Sunday Morning Labor

Until 2020, I flattened all my seats with handplanes. In 2019, I bought my Minimax jointer/planer. It had a reasonably good year, so I decided to spend some cash rather than pay taxes on it, and 2020 projected to be an even better year!

Yeah, Nostradamus I ain’t.

The planer is only 11 1/2 inches and is no help with full seats, so I plane the sections that I’ll glue up, joint them and then hand plane the joints. I’m much better at tuning handplanes than I am machines, so I always default to the handplane for these critical joints. With some care to make sure the edges are square, there is rarely any need to plane the surfaces again.

For the Temple Chair video, I decided to go back to gluing up rough cut parts and planing them after. As I filmed myself flattening the seat, I noticed how much I was enjoying the process. A while back I realized that I have a long running love affair with labor. Anyone watching my house project already guessed this. I don’t want to just design or step in to do the final work, I find a lot of contentment in the laborious activities. I don’t always default to doing things the hard way, but somehow it often seems the most appealing route. This can cut the other way too. I used to teach classes with 12 students, which meant gluing, flattening and thicknessing 13 seats (one for me). I’d do a couple of seats a day for a week or so. It wasn’t too bad, but now that I find my energy more limited, I can’t afford to throw it all at a bunch of seat blanks. Now with my Minimax and of course my intrepid associate Karen Cascone, we get the job done in short time, and the chair knows no difference.

Speaking of the house project, here is the kitchen with the cabinets installed. No, I didn’t build them. In another concession to my limited time and energy, I bought them, and boy was it the right choice. After a quick install (I did do that part), I stepped back and felt the joy of the process complete. I’m waiting on pulls and countertops but here I stand, my time and energy intact. I’m eighteen months into the project, and the adage equating completion with beauty is holding strong.

In case you need reminding of the “before”

So, with some of the time and energy saved, I got to spend some time this Sunday morning planing a seat. Here is the 10 minute video of me in action bringing the seat to thickness, If you can’t make it to the shop today, maybe watching me labor will scratch that itch.