Lovely and poetic. I have a carpenter friend who cannot understand why I make chairs using only handtools. For one thing, that is how I was taught. But using machines ultimately makes me a machine as well, maybe just an extension of it. It takes me a long time to make a chair but the payoff is to be able to report that I use the same tools and techniques that were employed by chairmakers in the 18th Century. Beyond that, all of my chairs contain my mistakes, hopeful small and only noticed by me and someone else who makes chairs. It gives them a personality that I find reassuring and oddly familial. Beyond all that and in response to your viewpoint on traveling the backroads, I offer an old poem of mine that says the same thing. Cheers-Dan
What a great post, Pete. I do a limited amount of flat work, mainly because I want to make some furniture for my house, but I don’t find it nearly as fun as chairmaking. So I’m more interested in using power tools to speed that along a bit. For chairmaking, it’s pure joy to use hand tools almost entirely. So I find myself with a hand/power split in my shop around chairs and flat work. Not sure if anyone has a similar experience.
Lovely and poetic. I have a carpenter friend who cannot understand why I make chairs using only handtools. For one thing, that is how I was taught. But using machines ultimately makes me a machine as well, maybe just an extension of it. It takes me a long time to make a chair but the payoff is to be able to report that I use the same tools and techniques that were employed by chairmakers in the 18th Century. Beyond that, all of my chairs contain my mistakes, hopeful small and only noticed by me and someone else who makes chairs. It gives them a personality that I find reassuring and oddly familial. Beyond all that and in response to your viewpoint on traveling the backroads, I offer an old poem of mine that says the same thing. Cheers-Dan
Traveling
Sometimes
I take the
long way
home.
To see
what
I have not
been missing.
To be
nearer
those things
I can
do without.
I fulfill
that need
for distance
and
misspent time.
Semi-circles
in exchange for
straight lines.
2000 Daniel Thomas Moran
"...more of a reflection of your circumstance than your appetite." What a well-riven, lightly shaped phrase.
What a great post, Pete. I do a limited amount of flat work, mainly because I want to make some furniture for my house, but I don’t find it nearly as fun as chairmaking. So I’m more interested in using power tools to speed that along a bit. For chairmaking, it’s pure joy to use hand tools almost entirely. So I find myself with a hand/power split in my shop around chairs and flat work. Not sure if anyone has a similar experience.
Yes to all of it