Things That Stick With Me

There are several times in my life when I’ve stood transfixed by something; something that had a huge impact on me out of proportion to the usual experiences.  I’m not sure why certain things change my life and most things don’t but they do.

Some things are obvious; meeting Melissa for the first time and the birth of my children rise to the top of that list.  But there are also a lot of other apparently mundane things.

Funny thing is:  most of these things were totally random.  I just happened to be channel surfing or walking past a television and this thing was on that made me come to a stop.  And in some small ways, my life changed direction.
Here are a few, in no particular order.

The New Yankee Workshop.  My Dad had a workshop and was always building something and so I grew up with this sort of thing all around me but as a young man, I never really had any interest in building things myself.  Then one day we were watching This Old House (after we had purchased an old house ourselves) and as it ended, the spin-off show The New Yankee Workshop came on.  Norm Abram calmly began to show the viewers how to build furniture and I just sat there riveted to my seat.  The intense desire to work wood came over me and has never left.  All of the things Dad did and the things we did together came back to me in a flash and all of a sudden, deep down inside, I knew that I was a woodworker and had to pursue it.  Melissa probably regrets that day; it was at that point that I began to collect tools and plans for building things.  The list is long and still growing.

Paul Sellers.  One day I accidentally learned that there was a woodworking show in Tulsa.  I don’t remember how I came to notice it but it lasted until mid-afternoon on a Sunday and I went about mid-day.  I only had time to browse a bit but there was a small booth there advertising the Homestead Heritage Woodworking school near Waco, TX and Paul Sellers was there demonstrating hand tool only woodworking.  And I stood there for two hours straight.  I wandered away briefly because I remember there was a demonstration of green-wood turning but I returned to Paul Sellers and only left when the show closed down.  He had a partner there who did most of the talking but he himself was almost silent – just building things and demonstrating techniques.

I had seen the Woodwright Shop on PBS before and while I found it interesting, I had not gotten the fever for hand tools.  Something happened to me though while standing there within arm’s reach of a master and seeing him join two pieces of wood with dovetails and then inlay a stripe into the wood with wood of another color and do it all quickly and quietly with about three hand tools just blew me away.  I could not get it out of my mind after that. Until that day, whenever one of my chisels got dull, I would seriously consider just buying a new one, but Paul Sellers whipped out a diamond plate and sharpened his chisel with no jig in just a few seconds and got back to work.  I was stunned.  In a moment I switched from astonishment to desire. I went straight home and tried to replicate what I’d just seen with the tools I had.  
I have always wanted to go to one of the many week-long classes at such schools but have never really had the time or money but still, since that time, I’ve gravitated to more hand tool use and have read anything and everything I could get my hands on.  YouTube was the biggest boon to my fervor since Paul Sellers has a channel there along with tons of other woodworkers who demonstrate their skills.

Alone in the Wilderness.  This was one of those documentaries that our local PBS station put on during one of their pledge drives some years back.  They showed it several times during the fund-raising month.  Again, I just happened to be channel surfing past it and as soon as I saw it I stopped where I was and watched the whole thing. 

The content kept going through my mind for weeks thereafter – so much so that I found it online and bought it.  This was a simple story of a man in Alaska named Dick Proenneke who decided to go into the Alaskan wilds and build himself a cabin and live there by himself just to see if he could do it.  He did everything with simple hand tools and documented the process with a wind-up film camera (this was back in the late 1960’s).  The process of figuring things out and coming up with clever ways of creating a house with materials at hand and, more importantly, building a house that did not look like a primitive hut that a wild man would haunt, still fascinates me.  His was a cabin with doors that locked and windows that actually kept the weather out.  It seemed downright cozy (if a cabin without a flushing toilet can be cozy.)

At that point, I started trying to learn some more primitive skills just to see if I could.  Things like starting a fire are now so simple that most people have no clue how to go about it without going to the local convenience store for a lighter.  Even then, many people would fail at getting a camp fire started.  I’ve always wondered how people used to get a fire lit with only a flint and steel and after seeing this, I started to try.  I succeeded too.  I also made a little camp stove that included more air circulation so that the smoke was also burned which increased the heat generated and thus the efficiency. 
I’ve never built a cabin but the things he did affected my woodworking as well as my interest in other very basic things like muzzle loading firearms.

