When Megan Fitzpatrick posted the frontispiece of Christian Becksvoort’s latest book, Shaker Inspiration, on Instagram a few months back, I knew I would be placing an order. Not only have I admired Becksvoort’s work for decades; the frontispiece was utterly lovely, promising yet another beautiful and informative book from Lost Art Press.
What I did not expect was a book that offers as much to the professional or would-be professional woodworker as to the ardent Shaker furniture fan. In addition to a sizable section devoted to Shaker furniture, with measured drawings of Becksvoort’s own designs and reproduction pieces along with a portfolio of drool-worthy classics, the eminently readable book encompasses wood technology (informed by the author’s academic background in forestry), no-nonsense discussion of training possibilities, tips and techniques (several of them new to me) and invaluable advice on what’s involved in setting up a business and running it successfully.
Those who have read my book Making Things Work will be aware of the importance I attach to being honest about the sometimes-brutal realities of basing your livelihood on furniture making. Ever since I read Becksvoort’s no-holds-barred reply in Fine Woodworking to a reader’s letter asking how to make a living as a furniture maker, I have wanted to shake his hand.
After weeks of looking forward to that handshake, I relinquished the opportunity to meet Mr. Becksvoort at yesterday’s Lost Art Press event due to the forecast for several inches of snow combined intermittently with the dreaded “wintry mix.” But I’m looking forward to seeing him in April at Fine Woodworking Live.
Seriously diminished in volume after 24 hours of temps hovering around freezing, the snow is still lovely to look at.
Monroe Robinson’s trussed log bridge. Photo taken by Dick Proenneke in 1981.
Editor’s note: In January we announced a new book about Dick Proenneke. Here, author Monroe Robinson shares how building furniture with his father, counting sockeye salmon in Alaska and a bridge led he and his wife to be caretakers of Dick Proenneke’s cabin. There is no one more qualified to write this particular book, given the years Monroe has spent in the restoration of Dick Proenneke’s cabin and the replication of his tools, and we are thrilled to include Monroe in our roster of authors. — Kara Gebhart Uhl
Spending 19 summers volunteering at Dick Proenneke’s cabin and then writing “The Handcrafted Life of Dick Proenneke” has its unlikely origin in the southern Arizona of my childhood. In this desert landscape I learned about wood as I helped my father construct a dozen pieces of our household furniture from aromatic cedar, but what I remember from those times was fear of criticism. This fear drove me to work hard and always to the best of my ability. The desert also provided the awe I felt and still feel from every wild creature I encountered traveling the desert by foot. I used leftover cedar boards to stretch more than a few rattlesnake skins to make wall plaques to sell to tourists. Today, protecting wild creatures and wild lands is deeply woven into my life and everything I make. It is not surprising I became someone inspired by the life of Dick Proenneke.
The dream of watching tens of thousands of caribou drew me north in 1965 at the age of 19. By chance that first summer working for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, I helped count 24 million sockeye salmon returning to spawn in the headwater of the Kvichak River watershed borders Twin Lakes where Dick Proenneke would build his cabin three years later. This is a wild and magical corner of Alaska and, just like with Proenneke, it has held a part of my soul since that first summer.
In 1979, my first log construction was a trussed log bridge only 30 miles from Proenneke’s cabin. The many years of striving to do my best work had transformed from the fear of my childhood to the reward of constructing this bridge where no space between logs would accept a credit card. I had to plan this project well for I was working more than a 100 miles from the nearest store and there would be no provisions beyond what I initially flew in. (See Fine Woodworking magazine issue No. 33.)
In 1981, Dick Proenneke hiked the 30 miles to the homestead where I had constructed the bridge and said to the owner the bridge was the most beautiful log work he had seen. This was how I first heard of Dick Proenneke and the life he was living at Twin Lakes. IN 1982, I hiked 65 miles through the wilderness to meet Dick Proenneke. We corresponded until Dick departed Twin Lakes in 2000 when the the National Park Service (NPS) invited me to consult on what should happen to Dick’s cabin. Arriving at Twin Lakes, I met K. Schubeck who later became my wife. The two of us have been caring for Dick’s cabin as volunteers and meeting visitors every summer since. I have been involved in all the restoration of Dick’s cabin and replicated most of his handcraft as his restored originals were flown to the NPS archives. At Twin Lakes doing my very best work is expressed in replicating the detail of Dick’s handcraft. I want future visitors to imagine Dick’s hands polishing the patina on the replicated objects.
