The word count tool tells me that I have now written more than 100,000 words on this blog, enough to fill two average non-fiction books, in addition to posting more than 500 original photographs since starting in September 2008. At this milestone, I again say thank you, dear readers, for including Heartwood in your woodworking reading among the ever-growing multitude of choices online and in print. I hope this blog helps expand your technical understanding as well as your enjoyment of woodworking.

I still believe that blogging can share information in a fresh and nimble way unmatched by textbooks and magazines, often exploring areas that other media neglect. Topics can be covered briefly or, using the series format, at considerable length and depth. Moreover, it’s fun.

I will continue to offer content based on my hands-on woodworking experience – real-deal stuff “arising from the sawdust and shavings of my shop.” If there is a topic you would like to see covered, drop me an email and I’ll try to write on it, but only if I know what I’m talking about.

If you are at all inclined to add a comment on a post, please do! I wish there were more comments because they share knowledge and help me connect with readers. I must hold comments for moderation and close commenting 30 days after posting because though Akismet blocks 98-99% of the many thousands of spam comments, a substantial number get through and they are often ugly.

Also, please feel free to email me with your woodworking questions. I love this craft and want others to enjoy it too, so I especially like helping novice woodworkers get oriented and move on to building things.

As a personal update, I am recovering from recent shoulder surgery so I cannot do any woodworking for a while. I should eventually be fine, but in the meantime, oh, how I miss building stuff! This has also forced me to cancel the talk-demonstrations on drawer fitting and options for smoothing plane setups that I was scheduled to present in March at the Northeastern Woodworker’s Association annual Showcase event in New York.

The next series in the blog will be on my sharpening bench and setup which has undergone many revisions and refinements over the years.

As always, thanks for reading, and happy woodworking to you.

In a recent post on the Fine Woodworking website, FW Senior Editor Matt Kenney questioned if employing jigs and shortcuts to achieve excellent results constitutes “cheating” at woodworking. His emphatic answer is that the result, not the method, is what matters. He encourages each woodworker to unapologetically find the methods that work best for him to produce the furniture of his desire.

By and large, I agree with Matt. Judging from the numerous comments on the post, this question concerns many woodworkers.

But it got me thinking, is there cheating  of another sort in woodworking? I believe the answer is yes, there is.

Cheating in woodworking is pretending that what you made is better than you know it to be, or that it meets your standard when you know it really does not.

Honest craftsmanship, at whatever level, is a result consistent with an intention. It is not necessarily a precisely realized prediction of each procedure, or of each element of the design, but at least the concept, the core idea, of the piece should be successfully expressed. That, after all, was your purpose in building it.

Now, there is always some unpredictability, and thus risk, involved in craftwork because until the piece is completed, its full impact cannot be felt. In other words, despite all of a craftsman’s designing and workmanship, he never can fully grasp what he has gotten himself into until the piece is done and stands there before him.

You may have chosen to make a simple functional bookcase or a high-class cabinet. The piece may have involved a novel design that you were not sure would “work,” or may have pushed the limits of your skills.

In all cases, there is a reckoning that comes when the work is done.

Is the piece within the range of what you intended? Has your concept – your core idea – been expressed? If so, was it a good idea in the first place? And the workmanship: is it of such level to carry that expression? Put simply, did you make what you really wanted to?

I know if I did or did not. It’s not an absolute judgment, but there surely is a discernible threshold – an overall truth about the piece. Cheating in woodworking would be to kid myself about that.

Fortunately, there is no need to cheat. Just get a pencil, more wood, and sharpen your tools, including the one on your shoulders, and get back to work.

My recent hike in New Hampshire’s White Mountains prompted this thought.

As we attempt in our woodworking shops to make objects of some small beauty, I believe we are merely borrowing from the ultimate source of beauty, the Creator, to bring joy to us and to those who appreciate our work. That is truly happy woodworking, for which I am grateful.

Happy woodworking to you, dear readers.

