Years ago, I was a hunter. I no longer am and at the risk of having my house raided, I turned my guns into plowshares….er rather tools a while ago. This is the burbs, it wasn’t convenient to use them without driving far enough away to waste half a day to shoot groups and come back. So off they went to someone who will use them.
I remember the magazines back then. They’re probably worse now as the magazines go down the ladder to younger and younger writers who have evne more trouble hiding that the point of the articles is just to show off whatever is new and provide a link to where to buy it. I bought a 300WSM rifle back then, and it’s not that important, but it was an oversold not that revolutionary cartridge that may have been a rip off of the only writer that I actually liked in the magazines and still do looking back. A guy who wrote technical bits for reloaders and not just stories about shooting a rock sheep 582 yards away with a steady stick.
There was an upstart publication at the time that did nothing but advertise that they’d tell you when something was actually terrible. I got out of the hobby and don’t know how that worked out, or if they ever sold their souls, but I’d bet they had some difficulty finding traction in the gun world where manufacturers spent their time trying to get someone with a 300 winchester rifle to believe they needed a 300 something else that would make far less difference than just being a better hunter. Either way, everyone was selling something.
I’m not that test magazine – they were trying to make a name for themselves by blasting someone else. I will probably sell tools professionally, but my negative opinions about what’s really rooted in wanting advancement for hobbyists….those opinions aren’t linked as some kind of strategy. I can guarantee fake nice and false compliments is the way to sell more. My attitude will limit business potential. I don’t care, even if I’m making stuff and selling it, I’ll still be a hobbyist. I have a hobbyist mentality. You make what you like and try to learn first if you’re trying to get somewhere, not just go with the flow and see if you can find another quarter under a rock.
The Fallacy of The Pros
There is some sense that my negative attitude comes from asserting some sort of standing. No thanks, I have no standing, I’m not an authority on much and it’s really the hobbyist mentality that makes me crabby. I use Paul Sellers as an example, but it’s not just Paul Sellers. It’s Paul, the folks who will attach a parachute to you as you run, and the resentful furniture builders who claim to be professionals but usually are just trying to make furniture on the side.
With few exceptions, this is a Fallacy. Most of the folks who give me the most grief are self-appointed pros who would starve if they had to make furniture for a living. The false argument comes about that in hand tool talk, there’s a need to include power tools because “you can’t make any money working by hand”. Well, take away installing kitchens, repairing stuff someone else made, or building things in houses as a “furniture builder” and most furniture builders wouldn’t have much to do. They’re not furniture builders. They’re idealists, and often dishonest.
I don’t know if any of them has the potential to build something like Lonnie Bird would’ve taught, or the NBSS type projects. Maybe they do. I don’t think Paul, or Chris or Rob will ever get anyone there, but I have seen with my own eyes, people building fine period furniture as a hobby within a few years.
You just won’t find it on the forums, in the magazines, or anything like that.
I witnessed my mother work in the craft circuit, where people actually do make a decent income. My mother would’ve liked making higher end stuff, but she couldn’t find customers for it. I can’t imagine her going out to forums somewhere assailing hobbyists who were wanting to do fine pencil drawings or oil painting as “not doing it the way pros do”.
The Truth is that Fine work is for Hobbyists
One of the fine professional makers I saw trying to sell superb period furniture was 20 years at the time and just out of a two year program. He already made better furniture than he could sell and gave it a shot for a few years, but the last time I saw what he was making built ins. Except it’s important to note he doesn’t peruse forums and I don’t have any reason to believe he’d be frustrated to find out that an amateur would want to do something by hand that he couldn’t make profitably with half power tools.
I guess SAPFM gives out awards, and relaying what I recall from about a decade ago, the winners would often be physicians or some other hobbyist who was unbound by this nonsense argument that things need to be kept accessible or done “the real way pros do it”. Nothing is done now any better than it was done in 1790 and we don’t need to be stuck adhering to the idea that nothing can really progress further sprinkled with resentful attitudes from self appointed pros who never have really made a living making furniture in the first place.