Replica of Dick Proenneke’s 4″ bean can chimney cap that Monroe Robinson made from two bean cans and a 9″ circle of 5-gallon gas-can metal.
Dick Proenneke’s handcrafted crimping tool.
Many visitors to Twin Lakes every summer have memorized sections of Dick’s published journal entries. Many have an insatiable appetite for Dick’s handcraft and have contributed to my understanding of Dick’s work. It is now a responsibility to share my knowledge of Dick Proenneke’s handcrafted life, his tools, his handcrafted items and how he used and repaired those objects. The book is a glimpse into a life lived with purpose, a life Dick shared with the hundreds who received his detailed and outward-looking correspondences.
Dick Proenneke’s cabin door hinge showing how accurately they were sawn and fit.
Dick Proenneke’s cabin can be a very busy place sometimes, making it difficult to provide a complete tour to every visitor even with two of us being present. People arrive by float plane as early as 8 a.m. and as late as 10 p.m. seven days a week.
Occasionally three, four or even five floatplanes will be there at the same time. It is sometimes exhausting but always a privilege. The future is moving away from our volunteer service toward using uniformed seasonal rangers as tour guides with the maintenance and care done by NPS staff flown in. A portion of the money from the sale of “The Handcrafted Life of Dick Proenneke” will be donated to an endowment account K. and I helped set up. This account will assist the National Park Service’s care for Dick’s cabin and help maintain the wilderness character of Twin Lakes.
David Savage, author of “The Intelligent Hand,” is in the hospital and not doing well. Before he leaves us, I want to get something off my chest.
I met David in person in 2014, but I had known about him and his work for many years. On this side of the Atlantic Ocean, David’s designs (which are incredible) never get a lot of press. But on occasion his articles about hand tools, business and the craft cross the sea.
His blunt, some would say “pungent,” tone rubs many people the wrong way. He rattles manufacturers when he states his opinion about tool steels (he hates A2), the state of tool manufacturing (fairly sorry) and honing guides (also not a fan).
I loved his columns in The Woodworker and Furniture & Cabinetmaking magazines. While I disagree with him on some points (and who cares about points?), I admire his courage to say what he thinks, which is based on long experience. He doesn’t equivocate. And he does not give a stuff (his words) whether you like it or not.
I was eager to meet him. When the chance arrived in 2014, I was teaching a tool chest class at Warwickshire College. David drove up from London to meet me for an early dinner. When I told the students and instructors my plans with David, they were quick to warn me. The short version: They’d heard through the grapevine that David is difficult, wickedly opinionated, pigheaded, even rude.
I walked to the restaurant and found David outside. We shook hands, and within five minutes I knew he was going to be a friend for life.
No matter what you’ve heard from others, David is a lovely man. Generous to a fault. Self-deprecating (also to a fault). Terribly honest. And has no secrets (that I could find).
While all that is important for you to know, I also want you to know that my relationship with David fixed me (I can’t think of a better word) in many ways as a human being.
Like David, my writing has always attracted strong detractors, ever since my first piece was published in my 8th-grade newspaper (a profile of a bunch of snobby homecoming queen candidates). Throughout my career, I’ve been baffled by the hate letters. It’s one of the big reasons I shut down my public email – I was weary of the steady diet of threats (mostly beatings, but one Klan death warning), threats of lawsuits and people who wished ill on me, my business, my family.
I’ve compared notes with fellow writers. Except for the political columnists, I have a way-above-average hate magnet. To be honest, this criticism eroded and sometimes shredded my psyche. I’m sure this was the intent of the detractors. And I was a loser in the battle.
David was the first writer I ever met who had the same hate magnet. But he was better than me. He did not brood. Instead, he carried on with his life and work. He didn’t back down, compromise his ideals or even mellow (“The Intelligent Hand” is evidence of that).
