This is not the first thing you want to see when you walk into your shop, especially when said cabinet was full of your hand planes and sharpening stones. Definitely not the first thing.
After pushing my stomach down out of my throat, I surveyed the damage. Fancy new tote on my jack plane, toast.
Yoke on my no. 8 jointer plane from the late 1800s, busted.
Otherwise, my tools were mostly unscathed. The handle on my crappy spokeshave snapped off, and my 8000 grit sharpening stone has a nice crack, but it’s still useable. And that was really it. Couple dings in things, but nothing major. Thank god for the ductile iron in the modern planes, and a couple lucky bounces for the others.
I ordered a replacement y-adjuster for the 8; it arrived on Saturday. After a trip to the local hardware store to pick up some punches, it was pretty easy to replace, if nervy. Anytime you have to hammer on cast iron from 100 years ago, you get a little nervous. All went well though, and I have a working jointer again.
Now, back to making furniture. And tearing down all those crappy cabinets.
No, I haven’t gone and decided to embrace some of the shadier parts of rural Michigan. I’m doing something even crazier. I’m building furniture.
If you’ve followed this site at all, you’ve seen the recent videos for Chris Schwarz’ new book The Anarchist’s Tool Chest. I received my copy yesterday and finished it up tonight; here are my impressions after the first read.
First off, the book itself is a beautiful object. It has a lovely solid cover with an embossed graphic, no silly paper dust jacket to get torn up and lost. The cover has a texture to it, so it won’t slip when placed on a stand or your lap. It’s a good size, and has the feel and look of an old book. The paper is heavy and crisp, the type is wonderfully set, with some nice little touches in the typography. There’s no colophon, so I’m not sure what fonts were used, but the type is easy on the eyes and well spaced.
The book is a story in three parts: why you should build things yourself, what tools you’ll need to do it, and finally, where to store those tools so they will outlast you. Unlike many of the books published under the Popular Woodworking label, which tend towards a collection of articles, this has a narrative and a coherence that makes it an enjoyable read, more like a novel.
The first part, why you should build for yourself, struck a chord. I strongly dislike most manufactured furniture, especially Ikea’s furniture. My father taught that it’s better to buy a quality thing once, rather than buy a cheap thing ten times, and I’ve ended up kicking myself every time I’ve forgotten this maxim.
To that end, as my wife and I have been furnishing our home, we keep moving up the retail ladder. First, I picked up a bedroom set from Ethan Allen. Looks nice, but after living with it for a while, the build quality is only OK. The Stickley living and dining room stuff we purchased later (after saving many pennies) is better, but even that has some quality niggles. And going back to the showroom now, I don’t see Stickley getting better. Boards in top glueups are getting narrower. Joints look sloppy.
In the second part of the book, what tools you’ll need to build quality furniture, Chris doesn’t pull any punches. His thesis is that you only need about fifty different tools to make just about any common piece of household furniture. Yes, only fifty tools, and none of the fifty are power tools. He advises that you should buy the best you can afford, trying to buy such that you’ll never have to buy again.
As the (soon to be former) editor of one of the more popular woodworking magazines, I think it takes some testicular fortitude to say straight out that it would be better for most folks to limit their tool set and buy tools that you only have to buy once. He does include some power tools in the margins, things that will make life easier, but not the standard table saw. The shop as described is much more centered around the workbench, not the power equipment. The powered gear exists like a shop apprentice of old, dealing with the drudgery of milling rough lumber.
The third part, how to build a chest that will hold your tools so they’ll last a few lifetimes, is more like the workbench books; here’s what we’re going to build and here are the rules for how to design and construct it. The writing and pictures are clear and concise and have me seriously considering building a tool chest instead of the hanging tool cabinet for the Hand Tool School final (sorry Shannon). [ed note: definitely building a tool chest instead of a hanger after I proved gravity works]
Throughout the book, Chris punctuates his point with personal stories from the journey down the path. It’s a much more personal book than anything he’s written before and I enjoy that touch. The writing is top-notch.
I’ve been slinging code for a long time now. I had my first gig for pay back in 1996 and with a couple small exceptions, I’ve been telling computers what to do since. But for the past year or so, I’ve been a rookie all over again.
November before last, the company I worked for merged with another. After a few months, my baby turned into a proper application and got pushed out the door.
I moved on, getting a new project in a language and toolkit I hadn’t used since college, on top of a database system I’d never used in anger. Similar to what I’d used in the past? Sure, but the devil is in the details. Knowing your way around a system is a big part of what separates the efficient programmer from the rookie.
I was a rookie again.
Now, I’ve done this a few times, and I think most programmers who’ve been around for a while have too. Times change, frameworks come and go; you either learn and adapt or your spend the rest of your days maintaining someone else’s legacy. Thankfully no one has really come up with anything new in computing since the 1960s, so all the different systems are built on similar bones. I find the learning curve for each new system is a little shallower than the one that came before, though some jumps are harder than others. Learning good JavaScript was mind bending, as were C++ templates.
Being a rookie again is frustrating; I feel like I’m moving in molasses. Tasks that should take an hour end up taking a day. I find that this is rarely because of a lack of understanding with the language, but instead a lack of experience with the tooling and frameworks used to build a proper application. Every programming environment has a language at it’s core, but the truly distinguishing features are the frameworks and tools around the language that let you create useful applications.
When I’m a rookie, I want to become proficient as fast as I can. To that end, I always try to find a guide or a mentor, someone already proficient in the thing I’m learning. A good guide will help you to efficiently use what the framework provides and steer you around the potholes and pits of certain death. Have them review your code and your architecture, as often as possible. Make sure they know you’re treating them as a mentor, otherwise they might get a bit annoyed with the constant review.
I also write down what I’m learning. Just quick notes in a notebook is plenty, or I’ll keep a blog. Writing things down helps me to remember what I learned. Something about forcing the knowledge out of my head and out onto the page helps me internalize the lesson. Things I write down, I remember for years. Things I don’t I seem to quickly forgot.
Next, I try to teach what I just learned to someone else. Teaching is the best way to make sure you fully understand something. To teach, you have to really wrap your head around a thing, so much that you can explain it in words and pictures to something else.
If I keep that up, I find I’m out of rookie land pretty quickly.
A user interface for exploring systems of differential equations. Every variable is shown as a plot; every parameter has a knob that can be adjusted in realtime. This ubiquitous visualization and in-context-manipulation helps the user develop a sense for how the parameters of the system influence its behavior.
Part of the Kill Math project: http://worrydream.com/KillMath
