Over the years, the most offensive thing I’ve ever done (so I’m told) is to make a sticker that said, “Kill Your Tablesaw.” It was conceived of as an absurd self-caricature – a spoof of the classic Luddite bumper sticker that said, “Kill Your Television.” (Wait… do Luddites drive cars?) Anyway, it’s clear by now that M&T has a reputation for the hand-tool “thing,” and we make no apologies for it. We’ve decided not to use “power tools” in our furniture making for several reasons, but none are about pretension or ego. We just do not enjoy machinery. And we really love hand tools. That said, in the woodworking world, the elephant in the room is the fact that...
“Take the meanest rusty handplane, clean it up, grind the blade and sharpen it like a razor. Tune the plane, set it very fine and run it over a scrap of oak. Hear the sound it makes and feel the finish. If you share that thrill, set yourself a project to make entirely by hand. By doing so, I once, years ago, renewed my love affair with wood. I have owned some machines myself, but I examined what I was doing and decided to go organic. I haven’t regretted it once.” –John Brown, from Good Work Thank you, Lost Art Press, for publishing this excellent book by Christopher Williams. As longtime fans of Brown’s writing, we heartily commend it....
Good stories are often built around a plot line of “the last one.” Something once grand and beautiful has dwindled, fallen out of favor, or disappeared from common knowledge, until there is only one left somewhere in the world (or universe). I think of The Last of the Mohicans, written almost 200 years ago by James Fenimore Cooper, or The Last Jedi, about which I shall say no more. The premise is compelling (whether or not the actual script manages to be) and I often find myself drawn into such tales. A young boy discovers he is the only remaining heir of a mythical kingdom and possesses strange powers? A computer programmer finds that he is the one long-awaited hero...
John, a former student of the M&T Apprenticeship and current Daily Dispatch follower, recently sent me a link to an interesting article posted on the BBC. The piece discussed historian Roger Ekirch’s research into human sleep patterns throughout time. Ekirch’s interest in the subject became part of his book about the history of night titled At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, and it reveals a fascinating aspect of human society and ubiquitous change. The insight this article highlighted was the worldwide pre-industrial human pattern of “biphasic sleep” – two sleep sessions (the first starting somewhere around 9:00 pm and the second starting around 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning) with a several-hour wakeful period of productivity in the middle...
Watching vintage films of woodworkers in action is one of the most illuminating avenues of woodworking research. Watch this guy carve a spoon – there is so much to learn. The way he wields that axe to do the vast majority of the shaping is humbling. And inspiring.
Then the knife work – so swift and confident.
This is craftsmanship.
-Joshua
In my last post, I defended the value of ornamentation in furniture-making, and also introduced the architect Aldolf Loos’ famous 1910 polemic, “Ornament and Crime,” in which he propounded that – you got it – ornamentation was bad. Here’s one redeeming thing about Loos’ proclamation, though. By glorifying pure form, he was condemning an awful turn-of-the-century factory culture. One that appropriated countless variations of traditional, culture-specific craft ornamentation – then figured out how to industrially stamp or impress those patterns onto bowls, wallpaper, dress hems, and all the other everyday items with machines in a form of “surrogate art” or “add-on intarsia.” As the architect Ingeborg Rocker puts it: “Loos’ critique responded to the increasing alignment between ornament and fashion,...
In this episode of the M&T Podcast, Joshua and Mike take a big-picture, global look at pre-industrial handcraft. This was not a region-specific or time-bound set of practices or traditions but was much more diverse and variegated than we can possibly imagine. Try to picture the breadth of creative work done by human hands before the homogenizing effects of the Industrial Revolution came into play, and you’ll begin to get the picture. Starting from their recent efforts to source an obscure Spanish chairmaking tool, they discuss the fascinating pursuit of studying handcraft heritages around the world, and how we can learn more about ourselves in the process. SHOW NOTES: Amy Umbel's Article from Issue Eight William Coperthwaite, A Handmade Life The...
Just published a new video in our “Setting Up Shop” series. This time, Mike talks about smacky things: hammers, mallets, mauls, and even the polls of axes – tools far too often overlooked.
In case you hadn’t seen this video yet, I highly recommend it (and all the others from this channel). This is a 1965 film of Albert Bock, the last wooden bench plane maker of William Marples & Son in Sheffield, England, at work at the bench. There are a number of interesting techniques and approaches shown in this brief clip. I’m especially fascinated by the brutal (but effective) shoulder paring technique. Ken Hawley, the narrator, said of Bock, “He told me that when he went on holiday, and came back, the hard patch of flesh was like a piece of raw liver for the first few days while he ‘got it back into form,’ as one might say.” Yowch. I’ve...
Yes, for those of you wondering, Mike got his article done on time. And so did our other Issue Twelve authors. Today, after reconvening since the holiday break, Mike and I began sorting out the new articles and working through them. Even though the back-and-forth editorial work happens through shared digital docs, it always starts as a printed text for us. The experience of reading in print is so radically different than that on screen, and especially because these words will end up on paper, we want to begin our first interaction with these authors in the most focused and uncluttered presentation: print. Every six months, we divvy up the printed articles and settle in with red pens to...