Having observed David for the last four years, I now have the courage to follow his example. His business and his creative spirit survived bankruptcy and becoming radioactive in his own trade. (Side note: David said that after his bankruptcy, one of the first people to call him with words of encouragement was John Brown.)
After spending 16 days with David in Devon, I rewrote “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” and it became a book with a much sharper edge. A book that was much closer to my thoughts as a woodworker. This summer, as I edited and designed “The Intelligent Hand,” I felt the last of my inhibitions fall away. (Thank you, David.)
Because of him, my next book might be a monster. And now I don’t give a stuff, either.
I don’t have the words to fully state my gratitude. My thanks will be in the form of my next book. I only hope he will be here to read it. Who knows? Crazier things have happened.
Editor’s note: As we wrote about in August, longtime LAP author Don Williams is writing a new book, “A Period Finisher’s Manual.” Don is a conservator, craftsman and author of many articles and several Lost Art Press books, and the maker of Mel’s Wax, a patented archival furniture care product. This post has been adapted from his new book’s introduction. Don is currently editing the manuscript and taking lots of pictures at the finishing bench.
It’s probably not the best marketing approach but now that the first draft of “A Period Finisher’s Manual” (APFM) is in the compewder it is probably time to scribe a few words about what it is not. That’s right, what it is not.
Even the title gives a clue; it is not “The Period Finisher’s Manual,” not “The Complete Finisher’s Manual” nor “The Ultimate Guide To Finishing.” Regardless of the subject or context those kinds of book titles almost always make me roll my eyes audibly. Epistemologically they strike me as pretentious and implicitly fraudulent; even The Bible confirms there was a lot more going on than there was time and space to record it all. I am personally not burdened with undue humility, but any book I write is by definition incomplete. To quote the punchline to an old joke, “An expert is a guy with a briefcase a long way from home.” I’m at home so my work can only include a portion of knowledge. So my title is “A Period Finisher’s Manual.”
Another thing APFM is not is a slavish catechism of pre-industrial finishing practices. No, you will not need to don knee breeches and replace your electric lights with tallow lanterns or wax candles in order to comply with the thrust of its message. You do not need to be strictly limited to the materials and tools available to the 18th-century workshops of London, Paris or Williamsburg. Certainly these form the conceptual and practical foundations but are instead the guides to thinking about finishing compatible with the technologies and aesthetics of the past. It’s sorta like the tag line for Don’s Barn: “Where modern craft meets the past.” APFM is about a way of working at the woodfinishing bench that transcends the limitations of orbital sanders and catalytic spray lacquers. Hint: You are probably not astonished when I suggest that old-timey hand-worked surfaces and their finishes are the more beautiful option. Just my opinion, of course (but I am right).
Were I forced to describe APFM briefly, it would be “The
What, Why, and How approach to traditional woodfinishing.”
What?
“A Period Finisher’s Manual” is not any sort of definitive survey of finishing materials and processes. It is a selective review of just a few materials and practices predating the Age of Synthetic Chemistry: a few waxes, a few varnish resins, and a few oils, applied (or not) with elegantly simple tools. The greatest attempt to recount a complete inventory of materials and processes available to the finishing enterprise was the magnificent WWII-era undertaking “Protective and Decorative Coatings” by Joseph J. Mattiello, consuming multiple volumes and almost 4,000 pages. Yes, I own and have scoured the set, along with its 1970s-era successor “Treatise on Coatings” by Myers and Long, and the most recent “Organic Coatings” by Pappas, Jones and Wick.
I could enter into writing APFM with the expectation that
the reader would undertake a thorough study of these tomes beforehand, but that
would likely be an unfulfilled expectation.
So necessarily APFM will be restricted to materials and information the
reader is most likely to actually use.
Why?
