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The Description Misses the Wonder

The fluting engine is a simple device. Pull on the lever, and the cutter – attached to a short arm at a right angle to the lever – moves in an arc and cuts a path through the wood. Rotate the turntable a bit and repeat – somewhere between 50 and 100 times to complete one pass around. Raise the table, and make another pass. Then repeat, perhaps carving 1/32" to 1/16" at a time until you’ve carved out a bowl.  This is what happens, but the description completely misses the wonder of carving a bowl this way. The sound of a sharp cutter slicing through the wood is amazingly satisfying. The cuts come out glistening from the sharp edge...

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The Fresh Air of Wendell Berry

When anxiety is running high, when the news cycle can’t get any louder, when it seems like the world is an irredeemable mess – then is a good time to crack open some Wendell Berry. Fortunately for us, Berry, who turned 88 this year, is a prolific writer, so there are many different volumes up for grabs. There isn’t really a wrong direction to go – his essays, his fiction, and his poetry all offer pithy diamonds of wisdom and joy. Berry has been gently but firmly pushing against the status quo for decades. Industrialization, education, politics – in all those areas where civilized debate is essentially nonexistent at the moment, he speaks like a breath of fresh air in a...

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The Most Prolific Planemaker of the 18th Century

Francis Nicholson is generally regarded as the most important figure in early American planemaking. He was the first documented planemaker in the Colonies, he was inventive and original, and he appears to have been highly prolific: An astonishingly large number of his planes survive. But I believe it’s time for a reconsideration of Chelor’s significance. An exhaustive survey by Ingraham found that over three quarters of the surviving planes with Francis’s mark were made after he moved to Wrentham. Further, the number of surviving planes with Chelor’s mark actually exceeds the number of Francis’s planes with the Wrentham stamp. Taken together, these facts suggest that Chelor may have been responsible for an explosion of productivity in Nicholson’s shop during the...

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