“Slöjd makes my body strong, gives me a strong back and muscles – slöjd contains a rich diet for both body and mind. Also, I’m able to repair things when they break. That’s why I think of it as a survival kit – in a society where we’re trying to be sustainable and live more simply, craft can be a part of that restoration. When we make things, we want to take care of them – we’re not throwing them away after five years and buying a new one. This gives you a definition of what quality is. The urge for quality is also an urge for quality of life, where making and beauty give meaning to what a...
As a starting point in understanding Japanese tools, it’s probably best to examine how they are made. And even before looking at how they are made, it’s good to look at steel, and how steel works. In its simplest form, steel is a combination of iron and carbon. Pure iron consists of atoms of iron that arrange themselves naturally into a cubic structure. This cubic structure is not rigid, however. The cubic structure can move, which is why pure iron is malleable, and can be hammered and shaped into forms that are useful for us. Carbon happens to be just the right size so that if it is able to get into the gaps of the...
The importance of the relationship that humans share with trees cannot be overstated. Simply put, we owe our survival as a species almost entirely to these plants, and from our most ancient past we have held trees in the highest esteem. Consider the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, or the great ash Yggdrasil in Norse mythology that holds the nine realms together, or the sacred fig (Ficus religiosa) that Buddha sat under. Trees provide us with our primary shelter-building material, giving poles for tipis, timbers for barns, and even peeled veneers for plywood. Every culture has produced household goods primarily out of wood and, until the Industrial Revolution, it was our primary...
Like so many Windsors, our chair is an anonymous work – a puzzle that spans nearly 250 years and perhaps two states. Thankfully, it has avoided catastrophe over the centuries and remains intact, untouched black paint and all, to serve as something as transcendent as it is enigmatic. There is beauty in that mystery – something captivating in its design and its origin. In late 2018, this chair was on the market for $30,000. While that might seem like an extraordinary sum – and it is – it remains only a fraction of the value of a similarly uncommon Queen Anne or Chippendale side chair from the same era. In many ways, “country furniture,” like our Windsor, is a bargain,...
Hayward’s writing is suffused with a poignant awareness that the 20th century was a time of inexorable decline in the use and manufacture of hand tools. All sorts of skills and techniques that were taken for granted in previous centuries disappeared, and the use of the double iron wasn’t immune from this trend. By the end of the 20th century it was common, as I noted earlier, to hear the claim that cap irons didn’t really stop tear-out. Some writers speculated that the real purpose of the cap iron was to stabilize or add heft to the cutting iron. One prominent author wrote that cap irons “do more harm than good in a handplane” – a statement that would have...
M&T: Tell us about your process of making. Are any two objects ever the same? JS: They can be to a degree, but I love to give them a slight difference. For example, when I make butter knives in batches of 20 or 30, I use a paper template to make each outline. But when I shave them down, they always come out slightly different because of small variations in the material. I have to make a decision on each one – is this going to taper a little more here or there? I can’t produce exactly the same thing every time – although it is possible do that working by hand, but what’s the point? My aim is to...
Because complex modern society is maintained only through specialization, most of us focus our career development in one narrow track. We develop skills in one area in order to get a job to make money to pay other specialists to make and repair our stuff. It is possible in the modern world to become a renowned expert in a particular discipline but be helpless in every other area of life. But it was not always this way. Before Americans turned to factory work in the 19th century, skilled tradesmen worked for the most part on their own or in small shops that offered diverse goods and services. Especially in rural settings, defining one’s occupation was tricky. Was humble Jack a...
The back-to-the-land movement (as well as more recent offshoots such as the farm-to-table trend in dining) seeks to short-circuit the elaborate industrial complex that produces most of our consumable and durable goods these days. Proponents of the philosophy point to the loss of skill that is evident in the average person for basic tasks; to the health and environmental effects of large-scale industrialization; and to the sociological harm that comes of being dependent on technologies that are beyond the control or comprehension of most individuals. This dependence becomes crippling when a technological or supply-chain disruption renders us incapable of executing those basic tasks that we have turned over to mechanization. Even as we enjoy the benefits and ease that these...
The first challenge both men experienced was the exponential development of machine technology which began in earnest during Morris’ generation and continued on through Nakashima’s. Nakashima, Morris, and Ruskin before them, recognized that handwork, especially when undertaken with creativity and individuality, infused the work with both a tangible sense of human input and with a level of detail and quality that distinguished it from mass-produced machine work. That unique human quality went missing from machine-produced furniture because the latter relied on standardized dimensioning; repeatability; and mass-produced, surface-mounted ornamentation. Morris saw no future in these processes. In his 1884 lecture, “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” he optimistically predicted the demise of machinery, which “would probably, after a time, be somewhat restricted...
In the early 1990s, I began my woodworking journey with a couple of vintage Stanley bench planes and a Fine Woodworking book on hand tools. I dutifully followed the book’s instructions on setting up and sharpening my new planes, and everything was going pretty well until I came to the section on setting the cap iron (also known as the chipbreaker). According to the author, for difficult hardwoods I was supposed to set the edge of the cap iron “as close as possible” to the cutting edge. So I did, and disaster ensued. I could barely push the plane; it shuddered, shook, and quickly came to an unceremonious halt, the mouth hopelessly clogged with balled-up shavings. I moved the cap...