Fresh designs are exciting to conceive and build. The effort and risk involved in developing a new design concept lead to a feeling of accomplishment when the work is done. By virtue of their novelty alone, such pieces draw attention, and tend to be called creative, imaginative, clever, or even brilliant. New interest is created, boredom is avoided, and challenges are met. Creativity expands.

Yet, if every project is fresh and different, when will you have a chance to refine your work? Most truly excellent work is a result of refinements of previous attempts at the same or similar idea. Such work builds upon a previous design concept by refining elements such as proportions, materials, textures, workmanship, and meaningful embellishments. The integration of the elements is also refined.

That’s how the best work comes about. It’s true of furniture, jokes, recipes, tools, music, and on and on. You have to work on something to make it better! Your work does not always have to be new and different. And as for “original,” I’m not sure there truly is such a thing. On the other hand, appreciating the value of refinement does not excuse working an idea to death, getting stale and unimaginative, complacency, or creative laziness.

As an example, look at the work of the late Sam Maloof. His iconic rocking chairs are the products of years of refinement of a core style concept, but his work is never boring. Still, early Maloof is not as good as later Maloof.

Another good study in refinement is Albert Sack’s Fine Points of Furniture books in which his keen eye identified the “good, better, best” of early American furniture and its features.

Now, here are some related bite-sized opinions for thought. The “arteests” and the arbiters of cool in some parts of the high-end craft world seem to reflexively give extra credit to work which is new and different, but often lack the attention span to extol work which is less flashy but has undergone sustained refinement. New is not automatically better. On the other hand, the approach from some corners (Architectural Digest?) seems to take it as axiomatic that the refined work of modern masters such as Maloof, Jere Osgood, and Silas Kopf cannot be as good as that of the 18th century masters. Oh, how I disagree with that!

In summary, while there is much value to fresh ideas, we should not forget the role of refinement in producing the best work.

It is not easy to make fine things from wood. Woodworking is a succession of mostly subtractive steps which requires careful planning. The critical differences between success and failure in most woodworking processes are subtle, often difficult to reliably articulate, and regrettably seem to require a bit of failure prior to the success.

Human nature creates a tendency to imagine an easy path to success, and, further, to seek this illusory path against all odds. Now certainly, woodworking can be taught and learned with reasonable diligence and, along the way, plenty of fun. Today, there is an abundance of excellent learning tools which admirably remove the unnecessary mystery from woodworking. Unfortunately, the woodworking student – and that means all of us – can be easily distracted by the allure of magic.

Magic is everywhere in the world of woodworking. Catalogs tout machine jigs, especially for the router, that guarantee “perfect” results “every time”, hinting that no real skill is required. Sharpening and finishing, perhaps because they harbor perceived mysteries, are particularly prone to the din of hype. Gurus demonstrate astonishingly fast technique making parts that are conveniently abstracted from the constraints of a real project.

Sure, there are places for time-savers, innovative devices, and instructive demonstrations. The point here is that the hype can lure you to squander your efforts seeking answers in the wrong places while neglecting the acquisition of true craftsmanship. Though the noble task is slower than we might like, and sometimes disappointing, it is ultimately joyful.

Consider this: the only magic tools are the ones attached to the ends of your arms, and they only do what your brain tells them to do. I suggest being cautious about where you invest your time and energy in developing your woodworking craftsmanship. You very likely have an intuitive sense of true skill and quality, especially if you have developed it in other fields. Follow that, not the hype.

That’s the way to happy woodworking.

The machine’s 7 1/2-inch blade, powered by a motor claimed to develop one horsepower, could cut 1 5/8″ thick wood on a table 14 inches deep. Its shipping weight was all of 31 pounds. Sears was selling it for $70 in 1970, and though now it hardly seems an enviable tool, back then I wanted it.

