There are no vises on Japanese benches. In fact, to a craftsman accustomed to Western woodworking, Japanese benches don’t look like workbenches at all. Author Toshio Odate notes: “Traditional tategu-shi do not use workbenches for planing. Planes are used either while standing at a planing beam (when working long material) or sitting at a planing board (for shorter material).” The planing beam is a smoothed and squared timber with one end held elevated on a triangular horse, while the other end rests on a block of wood. This is then butted against a wall or other immovable support. For a planing stop, usually a pair of nails driven into the beam suffices. Andrew Hunter, a furniture maker based in upstate...
The middle class was growing by leaps and bounds at the beginning of the 19th century, demanding cheap consumer goods. Retail showrooms, an ancestor of Rooms To Go, started popping up and eating into chairmakers’ profits. Windsor chairmakers quickly adjusted, redesigning their chairs, changing their joinery techniques, increasing their division of labor, and using interchangeable parts to speed up the chairmaking process. Did the Industrial Revolution really start in a chair shop? Early 19th-century chairmakers were fast. Really fast. In her book, Windsor-Chair Making in America, Nancy Goyne Evans calculates that a chairmaker making batches of two dozen side chairs – starting from the log and using all hand tools – could have a chair ready for finish in about...
As Shakers, we don’t look at ourselves as a guild of craftsmen, but as Believers. Being a Shaker means being a follower of Christ. Jesus instructed us to “be ye perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect,” and we seek to apply this to all we do. In Shakerism, personal perfection is something that unfolds over time. Although we might strive to make the best chair that we’ve ever made, in 10 years we should be able to say that we make them even better than we used to. But this is not to say that a Shaker craftsman would have identified himself as a furniture maker. Shakers see themselves as tied to the land, and because of...
Hand-tool woodworking in every tradition requires maintaining sharp edges. While I had no problem using sharpening jigs, I wanted to teach myself traditional freehand sharpening to understand its benefits. I quickly learned that I had underestimated the skills needed to sharpen a 70mm blade. In retrospect, sharpening a smaller plane would have made things easier for both me and my sharpening stones. In addition, Japanese plane blades are constructed differently than modern Western irons. They have high-carbon steel as the cutting edge, laminated with soft iron that forms the bulk of the body (such as in early Western planes). The steel is heat-treated to be quite hard for good edge retention, but that hardness can make sharpening (especially lapping the...
For those who seek to continually grow in their craft, production work isn’t something to be afraid of or to avoid. It may seem contradictory to think that repetition can open us up to new experiences, but it does. It also helps us to solidify the traits and characteristics that we need to take our work to the next level. It is when we refine our processes as craftspeople that we can increase our level of professional maturity. Production work develops our physical skills through practice and repetition, and helps us find inspiration when we reflect on the process of even the simplest task. Most importantly, production methods tune our mental state with focus, right attitude, and observation. All these...
Folk cultures around the world (including in Appalachia) have been built primarily around oral, rather than written, tradition. In song, story, and lore, truths and values were conveyed to the next generation and maintained over centuries. But to us rationalist moderns, this ancient way of recordkeeping seems imprecise and vague. Folklore scholar Richard M. Dorson describes our rather haughty perspective: “To the layman, and to the academic man too, folklore suggests falsity, wrongness, fantasy, and distortion. Or it may conjure up pictures of granny women spinning traditional tales in mountain cabins or gaily costumed peasants performing seasonal dances.” Dorson, a defender of the value of folklore, invokes in these words the unconscious bias that many today harbor toward indigenous, poor,...
Traditional icons are the culmination of many different arts. The hands in the studio are engaged as woodworkers, gilders, painters, and finishers, and our eyes see as historians, theologians, and artists. The interplay of these disciplines means that it is the joy of the studio to work with many different people in our tasks (for instance, the list of people I need to call back as I write this includes a sawyer, a priest, and a professor). It also means that what’s done here can offer a unique perspective on the purpose and consideration of the materials and methods it employs. The making of each icon begins with wood. A panel is its foundation, and like any home, the icon...
Schumacher uses an exercise in basic math to show that technology has allowed us to reduce the time spent on actual production of goods to such a tiny amount that it becomes insignificant. The prestige of being a producer, as a consequence, has greatly diminished. If we can rethink efficiency, says Schumacher, and increase the hours and workers involved in production, we could have enough time to “make a really good job of it, to enjoy oneself, to produce real quality, even to make things beautiful.” For a young craftsman seeking encouragement in following a different path, these were powerful words. Schumacher’s aim was to help developing nations by providing aid that employed the greatest number of people. For example,...
I flew into Bucharest and caught a long ride north with Mihai Bodea, our documentarian, through the broad, flat Moldavian tableland along the Siret River. In addition to breathtaking views of the Carpathian Mountains in the far west, I caught a few glimpses of distinctive Romanian traditions: vineyards; market fairs by the side of the road; lots of small roadside stands selling onions, peppers, grapes, melons, and other produce; and the iconic caruta horse carts the country is famous for. Many people still use horses in daily life as a practical option, part of a widespread living tradition of regional self-sufficiency. This way of life also manifests itself in other ways such as keeping a home milk cow, scything hay, keeping a...
Do you remember how to reboot your old PC running Windows 95 when it froze up? How about the process of uploading music to your Zune or iPod Shuffle? Even further back, remember returning video rentals to Blockbuster (be kind and rewind)? All this stuff is knowledge that many of us had to acquire in order to utilize the technology of the day, back in the day. And it is all completely irrelevant now. Here at M&T, we’re big fans of skills and knowledge that do not go out of date. Things our great-grandpa knew and our granddaughters will know; things that have brought productivity and fulfillment to countless generations. I’m talking about the timeless skills of handcraft. Not with...
