As each of us starts out in a new craft, we wish for someone with experience to show us how it’s really done. It’s possible to read all the tutorials and hear all the explanations and yet still feel like we haven’t gotten to see how it’s done in the real world. Watching a craftsman work in their natural setting brings out all the subtleties of work habits than make all the difference for us learning in the early stages. The experienced artisan’s subtle movements burn into our subconscious and those small things teach us more than is often given credit. When my family listened through The Joiner and Cabinetmaker on a recent road trip, one of the things that stood...
During the lull I have during Mike hard at work editing our upcoming Foundations video and before wading deep into Issue Two (and working on my Fisher book), I finally found a moment to add some new products to our e-store. 10 Essential Furniture Repair DVDs First off, the ’10 Essential Furniture Repairs’ DVD produced by Popular Woodworking shows the most basic repairs I’ve employed to make a living restoring antique furniture. Although it’s not a shortcut approach, I did select some of the more straightforward (and less specialized) repairs to demonstrate. You can do this. From loose joints to severed tenons to white rings in an old finish and more, this DVD should bolster your confidence to make repairs...
Reading M&T is an opportunity to unplug from the screen time of modern life and to revel in the creative pulse and enduring craftsmanship of woodworkers. But books do have their weaknesses. I find that someone can tell me how to do something ten times and I still struggle but as soon as they show me in person, it clicks. The success of YouTube tells me I’m not alone here. I regularly talk with two different kinds of readers that express the same desire. There are the folks with little to no woodworking experience asking me how to get started. I also have long-time power tool users that are falling out of love with their dust collectors and router bits....
I have long been an advocate for teaching the basics of furniture conservation to woodworkers. Too often conservators hold their hard-earned techniques for repairing antique furniture tight to their chest. Often this secrecy is not due to an elitism but rather a concern that important objects of our cultural heritage are preserved in the hands of experienced individuals. While I sympathize with this desire in theory, I find that, in practice, woodworkers are going to fix old furniture with or without a professional’s help. It seems better to me to teach value assessment, preservation principals, and safe repair techniques. I've been blogging about these things for a number of years now but sometimes you just got to see this stuff...