Recently I was corresponding with my friend John, a former seminarian, about the meaning of a particular passage in the New Testament. At one point in the discussion John said something to the effect of, “You can only get so far in this without reading Greek.” What does that have to do with woodfinishing (other than the possible implicit divinity of the craft)? Well, in the very same exchange John reminded me of my exhortation to students that, “In woodfinishing you can only get so far without learning some chemistry.” That said, “A Period Finisher’s Manual” is not a chemistry textbook. Rather than bombarding you with such exquisite knowledge, even though it would no doubt thrill a small cohort of readers, APFM integrates chemistry and its parent, materials science, as I believe necessary for the finisher to understand why things happen as they do on the surface of the wood. Solvent theory, molecular weight, adhesion, rheology, film formation, gloss, diffractive index, surface tension and many other components of successful finishing are essentially manifestations of molecular properties.
So too is color, even though I spend almost no time or words on the subject. APFM is not a color technology book, at least in the context of historic dyes and stains on bare wood. I find little use for ancient recipes for chemical wood stains in my own work so the topic is not addressed in any meaningful depth here beyond japanning and interlaminar glazing.
The need for understanding materials science in the finishing room is a constant theme running through the art form. One vignette from my own past is a fairly omnipresent reminder to me. Forty-five years ago, while working as a “scratch and dent man” for a furniture store, I was charged with touching up a set of bilious French Pretentious bedroom furniture. (Pop Quiz – Q. What’s the difference between a furniture repairman’s “touching up” and a conservator’s “inpainting?” A. About $75/hour.) Though I have a pretty good eye for color and layered finishes it was a struggle to get to an acceptable appearance, in the end involving the forcible integration of powder pigments with a concoction of spirit varnish, oil paint and latex. With these three totally incompatible materials I got it to work through the sheer application of energy, in this case the forced agitation with a brush. I was so pleased with the result that I bragged about it to my friends. Hey, I was 19.
Knowing what I now know about material properties, I have to wonder if at some point later the touched-up areas simply exploded off the surface. As my late friend and colleague Mel Wachowiak used to say, “With enough force you can pull the tail off a living cow.” I guess the same is true for incompatible woodfinishing materials. I got them to work together under the whiplash of vigorous mixing, but some understanding of the chemistry involved sure would have helped me then and it will help you in your future projects.
Which leads directly into another descriptor of what APFM is not – a stuffy academic book. I won’t say that Chris put his foot down, but he did suggest in a most emphatic manner that any book with hundreds of footnotes was unlikely to be appearing in the LAP catalog. Any technical citations will simply be folded into the folksy banter of the text. If you have read my other books or follow my blog you will know what to expect – big words when necessary, good humor always.
How?
“A Period Finisher’s Manual” is not a book of “how-to” tricks. Pets and circus animals do tricks, craftsmen have skills and techniques. (I’ve literally warned editors if the word “tricks” ever appeared in concert with one of my articles our working relationship was terminated.)
Instead, APFM is my attempt to describe a systematic approach to woodfinishing, complete with several dozen detailed verbal and visual descriptions – basically the How? culminating the What? and Why? considerations I mentioned above. By walking through a variety of finishing projects, complete with conceptual rationales and step-by-step visual representations, I hope to instill you with the confidence to embrace finishing as something to be anticipated with a delight rather than be feared and loathed, and ultimately, shortchanged. I have seen far too many examples of wonderfully designed and skillfully crafted woodworking projects that were betrayed by their makers’ puking some polyurinate on the surface with little understanding and less care.
Decades of woodfinishing (and teaching same) confirm that despite its vagaries it can be a predictable step-by-step process built on a foundation of technical and artistic understanding. So, I’m organizing the book’s contents the same way I organize the concepts and practices for my own woodfinishing, resulting in predictably good results.
Perhaps I should have titled it “A Predictable Finisher’s Manual,” or even “A Contented Finisher’s Manual.”
Because in the end, it is also not unpredictable and definitely not intimidating. It is in essence the very reason we make stuff.
The contents of our trash receptacles say a lot about us. I drink Twining’s English breakfast tea, have a AAA membership, and eat the occasional Boca Burger.
No matter how many years of experience you have at your craft, you can’t afford to stop learning.
