Audience, Considered

Over the years I’ve struggled with the argument that a blogger should make some attempt to keep to some focused range of topics.  After all, as a person I am not easily defined by any one of my interests, and I felt that Life Revisited offered an interesting conceit, that the central theme of my creative pursuits was the desire to examine the world with fresh eyes.

I’m finding, though, that it’s optimistic naive of me to assume that a reader who shares my interest in poetry might be willing to filter out the noise that originates from my interest in woodworking (and vice versa).  Over the past few weeks I’ve been looking for a new approach, one that acknowledges the Venn diagram of interests I share with my readers.

So, to my fellow poets, I announce a new blog, Veil of Tablets.  I have migrated my poetry-related posts there from Life Revisited, and I’ll be deleting that content from Life Revisited shortly.

I plan to continue writing about woodworking on Life Revisited.  I’m excited to explore more hand-tool topics in the coming months.  I’ll probably also contemplate the economics of hand tool woodworking and our relationship as amateurs to the craft of woodworking – fertile soil.

Taking Up the Challenge

Earlier I posed the question “what would I need to do–what skills would I need to develop–to allow me to get rid of my radial arm saw?”  This beast of a machine serves one purpose in my shop: it makes a nice, clean crosscut.  When making furniture, that’s an important result to aim for, but artisans have been making clean and accurate crosscuts for centuries, and with much simpler tooling that didn’t take up as much space as a horse. 

So here’s what I came up with.  Over the next six months, I’m resolving to crosscut exclusively by hand.  I own a few crosscut hand saws, and I know how to sharpen them. Along the way, I’ll build a pair of saw benches to get the work down to the right height, and I’ll build a better saw vise to speed up sharpening.  I’ll experiment with more saws: coarser teeth to go faster, finer teeth to get closer to a final finish with less planing of end grain.  With six months of focused, intentional practice, I should get pretty good at it.

I’ll start here by recording a baseline of my skills. 

Here I’m about 60% through a crosscut in a hard maple board. I’ve come close to sawing to the line, but there’s definitely room to grow.

I'm a couple of degrees away from my line by the end of the cut, and I was a couple of degrees off from plumb. Those inaccuracies left me with some planing to do to get a nice finished surface.

Since this will be the tail board for blind dovetails, I didn't need the edge grain to be perfect, so there are a few marks from the saw remaining.

I suspect the saw benches will make a significant difference.  I’ll get to those once I clear out a backlog of other projects.

A Call to Arms

Turning my attention back to the community of woodworkers after a hiatus, I found that much had changed. The economy has taken its toll on our collective spirits, making us practical and limiting our vision.

One bright, shining exception was Chris Schwarz’s move this year to leave his role as Executive Editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine and focus on his side venture, Lost Art Press. This move was inevitable: Schwarz simply has too much to say to be beholden to a corporate definition of success. Magazines must court the advertising dollars of tool makers, and that extension of consumer culture–upside down in its assertion that artisans are first and foremost consumers–is in direct conflict with the soul of Craft.

In that vein, Schwarz’s new book, The Anarchist’s Tool Chest, is a must-read, a call to arms for furnituremakers. There is an edge to this book, not in the “pitchforks and torches” sense of tearing down governments, but in it’s assertion that artisans in wood must be the masters of their tools, not slaves to tool conglomerates. There is a broader critique too of mass-produced furniture, which may be preaching to the choir; nevertheless, even the choir needs a sermon sometimes.

Schwarz challenges us to break out of our consumer mindset when we think about our tools, proposing that each tool must pay its share of the rent in our workshops. A central premise of the book is that for the joiner focused on casework, there is a basic set of hand tools that will get us pretty far, and that we should look to machines as apprentices. If they don’t save us significant labor, they’re making a mess and taking up space.

There is an intellectual spirit to Schwarz’s writing that I appreciate, though not every woodworker will. Schwarz does his research, and quotes sources from the entire written history of the craft, much of it pre-industrial. He takes that research into the workshop, and comes back with confident assertions that, yes, there is a better way. This is challenging to readers accustomed to the pandering of the magazines, but there is a healthy way to interact with Schwarz’s assertions. It takes an open mind and a willingness to question our skills and methods.

For example, early in the book, Schwarz details how he sold off much of his tool collection, paring down to essential tools that “paid the rent.” While some of these moves would be gut-wrenching to the average home putterer, Schwarz is not sentimental about it. Out goes the miter saw and the router table. He even questions the supremacy of his table saw, the true sovereign of most home shops. “Once you foresake plywood,” he says, “your shop can change.” He moved the table saw against the wall, which “opened up a dance floor in the center of my shop.”

This got me thinking about my own workshop, a one-car garage I (hypothetically) share with my wife’s car. The car hasn’t fit in there for several years, pushed out by my big machines. Car aside, it’s cumbersome to make furniture out there, it’s so crowded. The two biggest beasts in my shop are the table saw and the radial arm saw. The table saw is a 70s-era cabinet saw with extension rails ideal for plywood sheets. I’ve taken to breaking down plywood with a circular saw, though, because I find it safer to move the tool than to move a full sheet of plywood. If I don’t use the table saw for breaking down plywood, can I shorten the rails and reclaim some space?