Trust me on the tool side – I’ve been informed more than once about how I should really make tools, that I should not mess around with forge welding bolsters, but hire this or that thing out and really “do it like pros would do it”. I’m a hobbyist toolmaker. Even if selling something, I’m a hobbyist toolmaker. I’m curious and want to see what’s next, not how can I get into the game of marketing stuff and pushing rah rah.
When I see someone who is only a couple of years into woodworking making fine furniture or fine tools, I want to know what they’re doing. They won’t have to hide any facts.
The internet provides us a unique opportunity to share information at little cost. It’s gone backwards in 23 years as far as I can remember, in terms of woodworking info that’s shared. The folks who made inroads early on, like Lonnie Bird, where you could probably learn basics and get to building fine furniture pretty quickly, they seem to be gone for Numb Stumps, Fakobs and Pall Cellars. The art of reaching beginners and then putting them in a heavy suit to slow them down is here.
The supposed pros failing in what is a hobby now don’t help, either.
But I have no interest in creating a false aura about my accomplishments – you can see some of them on the things made. I’m not claiming to be Leonard Bailey or Cesar Chelor – i’m just a guy trying to punch the bottom of the knowledge flower to see if we can get it to bloom.
If I have to brand my tools “Cranky Brand”, that’s fine. I’m not going to pat Krenov Copy Planeworks on the back just to sell Cranky Brand tools. it’s not nearly as important as the hobby.
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 
I large agree with you. I still think you are a bit hard on Chris S though. He is the only one of the “gurus” whose work I actually like. He makes nice chairs and have a good eye for design. His chairs gives me the urge to make something similar. I can’t stand looking at Rob and Paul, because neither of their work lights any fire to create within me. Many of Pauls designs have weird proportions (his spoons are both ugly and unpractical), and Rob only seems to make garish combinations to show of his tight dovetails.
And that is the crux of the problem. Everything on Youtube seems to be about making tight dovetails (figuratively, tight dovetails can be exchanged for jigs or whatever). The Youtube stars never seem to talk about what you want to use the dovetails for since they just want you to buy stuff of Amazon. And then it is more profitable to play at peoples perfectionism instead of just stating: “It is ok if your joints are full of gaps. They will get better with practice.”
You are fascinated by high end period furniture, while I can appreciate the quality of the craftsmanship it is nothing that I want to make. I mostly like vernacular furniture, modernist furniture and some gustavian late 18th century stuff. So I really don’t feel a need to get to the level of fancy veneer and carved feet. There is a danish man living two hours south of me who is a master (in the original sense, earned the title by prooving his skill to other masters) cabinetmaker. He is probably the only full time high end cabinetmaker in this part of the country. He used to be employed by the royal danish court repairing *really* high end antiques. However he quit that job because he got tired of that kind of furniture and wanted to make furniture that he himself enjoys. That furniture is a lot simpler, and more influenced by nordic modernism than danish royalty. He still enjoys and uses marquetry though. The point of this rambling is that the point is that for a hobby you have to find out what you enjoy and how you can keep improving, because that is enjoyable in itself.
Oh, and if you ever start selling stuff I might be interested in a plane iron or a chisel or two, maybe even with expensive trans atlantic shipping.
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You’re right. It’s not fair really to say any of the three are the same, because what they offer differs a little bit. I have some of Chris’s publishing work, but mostly when he puts together something other people have written. Someone convinced me to buy the workbench book a long time ago and I think I may have thrown it away because I needed to make a bench that’s suitable for woodworking as well as toolmaking.
And Chris tends to make things in my opinion that look more like something you’d want to have vs. just making something plain with really tight joints or something just ugly in general (i’ll bet you can assign the right name to each of those cases).
My issue with Chris is the suggestions to beginners in the past were heavily dosed with an artificial obligation to spend money on the boutique woodworking community. Either implicit or explicit. Offering bad advice about hand tool use, when hand tools are practical, when you should sharpen your own saw, or demonstrating things he just learned too quickly when looking just a little closer would be helpful.