Tracker Organ Documentary.  I still cannot remember what film this was or when exactly I saw it but I remember that I was in Fort Worth in our second apartment.  We were getting ready to go somewhere and I was just waiting for Mel to get ready and for the proper time to leave the apartment.   I have always gotten ready early and often end up having to spin my wheels until it’s really time to leave.  We were probably getting ready for a party with our church group or perhaps with my fellow graduate students.  But there was a documentary about a company that still made pipe organs in the old way; with mechanical key mechanisms, no electronics, or anything.  They were called “tracker” organs. They made their own pipes out of a special alloy that they melted and poured out and hammered into sheets which were then rolled and shaped by hand.  Then there was all the woodworking; everything from rough construction of the organ frame and bench to the fine carving of all the decorations.  I watched fascinated by the craftsmanship and the knowledge of so many things necessary to make the whole thing work.  The images are clear to me in my mind even now.  I remember how I felt watching the woodcarver and how the shavings seemed to flow from his tools with no apparent effort. I knew that there was a lot of knowledge and experience in those hands; having nice steel that would sharpen well, knowing how to sharpen it to a razor’s edge, knowing what to cut away and what to leave.  Every craftsman in the video was so expert as to make it look easy.  I think that’s what it is: they were creating something so amazing and making it look easy. 

Secrets of the Samurai Sword.  Blacksmithing is another thing that I’ve always been fascinated by, probably because Dad dabbled in it for awhile during my childhood.  I loved to watch him heat up a piece of metal and pound it into shape on his anvil.  My great grandfather had been a blacksmith (so my mother told me) and she had many happy memories of the craft.  My Dad would make simple things like branding irons that people would just hang on the wall – I don’t remember him making much else at his anvil although he may have.

This lay dormant in my mind for quite awhile until I was in college.  At this point, some instructor in some class (can’t remember what) decided that we needed to see a documentary on Japanese people who were recognized by their government as living museums of knowledge; people who still retained detailed knowledge and skills that had all but died out.  One of these was a blacksmith who still made Katana – the swords of the Samurai.  This was not some enthusiast doing simple demonstrations for the public; this was a master of the art that young men paid good money to learn from.  He could reproduce something that represented the highest form of the craft and which was better than anything else anywhere.

Again, I remembered almost every word and image.  Curiously, there were other people documented who did other things but these I completely forgot.  I was fascinated that there was a “lost” art – that at one time in history there were swords that were superior to anything that exists now (because, of course, we don’t need swords any more).

Later, while at Texas A&M University for a conference, I had a few minutes and discovered that on the top floor of the student center was a firearm museum. They were displaying a traveling exhibit of genuine Samurai swords and I got to see them up close and personal.  What struck me about them was how it was just so obvious by looking that they were beautifully made and razor sharp.  The metal looked different from any other that I had seen in some subtle and indefinable way.  I stared at them for a long while.
Along this same line was an article in Scientific American about Damascus swords.  In this article, another blacksmith from North Carolina working in concert with a metallurgist had reproduced one of the highest known forms of swordmaking in the western world and they too were said to possess almost magical qualities.

Then finally the PBS show NOVA broadcast an episode about these swords and showed the process of making them in some detail.  Again, I sat and watched the whole thing with such focus that nobody else in the room could get my attention.  I feel that with only a bit more knowledge, I could make one myself in my back yard. 

So what is it all about? What strikes me about all this is how random all this seems.  How can one series of images at such a random time have such a profound impact on me? Why these things and not others?  Why hand tool woodworking and not football? Is there something inside me that was already interested in these things and these films just struck a chord or was there something else at work? Why were all these things so visually oriented?  Or is it that they are creative and I have some intense inner desire to make things?
 
I am a scientist by training and have always gravitated towards the sciences; it was no stretch to imagine myself going to grad school and entering the field of science and engineering and I’ve always been reasonably successful at it.  It would have certainly been handy if I had absorbed my lessons in physics as thoroughly as I did these videos about making things.  I’d be a better scientist because of it.

So why did I never feel such an intense passion about any of the science?  Maybe I did and the act of pursuing it all my life just makes it seem normal.  It is true that as a kid, I was always checking scientific books out of the library – to the extent that my teachers would try and redirect me to other literature at times.  So maybe I’m just passionate about a few things.  I do remember being transfixed by the space program of the 1960’s.