The radial arm saw, a 50s-era machine set up on a platform at the back of the garage, takes up every bit as much real estate as the table saw, and the only operation I use it for is crosscutting to length. I began to ask myself, “what would I need to do–what skills would I need to develop–to allow me to get rid of my radial arm saw?” More on that later.

I’d come to the book curious to learn what Schwarz’s short list of tools would be.  I wasn’t quite so ready to accept his assertion that a traditional tool chest was the best way to store them.  That’s great for him, I thought to myself. He’s working out of his basement, and it’s probably harder to hang cabinets on the walls.  It’s floor space that’s a premium in my shop. Slowly, the tumblers began to fall into place.  The more I thought about what I could remove from my workshop, the more I realized that the tool chest may in fact be the ideal storage method.

Suffice it to say, I plan to take up Schwarz’s latest challenge, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be a better and happier craftsman for it.  If my wife can park in the garage again, she’ll be happier too.

Ah, the irony. As I was composing this post, the power went out, further taunting me to reduce my dependence on machinery.

The messages that stick with us

Many of the blogs I’ve read have a tendency to focus on the hyper-recent, fifteen minutes of fame kind of topics. A more cynical writer might claim that it’s a ploy to optimize those blogs’ search result placement and page hits. I prefer to think it’s a sincere desire to take part in the larger conversation going on in a dispersed community.

 
 

Don’t get me wrong–I see a definite a place for that kind of blog. There are a lot of great conversations going on out there, conversations we couldn’t have had a generation ago, conversations enabled by technology.

 
 

But there’s also value in another approach, one that doesn’t get quite so caught up in the noise of minute-by-minute blogging. The approach that seems right to me–for me–is one that lets those seemingly interesting ideas hang around a while. Like a poem that you write that you think might be good; if it’s really worth reading, it’ll still be worth reading six months later.

Studio Furniture in the Big Tent

Asa Christiana is on the defensive.

Editor of Fine Woodworking, Christiana posted this piece in the FWW editorial blog in response to a recent interview with Tom Loeser in American Craft.

Loeser is the head of the Woodworking department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  His series, Flotilla, was featured recently in Woodwork.

While Christiana quotes only a snippet (in bold, below), I think we get a better understanding of Loeser’s argument by understanding the context in which the offending statement was leveled:

Loeser has been taking full advantage of this creative license. As an academic, he recognizes himself as a subversive in the field. “I think the woodworking world is too small, too limited and too defined by Fine Woodworking magazine. There is a slightly anti-intellectual slant to it. I am more interested in the ideas behind it and opening things up. I am interested in where we overlap with design and where we overlap with art.” Loeser has always worked from historical objects and sources, but he plays with ideas of function by deposing the users’ operational expectations. These days he welcomes escapes from his studio furniture oeuvre to explore other systems of generating form.

What is troublesome is that Christiana’s rebuttal sets Loeser up as a straw man, showing pictures of his most challenging work with no context, making him out to be some ridiculous figure, rather than a daring and courageous individual.  As with all straw man attacks, Christiana sidesteps the earnest (and earned) criticism Loeser offers to FWW, that it is parochial (my word choice) and anti-intellectual, serving a focus-group audience.

Not surprisingly, Christiana’s followers, who like FWW just as it is, rally round the flag and take pot-shots at Loeser’s more challenging work.

This parochial and anti-intellectual stance within woodworking has made American furniture stagnant.  We get really good at mimicking Stickley or the Shakers, and maybe we stretch a little to make these styles serve our 60″ widescreen displays.

Not enough of us are concerned about the direction of American furniture.

Studio furniture makers play an important role within the larger ecosystem that includes the magazines, the designer-craftsmen, tool-makers, amateur woodworkers, reproduction craftsmen, educators, and much more.  Loeser and other studio makers challenge us to see beyond period styles, to remove our self-imposed constraints, to shake up our notions of how furniture should look and what it means.  They challenge us to grow.

Notice, too, that I consider it an ecosystem, not an economy.  This is an important distinction.  If we reduce our craft to an economy, then we are merely consumers whose only role is to buy new machines with granite tops.  By seeing woodworking as a larger, more varied endeavor, with broader (and maybe even loftier) goals, we can stimulate a creative renaissance.

It is Christiana’s loss, and ultimately a loss to FWW’s readers, if he fails to make room in the tent for studio furniture.

As an intellectual and a maker, I would hope Christiana might see an opportunity to bring Fine Woodworking out of stagnation.  He has given us a taste of the intersection between design and woodworking with some great contributions by Michael Fortune.  If only it were enough.  Clearly we miss entirely the intersection between woodworking and art, the intersection at which Woodwork, by comparison, has done its best work.

While I hold out hope for a bigger tent for woodworking, it feels as if Christiana has come down on the side of the focus groups and the advertisers.  I expect more tool reviews and a continuing disregard for daring, challenging, and thought-provoking work.

Meanwhile, I’ll cross my fingers that Tom Caspar won’t turn Woodwork into another American Woodworker.  Maybe I should be reading American Craft…