A quick note to start off: Thank you for subscribing! I’m new to writing online and am trying out a few forums, including this one. I have been posting essays on my website; this is the third one, and I thought, a good intro to my woodworking.
“You want to maximize the amount of wood you’re using,” my dad told me as we stood in front of a stack of boards in his shop. I had just finished going through and attempting to mark which boards would be used for which parts of the beds I was making for my children.
He pointed, “Here, for example, you will have a lot of leftover wood after you cut this. If you used this for the lower head board, then you could also get the foot board from it and not waste any wood.”
I nodded my head, taking mental notes to jot down later.
“Here at the farm we’re lucky because we have access to so much wood and much of it is beautiful,” continued Dad. “But, if you’re buying wood in the future for your business, you’ll want to make sure you are using as much of each board as you possibly can to save on costs.”
My dad is a mostly retired organic farmer who has been woodworking since high school, and as a paid, side business for over three decades. In that time, he has accumulated all the equipment a woodworker could ever want, converted a barn into a wood shop, set up a sawmill, and turned trees into furniture for himself and others.
He is a man associated with such phrases as:
“You can never have too many clamps.”
There’s no real chance that’ll ever be an issue for him.
“It’s the mark of the master to make the difficult look easy.”
He says this with a twinkle in his eye, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, usually in response to an exclamation of mine about some new technique I’ve tried that looks nothing like his example.
My dad is as incredible at building heirloom furniture as he is at fixing anything that breaks, from a toaster to a tractor. The handiness was, I think in part, a necessity for a money-strapped farmer. There was no extra in the bank to pay someone else, so my dad did it.
“It’s important to be able to find your ass with your own two hands.”
That’s one I now say to my own children.
Learning to woodwork from him, then, is a renaissance education.
I’ve learned to take apart and clean the gunk out of an orbital sander, to disassemble the motor on a sander and fix its faulty spark-plug thing (I might not have all the terms right). I built a router table with my dad, learning how to repurpose an old bathroom cabinet and cutting thick plexiglass for the first time.
One of my dearest friends is a whiz with trash, turning it into all manner of beautiful, delightful crafts, from cards to photo boxes to flowers.
One might say that my dad has similar proclivities. However, where my friend saves things like paper and cardboard and buttons, Dad saves what any reasonable person would consider junk. The aforementioned bathroom cabinet. (Though he would be the first to point out that it’s a good thing he did save it because now I have a router table.) Old windows. Cupboards stacked one on top of another. Casters. Wires, hinges, nails, foam, shapers.
That last item is not like the others. Shapers are large tools, about the size of a mini fridge box, out of fashion now but in the past used to cut shapes into wood. My understanding is that most people use routers now to much the same effect.
At any rate, my dad has four. That’s about three more than most old-school woodworkers (and four more than modern woodworkers), I’d wager. He has so many that they are mostly just horizontal storage space. A woodworker, I have learned, is always in need of more space on which to place pieces of their current project.
“You can never have too much horizontal space in the wood shop,” Dad says.
“That’s what you say about clamps,” I reply.
“And aren’t I right?”
If I’m being honest, I have managed to take up what little horizontal space there was in the shop with my recent projects and new tools. My taper jig is now sitting on top of a shaper.
As an apprentice, there are the techniques you learn and practice.
Sighting down the side of a board to look for the straightest edge. Looking at the grain to figure out which end of the board to feed into the jointer. Checking the end grain to see if the board is likely to cup or twist. Cutting dovetails, mortises, tenons. Learning to use block planes, spokeshaves, chisels. Learning to be safe around machines that could easily dismember you.
Then there are the ephemeral lessons.
The messages and philosophies that influence you more deeply, shaping what you see and what you create. In the same way I work with wood, I, too, am being carved and molded, bent and formed, built into something new.
In many ways your father was a lot like my father. My father was a hoarder, but of material, that is, anything that he thought he might use to make something with someday. He had retired from Boeing and Boeing Surplus was his favorite place to shop, All sorts of aluminum shapes at rock bottom prices, drills at fifty cents a pound, C clamps, high strength ones, at a dollar an inch, and other stuff.
And my father, like your father, was right about never having too many clamps.
Thank you 😊 I always wanted to be on NPR. Audie Cornish is my hero!