What’s the common denominator?  Most of these things were documentaries on PBS.  They are all about making things.  They speak to learning some deep, basic, fundamental knowledge.  They are about diving deep and learning excruciating details.

All I know is that these events remind me of how it feels when working a jigsaw puzzle.  All the pieces are there and seem random and then, every so often, one piece clicks into place and causes an entire image to form out of the chaos.  And then you feel the satisfaction of making it happen.

I guess we all have things we’re passionate about and the passions get ignited by many different sparks.  Nowadays there are many such (usually short) videos on YouTube and Vimeo.  Apparently there are a great many people out there that just like to make things with their hands and, thankfully, there are also people who like to make films of those people and by watching those films, I know that I am not the only one.  I want to contact those makers and say “I’m a kindred spirit”.

These intense interests have always taken a back seat to life.  There were kids to raise and a job to go to. Bacon must be brought home after all.  But now that the kids are out of the house, I can start indulging myself.  My list of projects is long and time’s a-wastin’!

Lessons Learned During My Last Project

Never has the phrase “Your mileage may vary” been more applicable.  The decisions I made as to how I worked were heavily influenced by how little space I have to work in coupled with the fact that I have a strange aversion to loud noises ( my love of rock music not withstanding).  Everybody brings their own biases into the process and what works for me may drive other people crazy.  In the end, it’s about your end product; if you produce something useful or beautiful (or both), that is success.  But here are some observations in no particular order:

1)      For mortises, avoid the drill-out-most-of-it method.  Chiseling out the rest tends to leave a tapered mortise wall – at least that’s how it worked for me.  Using a square block of wood to guide the chisel introduces just enough fiddling and clamping that it become quicker and easier to just bash them out with a chisel – that works better than you think it will.  Or buy a hollow chisel mortiser.  Or buy a Festool domino.  But if you’ve got the money and/or space for that, you probably never even went through any of this hand-tool business anyway.

2)      A router plane and a shoulder plane turn the process of making tenons from near-impossible to near perfect.  Again, this is true if you’re using hand tools.  But I’m gonna claim that even if you get rid of most of the waste with a power tool, these two hand tools will complete the tenon with perfection and avoid your having to spend a lot of time fiddling with a jig.   But hey, we all make choices…

3)      Laying out things works so much better with a divider than with even the most accurate tape measure.  And the more mortises you have, the more the layout will get out of whack with even the tiniest error creeping in at each measurement.

4)      Waxing the sole of a hand plane makes a huge difference in how much energy it takes to push the plane.

5)      Sharpening a saw makes a huge difference in how fast it cuts.  This seems obvious but it is still striking when you first experience it.  Perhaps because dullness sets in very slowly and you aren’t aware of how gradually things are getting worse.

6)      The humble holdfast is more valuable than any F-clamp.  And faster.

7)      The chamfer is an attractive accent and extremely easy to do with a handplane or spokeshave.  For me, it went faster than a router when I factored in the time it took to find the chamfering bit and get it installed into the router table and hook up the dust collection.  The crossover seemed to have been about twelve linear feet of chamfering – more than that and it became feasible to do all the router set-up.  But the routerless method was more pleasant due to the lack of noise.  If noise doesn’t bother you, then route on!

8)      You have got to learn to cut as close to your line as possible – whether with a hand saw of powered one.  Splitting the line is not some high-minded goal – you’ve really got to do that or risk making a lot of work for yourself later on.

9)      If you use hand tools at all, your bench becomes all-important; it is as much a tool as anything else.  If you are an all-power-tool person, then all you need is a table to assemble parts on.

10)   Everything is great until you have to work on an especially large or long part.  Then your tried and true methods of work have to be altered.  A long bed rail may force you to abandon your precious band saw (or, hypothetically, your table saw with a tenoning jig that holds the work vertically) and grab a hand saw anyway because that’s really the only way to attend to that tenon on the end of it.

11)   A surface planer truly is a luxury that almost anyone can justify.  Life would be extremely difficult without it.

12)   A project becomes almost chess-like when you try to look ahead several moves in order to match the pieces of wood you have with the project you’re building but to do so successfully will make the project end up looking noticeably better.

13)   Sharpness is important but it seems that only the smoothing plane and a block plane intended for doing end-grain need to be as sharp as a razor. But because chisels are the easiest thing to sharpen, there's no reason they shouldn't be razor sharp.