Wood Butcher
Let me state at the outset, I am no real woodworker. This is not false modesty, trust me. My real woodworking friends will tell you I’m a screw and glue carpenter, a 90-10 guy, the sort who possibly tries to be better but loses interest part way through and figures 90% is close enough. Really more like 80%. I could make excuses, lack of good tools, insufficient training, a shop that’s a shack on its way out, but the truth is I’m too lazy to learn joinery techniques, good finishing skills or more exotic methods of the trade.
What I figure, see, is the design is the thing. The design, if it’s artsy fartsy enough, will more than compensate for primitive building strategies. Plus, use interesting woods, laminate them, draw the viewer’s eye to those rather than give a close inspection to the slightly off joints or the rough finish. More than likely I’ll attempt a difficult design, get in over my head, then have to adjust on the fly. Real woodworkers proceed with a set of plans. Me, well, not so much. Let me give you a case in point, my latest project.
I have an old colonial maple hutch that’s a little too wide for where we have it so I thought maybe I would make a replacement, one that would actually fit the space. But naturally I wasn’t going to duplicate the old one in miniature. I am, if not a woodworker, supposedly an artist. Hence, I needed to make an art piece. What I did was, first off, laminate these narrow strips of wood I had laying around the shop, maple and walnut lengths until I had a pretty sizeable pile of 2×3 lengths, some with a maple strip in the middle, some the reverse. Lots of them, enough to make a skeleton framework, no plywood carcass, no plywood back, no doors in the lower cabinet. My goal was to create a sort of intricate ghost cabinet, bones but no skin, everything visible.
Naturally I didn’t have a finished design in mind, just figured I’d build it piece by piece and hope for the best. Sometimes this actually works. Sometimes not. I have 5 acoustic guitars I could show you that would illustrate both. This, though, I wanted a lower cabinet and an upper bookcase with shelves, the bookcase resting on top of the bottom, slightly narrower. The shelves, since I’d laminated everything in the bodies of both, got made from strips of maple and walnut and some left over bubinga from the guitars. A ton of glue went into this hutch, let me tell you. Clamps by the dozens squeezed glue out of joints that had to be cleaned up when it dried. There was lots of sanding, 60 grit to 100 to 150 and on and on. A real woodworker would have taken it to 350 to 400 and even to 600 grit. Me, I quit at 220, figuring further sanding would be wasted on my finish techniques. Plus, think about a framework of so many pieces of laminate and imagine nice finish work in those hard to reach spaces. I couldn’t either….
Yesterday I put the final shelves on the bookcase and oiled the entire hutch. There’s a joy in watching plain sanded wood come to life as the Danish seeps in and gives it color and depth. And a small sense of accomplishment … despite the limitations of my woodworking skills. What I think, and what I want to convey, is that you don’t need to be a professional woodworker to build your own stuff. There is no satisfaction like doing it yourself. Although, I have a couple of guitars that convinced me that might not always be true. And why I quit building them. But they do look nice hanging on the wall….
Hits: 23
Tags: Woodworking for the Slothful, Woodworking vs. Woodbutchery, Woodworking without Plans