And then turning around recently and claiming to be the person who will help woodworkers not waste money on something like sharpening after he spent much of his career touting new tools and advising that setting up older tools is “false economy”.
This is somewhat minor and only comes on my radar when someone says “Chris says nobody works entirely by hand” (Warren does – and Chris is perfectly aware of Warren and knows who he is), or “modern saw steel is better, so buy new saws”. it’s funny, just as an example, if there is a current quality issue with anything, it is plain carbon steel that’s being made into spring since domestic or european mill run stock can be hard to find. 1095 is actually the only thing I’ve gotten recently where I’ve found defective stuff under the microscope.
And the kicker after that is his expression of not being that accomplished and inability to tolerate it when someone suggests he should redo a demonstration. At one point, he was excited because he was reading about clenching nails and showing a “how to”, but doing it horribly. George Wilson pointed out that the sloppy bits would’ve been done differently and “by nobody like that in the 1800s” on neat work, and got upset about it and what next? The lowest wit of the minions found out where George was registered and determined themselves to harass him and get him in trouble with the forum.
this may beg the question, am I the expert at anything or do I talk about things that I think are lifetime skills? i think design is a lifetime skill. I talk about sharpening all the time because I think everyone should be able to do everything i demonstrate almost immediately so that they can move on. Not because I think there is some virtue to pretending that it takes a lifetime to sharpen. if one can’t sharpen like I can, working with hand tools will be difficult.
Am I being overly picky? Probably. But not because I want to be considered in a conversation with the Georges – I just want to address hand tool related stuff to figure out where we’re limited by the tools vs. being limited by the Chris’s of the world not knowing enough to give good direction.
Recall a post long ago where he was sawing the end off of a bench, it was supposedly a hand tool project more in the spirit of “do it and imagine you were doing it back then”. he declared that the ends had to be cut off with a circular saw because he probably didn’t feel bound to figure things out. In the case of something like a thick bench top (or anything large), we put the crosscut saw aside and crosscut the wood with an aggressive rip saw, and then “chris says” messages come to me. It’s not about me, though – if I say I can do it, I’ve done it. if I’ve done it, you can do it. if you can do it, you don’t have to be limited by what Chris can do.
There are probably dozens of people like me – some who specialize in carving, some who specialize in sketching design and offering the next layer of attainable advice rather than trying to be a single source for everything. I wish we could get them all involved in everything, just like I wish every rotten-tempered person who likes to criticize my talk about sharpening could manage to address the sharpening instead of “he doesn’t even make furniture”. they could prove me wrong instead – showing where fine work makes no difference with this kind of sharpness and speed, or showing a faster and better way to get the same results.
(woe be to us if you ever get an iron from me and have to pay shipping plus duties!! I looked at the first class shipping rates yesterday and to sweden, to ship a single plane iron would probably be $40 (!!!)).
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I can see your problem with Pop wood era Chris. I have no relationship with that however so that is probably why that doesn’t colour my view on him. I agree about the boutique tools though, Tite-Mark marking gauges and Vesper bevels are probably very nice tools, but they are extremely expensive for most people and not really justifiable when you can get a Veritas gauge (not inexpensive either) or a shinwa bevel (high quality at a good price). I also find that he is his best when he writes about workbenches and chairs. The George Wilson story is not pretty, I do agree that one should avoid doing how tos if you are not good at it. There would be quite a difference if the videos theme was about trying a new technique and being up front about being new at it.
I’ll answer later about design on your later posts.
(Yikes! International shipping really has sky rocketed hasn’t it? If I ever buy anything from you, lets make it worthwile the shipping then)
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Let’s say I made something you really wanted. Even if it’s five things. I’d have a hard time justifying that you couldn’t find a better fit locally and work with it or modify or learn to make it.
