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From the M&T Daily Dispatch: 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch: 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch:

From the M&T Daily Dispatch:

OK, sure, making your own furniture is rewarding and engaging and meditative and enjoyable and all that. But in practical terms, as we’ve been looking at the value of learning to do things for ourselves in an increasingly specialist-dependent society, can you actually save money doing it yourself? If you’ve ever roamed the spacious aisles of a big-box store, you may find yourself aghast. Here are desks, chairs, and bookshelves that (at the low end) feature a price tag less than you just spent on lunch. “I can’t even buy the materials I’d need for that price!” you might exclaim, shaking your head in amazement as you wander off in search of a gallon-sized jar of pickles. And it’s true...

Today from the M&T Daily Dispatch:

Photo: Xueguang Lyu Congratulations and thank you to the Mortise & Tenon Apprenticeship Program Spring Term graduates! Congratulations on persevering and meeting the challenges of the 8-week online course, learning to use hand tools to prepare stock and cut the joinery used in practically all pre-industrial (and contemporary) furniture. Thank you for such excellent participation in completing the weekly assignments, engaging in the forums, and presenting questions for Joshua and Mike to address in Office Hours. Building upon the first four weeks of the program where we learned to sharpen all our tools, prepare stock, cut mortise and tenon joints, and through dovetails, we went to on learn half-blind dovetails and rabbets and dadoes, tree felling, splitting, riving, and carving...

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...

  There’s always something under the floorboards. Or in the walls. Of all the different bones stitched together to make up a building, writers have perhaps gotten the most mileage out of the romantic—and horrific—possibilities of those sunless spaces between joists, beneath the planks. Arthur Rackham, “Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination” (1935) The one you probably remember from school is Edgar Allen Poe’s perennially unnerving short story from 1843, “The Tell-Tale Heart”: the story’s unhinged narrator struts around, confident that he’s gotten away with murder, having Tetris’ed away the grisly, dismembered evidence of his crime “between the scantlings” underneath the floor. That is, until some cops show up… as does the ghostly sound of his victim’s heart, “a low,...

Fisher’s only surviving cabinetmaker’s bench has a system of 5/8" peg holes that I have found effective for planing stock. This method of face planing is illustrated in a 1425 portrait of a Nuremberg joiner. The system has two parts: two stops at the end and the rows of holes 2" apart spaced every 6" down the length of the bench. The board can be held in place with four pegs installed, locking it in from two directions. The two pegs supporting the back of the board prevent lateral movement and the two at the end prevent it from moving forward. The result is stability in both directions for whatever kind of planing is necessary. This workholding system might be...