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Podcast 43 – Skill as a Safety Net

Power tools are dangerous. This should not be a controversial statement, but somehow the observation always incites vigorous debate. In this podcast episode, Joshua and Mike discuss Mike’s article in Issue Twelve titled “Risk & Reward: Skill as a Safety Net,” in which he tackles this delicate issue. Rather than falling back on tired clichés, Mike seeks to reframe the discussion in a way that can deal honestly with the injury statistics and enable makers to make tooling choices personally catered to their objectives. If you are operating on the assumption that true woodworkers really ought to power up, you really ought to hear Mike out… before it’s too late. SHOW NOTES Issue Twelve Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford...

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They Sold Like Hotcakes

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...

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“Shop Class as Soulcraft” Now In Stock

Every once in a while, a book is written that, while not explicitly focused on woodworking or furniture, manages to perfectly encapsulate the core essence of why we (as woodworkers) do what we do. The bestselling Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work is that kind of book. Its insights have been illuminating for us here at M&T, and we’re thrilled to now be stocking it in our store. Author Matthew Crawford has a unique perspective. He has a Ph.D. in political philosophy and runs his own motorcycle repair shop. Early on in his career, he landed every intellectual’s dream job as director of a Washington think tank. But he soon left that position, disillusioned by...

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Patience and Sandpaper

And how, it will be asked, are these products to be recognized, and this demand to be regulated? Easily: by the observance of three broad and simple rules:  1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share. 2. Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end. 3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of preserving record of great works. I shall perhaps press this law farther elsewhere, but our immediate concern is chiefly with the second, namely, never to demand an exact finish, when it does not lead to a noble end. For observe,...

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Toward a More Particularized Understanding of the Trades

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of essays by master cooper Marshall Scheetz. We’ve recently been talking with Scheetz about fascinating new research he’s been doing relating to aspects of his trade he’s not yet explored in all his years at the block. We’ve published his writing before and loved it so much that we decided to give him our platform here to share his latest findings. I never imagined wooden buckets could keep me occupied, or rather, transfixed for so long. The simple purpose of a bucket or barrel belies the complex symmetry of such a mundane object. Coopering is the intuitive act of assembling carved wooden staves into a conical form, bound by hoops driven...

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A Good Deal Even Back Then

The Sussex chair, named after a country chair found in its namesake county in the south of England, was presumed to have been refined in 1860 by William Morris. It was put into production in 1870, leading to a full collection of Sussex seating including children’s chairs, corner chairs, and settees. These were crafted up until the Second World War and proved to be a very successful range for Morris & Co. As it happens, a 1912 catalog featured a Sussex armchair much like the piece I have made which was priced for the equivalent of 49 pence – this was considered a good deal even back then! The concept of the BBC show was to give modern craftspeople the...

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“If You Want Something Done Right, Do It Yourself”

We’ve probably all heard this phrase before, but it’s admittedly becoming harder and harder to live by. For example, if you need to change the formatting of your laptop’s hard drive so you can update your MacOS to the latest version and you want it done right, do you do it yourself? (Some will say yes. I’ve been putting it off for months.)  Our “somethings” used to be simpler. Vehicles, for example, had adjustable carburetors, few electronics, and most anything wrong with them could be fixed on a warm Saturday under a shady tree. My first car was a 1984 Dodge Caravan (the first minivan ever!) that my parents had purchased new, and I inherited it with 168,000 miles on...

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Podcast 42 – Is Hand-tool-only Woodworking Actually Viable?

  Many woodworkers get into hand tools because they are drawn in by the joinery: dovetails, mortises and tenons, etc. As they continue building pieces in their shops, some begin to wonder if it’s possible to “cut the cord” even further. What would it be like to build from scratch without any machinery whatsoever? How would one start with rough boards and end with a beautiful drop-leaf table without ever firing up the dust collector? In this latest episode, Joshua and Mike discuss these questions in light of Joshua’s forthcoming book, Worked: A Bench Guide to Hand-Tool Efficiency. Joshua makes the argument that “engineer” woodworkers and “monastic” hand-tool-only woodworkers operate on the same strange assumption: that hand tools are supposed...

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Lines for Hewing Timbers

To lay out lines for hewing, the timber’s cross-sectional dimensions were drawn onto both ends of the log, with their sides established plumb. The Americans typically used spirit levels to do this, but some of the French carpenters used plumb bobs to establish these lines. Once the ends were drawn, they were connected down the length of the log with the snap of a chalk line, making a straight timber from the natural, irregular tree. In most cases, the carpenters peeled a strip of bark only where the lines would be snapped, rather than peeling the entire log. This served two purposes: First, it saved labor because peeling bark in areas that were going to be hewn away would be...

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