I’ll never be a salesman for my own stuff – the purpose of that being I’d rather sell nothing than have people buy into woo. My basic proposition at this point is that the stuff is made by hand and I can have more freedom in what’s made shape-wise or spec wise because of it, but I think, for example, that if there was a foundry in the US that would die forge chisels, A chisel just as good as something I’d have to charge $100 for to make it worthwhile could be finished, handled and hardened for $40, or made for $10 in china. The aldi chisels are proof that a usable chisel can be made 4 for $2 and resold for $6 or $7.
The add on costs just make me recoil a little – something that’s already more expensive just because it’s made by hand then driven up by customs and shipping.
If I spec’d a version of chisels to be made and thermally cycled and finished to an OK level in china for $10, it still probably wouldn’t amount to that much because a lot of folks just wouldn’t be on board with having an excellent $10 chisel. so that part’s nuanced – maybe I’m overthinking it a bit, but I hope that none of my tools land in peoples hands for the thought of technical superiority. I think that part can be done quickly. Maybe getting a seaton chest style chisel wont’ be quite so easy, but the rest of the stuff is hard to justify the spending on. I mention blue spruce fairly often – I think once you know what’s in chisels, there’s just nothing there, but when one is starting out and the high surface finish and neat machining is seen, and figured wood choice, and so on, it seems like there’s a lot more there in substance than there is.
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Too, as a follow up – the prior reply was so long that I didn’t mention design – I don’t think what specific design is that important. For me personally, when someone talks about danish modern design and minimalism as the pinnacle, it seems to me to be sort of the macaroni and cheese of the furniture world. If you need a chair, you can sit in it. It pushes against convention about what’s good.
but if you like it, you like it. if you like shaker, you like it. If you like queen anne, you like it.
I like the earlier design items of the classical design era because they have more of a natural flow to them – as in seen in nature. They are not always a duplicate of nature, but an interpretation of it. And what comes out of that is what makes a nice saw handle, what makes a nice guitar and so on. The items in a gibson les paul that make the les paul look wonderful and timeless are classical items. the curves, the arch top, etc, fly in the face of the industrial design items going on in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Even leo fender, whose guitar is like legos, still had designers do what they could with what’s left that’s not part of the functional design.
But it’s not important for someone to like someone else’s design opinion so much as it is for them to figure out what makes the designs they like something that they like, and then take on the burden of function and design in combination without making beautiful impractical garbage or functional stuff that looks like wooden cow patties.
I think if someone had a great idea for pushing forward a better looking version of RTA furniture, that’s still worthy. they just aren’t likely to be crossing hand tools, and I tend to stay away from the stuff working furniture makers do to try to pinch pennies, because it’s limiting if not used properly.
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While thinking about this post I’ve stumbled on a YT video and decided to go back and comment. The video was titled something like “can YT celebrities woodwork?” or something like that. It’s a clickbait, so don’t watch it, the video is about some “woodworking” conference somewhere in mid-states, never heard about it and probably never will again. The host said something like “this conference isn’t about woodworking, it’s about networking, audience and growing your brand”. I guess this is the only thing anyone need to know about the whole YT “community”. And I think that it’s “the gurus” who create and promote this type of… whatever is it, I don’t have a good or a nice word to describe it. I might’ve not cared about it, let people do people, but they spam the algorithm so hundreds of small channels that could share tons of useful info just can’t be found. Pretty sure there’s at least a few hundreds channels like yours where people just do stuff and find amazing things in the process. Yet all I’m getting is 1001 way of cutting sloppy gappy dovetails from people with a couple of thousands dollars setups who can’t clench a nail properly. They can’t read the freaking manual either, so even that is copied from somebody’s else sloppy video. There were a few encounters on other social media, also baffling and hilarious at the same time, like a guy who just blindly copies whatever that one particular channel does refers to it as to “my mentor”.
I was also going to go on a rant about boutique tools, but while I was looking for words you wrote your comment. It’s pretty much on point, people that push for “a machine is the only way” aren’t that different from “premium tools are the only way” people.
I have typed this comment and then deleted it like three times already. Maybe I shouldn’t have posted this one too.
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