress has been removed. This is known as plastic deformation. As the stress increases still further, we reach a level of stress at which the material fails, often catastrophically.
The other kind of stress that we need to know about is shear stress. In contrast to tensile stress, shear stress is applied parallel to a surface:
Shear stress
The ratio of stress to strain in shear is known as the modulus of rigidity, or shear modulus. As with tensile stress, we need three separate shear moduli, and we need to consider six different ways of applying shear to our material:
Collectively, RT and TR shear are sometimes called rolling shear; you can imagine the wood fibers rolling alongside each other. Although wood fails readily when subjected to rolling shear, it’s not something that comes up too often in typical wood construction, simply because we don’t often design joints in such a way that rolling shear occurs. One area where it is important, however, is in plywood; when a piece of plywood is bent too far, it can delaminate as a result of rolling shear failure.
LR and LT shear are the two kinds of longitudinal shear. Wood is generally more resistant to longitudinal shear than rolling shear; however, longitudinal shear is a common failure mode in an overloaded beam.
Finally, RL and TL shear are the two kinds of transverse shear. Except for certain brittle softwoods, like western redcedar, wood very rarely fails in transverse shear: it will undergo tensile failure first.
There is one final complication to all of this: When we pull on a piece of material, in addition to getting longer, it gets skinnier. Conversely, when we push on it, in addition to getting shorter it gets fatter:
The degree to which this occurs is known as Poisson’s ratio. (An example of a material with an exceptionally large value for Poisson’s ratio is Jell-O®.) And, once again, since wood is anisotropic, there are three values that we have to keep track of. The reason that Poisson’s ratio complicates things is that it introduces “crosstalk” between the axes. Exert longitudinal tension, and you get radial and tangential tension, too.
So, when we model the mechanical behavior of a wooden structure, we have to take all of this into account. (Fortunately, we just have to specify the nine material properties; the modeling software does the rest.) For this investigation, I used values for dry black walnut (values for an assortment of woods are listed in the Forest Product Laboratory’s Wood Handbook). I modeled the joint as two quartersawn boards, 12″ L x 4″ W x 3/4″ T, with a single large dovetail (1:8 slope). For this simulation, I used Calculix software, and the joint was loaded as if I were trying to pull the tail board straight out of the joint.
The result for the worst-case tensile stress in the tail board is shown here:
As you can see, the stress is highest at the root of the tail. And if you’ve made enough dovetail joints, you’ve probably seen at least one tail board with a crack beginning right at that point. Although you can’t see it in the figure, the maximum tension is in the Y direction, across the width of the board.
The result for the pin board looks like this:
Again, the maximum stress is along the root. (And veteran dovetailers have probably seen a crack or two in this area as well.) By the way, the reason for the high stress way down the board, away from the joint, is because the far end of the board is fixed, and therefore the board is bending from the force trying to pull the joint apart.
Maximal shear stresses are shown below; they are concentrated in the same areas:
Although the shear stresses are much lower than the tensile stresses, note that shear strength is also quite a bit lower than tensile strength, so shear failure is still a possibility. The result (a crack) would be the same, however, so it would be difficult to know exactly how the wood failed. One purely shear failure mode would be if the tip of one of the tail’s “ears” sheared off.
The most important takeaway from these images is to note how the stresses are very tightly localized, right at the joint surfaces. The bulk of the material in both tails and pins is just sitting there doing nothing useful. That tells you that skinny pins (and skinny tails) are just fine. In fact, if you’re concerned about the strength of a dovetail joint, a solution would be to use as many pins and tails as you can cram into the width of the joint; that way, any destructive forces are spread out over more joint surfaces:
MaxStrength™ dovetail joint – lots of skinny pins and tails, but be careful to avoid making the half-pins (or half-tails) at the ends too thin
So who wins, pins or tails? As it turns out, the peak tensile stresses are very close in the two halves of the joint. Given that the wood is quartersawn, I’d have to declare the tail board as the victor, since its major stress component is in the radial direction, whereas for the pin board it’s in the tangential direction. However, if the boards were flatsawn, it might very well go the other way.
Of course, in a real-world hand-cut dovetail joint, one of the tails or one of the pins will inevitably be tighter than the rest, and that’s where the failure is going to occur.