While returning home from competing in high school indoor track meets in New York City during the winter months, I would get off the public bus and browse the tool department at the local Sears store as I waited for a ride to complete the trip. I studied that little saw and imagined exactly how I could use it to make things from wood that would exceed my basement output at the time. I had been carrying in my head a scene from a few years earlier when I saw a man, a real woodworker, cut parts for a box I was making. He used a cabinet saw to do this more easily and precisely than I could ever hope to by hand. Much later, in recollection, I could identify his machine as a Unisaw.

Oddly, having now found, through the wonder of the internet, a picture of that little saw in a pdf of the 1969 Sears catalog, I clearly feel a glimmer of that long ago desire. (Page 26 of the catalog, bottom right corner.) I never bought the saw. But I kept making things from wood, and it’s OK now, life worked itself out and I’ve got a very nice top-of-the-line cabinet saw along with lots of other tools. The love, and that’s just what it is, love, endured and evolved.

It must be about push and pull. The way life is, we spend so much of our time and energy pushing ourselves to do the things that must be done. No complaints, and all that. There are, though, a few special things that call to us. These pull us and don’t let go, not for a long time, maybe never.

Heed that pull. Follow, if you can. It’s your soul calling – and it’s important.

Happy woodworking.

Steve Jobs understood, and was able to bring to fruition, not merely the intersection of technology and design, but that they are inseparable aspects of a desirable product. High tech devices are, after all, valuable only if humans can interact with them, and it is via design that we do so. The inviting look and feel of Apple products draw us to them. So often, while we see other brands in the store, we readily sense that we want an Apple – leaving aside whether we can afford it.

Jobs recounted that a course in calligraphy that he took years before he began designing computers was a great influence in developing his appreciation for the importance of nuance and subtlety in comprising an overall style and look. In that art, the smallest details of spacing and line weight, for example, matter decisively in creating the whole image.

Phones, laptops, and other electronic devices are all basically the same shape, but the details of an Apple product add up to produce an unmistakable attractiveness. When you know the underlying functional quality is also there, the product is a real winner.

So what does this have to do with woodworking? Well, looking at a Maloof chair or a Krenov cabinet, I think the question is answered. These masters made things that invite our interaction, are the ultimate in refinement of style, conveyed largely with judicious details, and, of course, embody honest quality. When seeing their work, all this adds up to evoke that wonderful “ahhh.” It is the masterful execution of inspired intent. So intimately human, so wonderfully functional, the piece calls to us, and we reach out to it.

This is what we strive for as we take our best shot at making fine things. In Krenov’s words, a “quiet joy.” 

I was browsing in a Woodcraft store a while ago and saw some blank knife blades to which only a wooden handle needed to be attached to produce a nice knife. I am not a knife maker but I certainly like tools, including knives, and figured this would be an easy diversion for me, an experienced woodworker, while more profound projects ruminated in my head. Ha! Yeah, right.

I bought two. I was thinking vaguely, without fully admitting to myself, that one was to screw up and learn on, while the second had a shot at turning out OK. Really, it was not a difficult project, but even such a seemingly straightforward job as this harbored glitches that, lacking specific experience, I was unlikely to anticipate.

How was I to know that the quick-set epoxy would make an ugly thick glue line, or that blending the handle near the heel of the blade would be tricky? Even though I’ve handled knives for many years, decisions for the figure, weight, thickness, and contours of the handle were confusing. I also was not accustomed to seeing sparks fly off the drum sander along with the usual wood dust.

In short, after irretrievably messing up my first attempt, the next try resulted in a decent handle. The process still felt awkward, and I know there is plenty of room for improvement.

So, while not wholly unfamiliar, this was new territory for me. The experience reminded me how damn difficult it is to make things, especially to make them come out the way you really want them to come out. It’s not quick, easy, or perfect every time.

To students of woodworking, and that means all of us, I suggest we ignore the popular trend of hawking this or that technique as easy-peasy, quick as a flash, or (ugh) “perfect every time.” Woodworking is none of those. Sure, you and I can and will learn new skills and do excellent work, but it’s really not easy.

So, ignore the hype and keep making sawdust. Happy woodworking!