You've got to warm up

Holiday collection | Lessons from Gary Rogowski

Hey there, a little update: I’m doing the biggest glue up I’ve ever done today. A 25” x 80” butcherblock countertop. I’ve got wax paper to put underneath to keep the glue from getting all over the work table, an extra bottle of wood glue, and an arsenal of swear words ready for deployment.

I’ve finished making a batch of new small items to sell for the winter holidays. Here’s the big boy—a Black Walnut charcuterie board. Like the cough drop artfully placed on the counter? I don’t know about you and your family, but everyone in our family has some kind of respiratory guck that won’t go away (except Josiah, maybe he’s the culprit!).

I hope your next two weeks go well and that you stay healthy!

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Lessons from a master woodworker

A week and a half ago, I spent a weekend in a room full of woodworkers learning how Gary Rogowski builds a bookshelf. The workshop was hosted by the Minnesota Woodworkers Guild.

Rogowski is a woodworker, writer, and director of the Northwest Woodworking Studio in Washington. He’s a highly regarded maker of fine furniture with a five-decade career. He also wrote the book Handmade, which I’ve written about in other essays.

We watched, Gary worked, we asked questions, Gary answered. At one point they asked for a volunteer to come up to chisel out some mortises and I shot my hand up Hermione-fast. I can watch something all day long but until I do the work myself, the lessons don’t sink in.

Especially with woodworking, you have to know it on multiple levels. Intellectually, how tools work, what to watch for, different qualities of different species of wood, the steps for making a variety of joinery. Physically, including what you feel with your hands, how machines sound when you’re using them, how to hold tightly without creating a death grip, the important details you need to watch for.

Someone can explain these various aspects all day long and I might retain a fraction of the info on an intellectual level (taking notes helps—writing about it later is even better for my brain) but that doesn’t do my other senses any good.

One caveat for the takeaways that follow: We can think we’re communicating clearly but other people are hearing our message to the tune of their own perceptions, influenced by their emotions, memories, beliefs.

So what follows are just my takeaways, not necessarily the best takeaways.¹

• You’ve got to warm up. You can’t come into the shop with your mind filled with everything else from your day or to do list and expect to immediately transition into the deep focus that is necessary for woodworking. You need a transitional practice, a warm up. Gary takes a couple small pieces of wood and handcuts dovetails, his five-minute dovetails, he calls them.

• Work always takes longer than you expect. It’s good to track your hours on each of your projects so that you can start to get a better sense of how long certain aspects might take (say design or milling or joinery). With any new project, once you’re done estimating your hours, add at least 20% more because inevitably, no matter how carefully you plan or work, issues will arise that will need to be addressed and the minutes you spend re-calibrating tools or chiseling out another 1/16” of your mortise adds up.

• A woodworker will absolutely commandeer any available horizontal space and still not have enough room or be able to find the specific tool needed. Okay, so this isn’t something Gary said but I have yet to see any example that does not conform to this maxim.

• Set up takes an hour, the cut a minute. Setting up your machines, templates, placement, etc will likely take 2–5x as long as making any final cut. But you’ve got to put the time in, otherwise you’re screwing over your future self.

• Hold the chisel by the metal, not the handle. I learned to wrap my fingers around the metal as I guided the flat side of the chisel against the edge I wanted to keep and cut out the waste I wanted to remove.

• Journey, not destination. Making furniture (really, doing any kind of craft) is not about the end product, it’s about the journey to getting there.

• The journey includes these steps: purpose, intention, joinery, details, models. Learning these skills helps train your thinking and strengthen the connection between your hands, heart, and mind.

I’ll write more on these topics in the future (you know me, armchair woodworker philosopher!), but those were my main takeaways from the event.

Before leaving, I checked in with a compatriot at my table, a kind and humorous man named David (he always had a twinkle of mischief in his eye) and asked what his takeaways were. The main one for him, he said, beyond the techniques he wanted to practice and skills he wanted to hone, was the importance of slowing down and not being too focused on the end product. Learning to be more at peace with the process.

This sentiment was also shared by Chris, another woodworker with a generous spirit I chatted with, who encouraged me to keep woodworking, even if I wasn’t at the level I desired, because it’s about the work, not the destination, and just showing up each day was actually what mattered most.

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Essays from this newsletter

1. For instance, if I were a more experienced, skilled woodworker I bet I would’ve understood all the technical terms used. Maybe even be able to put some into use! But no, my own language is still peppered with “thing-a-ma-bob,” “gizmo,” etc.