Path finding

I just wrapped up a Continuous arm class and am taking my recovery day(s). It was a rare class where the students had little or no experience with chair making or green woodworking. One of the reasons I find myself on the soapbox about this approach to making things in wood is because I see the lightbulb go off in my students heads as they do things they never imagined were possible and make something beautiful in the process. I’ll never forget my mother’s response when I told her I was going to make chairs from green wood, “Are you allowed to do that?”

My entry into woodworking was during a sort of homogenous age where woodworking meant cabinets and for heaven forbid, entertainment centers. Look back at the issues of magazines from the mid 80’s to early 2000’s and you’ll see what I mean. No, I’m not dumping on machines, I love the way my sliding miter saw cuts molding and the way my planer thicknesses boards. Until 2020, I hand flattened and thicknessed every seat that came out of my shop, whether for my own work of students, so believe me when I tell you that I love my planer!

When I learned in a machine driven shop, I was thrilled with the feeling of empowerment I got using them. But after a while, I started thinking that my job could mostly be defined as “getting a spinning blade to follow a predetermined path”. The fence on a table saw is a perfect example. It’s so powerful at ripping boards to a specific width, but every departure from that core task takes work and adds complexity. Even though I was enagaged by the tools, I couldn’t help but notice that most of my time was spent adding to or reinventing them to enable a piece of wood to engage the blade in a different path. At the time. I loved the accuracy and repeatability they offered, but in the end, I felt like everything was more of the same, more blades, more paths. This was before the advent of CNC machines, which wildly expanded the paths we could get a blade to follow, but in the end, it’s the same approach to the material.

Riving wood gave me the ability to push the material in other ways, exploiting it’s flexibility, fibrous nature and strength. Plus, I got to do it mostly with hand tools. The process and outcome changed from being dictated by the machine or jig, to being determined by the nature of the material. Sometimes, in a seemingly similar vein of thought, I see folks embracing hand tools as if a hand sawn tenon or a mortise chopped with a chisel is better. It isn’t. The point isn’t to compete with machines or to reject them on some moral ground, it’s to recognize when you use them, you are working with the limitations that are built into them, and your choices and options will develop like a muscle in relation to those limitations. This isn’t a bad thing, but it might be the reason that lots of work made on machines have flat surfaces and 90" degree joinery. Every step away requires more effort. This is a big part of the lightbulb I see go off in my students head in every class, when they realize that there is a whole world beyond those references.

I often think of it as the difference between highways and backroads. Highways, like machines, are meticulously designed and built for speed with preset, limited destinations. They get you some places fast, and some vehicles travel them better than others. The back roads on the other hand, can range from well maintained pavement to dirt roads and often require a different configuration of vehicle altogether. But the destinations are greatly expanded. Taking a semi truck on backroads can be treacherous, they do their best on the highway, but the back roads are fine by foot, bike, horse or car. The same can be said for the feeling I get when I see someone on foot on the side of the highway, it seems ill advised and a sign of some sort of adversity. To beat this metaphor to death, I’ll take it one step further. When I look at machine based work, the similarity of choices made often leaves me cold. It’s like the “variety” of restaurants that you see at a rest stop, yes, accessible but more of a reflection of your circumstance than your appetite. I find the woodwork that engages me most as a viewer doesn’t instantly reflect the tools used for it’s creation, e.g., “Wow, they must have a wide planer! Work by Peter Follansbee or Kieran Kinsella are great examples of this. Yes, I can imagine the tools they use, but their creations aren’t obvious reflections of them.

How you travel is a personal choice. For me, dithering around on the backroads is where I find my interest. Developing my muscles this way has severely limited my output and options, but I still feel empowered and engaged. It’s a personal choice, but I think it’s important to know the path exists.