Kitchen cabinet making is viewed as an inferior form of woodworking by many of those who reproduce 18th-century Philadelphia highboys. Well, let them feel superior. The fact is, building kitchen cabinets requires endless learning–not least because hardware manufacturers are constantly inventing new products to make life “better.”
Sometimes I feel like cabinetmakers have become the doctors of the cutting-edge hardware world. We’re visited by hardware company salespersons and bombarded with literature about new products that will open doors, close drawers, lift lids, hide appliances, and make exhaust vents invisible. Our clients see these wonders in their neighbors’ kitchens or advertised in magazines and want them (just as yours truly asked her doctor about Cologuard as an alternative to colonoscopy, thanks to the manufacturer’s underwriting announcements on NPR).*
My basic attitude toward such gizmos is the equivalent of the sign on my doctor’s office door: Pharmaceutical Representatives Not Welcome. In my kitchen, the cabinet doors hang on surface-mounted butterfly hinges and we toss our trash into a freestanding can beneath the sink. I like simple.
Things are different when I’m discussing hardware with clients. It is, after all, their kitchen. Consider trash. There’s a spectrum of ways to store it until you’re ready to take it outside. As with most cabinet detail decisions, I go through all the relevant options. We start with a fork in the road: Would you like a freestanding trash can (or unassuming bin beneath the sink), or would you prefer a dedicated trash cabinet?
Quite a bit less dreamy: a plain bin stashed under the sink. (This one’s ours.)
If the former, congratulations! You’re done. Just put the thing in your kitchen and get cooking. Choose the latter and you’ve launched the cabinetmaker’s equivalent of an automated answering system—Enter your account number followed by the pound sign. Press 1 for customer service. Now press 2 for residential or 3 for commercial. Etc.
How will the cabinet open? Will it have a door on hinges or be made like a drawer? Will tossing that tea bag wrapper mean reaching into the cabinet, or will the trash receptacle slide out to meet you?
Made that decision? Good. However, you’re still not done.
You can either buy a pull-out unit or make one. If you’re going to make it, will the design allow for bottom-mounted runners (such as Blum Tandem slides) or will it need to be side-mounted higher up to counteract the stress on the door if the pull is at the top?
Are you willing to use a knob or drawer pull, or do you want the unit to open hands-free? If the former, great; just install it. If the latter, there are several further options, from a foot-operated pedal that pushes the unit open to an electric servo drive.
(Servo drives? Are we still talking about trash?)
***
My most recent kitchen job called for a cabinet dedicated to trash and recyclables that would open hands-free. At first I planned to fabricate a pedal—not just any pedal, but one with sufficient oomph to break the grip of the little man who hides at the back of every Blum Tandem with Blumotion drawer slide (or the Blum Movento slides that came with the Rev-A-Shelf waste and recyclables unit I had purchased). I wasn’t thrilled about installing a pedal, because the sink area is the first thing you see on entering the dining room; a pedal dangling beneath such an exposed cabinet just seemed too reminiscent of a tampon string. The kinds of objects that might logically be hanging down from a trash cabinet (a nicely printed sardine or spice can could be epoxied to the bare metal bar I imagined using in place of a pedal; my second suggestion was to carve a cute wooden mouse and stick it to the metal bar) are not likely to appeal to most people commissioning cabinetry. Trash falling out of the waste receptacle? A mouse trying to climb in? These were bound to reflect badly on the cabinetmaker or the clients, respectively.
Fully exposed. The trash cabinet in my most recent kitchen is prominently in view from the dining room.
I called my hardware company and asked about the trash container equivalent of a touch latch. Of course such hardware exists; in my supplier’s case, it’s the Blum Tip-On with Blumotion unit, a nice middle ground between the pedal and the servo drive. With a bit of help from Sarah Gates of Blum’s customer service team, I got the thing installed. It works like a charm.
*Note: The clients in this example did not suggest the hardware I used for their trash pullout. I did.
This door in my most recent kitchen build conceals a Rev-a-Shelf waste and recyclables unit on Blum Movento slides with hands-free action. See it in action here. For some hard-won tips on retrofitting this unit with the Tip-On system, see my post at Popular Woodworking.
